Photo from Culture, Power, and Politics
At 79 Leonard Street in Shoreditch is a unique, democratic meeting point for the photographers of today – much like Shakespeare and Company was for the likes of Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and James Baldwin.
So it's no surprise that Photobook café, the trifecta of cafe/bar, photography gallery, and photobook library, was the location of photographer Antigoni Memou's latest talk, Origins and Politics of Documentary Photography.
Dr. Antigoni Memou, 45, a Senior Lecturer in History of art & photography at University of East London, spent the talk describing the elastic category of documentary photography, from its origins in the late 19th century with Jacob Riis photographing social class in New York city up through the American Great Depression, up to the late 20th century.
She engaged the audience with exercises to talk amongst themselves, asking them to analyse photographs like that of Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother.
"I would like in a moment, to invite you to think through that image, but just to give you a little bit of background to help those discussions. What do you notice about the photograph you see?" she asked the people crowded into the small room, directing them to discuss their different points of view with someone they didn’t know. “It's interesting to kind of think why this became one of the most iconic images of the 1930s. Why was it picked up by Roy Stryker, who apparently recognised this [relevance] immediately and sent it to the press?”
Fascinatingly, the famous photograph was shown through alternate takes from different angles not often seen, which begs the question: would history be different if different photographs were chosen and distributed by the mass media?
As photography has become a main source of information in the digital age, history is always important to know. The audience is intrigued as Dr. Memou makes a great connection from title/caption to photos and speaks of the importance of considering the delivery and understanding of photographic messages.
“Many theorists will talk about the violence of this camera, about the photographer, like imposing on their cities, their own viewpoints, their own class position, their own way of looking at the world,” she says. The error of poverty porn photography, for example, continues to exist, as suggested by an audience member, more through fashion photography, as it began in 1889 with Riis.
Here's the audience discussing Riis' image Sleeping Quarters, :
Alice Cannell, 22, a recent graduate in photojournalism attended the talk with an old classmate. Noting Riis’ later work photographing working children in the industrial age, she said, “the photo of a young girl standing in the middle of two big machines stands out to me. It put into perspective again how young and small the children were in comparison to huge machines.”
The cosy café opened up into a white-walled gallery space, filled with not an empty chair, with a few late-comers lining the walls. Overrun by the crowd of drinkers gathered above, chatter carried down the stairs and the bass of music was felt through the ceiling.
Cannell observed that “the lecturer made sure we understood how at the time, reading and writing wasn’t understood by everyone, and how visual literacy was so important then.” It's obvious why Dr Memou's talk was such a sell-out: it was cerebral, informative, and interesting for the history fanatic or studious photographer.
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