Still A Magical Process
When Jo Spence, the influential British photographer, visited a Nottingham landfill site in the 1980s, she was shocked to find so many discarded photographs amongst the refuse. Part of her anxiety was not just the number of photographs people take, keep AND discard, but the need to make such records in order to commit the present to memory as images.
Significantly, she observed that people always put on a brave face for the camera. Ordinarily people don’t choose to memorialise the crises, whether emotional, physical or financial, that threaten to fracture their lives. They use photography to record their lives selectively: family outings, celebrations, births not deaths or moments of personal trauma.
From the 1930s onward, ‘documentary’ photography assumed the role of revealing the ‘truth’ behind our smiles and the visual evidence of documentary photography - by purportedly being able to point to inequalities in the system - supplemented the case for the setting up of a welfare state in Britain.
Although it is possible to trace that documentary tradition up to the 1980s when Jo Spence was making her own photographic work, what particularly interested her was how the state and its economic and welfare systems impacted upon individual lives and self-perceptions. She felt this most keenly, physically as well as psychologically, famously documenting her personal struggle with breast cancer and the dehumanising effect of medical treatment. Taking photographs empowered her and became her means of articulating and communicating those experiences.
Kit Anderson, RubyThis article on the work of photographer and ceramicist Kit Anderson is an opportunity to describe how an example of local health care - its history and future and photography’s past and future meaning in a digital age - have been brought together in a very specific relationship: in an artwork recently completed for the new Mary Potter Health Centre in Hyson Green, Nottingham.
Recalling Spence’s visit to Nottingham is a way of pointing to the contradictions represented in photography as a powerful yet ephemeral, fragile and imperfect, memorial to individual lives which can be too easily lost, whether in archives or altogether like those emptied into landfill. While today even more images are consigned to oblivion with the press of a digital delete button, beyond the reach of even the most subtle archaeological science, Kit Anderson’s work with photography relies on the permanence of fired clay. Retrieving a process which created some of the first ever ‘permanent’ photographic images at the beginning of the nineteenth century and applying it to ceramics for this commission, Kit alters how photographs and the events they witness are experienced.
It is a process in which the ephemeral nature of digital imagery is both a key and a conundrum that might connect Jo Spence’s anxiety over photographs and memory, with the much longer life span of a piece of pottery. Think of a city as one big missen heap, until the landfill sites of the twentieth century. Before oil and plastics, only metal, bone and ceramic generally survived the constant compression and decomposing process. A little trowel work in the flower bed is bound to turn up unidentifiable part-objects of rusty metal, glass and pot shards. Nothing ancient or destined for the British Museum, but remnants that provide a fascinating insight into very recent and sometimes highly local histories of the decorative and applied arts.
But I suspect I would be shocked if - wiping soil from a fragment of tile - I revealed part of a portrait: an eye, a mouth, not from a drawing but from a photograph. Why?
Because only very recently have the conceptual practices of contemporary photography been inserted into the history of applied decoration of ceramics, whose contemporary practice has arguably been more concerned with form, texture and material than with surface qualities. A little of that specific history is helpful here.
By mid-eighteenth century in Britain, there was a growing interest in applying the printing process of engraving to reproduce surface decoration on ceramic ware, part of the drive to production for a growing market of middle-class consumers and the spread of industrialisation to all modes of production. Just as transfer and engraving superceded hand painted decoration, in the second half of the nineteenth century - with the arrival of photographic processes -manufacturers would no longer have to rely on hand engraving. According to Paul Scott, the authority on printmaking techniques in the ceramics industry, it was Lafon de Camarsac working in France in the 1850s, who used a method of applying a light-sensitive coating to ceramic, now commonly known as the gum-bichromate process. Although ‘it was one requiring a degree of skill to work effectively and consistently, and wasn’t one for mass industrial use’ (Scott, 1994:27), by 1868 de Camarsac was able to use it in a limited way to reproduce portrait images on porcelein. [See Paul Scott, Ceramics and Print (A & C Black, London, 1994) pp. 26 - 30.]
The method used by Kit Anderson for the new Mary Potter Health Centre mural is a new variation on de Camarsac’s process. The story of the gum-bichromate process is one of regular development and adaptation. De Camarsac mixed the light-sensitive ammonium di-chromate with gum arabic, coating this onto a ceramic surface, exposing it to sunlight through collodian glass plate negatives and dusting the resulting sticky image with dry glaze pigment: a technique he developed from the process used by photographers on paper. Kit Anderson takes the process of mixing light-sensitive chemistry and ceramic pigments, but has developed it further, creating the colloid for applying to the surface of unfired tiles, a significant advantage as the tile can be left glazed or unglazed. The sensitised surface is brought into contact with a digital negative and exposed to ultra-violet light. When the tile is washed in water, the latent image is gradually revealed. Firing the tile in a kiln fixes the image. The tile can then be glazed or left unglazed. Either way, the image will be permanent.
Kit Anderson, Glazed ConvoyIt remains the same slow and painstaking process that frustrated de Camarsac, but now the fact that it is not mass-producable is its virtue. Where 19th century exponents of photography were enthralled by the microscopic detail produced by the daguerreotype process and its apparent truth to life - ‘made by natures own pencil’ was how Britain’s pioneer in photography, Henry Fox Talbot, described his own calotype photographs - in the 21st century when photographic images have been at the centre of so much mis-information, the aesthetic power of the gum-bichromate process relies on creating a less convincing image. Still recognisably photographic, but more obviously selectively filtered through time and memory, a mutable document is produced which is open to the imagination too. In the digital age, its imperfections - which mark a process rather than an electronic system - seem in direct sympathy with the use it has been applied to here by Kit Anderson.
For Kit combines imaging and making skills as a photographer and ceramicist, with her experiences as a woman, mother and long-time resident of the Forest Fields area of Nottingham. An important part of the appeal for Kit of the commission for the Mary Potter Health Centre was its localness and the opportunity to test a working process that would make this important new centre’s history more visible and more permanent. Utilising the process I've described to reproduce a mix of photographic images made during workshops with local residents - photographs of the new centre and its building in progress, photographs drawn from the Health Authority’s archive - Kit has created a public artwork in which memory is embedded, literally, as part of the story of the health-care and the lives of people in the area. A similar collective sense of history was evidenced when the Centre’s name was reviewed before the new building opened: the general agreement of the religiously diverse community in Hyson Green was to honour the work of Mary Potter, a nun, by retaining her name.
Kit talks about the importance of continuity in community and in an arts practice. The opportunity provided by an Arts Council of England bursary in 2006 enabled her to discover so much - buying time and a certain status that comes from being acknowledged by a public body. The Mary Potter Health Centre commission was proof of the value of such public support. Her resulting work provides an important reminder of the stake local people have in their own community, a place where they and the working health professionals can together sustain the spirit and health - and therefore the continuity - of that community.
Kit Anderson, ShoeThis most recent development in Kit Anderson’s work in photography and ceramic, using the immediacy and recording potential of the former and the permanancy of the latter, has helped to make visible, and thus to substantiate and respect the history of local aspirations to help others, providing both a more lasting and yet a more subtle document. It suggests the value of returning to 'old' photographs - rather than simply taking more. Creating a new context for their use, as this project has done, provided the opportunity to ask further questions of their provenance: such as, for whom do they have meaning and what histories do they uphold? The message for those who feel anxious about photography representing so much of the past committed to memory – private and public – is how the selectiveness of that memory, and not photographs, produces misleading documents. Now this still magical process offers a more creative permanence.
