In order to better my experience during my second year at Hautlieu doing Photography A Level, and to also benefit myself as an artist for personal satisfaction and understanding of the industry, I have begun an enrichment scheme at Societe Jersiase which has been running for several years now. I am working closely with both Karen Biddlecombe and Gareth Syvret and the scheme was set up with the function for the student to visit once a week for a couple of hours i order to help them with any tasks at the Societe as well as the staff at the Societe to guide and direct the student in the right direction for their own personal investigation.
I began last Monday (27.11.17) and had my second day today (04.12.17). I am there each Monday from 10am -12pm.
Tasks which I have begun include looking through and becoming comfortable using the archival database in which all the archives are stored. Last week I was looking through all images relating to ‘weddings’ in Jersey. To find these, I simply do a search for a key word, in this case ‘weddings’ and the relating images appear. There are over 100 images of old wedding imagery but no images relating to ‘divorce’. The images I discovered were mainly taken by prominent photographer of nineteenth century, Percival Dunham who was employed by The Morning News – newspaper in Jersey at the time and the images were mainly very stiff, set-up and formal images of groups of people – the traditional wedding photography method at the time due to the lack of advanced technology in which long exposures were required capture a crisp image. Becoming comfortable using the database in the archive was very useful as I know I will be using it throughout my time at the SJ to retrieve important information I may wish to include in my project at school. Once completed a search for an image, you are given other details about the image such as the date taken, published, the subjects within to the image, where it was taken and whether it was published in a newspaper. As well, there are key words which you can use to direct you to other searches relating to that word.
As well, during my first day at the SJ, I started looking through an encyclopedia of photography in the twentieth century and within this, there was a short section on wedding photography and in particular, how this used to be and look like in comparison to what it has developed into due to better and more advanced camera techniques etc. I read this section in the encyclopedia and found it very interesting as I was able to relate it to the image in front of me that I was looking through on the archive. It mentioned how wedding photography used to be very formal and often in groups where the images were staged to the the best outcomes – I noticed this in the image on the database – there were very few images where it was taken in the moment because if people were constantly moving, the photographer would not be able to capture this due to the long exposures required using the old box format cameras.
I also begun reading, as it related to my project at school relating to relationships and my parents divorce about the concept if divorce parties which has only recently become a very popular market for a niche audience who wish to vent any anger over their divorced partner, in particular, if it was a painful break-up.
(Here is the online article published by The Guardian on divorce parties)
This introduction of divorce parties as a method t forget and vent your anger on your forgotten former partner present the idea of rituals and traditions in that there is a celebration/get-together for birth, marriage and death but not divorce… When in attendance at a divorce party where you are the center point, you are essentially becoming the person you used to be when you were single, where you feel more free and interdependent and we celebrate this – that we don’t need anybody else and we can enjoy life solo yet we also moan when single and wish we had a partner. At a divorce you experience the riddance of bad memories by burning possessions of the other half that they may have left at the house. I intend to write a blog post outlining divorce parties, their purpose and their popularity.
Moving onto my second day the SJ, I carried out some other tasks for the duration of my time there on 04.12.17. These included being shown the store room where all the archival images are kept. Karen took me to the top floor in which the store room is located and in here, the room temperature has to be a certain number of degrees and the images have to be sorted very neatly and orderly in acid paper in order preserve their quality as they are very delicate and important to the history of Jersey as everything that relates to the history of Jersey is sent through to SJ for them to keep and sort from the accessions they receive. This was a very interesting activity and allowed me to realise the extent of the images SJ owns. There were monochrome prints as well as colour prints and collections of aerial views from wartime as well as collections of images taken by a range of photographers the island used to home, including Percy Dunham.
Finally, during my two hours, I began to sort through and look at the recent collection of old Jersey postcards that SJ has acquired. They have over 50,000 old postcards and some present Jersey as a honeymoon destination for couples – as it once was and this was a great activity for me to see the old representation of Jersey which is still circulating around the island currently. I was also trained on how to scan the postcards into the system using the specialist technology which was useful.