On Friday 25th September our group went down to the old police station in town to see Tom’s exhibition. This was interesting to go and see as we have worked with him on a workshop earlier in the year as well as going to France for the day with him and the Archisle people to explore performance photography. Here we were able to express ourselves in the public eye, this was fun and we got to see what it was like to be a performance photographer like Tom Pope. Most of Pope’s work is based on weak anarchy that he has already explored, as seen on his blog. Pope wants to challenge the way people think and to challenge authority by doing things that aren’t necessarily illegal but they are deemed as unacceptable. I think that this is a vey interesting concept and think that Pope can work with so much for this too.

Pope’s Weak Anarchy: http://www.tompope.co.uk/weakanarchy.html

Pope’s Archive Exhibition: http://www.tompope.co.uk/iamnottompopeyouarealltompope.html

Tom took us through his exhibition explaining the meaning behind a lot of his work. Most of his work was inspired by John Baldessari as well as using his film camera for his photographs. The best part of the exhibition for me was the room filled with cutout faces of people from the archive. I found this really interesting to go around and look at all of the different people that lived in Jersey at some point throughout history. I think that this was a really great idea as well as Pope taking these cutouts around with him and randomly asking people that he met to wear one so he could make a photograph of them. I thought this was a really great way to spread the archive and get it out and around to the people in Jersey.

John Baldessari

Baldessari Portfolio:  http://www.moma.org/collection/artists/304

Pope was inspired by Baldessari’s work, including his work on throwing a ball up in the air editing it together to make three balls inlined with one another up in the air. This is where Pope did a small workshop with us when we tried to throw oranges at one another and catch it while making a photograph. I think that this was a unique way to respond to Baldessari’s work. In Baldessari’s image it looks as if he was throwing oranges which is where I think Pope gained inspiration for his mini workshop challenge. This was fun and a unique way to make photographs which allowed us to broaden our minds when it came to performance photography as well as just photography in general.

Another aspect of Baldessari’s work that has inspired Pope was the specific use of the colour blue. This makes his images stand out and capture the spectators attention straight away as the colour blue is very inviting. Pope applied this to his exhibition using it as a background for the images that were done in threes [like Baldessari’s image of the balls in the sky] and he dropped them onto the table. They fell in their position by chance and Pope changed this everyday for his exhibition so that they would constantly be changing. I found this interesting and fun to look and and try to spot the copies of each photograph from the archive. These images were taken from the archive again to bring it out from where it is hidden, into the public eye and so that as many people as possible are able to see these images.

One particular image that I really liked was titled, Jeffery’s Leap. Here Pope went to a cliff edge, with a wooden board and threw it into the ocean while someone else made the image. Pope went out to the bottom and got the board back. He then printed out the image 12 times to go along with the film camera that he has, Hasselbald, that has 12 exposes. This was interesting as Pope is using old film cameras instead of modern digital ones, meaning that the one photo that is taken at the time is the only one and it has to work straight away because film is very expensive to buy nowadays. Now Pope printed it out 12 times, he drilled a hole and added a bit of string to the board so that he could retrieve it easily when throwing it in. He added one image at a time and screwed it down then throwing it off the cliff and into the ocean. Each time he added another of the same image until all 12 had hit the water. Whatever had happened to them while hitting off rocks and being thrashed about in the ocean was how it was going to look and end up. This was all by chance and whatever the turn out was, was what Pope was going to add to his exhibition. I really liked this part of the exhibition as it was interesting to hear the story behind it as well as it looking really great and standing out almost like it was on a canvas, compared to the rest of the images that were all in orange frames.