Blog

PCN's current Featured Collection is from the Madame Tussauds Photographic Archive, we've been talking to curator Zoe Louca-Richards about the collection and her work.

PCN, Hi Zoe thank you for taking the time to be our Featured Collection can you tell us a bit about this collection, its history and your role working with this collection?

As curator I am responsible for an eclectic collection documenting the history of Madame Tussauds London, its formidable founder Marie Tussaud, and her family, who were integral to the development of the business until the 1960s. Day to day I provide research support for the brand, and manage a heritage collection containing everything from a pair of Elton John’s shoes, to Marie Tussauds’ 1803 letters. For the past 18 months it has been my mission to identify the unique treasures we have hidden away in cupboards and basements, and through them reinvigorate our remarkable history. The glass plate negative collection drew my attention early on for both its documentary and aesthetic value. A small portion of the collection had been digitised in 2015 along with early company documents and records, but otherwise had been largely forgotten. 

At PCN we're very passionate about glass plates can you tell us more about this part of the collection?

The glass plate collection contains over 500 negatives, ranging in size and dating between 1890 and 1950. It provides a unique and unrivalled insight into the history of the Madame Tussauds attraction in the early 20th century and is a valuable resource for understanding the history of the company. The collection is thought to have been solely the work of John Theodore Tussaud, the great grandson of Marie Tussaud, and creative director/head sculptor of Madame Tussauds in the early 1900s. The John Theodore Collection is part of this broader collection, and comprises 3 wooden boxes containing 120 negatives, dating from the mid-1890s – the earliest in the entire collection. Unlike the rest of the Madame Tussauds glass plate negatives, which have at some point been rehoused in contemporary conservation wrappers and boxes, this small collection has remained in their original indexed 19th century negative boxes. This discreet collection of negatives differs from the broader Madame Tussauds glass plate negative collection as it contains not only early portraits of staff, but also family portraits and holiday snaps. It provides a unique and intimate insight into perhaps the second most famous Tussaud, and the reticulate work and family life of the man that saw the sale of the company out of the family, it’s survival through WWI, and a devastating fire that nearly entirely destroyed the company in 1925.

What content does John Theodore Tussaud's glass plate negatives cover? And do you know anything about his interest in photography?

John Theodore’s portraits, both in the studio and at home, exhibit a natural dynamism of pose and expression, distinct from the formal photographic portraiture of the late 19th century. Many believe that the snapshot only has an effect if we have a personal connection to it. However John Theodore’s snapshots of his children have a haunting, mesmerising, aesthetic beauty about them that grips the viewer, and evokes feelings of nostalgia and childhood innocence. These family snapshots and studio portraits all exhibit John Theodore’s exceptional ability to breathe life into static images, the very same skill that enticed the public so strongly to his wax portraits and Tableaus at Madame Tussauds. It’s hard to say whether he considered his photography as an artistic endeavour, or purely a documentary tool. Despite being a prolific photographer and his clear aptitude for the art, there are no examples of John Theodore ever discussing his photography. However, these photographs are the only remaining examples of his artistic talent, as most of his sculptures were lost in the 1925 fire and later the 1940s bomb.  

Amongst the beautiful but haunting snaps of his children playing in cottage gardens, energetic studio portraits, and aesthetically pleasing landscapes of the English countryside, are a number of blurred or over exposed images. To the contemporary eye, these are the abject images that would be swiftly deleted without a second glance in today’s digital world, but John Theodore preserved and indexed them equally. These fascinating images demonstrate someone grappling with how to master this relatively new technology, for both the benefit of his work, and his family record – finding value in both success and failure. John Theodore was an innovator, much like his great grandmother, with several registered Patents to his name, and whilst we cannot say if these “effects” were deliberate or mistakes, these images are a fantastic demonstration of the creative and experimental approach John Theodore was known by his friends and colleagues to take to all avenues of his work, whether in art or in business. Photography is of course now a significant part of the sitting process for creating our figures at Madame Tussauds, and John Theodore was most certainly the first Tussaud sculptor to utilise this new technology as part of the process.

How has working with this collection impacted on Madame Tussauds the attraction?​

The collection is helping to deepen our understanding of the attraction at the turn of the 20th century, a time of immense change for Madame Tussauds, and of John Theodore himself, the driving force behind its continued success during this period, and an integral member in what could be considered one of Britain’s most prolific artist families. So far the cataloguing of the John Theodore Collection has been relatively straightforward thanks to the meticulous indexing undertaken by John Theodore himself, and his wife Ruth. Both the larger Glass Plate Negative Collection , and the discreet John Theodore Collection, not only provide staff with a visual insight into the attraction, but also the opportunity to learn more about the members of the family who founded and ran the attraction for over 200 years. The hope is that eventually all of the negatives will be digitised and catalogued, so that this incredible resource can be used and accessed to its full potential.

