 Welcome everyone who is joining us for the second half of the first day of this conference. I'm just going to wait before I formally start, just we can see the numbers of people logging on, steadily climbing, so we'll just give people another few seconds to join us before we formally begin proceedings. So it's a good time to get water, coffee, snacks to make yourself comfortable for the second half of the conference. So I'm going to begin and welcome you all back to part two of concerning photography conference, a collaboration between the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Photographers Gallery. My name is Sarah Turner, and I'm the Deputy Director of the Paul Mellon Centre. And it's been absolutely fantastic to collaborate with the team at the Photographers Gallery on shaping this event. And if you attended this morning, I think you'll agree that events like this provide a moment of gathering and of reflection on historic practices and a chance to think about the connections between the past and the present. And we had five terrific papers. It was such a full and interesting morning and really fantastic discussion as well. So we really encourage you to be part of the conversation and the discussion as we go through this afternoon's panel. I just want to take you quickly through some of our housekeeping rules and guidelines before I hand over to our chair of this session. So the session will contain two 15 minute papers in the pedagogies panel, and that will be followed by a Q&A session. And this will be followed by a 10 minute comfort break. And then we'll return after the break for a keynote by the artist Mata Hussain. And there'll be a chance to ask him questions after that. To ask questions, use the Q&A function at the bottom of your Zoom screen and you can type your questions into that and the chairs of the session will be able to read out your questions and put them to the speakers. The session is being recorded so you can watch it back later and share it with all your networks, your friends, your students as well. If you want to use the closed captioning function as well, which can be really useful, you click the CC button, which is on the bottom right hand corner of the screen to enable the captions. So thank you to our audience for joining us from all across the world. It's a real pleasure to have you with us along with our panellists who are going to present some really fascinating insights. And I think this theme of pedagogies will really link to some of the conversations and discussions we had about infrastructure this morning. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Karen Shepardson, who is our chair for the pedagogies panel. Karen, over to you. Oh, thank you so much Sarah and I'm thrilled to be with you today. So hello everyone and welcome to this afternoon's session concerning photography and specifically pedagogies. For those of you that don't know me, I'm Karen Shepardson. I'm program director of photography at London College of Communication and a reader here too. And it's my great pleasure to be chair in this afternoon's panel and linking into what I think is a highly anticipated artists keynote event towards the end of the day. For those of us within various institutions of education or working with graduates coming from creative practice concerning photography pedagogies seems highly salient, perhaps never more so. And chiming in with some of the themes of this ambitious conference, considering pedagogic histories, politics, cultural positioning, geographical and geopolitics positioning of past presence and futures, considering the presence of the past residing in our presence. I think we're going to have a crack in afternoon and to kick us off we have two speakers which I'm going to introduce so I'm going to introduce now. And then we'll move to our first speaker. Our first is Anne and Leiden, who is chief curator of photography at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, where she's responsible for the collection of some 55,000 plus images. She joined in NGS and was Associate Curator of Photographies at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, as we know. She's curated numerous exhibitions, including the work of Helen Adamson. Adamson, I beg your pardon, Paul Strand and Diane Arbus. She's the author of a number of books, including railway railway visions, photography, travel and perception. The photographers of Frederick H. Evans, a Royal Passion, photography and Queen Victoria, and very recently a perfect chemistry, the photographs of Hill and Adamson. But our first speaker of the afternoon is Dr Juliette Hackin. Juliette is Program Director of the MA in Contemporary Art and also Subject Lead in Photography at Sotheby's Institute of Art. She's the general editor of photography, The Whole Story, author of Lives of the Great Photographers, I think both of which were published by Thames and Hudson, author of photography and the art market, and the co-editor of photography and the arts essays on the 19th century practices and debates. Alongside that, Juliette is also co-series editor of the new hot topics in the art world, something we're all looking forward to seeing. So Juliette's paper is Talking Pictures, Teaching Photography as Art in Higher Education. So Juliette, can I pass over to you now, so if you can put your screen on. Can you hear me? I'm having a struggling of course with my IT. Don't worry at all, we can get you there. But you can hear me and you can see me. I can hear you and I can see you beautifully. Okay, thank you Karen for that kind introduction. I'm just going to see if I can get this up. Is that full screen? That looks great. Yes it is. Okay, thank you everyone for setting this up. It's an absolutely brilliant occasion to be discussing 50 years of photography in the UK. I am going to read this. It is a script. I'm sorry about that, but it's very new. In her 1979 essay, Lookers, Buyers, Dealers and Makers, Martha Rosler invokes a new intelligentsia of photography, currently developing in university programmes. She was not speaking about academic theories of photography such as Roslyn Crouse, then at CUNY. Instead, Rosler drew attention to the validating role of those newly enfranchised academics who would, she wrote, Give a legitimacy to that rarefied cultural entity, the history of photography and to specific works within it. Rosler did not specify professors, institutions, programmes or cohorts in her essay. In what follows, I will be examining some of the specifics of this particular photographic pedagogy, insisting upon its institutional character in order to draw out what was distinctive about the higher educational scene for photography in the UK in the 1970s. According to photography specialists duet Alexander, by 1963, the teaching of photography at university level have become such a significant force in the United States that it led to the founding of the SPE, the Society for Photographic Education, led by Nathan Lyons. A problem with my slides there. Well, this speaks of a specific post war boom in photographic education arising in part from the 1944 GI Bill and the social and economic currency of mass media and advertising. It's important to stress that many educators had formulated their pedagogic approaches in much earlier periods. I see this by looking at the attendees at the invitation of teaching conference of 1962, also organized by Lyons, which led to the founding of SPE. The 28 attendees included Harry Holmes Smith. He taught the first course in photography at the new Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937. He could study with Maholi Noj and Harry Callahan at the same institution and become a part-time instructor there. Aaron Siskin, a tutor at the same institution from 1951. Minor White, who became in 1947 or had become in 1947, the primary instructor teaching photography as an expressive medium at the California School of Fine Arts in a department founded by Ansel Adams. So Walter Rosenblum, who was at Brooklyn College, and Beaumont Newhall, who taught at Rochester Institute of Technology from 1956. John Sarkowski recently appointed to MoMA and a young Jerry Osman, also in attendance, had studied with Newhall at RIT. Beaumont Newhall later characterised his role in achieving accredited status for the history of photography in higher education at RIT. As one of the many triumphs of what was, to him, a lifelong campaign to elevate the status of photography to art. The photographic pedagogy that I'm describing is not only distinctive for its lineages, its long lineages, but also its pedagogical nexus with institutional collections. Not only of photographs, but also of the book collections that these fostered or attracted. Among influential US curator-educator historians such as Newhall, we can also name Frank Van Deren Coak and Peter Bunnell. Van Deren Coak was in 1962 appointed Professor of Art, Chairman of the Department of Art and Director of the Art Museum at the University of New Mexico, an institution that Newhall would join in 1971. When in 1972 photography entered an Ivy League University, Princeton, in the form of the first endowed history of photography professorship in the US, the appointee Peter Bunnell had also studied with Newhall at RIT. The professorship in the history of photography and modern art was endowed by one of the most influential US photo files of the 20th century. David Hunter McAlpine III, his mother was a Rockefeller, according to Rosler, one of the families who own high culture, and a prime mover together with Ansel Adams and Beaumont Newhall, behind the establishment of the Department of Photography at MoMA in 1940. Bunnell was also the curator of the Princeton University Art Museum and Otto Steinert at the Folkwang Museum of Design, School of Design in Essen. He used the collection he was building as his teaching materials, although I should say that Steinert's collection I think at that moment was both personal and institutional, there was a bit of a gray area. In this way, Bunnell, who at MoMA have been responsible for shows that integrated photography within the other arts became an apologist for photography itself, in charge of the acquisition and care of a collection whose very existence promulgated medium specificity. This institutional pedagogy tied to the object could also be exported. When the Musée d'Orsay in the late 70s wanted to train up François Algren to be the museum's first curator of photography, she was sent to Princeton to take Peter Bunnell's classes on photography. Now you've probably noticed in the account so far that I only really realised much too late in the process that very few female educators appear in this account or indeed at that conference, although they do claim to have invited two women to be there. So that's a whole other subject that's generated from this topic, which is female educators and academics and photography. Some of students we see here and also someone like you said Maudelle has such a pedagogy lineage which goes back to the photo league in the 1930s. So that's that's a whole other area to consider, we might do in the questions I guess. This institutionalised androcentric modernist pedagogy of whatever shade and whether socially engaged expressive neo surrealist or straight together with this institution published literature, forced a self referential cohesive notes that should be seen as a defining aspect of creative photography, which although not necessarily commonly defined in this way should perhaps be identified as American differentiating it. So it should argue perhaps from what is a European inflected independent photography. As Rosla recognise the codification of photographic histories and aesthetics in the classroom was also defined decisive in the emergence of an art market sector based on early photography in the 1970s. Also a book such of these were available to a UK audience. We can see from what I've just traced that there was no similarly entrenched culture institutional culture of photography. As there was in the US in the 1970s. The occasion for this conference. Other significant interplay we can say between the US. Many channels we could mention that may have been read in both countries, and also books as well in circulation and also one such as this one on the right dialogue photography, which marks the collaboration of well be visiting lectureship program that trend polytechnic. So we have Paul Hill and Thomas Coupe Joshua Coupe on the front he was one of those American visiting professors and the book itself intriguingly had this. This dedication