Itinerary

See below for further information about sessions and presenters

Friday 3^rd March

09.30 – 10.00 Registration

10.00 – 10.15 Introduction (by Helen Sear)

10.15 – 11.00 David Campany – Straight pictures of a crooked world

11.00 – 11.25  Steffi Klenz – Nonsuch

11.25 – 11.45  Coffee break

11.45 – 12.10  Anne Hardy

12.10 – 12.40  Anne McNeill in conversation with Trish Morrissey

12.40 – 13.00  Question time (chaired by Julia Peck)

13.00 – 14.00  Lunch break

14.00 – 14.45  Cornelia Parker – Avoiding the Object

14.45 – 15.10  Polly Braden – Adventures in the Valley

15.10 – 15.40  Roma Tearne – The Cooden Bay Photographs

15.40 – 16.00  Tea break

16.00 – 16.45  John Slyce – Dismantling Documentary, Reinventing Postmodernism: Further Notes on the Politics of Representation

16.45 – 17.30  Concluding session (chaired by Ian Walker)

Evening programme:

18.00 – 20.00  Book signing reception with Roma Tearne in the exhibition Fictions Abound  at Turner House, Penarth (with shuttle bus)

20.00 – 22.00  The Last Horror Movie (2003) at Chapter Arts Centre, Cinema 1 - The director Julian Richards will be present for post-screening discussion

Saturday 4th March

09.30 – 10.00  Registration

10.00 – 10.15  Introduction (by Andrea Lange)

10.15 – 11.00  Jan-Erik Lundström – States of Exception: Documentary strategies  and the contemporary political landscape

11.00 – 11.30  Owen Logan – ‘Reality Based Communities’

11.30 – 11.55  Faye Claridge – Murmurs from the Ark

11.55 – 12.20  Miklos Gaál – Collected Remarks

12.20 – 12.40  Question time

12.40 – 13.40  Lunch

13.40 – 14.25  Russell Roberts – Mass-Observation: Documentary Facts - Documentary Fictions

14.25 – 15.10  Joan Fontcuberta – Photofictions and Mockumentaries

15.10 – 15.20  coffee break

15.20 – 16.15  Hito Steyerl – Look out, it’s real! Documentary, experience, politics

16.15 – 17.00  Verena Kuni – Make It Real. Re-Enacting Indexicality in the World Wide Web

17.00 – 18.00  Symposium concluding panel discussion (chaired by Brett Rogers)

18.00 – 20.00  chance to see other half of Fictions Abound exhibition at Chapter

Please be aware that this itinerary could be subject to change

Introduction by Helen Sear
Helen Sear is currently Senior Fellow in the Centre for Photographic Research at Newport School of Art, Media and Design, University of Wales, Newport.  Coming from a Fine Art background of performance, film and installation work made in the 1980’s, her photographs have since been in numerous exhibitions, including ‘De-Composition: Constructed Photography in Britain’ (British Council, 1991), Photo Espagna (2003) and ‘La Mirada Reflexiva’ (Castellon de la Plana, Spain, 2005).

David Campany - Straight pictures of a crooked world.
Campany traces the unwritten history of the documentation of artifice, from Edward Weston’s and John Divola’s photographs of Hollywood backlots to Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin’s latest images of ‘Chicago’, the fake town in which Israeli soldiers practice urban operations.  Fiction and fantasy are seen in such works as social phenomena, while photography is understood as a seemingly objective means of recording them.
David Campany is an artist, writer and Reader in Photography at the University of Westminster.  He is the author of Art and Photography (Phaidon 2003) and contributor to Source, Photoworks, Contemporary, Engage and Art Review.  He is currently working on a book about photography and cinema.

Steffi Klenz - Nonsuch
Klenz will be focusing on her new photographic series Nonsuch which concentrates on the ‘model’ town Poundbury in Dorset.  At first her images of the seemingly unexceptional space, taken with meticulous attention to detail, could be perceived as documentary photographs of an ordinary town.  However, they have an uncanny atmosphere of estrangement in their depiction of an abandoned place, devoid of people, litter and personal details – rather like a stage set for a performance.
Steffi Klenz graduated with an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in 2005. She is currently showing her series A Scape at the Focal Point Gallery (January-March 2006). Her series Nonsuch will be featured in Portfolio Magazine in June 2006 (issue 43), and be shown at Andreas Wendt Gallery, Berlin, October/November 2006.

