Feature Shoot

The Artist Who Escaped New York’s COVID-19 Pandemic Without Leaving Home

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 04:07:23 GMT

Quarantine 11

Quarantine 16

When the COVID-19 crisis first hit the United States, New York City became the epicenter for the pandemic. By April 1, a harrowing 5,000 cases were reported every day, forcing the city to shut down en masse. While unrooted transplants and the uber rich fled en masse, spreading the virus across the United States, New Yorkers of all stripes hunkered down to weather through the storm.

For many the feelings of isolation, on top of the specter of illness, death, unemployment, housing and food insecurity have been devastating. Forced to adapt to extreme circumstances, many dug deep into themselves, looking for ways to make the best out of a bad situation. Artist Karine Laval found solace in the terrace garden of her Brooklyn home, where she began making photographs collected in The Great Escape, now on view by appointment in her Brooklyn garden through September 7 as well as via an online video tour.

“Our only escape and way to cope with a feeling of imprisonment and anxiety may be to make best use of what we’re lucky to have and use the power of our imagination to push back the limits of our own confinement,” Laval says. Here she shares her journey to align with the progress of nature itself, finding solace and inspiration to create by following the organic cycle of life and death.

Quarantine 4

To begin, can you tell us about how your life has changed living in Brooklyn during the COVID-19 crisis?

“I started to self-quarantine on March 5 upon my return from a trip in Costa Rica. While there, I was loosely following the news and receiving messages from my family in Europe, describing how COVID-19 was raging and countries were shutting down. The US still seemed to be in a bubble of their own but I had no doubt that we were not going to be spared. I decided not to take public transportation anymore, avoid seeing anybody and stay inside unless I needed to go out to shop for food.

“I’ve followed that routine until the end of June, and I’m still social distancing. I don’t think I’ve ever been in the same place for that long during my entire adult life. I’m usually very social, and love to host dinners for friends and visit my family in France and Germany a few times a year so i’s been a big change of rhythm. I also travel a lot for work, whether it’s for an assignment or commission or for my own personal work.

“This forced pause has also affected my professional life. Luckily, I was working on a large-scale installation project in London when the lockdown started here and there, but we’ve been able to continue to work on it remotely despite major delays and hurdles.”

Could you share some of the life lessons you have learned having had to adapt to life in New York when it became the center of the global pandemic?

“This extraordinary experience has made me appreciate time, space and the ordinary in new ways. It also helped me enjoy and focus on the simple things that immediately surround me, like my own garden, my home and my neighbors. It’s not that I was not paying attention to them before, but my awareness and enjoyment of them all was definitely enhanced.”

Quarantine 9

Can you tell us about your experiences tending to your terrace garden and what you observed about being so closely involved in the process of nature?

“I feel fortunate to have a terrace and a small garden, where I’m spending time whenever the weather permits. I’ve never had the opportunity to see spring unfold the way it did this year. Flowers and bushes came to life in slow motion and I’ve watched nature follow its course while our lives have been on hold.

“There is an incredible variety of birds chirping and singing different melodies, which I hadn’t noticed as intensely as I’ve noticed this spring, certainly because the roar of the city had fanned away during the lockdown. Sometimes I even feel I’m transported into a tropical island or a rain forest, especially since New York is now considered a sub-tropical climate.”

What inspired you to begin thinking about making a series of photographs inspired by your garden?

“For the past decade, I have explored the notion of space as both a physical or geographical place—and also as a psychological and imaginary space that includes our relationship to nature and the environment we live in, between the natural and the artificial. After examining man-made places of leisure (i.e. swimming pools, beach resorts), I’ve become interested in another form of man-made environment: the garden.

“In 2014 I started the series Heterotopia, for which I traveled in the US and Europe to photograph public and private gardens. But I had never photographed for this series in my own garden. Being there everyday for weeks at a time, contemplating my own garden and witnessing its transformation inspired me to photograph it for my series Heterotopia.”

Quarantine 3

How have these new works may have been informed by the work you did for Heterotopia?