You see more images from this archive on our Featured Collection page, and you can read more about the Madame Tussauds Glass Plate Negative Collection, the John Theodore Tussaud Collection, as well as other items from the Madame Tussauds Archive by going to https://www.madametussauds.com/archive

To coincide with this month's Featured Collection of images from FORMAT19 FOREVER//NOW, our members' blogpost this month featured a talk given by our director, Paul Herrmann at this year's festival in Derby. In his talk, Paul discussed how through the work of the PCN, some worrying patterns about the the issues people and organisations were facing specifically about digital work began to emerge. 

The early days of digital promised something amazing: using the power of the link, no less than an interconnected and interwoven visual story of our era; the idea of the photograph as a node in a living network. But the reality, and the early conclusion of our research, based on interviews and surveys, is that that might not happen. If we do nothing, we will get a very skewed digital legacy. How will we access today’s born-digital photography in 100 years’ time?
 
I’m going to talk about three areas - personal photography; small private archives belonging to photographers, galleries and SMEs, and larger public collections. They have different but overlapping problems. And I’ll finish with a few examples of where the problems are being tackled, and some suggestions.
 

Personal photography
 
About 10 years ago an elderly relative of mine died. The man's daughter and son-in-law took it upon themselves to sort things out in the way that is considered necessary when somebody dies. The son in law rang me up a few days later. He said: "I've cleared his computer and sold it."
 
Nobody now knows exactly what was on the computer. I imagine it included emails, writings, ideas, inventions, photographs, documents. What I might call my relative's "creative output". And, by implication, stories about his life; who he knew; whom he interacted with; what they talked about. It also contained things like caches, accounts, search histories; automatically-produced data that might tell a slightly different story about my relative's life. To quote the academic Kyle ML Jones: "Each of us has a 'data double,' a digital duplicate of our lives captured in data and spread across assemblages of information systems."
 
Most of us can immediately understand the difference between creative output and automatically-produced data. And a moment's reflection can tell us that the creative output is on a spectrum of privacy. It ranges from stuff that we are happy to share with the whole world, to things that we would really like to keep private, or even destroy. To the son-in-law, the answer was simple. Delete everything. My relative was a private man; let him keep that privacy in death. Yet when we surveyed photographers on this question, most of them don't want that. Only a very small percentage said get rid of everything. Most people would like at least some of their work saved, kept together, and available to look at. I don’t want to say we should obsessively save everything, but we should consider how we will be perceived in the future.
 
Of course when someone dies, a lot of things connected to the legal status of their property change. We can no longer ask people what their intentions were, so it becomes more difficult to act according to their wishes; even assuming that their own wishes were sensible and wholesome. Unfortunately, the law is rather a complex but at the same time blunt instrument. If we don't leave a letter of wishes, or sometimes even if we do, things are probably not going to happen the way we want.
 
One of the causes of difficulties is that photograph are at an intersection; they are both personal data and creative output. According to the current data protection act: "'Personal data' means any information relating to an identified or identifiable living individual." Of course that includes a lot more than just pictures of people; it might mean anything that includes any references to human activity. To oversimplify, the default position has become to lump everything together and delete it as “data”.
 
At the same time, the legal burden on the organisations that store people’s photographs is changing. One thing they want to avoid is getting involved in squabbles with heirs and other interested parties. Most social media services will deactivate accounts of the deceased at the request of an immediate family member. Some, in particular Instagram and Facebook, have started to include memorialising options. Facebook, which has put a lot of effort into understanding its users’ drives and motivations, allows for a Legacy Contact with certain powers. But I can’t imagine Instagram wanting to become effectively a graveyard with a majority of accounts belonging to dead people; and of course by definition this is going to happen some day.
 
Most contractual arrangements are rendered void by death of one of the parties, and I don’t think the social media companies see themselves as required to look after this material for ever. I can imagine a time when social media services just start quietly losing this work. Although Facebook claims not to delete photographs, several people have reported that they can’t find old images, and sometimes it’s the links to those images that no longer work.
 
What is the long-term future of our digital assets on the apparently free services like Instagram and Facebook? Think of the example of GeoCities, once host to 40 million web pages, which has now effectively closed down. You might be thinking that this is not what we are here to talk about. These people casually using free social media services can’t expect their work to survive. But that is not the view of social historians or archaeologists, whose work depends on access to individual and personal material. 
 
