I Am Not Tom Pope, You All Are Tom Pope

We visited the Tom Pope exhibition in St. Helier which represents the work he has created within the 6 months he has been in Jersey. One of his objectives for this project was to spread photographs from the Jersey archive into the community to ‘keep the archive alive’.  Pope did this through his genre of work which incorporates repetition, chance and play into the making of his photography.

One of my favourite pieces of Tom’s work is “We Can Be Together” which is wearable face masks of people within the archive. I like this piece of work because I think it’s a good way to engage with the public, and it goes with Tom’s genre of play. For example one of the photographs displayed was of a group of people on the beach wearing the masks. However the way Tom displayed the masks in the exhibition wasn’t as interactive as the idea itself.

Another piece of his work which I also liked was the video which Tom made called “propositions”. The video displayed different photographs of postcards with photographs from the archive. Pope then wrote over the postcards and put the post cards into people’s bags without them realizing. I think that this is an interesting and unusual way of spreading the archive into the community. This idea came from back during the Nazi regime where a man put postcards into peoples belonging’s without them realizing and on the postcards there were retaliations against the Nazi’s.