Description:Image Title "Trees, Black Patch"
Far beyond the bricks of our built environments, that are often seen to define us, it is the mental construct of community that matters most. In this sense, notions of community, of belonging and of course of otherness are not monolithically fixed constructs; they are all fluid and intangible ones, drawn and experienced upon the unseen and hidden landscape of our emotions and the ability of our minds to make these feelings real. This then is a work that explores the connection between the imaginative geography of landscape [psycho geography] and the ‘imagined community’ that it in turn engenders. (Benedict Anderson,1983).
Firstly, the images exhibited here are only a brief snapshot of the greater photographic work produced from this commission – more images can be viewed via my website. Yet within this work my intention was not to pander to the audience and produce a work that said ‘look at us...we’re just like you’. Because indeed why should the residents of these communities have to explain themselves to those outside of the community? Indeed, what I was keen to produce is a series of questions that initially create spaces for the confirmation of the audiences pre-existing impressions and stereotypes before later challenging them.
To in other words allow the viewer the space and the opportunity to vent their ‘mental accusations’ and then within other perhaps more empathetic images create a space for them to reflect and in turn confront these initial beliefs. But it is not my intention to give truths or answers within this work; instead I see all the works in this series – photographic, film and text - as openings or entry points for the construction of dialogues. My role is not to presume that I can give answers but to instead create spaces that begin, rather then ends dialogues.
In order to draw the audience in to enable them to ‘project identities’ upon the photographs, all of the individuals within my images are all deliberately left open to be interpreted by the viewer. Information concerning the individual’s names, ages, occupations and indeed the environment itself (which is often used within portraiture to define the subject) have been removed - leaving only the direct relationship between the individual and the audience.
For this reason this is a work more about the audience than the subjects within the frames, as the images become a series of tableaux that reveals more about the viewer and the perceptions which they have chosen to project upon the subject, than of the ‘real’ identity of the individual under scrutiny within the frame.
What has been the most important aspect of my works have been the relationships that have arisen during the course of its production. I see the images – especially so within the film, as collaborative works which would not have proven possible without the active participation of the individual within the frame and of course impossible without trust. Perhaps in this sense, it is only trust and this direct connection between ourselves and others that becomes the only way for the ‘imagined community’ to be made real.
But of course, as we know, our identities are not only of our own making, they are also one’s projected upon us by others. There is not one community of Handsworth and Lozells but a multitude of alternate realities, all of them real and all of them imagined and of course, all of them existing upon the unseen plane of the hidden landscape.
We are all connected and yet we are all separate. Yet whilst we look, it is impossible for us to truly see the unknown others around us as they wish to be seen. As like us they find themselves posited between mind and corporeality; between the physicality of their geographical existence and the individual they and we think they are. Yet, ultimately in the end of course, they like us will always be made real by how others choose to read the light upon their surface.
Andrew Jackson
www.writtenbylight.com
Note: Birmingham Stories is extremely grateful to Andrew Jackson for sharing his work with the project. If you are interested in learning more about his work, please visit his excellent website, 'Written by Light'.