The IT Consultant Andréa Perrot is looking at this problem in more detail. She says that in practice “how people manage their own images leaves a lot to be desired. When people die hardly anyone passes on information about their digital assets to their next of kin, in particular photographic images.” Meanwhile, she says, "The average person believes the world around them is managing the huge amount of electronic data to a sufficient standard." But cloud services are effectively being expected to look after what she calls “photography landfill”, or “cloudfill,” incurring increasing financial and environmental costs, while the difficulty of accessing and wading through the cloudfill will effectively render it inpenetrable. Worryingly she says: “Does today realise how the future may see us as a ‘lost generation’?”
 
Someone told me: I am the only person in my entire family preserving photographic material, analogue and digital. I fear if I die it will all be lost.
 

Small private archives belonging to photographers, galleries and SMEs

So let’s look at what might be seen as the next stage up the preparedness scale - professional photographers, SMEs, small galleries, and so on. Probably quite a few of you in the room today. You are prepared to invest in your and your organisation’s digital legacy. Are people in that position doing enough?
 
I don’t think so. For the purposes of the research we are carrying out, we surveyed people who have a working interest in a digital archive or collection of photography - a mixture of organisation staff, individuals such as photographers and their heirs, and concerned volunteers. We heard from around 70 people. From the survey, 67% of respondents - two thirds - agree that there is a real chance that digital material might be lost from their collection in the future Just 30% agree that the digital material in their collection is likely to be accessible in 100 years time.

There are significant concerns around knowledge, standards and conflicting advice. Only 43% agree with the statement “It's very clear to me what needs to be done to preserve digital material long term”, and only 29% felt that they have access to an authoritative source of knowledge about the subject. Only 23% of respondents have sought knowledge and information about this from a professional association. Just 7% have referred to a set of standards.
 
Typical comments include:
 “If there is a set of guidelines or standards I should be following I am unaware of it, and make decisions based on what other people do and advise, and what seems sensible.”
 
“Digital standards seem quite elusive ... file types, sizes, systems seem to vary considerably and change frequently along with the opinions that revolve around them.”
 
49 people answered a question asking what collection management, cataloguing, digital asset management or backup software was in use. 42 different software applications and packages were cited along with four bespoke or self-written systems. That’s not in itself a problem, if all those packages are doing the job; but my impression is they’re not - people are using what they know, or feeling their way. I’d argue that for those looking for a universally recognised package for setting up an image database - there isn’t one. 
 
There are also substantial concerns around technology. The long-term viability of different storage methods and media is often questioned. People cite drive failure, redundant software and even bit-rot. And at least one person has mentioned the rather wonderful-sounding M-disc - M for millennial - a DVD-R made of stone, or in fact a stone-like substance, that is supposed to last for a millennium. £22 for a pack of 10, with one three star amazon review saying:
 
“I bought these for long term storage of photographs - so it's impossible to review until after I'm long dead. Apart from that they seem fine.” Reassuring stuff.
 
I don’t want to say those two issues of knowledge and technology are not important, but I also don’t want to dwell on them too long; because I think they are actually specific issues in a more general context, and at least theoretically, issues that have been resolved. One respondent said: “the problem is not the technology, the problem is money and resources.” That’s getting warmer, I think. We have a series of system problems.
 
As a way into these more difficult areas I’ll use another example from my own life. I have worked as a photographer since the 1980s. I was asked to find a photo of someone I took on an unspecified date some time around the turn of the century. No problem, I thought, everything is catalogued. What I hadn’t realised is that during the changeover from analogue to digital capture, my archive changed from contact sheets to scans to CD and DVD backup to hard drives. I had five different systems over a relatively short timespan. Mainly because I temporarily forgot about one of them, it took me two days to find the photo.
 
The point is, I am supposed to be fairly competent in this area. Even assuming my heirs are concerned about my photography, I can’t see that they are going to preserve those delicate interrelationships between the elements of my five systems. That takes, yes, time, money and resources, and also care, and some decisions.
 
My own system was effectively a closed one. But when systems spread across multiple places and owners, the complexity escalates. The basic problem is that preservation of digital assets is quite a complex system where everything has to work. I don’t know if anyone heard the memorable talk by Hester Keijser in Derby a couple of years ago, but she described how the further away in time we get from any system, the less comprehensible it is. So we need to make sure that we all have at least a basic understanding of our digital lives. One curator told me that she simply didn’t have the knowledge to deal with digital objects in her own collection, but she depended on IT colleagues. That is no longer really an option for us as digital humans, homo digitalis. Skills like keeping our operating systems up to date and maintaining our digital storage and backup are now as essential as knowing how to find a book in a library, or even, dare I say it, as crossing a road. As things are, we continue to hand over power and responsibility to technicians who, to be fair, probably don’t want that responsibility.
 
The role of all of us is to know at least roughly how our systems work and keep surveying and testing for weaknesses. Those weaknesses could be around knowledge standards and technology, but they could also be legal, political, commercial, or cultural. In other words we might lose digital assets because we don’t know how to preserve them, or because a bit of technology fails, but also because we have an inappropriate contract, or a new law comes in; there is a board or management decision to delete material or spend less money on keeping it; we outsource to a particular company that closes down; or for whatever reason it become appropriate to change policy. Or a million other reasons. It’s really important to keep actively looking at how a system is functioning rather than fall back on some procedures that might become outdated or not up to the task.
 

Larger public collections

Let’s look finally at some larger organisations, the institutions such as museums, libraries and big archives that we task with looking after our common heritage. They are system-based organisations themselves, and so somebody ought to be keeping watch in the way I described before. Are they the most prepared for this work of preservation and legacy access?
 
Sadly, I don’t think so. In fact their systems are creaking and cracking. I suspect it’s to do with the way big, especially public, services work, and how it can be difficult to stay flexible and responsive in the way I just mentioned. If someone accidentally breaks a filter in the swimming pool, that’s okay, it gets repaired or replaced, and everything is back to normal in a few hours. But if somebody accidentally switches a fan off in the server room, and various systems overheat and circuit boards fry, that’s less okay. There is no digital equivalent of sprinkler systems. Sure there are ways of retrieving files and there are backups but it depends on that all working well. Google “How Toy Story 2 was almost deleted” for an insight into how easily it can all go wrong.
 
I asked around at medium-sized museums about their software systems. Are the collection management systems, digital asset management, storage, backup, and web servers, all talking to each other properly? Are the database fields replicated across the different packages? For the most part, people I spoke to shrugged their shoulders. One person under the age of 30 understood how it all worked. One museum manager told me: “if you find a place where they’ve got it all working smoothly, let me know.” Another museum employee showed me a former darkroom where he had set up his own unofficial storage systems, because he felt he couldn’t rely on the council’s outsourced IT services.
 
Let’s talk briefly about those outsourced services. There are organisations that say they can do all your digital preservation services for you. The trouble for individuals and small collections is the significant cost; well into five figures for a single seat. Private organisations such as ISPs can and do go bust. I know this from bitter experience when it took Redeye four months to retrieve all its data from a failed ISP.
 
Meanwhile, a third of the world’s web and cloud assets are stored by one company, Amazon Web Services, in their S3 storage. I am told it is extremely reliable, but it has had very occasional outages and I slightly shudder to think what would be lost if Amazon were to go bust. The way our public museums and cultural institutions are being systematically run down and underfunded is a depressing reflection of our political system. Everybody wants museums to be great, progressive and exciting, but in an era that tends towards polarisation, it seems that only the most large-scale of them, or the new start-ups with different business models, can find ways to achieve this.
 
Relevant quotes from our survey:
“Even if you know what to do, it is impossible from an institutional point of view to get a REAL long-term plan that is also sustainable in terms of resources. A big problem is that the bureaucracy level that is at the top of institutions and gives us the money still believes in the digital revolution but doesn't understand that a lot of actually obvious measures still have to be taken, among them long-term digital preservation.”
 
“We are several sites that cover several disciplines, with several systems. Each department has evolved separate procedures for cataloguing digital assets.”
 
“It's often the people within the organisation who are decision makers on budget, that do not understand digital or the value of photography as historical records. This lack of knowledge or unwillingness to understand the value of digital records / images impedes the structuring, conservation and upgrades needed to store digital. Education is not just for the curator or archivist but for the finance and/or decision makers to supply necessary investments.”
 
I don’t want to end on a downer, because there are plenty of new examples of good practice, and there’s a few things we can all do to improve things. I like what is happening at the Martin Parr Foundation, which supports and preserves the legacy of photographers who made, and continue to make, important work focused on the British Isles. They are just starting to consider the digital assets of other photographers than Martin himself. They have three great things: a foundation legal structure that aims to preserve things well into the future; a flexible and responsive approach that has developed a really neat mirrored NAS system; and a very clever head of production Louis Little who oversees all that.
 
I was also pleased to hear from one photographer who has helped set up a shared, effectively co-operative storage scheme with 11 others in a similar position. The 12 people look after three mirrored servers in different locations. You buddy up with someone with whom you share your encryption keys. As with the Martin Parr Foundation there is trust involved, but it’s a way of both spreading the risk and allowing continued access to your work in the long term - even for your heirs after you die. He thinks the system might be overkill given the price and quality of S3, but who knows.
 
I’m also intrigued by some of the new models of distributed storage, which seek to do no less than upgrade the web and resolve many of the problems we have been talking about without changing the interface. Have a look at IPFS - the inter-planetary file system - they call it the permanent web.
 
Finally, a few suggestions:
With friends or colleagues, talk about your digital legacy, and do some risk assessment - what could go wrong?
Think about what your heirs will find when you’re no longer there. Is it all clear enough?
Organise your digital archive as much as possible.
Write a letter of wishes.
Consider the spectrum of privacy and find ways to label your assets accordingly.
Be, or become, a digital human.
If you have a boss, make the case to them for digital preservation and legacy.
Come to the event we are planning at the end of 2019.
 
Links for further information: 
The Digital Legacy Association
Data Doubles
IPFS
Preservica
Martin Parr Foundation
The Digital Beyond
Photographers' Archive and Legacy Project

Further information about this year's Format Festival can be found here.

Alongside this month's Featured Collection, we celebrate Chinese New Year with an interview with Open Eye Gallery's curator, Thomas Dukes, who offers an in depth insight into gallery's collection as well as the gallery's relationship with Artists of Asian Heritage and Liverpool's Chinese Community. 

Could you give some background on the depth and breadth of the Chinese section of your collection?

We have over 1675 catalogued pieces making up the archive along with a number of other promotional materials such as magazines. There are some press prints in there and there's probably around 20 of the most contemporary possessions that I haven't actually popped into the digital archive yet.
 
The works in the archive that we could talk about as a lineage of photography relating to the Chinese community, particularly in Liverpool, starts with Burt Hardy's work from the 1940s looking at one of the earliest Chinatowns. Liverpool has the earliest Chinatown in Europe which is one of the reasons that as a photography gallery we're committed to working with people in Liverpool who have Asian heritage. This includes people in Chinatown who predominantly came from areas which are now referred to as the Guangdong region or the Hong Kong region as well as this new global citizen, the students that are at the four universities in Liverpool, who are all over China.
 
Bert Hardy’s work from the 1940s starts looking at the living and working conditions of people of South East Asian heritage who have come over to Liverpool. His work is black and white, it is documentary, it was primary taken for a number of the photographic journals such as The Life and Picture Post. It is a really early interesting piece that we are proud of having.
 

Shanghai restaurant, Nelson Street (1942) © Bert Hardy at Getty Images. 

There are additional pieces alongside this but after that we skip forward forty-six years and there's Martin Parr’s collection of work entitled Connections which looks at the Liverpool-Manchester connection that featured photographers like John Davis. Martin Parr’s work also looks the relationship between Liverpool’s Chinatown and the Chinese community in Manchester and that was in 1986. This work displaced as part of Look 17. A couple of pieces from that collection that were shown over in the Museum of Liverpool which is a National Museums Liverpool property. That was part of an exhibition that was curated by a member of the team here, Charlotte Tsang. It looked at her selection from our archive alongside Chinese artists as well curated by Ying Kwok.
 

Sunday Afternoon, Liverpool Chinatown (1986) © Martin Parr. 

Jumping ahead to Jamie Lau's commission from 2014. This was commissioned for the exhibition Urban Flow. I wasn't actually the curator here at the time, that was Joe Carruthers, and that's a really beautiful set looking at the contemporary Liverpool Chinatown.
 

Red Green and Black (2014) © Jamie Lau.

More recently, we've got Derek Mann from 2017. That was another Look 17 commission. Derek had this wonderful project where he'd gone back to Hong Kong and looked at the housing market over there. He grew up in Hong Kong and then moved to UK and he's now lived in both places for around the same amount of time and he's got to a point where he was looking at properties over in the UK and when he went back over to Hong Kong was able to make these comparisons about the global similarities when looking for property but also the accelerated nature of development over in Hong Kong.
 

From the series Close to Home (2017) © Derek Man. 

Then finally there is Teresa Eng’s work in 2018. Her commission was part of Snapshot to WeChat. She made a project looking at the difference between the digital representation of self, as made through selfies or a shot of the person and their friends going out, compared to a portrait that was made of them there in the street and that was just phenomenal. That was between February 7th and February 14th in 2018, from Chinese New Year to Valentine's Day which was very cold time to be out in there, asking people if they would allow her to make a portrait of them as well as share their selfie!
 