Anne Hardy
Anne Hardy will talk about her recent work.  Her photographs depict interior spaces that appear to be in a state of limbo or abandonment, juxtaposing a credible reality with a poetic strangeness.  Hardy makes the spaces in her photographs from scratch in her studio, often using found abandoned objects as the starting point.  Her work alludes to a hidden underbelly within our contemporary life; chaos residing just beneath the surface of the everyday, and explores the borders between truth and fiction, fantasy and reality.
Anne Hardy is visiting fellow in the Centre for Photographic Research at the University of Wales Newport.  She will have a solo show at Maureen Paley in spring 2006, and was recently shortlisted for the Max Mara Art Award.  Her work has been included in major group exhibitions in the UK and abroad, including ‘Really True! Photography and the promise of reality’, Ruhrlandmuseum, Essen, 2004.

Anne McNeill in conversation with Trish Morrissey
The conversation will focus on Morrissey’s body of work Seven Years and the reconstruction of memory through family photographs.  One of the functions of the family album is to re-enforce the myth of the ‘happy family’, which is often contrary to the true tensions behind the scenes.  In a series of elaborately staged portraits, Morrissey worked closely with her elder sister to impersonate family members (both real and imagined) and to re-enact memories familiar to all of us, such as childhood birthdays or holidays at the seaside.  Through the use of gestures and body language, emotions which are normally hidden are subtly teased out, to produce psychological tensions within the photographs.
Trish Morrissey - Born in Dublin, Trish Morrissey now lives and works in London.  She primarily uses photography, but more recently video.  She received her MA in photography from the London College of Printing in 2001.  In 2004, her solo show ‘New Works’, curated by Anne McNeill, opened at Impressions Gallery, York, and continues to tour to galleries in Europe, including Gallery of Photography, Dublin and Pump House Gallery, London.  In 2005 she showed Seven Years at Yossi Milo Gallery, New York.
Anne Mc Neill - Since January 2000 Anne McNeill has been the Director of Impressions Gallery.  Anne McNeill began her career in 1984 working at Camerawork, London.  In 1993 she joined CCPM photography commissioning agency, based in SE England, as the Development Officer.  By 1995 she had led the agency through change and established it as Photoworks, where she was the Director.  She was Artistic Director of Photo 98, the UK Year of Photography and Electronic Image.

Question time - chaired by Julia Peck
Julia Peck graduated in Photographic Studies from the University of Derby in 1994. She received her MA in photography from the London College of Printing in 2001.  In 2003, Quarry, an exploration of fear and space in the landscape, was published in Next.  She is currently a PhD candidate at Newport School of Art, Media and Design, University of Wales, Newport.

Cornelia Parker – Avoiding the Object
Cornelia Parker has always used photography as part of her practice.  The photographing of her work in progress in Thirty Pieces of Silver and Words That Define Gravity operates on many levels in addition to that of a documentary tool, and delivers potent images in their own right.  From projecting a feather taken from Freud’s pillow trapped between glass, to reclaiming silver from photographic fix, she will discuss selected work in relation to photographic representation, evidence and transformation.
Cornelia Parker has became known for a number of large scale installations including Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View 1991, and The Maybe, a collaboration with actress Tilda Swinton shown at The Serpentine Gallery in 1995.  In 2001 the Victoria & Albert Museum in London commissioned a permanent installation for the British Galleries.  In tandem with the large projects she has been realising an ongoing series of smaller works entitled Avoided Object, working in collaboration with numerous institutions including HM Customs & Excise, The Royal Armouries, The Alamo and Madame Tussauds.

Polly Braden - Adventures in the Valley
Braden will present a new version of the experimental documentary she has been making with David Campany.  Adventures in the Valley is a sequence of colour images made in the Lea Valley, which runs from the Thames in East London up to Hertfordshire.  The area has been in permanent flux for some time and large parts of it are to be transformed by the 2012 Olympics.  Moving between observational documentary and staged encounters the digital slideshow of 150 images is both descriptive of a place and self-reflexive in its method.
Polly Braden is a photojournalist and documentary photographer.  She works regularly for newspapers and magazines, and also exhibits her work.  She is a winner of the Jerwood Photography Prize and the Guardian's Young Photographer of the year.

Roma Tearne - The Cooden Bay Photographs
Tearne draws from her recently published photo-narrative 'Cooden Bay' in this audio-visual presentation.  'Cooden Bay' is a story about a collection of family snapshots of the kind with which most people are familiar.  The text is part realist, part gothic fantasy, and part psychological drama, but the photographs, some of which are embedded in the text, are not illustrations of the narrative.  Instead they act as a marker in order to blur the boundaries between the world and fiction.
Roma Tearne was born in Sri Lanka and lives Oxford.  She completed her MA at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford and currently holds an AHRC Fellowship at Brookes University, Oxford.  For the last five years her work has been almost exclusively about memory and narrative.  She is in the process of completing her first full-length novel about Sri Lanka.