at the beginning. So may make Williams very excellent article on on photographic pedagogy in 1970s UK has noted this significant engagement with US photographic culture. I also point to individual connections such as tenure a Jones, the British graphic designer and photographer who gained a scholarship to Yale School of Art in 61. And then studied at brother bitches design lab based in Richard Aberton studio in 62 to 63 and became a visiting lecturer in photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, and I think it's important to also stress these kind of directional threats, which go in the opposite direction from the US to UK, as I've been discussing. Despite these dynamic sites and instances of creative transnational exchange, it's important to stress that, as Alexander Miss Covey tells us academic courses on photography that were offered in the in the UK in the 1970s were confined to colleges and to polytechnics and had not penetrated universities. Although the US has its own polytechnics and technical universities, the particular the polytechnic as most people here will know has a particular history in the UK in the 1960s to 1990s. These institutions gain critical mass on the back of the Robbins committee report of 60 to 61, which responding to the need for more education and science and technology to invigorate post war industry advocated the establishment of teaching, rather than research institutions in higher education. According to Muscovy in the 1970s 15 UK polytechnics and art schools will start to offer higher education and photography. In identifying the establishment of these new polytechnics as crucial to creating new possibilities for photographic education, but Williams notes the Council for National Academic Awards, the central validating and funding body for the polytechnics were able to word degrees deployment and certificates of a comparable standard to those accredited by the universities. Well of course this was a radical development. Other commentators have argued that the polytechnics were established in part to preserve the distinction that a higher degree from a traditional university conferred. So the 1960s polytechnics created a two tier system that became known as the binary divide. When the system came to an end in 1992 with the Higher Further Education Act, the majority of polytechnics and many art schools became new universities with their own degree awarding powers. The photography decides every end of the UK university system in the 1990s, not the 17s. And it would in time become possible to study at a British University history and theory of photography divorce from practice. On that note, this is the point at which I wish to disrupt the established narrative of the narrative trajectory of the history of photographic education as that of its eventual penetration of higher education and its successful entry into the Citadel of art history in the same way it was acclaimed to enter the Citadel of art in 1970s Manhattan. That narrative is a linear one, which asserts the triumph of a venerable aestheticism informed by the assumption that a shedding of art is the criteria of photography's elevated status. It's not my intention to critique accounts of higher education photography in the UK such as that by Ian R Smith, which was substantially expressed as a timeline, but only to point to the technological imperative that often underpins such analyses. In the early 1980s, two books were published that were clearly designed for burgeoning demographic of those studying photography in English language higher education. On the left, we see the classic essays of photography edited by Alan Trachtenberg in the American Studies Department at Yale in the US and in on the right thinking photography edited by Victor Bergen, then based at the School of Communication at the Polytechnic for Central London. Both were anthologies, but whereas the former made a claim to canonical status for a series of writings on photography beginning with nex, the latter made its claim on the present intellectual moment with Bergen's introduction reading like a manifestor. A number of the essays, including those by Walter Benjamin, previously appeared in those journals such as Studio International Artform and Screen that created a form for the application of semiotic psychoanalytic and feminist theory to visual culture. Photography lent itself to such theorisations because it had no established university discourse. It's critical theory evolving out of analyses dating back to the 1920s of cinema and mass media, rather than art history. It's elevation to use Roslyn Krause's term a theoretical object at the UK Polytechnics and Art Schools was not an attempt at assimilation to the university system. Instead, it was part of a wider claim to cultural terrain that was largely excluded from traditional university pedagogy, such as critical theory, sociology and media studies. At the same time, and this is important, I think I want to put it in relation to the discussion this morning, it was about talking pictures. The American Photography promoted the consideration of photography as an art practice and that's a quotation from Bergen in so doing it became a significant site, not for the promotion of self referential lineages, but instead of that plurality of approaches that would in time itself reinvigorate the teaching of photography as university art history. In 1971, the American Photography critic, A.D. Coleman, called for US photography education in the spirit of Lazlo Maholianach, not asceticism. The dominance of curatorial photographic pedagogy in US higher education programmes, rooted in remarkably coherent lineages that mirrored the exclusions of photography itself, meant that photographic modernism was still in the ascendant. The UK would also import this kind of surreal model that did so as a part of its emergent institutional culture of collecting, but only achieve some form of critical mass perhaps in the 1990s. At the Polytechnics where photography was a theoretical and practical rather than curatorial object, the UK gained its own new intelligence or photography, one that, instead of deriving their validation from the pedigree of its pedagogy, did so by aligning themselves with new critical possibilities. In our emergent discourse of the history of photographic education, with its linear narratives of triathlons assimilation, it might be assumed that the situation in the UK in the 1970s and 80s was merely a developmental time lag, a staging post on the way to university validation and examining the nexus between the history of higher education photographic history. Ysthetics and institutional culture, however, the 1970s and 80s emerges as a significant pedagogic moment in its own right. Thank you. Oh, thank you, Juliet. I'm back on time. I'm sorry to have interrupted you right in that final moment. I do beg your pardon. That was wonderfully two time. Thank you. I'll pass over before we have questions will bring questions in all together at the at the end, but can I pass over over now to Anne and the paper on the Glasgow degree and are you there. Yes, hello everyone. Lovely I can hear you beautifully. Thank you. Great. I'll just start sharing is a real pleasure to be here today with everybody. And thank you for the invitation. Pay me all of art was the first of its kind in Europe to offer bachelors degree in Phryngart photography will provide an account of how this came to be by considering the national and international forces at play, alongside the individuals. And the, the contributions to formal education in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. So in a way sort of picking up from Juliet's paper before. Mae'r cyfnod yn ymgyrchol iawn, neu mae'n ddiweddol ar gyfer y cyfnod a'r institution. Ond ydym yn chweithio ychydig y gallu gwahanol a chymau yn cyfnodol o'r cyfnod o'r ddweud ac mae'n gwybod, mae'n ddweud yn cael eu cyflos ymgyrchol a'r cyflos ymgyrchol a'r cyflos ymgyrchol ymgyrchol. Y dyfodol yma'r ffynart ffotograffu ymgyrchol ymgyrchol a'r ffynart ymgyrchol ymgyrchol ymgyrchol was born out of the vision of Tony Jones, director of the school and Bill Buchanan, head of fine art. Buchanan was a former student of GSA and had been art director of the Scottish Arts Council from 1961 to 1977. Jones had previously served on staff at the school before moving to the United States to work at the Texas Christian University at Fort Worth. Jones returned to Scotland in 1980 with a heightened sense of internationalism and a great deal of energy for what he termed the forward programme, essentially a shake-up of the existing departmental structures. The fine art department at the Glasgow School of Art had consisted of drawing and painting, sculpture and printmaking. Almost immediately Jones transferred the department of murals and stained glass from the design department into the fine art department and initiated the creation of the undergraduate fine art photography degree course. Jones' forward programme also recognised the need to think of the future, not just as it pertained to the teaching within the school, but a wider remit of welfare for students and their prospects after graduation. Writing in the report for the Governors for Glasgow School of Art, he said, the students who have graduated this year have gone out into a society stagnating and recessioned unemployment and will try to establish themselves in careers and professions themselves hard hit. The students who are presently in course will find the situation even more difficult. We at Glasgow School of Art must continually examine and amend our work in the task we have of providing excellence in education while responding to a changed society. We must also collectively remonstrate with the government hostile to education and comprehending of our role and intent it seems on a determined campaign to dismantle the finest educational system in the world. Jones also outlined the obligation and indeed his intention to connect the school to the city in which it was based. Embedding GSA so that Glasgow inhabitants, industries and professions would be familiar with the work of the students and the school. As much as he was rooting the art school and its teachings in Glasgow and its immediate locale, Jones also saw the need and importance for strong international links as part of the forward programme. In the academic years ranging from 1980 to 1982 there were several exchanges of GSA staff with American colleagues. No doubt his own tenure at Texas provided links and connections to capitalise on and the appointment of Thomas Joshua Cooper from California as the leader of the photography fine art degree course would have been entirely in keeping with this outlook but I'll come to that later. Although it was Jones's director who launched the forward programme and had the guts to call out thatcher's government at the time, a lot of the vision for the GSA photography degree lay with Bill Buchanan. Buchanan, a former student at Glasgow School of Art, returned in 1977, first as head of fine art, later as deputy head and then acting head of the school itself. If Jones brought an international outlook, Buchanan offered an acute awareness of the particularities of the Scottish scene, having worked at the Scottish Arts Council for 16 years. He was also the best advocate for introducing fine art photography at the school. He was passionate about the medium, had mounted a 1970 exhibition on Helen Adamson and was an international authority on the work of James Craig Annan and he would later take up the chair of Stills Gallery in Edinburgh. The founding post was awarded to Thomas Joshua Cooper, an American photographer who studied with Beaumont Newhall at the University of New Mexico and who counted among his referees for the Glasgow job, Ansel Adams. However, it would be misleading to present Cooper as an American swooping in to radically alter the teaching of fine art photography in Scotland, indeed Britain. The reality was that he had already helped to shape and been shaped by the photography scene in Britain in the 1970s and was as much a part of that as he was reflecting specific American values. From 1973 to 1976, Cooper worked at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham as the course director for photographic studies and a senior lecturer in photography and the history of photography, while also conducting annual workshops at Sheffield Polytechnic. While teaching at Trent, Cooper befriended fellow instructors Paul Hill and Raymond Moore, who like him were photographers who championed a black