Tom Pope is the performance photographer that visited us at the Jersey Societe. A performance photographer means that he makes films from social content, for example whilst working with Andrew Lacon (a famous sculptor) they created a man made stage in which the public needed to walk over to get into an art museum. This was held in the Hockney Gallery in London in 2010 and was called ‘Enter Right Exit Left’. Pope and Lacon did this to examine audience participation within the space installed.

Tom studied photography in the arts in 2008 at Swanswa’s Metropolitan University then went on to do his masters at the Royal College of Art in 2011. During doing his masters he started to experiment with the idea of time through the use of film. His first project a video camera was set up on a tripod whilst Tom aimed an arrow from a bow and arrow towards the camera. The clip is 1.17 seconds long and ends with the arrow flying into the camera lens. This collection of work is called ‘Blinded By Amor’.

Another project of Tom Pope’s called ‘Kinsington Chalk’ whilst he was studying at the Royal Collage of Art was set up in the streets of Kensington and the video camera and tripod was set up on one side of the road facing this large black box which Tom was trying to write the numbers 1-60 in 60 seconds.
During the video, members of the public come up to Tom and question what he is doing and try to tell him what he is doing is unacceptable. Tom replied nothing to these people however when he was explaining his theory behind his project he explained that he was testing the social acceptance boundaries which run in a community, without breaking the Law. Tom said this project was inspired by ‘Eddris Khan’ who also tests Authority.

I really like Tom Pope’s work, as I believe that he injects creativity into it along side context. For example I really like the idea of going against social norms and pushing authority to gain a reaction from the public. There is an example of this in his project ‘Kensington Chalk’.

Whilst in St Malo I experienced gaining a reaction from the public whilst we gave out flowers to ‘randomers’ as a token of kindness. Most people’s reaction was hesitant yet very thankful- however some people refused the gesture. I thought this was very interesting to see a persons reaction, and concluded that most people reacted to the gesture in a similar way to how they saw a previous ‘flower receiver’ act. We captured images and video’s from this shoot.