The Collecting Place
My ideas for The Collecting Place were developed in conjunction with Andrew McCarthy, Deputy Director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum with whom I worked successfully on Leaving Home in 2005. From the start we wanted to work with sight-impaired young people as a distinct group who can easily become marginalized by visual arts projects. I wanted to explore the receptivity of such a group to visual exploration. I also wanted to explore – as a personal goal – certain fundamental properties of photography through the use of large-scale equipment.
Participants
After originally assuming we would be working with Education Bradford, it soon became apparent that an invitation to families rather than schools would provide the best chance of recruiting participants for an extended project. Simon Labbett, Rehabilitation Officer based at Bradford’s Morley Street Resource Centre, was an early convert to our aims and obtained positive responses from several families to our letter of enquiry. We held an information meeting at Morley Street Resource Centre in February which I am sure secured the commitment of those who attended.
Running the project in the Easter holidays also gave us a group of interested parents/guardians who played a full part in many of the activities.
I spent some time investigating basic optics and the structure of the eye, and found out as much as possible about the individual disabilities of the participants from Simon Labbett. I am particularly pleased that we had time to perform some basic optical experiments during the project, for example restaging a version of Kepler’s proof that light travels in straight lines (thereby causing both pinhole and lens images to turn upside down). This principle was applied in two of the exhibited large-format pictures, where pairs of participants – standing inside the camera – are silhouetted against an inverted background.
All the participants who attended the original information meeting were highly motivated and maintained concentration and enthusiasm throughout the 6-day span. In fact they turned out to be an ideal group, and I quickly had to revise my initial assumption (put forward in the project proposal) that they might be less receptive to photographic activities because of impaired vision. If anything the opposite was the case. Only one person missed any of the days, due partly to acute sensitivity to bright light.
I assume that participants feel they learned quite a bit about photography during the project. I posted basic information about cameras and camera obscuras on the project blog: www.thecollectingplace.blogspot.com, which became a useful repository for feedback and pictures and which is being maintained at least for the duration of the BPM exhibition. All participants posted items on the blog. One also produced an illustrated journal of the project.
There were frequent opportunities for the exercise of motor skills and brain-hand-eye coordination in the various project activities, from assembling the camera tent to measuring and pouring chemicals. Working in a safelit darkroom and inside the darkened camera undoubtedly posed challenges to some people, but at no time prevented full participation
Socially the project seems to have been very effective. Friendships were formed between young people who had not met before, and all behaviour was noticeably civilized and considerate.
Planning and Delivery
Following the initial meeting with participants in Bradford, Andrew McCarthy and I worked out a schedule for the 6 days of the project. I felt it was a great bonus to be able to work intensively with a group over a number of consecutive days, and tried to plan a project that would build skills and understanding towards a major piece of experimentation. See the Project Schedule document for this initial proposal. A handout given to participants on the first day set out the same basic timetable of activities.
I was in two minds about the value of allocating a whole day to the National Media Museum visit. In the event it turned out very well: people were genuinely interested in the exhibits. The early photographs laid out for us in the Insight archive were particularly popular. I had asked to see cyanotypes by Anna Atkins (possibly the first recorded woman photographer) but didn’t realize the museum had a hand-stitched book of natural history photograms given by her to her father. This seemed to offer a nice parallel with the Brontë children’s famous Little Books, and it encouraged me to fit in a cyanotype-sunprint session at BPM the following day in which we used an identical technique to produce photograms of flowers on blue paper. On the same day we also made time to perform the inverted-light source experiment referred to earlier: this was in response to a question about how light passes through lenses.
Overall I think the progression from cameraless silhouettes (introducing darkroom work) through museum visits, optical demonstration, pinhole cameras and cyanotypes to large-scale image production worked well. I could have worked harder to provide solid information about optical principles, camera construction and photo-chemistry, but some of this is on the blog, and I hope I have at least provoked curiosity about these matters.
I might have provided more opportunities for participants to solve real problems that arose during the project. There was a certain amount of this (see bullet points in next section below) but the availability of willing adults made it very easy to overlook opportunities for problem-solving. However participants did feel ownership of the project: when I proposed reshooting one of our early photographs there was clearly-voiced opinion in favour of keeping and exhibiting what we had already done.
Technical Preparation and Realization
My basic stimulus for The Collecting Place was the ambition to make a photographic camera big enough to stand in, with an image bright enough to view comfortably on the interior focussing screen. I equated this with the working conditions experienced by Victorian wet-plate photographers, although clearly we were doing something uniquely our own at the same time.
