Bradford study visit

‘Eccentricity is a quality the British prize above many others. It may be impractical, uncomfortable and at times a nuisance, but it denotes character and individuality. It also pleases the escapist imp in all of us.
 A genuine eccentric is one who pursues his own version of the truth and value of things untainted by outside pressures or conventions.’
Tony Ray-Jones, quoted from his notebooks c.1971
 
Earlier this month a group of OCA photography students joined me for a study visit to see two diverse and stimulating exhibitions at the National Media Museum in Bradford, Yorkshire.
The joint exhibition by Martin Parr and Tony Ray-Jones, Only in England charts the last few years of Ray-Jones’ career, just before his untimely death at the age of 30. Ray-Jones’ book A Day Off (published posthumously) charted Britain at leisure; quirky, gently humorous, slightly surreal and yet always charmingly affectionate. Ray-Jones had spent five years in America absorbing the influences of the best, young street photographers such as Joel Meyerowitz and Garry Winogrand. This exhibition shows his return to his roots, to pay homage to the British people in all of their eccentricities and class-conscious social rituals.
Martin Parr was invited to trawl Ray-Jones’ archives from this period, choosing his own selection of images to be printed, many of which have never been published before. Controversially for some, Parr has had these printed digitally and much larger than the vintage prints that they accompany. The history of photographic exhibitions includes many permutations of photographer-printer relationships: self-printed works, mixtures of self- and vintage-printed, as well as those printed by others, either for photographers who always chose a professional printer to get the best from their images, or because they could not print their own work at the time (e.g. war photography by Capa or McCullin).
What I found fascinating and poignant was the opportunity to see at first hand not only Ray-Jones’ images, but so much accompanying contextual material: Pages from his notebooks suggesting books to read, lists of possible future projects, dummy plans for his book (that he never saw), part of his postcard collection, books that influenced him etc. Many of us found the vast light-boxes showing contact sheet prints of his films to be insightful: Selected frames were marked up with a Chinagraph pencil choosing those for enlarging, some with notation for cropping and exposure during printing. The process of recording movements of subjects and photographer were revealed through the sequences of images, as well as his editing and the ‘hit-rate’ of chosen images per film exposed.

Parr’s contribution to this exhibition shows early work that resonates with Ray-Jones’. When Parr finished his studies at Manchester Polytechnic, he lived in the West Yorkshire town of Hebden Bridge, developing his personal style at the same time as documenting its community. The images in this exhibition date from that period, illustrating Parr’s transitory period between education and independence. Parr’s images were taken in the late 1970s, less than ten years after seeing Ray-Jones work. There is also an accompanying book available, The Non-Conformists, penned by Parr’s wife. This is the most comprehensive selection of this period of Parr’s work ever shown, considerably more than was shown at his retrospective in 2004 (see also the monograph Martin Parr, edited by Val Williams, published by Phaidon in 2004).

Parr acknowledges Ray-Jones as having a profound influence over his early works and this can be seen when viewing the exhibitions side-by-side. In comparison, Parr’s work lacks the tension of the spatial arrangements of people and the subtleties of expressions and interactions that Ray-Jones had managed at a similar age…which begs the question as to what Ray-Jones might have gone on to produce in later life.
Written at the time of this exhibition’s first showing at London’s Media Space, an insightful essay by Francis Hodgson is available here: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2013/09/tr-j-in-context/
If all of that wasn’t enough food for thought, in the afternoon we saw another exhibition, Open for Business. West Midlands community arts group Multistory commissioned a group project by nine Magnum photographers to document and record manufacturing industries in nine British cities, which was then toured around nine cities (there’s definitely a theme here!)  http://www.multistory.org.uk/projects/open-for-business/
What struck me straight away was the impact of seeing what could have been nine similar projects all together in one room. Viewing the projects together, each by a different photographer, each documenting a different business in a different city showed just how diverse the vision, selection, editing and styles of photography can be. The human influence over this ‘mechanical recording’ was ably demonstrated as being paramount in the communication of this underrated aspect of documenting people’s lives.
Many of these projects were mixtures of details, still-lifes and workers. Bruce Gilden’s approach was to take full-face portraits showing every detail of the sitters – enlarged, stark and vulnerable. Other photographers took a wider view, such as Stuart Franklin’s views of wind and wave power generation contrasted with ship-building in Scotland.
Jonas Bendiksen chose to document the textile industry of West Yorkshire, the area around the museum. Bendiksen produced sensitive images of the interaction between workers, the raw materials that they used and the repetitive processes involved – still largely controlled by hand and eye. What drew our group to this set of images was that several were framed in the same style as the other pictures, yet were video screens showing small details of the processes, ones that will have been watched by workers in factories around the world since the start of the industrial revolution. The films were shot with fixed cameras showing moving machinery and yarns, continually looping around, reflecting the cycle of materials involved.
There are video clips of each of the nine projects, narrated by the photographers here: http://www.openforbusiness.uk.com/stories/
There is a link to student Ian Nutt’s blog post (with images) here.