and white aesthetic and aligned with a fine art tradition. This shared philosophy both reflected and contributed to changing attitudes towards photography in Britain at that time. While both Hill and Cooper had published their concerns in the September 1974 issue of Creative Camera describing the state of photography teaching in Britain as a photographic dark age, they believed that central to their teachings at Trent Poly was the primacy of the image rather than theory or purely commercial applications. Their teaching was student-centred, encouraging self-reflection. Citing Beaumont Newhall's history of photography that had only come out the decade before, Hill and Cooper saw photography as having four major concerns, the straight, the formalistic, the documentary and the equivalent. It was essential in their eyes that both teachers and students have quote, a passion for photography and an obsessive desire to realise their personal truths. The same year the Creative Camera piece was published, Cooper held his first exhibition at the Photographers' Gallery in London, which Sue Davies had recently established as the first public gallery in the country dedicated to the medium of photography. When the Hayward Gallery presented three perspectives on photography in the summer of 1979, the large exhibition focused on socialism, feminism and modernism with each section selected by a different curator. And for those of you that were with us this morning, we heard a really great paper on the exhibition by David Bate. Paul Hill was one of the curators and he included several of Cooper's prints alongside those by other photographers who were relatively unknown at the time, such as Martin Parr. Throughout the 1970s, Cooper and Hill collaborated, even though they were no longer teaching alongside one another at Nottingham. Together with the Magnum photographer David Hearn, the three men produced a programme on Paul Strand, one of several that the BBC were televising about photography. Hearn had established his documentary photography course at Newport in Wales in 1973, which was set out originally as a 12-month training skills course and later morphed into a degree course. Higher education for photography was beginning the shift away from the vocational and diploma status towards serious study and ultimately degree bearing. A staple on every assigned reading list on photography courses was the 1979 book dialogue with photography authored by both Hill and Cooper. It featured detailed interviews with 22 photographers and to this day it has never been out of print. Cooper was thus very much part of the distinctly British scene around photography in the 1970s and was actively advocating for photography as fine art through his own practice, his teachings and his creative outputs in television and publishing. Although he left the UK in 1979 to return to his native California, he had already left a legacy behind. It was not a surprise then that he should feature as a prime candidate for the job at Glasgow. Indeed it is telling that of the four candidates selected, three mentioned Cooper by name in their own interviews. When Cooper arrived back in the UK in 1982 to take up the post in the newly created department at GSA, he discovered that no actual photography department existed. He would be creating it from the ground up with classes beginning the following academic year. At the time Glasgow and other Scottish schools offered technical classes but few institutions allowed photography courses to count towards a fine art degree, a critical distinction. The pressure was then on to get the degree ready for the incoming class and required legislative changes and approval from both the Scottish Education Department and the British degree awarding body, the Council for National Academic Awards. Cooper was faced with the task of creating the core structure to the satisfaction of these political agencies while also ensuring that the programme would be very much embedded within the fine art department. The Glasgow School of Art was the first of its kind in Europe to offer a bachelor's degree in fine art photography. While the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany had appointed Bernd Besscher, Professor of Fine Art Photography in 1976, the degree awarded to his students was in fine art, not fine art photography. The community that built up around the programme in Glasgow was tight knit in the beginning with about a dozen students including Jean Baird, Peter Finnemore, David Hazel and Richard Leroyd. There were lots of outcomes from the introduction of the degree. Jean Baird, one of the first students to enrol in the course, later received the distinction of being awarded a full bright scholarship, the first time it had been awarded in the UK for photography. Martha McCulloch was the first postgraduate student and went on to be the first director of street level gallery in the city in 1989 working alongside Katrina Grant, another graduate of the fine art photography degree in Glasgow. Richard Leroyd graduated in 1988 and embarked on a hugely successful international career. Cooper taught independent critical thought and demanded that his students think analytically about photography. According to Leroyd Cooper was concerned about quote facilitating the individual. It was never a formal imprint of his style, end quote. This aligns with Cooper and Hill's earlier position of always being student-centred with more than 700 students having studied photography over the course of Cooper's tenure, the impact of the degree is widespread and global. Graduates went on to teach at courses and universities around the world advocating their own approach, but ultimately championing fine art photography and the importance of the history of photography. But the Glasgow degree also had much more immediate effect locally at the time. The formalising of the degree within higher education was a validation not only of the academic kind, but an indication of an enthusiasm for photography in all its guises. In the days and months leading up to the course launching, Bill Buchanan was also spearheading plans to form the Scottish Society for the History of Photography, commonly referred to as SHOP. The society's key objective was, and still is, to further interest, understanding and pleasure in both historic and contemporary photography to expand local Scottish photography and bring international talent into this community. Buchanan held the inaugural meeting in his office at the Macintosh building after a hugely successful international conference also organised by him, and I'm showing this slide again because right above the entrance to the Macintosh building is the director's office and that's where SHOP was born. In title Scottish Contributions to Photography, the three-day event took place in Glasgow in March 1983. The conference attracted three times its expected audience, drawn perhaps by the roster of the national and international photo historians. Things were also happening elsewhere in Scotland. From the 1970s onwards, efforts to showcase photography had been building and were most visible in the creation of Stills Gallery Edinburgh in 1977, emerging from the Scottish Photography Group set up by Richard Hoff, Michael Edwards and David Pashley. The following year, Corridor Gallady was established in Glenrothes by Asa Goldsmith and her husband Peter, and was an incredible resource for showcasing the work of emerging photographers at the time. A 1979 working group had been formed to investigate the feasibility of a national collection of photography involving several national bodies and ultimately led to the creation of the Scottish National Photography Collection at the National Galleries of Scotland. While photography had featured at NGS since the early 20th century, it was now formally recognised in 1984 as a distinct collection based on the huge efforts and scholarship of Sarah Stevenson and before her Catherine Michelson, both of whom had worked extensively on the extensive Hill and Adamson material that is the cornerstone of the photographic collection. As to be expected, the overlapping connections of those interested in medium were many, whether for its practical application, art historical research or pure pleasure. The Glasgow Degree set off a series of reactions with other Scottish art schools and places of higher education, phasing in degree-bearing courses in photography. Gradually the ripples within the photographic community widened in Scotland, spreading further and encompassing more. Such was the feeling that photography was now being recognised as an art form and essentially becoming quote unquote mainstream, that the Scottish Arts Council decided to subsume their specialist photography committee into the visual arts. There was momentum in all areas from governmental bodies, higher education, national institutions and a growing number of societies, associations and clubs. This is not to say that the Glasgow Degree was a sole catalyst, but it was activating and contributing to the photography landscape of Scotland and beyond. The Scottish Society for the History of Photography set up within the walls of GSA by Buchanan became a nexus, counting Cooper, Stevenson and many others within its founding ranks, including Murray Johnston, who in 1986 was appointed head of photography at Edinburgh College of Art and was responsible for introducing the degree course there. Murray along with his wife Kate Johnston also established Scottish photographic works, a company whose aim was to publicise, support and market the best of independent photography in Scotland. By 1988 Gloria Chalmers had established portfolio gallery in the Scottish Capital, followed by the magazine which ran until 2010, both championing photography's fine art. Meanwhile, Pashley, who had helped to form stills gallery, became a central figure in the establishment and development of photography at Edinburgh Napier, helping to steer the course from HND to CNNA Degree and ultimately to Honours Degree later in the 1990s. It took a little longer for the teaching of the history of photography to become part of the honours curricula within art history departments at Scottish universities. The University of Glasgow appears to have started in the first half of the 1990s and the University of St Andrews followed in the second half of the decade. As with most subjects, attempting to chart a history is not necessarily linear, instead it can form a series of overlapping moments, critical masses and a network of dependencies and connections, such as the case with the Glasgow Degree, deliberately named for this paper and intended as a play onwards. It is of course a nod to the Six Degrees of Separation Theory which posits that anyone can be connected to anyone else in the world through six or less connections. Now you can see from my slide I'm not skilled enough to be able to adequately demonstrate this, this took quite some working on just with what I had, but as I hope my slide shows it paints a picture suggesting these interlocking connections and dependencies concerning the introduction of fine art photography at Glasgow School of Art. One minute in. It's not exhaustive indeed if anything I think I've only scratched the surface and much more research is required which again has been a theme that's come through the papers this morning as well. The ecosystem that is photography involves many different people, places, institutions, galleries, collections, journals and so on. It is exponential and we are all connected. As we gather here to celebrate the photographer's gallery it is worth reminding ourselves that no one can do this alone. It takes us all working together to champion, support, interrogate, challenge and ultimately be concerned about photography. Thank you. Oh thank you so much Ann and Juliet for two utterly fascinating and gripping talks. I completely lost track of time myself and luckily I had a beeper on so thank you so much. I know that we have some Q&As so you can start to be adding those Q&As and I'll turn to those in a moment but perhaps I can just sort of kick off while we got some minutes to think about that and of course I think what Juliet would not be surprised to hear my first impression was or my first observation was men, men, men perhaps unsurprising given sort of the historical context but also Ann your quote by Tony Jones around the concern for the prospects of those Glasgow graduates which in so many ways just feels too contemporaneous. You know these are concerns that we still share today but I think I'm quite curious