We were fortunate to obtain a Darkroom Tent from the grandfather of one of the participants. This was of sturdy construction (currently available ones are much flimsier) and proved ideal for attaching additional plywood boards to support the photographic film and lens. It was the only modification needed apart from cutting a hole in the light-tight fabric at one end to take the lens,
Conventionally this kind of project has been based around pinhole photography (i.e. no lens) and indeed we made pinhole cameras from cardboard boxes as part of the introductory activities. These have the disadvantage that the images are very dim with resulting long exposures of several minutes. I was concerned that:
• people with impaired sight would be unable to view such images
• wind movement might ruin long exposures made on location.
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I had come across the specialist lens manufacturer Optical Instruments Ltd in an exhibition at the Science Museum, London and commissioned them to make us a lens to fit the camera tent. I discussed our unusual requirements with their lens designer, who came up with a 4-element construction giving a 4ft square image with a focal length of 4ft (the interior length of the camera). It proved impossible to design a wide-angle lens with such a specification (the angle of view approximates 70mm on 35mm format) giving another link with Victorian photography: wide-angle lenses did not become available for photography until after 1900. The nineteenth century look of the images is partly due to their moderately telephoto nature.
As part of the preparatory work I visited Optical Instruments in Croydon to see our lens elements being ground and polished. This was quite fascinating, and I have still to fully absorb the experience which however is partly recorded in the project video. I would like to go back in order to fully understand the considerations that affect the building of a bespoke photographic lens.
To save money the lens came without a focussing ring (although some focussing movement is possible by rotating one pair of elements against the other) and without aperture stops. Because of delays in manufacturing, the lens was only delivered a day or two before our first outing, and it was very exciting to discover on the first day how improved performance could be obtained by attaching a manual stop to the front of the lens to increase resolution and depth of field.
As a group we:
• painted the interior plywood boards
• greased metal pole ends for easy assembly & dismantling
• positioned and fixed hooks for attaching the boards to the camera frame
• measured and cut black fabric for extra light-fastness
• devised and fitted a hinged shutter to the lens
• devised and fitted a manual aperture stop
• worked out efficient method of erecting camera
• calculated and recorded practical exposure times
• discussed safe working procedures
• discovered an efficient way of working inside the camera
• mixed darkroom chemicals
• established handling routines in darkroom
Optimum focus turned out to be just beyond the focal length I had specified for the lens, (an imperfection now being dealt with) and correction was made by bolting spacer rings out between the lens and the camera body. This had the incidental effect of making the camera look more impressive.
The ‘film’ was standard variable contrast black & white photographic paper, used together with a low-contrast printing filter to soften the contrast between highlight and shadow areas. Sheets of paper were cut off a roll in the darkroom and transported in a light-tight tube to each location.
In the field the camera worked extremely well, proving quite easy to transport (with everyone carrying something), easy to set up, and genuinely light-tight even in strong Spring sunshine. The weak point light-wise was the skirt of fabric that spread out around the base on each side. On rough ground this tended to let light in, but we laid extra fabric as an internal floor and this trapped the stray light. There is no evidence of fogging on any of the 7 negatives.
Exhibition and Outcomes
In the ACE funding proposal I wrote of a desire to show that a photograph is not a direct transcription of the real world but a construction requiring imaginative interpretation. I think our large exhibited paper negatives encourage this interpretation. All displays of educational project work run the risk of looking a bit thin – so much of the activity is below the surface – and in this case the artistry is not so much in the perfection of the photographs as in the fact that they were produced at all. However the 4x3ft paper negatives do make an impact and, it is hoped that they lead spectators to look further into the project aims.
The exhibition is indeed only part of the project, and we have worked hard to ensure that other elements are visible. The Collecting Place comprises:
• Initial proposal and schedules
• 6 days contact with participants
• www.thecollectingplace.blogspot.com
• Exhibition of 7 large-format photographic negatives
• 3-minute documentary video
• Catalogue
• Media coverage
• Evaluations
Each element contains information or imagery not available elsewhere, so it is possible to examine the project from different angles.
I very much hope that the project will have a lasting legacy. The museum has already scheduled a public appearance for the camera as part of the Brontë Society Annual Weekend events in June, to which the original participants have been invited. I hope to maintain longer-term contact with them via the blog.
The existence of the giant camera and lens is a substantial educational resource for the museum, and we expect to do further work with it over the next few years.
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