Michelle Sank was born in Cape Town, South Africa and currently resides in the UK. Sank is well known for her ‘youth work’ among projects: thematic series of portraits of young adults, often dealing with an adolescent struggle to find their place in the world or define their identity. Her ability to evoke these human states through a direct yet deceptively potent vision has led to numerous commissions and residencies photographing young people in diverse cultural settings: Belfast, Northern Ireland; San Francisco, USA; Manheim, Germany; Wolverhampton, England etc.

Introduction Article – Michelle Sank Insula: Archisle

Writing about her work, the photographer David Goldblatt has observed: “Michelle Sank uses a simplicity of means that falls way below the zealous art critic’s qualifying level for success”

Insula is a photographic project that Sank took part in in 2013 on the island of Jersey where she arrived in April and had a residency on the island for 6 months when geographic and historical influences also loomed large.

Working outside of particular demographic scenarios Sank’s Jersey imagery continues to develop lyrical vision within which the defining influences are place and cultural geography. Insula eschews a specific brief though the work responds to the wealth of nineteenth century portrait photographs within the Jersey Photographic Archive that it now joins as a powerful point of interpretation. The beguiling qualities of these new photographs call to mind the position that Lewis Baltz found for photographic series “somewhere between the novel and film”. As such, Sank’s photographs offer a visual poem to the island.

I have chosen to look at Michelle Sank’s work as I enjoy and like the visual aesthetic of the photographs when they are produced I like how they are taken and what they are representing which is why I have chosen her as one of my photographers.

I have chosen the photograph below as my chosen image to analyse as it was one of the photographs that I was most drawn to. The women shows to be in the centre of the photograph lying close to the foreground, she is the only figure that can be seen in the whole frame and I find this quite interesting as it singles her out and I feel almost enhances her surroundings as there is no other noise coming from the image apart from her figure and it creates a quiet background and surrounding which I feel is effective here. The way her mouth is formed suggests she may could have been talking, from the squint it suggests the natural sunlight is lighting her from the front, as we might guess that she could be talking it makes this a much more personal shot as she would be having a conversation with the photographer, it feels more personal and less staged; almost just in the moment.

Francis Foot was born in 1885 in the channel island Jersey to mother and father, Francois Foot and Louisa Hunt. His father was a china and glass dealer in Dumaresq Street, at a time when the area was one of the more affluent in St Helier. Francis soon became fascinated by photography and the early phonographs and gramophone records and realised that he could earn a living from them, from this his family took on a second shop in Pitt Street where Francis worked as a photographer, while his father and mother sold gramophones, records and other wares.

Francis Foot was in and among the most prolific photographers of early Battles, he was better known for his shop in Pitt Street, selling, among other things, early phonographs.

From 1905 to 1920 Foot was a regular visitor to the Battle on Victoria Avenue and many of his pictures survive in a collection held in La
Société Jersiaise’s photographic archive.

Foot’s pictures are notable for their depiction of the people involved in early events. Whereas the first photographs of the Battle of Flowers from 1902 onwards concentrated on general views of the arena and the audience and later they were generally interested in the spectacular floats which gradually came to dominate the event. Foot homed in on the participating adults and children, for without them there would have been no carnival.

Below shows one of Francis Foot’s photographs, it shows a women and child stood outside their shop. For the time this was a common thing to happen, I have been able to relate this type of photograph to some of my own family photographs I found when researching my own family history (also shown below). This style of photograph was very common, almost like an environmental portrait, usually the owner and their family stood outside their owned shop, it was their life work and these images were taken to preserve these histories. Francis Foot was looking at the people rather than the surroundings.

The Jersey Archives were established as a part of Jersey Heritage in 1993. These archives are the island’s national repository holding archival material

With collections recognised by UNESCO, the Jersey Archive is the Island’s national repository holding records on all aspects of Jersey’s history. Researchers can use archive resources to trace their family history, the story of their house or street and to find out more about the German Occupation of Jersey during the Second World War.

In 2017 the archive team launched thousands of images from the Jersey Evening Post photographic archive. These are now available to view online.

The archive catalogue can be found online. The online catalogue includes images of a number of documents including Occupation Registration Cards, will and testaments and transcriptions of early baptism, marriage and burial registers.  Documents can be downloaded through an annual subscription or on a pay per view basis. Information leaflets are available on a variety of subjects. Staff at Jersey Archive can assist with legal and property research enquiries, offer advice about preservation, and give talks, tours and education services. Jersey Archive also holds the collections of the Channel Islands Family History Society.

The Jersey archives were awarded Accredited Archive status in 2014.

Our visit to the Jersey archives gave me a good insight into how I can use archives into my own work and how they can be helpful with looking at something with a historical subject matter. Below I have some photographs of some of the documents that we were lucky enough to be able to look through and gather information on, from letters between Jersey and England during the war to identification cards that were used throughout on the island.