From the series Self/Portrait, Liverpool (2018) © Teresa Eng.

The collection does hold this really fascinating history of engagement through photography with the Chinese community in Liverpool regionally, nationally and internationally.
 
Would you talk about the discussion that starts the acquisition of projects by contemporary artists with Asian heritage?

The discussion around acquiring a project or a group work is relatively standardised in that using guidelines from an artist's network and the Arts Council ensures that there's transparency and openness around the expectations of budget, for example, on both sides. Therefore, we just go into it saying, “we have X amount of budget and we would like to collect X number of pieces do you think this is possible?”. Recently all of the commissions that we've worked on in that way have been amazing. Thinking about Yan Preston, Derek Man and Teresa Eng, we've got this really interesting body of work that talk to issues that are as our as relevant on say, the Wirral, as they are in Shanghai or further afield.

The discussion that starts the acquisition of projects though predominately comes from the agendas within the gallery, given that we tend to work in partnership. For example, we will partner with Liverpool City Council to present a number of creative outputs or with city-wide festivals such as Homotopia or other National Portfolio Organization that advocates for social justice. So that the discussion around making a project will come from this kind of partnership work that we do around presenting in the gallery a series of events and work to inspire and start discussions and then this will grow into a project. 

For example, with Derek Man looking at the rapid development of Liverpool and the rapid development of Hong Kong and what that means for a generation of people who are looking at having homes and making a project from there. Or, we have Yan Preston looking at the experience of an increasingly mobile citizen who is able to study in one place, work in another place and just becoming more familiar and the fact that there is a developing global identity and the discussion around it. They very much come from our work with communities around the gallery and then are carried forward into projects.
 

Echo (2018) © Yan Preston. 

The gallery made a decision to "connect our collection to contemporary audiences through exhibitions and research”, what is your role in the process of connecting with the community as a curator? 

This is entwined question. I always feel that the ethos in the Open Eye Gallery and the support of the whole team is what means that we are successful in working in partnership. It is no good if our responsive programming is working in partnership if I am not willing to be flexible around working with different partners and making the space somewhere that is accessible and usable. So, it's very much a team effort in ensuring that we can be a space for our audience.
 
In exhibitions such as North, a show that look at the generation of Northern character tropes as passed on through photography. For example, how John Bulmer’s image of 1960s girl with rollers in her hair coming over the Mill Bridge in Yorkshire gets updated into Alice Hawkins’ The Liver Birds shoot. We connect that to our audiences by sharing work in the collection that demonstrates how those tropes and photographic mores are onwardly communicated.
 
As a curator, I’d like to think that I connect with the community through talking to people and through working in partnerships. I can't be embedded in all of the communities we want to work with, but I can make sure we talk to people who are part of these communities. Making sure we are very open when we are communicating: when we are writing text and dialogue or when we are making a selection. It comes back to partnership and transparency and then being able to use the collection in a contemporary setting or against a contemporary concern.
 
You recently took a research trip to China, could you talk about how that was and the gallery's work with international artists more generally?
 In the back part of September, I took a trip out to PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai. I was on a program that did our studio visits and institutional visits and I met a number of the collectors and artists and visited a number the galleries out there. I think for me, seeing how a cultural landscape is so different from here is just fascinating and it gives a much better insight into different ways that people engage with culture and the different ways that culture can be supported. It also raised questions about who are the most kind of active performers in making the culture, what kind of culture do we want and how we as actors inside it can work towards that.
 
At the moment, seeing the role of market forces in China is the most pressing thing for a number of the media outlets that report it. For example, The Art Newspaper and Art Review are quite concerned with market performance and the impacts of that for institutions and for artists. That is quite a large part of how the arts ecology can be supported, so seeing how the market is trying to find a way of ensuring that there is freedom for the possibility of experimentation but also making it so that being an artist is a viable career choice is interesting. I will be going out there again in December to meet lots more artists.
 
Working with international artists more generally, I think Look, our international Photography Festival, is the best way that we can do that. Right now, it is programmed in as a biannual festival and it's structured around using photography as a media of exchange between two countries.
 
Could I describe some of the work the gallery has done with local artists?