and it might come through some of the Q&A as well but I'm curious to hear more from both of you in terms of the photographic educations that you so beautifully outlined as to their sort of hermetically sealed natures. Juliet the slide that you showed of for example Newhall's publication, the history of photography you know in one sense the history not histories of photography as a single being and all the visions and values that we see underpinning photographic education whilst importantly opening up photography as a subject for for us to study nevertheless risk potentially remaining reductive. Just to say something about the history of photography I know exactly what you're saying and it does seem such a Newhall's text seems such an incredible text it was first I'm now going to forget blank the date it was first published in the 40s and I went into three or four publishers the last one in 1982 and it was certainly on the shelves when I went to college and wanted to study the history of photography. At the same time as we've all been talking about it's not as monolithic if it seems it's really interesting to look at the evolutions in his own thinking within that we like we like to use these as kind of you know examples of a kind of what hermetically sealed culture etc and of course they were very powerful but it means sometimes we avoid looking at what's going on but for instance Newhall you know doesn't really talk about photography as an art form to the second edition and then it's buried in like chapter two he sort of you know says actually all photography is sort of expressive in an art form but you know it's it's literally buried and as it goes on over the 20th century it becomes more overt that it's an expressive medium for him which is an evolution about what he probably felt he could say. Thank you thank you Juliet and did you want to come on in? Yeah I think I mean it's important to also just put it into context that there's for even though it was defined as the history and not sort of taking in the plurality that we've been discussing today in part I think it was also an attempt for the first time to kind of begin documenting that history like creating that canon and starting now obviously in doing that there was lots of people that were omitted but it was also a starting point and it has been very sort of foundational for the teaching of photography in schools and universities all over the world so it has a huge impact but also I think it I'd like to see it as the first crack at it if you like and that we you know we that those stories still ongoing the histories are still being made and it's it is up to us whether we're you know academics creators photographers researchers you know to be showcasing highlighting sharing those stories you know so I don't see it as so static and closed I think I think the the responsibility does pass to us all. Thank you so much for that yeah and I was very struck as you move towards completion or conclusion Ann about that notion of that interconnectedness so the ancestors the interconnectedness and the incompleteness that we we're moving forward all the time and and we have some agency in that I can see some questions that come in here and I do want to be able to use this time for those so I can see one from Taos and I'll read it out thank you for your fascinating papers I'm very interested in the transatlantic dialogues as constant presence in both your papers I was wondering if you could tell us more about other aspects of this North American influence in the institutionalisation of British photography thank you very much I well I think it I mean again it's what I hoped in that my slide um while I was focusing more on Glasgow you could see there was already a lot of those North American connections that were sort of showing up and and indeed I was sort of looking at it from a moment sort of immediately before and then after but if you go further back you've got people like you know Bill Jay who makes the move over and is then teaching at the University of New Mexico as well um and and he had been such an influence within British photography both prior to his departure but then even after he had left too he continued to be a force as well so I think it is definitely something that was happening and continues you know to happen and probably because of the the shared language the English language again it's like back to what we were just talking about with Newhall's you know book being published it's we can't underestimate how how much that sort of defines our knowledge just by simply being accessible in a language that is available to us um and you know so I think I think that accounts for a lot of those interactions across the Atlantic if you like it's because of of that sort of first and foremost the shared language and a certain shared sensibility that then it comes about with that. Thank you Ann. Julia. Sorry sorry Karen you go. No no I'll pass to you. Okay now I was actually going to say that um I think probably that's something that I would ask others to kind of you know contribute to you to to look at that and I was fascinated by that element of what I was talking about but I just wanted to perhaps um say look let's not forget Europe you know just because that my paper to in particular focused on that and Ann is a little bit lesser but you know and I think it's really important that it is a language thing um but at the same time I mean there's lots of connections I mean you know the people who are involved in that project the Paul Hill and Thomas Joshua Cooper one you know they had these fantastic letters of reference from Beaumont Newhall but also I think from Latig as well and so there was there is a lot going on and I don't well I'm just really kind of putting in a please say let's not forget what's happening in Europe especially with the founding of all in I think 1971 etc but I do think probably still there possibly based on that wonderful exhibition it did in Paris a few years ago the 70s the American American 70s that in both Europe and the UK often looked to the US in the 70s it felt that there were things were more evolved and dynamic whether that's right or wrong so it's a very kind of interesting kind of geographical exchanges going on with lots everyone working together but also looking to the states I think thank you for that Juliet we've got a question coming in from an anonymous attendee always a bit of a risk but here we go Juliet referenced the different philosophies behind American pedagogy which was informed very much by the modernist canon and that taught in Europe and the UK can she describe a little further what those very different approaches amounted to in the 1970s and then how they impacted on the photography produced here in the UK um okay gosh that is a big question um so I think that I mean it's very it's it's tricky because again it's very in such a short presentation it's very um uh easy to present um things that's very straightforward and easy and you know and this look this look like this you know also it looks like um Sarkowski and things like that and of course the work was very different but you know there does seem to be the sense of two you know there's a pantheistic what I call pantheistic modernism that comes out of the states which I associate with Ansel Adams in particular kind of really um about nature about landscape about one's feelings in the landscape to that a kind of romantic entanglement with the landscape um and then of course there's a kind of as we saw in the slides that I showed a very much a kind of moholynog derived bowhouse type of photography light experimentation homes I want to say that there was colour photography as well but I couldn't get colour images to download for this um so it all looks very cohesive and black and white um so there's there's that and also this is kind of much more you know the sort of strand formalism um and of course that kind of what I was calling a neo surrealist um again that's sort of tying into that kind of meat yard um van deren code we saw the double exposures um so those are kind of those those are the kind of different um main strands I guess and socially engaged photography as we saw with well well um well to Rosenblum um I mean I think one of the interesting things about all of this is how people came to define these as as all kind of of a piece you know they seem so incredibly different to me but they were kind of you know imported as as having a common sensibility as such now as for how that particularly um you know was absorbed into the teaching and students practice that I'm not there yet so great question but I'll I hope to do some more work on that maybe others here can comment on that yes I think there's still much work to be done and that's that's always an exciting point in terms of our own histories and theories and our own reflections we're moving towards the break and I think that it's always good to have some comfort breaks and a moment of a caffeine recharge before the the next next set as it were but I just wanted to say that we've had a message coming from Martin that's that's Martin Pover just saying you know let's not forget another significant player in photography education who didn't emanate from the USA and I think that we're all much more muchness about that about the complexity of that but referencing for example Evans who started documentary photography at the Guildford School which was I think in the late 1950s and of course Jane Bown amongst many others would would emerge from from that particular school so yeah fair fair point Martin yeah thank you I just want to say my my my my paper was a preamble to you know I mean a preamble to then what comes next and I absolutely want to say that that was that's a springing off point for then thinking about the UK situation has been really dynamic I think Judith for me some of the the most enjoyable and shifting conferences are just that that moment where we are able to be thinking this is actually a springboard into something more and and developing and I think that that's perhaps the very best that we can be wanting from our conferences so we're going to have a break now we're going to reconvene I think let me just check on my notes I think it's 320 and I'm known as the police of time so if we can come back at 320 yes you can see that I'm ringing here to say that it's time for our break so if you can come back at 320 and where we'll have the much anticipated keynote from Matarff is saying thank you so much and can I think once more and in Juliette for two really provoking papers I am I I thoroughly enjoyed our time together so thank you hello everyone we should be back now I think it's 320 and just looking at people coming in I can see that most of us are here welcome back is my pleasure to welcome back and present and introduce Matarff Hussein I think there's times when we say little introduction is required but I would just like to contextualise Matarff's practice because I think it is so significant of this particular moment and of times to come British artist Matarff Hussein explores the significant relationships between identity heritage and displacement his themes developed through long-term research and articulating a visual language that challenges the prevailing concepts of multiculturalism given the framework of this afternoon sessions I'm really interested in seeing that Matarff has received his first degree his BA in history of art at Goldsmiths specialising in postcolonialism and photography and then an MA in museum and gallery management at city here in London and then a subsequent MA in photography at Nottingham Trent University Matarff's You Get Me series focuses on young working class Asian men in contemporary Britain the exhibition was curated by Mark Sealy and launched at autograph in 2017 before travelling on to Impressions Gallery in Bradford and and then beyond he's going back home to where I come from made in Kashmir and Pakistan explored ideas around homeland loss memory and the overview effect which was exhibited at new art gallery in Warsaw and his Honest With You series is about femininity sisterhood resistance and political defiance of British Muslim women Matarff has been the recipient of numerous awards and commissions he was also winner of the Curator's Choice Award and was selected as the 2015 Lightwork and Autograph ABP Artist in Residence Matarff was also chosen from I think over 500 international artists to be the discovery artist under the prestigious discoveries award in 2016 at the Houston photo fest Matarff presents a keenly