John Slyce - Dismantling Documentary, Reinventing Postmodernism: Further Notes on the Politics of Representation
Slyce returns to previous critical moments and documentary practices - particularly those centred around the work and writings of Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler - to examine what is at stake in contemporary flirtations with post and mock-documentary photography.  How might practices that reinvent documentary traditions along the lines of a conceptualised or performative realism cast our present moment of culture and economy into a more revealing light'  Where might an engaged practice of social documentary find a place in postmodernism'  What might this look like and how might it function'
John Slyce is an American writer and critic based in London.  He writes regularly in Portfolio, Camera Austria, Art Monthly, and Flash Art and was a contributing editor for Creative Camera and Dpict.  He has written numerous catalogue essays on the work of artists such as Jemima Stehli, Gillian Wearing, Sarah Jones, David Shrigley, Michael Landy, Muntean/Rosenblum, and Artlab.  He is visiting and part-time lecturer at Middlesex University, department of Art and Visual Culture, at the Royal College of Art, and at Christie's programme in contemporary art.

Concluding session chaired by Ian Walker
Ian Walker is Programme Leader for the MA in Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Newport.  He has written extensively on photography, including the book City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and documentary photography in interwar Paris.  In 2005-6, he has received an AHRB Research Leave grant in order to complete a new book on English Surrealism and photography, to be published in 2007.

Introduction by Andrea Lange
Andrea Lange is currently Exhibitions and Promotions Officer at Ffotogallery.  Previously she worked for the recent Berlin Photography Festival and curated exhibitions for the NGBK (Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst) in Berlin.  She has written extensively on contemporary and historic photography and was visiting lecturer in Berlin and at Newport School of Art, Media and Design, University of Wales, Newport.

Jan-Erik Lundström - States of Exception: Documentary strategies and the contemporary political landscape 
Lundström will analyze current artistic projects with respect to his thesis, that, in response to the contemporary political landscape - characterized by its global “state of exception” (Giorgio Agamben) - documentary work, anchored in photographic media, has manifested complex and many-layered strategies, intended to reflect upon and produce the present.  In particular, his investigation of recent documentary strategies observes the expanded tense of contemporary work, incorporating not only the past, but also present and future.
Jan-Erik Lundström is the director of BildMuseet at Umeå University, Sweden, and also active as a freelance curator and writer.  Among his latest exhibitions are ‘Politics of Place’, ‘Killing Me Softly’ (Tirana Biennial), ‘Projects for a Revolution’ (Mois de la Photo, Montreal), ‘Double Vision’ (Prague Biennale) and ‘After the Fact’ (Berlin Photography Festival, 2005).  His books include Nordic Landscapes, Tankar om fotografi (Thoughts on Photography), Irving Penn and Horizons: Towards a Global Africa.  He is a consultant of contemporary African art for The Museum of World Cultures in Gothenburg.

Owen Logan - ‘Reality Based Communities’
‘Reality Based Communities’ has been used as a term of derision, directed by journalists at a senior advisor to President Bush, who had declared “we are an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality”.  Owen Logan’s work is concerned with the articulation of power in the global oil economy and he will talk about some of the problems of representing that theme both in Nigeria and in the North Sea industry.  His work mixes digital montage and straight photography and recovers methods from the history of anti-naturalist social realism.  He will address the wider cultural and political significance of these strategies, and their limits, in the context of mass-mediated society.
Owen Logan is a photographer and Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen where he works in association with the oral history project, ‘Lives in the Oil Industry’.  He is also a member of the Cultural Policy Collective (www.culturaldemocracy.net).  His work has been exhibited and published widely in Europe and Nigeria.

Faye Claridge
Claridge focuses on her recent series Murmurs from The Ark and its play with authenticity and interpretation, referencing the camera’s history of objectivity and the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. Poised between tableaux vivantes, theatre and painting, her portraits explore the roles of poser, viewer and photographer.
Claridge received her MA in Fine Art from the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, UCE, in 2005. Claridge frequently works site-specifically as artist-in-residence, continuing research into the interpretation of history. Additionally, as a writer and active supporter of artist-led culture, Claridge is co-founder of Periscope (Birmingham artists project space), a commissioning editor for Midwest artists’ website and a video journalist for the BBC.

Miklos Gaál – Collected Remarks
Gaál will discuss his work with respect to his relationship with the medium of photography, exploring his particular use of the camera’s focussing mechanism as a method of distancing and creating the element of surprise, to prompt the viewer into reflecting upon their way of looking at photographs as representations.
Miklos Gaál studied graphic design at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki from 1995-99, and photography at the School of Photography and Film at Göteborg University in Sweden in 1997-98.  He graduated with a MA in photography from the University of Art and Design, Helsinki in 2004.  Gaál has had numerous exhibitions in and outside of Finland since 1999.

