A series of structured learning packages, combining specially commissioned essays with selections of images from Source's back catalogue.

CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO PHOTOGRAPHY:

EXTERIOR & INTERIOR SPACES

by Jesse Alexander

As well as the people and goings-on around them, photographers have turned to different spaces as subjects for their work. Of course these are infinitely diverse, ranging from exterior spaces that we might identify as 'landscape' photographs, to much smaller interior spaces like bedrooms and even fabricated, model spaces. We will look at how practitioners have used different spaces both to document them and to explore different ideas, themes and concepts.

John Davies is on of the UK's most important and celebrated landscape photographers, and has recorded the man-made landscape for decades. As part of his series Metropoli, Davies examines the urban landscape of Belfast as it underwent urban regeneration in the early years of the new millennium. Typical of his work, Davies chooses a high vantage point from which to make his photographs. This very deliberate point-of-view almost puts the viewer in a position of power, literally overlooking or surveying the expanse of land beneath them. Davies uses a large-format camera, and his photographs are usually printed quite large so his pictures are able to communicate a substantial quantity of pictorial information. His work can be very engaging, and it is easy to become absorbed into the subtle activity and the architecture depicted within his photographs.

The fringes of the city and urban activity are typical subjects in the work of Paul Seawright. His work explores spaces that are difficult to define or do not have any identity - places between suburban dwellings, industrial areas, and places where people generally pass through very quickly without taking much notice. Seawright's images can seem a little creepy; they depict the sort of spaces where you could imagine finding a dead body, for example. This is perhaps because they interact with our stereotypes of such spaces, as represented by the television and cinema.

Barry Fletcher's series, Dens also take the viewer to parts of wastelands and secluded bits of the landscapes. For this work, Fletcher sought-out people who were willing to take him to the places where they played, made dens and sought sanctuary throughout their childhood. Since many of the sitters are now in their middle-ages and older, the sites have of course changed significantly over the years. Fletcher photographed his subjects from a comfortable distance so as to allow them to relax and for old memories to come flooding back. The sitters seem as if in a state of contemplation, probably of their childhood memories, but also perhaps about the years that have filled the time since they were last at that location.

Places with personal importance are also the subject of Peter Kane's series Significant Space. In this work, Kane removes his snap-shots from their original context within his family album, and re-photographs them within the landscapes that they were originally taken. While some of these locations have change very little over the years, some changes are more apparent: The viewer's eye cannot help but scrutinise both scenes for their discrepancies. There is an interesting relationship between the two scenes - one referring to the past, one the present day - which is exaggerated by Kane's deliberate use of a shallow depth-of-field to make the background image appear out-of-focus. The way Kane includes his own hand suggests that he is engaged in the act of remembering.

Public, 'collective' memories rather than personal ones are partly the subject of Donovan Wylie's series The Maze. In this ongoing project Wylie documents inside and around the Maze Prison that was built to contain prisoners from both sides of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and gained a notorious reputation. Wylie was granted unparalleled access to the vast complex when it was decommissioned as part of the peace settlement in 2003. Wylie's photographs reveal quite plainly and objectively, a place that became ingrained in history and is still steeped with memories of protests and hunger strikes. His series is deliberately repetitive in places, which reflects the rigid and monotonous architecture, and helps the viewer to get a sense of what it might be like to inhabit such a space.

Mark Ellis reveals places involved in conflict, yet were previously quite unknown and out-of-sight from public consciousness. In his series Protect and Survive he explores regional command centres that would have been used in the event of nuclear aggression between the UK and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Some of these bunkers are now public museums. With a similarly 'straightforward' aesthetic as Wylie's work, Ellis's photographs reveal quite clinical and untouched spaces, poised in a state of readiness. In some of the works, Ellis has used only the table lamps that were already in the rooms to light the photographs, which has led to quite theatrical imagery. However, the objective, almost detached style of photography uses a space to give the viewer a chilling reminder of how seriously prepared we once were for a catastrophe.

Often a source of much frustration, Andrew Lee documents the spaces that we are certainly aware of, but rarely get a glimpse at: telephone call centres. Lee has photographed various call centres across the country, when devoid of members of staff, to reveal the often bland and repetitive open-plan interior spaces. The series also considers ideas about the disjointed and global nature of modern life, whereby you may have to speak to someone who is several hundred miles away to discuss an issue much closer to home.

Some practitioners have re-considered the concept of an interior space by using unusual subject matter, and even creating and re-photographing their own spaces. Mervyn Arthur's photographs of interior spaces appear almost as abstract forms, or even perhaps studies of a futuristic spaceship. However, as their title - Camera Interiors - reveals, Arthur has turned the camera on itself to examine its inner workings, reminding the viewer that all cameras are in fact an elaboration of an empty, sealed space in which light can pass through.

The simulated landscape has been a popular choice of subject matter in which practitioners can consider our relationship with our external environment. Karl Grimes's series Stuffed Histories, at a first glance look like professional photographic stills from a popular natural history documentary television program. However, subtle imperfections reveal that the scenes are actually diorama - stuffed dead animals amongst artificial 'sets' and painted backdrops that can be found throughout museums. Grimes's work perhaps makes fun of these staged, rather dated museum exhibits, particularly in light of modern methods of computer-generated imagery. It also highlights some of the similarities between these kinds of simulated representations of living things and the nature of the photographic image, which is ultimately a two-dimensional rendition of a frozen moment in time.

Petros Chrisostomou works with a peculiar kind of diorama which he then re-photographs. With close attention paid to the details of his constructed rooms, his photographs can be a little disorientating to look at when they are filled with his peculiar structures formed from ordinary items like hair, feathers, biros and coins. Chrisostomou describes his work within a surrealist tradition, as well as attempting to explore our perceptions of photographic reality, and scale.

Chrisostomou's work shows how objects placed within a space - albeit constructed - can easily dominate it, but they pale in comparison to the objects in Andrew Robinson's work. In his series Holding On, piles of magazines, dirty crockery and general rubbish completely consume the house inhabited by a person with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder who is unable to throw anything away. The precision and clarity of Robinson's records of these rooms, made possible with a large-format camera and studio lighting, are an intimate and perhaps disturbing insight into a difficult and problematic condition. So much clutter fills the rooms that there is very little of it left visible to the viewer. Like the purpose of much photography - to make a record of an image of the past - Robinson's photographs were an aid for the individual in question to be able to begin the difficult process of clearing their house of the piles of junk.

Group Discussion Topics:

• Discuss the group's preconceptions of landscape art. Have any of these ideas been challenged by the practitioners discussed?
• With the work of Barry Fletcher in mind, draw upon the group's individual experience of special places past or present. How could these spaces be represented, or possibly reconstructed?
• Discuss what are relevant issues today surrounding our urban, rural and global landscape, and whether it is important for photographers and artists to address these in their work.

Activities:

• Ann Marie Curran's series Celibacy of close-up studies within private bedrooms reveal how ordinary, inanimate object can take on a new meaning when photographed under the scrutiny of sexual frustration. Confine students to a room at college for a period of time to make some close-up photographs of things that they wouldn't usually notice. This exercise could be set to do in a room at home.
• Make a visual record of a journey that you make regularly on foot (i.e. to college, work or a friend's house). Photograph the things on your journey. They may be things that you see regularly or they may be things that you normally overlook.