anticipated talk around his practice and research discussing really urgent and important themes of immigration representation selfhood and the power of the gaze through portraiture considering why community collaborations are important to respond to the poor visibility and stereotyping of Muslim communities globally and how through the power of the gallery wall a different conversation or conversations can take place that not only challenge across all the spectrums but uplifts and enriches the understanding of a community that has felt silent and to quote Matarff, muzzled. That's powerful stuff powerful terms. Matarff has a potency to shift not just photography but the ways in which we view the world. So without further ado I'm going to pass over to you Matarff and then as we finish that presentation Matarff Louise is going to pick it up for Q&A. Thank you so much, thank you. Thank you very much that was quite an introduction, thank you. Okay so I'm just going to share my screen so I can then start my talk. Let's make sure everyone gets to see this. Can everyone see this okay? That looks great if you just want to go for this screen, brilliant. Perfect thank you. Okay so I'm just going to like I guess step in really so I mean that was a great introduction and I guess I don't really have to say much else but yeah my background was in museum and galleries and you know I really had a career in museums for about eight years and I didn't really think I was going to be an artist. I wanted to find those artists that were making work about the British Muslim experience but you know being looking and researching the work that was out there felt like it was it was some of the work was very ghettoising and it really wasn't reflected in my experiences. So while I was working at the National Portrait Gallery I ended up going back home to Birmingham most weekends and holidays to start this this body of work and it was really for me and for about four years I actually didn't really show the work to anyone just and this was the kind of work I started to make and this was really the start of my You Get New series and at the time I was literally thinking all sorts of people whether it was men, women, looking at material details but you know I was really interested in street culture, I was really interested in how these young men were defining themselves under this political pressure of being labelled everything that they're labelled you know whether they were terrorists or an effect of society or they didn't belong and you know I really felt and I knew the power of museum and gallery walls and so I used to say to these young men when I came across them that I have the opportunity to put you on in a museum I have an opportunity to exhibit you in galleries I mean I was kind of fibbing at the time because you know I was just starting starting my career but I wanted to kind of position this work within that framework and so this is the work that I started to make and it was really me mapping out my own identity politics so looking at you know my Pakistani identity and the fact that every year we used to celebrate the independence of Pakistan in the community and within my family and you know having these dual identities that at times were quite conflicting and you know that period you know you had you know David Beckham with his cornwalls and it was interesting how you know that was filtering into the into youth culture as well but also this idea that when I was at Goldsmiths I really fell in love with a module called Postcolonialism and it was there that David de Bosa introduced me to some incredible artists essentially black artists people like Ian Kishinabari, Kerio Memes, Hank Willis Thomas, Sonia Boyce and you know cultural theorists like Stuart Hall and Edward Seed and and and Frank Sannan and you know I ended up looking at the black experience within the art historical canon to really find my voice and in a way the South Asian male was looking at the black experience within popular culture to find their sense of representation too so it was interesting how we you know I went to another space and the community that I lived with and hung around with, ground up and you know in Birmingham in colleges were really inspired towards the black community and it was because it was there were some amazing figures you know it was Muhammad Ali who converted to Islam there was Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam movement and you know I think because those types of figures ended up taking on the Muslim identity South Asian men, Muslim men really felt that they could also own a type of black experience and so you know over the four years I was kind of networking walking the streets but I also ended up wandering into a lot of these gyms and met Sal and this is Sal they call him Big Sal, he owns a gym in Birmingham called Flex and Sal has this incredible urban legend about him and I really wanted to get to know this this this man so for about three years I didn't even ask to have his portrait I just wanted to know who this man was and is given his reputation in Birmingham and we talked about everything you know we talked about you know the difficulty growing up in Britain how there is this kind of real sense of violence and gang culture how you know there is a real sense of repression and the fact that the Asian male really has to feel like they have to hold themselves in a very aggressive way because of the political pressure that they have faced since the 60s and you know I'm talking about things like pachybashing and you know where vans of you know white working class men would go around finding young Asian men to essentially be up on the streets and and so I think under that over that kind of violence the South Asian men had to had to take a stand so I mean when my dad talked about these things having to have fights on the streets and my grandfather used to talk about you know racism within the workforce and and so you know I met Sal and you know it was it made sense to me why he ended up holding himself in this way and you know he came in one day with this t-shirt on and I just loved it and I said I would really love to be able to make your portrait with this t-shirt so he you know we met another day he came to the gym and and we kind of sat and made this portrait together and I think this was one of the first times I really started to understand really playing how I can play with powers and visual culture that's kind of demonised us and for me this portrait is really about feeding the beast you know this idea that we're always seen as threats and violence and I was like okay let's make an image that would you know would articulate that and the media would want to kind of run with so it was this kind of tug and cheek moment but also just wanting to talk about the the real complexities of our communities and so yeah over the over the course I started making these types of portraits a lot of them are three quarter length there's a fashion element to the work and I wanted to really celebrate that because you know we've been so invisible in so many parts of western culture and one is in the kind of fashion world and I wanted to find beautiful brown men who I felt were worthy enough not just the great gallery walls but would be envied and would be celebrated and and this is kind of the exploration into the four years I was making the work and I realised that you know I was making work about men so the focus ended up kind of being about men and I wanted a question well what does it really mean to be a man in this community so that was kind of my decision within the first year or so of making the work and so I carried on building and and and then four years later into kind of my into kind of building my work and you know three years I ended up leaving the national portrait gallery really dedicating myself into Birmingham I was given a wonderful opportunity to have a show at Mac in Birmingham and it was really a project based exhibition and Craig Ashley and Trevor Pitt helped to curate and produce the work so they we went through my archives and this is basically what we ended up presenting and we decided and you know through my research that I really wanted to kind of talk about the identity formations that are taking place within the community so these are the three portraits the first one is really looking at the notion of a collective identity whether that's through your religion or through your family and then the mid the middle portrait is really looking at social identity what are the identities that you start to form on the streets away from family and away from the safety of school and then the third identity formation is really about ego identity how are these young men looking at their the older men and the older guys the cool guys and and kind of how are they wanting to emulate themselves in the future that this is kind of the the complexities that I felt myself growing up feeling but also what was going on in the community and one of the things we ended up doing which which really made me realise the power of community engagement was you know we ended up or I ended up transcribing the question what does it mean to be a Pakistani male today and there was a wall on the side and I allowed people to come and comment and I think over the course of the you know the exhibition which was really a kind of project based display um we ended up having I think about 400 post-it notes and I've you know kept that for research and it really helped informed my practice and it was it was the start of you know me really starting to kind of exhibit my work and and sharing it but as you can see straight away there was a there was a real element to kind of frame the work beautifully and position them in quite large scale to kind of emulate um you know contemporary portraiture so it was basically an arts camp to allow me to base myself on Birmingham and this was the work that I really I started to make looking at young men in their environments position you know really finding beautiful men that was really important for me so um you know it was really important that when these young men would be graced in gallery walls that you end up falling in love with them and and I think it's a really important thing to do because it allows you to kind of open yourself up and then I felt like through that I could have a deeper conversation and really talk about the politics and you know question well who are these men that you see um are they threatening um you know can you see them as beautiful brown men can you see them as fine art portraiture beyond the narrative of repotage and beyond the narrative interesting was that you know I didn't realise at the time I always knew that my work was paying homage to 16th century court paintings you know paintings that I found in love with at the national portrait gallery but I was also really also loved the kind of you know the side profile portrait and any you know very recently I guess I realised that I was kind of paying homage to local miniature paintings and I think that was a very unconscious thing um and yeah in in the series this is probably one of the only few kind of repotage type portraits um but I really wanted to include this one in the series because it was it really talked about this idea of you know how you know do you see these two men and one's wearing western clothes the other one is wearing ish alakamees and also you know Andy that's trainers and you know they're both eating fish and chips with curry sauce and it was like well it's look at this incredible mix of cultures and and fashion and style and food and I was really trying to ask the question you know can Islam and western culture fit as well as this so it was really important that this particular image was made this series and um so while I was you know had the show at the Mac in Birmingham I was asked to submit a portrait at New Art Exchange for the Culture Cloud where I won the curator's choice award and I really felt this particular portrait embodied everything that I was talking about in terms of hybridity so you've got this young man you know he's wearing a Jamaican vest he's got his muscles which references a hollywood you know he's got his Islamic beard his french crop hair he's got the gang related tattoos on his face and he's wearing this Starveys anamola which would have some form of Arabic Islamic scripture and it was just amazing how this one image really brought everything together and I was always talking about this idea of you know we're constantly split growing up you know you're you are the British or you're Muslim you're Pakistani or you're Bangladeshi and through my research I wanted to say that we have the power to be hybris and we should really celebrate all our complexities and bring them together and so this was the portrait that I entered and you know thankfully and really honoured to have won the curator's choice award which gave me an opportunity to have my first major main gallery show at New Art Exchange and it was curated by Melanie and and Skinda wonderfully pushed for me to have the main gallery and Skinda was director of New Art Exchange and now is the director of the British Council and this was the residency was in 2014 and it was a six month residency where I based myself in Heisen Green which is where New Art Exchange is and at that point and that time the name Nigel Farange was all over the press and it was he just started his name and the conversations that he was saying were incredibly shocking to me these were the conversations that I was having on the streets when I was growing up this idea of you know migrants taking over we should go back to where we came from and that we're a threat that we're vermin and that we're not worthy to be in this country and I was you know I was really scared I was thinking wow I didn't really think that 27 28 I just have had my first child she's you know one and a half and we're having the same conversation that my granddad had my father had and now I'm having so I I said to Skinda and now that I really want to look at the migrant experience in Heisen Green and really start to open up you know the reasons why these communities come to England and it's the same story of my family which was they left Pakistan they left Kashmir to better their lives and to better our lives and and you know for the hope of education the faith of education and both my parents work incredibly hard just like the communities in Heisen Green and you know the the main image of Ali that I used really helped steer the the conversation in the in the space because when I met Ali he talked about the horrific violence that his and his family suffered in Sudan and how they were lived in camps and being fed by organisations like Save the Children and he came to Nottingham to study architecture to be able to one day go back and rebuild his country and you know these were the the stories that I came across in Heisen Green and so we we exhibited a series called the commonality of strangers and I just wanted to quickly show you this particular portrait of Hassan Mahmood and Numan. I ended up reconnecting with Mahmood in the middle literally last week he found me on Instagram when I posted one of my one of my photographs and portraits and you know he he he we were messaging and you know the first thing he wrote was no one ever wants to take pictures of people who look like me and you and I found that such a powerful message that I wanted to kind of share this with you all today and and we when we spoke on the phone he said you know how instrumental it was just for him to see himself in a space like that and how he carried that portrait with him for years in his room and it kind of really steered him on to do some great things and he ended up graduating at LSE a couple of years ago and and and you know this you know the photography and art is so powerful I think we sometimes forget just what it can really do and again Mahmood said you know even though photography is silent your work gives us a voice and I still really feel that with my practice so it's so important for me that the people that I who trust in me to make their portrait that I really try and represent them honestly and it's why you know in in the show in common land history is that we had text and it was their voices and it was their stories and the way I ended up exhibiting the work was was very similar to the way the national portrait gallery puts on their exhibitions and so I really wanted to come and elevate it and so while I was you know working in Birmingham I had I had an opportunity to do an MA and my MA really I wanted to focus on Muslim women and I already started to make that work but I wanted to keep the conversation very separate from the men because I felt like the men were having a very different conversation than the women and what's interesting is that under this political pressure of being labeled what they're labeled or labeled what I'm labeled you know when I'm a terrorist or terrorist sympathiser or a pedophile or I might kill my sister's in the name of honor um these holding themselves incredibly masculine and they're showing their sexuality as a way of saying we're proud of who we are and it's interesting that in contrast Muslim women have decided to revale or veil wear the hijab and to cover their sexuality and by them wearing the veil it also identifies them as Muslim women so it's them also saying we're proud we're Muslim and we want to identify and so this was the kind of series that I started to build it's not published yet I'm hoping to publish it in the next year or so but I was looking at the veil and it was really interesting that when I went to college 90% of the women didn't wear the veil but through this pressure of misinformation through being told that you are not good enough and just being and just our religion and our culture being demonised a lot of the Muslim women have started to wear it as a form of defiance and to really be proud and and we know through the media and the press that the veil does bring unwanted attention and violence any stories of Muslim women being attacked on the streets purely because of their choice of a fabric and you know it becomes very political but also that you know there are women who don't wear it and I wanted to kind of make sure that I included that in the series and what's really fascinating is that the women on the streets ahead learn of the men they're so much more articulate they're really aware of their kind of the politics around them and they're also really willing to have a different conversation and actually really step up because I think that they've been at the front end of it more than the men actually so this is the series I'm building and one of the last portraits I've made so far as a fara and I really wanted to get fara to hold the cricket bat which was referencing colonialism and the idea that one you know Britain was colonising countries they also brought the game cricket to basically you know civilise the savages essentially and so I wanted fara to kind of try and you know break that mould and she looks amazing and really fierce and confident and really breaking the stereotypes so this is kind of the series that is building at the moment and also while all this was happening in Birmingham I ended up connecting with multi-story with Emma and Emma was really interested in my practice and she said I'd really love you to work in the black country and she invited me to wander around Tipton a really quiet town in just outside of Birmingham actually and I ended up going to Tipton just wandering the streets and it was incredibly quiet space and I really didn't know what I was going to do because I you know I tend to walk on the streets and find people hanging around but a week later when I went after I went there was an actual nail bum attack that happened in in one of the mosques and it was an Eastern European chapter basically upon to three nail bums and one of them actually exploded and it happened in 2013 and when that happened it really reinforced this idea that we don't belong it forced this idea that one day we might be kicked out and it also and because these were the conversations that were taking place in my home my dad always used to talk about you know we can't stay here forever they will kick us out one day and and there will be this global war against Muslims and this was kind of happening and if you look at what's happening right now with our politics you know our civil rights are being changed you know that there is this real threat now that that we could essentially be told to leave and this was the conversation that was not happening just only at home but it was also happening on the streets with the young men and women I was I was kind of talking to so I said to him I really want to talk connect with the community and this is Mustak who was the chairman at the time and I met Mustak at home kind of afternoon he was a bit busy and he told me to come back the next day and we had this conversation for about four hours about my life where I'm from where my family's from how many brothers and sisters he wants to know everything and I you know gave him everything and and he's like what would you want to do and I said I really want to get to know the people who built the mosque I'd love to know how this community established themselves here and the impact of this particular incident he said okay I'll do that for you so every now and then I'd get a phone call from Mustak and he'd say Harji Saab, Gorom number 87 would love to meet you can you come around at two o'clock so I jump in my car and drive you know one or two hours because I was kind of in London at the time as well and I would knock on the door and I would be greeted by someone like this man and this is Gorom and he you know cameo came to England when he was in the early 20s and he's by a life in the foundries in the factories building mattresses boiler parts and these most beautiful conversations with these men and I you know I asked them you know do you feel British and they said yeah of course this country's given me everything it's given me a home it's given me a life it's I've been able to bring up my families I've been able to educate my children I love this country and when we talk about the politics and I say well what do you think what's going on and you know they and I conversed with them in Urdu so my mum refused to speak to me in English going up and I at the time used to hate it and my mum always said to me oh you know you're gonna you're gonna thank me one day and as I was making this series I was like wow my mum was really right I was gonna I didn't realize this was going to be so important and you know they said really poetically that you know those they're all lies you know that's that doesn't relate to us and it just really broke my heart that you know there's these communities and my family and we work so hard and we do so much and we really try to be part of British western society but we're constantly rejected by our political figureheads and so this is the motivation as to why I make the work and why I feel like it's really important that we should have these conversations you know these are the conversations that we should be having right now about what is going on in our society why are we in this position right now and and it was a really wonderful beautiful series and we ended up having an exhibition at the local library Dewey Lewis published the book I was able to give back the books to the people as a thank you and that was really important because like I've said before without them I can't make the work that I do and so you know I really felt like my work was going to I really felt actually You Get Me was going to be my first series and that was going to be exhibited and it actually ended up being my third series and you know Mark City's been an incredible ambassador of my practice I actually met him six years earlier and Mark really helped network me around the country and talked to all the all the museums and some amazing people and and you know I have this opportunity with Mark to kind of show the work in London and and this was it you know this was nine years of making my work and pushing it around and and what was interesting was that even the Commonality of Strangers series really didn't get the kind of I would say the kind of press that I really hoped it would get and I think that it was because we weren't really ready for that kind of conversation about challenging the politics that are around us but in 2017 you know we had Brexit we had Trump you know racism was rife everywhere you know and I think people were very shocked about what was going on so when You Get Me came out I had to really make a decision and the decision was this you know do I talk the academic speak do I talk and say words about male redundancy and throw out governments politics and politics around prison systems and populations in the UK or do I be really honest and I was really honest and I really talked about how growing up the racial violence that I suffered the pack of action that I suffered the fact that we felt so invisible in these spaces in museum and gallery spaces you know my my key motivation was to represent us in museum and gallery spaces to be part of the art historical canon and the reason why I ended up making portraits that were beautiful because I wanted to celebrate us as noble dignified cities and so the show opened I had my first interview at Huck magazine and that's kind of what I said and it really rippled and it it it went crazy and what was amazing that you know at the opening we had over 600 people come in terms of press I think we hit almost close to 2 million in two months and it was because I think we were ready to have a really honest conversation and the way I did the hang was that the larger portraits were unglazed and there were the kind of slightly older men and talking and then the quotes were really talking about them feeling disenfranchised hopeless and then the smaller portraits were of the young boys and they was really looking at boyhood but also how when on monolith as we're constantly told and I glazed them so they were behind glass and it was this conversation that how do we stop this generation from feeling disenfranchised like the older men and yeah it was in a really incredible moment and I'm really thankful to say that the work itself has now been collected in some amazing collections and it's also toured across the country and it's also gone to the States and thankfully to Mark also you know my You Get Me series was published by Michael at LAC and you know one of the things we did in the book was a very personal essay which talked about my motivations but we also included a lot of quotes in the book which were the voices of the community but also at the back of the book I wanted to use the research that I've been doing over the last five six years of newspaper headlines and I really wanted to kind of put them at the back of the book so people could really see the propaganda that was happening you know and it crystallised the fact that yeah we have been really demonised and our narrative has been totally hijacked and we've been completely muzzled and voiceless so that was the You Get Me series kind of high point I was actually like really exhausted at that point and you know we're still having conversations from I've written the press and Nigel Farage saying go back home and I was like you know what I'm going to actually go back home to Pakistan and see and really articulate what it is that my parents ended up leaving so I did this series called going back home to where I came from and it was a phrase that a lot of kids used to say to me as well when I was growing up and I really wanted to in this in this series you know we published a book and it was with British Council and Icon Gallery and you know I knew Gallery and also ended up exhibiting the work was to kind of pay homage to my mum's stories she you know as we were growing up she'd always tell me that you know how rich and how diverse Pakistan is and Kashmir you know she used to talk about the forests and the rivers and the and the lakes and I used to say and along with my you know along with my brothers and sisters mum if Pakistan was so great Kashmir was so great why are we here you know why are we struggling and she'd always say you're here for a better life you're here to be educated and to do better than I could and so when I went back I really wanted to pay homage to her memories and so you know this is the world that she would have gone to as a little girl to get water when I made this portrait of this young boy I was thinking man I could have been that young boy uh running in the river and jumping in the streams instead of running away from the races and you know I met my great grandma for the first time I reset um traditional mud houses which I wanted to you know pay homage to our humble beginnings and I really fell in love with the light out there and I really had this moment of just having fun with photography you know the work wasn't as rigid as the kind of three quarter length formulaic wired landscapes that I was making in my you get me an honest with you series because that was referencing you know popular culture and and it was referencing you know billboards but this was all about just tones textures and light and I had the most incredible time out there and you know I really fell in love with Kashmir and I remember um on the roof top of my mom's house under the starlit skies and my cousin was talking about a Zab Kashmir a free Kashmir and we were eating walnuts from my mom's tree and um you know he was just saying you know if I want food I can just get it from the land there's no such thing as you know real capitalism in in Kashmir and I experienced that actually and and um I said to him oh I really hope that I can have some of this for myself and when I said that he said to me no this isn't yours this is mine your home's England and so you know it really crystallised conversations that I was having with a lot of my friends and the people I photographed where it's this narrative that we are a lost generation we don't really know where we fit but I think through my work what I'm trying to say is that we don't have to choose we can bring everything together and you know part of the exhibition at New Art Exchange you know I really wanted to build a traditional mud house and this was a very very much again a collaboration with the community we had four different communities come over through the space of two weeks and they helped build this house we had elders Pakistani there was a Pakistani woman's group who came and they literally lined the the house with clay and we had this beautiful sound piece of birds playing in the in the gallery and we ended up kind of decorating the space on the inside so for me it's really important that we can that through my practice that we can create this kind of community collaboration so this is kind of the work that I've been making and I've had this incredible opportunity with Chris Boots he was former director of Aperture and I've just come back from a six week trip in Toronto and and also New York City and you know the idea is to really look at the American Muslim experience in contrast to what's going on here in Britain so this is a little bit of an exclusive in terms of showing you the portraits that I've been making out there and what's incredible I feel is that the conversation in in in North America is like 20 years ahead and the youth that have this incredible hope and this aspiration to really make a difference to really change the way that we are perceived and I was so welcomed I mean in the in the six weeks that I was there I ended up making 75 days I worked incredibly hard but the level of engagement and the willingness to be part of a different conversation was was something I just haven't experienced in the UK and there's a gentleness there that isn't here in in in the UK and I think that's down to the kind of political violence and the violence that the community really suffered in this country and it's so diverse in America you know I met people from you know Palestine I met people from all over Africa I met people from Iraq, Yemen it was just such an amazing series and so this is part of the New York City work and you know these are the four portraits that I'm able to kind of share with you and yeah I'm excited this is the kind of start of a bigger series that I'm trying to do in America and what's really interesting is that every time I finished making a portrait of someone they said thank you so much for allowing us to have a voice and an opportunity to really talk about our complexities so I feel really privileged and really humble that I have the opportunity to do that in the US but also the the crazy thing that actually you know no one else is doing this no one else is really making this this work to try and create this visual narrative of Muslims globally and and celebrate them as beautiful fine art portraiture so yeah this is this is me so I want to thank you very much for for listening to my talk and I welcome any questions hi Matthef, thank you so much for that that was really fascinating sorry my own camera now that was really fascinating and so rich and I feel like you've tackled a lot of questions that I was going to pose so I didn't introduce myself my name is Louise Elliott I'm curator of talks and events at the photographer's gallery thanks everyone for joining us we're about to open up to questions from you so do send them through the chat box here I might just start us off with some question of my own I do feel like you've answered a lot of my questions Matthef but you focused a lot on the sitter and I know that's something that you view as a collaboration it's something that both people have creative hands in making the final image but I wondered a little bit about the backdrops to some of the images and also how it's been the subject of some of your work like Muslim ghettos for instance and how you determine the place with the sitter but also in that instance how the place becomes the subject yeah sure so you know I really see the street as my studio and one of the things I try and do in my backdrops is really limit the colour palette now I could you know put them in areas which look very impoverished and you know this kind of really perpetuating that narrative of this characterization of these communities and I didn't want to do that I think I started doing that with my work very early on and I realised that this is just jarring this is kind of feeding the certain stereotype so I when I'm walking I you know when I meet someone I walk with them and we end up just walking the streets and as I'm talking to them my eyes are everywhere and I'm trying to find their backdrop their right space to be able to celebrate their brown skin the most important thing for me is how do I celebrate their brown skin in in the frame and that's why the backdrops can be quite muted or limited or brick walls or just greenery or they're in corners if I put them in corners it's really to kind of celebrate urban pens work in the studio a little bit this is kind of my little moment and and it's and that's it and then and the reason why the Muslim ghettos series is very separate from any of the other work that I put together is because I don't want to mix those things up because very early on well actually not even early on but close to be publishing the book with Michael we had those images in in the book and and I I remember flicking through one of the drafts and and I was like this this this is making me feel sorry for this community like I don't want to do that so I said to Michael I think we've got to get rid of this stuff this is this is pushing it into a narrative that I don't want to put it in you know Michael and I sat down and he just thought about it for a minute he's like yeah you made the right decision and so we moved on and the Muslim ghettos series is going to form another body of work that I'm making with Icon Gallery and Photo Works in the next year or two which will be about the illegal CCTV that was placed in Birmingham so that's going to have its moment in its own right but for me it's all about trying to find beautiful backdrops and and so then the city becomes the celebrated subject really and it reads like that too and I suppose that I can see how it's viewed in a way that distinguishes itself from the portraits that you do we do have some questions coming in now I'll start with Rahab Alana one of our contributors for the subsequent days she thanks you for the they thank you for the brilliant presentation if you have a gauge on it could you talk about the reception of this work in Pakistan and even Kashmir yes I guess your home series oh and actually the the you know why you get me series and and also the honest with you series I had a wonderful opportunity to be part of the Biennale and you know I was I was exhibiting with Aisha Khalid she she turned her home her first time into a gallery and and I remember I mean it was such a moment I remember one lady who I was hanging out with and her name was and she walked into the space that I was exhibiting and her face was like rabbit in the headlights I saw and it was and I couldn't I would always remember her reaction because she saw herself reflected on the walls but she realised that this community wasn't Pakistani they were British and there was this real distinct difference and so that's and now that reaffirmed what I've always been saying which is that we are British we are British we're just not British or English in the way that maybe British society wants us to be and so the risk has been really fascinating in that sense and yeah my you know my mom when she goes back to Pakistan she takes my books and she shares them with family and of course everyone's really fascinated about you know the the evolution of Pakistani culture or Muslim culture in Britain. No I think it also speaks to what you cited earlier about some shared beliefs and aspirations that exist across a lot of your sitters and thinking about what you said now about the people you encountered in North America not versus here but I suppose just in contrast but there's something about those shared aspirations that unites people despite geographical distance. Let's see thank you for that there's another question around I guess it's your plan really around Muslims in the UK is there a plan to embrace the multi-ethnic dimension of Muslims in the UK at some point so I guess is that bringing maybe a question of bringing everything into project or an exhibition? I would probably say that question is more about looking at you know not just Pakistanis, Bangladeshis or the South Asian experience but perhaps people from you know the continent of Africa and so yeah there is plans to build those bodies of work and I'm definitely doing that in the US so in the US it's very much open it's about the Muslim experience but yeah this is like you know I'm still young I'm only 40 so you know I've got plenty of time to kind of be building this work and as you can tell that a lot of my work takes a long time to research and not only research but to position we all know museum and galleries are heavily booked in advance and it's about waiting for key time so I'm constantly working on several projects waiting for the right time to be able to publish an exhibit so yeah I'm not limiting looking at one particular demographic. Yeah and I think also the durational element of your research shows the care and rigor that you bring to it. We have a question though about some practical components around how you develop, this is from Claire Caroline, thank you Claire. How do you develop the pose and gestures with a sitter? To what degree are you directing the sitter or they're saying specifically the picture of Farrah where you said you wanted to hold a cricket bat so how much I guess it's about your collaboration with you? Yeah so that I basically carried I carried the cricket bat with me and I borrowed it from a friend of mine and so I was walking around London with it but you know when my work comes to the kind of end of a series I basically start to look at where the holes are and I talk about this idea of building a really wide colour palette and then I edit and paint in the studio and then I realise what's missing so then I start to kind of really direct and imagine the kind of portraits that I want to make and that's when my intervention really comes in to play. It's like well what is missing what do I need in this series and I'm very meticulous about it I will break down a sequence of like right I've got this I've got this I've got this I've got this and so and then it's about building on it but in terms of how do I make my portraits yeah I direct it's I very much direct and it's about getting the sitter at ease because I want them to feel like they can really own their portrait and really celebrate their own representation and you know a lot of this sitters in the US are like oh thank god you're really good at directing I really hate being in front of the camera and I kept saying to them I got you and because they kept saying to me I got you and so I'm like yeah I'm going to make sure that it's 10 out of 10 when we walk away from each other and if it's not I'm going to come back to you so with time with the luxury of wanting to build legacy projects over a long period I have the luxury of going back to them and meeting them again and remaking and because I don't want to rush this because once it's out and once you really put this powerful visual culture out you want to make sure it's going to really hit back at the propaganda and so I try my best to give myself as much time as possible in my work that makes sense I mean it's a very it can be a very vulnerable experience for the sitter but also the work that you're trying to do that dispels and challenges really dominant problematic and limiting narratives totally um there's a question here from Graham Harrison your subjects in America thank you for allowing them to talk about their complexities so I'm still talking about the sitter relationship do you feel that still photography is capable of conveying such complexities or might you think of using more words or even to film in your work yeah so we're doing everything now so with Chris um you know I've got I'm really excited to say that I've got a show with Stephen Borger gallery in Toronto and we're having a few days before we're having an online discussion and where I'm inviting the sisters to come and talk and we're going to have this really wonderful exchange and so the interviews that I conduct with everyone will be starting to do online almost like a podcast and it is really trying to you know use the power of social media use all the tools that we can use today to be able to kind of have the conversation and it is the conversation that's the most important thing yes the portraits are beautiful and they elevate and they're fine art all those things but actually what I really want to do is elevate the next level which is to bring make the sisters come alive and you know I've interviewed everyone we've transcribed all the interviews they will be in the book we're looking at I'm thinking about working with a sound artist to create audio pieces in the museum and gallery spaces that is all these things but I think ultimately portraiture is just really really powerful it can speak without words and it and you know that's what I love about portraiture it has this unspoken conversation so regardless of the fact that you know not all the time you're going to read the quotes and have their voices just to be able to see the the muslim visual culture like how how diverse this community is that's powerful and it's on right you know you are some of the portraits I made in the US and like man they don't even look muslim and and that's what that's what really excites me you know so that's what that's what I'm trying to do yeah I remember something that you said to me when we spoke last week where you said that photography is I'm reading your quote if I wrote it down photography is the most important discipline to have these societal conversations totally totally because we're so as a society we are so trained and we uh we know how to read an image and you know photography is the most powerful medium and I think and the reason why is because we're all so seduced by it I mean everyone's make takes images everyone makes images everyone what consumes them so I'm going to try and celebrate the fact that we everyone feels that they're a photographer and everyone feels that they can have a comment on on images and visual culture so yeah and this and photography is the medium that demonised us and even if you look at archival work you know there's a few archives that I'm working on which basically demonised us in back in the Hindustan regions and times and and I really thought that's when the degrading terminology really came about with our communities so yeah the colonial apparatus of photography is something that I want to challenge too so it's it's about fighting back in every element I'm just noticing the time I'm really sorry we won't we won't be able to get to every question here today um I might just ask one final one from those that were submitted and then we'll move to closing remarks but thank you everyone for your comments this question brings us back to how we started the conversation today which was looking at institutions organizations and the wider sector of photography so how difficult was it for you to gain access to photography or organizations in the UK and have you experienced um overt or interact racism in these places um yeah uh it was difficult don't get me wrong if you if you if you look at the spaces that really gave me those opportunities um there were spaces like new art exchange like autograph and the spaces that we focused on giving black and south asian voices uh artist opportunities and the thing is you know I've worked in museum and galleries for eight years before I dropped ship and became an artist and the people who work in these spaces are my friends and and and you know I there was moments where I was very disheartened by some conversations that were taking place between between you know the curators and and people that I really felt like we could we could challenge these narratives but the reality is that you know sometimes you know it it's hard like it's not it's not and I don't think it's you know I get this conversation a lot is it is the art industry racist no it's not is it difficult to get into these spaces of course it is it's difficult for everyone but what I wanted to do as an artist was to say you know what if I can put working class brown people on museum and gallery walls and if I can position them as fine art portraiture and if I can get them collected in amazing collections like the government art collection like the national portrait gallery in scotland you know there's hope so you know let's not let's not say that you know the art world is is racist let's just keep pushing gently and with love and let's have a really open conversation and and it all it takes time change real change takes time and I'm not going anywhere so you know I hope all the other artists aren't going to be deterred deterred either really thanks that's very heartening especially if someone who's also fan of museums and galleries but it's not as though we're not aware of how fraught they can be with their own problems and how it ends and and that's that's the complexity isn't it really but you know we're all here trying to make a difference yeah and I think especially with your work it starts with changing what's on the walls and allowing these stories and those who are visiting to see their lives and experiences reflected and to feel that connection yeah and that was a conversation I had at the you know autograph you know when the show opened everyone was saying I never thought these two worlds would come together and for me that was enough I was like great I've done my job you know because that's what I wanted I wanted my two worlds to come together you know I really love music and gallery spaces and I know the power of those walls and I just really you know I wanted that to come together and it did and so it was a great moment thank you that's a really nice thought to end on and I hope that's something or that's a view and experience that I've shared by many here and I'm sure we're all really hopeful and ambitious of what the future has but for your practice but also what museums galleries organizations co-operatives co-operatives what they can bring you know have to wrap things up today but Metab that was really such a wonderful presentation it was really great to also get a sense of where you're going with the working north america and how you're going to kind of pick up some other threads that you've been working on so thank you for that and thank you all for joining us today it's been such a rich and fascinating day of discussions and debates as we looked at the formation of photography over the last 50 years as a practice as a sector and as a site for critical debate thank you to all our speakers Shara Mablin and McNeill David Bates, Taoist Damani, David Dudney, Anabella Pollan and this afternoon with Karen Shepardson, Jewett Hacking and Anne Leiden I hope I haven't forgotten anyone to our collaborators of course at Paul Mellon Centre Mark Hallott Sir Turner, Shona Blanchfield, Dana Conve and to my colleagues at the Photographers Gallery thank you and lastly and importantly thank you all for joining us with us for this momentous partnership between Paul Mellon Centre and the Photographers Gallery uh we will pick things up next week uh starting again on Wednesday the 1st of December when we look at materiality and process and printed material like the magazine and photo publications and more information at the bill on both their website at the photographer's gallery's website at Paul Mellon Centres I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and thank you again so much Mataab it was really lovely to have you here and we will pleasure thank you so much for having me thanks everyone