What is feminist documentary photography practiceand how does it form part of a multi-disciplinaryapproach to research?

INTRODUCTION

This research paper gives a brief overview of a practice-

based PhD research project being conducted within the

Ulster University Research Institute for Art and Design.

I report on a historical case study I have been

conducting on the London-based group, Format, the

world’s first women-only photography agency which

operated between 1983 and 2003. In the summer of 2010

the National Portrait Gallery in London mounted a major

exhibition on the work of Format during its twenty years

of operation, primarily focusing on its work in the area

of portraiture but encouraging a more general assesssment

of this experiment in feminist picture making. My

research departed from this reappriasal of Format and

involved exploring the archive sources relating to the

organization in order to both historically document the

work of the agency and to trace its legacy for

contemporary feminist photographic practice, particularly

in Ireland.

My PhD seeks to trace this legacy primarily through a

discussion of my own creative practice as a feminist

artist and photographer. In the historical research I

accessed the available archives1 (FOOTNOTE NEEDED)

holding material related to Format to trace the working

practices of the agency and to explore its work around

the representation of women in a body of pioneering

work which addressed a range of women’s and social

justice issues.

Like the work produced by the women photographers of

Format, my work ( produced within Ireland from 2010-2016)

has a politically engaged character. Similarly it

takes a collaborative form and adopts an oppositional

stance with regards the dominant forms of visual

representation. It also seeks to situate itself within

the grassroot feminist community in Ireland on both sides

sof the border. The major political focus of the

contemporary feminist movement in Ireland is the issue

of abortion access and activists are mobilising to

challenge the dominant misogyny enshrined in the legal

and political systems in each jurisdiction in Ireland

in relation to the limited rights of woman to control

their own bodies via accessing abortion provision. My

personal involvement with the abortion rights movement in

Ireland has provided the social basis out of which my own

photographic practice has developed since 2010 as well as

the framework from within which the work can generate

context and meaning, and traction for social change. My

work emerges out of my activities as a core member of

Alliance for Choice in Belfast, the Abortion Rights

Campaign in Ireland, the Belfast Feminist Network, and

the home|work collective. It also profited from my

opportunities to collaborate with individual activists

and groups outside Ireland such as the Abortion Support

Network in London, Women on Web/Women on Waves in

Amsterdam and RSFU in Sweden. In my work I also

collaborated with Platform Arts Belfast, the OKK Gallery

in Berlin and the Array Arts Studio collective in

Belfast.

In this paper I provide some examples of this

contemporary feminist photographic work in Ireland and

my research seeks to evaluate this very much in

continuity with the earlier modes of feminist

photographic practice pioneered by Format. Indeed the

outcome of my research on Format has been a renewed

interest on my part with on the classic feminist

concerns with consciousness raising, and the

development of supportive networks and knowledge sharing

to achieve this.

THE CONTEXT OF FEMINIST PHOTOGRAPHY

The second wave of feminism in the UK and Ireland, which

began in the late 1960s, was influenced by the American

Civil Rights movement and later by radical opposition to

US involvement in the Vietnam war. It grew to strength

in the early 1970s and saw women campaigning for equal

pay, affordable childcare, safe streets and abortion

rights. More women, including more working class women,

were attending third level education and this access to

higher education, including arts courses, began to afford

women the opportunity to speak about their experience of

gender discrimination through visual art, literature,

politics and sociology.

In Britain, feminist activity [in art] began in the early 1970’s… And from

its inception has been concerned with radical feminist issues, such as

building an audience of women, rather than issues of equity with men..

[Parker & Pollock: 1983}

Often feminist artists were moving towards a new kind of

cultural expression which questioned the dominant

representation of woman to be found in the media and the

time and turning the 'gendered spectacle' on its head,

seeking to unearth the authentic voice of women’s

experience in all its diversity. Although the concept of

a different and specifically female voice is often

contested as essentialist within certain critical circles2 REFERENCE NEEDED HERE in character and ideologically

constructed, this notion remains central to the

development of feminist photography practice that seeks

to address the experience of woman.

Although women have been a significant presence from the outset in

photographic practice in Britain, before the intervention of feminism in

the 1970s their work was regarded in stereotypical or patriarchal

terms. In this way, the female portrait photographer was often thought

of as being inferior to or more frivolous than her male counterparts.

[Jobling, 1997]

Women photographers in the late seventies used the

critical and organizational tools of feminist activism to

carve out their own space for their photographic work,

pushing against the inherent sexism of the industry.

Figure 1. Advertisement .from the British Journal of Photography, 1st May1970

One can get a vivid impression of this rampant sexism

from the advertisement above (fig.1.) which appeared in

the British Journal of Photography in 1970, one of the

leading specialist publications in the field of

photography. I was able to further confirm the degree of

the marginalization of woman within the photography

profession in the 1970s and 1980s by conducting a

somewhat rough and ready content analysis the BJP and of

the other leading specialist publication in the field

Creative Camera to see how woman photographers fared within

these in terms of coverage of their work. Every issue of

Creative Camera and The British Journal of Photography from 1970 to

2000 was examined to establish the number of women’s

photographic portfolios published and in-depth interviews

with woman photographers carried in these publications in

comparison to the coverage of male photographers. For

Creative Camera, the total coverage of woman photographers

was 18.35% of the total output of featured

photographers (only 5 women treated from 1970 to 1979 and

only 2 women of colour, ever). The British Journal of Photography

fared much worse and only had 4% coverage of women

photographer in the decade of the 1970s compared to

coverage of males. These results were not unexpected but

revealed not only the dearth of coverage of women

photographers, and hint at the extreme sexism of the

photographic world, which, as we have seen, has been

apparent in the widespead use of steotypical images of

woman as sexual objects in the photographic publications.

Certainly in the 1970s the need for women to carve out

their own space and assert their own voices seemed

apparent.

Photographic critic Val Williams has since the early

1980s written extensively on the work of women within

photography, and has uncovered a huge range of disparate

practice inflected by feminist concerns, from conceptual

art to studio portrait photographers, from investigative

and documentary work by photojournalists to that produced

by activists as part of of campaigns. She has sought to

locate this work within its cultural and historical

context - which is roughly that of Thatcher's Britain a

period in whch it was difficult to challenge patriarchy.

Speaking specifically of feminist achievements in UK

photography she has identified some of the key players,

Spectrum Women’s Photography Festival, Format women-only

photography agency, the photographic initiatives of the Women Artists

Slide Library, the Pavilion Centre in Leeds, the National Museum of

Photography’s Women Photographers 1900-1950 exhibition, the

Greater London Arts-funded Women Focusing magazine, as well as a

host of community initiatives all around the country.

[Williams:1990]

However as I conducted my secondary research reviewing

the availabe literature it became clear that to date

comparatively little has been written on Format, unlike,

for instance, the Hackney Flashers, a collective of

broadly socialist-feminist women who produced notable

agitprop exhibitions with photographic content in London

in the 1970s and early 1980s. In her book 'Women

Photographers in Britain' Val Williams recounts that

with regard the Flashers, "the group's nine women

members began to study the use of photography within the

capitalist system and to present alternatives. They

played a decisive part in establishing a context within

which women workers from different cultural fields could

work together in pursuit of a collective political aim".

(SOURCE?) But what of Format?

So, I set out to remedy the relative neglect of Format

in the historical account of the evolution of feminist

photographic practice in Britain. The historical

research was conducted primarily through consulting the

corpus of interviews of members of Format CONDUCTED BY

WHO ? which have been deposited in the Oral History

Archives of British Photography held in the British

Library, and supplementing this source with a number of

one to one interviews conducted by myself with former

Format members Maggie Murray, Jenny Matthews and Joanne

O’Brien. I also consulted the MAKE collection held in the

library of Goldsmiths College in London, which holds the

work of the Women Artists Slide Library.

FORMAT AS A CASE STUDY

Format, was founded in London in 1983 as a collective

response to a backdrop of sexism which saw woman both

largely excluded from professional photography and

subject to a range of demeaning forms of photographic

representation. The agency is widely believed to be the

first women only photography agency in the world,

emerging in a UK photographic community still largely

controlled and inhabited by men.

Maggie Murray and Val Wilmer initiated Format; they

combined their own experiences of working as women

photographers and writers, with their political

commitment to breaking down the boundaries preventing

women fully participating in the world of photography.

The agency would be dedicated to representing the

interests of woman photographers. From the outset it

aimed,

To offer women professional photographers a chance to develop their

career

And as Murray and Wilmer recall,

we wanted to cover the people who weren’t represented well in the

media at all and so that was women, but also black people, people

with disabilities, gays and lesbians all sorts of excluded groups…and to

work in the mainstream media rather than just with small groups,

because we wanted to be part of the political change happening

[Murray: 2003]

Figure2. Format Agency Brochure published 1983 (from the MAKE women’s art archives)

In an article penned for the Feminist Review in 1984 and

timed to be published alongside their press release

announcing the formation of Format, Murray outlined the

feminist standpoint of the agency in a bold statement

explaining their practice and motivations.

Politicized women have been amongst the first to identify and indicate

the double edged nature of photography. It is useful for documenting,

making visible and using as a creative tool. At the same time it can be

exploitative. The way it has been accepted in the past as ‘objective’ and

‘value-free’ has now been undermined. [Format 1984]

As the above quote indicates the the two Format authors

identified the need for reflexivity within photographic

practice a remarkable ethical stance for a photography

agency at that time, as it would be even today. Indeed

Format led the way in championing a photographic practice

that reflected on the subject position of the

photographer vis a visa their subject and the power

relationship involved in this, and which sought to

contextualise both the photograph and the cultural

processes which conditioned our modes of photographic

representation.

Val Williams identifies the feminist ethos at play in the

work of Format contrasting the political sensibilities

of women photographers to the othering gaze of canonical

male photographers:

Many feminist photographers, although undoubtedly impressed by the

caliber of this powerful documentary work, also saw its political

limitations and observed the consistent lack of interaction between the

photographer and the people being photographed. [Williams,

1986]

Format displayed clarity of professional purpose and

committment to criticality unmistakably positioning

their organisation at the forefront of radical thinking

about photographic representation and gender.

When asked more ecently about the impact of Format,

Maggie Murray has noted ;

Photography is only a small part of the world and we were only a small

part of photography [but] we were part of a larger movement, so that

helped bring the position of women and other under-represented

groups to the fore… THE FACT that we were there was of importance,

we were a women’s-only group that worked in a certain way. (Speaker’s

emphasis) [Murray: 2003]

In this short piece I do not have space to give a fuller

picture of the work of Format but it may be useful to

summarise what my research suggests were the core aims

of Format before going on to describe my own

photographic practice. These core aims can be summarised

as a concern with:

– The effective professional representation of women as

working photographers

– The portrayal of women as active subjects, not passive

objects of a male gaze

– Feminist consciousness-raising via publications,

workshops and exhibitions

– Covering a range of subjects consistent with the

feminist principles of the group

– Controlling the distribution, copyright and context for

their work, especially with respect to mainstream media

– Working closely with other feminist and radical

organisations such as the magazine Spare Rib, Trade Union

Groups, Women’s Groups and a range of alternative media

– Utilising new imaging technologies, where available

and affordable, to produce, publish and exhibit work

– Running Format as an organization in accord with

feminist principles

Format existed as a working agency for almost 20 years,

eventually shutting in 2003. Many of the women who had

been part of the collective found their own way as

independent professionals within photography, building

upon the networks and models of collaborative working

they had forged during their time with Format. Their

radical methods created a valuable legacy for later

generations of women photojournalist and documentary

photographers and it is this legacy that I now wish to

explore as this manifests itself in my own work as a

photographer and activist.

CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST PHOTOGRAPHIC PRACTICE IN IRELAND

The methods employed in my own photographic practice

acknowledge a debt to the feminist inspiration and

working methods of Format. Though clearly this legacy

needs to be rethought to meet the challenges of the

current period.3 FOOTNOTE NEEDED ON DIFFERENCES BETWEEN

THE TWO ERAS INCLUDING FACT THAT FORMAT RE ABORTION

OPERATED IN THE WAKE OF THE 1967 STEELE ACT AND THIS WAS

NEVER IMPLIMENTED IN NI, THOUGH PART OF UK. THIS

FOOTNOTE CAN DETAIL THE LEGISLATIVE FRAMEWORK FOR ACCESS

TO ABORTION IN NI AND REPUBLIC - NOT CURRENTLY COVERED IN

YOUR PAPER AND IMPORTANT TO SET THE SCENE RE FEMINIST

ACTIVISM

Like the Format photographers, my practice includes not

only the making of photographic work but a commitment to

develop a relationship with contemporary feminist

activism. As we have seen Format pioneered a

collaborative practice and its members worked with a

broad range of woman's groups. This approach is

intrinsic to my work, both in terms of my commitment to

share the outcomes of my research with those I have been

collaborating with, and in developing the exhibition of

the work produced in a number of sites chosen for their

political appropriateness, given my involvement in the

wider abortion rights movement. Sociologist, Sharlene

Hesse-Biber, sets out a framework for contemporary

feminist research with which I can certainly identify.

Feminist researchers use gender as a lens through which to focus on social

issues. Research is considered “feminist” when it is grounded in the set of

theoretical traditions that privilege women’s issues, voices, and lived

experiences.[Hesse-Biber: 2014]

The first project which I conducted as part of my

doctoral research dealing with the issue of abortion

rights project is titled “When they put their hands out

like scales” . It include production of a book of images

and text, an exhibition of photographs and a short film.

The project seeks to reflect the experience of a young

anonyomous Irish woman seeking an abortion. Her story

is revealed from a first person point of view.

Figure 3. "When they put their hands out like scales" (2013) Journeys 13, INDICATE IF A STILL PHOTOGRAPH OR A FRAME GRAB FROM A FILM Emma Campbell

In the project considerably efforts are made to address

the nature of how the subject is represented. She is so

in a manner in which she is neither victimised, nor

dehumanised. Instead the audience is invited, by the

lens position employed in the photography to occupy the

experiental posistion of the young woman portrayed in the

short film at the heart of the project. This strategy

seeks to render as normal the frightening journey that

thousands of woman in Ireland have had to make, to

abortion clinics in England to terminate their

pregnancies (in this case the journey by bus and ferry

and down England motorways to London).

Figure 4. Journeys 16 (2013) double page spread from the book produced as an element of "When they put their hands out like scales" page 25-26, Emma Campbell

The photographs seek to subvert the ‘objective’ gaze

frequently employed in documentary narratives dealing

with such abortion journeys. The edited images detail a

narrative which re-enacts the journeys made by pregnant

women to across the Irish sea and through England andto

the abortion clinics of London The work , seeks to

provideing a recognition of 'everywoman's'’s' journey, a

diary of exile and rejection in which woman seeking

termination of their pregnancids faceing potential

prosecution by the state due to the legaal status of

abortion in both jurisdictins in Ireland. As critic

Ariela Azoulay argues in her 2008 book The Civil Contract of

Photography,

Figure 5. Journeys 11 (2013) double page spread from "When they put their hands out like scales" page 5-6 Emma Campbell

When and where the subject of the photograph is a person who has

suffered some form of injury, a viewing of the photograph that

reconstructs the photographic situation and allows a reading of the

injury inflicted upon others, it becomes a civic skill, not an exercise in

aesthetic appreciation… The citizen has a duty to employ that skill the

day she encounters photographs of those injuries. [Azoulay: 2008]

Azoulay’s comment recognises the role of documentary

photography within feminist and other forms of political

activism and seeks to identify the act of viewing images

which portray those who have suffered injury and

injustice as one which takes place within a civic and

political context rather one of artistic reception or

voyeuristic entertainment. I would hope that my images

also address a wrong and assert a right while generating

for the viewer an empathy with the victim of this wrong

- including from those who may themselves have already

suffered the indignity of finding themselves outside of

the law and the protection of the state as they seek to

.control their own bodies. Such a communicational

exchange goes beyond the limits of voyeuristic

spectatorship, to become an engagement of compassion and

mobilization of political consciousness and civic duty.

My work has sought to reflecting the concerns of the

wider abortion rights movement in Ireland, and to

highlight the everyday-ness of abortion as an individual

response to unwanted pregnancy questioning any

representation which might further stigmatise the

abortion seeker. The images are accompanied by text drawn

from recent political debates WHERE? WHAT DEBATE? on

abortion. FOOTNOTE OF EXPLANATION NEEDED It seeks to

narrativise the plight of every woman enduring a crisis

pregnancy in Ireland and to do so in relationship to the

extreme misogyny of the two governments , established

churches and legal statutes in place north and south of

the border.

It would seem to me that embedded at the core of this

project and the subsequent ones conducted as part of my

PhD research, were the ethico-political ideas and

feminist working methods originally elaborated by Format.

Let me identify the continuities:

– The representation of woman (in this case myself)

as cultural producers who can challenge mainstream

discourse and cultural representations.

– The representation of women (in my case women

seeking abortions) as subjects, not as objects of a

photographic gaze; this entailed in my work employing a

first person perspective and acknowledging the role of

women as activists including placing myself in the work.

– A commitment to covering subject matter consonant

with Feminist principles; in my case this involved

focusing on the issue of abortion access in Ireland, an

issue which has been central to the feminist movement

since the late 1960s

– A commitment to Feminist consciousness-raising; in

my case I make work both for gallery exhibition and in an

activist context where it is available to be used for

campaigning.

– Seeking to control the distribution, copyright and

context for my work, especially with respect to

mainstream media which in the era of social media and the

world wide web presents radically new challenges (see

below).

– Working closely with other organisations whose ethos

mirrored those of my project, as my work is located

within a community of activists involved in abortion

rights issues this was the primary network of

collaboration.

– The utilisation of new technology, where available

and affordable to produce, publish and show work; using

websites, blogs and social media to share the work

without viewing restrictions.

Feminists in Ireland have sought to critique the dominant

media and political discourse around abortion with the

use of social media platforms. The short film element of

my project 'When they put their hands out like scales'

is hosted on the video sharing site Vimeo

(https://vimeo.com/42629064) where it has reached a

substantial audience both in Ireland and worldwide, well

beyond the confines of the art world. This reach was

helped by a review by Irish Times film reviewer Donald

Clarke (Irish Times Online, , Thursday 14th February

2013).

My work has more recently moved to foregroung my own

subject position and in the project I am currently

working on I use my own self-portrait as an abortion

activist, on a social media platform to challenge the

dominant visual representations to be found in the

abortion debate in Ireland - particulary the the foetus-

saturated imagery employed by the powerful anti-abortion

lobby which seeks to command media attention both north

and south of the border. YES A FEW MORE LINE HERE ON

PASSPORT PROJECT WOULD HELP!

Figure 6. (2014) Passport Butterflies from "A suitable hobby" Emma Campbell

CAPTION NEEDS TO GO UNDER THIS IMAGE

CONCLUSION

Format as an agency, successfully channelled the

marginalised place of woman in photography in the early

1980s. The Format activists challenged the dominant

representation of women to be found in the media at that

time, and sought to advance a portrayal of women as

active subjects while seeking to advance the position of

women as photographic professionals attentive to

feminist arguments even in their commercial commissioning

and distribution processes. Though the Format project

finished over a decade ago and while no new specialist

woman's agency pursuing a feminist agenda has appeared

to take its place, I would argue that the legacy of

Format lives on in a range of contemporary politically

engaged photographic work and in the much greater public

awareness around the issues of the media representation

of women. My own research and photographic practice

has fully acknowledged its debt to the Format

photographers and, as I have indicated, has embraced

their collaborative methods and critical sensibilities.

My Phd research has afforded me the opportunity as a

practitioner to 'enter the archives' and to become

intimately familiar with a now classic feminist activist

project in documentary photography. Indeed, through this

act of historical retrieval I have come to reflect on my

own practice as a photographer and have been re-energised

to develop this further as a communicative tool for

promoting social change in the lives of women.

The images we see, as a culture, help define and expand our dreams,

our perceptions of what is possible. Pictures of who we are help us

visualize who we can be. [Corinne:1985]