“I see this new work as a continuation of or a part of Heterotopia although it will always be a special capsule in time and space for me. I also use the same approach to produce the work. During this period of confinement and introspection, it also occurred to me that Heterotopia, and my work in general, had some connection with what we’re experiencing at the moment, being constrained into the limited realm of our homes.

“Although I usually get inspiration from the wider world and I’m away from my home while I work on a project, I often focus on contained and delineated spaces such as swimming pools or small areas in a garden, which I transform into fantastical larger-than-life landscapes that exist only beyond our perception and in the images I create. Somehow, through this new project my outer and inner worlds collapsed into one.”

Can you speak about how this experience inspired you to see your garden as an open-air studio?

“Instead of photographing these gardens in a straightforward, documentary tradition, I use the space of the garden as an open-air studio where I apply an experimental approach to create images rather than take photographs. The resulting pictures, which are far from a faithful portrayal of the plants and flowers I photograph, depict a disorienting representation of nature that can feel surreal or artificial. However, they are not derived from digital manipulation or post-production. The distortions, superimpositions and otherworldly colors are created in camera as single frames.”

How do you protect the prints from the weather elements?

“I’m not trying to protect the prints. They are casually pinned to the fences of the garden. They are printed on photographic paper and intentionally exposed to the weather. As a result they have been edited by rain, wind and sun, taking a life of their own. Just as we are at the mercy of nature and the virus, I decided to let go of control and let the works live on beyond me and be altered by the elements.

“I couldn’t afford this year to produce the exhibition at my regular printing studio, which was anyway closed. But I also thought it was fitted that the prints for the exhibition be produced ‘in-house’ with the only printer I have, which is a 17” wide Epson printer. In that sense, this is the ultimate ‘confinement’ exhibition of photographs of my own garden installed in that same garden a season later and produced within the limits of my home.”

Quarantine 12

Quarantine 2

All images: © Karine Laval

The post The Artist Who Escaped New York’s COVID-19 Pandemic Without Leaving Home appeared first on Feature Shoot.

Classes Delve into Photography Ethics

Sun, 20 Sep 2020 02:24:43 GMT

This photograph was taken at the two-day Emotional and Physical Resilience Workshop (2019). It was organized at Blink by Alison Baskerville at ROAAAR, with funding from the IWMF.

Our first workshop to place in Chiang Mai, Thailand at Documentary Arts Asia with Ryan Libre (2017).

As digital photography radically democratizes the medium, taking it out of the provenance of a once-elite group of imagemakers and gatekeepers, the subject of ethics in photography has come to the fore. Long overdue, we can finally begin to confront issues of bias, morality, and principle that have long infiltrated the medium by many of its most prominent practitioners.

Most recently, the Magnum Photos board voted unanimously to suspect veteran photojournalist David Alan Harvey’s membership after allegations of sexual harassment by a female colleague, as first reported in The Guardian. The suspension follows, but is not related to, the recent discovery of photographs Harvey made in 1989 depicting Thai sex workers who appear to be underage After being alerted to the presence of these images, Magnum took down its entire archive for what they described as a “comprehensive review – with outside guidance.”

Though recent, these are far from the first allegations made against a prominent figure in the industry, as the #MeToo movement brought to light the behavior of numerous men in the industry. But beyond their behavior behind the camera are the issues of what happens before the lens is even raised — the ethical issues with which all photographers, professional and amateur, must contend in order to produce work that cultivates social responsibility, rather than profit off opportunism.

Savannah Dodd, Founder and Director of the Photography Ethics Centre, shares her insights into establishing an organization dedicated to raising awareness and promoting ethical literacy across the photography industry through a variety of programs including online training, guest speaking, and interactive workshops. Here she speaks about the key ethical issues facing photographers today.

Savannah Dodd facilitating a workshop on photojournalism ethics at the Yangon Photo Festival (2018). Photo by Ludivine Paques.

To begin, can you give us a sense of the state of the world in 2017 and how global events informed the issues you wanted to explore in the creation of the Photography Ethics Centre?

“When I decided to start the Photography Ethics Centre in 2017, there were a number of major geopolitical events happening at the time, namely the migration of Syrian refugees across the Mediterranean, the surge of violence against the Rohingya community in Myanmar, and British secession from the EU.

“With all of these events, as with most events in the media today, photography played a major role. Sometimes photographs were used to promote empathy and compassion, while at other times photographs were used to stoke fear and bigotry. But the thing that was universal among them was the immense power that photographs had shape popular consciousness about an issue, and, therefore, political will.

“Around the same time, on an intrapersonal level, I was spending more time with professional photographers at exhibitions and events. I started raising questions about asking for consent and negotiating access. While some of the photographers I spoke with were very passionate on the subject and eager to have these conversations, others were wholly unprepared for these questions. I realized that there was a need for educational opportunities for photographers at all levels to improve their ethical literacy. Given the important role photography plays in the world today, we need photographers to develop the skills to produce work ethically.”

Could you speak about the power of photography, and the ethical issues that shape how this power can be used to help or to harm?

“Photographs are particularly powerful at shaping how we view and understand the world around us. Each time we take and share a photograph, we are contributing to what the world knows about the subject. Take and share a picture of a beach in Ireland? People learn a little bit more about beaches in Ireland. This is pretty straightforward, but we are rarely conscious of our representational power as photographers when we are uploading a photo to social media.

“While some photographs that we take and share are innocuous, others risk perpetuating harmful stereotypes. Some stereotypes are so imbedded in our way of seeing the world that we may not be aware of them, much less question them.

“In order to avoid sharing photographs that perpetuate stereotypes, we need to be very self-reflexive about our own biases, and we need to carefully consider what our photographs are saying. We need to think about what tropes a photograph invokes or rejects, what conventions we have used, and where those conventions come from. A lot of the conventions that we accept as being a sign of ‘good’ photographs are not just benign aesthetic decisions; they carry meaning and shape the way the viewer understands the scene pictured in an image.

“When we share a photograph, we have an opportunity to contribute to the visual record of whatever we have photographed. We can use that opportunity to either challenge or perpetuate stereotypes.”

The Photography Ethics Centre has run workshops for community organizations in Northern Ireland, where it is based. This one was funded by the Rebecca Vassie Trust (2019).

Could you speak about how the democratization of photography and how the rise of social media has expanded the role of photography in our daily lives?

“The democratization of photography and the rise of social media has meant that we are living in an increasingly visual world. We are constantly inundated with visual media, and we are constantly creating visual media. There is tremendous potential to enable people to communicate in ways beyond written and spoken word. However, many of us are ill-equipped to harness the power of photography effectively. We are taught to read and write in school, but most of us are not taught how to read and make photographs.”

What are the key ethical issues in photography in 2020?

“Representation has always been a major ethical issue in photography, but it’s getting a lot more airtime now thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement. The history of photography is steeped in colonialism and has been dominated by white men. This has led to a very specific portrayal of the world through the white, male lens. There are a number of brilliant organizations like Authority Collective, Women Photograph, and Diversify Photo that have been working very hard to shift this industry-wide imbalance.

“For individual photographers, I think that this is a moment to pause and really thoughtfully consider what is it that we are photographing and why we are photographing it. The culture of photography awards often leads people to photograph things that seem award-winning, without consider whether we are best-placed to tell that story. (There is another whole conversation that could be had here about what constitute “award-winning.”) We need to step back and listen to people from the communities are a photographing, to seek out photographers from those communities, and to bow out when work should go to Black photographers, photographers of color, and female and non-binary photographers.

“There are a number of other ethical issues that have come up in recent months, including questions of consent, identifiability and safety, and the exploitation of vulnerable minors. There will no doubt be many more ethical issues hotly debated on Twitter before the year is through. Although there are many deeply concerning practices that are coming to light, I find it really invigorating that there are so many people who are so passionate about photography ethics and who are having these conversations.”

What are three important questions a photographer can use to check their ethics?

“This is a really difficult question because ethics should really be embedded into the photography process, from the initial concept all the way through to publication. But if I had to pick three questions, I suppose they would be:

“1. What am I representing and why? Whenever we are taking and sharing photographs, we are engaging in a process of representation. Thinking critically about what it is you are trying to represent and why you are doing it is an essential first step in exploring the ethics of your photography process.

“2. Do my photographs and captions accurately represent the event? This is an important question to ensure our integrity as visual storytellers, and to highlight our biases and assumptions. It asks us to consider whether our photographs really tell the whole story. What have I cropped out? What have I focused on? And why?

“3. What impact could these photographs have on the viewer, on the individual(s) represented, and on others? We are not producing work in a vacuum. Our photographs will have a very real impact on the world around us. We have a responsibility to consider what that impact might be, and to mitigate any potential harm that could come to the people in our photographs as a result of our work.”

The Photography Ethics Centre organized the first annual Photography Ethics Symposium at the Royal Photographic Society in Bristol (2019). The second annual event in 2020 will take place online due to coronavirus restrictions.

Can you tell us about the Photographer’s Ethical Toolkit and the online Photojournalism Ethics Series, and the practical benefits of these courses?

“Our first online course, the Photographer’s Ethical Toolkit, was launched in 2018 in partnership with the Thomson Foundation on the Journalism Now platform. This course is available for free as a basic introduction to photography ethics.

“While we intended for this first course to be accessible for photographers at all levels, we felt that there was also a need to offer something that goes into a lot more depth and that relates directly to the work of photojournalists and documentary photographers. This is why we developed the Photojournalism Ethics series. In this 3-module series of self-paced courses, we explore the meaning of accuracy, the role of empathy and power in the photographic process, and the impact of our work on ourselves and on others.

“It is important to make clear that we do not aim to define what is ethically ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ Instead, our objective is to provide a space for photographers to take time out to reflect on what ethics means in their practice. Using material that we have designed and curated, we hope that photographers will engage with example ethical dilemmas and reflect on their past work.

“It is important that we take time to consider the ethics of our practice and understand where our red lines in advance, because it is extremely difficult to make ethical decisions in the moment and often these decisions have to happen in a split second. By thinking through their ethics in advance, we aim for photographers to leave our courses better prepared to face ethical dilemmas and to respond with sound judgement.

“Experience of working through difficult ethical considerations gives photographers tangible tools to be more effective in their work. It can help us to build better relationships, to communicate more effectively, and to gain access to communities in a socially responsible way. It also helps to ensure that we do not unknowingly breaching national or international laws and ethical norms about privacy and confidentiality, consent, and child protection.

Lastly, as we are living in a time fraught with factionalization and strife, how can a practice of ethical photography be used to unite us across so many divides?

“I think that photography ethics has huge potential for bringing people together in many different ways. Among the photography community, I think there is potential for constructive conversations about ethics to unite us, rather than divide us. At the Photography Ethics Centre, we approach ethics as principles that guide a person’s behavior. By approaching ethics using a principles basis, rather than as concrete guidelines or strict rules, we can all agree that certain ethical principles are important, like integrity and respect, but we can also understand that how we apply these principles may be different from person to person and from context to context. I believe that this could help to foster a more constructive conversation about photography ethics, whereby people can establish common ground by agreeing to certain ethical principles and explain their reasoning if they take different tacks.

“More broadly, a practice of ethical photography has so much potential to bridge divides in our society. By representing communities and social issues with more nuance and by moving beyond stereotypes with our photographs, we can foster empathy and connection among people from vastly different backgrounds. Photography has so much power to shape the way people understand the world around them. If we produce work that is based on a premise of empathy and dignity, if we take time to really understand who we are photographing, and if we ensure that we are telling the full story with all of its complexity, I think we can change the world.”

All images courtesy of the Photograph Ethics Centre.

The post Classes Delve into Photography Ethics appeared first on Feature Shoot.