Tuesday 13th june 2017

We spent all day at Société Jersiaise on tuesday with international photographers Tanya Deman and Jonny Briggs along with The jersey photographic archives worker Karen, the communications assistant. The day was divided up into workshops of 45 minutes were we had talks from all three and also completed small tasks relating to there work.

The first session that i did was with Tanya and she discussed with us about what shes been getting up to in jersey and what she hopes to do and link back to her photography. Tanya is a photographer from croatia who is over in the island for 6 months on a placement with the archives. She also spoke about how she has used the jersey photographic archives and then gone out and visited similar areas. One aspect of what she said about how she was going about taking her photographs was that “through key words she got to certain artists”. this seems to be something she has focused on with her photography. I also took away from the session with Tanya that “looking from above can help develop deeper ideas” and this is something i want to keep in mind throughout this project.

Tanya then got us to look through the photographic archives and began to use it to look for photographs of buildings and St Helier and chose images that inspired us or grabbed out attention. She then set us a task to capture two images of buildings around St Helier that we thought were ugly and then try to think about composition and how it could emphasise the unattractive buildings. Here are my images:

My next session was with Jonny Briggs, a contemporary photographer from London, who had some really interesting ideas about were his ideas come from. He spoke about how most of his images involve a lot of body language which he feels helps the images to tell a story and how his photographs are like “the products of private performances” i found the way Jonny spoke very inspiring the more he spoke about how he “thinks like a mindmap” and that “artwork is like an arena where there are no right or wrong answers”. His talk taking us through different pieces of his work also discussing the idea of how his images are meant to be confusing he likes that his images make people have to think deeper about what is going on and that he uses photography as “the opportunity to confuse and bruise” as he doesn’t know where the ideas come from most of the time.

Jonny then also set us a task to take one of the ARchisle photographs of a soldier and do something with the photograph which is a bit weird and abnormal and then rephotograph the image and get us to talk about the meaning of the images and how objects and manipulating the images with tears can change the message behind the photographs. Her are my images:

The final session was with Karen Biddlecombe, the communications assistant working for Archisle which was founded in 1914 and contains over 80,000 images. She spoke us through the archives and what has been done over the years to create its extensive selection of resources as well talking us through some of the images from one of the most famous photographers they have at Archisle, Henry Mullins. We also completed a task where there was 18 photographs all from different decades back until the 1840’s and we had to look at them and analyse them and put them into order from which we thought was the most recent to the oldest portrait image they had in the archive.

Overall i thought the it was a really interesting day which opened up my eyes to some really interesting new photographers but i also got a good insight into the jersey photographic archives and how i could use the archives in my future photography to create narrative and a deeper background picture to my images.