 Liverpool and the North-West has a wonderful heritage to be proud of. We ha ve the Associates’ Network which is a collection of practising photographers, academics, critics, writers and people engaging with photography and an audience. We try and support them by being responsive to exhibitions in our reception area on the digital screen which is an open source space right now. We also place exhibitions more widely in places like the Victoria Gallery and Museum in the forthcoming Look. We try and be here for our creative audience, this is one of our target communities in Liverpool. We’re very contactable and very open; we have a number of events which allow for audiences to just come and form a relationship by spending time at the gallery, sharing interests and seeing if there are any opportunities where interests may align, that is the best way that we can work with local artists. We have a number of clearly defined routes through which local artists can come and be part of what we are doing.
 
How would someone go about accessing images in your collection? For example, how have others worked with your collection of the past such as Rosa Fong?

 We do have a digital copy of the archive which has thumbnails and details but that's not publicly available. This is just because I still find today that when I'm contacting artists because we want to use their works that we hold in the archive in an exhibition, for example, or just generally we're in discussions, there are still some artists who say “I didn't realise that you know my work there” or “I don't remember how that happened”. So, it still feels like it's not as it's not as watertight as it should be. I don't think that that the quality of the images isn't such that it would allow for commercial use or only kind of marketable benefit to a third-party beyond education and ideas but still there's a few barriers.
 
For anyone who wants to see the archive they can just express an interesting and I can then write saying I'm happy to show the archive but accompanied by a clear warning as to the permissions and an agreement with the person that's it is for the purposes of education or development. The images can then be shared once the artist or the estate has been contacted. For example, Rosa Fong knew that we had the Burt Hardy pieces and so I sent over all of the images had a chance to look and we will then arrange a time where she can come in to look at the actual prints.

https://openeye.org.uk/
Twitter: @OpenEyeGallery
Facebook: Open Eye Gallery
Instagram: @openeyegallery

All Images Courtesy of Open Eye Gallery Archive

An interview with Juliette Buss, Learning & Engagement Curator at Photoworks who led the collaborative ‘Into the Outside’ (ITO) project which supported young people in Brighton to engage with and create LGBTQ+ heritage. (Coinciding with Pride season, Into the Outside is the Photographic Collections Network 'Featured Collection' August - September 2018; find out more about it below.)

Hi Juliette, to start off, please tell us about your personal role in ‘Into the Outside’?
I devised the original project concept of creating a new archive with young people, then put the framework together with artist Helen Cammock and managed the project.

And how did this project come about?
We developed the programme as a follow on from Queer in Brighton a multi partner LGBTQ+ history project. Consultation with young people identifying as LGBTQ+ or U (unsure) revealed significant levels of anxiety, vulnerability and isolation. Brighton, the queer capital of the UK, has a vibrant LGBTQ+ community, but many young people just coming out, or questioning their sexual orientation or gender identity, weren’t yet part of this community, so couldn’t learn or benefit from the lived experience of others. 

Which photographic archives were involved? 
The group engaged with archives held at The Keep, a world-class centre for archives including Brighton Ourstory (set up in 1989 to collect and preserve lesbian and gay history) and the National Lesbian & Gay Survey - a collection of personal writing and ephemera submitted between 1986 and 1994 addressing issues such as coming out, homosexuality and the law, and the impact of HIV and AIDS. People of all ages contributed to the survey, but a significant proportion of writing by young people in their late teens, made it particularly relevant.

Tell us a bit about the partners and participants?
The project was led by Photoworks in collaboration with Brighton & Hove Libraries Services, the Mass Observation Archive, the East Sussex Records Office and Queer in Brighton and supported by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund. Partners helped steer the project, and provided additional resources, expertise and capacity. We also engaged local (Stonewall Champion) schools. About 20 young people committed to the entire 18 month project - although we’re committed to working with LGBTQ+ communities long term and Into The Outside activity is still continuing in other guises including further youth projects, teacher training and through the online platform.

How were the young people involved?
The young people took part in an artist-led programme of photography and heritage-based activity with award-winning artist Helen Cammock, enabling them to create new work for two high profile exhibitions, run a series of events for other young people and create a new digital queer youth archive.

Their roles shifted quite dramatically through the project. As the project progressed, their knowledge and confidence grew, and their roles changed. They led interviews with other young people and ran pop-up photo studios and oral history booths. The participants also co-curated the final exhibition.

How did the project help young people build the skills to create a contemporary archive?
Artist Helen Cammock and the group started with skills development – oral history training, archiving and photography, plus conversation and discussion, from which a series of themes emerged. The material was (in some cases) selected around these themes. Then the young people undertook extensive research – spending days with archive material, visiting museums and exhibitions in London and listening to talks from a range of arts and heritage professionals.

How did archive material engage young people?
There’s an important quote from the project artist that I think sums this up…Writing in our journal Photoworks Annual, Helen (Cammock) said: “The ITO Collective tumbled into a melee of experience being asked to place themselves across time and place: imagine what it might have been like to have experienced some of the prejudice and pain, joy and love, sadness and forced invisibility that those who had come before them had experienced. It was a way of understanding what had come before, and the varying gradations of social change at different moments and in different places.”

As I said earlier, Brighton has such a vibrant LGBTQ+ community, but many young people weren’t yet engaging with this community. The archives helped bridge the gap between self and community - with the young people’s supported exploration of marginalisation and isolation, engaging with the personal stories of a community’s history and understanding that others had felt like they do, 

Why was a creative element important?
It was always the intention that young people would create contemporary images that would be part of the archive. Photography played a central role in their learning experience throughout the project. From day one, they used cameras to chart their progress, document their research and articulate their ideas. Participants used photography both as a learning tool to support their enquiry, and as an artform, looking at contemporary practice, experimenting with ideas and developing highly accomplished personal portfolios. Exhibiting was an important additional showcasing platform for their work. The participants identified themselves as a collective soon after their first exhibition - when their artistic voices became more confident.

Any top tips for other institutions working with artists and young people?
Know and work with your artist’s practice and experience...Helen Cammock was instrumental in shaping the project (with myself and partners) and facilitating the programme. Helen’s practice uses a range of mediums including photography, film and performance to explore invisible histories, inequality and social justice. Helen worked as a social worker for more than ten years. She brought lived experience, a unique mix of visual arts skills and highly specialised youth expertise to the project, setting up a safe, creative space and instigating an enquiry-based approach using photography.

When working with young people, allow for organic development. We recruited two groups of young people (13-16yrs and 17-25yrs) some of our participants identified, others didn’t. We’d originally planned to work with two distinct age ranges, but after groups met, they were keen to work together, so the two became one. You can never underestimate the level of support young people need. This project allowed our participants to explore and develop their sense of self and identity. For some, this had a powerful impact and they required guidance and a lot of support.

The project involved collaboration between Photoworks, libraries, archives, community organisations, an artist and young people… Any advice on dealing with challenges in partnership working?
Give it time and be flexible. The main challenge was the project took much longer than anticipated!  Initially envisaged as a 12 month project, it was extended to beyond 18 months. We had a brilliant mix of ambitious partners who each brought skills, expertise and resources to the project. There was a lot we wanted to achieve, and do well, so this took time.

It sounds like the project doesn’t only have a legacy, but continues to grow and influence…What happened next?
A lot happened next! And continues to happen. Three years later, three of the participants have recently been working as youth ambassadors on a new LGBTQ+ Photography Club we’re running, and they’ve been fantastic. In May 2018 some of the collective helped lead a pop-up photo booth at the Barbican Gallery, London as part of the Another Kind of Life exhibition and they’re also supporting a new LGBTQ+ programme we’re running. One young person worked on the hugely successful Museum of Transology at Brighton Museum and we’re now working on plans for an exhibition co-curated by the young people at Brighton Museum in 2019, as well as ideas for the next iteration of ITO.

FIND OUT MORE...
Visit the digital archive and read more: www.intotheoutside.org.uk
Follow: @photoworks_uk

ARCHIVE INSPIRATION...
LGBTQ+ heritage at locally-held archives, like the photo below, inspired young people as they created a new digital archive that shares and celebrates stories from LGBTQ+ young people in Brighton & Hove and beyond.

Image: Brighton Pride 1995. Courtesy Sally Munt and Queer In Brighton.

MORE IMAGES FROM THE 'ITO' DIGITAL ARCHIVE...
In addition to the selection of photographs from the Into The Outside archive featured on our website's homepage, we're delighted to share some more images below.

Image: Stars in Her Hair. Alfie, 2017. Courtesy of Photoworks.


Image: Together.  Anisha, 2016. Courtesy of Photoworks.
 

Image: Anime. Mally, 2016. Courtesy of Photoworks.
 

Image: Varga, from the series Atlantis. Romy, 2016. Courtesy of Photoworks.

Thanks...
Our thanks to Juliette Buss (Learning & Engagement Curator), also to Chloe Hoare (Learning & Engagement Coordinator) and Helen Wade (Sale & Marketing Manager) at Photoworks, all the young people involved in Into The Outside and project artist Helen Cammock, and Sally Munt / Queer in Brighton for their permission to share the image 'Brighton Pride 1995'.

Juliette is a member of the Photographic Collections Network; we hope to share more news from Photoworks' Learning & Engagement programme soon. 

If you have an idea for a blog post, please do get in touch: info@photocollections.org.uk.