Russell Roberts - Mass-Observation: Documentary Facts - Documentary Fictions
The experimental work of the group Mass-Observation, formed in Britain during the late 1930s, offers a valuable framework for thinking about some of the core principles of the documentary genre.  In the face of a mainstream documentary, Mass-Observation's reflexive approach to recording everyday life combined elements of anthropology, social surveys, documentary values and visual art, an approach which connects on many levels with recent strategies in 'art-documentary' practice engaged with questions of 'visual evidence'.  Such questions involve the creation of mock-histories, cross-cultural dialogues, staged or fictive scenarios.  This talk reflects on the methods of Mass-Observation in relation to this practice to consider the extent to which these often satirical or ironic contemporary strategies effectively engage with socio-political documentary work.
Russell Roberts is Head of Photography & Senior Curator of Photographs at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Wales, Newport. His most recent project was a book and international touring exhibition of the work of Tony Ray-Jones and he is currently working on a book and exhibition on Mass-Observation.

Joan Fontcuberta - Photofictions and Mockumentaries
Fontcuberta will debate the notion of truth in photography and the veracity of dominant documentary models.  Issues such as credibility and authenticity related to visual information will be examined from the points of view of ethics and semiotics.  A special focus will be on “mockumentary” as criticism, parody and deconstruction of traditional documentary in both film and still photography, and on the impact of digital imagery on collective conscience.
Joan Fontcuberta is Professor in the Audiovisual Communication Program at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, and currently Visiting Fellow at the University of Wales, Newport.  Previous visiting artist and lecturerships included The Art Institute of Chicago (1990-91) and Visual & Environmental Studies at Harvard University (2003-4).  He is the editor of Photovision, a Spain based bilingual publication, which he co-founded in 1980.  His work has been exhibited widely and among his numerous publications are two collections of his essays: El beso de Judas. Fotografía y Verdad (Barcelona, 1997) and Y Ciencia y fricción. Fotografía, naturaleza, artificio (Murcia, 1998).

Hito Steyerl - Look out, it’s real! Documentary, experience, politics.
This paper describes the transition from fiction to document within several documentary works dealing with tear gas clouds, such as Alan Sekula’s Waiting for teargas (2003). What are these pictures documenting' Are they documenting a political experience? Or, more generally speaking, is experience something which can be documented at all? Or is this one of the most prevalent documentary mythologies? And how does fiction intervene in those documentary technologies of truth?
Hito Steyerl, filmmaker, videoartist and writer based in Berlin. She was visiting professor for Gender and Cultural Studies at the Universität der Künste, Berlin 2001-3, and had numerous lectureships, including at Goldsmiths, University of London, 2004-5. Among recent exhibitions are the Manifesta 5 and the 3rd Berlin Biennial (2004). Her award-winning films are shown internationally on TV and at festivals. Her next publication is Die Farbe der Wahrheit. Dokumentarismus im Kunstbereich (Vienna, 2006).

Verena Kuni - Make It Real. Re-Enacting Indexicality in the World Wide Web
The world wide web is a mighty tool for spreading peer-to-peer live media coverage and a gigantic arena of representation, generously hosting a daily growing flood of amateur photography - but probably even more important is the indexicality of the www as such.  The belief in a stable index, providing a steady, reliable relationship between sign and signified, is still haunting our perception of photographic images to this day.  Kuni will discuss web based projects that propose strategies to critically engage with this ghost.  Special attention will be paid to the role of photography within the framework of a media system that does not only foster re-enactments of indexicality, but also beckons to use its structure to make the index itself become a shifter, a powerful tool for generating and processing realities.
Verena Kuni is a media theorist based in Frankfurt.  She has held various lectureships, including at the Institut für Medienwissenschaften, University of Basel, and was involved in research projects such as “Gender & Games”, University of Frankfurt am Main and “Cyborg Bodies”, HGKZ Zürich.  Kuni is a contributor to kunst-bulletin, spike art quarterly, Frieze, Camera Austria, and EIKON.  As miss.gunst, she runs her own radio show focussing on contemporary art and media, GUNST, on radioX (Frankfurt).  She was co-curator of video programmes for the Kasseler Dokumentarfilm und Videofest, and is now director of their interfiction conference and workshop programme [www.interfiction.org].

Concluding panel discussion chaired by Brett Rogers
Brett Rogers took up the post of Director of The Photographers’ Gallery in November 2005, arriving from the Visual Arts Department at the British Council where she held the joint roles of Deputy Director and Head of Exhibitions, Visual Arts since 1995.  Among the exhibitions Rogers curated are ‘Documentary Dilemmas: Aspects of British Photography in the 1990s’ (1993), ‘Reality Check: British Photography and New Media 2002-2004’ (in collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery).