 Hello and good afternoon. My name is Anna Daneman. I'm a curator here at the Photographers Gallery and it's my pleasure to welcome you all to the afternoon session of our Concerning Photographer Conference. We've already had a great morning session and I hope some of you have managed to catch up on that as well. We've had some utterly absorbing contributions and provocations addressing questions of when how photography is produced, engaged with and circulated. I'm delighted that this discussion will continue and further expand this afternoon. The topic of the forthcoming panel is printed matter, publications, books, magazines, and of course photo books which have so profoundly shaped and change the understanding of and our relationship to photography. Before I hand over to the chair of the panel Diane Smith and the four panelists, there are few notes on housekeeping. The session contains four 15 minutes papers with a Q&A session after the second and the fourth presentation. All of you can ask questions using the Q&A function. This session is being recorded and made available to the public. Close captioning is available. Click the CC button on the bottom right of the hand of your screen to enable captions. We will conclude the afternoon session after the panel discussions and before resuming again at 6.30 tonight with artist Penny Slinger, so we hope to see you all back again this evening. Thank you very much to Sarah Turner, Shona Blanchfield, Danielle Conway and the rest of the team at the Paul Mellon Center, and to my colleagues at the photographer's gallery specifically, Louisa Uliad, for the brilliant organization of the whole conference. Thank you to the speakers and to all of you for joining. And now over to writer and journalist Diane Smith. So welcome everyone, thanks for joining and thanks to Anna for the introduction. And so this afternoon we're looking at printed matter and also other media which have helped disseminate photography over the last 50 years. But we're kind of focusing in particularly on the 70s and 80s. So we've got two papers this morning and sorry two papers first of all, and then a break and then another two papers, and the papers this. First of all, are from Derek Bishton, who is going to present on the 10 eight photographic magazine and 1978 to 1992. He is a journalist or the photographer publish and internet pioneer from Birmingham, though he has strong links with East London, and also to a car. And he's still based in Birmingham though, during the 70s and 80s Bishton work with many political groups and agencies as part of the sidelines collective, a community design and photography resource he co founded in 1977 with Brian Homer and David and one of their projects was 10 eight magazine, which lasted from 1978 until 1992. His presentation will focus on 10 a given idea of some of the many things they were able to do. After Derek will go straight to John Wyver. And he's going to present screening photography, BBC televisions presentation of photography 1969 till 1988. John is a writer and producer with the independent production company illuminations specializing in documentaries about the arts and screen adaptations or performance. He's the director screen productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he produces the RSC life from Stratford upon even broadcast and recordings. He's also professor of the arts on screen at the University of Westminster, and has published several books. His presentation is screening photography BBC televisions presentation photography. So, first of all, we'll go to Derek Bishton. I'm I'm Derek Bishton and I was one of the 10 eight founding group. And I was the editorial director when it finally closed due to a cash flow crisis in the early 1990s. Let me give a brief overview of how this publication started life described the unique factors that helped shape 10 eights editorial focus on power and representation and remind everyone how it attracted many of the most creative and dynamic voices in politics and photography as contributors and editors during the 80s and 90s. In the process, it became a key resource for conscious image makers, cultural theorists and teaching institutions around the world. I think it's important to remember that 10 eight did not come out of an institution or a gallery or anywhere with any kind of formal connection with photography or education. It came out of a small upstairs room of a terrace house in Grove Lane, Hansworth Birmingham, courtesy of the sidelines community agency run by Brian Homer, John Reardon and myself. So I'm just, are you, do you, are you supposed to be sharing your PowerPoint because we can't see it yet. We're going to just do this introduction and then share the visuals. That's okay. That's our fault. I'm nearly finished so I'm about to put up the PowerPoint right. sidelines was an independent design and publishing cooperative working with community groups and individuals fighting for social justice and racial harmony in the inner city of the 1970s. It was a unique place where for a few turbulent years, the excitement unleashed the excitement and creativity unleashed by the flowering of a multicultural community profoundly affected everyone. Okay, well let's share the screen, shall we. My screen doesn't seem to be sharing very well. I do excuse me. Okay. Okay, so I'm going to try to share my keynote presentation, which I've just done with you now starting with a few brief images of work by sidelines. I do this purely to show the nature of the environment that created 10 eight. This was, you know, an active group of people producing kind of a lot of very interesting published material. So many issues were converging unemployment. The other racism of the police and other state institutions, deportations, police harassment of black people, the ravings of far right groups, like the National Front. These were the experiences that fed into the formative years of 10 eight. As our work expanded and issues around representation came in. So we began to reach out to people exploring the same issues. The Asworth Terrace was a vital dynamic meeting place is attractive created people of all kinds and some of them were photographers informal meetings became regular weekly get togethers. And after we failed to get any money to open a gallery, our preferred choice. We took what little grant aid was on offer and produced a regional photography magazine, which you can see on the screen now. So that's how it began. We had no fears about producing and distributing the magazine because we were already warehousing and distributing all kinds of printed material. The editorial group also comprised three people from West Midlands Arts photography panel, just to keep an eye on us. And this group included John Taylor who became a very important member of the editorial team. The grant specified that the magazine's content should be regionally based. But to be honest, we sing up frustrated with that. And then in issue four we published work from the hands of a self portrait project that John Brian and I had organized on the street outside the sidelines office we opened up the pages to national and international practitioners including Joe Spence and Angela Kelly, Joan Solomon, Sandra central William mess a whole range of people who produce self portrait work. Going off piece landed us in hot water with the regional arts association. But it established a way of working that became the template for all future issues of 10 eight. That is, we recognized right from the off that to produce a consistently compelling editorial offering on a regular quarterly basis. When you are operating right at the margins in terms of cash and resources. You're relying on huge amounts of unpaid work from a small group of people to make a real investment in the project. So you need a constant refresh, you need new voices entering the conversation. But there's word cloud apologies for the awful typography I did this a few years ago but anyway, what it shows it gives a reasonable indication of the number of people involved in creating and creating the editorial content of 10 eight over the span of 14 years. 19 people are credited as individual or joint authors. But you can see supporting their efforts was a huge community of writers and photographers. The relative size of the names reflects their frequency. But it's obvious the huge input of John Taylor Mark Blackstock Ronda Wilson, Roshni Kemper do David a Bailey suit green main. But there are scores of other names on this I'm sorry some of them are so small to be able to see them but if you did, you recognize really a map of some of the most important and influential voices of that period. So today I'm going to pick out what I see as some of the key moments in the evolution of 10 eight. So once we'd escape the parochial clutches of West Midlands Arts and become a client of the Arts Council, we abandoned the a three folding to a for format that we started with which we stolen from camera work. It would be too expensive and driven mainly by the interests of John Brian and myself we produce several issues around the nature of documentary photography the question that's validity and usefulness. There are a number of photographer led photo agencies emerging at that time. And the women's agency format for example, and as traditional outlets for documentary work disappears so tonight was drawn to provide an outlet for work documenting serious cultural issues. Green and common the peace protests and changing face of unemployment famine in Africa the minus straight. All of these became subjects of issues of 10 days. The question of how photographers will represent the on the visual or invisible precipitated the first really significant shift in emphasis in editorial direction. We began to examine the role that cultural theory can play in helping us to under develop new ways of seeing and understanding. Our images are inscribed with meaning. One of the landmark issues in this respect in my opinion was consent and control. There was 1984 and all wells dystopian vision of the way things might turn out was very much in our minds. But what editor John Taylor set out to demonstrate was that, unlike in all wells world where society was controlled by a benevolent group which knowingly manipulated and coerced the ignorant population. A bit like a well known social media app today some might say in the real 1984 control had become internalized. We obeyed because we agreed because we bought into ideas of what is normal is acceptable what constitutes being British. This issue asked, how did this happen. There is a content page here I hope you can see it because it looking back over this issue is just 37 years old there. I'm struck by its continuing relevant relevance. It was, I think and remains a to the force of how to make complex theoretical concerns accessible and relevant and shows how images are weaponized in the battle to control what we see and what we think we see. It opened up a new market for 10 18 higher education where media studies was just beginning to get established. It certainly cemented 10 exposition as a major publication in the much wider field of cultural studies. And I think from this point on we don't no longer just a photography magazine. At this time, when John ridden I was sifting through hundreds of our own photographs taken in hands with for the book home front, which incidentally was also exhibited at the photographers gallery and an edited form in from November to January 85. I became increasingly interested in the idea that there existed another alternative photo history of post war black settlement in Britain. I discovered this photograph of my wife, Marie taken in 1960 shortly after she arrived in the UK from Jamaica to join her parents. And it led me to think about the way the Windrush generation had documented themselves through the medium of formal high street portraits high street studio portraits. So, in the early part of 1984, I wrote to professors to a hall and asked him if he'd be interested in writing back photography about photographs of back war post war black settlement, ranging from high street portraits to contemporary press documentary. And I spent several weeks researching high street photographs high street photographers visiting the archives of picture agencies, such as Holton, where most of the images published in picture posts within hours, camera press and keystone, in order to provide Stuart with visual material. The resulting article reconstruction work was a landmark intervention in discourses around the history of black settlement in Britain, which were just starting to emerge at that time, and the difficulties inherent in mobilizing images from diverse sources to represent that history. It's been republished on several occasions. Recently in the excellent compilation by Charlotte Brunsden, writings on media covering Stuart's writings on on on that subject. It led to a massive upsurge of interest in an awareness of archives. The article directly fed into the work of Pete James who became curator of photographic collections of Birmingham library 1989. For many photographic interests, Pete took up the idea of seeking out the archives of high street photographers, and was rewarded when the entire output. Excuse me, when the entire output of earnest dice around two studios in Birmingham was discovered completely intact. The dice collection now resides at Birmingham library. It's also significant because it also marked a new development for the magazines in terms of collaborations with other organizations. On the basis of the powerful editorial that John and I have put together. We were approached by Alex Noble of the photographers gallery with the proposal that involved publishing a 48 page catalog to accompany an exhibition on London's immigrant communities to be held at the gallery. The fit was obviously very good this catalogue was included as a separate section staying on inside the magazine. 10 eight was involved in the commissioning of articles from CLR James and fruit Dondie and help the content of the help shape the content of the gallery's catalog. It also of course for us produced a bumper edition for which we only had to pay half. 10 eight in the photographers gallery collaborated on another issue in 1987 by the way body politics, where a show commissioned by the gallery formed half of the editorial content of the magazine. The perceived success of these collaborations led directly to another one in 1987 when 10 eight distributed the spectrum women's photography festival catalog with issue number 30 spellbound. The festival is organized by Elaine Kramer and Montaz Kanji, and involved more than 500 women photographers exhibiting at nearly 100 venues nationwide. The catalog was commissioned and coordinated by rationing Kemper do Ronda Wilson, who were both actively involved many years with 10 eight. I just want to backtrack for a moment and take you back to this issue of 10 eight black experiences. One of the other happy consequences of reconstruction work, and the black experience staying on issue was that it prompted David a Bailey, one of the most celebrated curators and cultural workers about time to come to Birmingham until we find out about 10 about 10 eight, where he immediately became a vital member of the editorial group. His first 10 a editorial project black experiences. The pluralist signifying the key shift from the undifferentiated black experience of issue 16. Published in 1986 set out some of the new agendas in black cultural politics. The issue wrote David was to recognize the extraordinary complexity of ethnic and cultural difference what Stuart Hall later called the Kaleidoscopic conditions of blackness. And to insert this awareness into discourses around representations of race and sexuality, which black people have been excluded from. The cover image of Shade repeated several times to indicate the many readings that could and were being imposed on it symbolize for us the complexity of the then current debates and race sexuality and representation. Through David the magazine came into and this is the contents page of that edition. And you can probably see that through David we came into contact with many of the most dynamic voices in black cultural production in the nineties. Such as Isaac Julian Cabina Mercer, Sotipa Biswas, Sunil Gupta, Jean Toudras, Rosmy Fanny Kodi, the list goes on this in May, this in turn made 10 days. This vehicle for mapping what turned out to be a period of rapid and turbulent change in both theory and practice in regard to black image making and black cultural work generally. Namely the struggle of black people not simply to recover themselves in past histories but to reproduce themselves as new subjects for the future to enter as Stuart Hall noted that most modern of all domains, the domain of representation. In 1990, there was some big changes in the editorial group. John Taylor left to work with Manchester University Press john's contribution to the development of 10 eight had been immense but when he left it enabled the remaining group to reorganize and rethink the way forward. 10 eight was no longer just a quarterly publication through the restless creativity that characterized its founding inspiration developed into something more closely resembling an arts agency. The move from the triangle gallery which sadly closed in 1988 and was now renting space in an old jewelry quarter workshop in hockey. Alongside producing and distributing 10 eight it was working locally to establish an international photography festival in the city which was held in June 1992. It had facilitated exhibitions of black British photography Houston photo festival. It had developed an exhibition touring service to promote the work of West Midlands based photographers, which involved commissioning and archive work. And the archive is now part of Birmingham library collection. And we use this moment to change the way the magazine was produced and marketing. The considerable evidence of this was the relaunch in early 1991 with volume to issue one bodies of excess, which was finally printed on 10 by eight paper. It was conceived as a photo paperback, more a book than a magazine with very high quality half tone reproduction. So in this strategy that recognize that our audience were not a verse to spending 795 in 1991 money which is about 18 pounds in today's money for a beautifully produced book dealing with serious cultural issues. The strategy worked and our sales went up. In the magical decade. The last published edition of 1080s undoubtedly the most significant in terms of the ambition and scale of the project. Working alongside Stuart all David a Bailey and Andy Cameron was an inspirational experience for me. We brought together the work of nearly 50 photographers and writers. We published several influential articles and set them alongside contemporary reassessments. It was I think another landmark publication. In this essay from the addition from Kabeena Mercer, examine the journey from roots, double OTS to roots, ROU TES. For Mercer the work produced in the 1980s from the margins was like a riser, cutting channels and pathways across the hierarchies of power, popping up in unexpected places. Giasper is a domain of dissemination and dispersal where seeds scattered amongst a long diverse vectors and trajectories. You don't have to be a fan of gardeners world to make metaphors out of a riser. So, I'm now exiting my presentation. And just a couple of words to sum up. So that's ultimately how I see the legacy of 10 a horizon that just keeps popping up. We wrapped up at the 1993 Recontre d'Al Festival in France in critical decade opened up the opportunity for Mark Sealy and myself to make an audio visual production for the spectacular. Recontre d'Al Contre d'Onoir was shown at the Teatro Antique in Arles in July 1993 and was based around the issues and artists foregrounded in critical decade. There was a significant moment for Mark Sealy and those working to build and maintain autograph. Now of course established in its gallery and offices in shortage. When 10 a cease publication, it had grown from a local magazine with a print run of 500 to an international journal with a print run of 5000. It had 1500 subscribers and was distributed in Europe and virtually every part of the new speaking world. In its last full financial year 1991 10 a had a turnover in excess of a quarter of a million pounds. So what happened simple cash for publishing is a long game you start commissioning a year before publication you have continual costs, you go to print wrap up an enormous bill. And then you wait for a return sometimes up for a year up to a year. Put this into a rolling schedule and you can see the problem. However, I don't want to end on a negative note let's instead celebrate the legacy that tonight has left us in terms of recording the formation of a new photographic epistemology. Okay, that's wonderful thank you very much Derek and we're going to go straight to John Wyver now whose presentation is looking at screening photography BBC televisions presentation of photography 1969 till 1988. So, can you see that okay Diane and everybody. That looks great thank you. Very good. Many thanks to the photographers gallery and Paul Mellon Center for inviting me to take part in in what's a really fascinating group of presentations. The key and obvious argument that I want this short paper to make is that television has to be regarded as one of the networks within which photographers and their associated meaning circulate. Perhaps but it's symptomatic of the marginalization of television that this has been this my presentation has been shoe on into a session that is otherwise and still labeled printed matter. To demonstrate my argument historically, the paper begins to catalog and offer elements of the most basic analysis of the presence of photographers in television programs on BBC one and BBC two during just the first decade of the photographers gallery. The years 1971 to 1980. And I have indeed shortened my time frame since submitting my abstract. I don't stress that the paper is a very modest start on this work. But it's been compiled by searching the invaluable and open online BBC program index consulting radio times and exploring the BBC archive, using a system called archive search, which I'll mention again at the end, and which will become accessible to registered educational institutions in 2022. I'm certain that there is much more to discover, but one of my felicitous finds was an item on BBC two's review in May 1971, which featured as a montage of the works of Jack Henri La Tigue linked to but sadly not illustrating the exhibition that was the photographer's gallery's second show. The item was introduced and voiced by the strands presenter David Jones. Excluding repeats in the 1970s I estimate that there are at least 100 documentaries dramas and review programs, which are centrally focused on some aspect of photography. Photographers and photographers are present elsewhere also tucked away in magazine programs, or on chat shows, as with the appearance of Don McCullen on an unlikely panel on Parkinson in 1971. A little analysis of these programs produces a perhaps unsurprising result that the photographers depicted in these programs are exclusively white with a strong presence of aristocratic associations and overwhelmingly male. But throughout, and especially towards the end of the decade, there are intriguing countercurrents as well. Directively the photographers on show provide a strong sense of the mainstream understanding of the medium in this decade, especially in historical and professional contexts. Photographers in these films are dominated by traditions including photo journalism, portraiture and fashion, as well as amateur networks as here. There is no recognition of modernist and contemporary art practice. Nonetheless, while almost all of the programs are little known and almost never screened these films collectively and individually offer a rich archive for further research and analysis. So among the themes that can be drawn out of the following and I'm going to rather gallop through these. Aristos Norman Parkinson photographer to the Royals features in three programs. Cecil Beaton on the previous slide is filmed at his country house of reddish, and there are no less than five films centered on Patrick Lichfield, including one in which he photographs the 18 year old aspiring pop star Sheena Easton. At Lichfield's five programs, there are I think just six, possibly seven that are centered on women photographers in total. Specialist scientific photography is featured in programs about Leonard Nielsen and an open university documentary about color photography to mark the centenary of the Royal Institute of Chemistry. There are also three films made with bird photographer Eric Hosking to with nature photographer Tom Weir and a profile of wildlife photographer Stephen Dalton fashion. Terrence Donovan and Bailey make inevitable appearances, but seemingly style photography is not as dominant in television photographers during the decade, then one might have assumed. The models, 1978 is a half hour film which incidentally is available on iPlayer about the differences in the modeling world between 30 years ago and today, as it was 78. And the most prominent photographer featured is Norman Parkinson working photographers. Among the less glamorous figures featured a freelancer Andrew Willis and stills photographer Ray Goff and the children's art series in the picture profiles aerial photographer Don Fraser. The theme I called history is closer than you think. In 1972, the 81 year old man Ray makes a lively appearance in an edition of review. The following year, Latig comes to London to photograph Claire Bloom at the Ritz, and perhaps most remarkably, Captain John Knoll, who was the photographer on the 1924 Everest expedition, in which Mallory and Irving lost their lives is used for a documentary newsmen. McCullen inevitably pops up in several places, nearly as often in fact as Lichfield, and the refined profiles of press photographers Terry Fisher and Tim Page. But the decade is also haunted by the ghost of picture post, which had fallen from its perch in 1957. In 1973 omnibus brings together Tom Hopkins and James Cameron by Robertson, McDonald Hastings, Trevor Philpott and Bert Hardy to plan a photo story, and then to dispatch parole bird to shoot a feature about a dairy farmer. So, Hopkinson pops up on an edition of the editors in 1976. And in 1977, René Cutforth narrates a full length documentary, The Life and Death of Picture Post. And we've already seen a full set of the magazine being sold off. In fact, to Hopkinsons nephew for the princely son of a thousand pounds. Happy Snaps. Popular preconceptions about photography are apparent in three comic dramas. Everybody says cheese 1971 by Douglas Livingstone, which doesn't survive. Big Malian Smith by Roy Clark 1974 and Jubilee in 1977 by Ray Connolly exhibition culture. The emerging exhibition culture of photography in the 1970s is marked in programs that respond to the V&A Cecil Beaton show in 1971, the landmark, the real thing at the Hayward in 75 and the 1976 Paul Strand retrospective. And for masters, perhaps inevitably the pantheon has a strong presence with documentaries and interviews with Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, and one of the very few women photographers to appear, Eve Arnold pioneers. And in fact eminent Victorians, the growing public awareness during the decade of Victorian photography is reflected in an edition of Collectors World and in a short film from BBC North about Alfred Atkinson, as well as in the series Pioneers of photography. First transmitted in 1975. This eight part series was I think the first substantial exploration of the history of photography on television with programs devoted to among others, Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Samuel Bourne, and Nadar. The series consultant was the photography historian, Aaron Schaaf. The decades other series on BBC television devoted to photography was this six part project in 1978 of about contemporary image making. Sitting in front of an untidy bookshelf, photojournalist Brim Campbell presents this shot on a shoestring series of what are essentially slide lectures interspersed with interviews and process sequences. The approach is thematic so the first film about movement features Ernst Huss, who pops up twice more in the series, the portrait talks with Arnold Newman, Brian Griffin, and Duffy. This documentary visits McCullen again and Chris Berry, and perhaps the most interesting of the films the fifth devoted to urban landscape goes on a location shoot with Chris Killip and speaks with Joel Myrobits. Overall the approach is technical lenses and shutter speeds feature heavily and the analysis formalist with the series clearly concerned to make the case for the skill artistry aesthetic appreciation and intuition of the invariably male photographer. Even when introducing an image by Faye Godwin Campbell makes exclusive use of the masculine pronoun, and while works by a few female photographers are discussed, all of those filmed a male new thinking. Towards the end of the decade omnibus screened two major arguably radical programs that engage with new thinking new critical thinking about photography. The Stolen Your Face produced by Tristan Poll in November 1978 offered Susan Sontag 50 minutes to outline the arguments of her, their new publication on photography, which is illustrated with numerous stills at film extracts from Goddard's Lee A, Michael Powell's Beeping Tom, and Antonioni's China documentary Chung Quo. Mike Dibbs studio shot film with John Berger pig earth broadcast in June 1979 is similarly simple in format using the photographs and eight millimeter film footage of Jean Moore to explore their experiences of and ideas about French peasantry and culminating remarkably in a nearly 20 minute illustrated exchange between Berger and the French academic Theodore Shannon engaging with the past. There are also the first indications of more innovative ways of revisiting photography's past perhaps most notably arenas 1975 film made by Carol Bell 40 years on from the publication of this now praised famous men in which the film the filmmaker searches for the families featured in the classic book by Agie and Evans feminism finally. I've already shown an image from a 1974 BBC Manchester film profile of circa Lisa continent continent. This is my British televisions first film dedicated to a photographer who is a woman. And right at the end of the decade in 1980 arena devotes in addition to female photographers. Joe spent in what I think was her second appearance on the BBC, and the American artist and more recently curator, Linda Benedict Jones, whose photographs taken in Britain, especially in Sheffield had featured in a show at the cities in 1979. Also in 1980, the strand of films about craft in the making profiles Dorothy bone, and the series best of British as I've illustrated earlier, devotes an addition to Jane bound. Here of course in the decade john Berger and Mike Gibbs ways of seeing introduces rigorous analysis of images both painted and photographic. And these, this was deeply influenced and inflected by feminist understandings. And in April 1979, another film made as part of the adult education output. Getting the message. A woman's place features Joe spent again, and acute as a representative the energy quality working party. And the BFI is Christian Christine garrity to discuss images of women in advertising the press and on television. I think from the lavish radio times billing that I've included there, you can perhaps see how the significant significance of the program was regarded. So there were the beginnings of change in relation to gender representation in television photographers, but as I noted before, they remained exclusively shamefully white. Before then, BBC television as a comparatively mainstream network of photographers in the 1970s had many limitations and lacks. And I want to propose that it's still an immensely rich resource, because almost all of the programs were made on film the overwhelming majority survive, which is not the case with all television from this time, and especially not from the early 20th of the decade. At last, the BBC archive is truly committed to increasing access to its collections. The main BBC program index is already an immensely valuable research tool, and it's increasingly possible to develop academic and curatorial dialogues with the archive, and to organize screenings of titles in relation to exhibitions and other cultural events. Here, the BBC centenary, the full range of television and radio programs will be available to those associated with an educational institution that has a subscription to an era license service such as learning on screens box of broadcasts. As a consequence, BBC televisions extensive and extraordinary archive about photographers on screen and on radio to will from next year be more or less fully open for much, much more extensive engagement, and I've been able to offer here. So go explore. Thank you. John, that was super interesting. So we're going to do a Q&A now with John and Derek, and we don't have questions yet so people who are watching do feel free to stick a question in now. But a few things did occur to me as we were going through. One of them was how these two papers into relate. So Derek, you mentioned at the start of yours, that you didn't come from an institution and you very much thought yourselves to be outside the institutions, whereas the BBC, I suppose you can say it sort of a certain institutional kind of body. So Derek, I wondered how you saw the BBC at that time and its photographic output. Was it something you were kind of aware of and did you feel yourselves to be doing something very different to what was being done on TV. I was made aware of it because you know, I mean the early 10-8 editorial meetings for someone like me, who had no formal training in photography or photography theory, were really like going to a weekly seminar. So I was just soaking up information. So I was aware that there were, as John has indicated, these kind of very formal BBC type programs. So what tended to be about photographers who were working in areas that had really very nothing, very little to do with what we were doing, you know. So it seemed remote, if you know what I mean, right. It didn't seem as though, I mean, they were something to aspire to in terms of, yeah, you know, kind of like being recognized as a great photographer, but we were always kind of questioning, you know, what exactly is the greatness of this, you know. And I think that was just simply a product of where we were coming from, you know, we had never been indoctrinated into the grand narrative and, you know, all of that. We were just coming at it as practitioners on the ground dealing with issues as we came up against them, you know, at a particularly, you know, turbulent and changing time. Did you get a feel for like who were the people who are commissioning these programs at the BBC. I guess I have a stereotype in my mind, but I wonder if that's actually true. The films come from a relatively broad range of people within the BBC and from different institutional positions within the BBC. I think it's too easy to kind of imagine the BBC or indeed BBC television as a kind of wholly homogenous operation. And I think that is some of the, some of that work is coming out of entertainment, like Parkinson's some of it's coming out of documentaries, and some of it's coming out of, and the most interesting work is coming out of either the Arts Department and I think particularly at the end of the 1970s, the music and arts as the department was known was a remarkably open and rich and interesting context for the production of work about all sorts of all sorts of strands of culture. Arena under Alignanto was a hit it's stride by then. Omnibus was being edited by Leslie McGahey after Barry Gavin, and both of those men had very broad and progressive tastes. And then there was a whole group of internal producers, like most obviously Mike Deeb, who, you know, has rightly achieved some recognition since, but others like Tristan Pol, who were really interested and engaged with new ideas and new ways of approaching culture. They were almost exclusively male, they were all white, and they were embedded in, you know, an institution that had very real boundaries, and there's a sense in which, as in so many other ways, television and television's engagement with culture only begins to really crack open with the arrival of Channel 4 in November 1982. And so, this decade is a really interesting moment when, you know, that the institution is still producing that work, and we don't have independent production companies, companies or groups from the workshop sector and so forth, like Amber, for example, who are hugely important in Channel 4 in the 80s, coming into the debate. I wondered as well, who might have been watching these programs or reading 10-8. So I found it interesting, for example, that one of the programs you mentioned, looking at women and how they're represented in the media, being kind of tucked away into education, rather than being, you know, perhaps one of the more mainstream programs. But also, Derek, I wondered if, you know, some of the issues that you were exploring were very pertinent to people in the UK who, you know, might not have a lot of money, but for example, the magazine got kind of more expensive as time went on. So, Derek, was there a certain audience that you were keen to reach and who do you feel that you did manage to reach with 10-8? Well, I think we were discovering our audience as we went along. You know, as I said, the initial brief was to produce something for local photographers. We realized that was a straight jacket that we just couldn't work with it. I mean, Joe Spence, who was a wonderful supporter of the magazine, and we published several of her pieces, came to us very early on with her family album stuff and said, you must publish this, this is perfect for you guys. So, we kind of had, we were, it's a bit like kind of, you know, we threw the pebble in the pond and then there were some ripples and we responded to those ripples, you know. And I think kind of, you know, as I tried to show, we kind of had our own very specific interests in the documentary mode because, you know, that's what we were doing as it were illustrating the stuff that we were producing there. But we very quickly began to see that there was, you know, a whole layer of understanding in terms of how theory could help us to negotiate some of the issues that we were facing. And I think we just simply kind of grew and grew into an audience that was becoming more and more receptive to taking on board those kinds of issues. And I think the issue of price is really interesting because, you know, we shied away from the idea of producing something that was too expensive. And I think that was part and parcel of our own, you know, kind of we were with people that haven't got much money and, you know, what we do in producing a magazine that was 10 quid or, you know, something like that. What we actually discovered was that when it comes to something that people really want, price is actually not a factor. You know, it really wasn't a factor that was a breakthrough moment for us. It was also kind of, you know, what destroyed the magazine because it created such cash flow problems for us. And actually we could sell 5,000 copies of a magazine of 15 pounds back in 1992. You know, so easily was ridiculous. So I think kind of what we see over the span of that period is just the increase in the size of the audience in the awareness of the audience in the growth of me. So, you know, of lectures and academics bringing more theory into those classrooms and undermining all the assumptions that people had about certain types of photography and the truth that that carry et cetera, et cetera. So I think that's what it was. It was a process, you know, it was a process, and we grew with that audience. Well, there's lots more to ask there, but unfortunately we're sort of running out of time for now. But you guys will be brought back in again at the panel at the end. So hopefully we'll get to a bit more then. So, yeah, so we're breaking out until 10 past three, and then we'll come back in with David Britain. Thanks very much. Hi Dan, I think we can get started now for the second half. So, thanks very much everyone for coming back for more. So now we've got two presentations and then after that we'll have a Q&A with those two speakers and then after that a panel discussion with all of the speakers. So if you have any questions for the next two speakers or for anything that's come up in the whole session then do put them in the Q&A. So now we're going to hear from David Britain and from Jacqueline Ennis-Coll. David Britain has engaged with photography as a writer, reviewer and editor of Creative Camera since 1980. He's a documentary maker, curator and academic researcher in the media department of Manchester Metropolitan University. David has written many essays and books and contributed to many journals. He also edited Creative Camera 30 Years of Writing, which was published in 2000. He's curator of the current light years exhibition series at the Photographers Gallery and his presentation will focus on the in-house publications of the Photographers Gallery from 1970 to 1980. And then after David, we won't have questions, we'll go straight to Jacqueline. Jacqueline Ennis-Coll is a neurodiverse black female photographer, writer and researcher with a postgraduate interest in black women in photography. In September 2022, she'll begin an interdisciplinary PhD research-led and practice-led programme at UCL the Slade, focused on black women photographic practices from the 1980s onwards. And Jacqueline's presentation will focus on photo books and black women photographers from the 1980s onwards. And so first of all, we have David. Hi, David. Can you hear? Oops. That's great. Can you hear David? Yeah, okay. Can you see my powerpoint? No, not yet. If you'd just like to share your powerpoint from the bottom there. Okay, just a minute. That's great. Thank you. If you could just go to full screen. Yep, sure. Full screen. If you press play at the top there. Just in the middle. Brilliant. Thank you. Right, okay. Thanks very much for asking me to participate in this conference. Thanks very much. This paper is based on some of the questions that I asked myself while I was curating this exhibition series of exhibitions for light years, which focuses on the 50 year anniversary of the photographer's gallery. I'm just going to do something that's almost taboo in a photography conference, which is talk about text. So let me start. I never know the precise role of the photographer's gallery. The photographer's gallery played in the long complex process of winning recognition for an art of photography in Britain. Can we glean any insights into this from the publicity, promotional material, the gallery produced between 1971 and 1980. In 1971, Sue Davis found herself in the unprecedented situation of running a gallery for an art that lacked legitimation. One of the tools she had at her disposal to win over skeptics was publicity in the form of so-called gallery guides. Here's an installation shot from the first exhibition we did from the light years series. You can see there's a lot of different posters on the wall there. We had a whole wall of posters from the 1970s. The reason I wanted to show you these is just to get some sense of the diversity involved in these. All sorts of sizes, all sorts of qualities. These were all gallery guides. They promoted the activities of the gallery and they promoted the exhibitions of the refer to you can see them there. It just gives you some sort of sense of what was going on there. This is the back of one of those posters you just had a look at it. It's a poster from a show called a much of style December 1975. I'm not asking you to read them, but it would be useful to skim over them. These were very basic texts on the backs of these posters. They were printed and laid out on a typewriter, in fact. And after 1980, they were professionally typeset. Davis wrote the text appears on the left under the Bryn Campbell text. You can see if you can see that there. She had a very distinctive voice that instantly became the voice of the photographers gallery. I would call it enthusiastic, well informed. mischievous at times. Anything but aloof. The profiles of mostly male producers from the roster were concise, undemanding and given to upbeat endings. Normally contextual texts appear alongside information about forthcoming exhibitions and puffs for the income generating departments of the gallery, such as the bookshop, the print sales department and the touring program course. The photographers gallery use this form of publicity to encourage participation and bring in photographers into social events such as private views, film screenings and talks. This is how I looked in 1980. So the gallery guide became formatted into a two sided a to tabloid that was designed originally by Peter based of the Sunday Times. It's really an updated version of the one you've just seen. That provides the visibility and a kind of shop window for each of the gallery's departments. Erwin Blumenfeld was the main exhibition and Davis's text about this has prominence on the left. I want to draw your attention to the design which formalizes the synergy that had been set up between the program and the revenue raising departments. So it's a fairly effortless exercise to make the connection between the Blumenfeld exhibition and a Blumenfeld publication under the books section is a little section saying books 20s 30s and 40s. And if you read that book section, not only can you get a synopsis of the Blumenfeld publication, but you can also discover that there are even more books in the bookshop by photographers who are influenced by data. That that that kind of relationship is very important to the gallery at the point that point. My primary interest in these in house productions is in their mode of address and their presumption of knowledge. The gallery guide for Blumenfeld would have differed from the press release that was sent out in both content and register. Obviously, the office from the photographers gallery that dealt with these kind of this kind of publicity also do dealt with the press releases. The guides, these guides not only featured news about the gallery's activities, they contain Davis's personal thoughts about the works on display. Now sometimes these can sound a bit jarring when, for instance, we read here that Erwin Blumenfeld's life was a struggle to fulfill his enormous ambition to influence the world. Or else where that Yaroslav Ponkar's pictures of Ladakh represent quote, a kind of paradise, no beggars, almost no crime, no hunger, great hospitality. Subjective interjections like these often accompanied by exclamation marks pop up regularly to make the gallery seem like an informal, non-exclusive place. To put this in this style into context, I want to show you what the publicity material look like that was issued by the White Chapel Gallery. These are two examples of gallery publicity that was circulated, as you can see in 1974. Now the White Chapel was founded in 1901 and it's a very, it was a very different organization to the photographers gallery in so many ways, except perhaps in one. Because the White Chapel, like the photographers gallery, was a bit of an outsider among art galleries, probably because of its location in the east end of London. Anyway, let's have a look at these leaflets. The leaflet on the left appears to me to be a concertina type format. And the one on the right looks to me to be a kind of booklet, which suggests that the White Chapel was producing different kinds of formats. These were the kind of artists that the White Chapel was representing at the time. Henry Chopin on the left is a poet, a sound and performance artist, a maker of artist books. See, Chini Cooney on the right produces visual and concrete poetry. You can't help noticing how the text is privileged. There's a massive information focused on the reputation of the artists and the contents of their exhibitions, including formal biographies and resumes of their outputs in different media. The mode of address is informal, almost telegraph ease in places, scholarly disinterested. It was almost certainly informed by our history and written by curators. It presumes a reasonably well educated audience, one for instance that was familiar with complicated notions such as interdisciplinarity and concrete poetry. The only concession in the Chopin pamphlet on the left, the only concession that seems to make to a general audience is a short explanation of sound poetry that quotes generously from William Burroughs. Davis's publicity is less formal than the White Chapel's, yet it was plainly not written for the general public. Davis seems to know the kind of person who is reading it. This is reflected, for example, in in-jokes and repeated references to people who seem to need no introduction. And then there's her willingness to appear as a little less elevated than most gallery directors. At some point she confesses that the prospect of an elite air witch show brings a happy smile to my face. The publicity demonstrates shifts in the register of Davis's interpretive writing that reveals skill and expertise and suggests that she was addressing a viewer who was quite educated in the subject. We often hear that most people in the 1960s and 70s were relatively badly informed about the art of photography because there was no formal education at that time. The sections of the potential audience were fairly well informed and were indeed well prepared for the arrival of a gallery of photography. They would include self-styled creative photographers who may have been working in journalism or studying applied photography at somewhere like Guilford College of Art. These photographers may have belonged to a progressive camera club where they could exhibit and they were almost certainly readers of the kind of photography magazines whose letters pages contained the outlines of the future battles of photography. This section of the potential audience for photography was predominantly male and white and also relatively young. They favoured titles including Photography Magazine, The British Journal of Photography and Creative Camera which along with Amateur Photographer urged readers to support Davis's enterprise prior to 1971. What little knowledge there was in Britain about the art of photography was found within an expanding realm of reproductions that laid just outside the reach of many ordinary consumers. These photography magazines provided a service to their readers as keen aggregators of this material. This is a slide of a spread from a 1962 issue of Photography Magazine. From as early as the 1950s readers of these magazines learned what they needed about the history of photography from extracts from books and catalogs by American modernists like Beaumont Newhall or Robert Doty who's written this essay. Meanwhile magazine features introduced readers to a cast of virtuosos whose pictures helped to entrench the straight aesthetic some years before it would become adopted by the photographer's gallery. This is obviously William Klein but it's from a February 1957 issue of Photography Magazine that reviewed four of the most important photography books of 1957. It's quite a strange thing to think that this was of its day. Ed van der Elskens Love on the Left was another one of those that was reviewed book number three. I think each was given two spreads. This is from a January 1959 issue of Photography again. The editor of this magazine was called Norman Hall who was very respected by creative photographers and in fact was one of the people who advised Sue Davis when she was setting up the gallery. He was well respected for his zeal in promoting the new styles of photography. Even as far as using Philip Jones Griffiths to illustrate a feature about technique which this is, Philip Jones Griffiths of course went on to produce Vietnam ink. But at the time like so many younger photographers he was trying to make some money, make a reputation and these magazines were really crucial for that kind of thing. So it's strange to see in a way to see these people when they started out. Don McCullen. This is a page from Camera Owner which became Creative Camera in 1968. Again this was popular with these creative photographers because it's editor prioritised pictures. So what I'm saying here is by the time photographers like McCullen or Klein or Ed van der Elskine came to the photographers gallery and they all did. Some of the audience knew their work from reproductions and had absorbed possibly by osmosis, the aesthetic discourse that underpinned it. Lacking the activist with audiences was fun not. The photographers gallery found common cause with elite photographers and advocates. It would be safe to say that most of the photographers were ambitious, left leaning and were enamoured of most things American. By design or by conviction the content of Sue Davis's texts was consistent with their work view. For example, she was keen to promote artist photographers. She equated the styles and trends of the art of photography with trades with sections of the industry. Even introducing Erwin Blumenfeld who was a co-founder of Dada in Holland as a successful fashion photographer. And found the source of all intention in being perfectly formed. She also insisted that a virtue of photography was its accessibility. Now this is not to say that she didn't have her own ideas too, which she did. So the original question, what did the photographers gallery contribute to changing attitudes towards photography. It would conclude from my research that the gallery's main contribution to winning legitimation for photography was as a catalyst for change from the bottom up. There is evidence that Davis knew how to use language and the form of communications to attract and motivate audiences. Those urgent and persistent appeals to see exhibitions, to attend talks, to purchase raffle tickets or even to lobby counsellors were a thinly disguised call to supporters to do something more for photography. To see the gallery in a sense as photography. I would say further research into the photographers gallery publicity might shed more light on the role of magazines. These photography magazines are sharing the future audiences for photography galleries. And also in Davis's vision of photography as an accessible alternative to contemporary art. Thank you so much. Collaborative research trips. Hi, Danny, I'm going to start your video. And then move on to a bigger project. Hi, Jacqueline, if you'd like to start. Yeah. Thank you, Daniel. Hello. Hi, we can hear you Jacqueline coming through really clearly. Take website declares that the photo book is one of the most important ways that photographers present and disseminate their work. Showing a number of images in a carefully selected order around a particular thing. Seen as a historical document communication and conversational tool and works of art in their own right. I would also state that we will be able to preserve this invaluable resource for generations to come and use it to tell new stories about photography, art history and photography's role in recording the culture and politics of its time. I'm going to start with. And I'm going to be on the dinner every store in her book manifesto or never giving up where she says, everyone should have the opportunity to create share and consume stories that reflect their cultures and communities, so that we all feel equally validated. obstacles by prioritising our commitment to ambition, hard work, craft, originality, and unstoppable ability. Creatives creatively circulate freely our imaginations, waiting for us to tap into. It must not be bound by rules or censorship, yet we should not ignore its social political context. Be wild, disobedient, and daring with your creativity, taking risks instead of following predictable routes. Those who play it safe do not advance our culture or civilisation. A wise person chooses partners who will support their creativity and gets rid of those who will undermine, sabotage or even destroy it. Personal success is most meaningful when used to uplift communities otherwise left behind. We are all interconnected and must look after each other. Society operates via powerful and often impenetrable networks that are called its tribal hierarchies, so we must establish our own systems of countermeasure. We must pass on what we know to the next generation and express gratitude to those who help us. Nobody gets anywhere on their own. The ancestors are swaying silently behind us. The dead souls of ones dearly departed who are the reasons why we came into being. We must remember them. Page one please. Listening with care to the wise words of the writer and messenger Ben Ochre, who voices, Africa is a living enigma, an old woman taken for a child, a wild person taken for a fool, a beggar who is in actuality a sage. Africa is a reality not seen, a dream not understood. Page three. The role of ancestors has always held a central cultural place within African cosmologies and their diaspora communities. Ancestors guide our actions and conscience and make demands on us to uphold values of kinship practices, including art and photography. Acknowledging Maud Salter as a photographic ancestor, or I would like to acknowledge Maud Salter as a photographic ancestor. She was an artist poet, art historian, cultural activist, curator, playwright, educator and a mother of three. She was born in Glasgow, Scotland in the 60s to a Scottish mother and African father. She completed her photographic studies with a master's degree at Derby University. She became a photographic ancestor in 2008. Her maternal grandfather was a photographer. Her practice is set by many to involve contemporary portraiture and photo montage, referencing the black feminine historical myth-making. Yeah, please turn to the next page. Her practice is also described as hybrid. Her practice was acknowledged in the usual ways through exhibitions, biennials, awards, collections and fellowships, and was a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. Photographic ancestor Maud Salter brought sustained awareness to the art histories and historical and contemporary presences of black women and played a crucial role towards building coalitions between black feminists and LGBTQ communities. She revived the overlooked and forgotten histories of black Europeans during the Holocaust and their genocide. Her practice then was one of repair and care. What will we learn from the past in terms of Nazi erasure practices? Is erasure just about the burning and erasure of targeted book publications? Or does such practices include systematic exclusionary practices such as blocking meaningful employment and or participation in the production of publications as a form of ideological control? Why with all the achievements? Why was there no sustained publication? Please turn, yeah, great. Why was there no sustained publication about the artist and photographer? Why was it necessary for the Maud Salter research team to begin a Kickstarter campaign and to seek public funding from the Arts Council to bring a new generation closer to her work and legacy? Isaac Huxley, Huxtable, sorry, Isaac Huxtable, editorial assistant at BJP, writes, power can maintain the status quo or ignite change or even stir up immobilized movements. Power involves responsibility. Authentic and genuine power has the capacity to transform and enrich. The question is how will we use our power and authority in the photographic world and who will we empower in the process? Photobooks are a powerful document that may expose or rewrite history, acts as a contribution to public discourse and may influence the perceptions, bias, thinking, felt sense and sensory world of our readership audience. The economy of the photographic world is financially set at a billion pounds in the UK. Should we find other ways of measuring our economy through a model of care, through the happiness or wellbeing of our photographic community? Do we want to invest in an attitude of poverty as a field of practice? Is our poverty due to our limitations that we impose on our imaginations? Our approach, our methods, our ideologies, our strategies, our values, our ethos. Are we approaching publishing with a neoliberal capitalist mindset? Could we envision and dream in more sustainable models? Do we value or exploit our cultural photographers? Do we perceive what we do within publishing houses as a service? Will each and every one of us within the photographic world and community search for solutions together and find the clarity necessary to enhance the conscience and not only the productivity of our collective field of practice? What constitutes a good photographic book? Who and what a certain's value? Do particular titles have an effecting and broader reach than others? How do we go about questioning the status quo? What is the difference between idealizing and communicating? Why is a book successful? How nuanced, care-orientated and mature are we when historicizing and theorizing the thinking processes involved and justifications in making transformative decisions that will impact on emerging and more established authors? How do we explain and justify and account for the choices we make in such a way as to draw an analysis? How do we demystify a publishing? By publishing on photo book, publishing itself, i.e. beyond the making process. How do different marketing strategies influence how a book is received by a public? What proportion of photography curriculums involve publishing and publications? How is taste generated, shaped and influenced? If taste is subjective, how then does that operate with regard to selection processes, scholarships and essay writing contracts? How do we navigate through the publishing world? What distinctions are to be made, if any, between publishing houses? What is a quality publication? How do we historicize and review the photographic world of publishing? Do we intend to keep things fuzzy? Is silence the answer? How are we evolving as a photographic community? What would help demystify the world of publishing? How could publishing be included in photography, education and learning processes? What are our economic models? Our social models of care? What values do we aspire to when working within our photographic communities? Do we even have a community? Do we want to grow a photographic community? What is our ethos? How will we balance the demands we receive from our readership and from our photographers? Who feature within a sustainable model? Do we prioritize? And what model will we adapt to going into the future? A social model of care or neoliberal capitalist orientation? Do we trust in our receptive audiences' willingness to invest in the unique photographic form? Is the responsibility of editors to ensure that in every project space is created to bring in new voices through text and images and to be alert to the need to gently challenge long-held assumptions about value and status? Will the photobook continue to exist? I'm going to end there. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks very much. And apologies, Jacqueline, that I wasn't able to introduce you properly at the start there. So now we're going to bring back David and also Jacqueline and have a short Q&A. And then we'll bring back everyone all together and have a panel discussion. I was really interested in the contrast, really, between Jacqueline's paper and David's and the idea of who is interpreting the images and who's presenting the images. So in the case of the photographer's gallery and the other institutions, David mentioned, it's not the photographers themselves. Whereas in Jacqueline's paper, it's kind of the idea that one might present oneself in a photo book. But then how do those photo books themselves get published and forwarded around? So Jacqueline, I wondered, do you feel that there's like a different approach to photography in the photo books that you've been considering? Do the photographers view their work differently to the way that perhaps institutions and curators pitch those same works? Yeah, I think when we're involved in our creative processes, we're involved in our creative processes. So obviously, if someone's not involved in that photographic process, then they're viewing that work from an outsider's perspective. And it's a responsibility of both of them to open up communication and to support a better understanding. And do you feel that it's maybe someone is quite difficult to get the photo book from the individual artist and to a wider audience? There seem to be a lot of questions in your paper about why particular artists don't get the coverage that Larty got the BBC and all the rest of it that we heard earlier on. So from the research that January it seems to be that it's perceived anyway that if a book is rejected, often monetary considerations is the main form that's given. Nothing necessarily about the value of the content. It's more about markets, which to me feels like a very kind of coupless approach to things. But yeah, I think part of the problem is that, like someone said earlier, the publishing industries don't necessarily have a diverse voice working within the publishing house. And therefore there may be a lack of experience in approaching less familiar markets and audiences. Yeah, that's a really interesting point. And David, I feel that that maybe relates to some of what you were saying about the photographer's gallery and the kind of clubby in-house atmosphere of the gallery, which on the one hand, I think sounds really appealing and kind of much warmer than a more formal institutional approach. But on the other hand, do you think there's a way in which that kind of atmosphere can feel quite exclusive and you're kind of like in the club or you could very well be someone who's outside the club and therefore not visible? Yes, I think inclusive clubs, exclusive clubs, they're all clubs as you sort of infer that there is always somebody producing and making decisions. And I think I'm glad you mentioned the clubbiness because that's the thing that started to really interest me about it. I must admit that most of this stuff was before I go involved in anything that you think of the photographer's gallery, which is around 1980, late 70s. And I found it quite an exclusive place. Admittedly, I wasn't a photographer. I mean, I was from the art school at the time and had a camera and wanted to be a photographer. But I didn't find that was, I mean, I might sound a bit like Derek here because Derek was talking about there are different kinds of photographers and photography is a place, well, with different kinds of people. And it wasn't, to me, a tremendously welcoming place because it seemed to belong to a certain kind of person who'd already, a lot of these ideas and these opinions had been there for a long time. And this is something I started to discover much later. But at the time, when I first encountered the gallery, it did feel quite novel, but very, very kind of, yeah, clobby and exclusive, yeah. And I was quite interested as well in how many of the papers that we've been discussing and thinking about are to do with the positioning of photography and also the text describing photography. And it's not the photography itself. So those images can always be reinterpreted a different way later on or by someone else. I wondered if you had any thoughts about that. For example, David Campany is quite hot at the moment on the idea of the paratexts that go with photography, like the little tags that go next to the photograph in the gallery and how those kind of shape the way that you receive the image that you're looking at. But they're not actually the image itself, which is kind of free of those boundaries. Do you think that's something relevant to what you've been looking at, David? Well, one of the things I wanted to put in this paper, but eventually I thought it was too complex, was that everything I was talking about was paratext. The sort of parallel today would be you get a sort of a notification on your phone about a show you want to see. And by the time you get to see the show, you've walked through corridors and corridors of paratexts. And so it's really quite almost unimaginable that you can possibly ever come to something without having encountered gallons and gallons of kind of paratexts. But those posters were very much paratexts. And Brett Rogers was quite helpful the other day. She sent me an email by a guy called Mark Edwards, who was a photographer who had exhibited in 1980, I think, of the photographer's gallery. And he'd written a piece for Zelda Cheetham about his early experiences and memories. And he was talking about the way these posters used to, the posters I referred to used to kind of come every month. And they were really exciting because it was not that much else, but they produced huge excitement. It was people knew what was on, they knew when the opening was going to be and they knew the social events around it. All of those kind of things were in that poster. And that's certainly paratext. And Jacqueline, I thought you made some really interesting points about funding as well. People using crowdfunding as an alternative to trying to get more kind of formal or institutional funding. Do you feel that the internet has opened up more possibilities for people to show their work and be seen? Does it allow people to sort of sidestep some of the paratexts maybe on also some of the institutions? Or are there still just as many myriad problems involved with that as well? Well, I was attempting to communicate was that someone of Maud's reputation and stature in terms of collections, awards and exhibitions should not be having to offend for funding in that way. If one was to look at the comparable opportunities for publications by her peers. But yeah, I mean, I think college students have a really unrealistic view as to when and how they get published. And certainly early career publishers, if they are eager to publish, then self-publishing is an option and kick starters and everything. But if someone's 20 years, 30 years in their career and have been acknowledged in their social engage work and the artistic practice and are working effortlessly to improve equity all around in all kinds of areas, including art history, writing, curating, then surely the publishing industry should also be acknowledging that gift and that contribution through publications. So my question was like, why on earth would we have had to, yeah, I mean, yeah, call on the community to ensure that her legacy remains. It's very troubling especially for up and coming photographers because we do look at our ancestors, our photography ancestors for inspiration. And I have a lot of my photographic ancestors, street photographers and they're not directly linked with my ethnicity or culture and I still acknowledge them and I value them. But I chose Maud Salter as an example because I wanted to acknowledge her as an ancestor and I quite liked the idea of acknowledging people that are no longer living but still kind of influence, continue influencing the whole field from when they're gone but surely that's a form of erasure. If those who have put a great deal of investment and are very imaginative and creative as Maud Salter was, there was a risk that her work would just disappear. And that's really troubling. Yeah, mm-hmm. Okay, yeah, that's an important point you're making there definitely. Okay, so we're gonna bring back Derek and John now and we're gonna have like a whole panel discussion. We haven't got too many questions going actually in the comments, but we do have a question for Derek from someone called Lizzie Coombs. She says, Derek, I have some copies of 10.8 but she would like to see more. So she's asking, where can she access and view copies of 10.8 magazine? She'd love to read more. Okay, well, I mean, 10.8 had an ISBN number so it's available in copyright libraries like the British Library and Cambridge and various other, I think there's five or six in the UK. So it's definitely available there. I think that Innova, the Stuart Hall Library has a set. I think Autograph for sure, Ditch may have a set but I don't know how accessible that is because it's not in a library. And if anybody's ever in East Weston in Birmingham, they can always pop round for a cup of tea and have a look in my front room. Well, that probably sounds like the nicest option I've ever done. So I've got a question actually, another question for you Derek. So some of what we've been discussing with David and Jacqueline, and also with you guys earlier on, hinges not on the photographers, but on the institutions who are showing photography and the makeup of those institutions. So something I wondered with 10.8 was it was set up by three white guys and then you were very proactive in showing work by black photographers and making sure those discussions were being had and also doing the same with women photographers as well. And you mentioned that Mark Sealy, obviously he went on to be one of the people really involved with Autograph ABP. I wonder, were there ever any tensions between who the original founders were and who the people who then got on boards were? Was there a feeling ever that you should just be handing over? And why was it then necessary for Autograph ABP to kind of go it alone? Was there kind of a loss of that feeling that you might be able to do it together? No, I mean, to go back to your first point, as I tried to indicate, we were working in a very multicultural scenario and although it was three white guys who set it up, we were working in an environment that had, you know, all kinds of interesting, radical black feminist people kind of importing. And as I also tried to indicate how our whole philosophy was to say, well, if you've got something interesting to say, why don't you come in and say it? And it was as simple as that because we had the experience. I mean, we were unlike perhaps quite a lot of groups who kind of set up in this way. We had the experience of publishing. We'd already published ourselves, self-published, all kinds of books and distributed them. Brian Homer was the managing editor of one of Birmingham's longest-running alternative newspapers for many years. So we had an incredible kind of grassroots understanding of what it takes to get a product out to shops, subscribers, et cetera, et cetera. And that's, I think, why people came to us because it was like, yeah, we could deliver that. You know, we had the mechanism in-house and we made it available to people. I mean, all kinds of different, as I said, 19 different individual editors over the period of time. And obviously they needed support. I mean, they just didn't come in with all the skills to be able to, you know, produce necessarily and certainly all the ins and outs of contracts of contacting people, et cetera, et cetera. So that was what we provided a kind of, you know, a resource that people could dip in and out of. And that's what we encourage right to the very end, you know? And so to tell you the point about Mark's theory, I mean, I think the point I was making there was really that Mark had come into that position at Autograph. It was in a very precarious financial situation at that time. It was working out of a tiny little office in the Bon Marché building in Brixton, you know? And again, there was a huge community of people who were invested in its success, but there wasn't actually very much money on the table to run the thing. And that critical decade issue and what it opened up was particularly with exhibitions in the Houston Fertifest and then the Royal Contradale, what it opened up was an awareness across a big swathe of the photographic establishment, which has been talked about by the other panelists and their resistance to letting in alternative different voices, which, you know, if you think it's bad now, go back to 1990 to find out what it was really like, or, you know, when it was a lot worse. What we offered him was that platform and that almost like a calling card to say, hey, you can't ignore us. You can't ignore what's going on here. And that, I think, was a huge, a huge benefit to him in establishing autograph. No doubt about that. And do you feel like with Jacqueline, we spoke very briefly about the value of photographers setting things up rather than, you know, institutions or curators. Do you feel that it makes a difference if it's the photographers who are making the magazines or running the galleries? That's a question for you, Derek. That's a question for me, right? It makes a huge difference. It makes a massive difference because I think we have been over the last 20, 20 odd years, you know, maybe longer. We have been in the grip of curators. You know, artists don't really exist unless the curator has decided that they exist, unless the curator discovers them, unless a curator can kind of, if it's going to enhance, I mean, I sound a bit cynical, but I do see this happening quite so much, that, you know, really, really great, interesting photographers in my mind are denied shows because curators decide, I don't know whether you're quite ready, you know, I'm not quite sure, would you like to go away? You know, all of that kind of thing, they're gatekeepers. And so I do see, you know, kind of, I mean, you know, if you want to get something done, yeah, basically do it yourself. That's what I say, yeah, which is what we did. Yeah, Jacqueline, I feel that that goes back to something that you mentioned, actually, that if there aren't, you know, black people or women or if certain groups aren't represented within the start of this speech, you can see the town. Yeah, oh good, brilliant. They may simply have blind spots. So I'm getting voiceovers, sorry. Okay, I'll start again. I wanted to pick up on Derek's point and related it back to something that you mentioned Jacqueline, which is that if there aren't, you know, black people or women or people from whatever groups, if they're not represented within an institution, then there may be blind spots about what people even think of, including or what might seem approachable. I wonder if you could say a bit more about that. Yeah, I mean, if you're marketing to a community that you're not familiar with and you have no lived experience of how to communicate or approach, then obviously that's a problem. And rather than just like do it and fail, which has huge consequences for the people that you're looking to publish, then one solution would be to have a diverse group of people a diverse group of people working within your company. And why would you not have a diverse group? I mean, I didn't like pick out particular minorities. I mean, women aren't a minority, yet they're a minority within the world of photography. So I think that's really strange. But I also wrote to, I also responded to Derek, what if the curators are practicing photographer? Are there skills involved in curating and could photography become too insular if we were exhibiting our own work? So yeah, thanks. Yeah, that sort of relates back to the question of audience perhaps, I think with John and Derek earlier, I was quite interested in the idea that TV is a mass media that can reach so many people, whereas specialist photography magazines, unfortunately, they're not gonna reach that same kind of audience. But John, you mentioned that the BBC, when it was commissioning the programs that you were speaking about, the people who were working their way overwhelmingly male, do you think that that directly feeds through to what they might think of commissioning and the kinds of debates that they were involved with? Yeah, I'm sure that culture and that makeup shaped in part what reached the screen and the fact that the production team of exploring photography was exclusively male, they would have never have asked the question about why there weren't any women photographers in the series. I think that the audience question is really interesting because we are talking about a completely different context. Of course, there is some overlap, but I don't have the figures to hand, but my guess is that say, the omnibus film with Susan Sontag was watched by two million people. That wouldn't have been exceptional in those days. And of course, it's impossible to know beyond the kind of most basic of hints from reviews and elsewhere what any of those people made of it. But the gap between that very broad, very extensive audience with all kinds of preconceptions and interests and concerns and resistances, and the fantastic audience of 5,000 for an issue of 10.8 is just so profound and so significant. And of course, I'm really curious about that and curious how those two things operate in the same cultural context. And what's your feeling about now, John, because there is still the BBC, but obviously it competes with so many other media has its importance declined as like a cultural influencer? I don't think it has quite the centrality that it had 40 years ago. Clearly many other institutions and many other organizations are creating moving image media of all kinds and enriching that environment. What the broadcasters still have though, in addition to access to a very significant audience, nowhere near the audience that guaranteed the audience that they had pre-Channel 4, pre-Satellite, pre-Internet and the rest, but they still have very significant production funding. And if you are trying to make an ambitious and expensive documentary or other project in a cultural context, then the broadcaster is going to be the most secure, if you can access it, the most secure way of funding that because other forms of funding from kickstarter through long tail streaming revenue and so forth are just never going to return the 50,000 plus that you're going to need to make a film of that kind. So I think it's the production funding more than the audiences in some way that give the broadcasters their centrality. We have a question from Claire Graphic actually kind of leading on from that. And she'd be interested to know how David feels the, sorry, how David feels the rise of TV as a medium might or might not have influenced the photographer's gallery program. Tricking one. Well, that would depend, it's 50 years of programming. I was very interested when I was writing, I was writing a little, I think called a diary, a curator's diary. And I was quite amazed to realise how early ways of seeing was on. I mean, 1972 and what? Really? That's incredible. And actually John's paper was quite interesting because I didn't realise that there was that Susan Sondheim programme or any of that. Now that's, I don't know what that says. I was quite interested in photography but maybe I didn't have, I'd probably been at the television around that time or something. But I didn't see much of that stuff. And I do wonder who did. Maybe people who, you know, had, you know, had televisions. I mean, it's certainly not me. It would be hard to comment on it but I thought looking back on it to answer Claire's or at least address Claire's point that, you know, when people were thinking about this photography gallery and it was, until 1975, it was the only one. Well, there was, other things started to happen towards the end of the 70s. It would be looking for perhaps support ideas, things looking to public, to a popular culture, particularly television's popular culture, to see what was being done about photography because the whole sort of argument of the photography gallery was that nobody's doing anything, nobody's writing about it, there's no photography crazy. But there was stuff going on. And the really interesting thing is Joan's, Joan's kind of summary of all the stuff that was going on. So I don't know, I didn't see much evidence when I was researching that the television had much to do with it, honestly, much influence in the program. But I think as time went on, it probably would have done. And okay, we have to wrap up very soon, but I do just have one final question I want to sneak in, which is for Derek again. It's quite interesting to see the kinds of questions that you were asking with 10-8 magazine and that we've been discussing about representation and who's within which institution. And I feel that those questions have kind of come around again now. Do you feel that? Do you feel that it's kind of after a period where those questions somehow went away that that is all coming back and being debated again a bit more? Oh, sorry, we can't hear you. Could you unmute? There we go, sorry. Yes, I do. I think kind of what's interesting about what's happened over the last few years in terms of things like Windrush, you know, at Grenfell Towers, the Black Lives Matter, all of these kind of, and the recognition that we look into all of our institutions and we see virtually no diversity at the highest level or even sometimes at the middle management level, that the issues that we were looking at, which is how do you get your, from the margins, how do you make your voice meaningful in terms of mainstream discourse? How do you insert all these ideas, not just the notions of the black cultural politics of the 80s and 90s, but you know, all of the debates, the feminists or photography moments as well, all of these things, which tonight was really assiduous in terms of documenting and encouraging the major practitioners into kind of, you know, all of those issues have really just come back with a vengeance because what you realized is that, although there were some successes, there's no question that there were obviously some successes that some people and some institutions did change, did take certain things on board. You realize that these are very fickle moments. The change of a director at the photography gallery can completely alter the whole way that the commissioning process takes place. You know, the fragility of funding, the lack of real economic robust models that can sustain a period beyond a few years. All of these, I think, are factors. Yes, so I think it has all come back very much. That's what I mean. What's interesting is I can't say that I read 10-8 on a regular basis, but obviously, when I'm preparing for something like this, I go back and I look at it. And I changed my mind about which were the most significant or interesting editions, but there's no doubt that there's loads of stuff in there that is still absolutely relevant in speaking to issues facing image makers. And of course, I mean, the field is much more diverse now in digital productions. You know, the fluidity that people can now move between different disciplines, you know, video, they can disseminate stuff digitally online and so on and so on. All of these are factors that haven't, we haven't really looked at today because obviously it's beyond the scope of what we were doing. But I do think that the issues have come back, yes, that they are still there facing there's diversity, you know, lack of access, lack of support, lack of continuity of funding. And as I said, you know, my bet you are too many gatekeepers, you know. Yeah, OK. Well, that seems like a nice place to leave it then. We've been looking at the 70s and 80s, but it's still directly relevant to the questions of today as well. So thank you very much for all of you, for all of your presentations and contributions. And that's it from us. And thank you for chairing so well. Thank you. Thank you very much for inviting me. Thanks. Thank you.