Saturday 23 May 2009, 10.00–18.00

Urban Encounters: Routes and Transitions explores the dialogue and practice of visual urbanism to bring together international researchers, academics, photographers and artists concerned with the transitional nature of contemporary urban space. This third annual conference addresses how photographic practices and archives intersect with an understanding of local and global routes as ‘places’, considering the temporality of place and the cross-cultural juxtaposition of locales

Conference Panels
Keynote: Markéta Luskačová

1. Mapping landscapes – Cartographies of looking

Discussant: Paul Goodwin, Tate Britain

Panellists

Paul Halliday, Goldsmiths, University of London – ‘Geographies of Nowhere’

Susan Trangmar, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design – ‘A Play in Time’

Caroline Knowles, Goldsmiths, University of London – ‘Landscapes of Migration’

2. Human landscapes – Place & identity

Discussant: TBA

Panellists

Susan Schwartzenberg, the exploratorium, San Francisco – ‘Space, Place and Existence’

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, the New School University, New York and Goldsmiths, University of London – ‘Guided Tours’

Davide Deriu - University of Westminster – ‘Picturing a City’s Soul: Photographs and Memories in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul’

3. Changing landscapes – Archives & activism

Discussant: Alison Rooke, Goldsmiths, University of London

Panellists:

Janet Delaney, University of California, Berkeley – ‘Form Follows Finance: The South of Market Project’

Tiffany Fairey, PhotoVoice –  ‘New Londoners: Separated young refugees frame their views on London’

Les Back, Goldsmiths, University of London

4. Guided audience discussion

Tate Britain  Auditorium
£25 (£15 concessions), booking recommended
Price includes drinks afterwards

    

Participant biographies

Keynote: Markéta Luskačová was born in Prague, and graduated Charles University, Prague with a degree in Sociology of Culture. She later studied photography at Prague’s FAMU. Her series Pilgrims and Šumiac, Slovakia captured the vanishing world of the rural pilgrim and the mountain people of Slovakia. For thirty years she has photographed street markets in London's Spitalfields, completing a great many other projects in Great Britain, focusing on the world of threatened minorities and children. As part of this work, she contributed to project "Citizen 2000’ concerning children in Britain from various social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, a project that resulted in the exhibition "First year at school’ for London’s Museum of Childhood. Since 1990, she has also photographed children in Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland. Her work permits the viewer to share in the joys and griefs of being human.

Markéta Luskačová's website >

Panelists & discussants

Les Back is professor and Deputy Head of the Sociology department at Goldsmiths, University of London. His major research interests focus on the culture of racism with particular reference to social identity and popular culture. Publications include New Ethnicities, Multiple Racisms: Race and Nation in the Lives of Young People (UCL Press 1995) and The Art of Listening (Berg Publishers 2007).

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is a photographer, curator and environmental psychologist based in New York. Her work explores the experience of everyday life in public and home spaces through photographic and narrative work. She has worked on projects in London, Buenos Aires, San Francisco and New York, and has exhibited at institutions including the Center for Architecture New York, MIT and UC Berkeley. Portions of her work can be found at www.buscada.com. Gabrielle received her PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and teaches at the New School in New York. She is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths College, and is co-founder of the Urban Encounters conference.

Janet Delaney received her MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1981. Her first major project, Form Follows Finance: A Survey of the South of Market 1979-1982, addressed issues of home in light of rampant gentrification. She has received three NEA grants, and various other awards. She has taught photography throughout the Bay Area since 1982 and since 2000 has been a full time lecturer in photography in the Visual Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Davide Deriu is a post-doctoral research fellow in architecture at the University of Westminster. His main research interests lie in visual culture and the representation of modern cities. After graduating in architecture in Turin, Italy, he specialised in architectural history and theory at University College London where he taught for several years. He has held fellowships from the Canadian Center for Architecture and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and has lectured at Middle East Technical University as well as various architectural schools in the UK. His current projects include a book on aerial photography and an edited journal issue based on the colloquium 'Eyes over London’, which he co-organised at Westminster in 2008.

Tiffany Fairey is co-founder of PhotoVoice (www.photovoice.org), an award winning participatory photography charity that empowers marginalised groups to use photography as a tool for positive social change. She has been involved in over 40 participatory photography projects around the world and has pioneered the development of PhotoVoice’s innovative methods. She is currently undertaking a PhD in Visual Sociology at Goldsmiths University.

Paul Goodwin is a theorist, curator and urban researcher. He is Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths College and Cross Cultural Curator at Tate Britain. His current curatorial and research work engages questions of migration, globalisation and the production of alternative urban architectures. In 2007 he curated Peckham Rising at the Sassoon Gallery in South London, an exhibition of urban photography and sound that explored media representations and spatial practices in an inner city neighbourhood. With the artist Monica de Miranda, he has just completed a collaborative project (exhibition, film programme and a book) called ‘Underconstruction’, that deployed contemporary art strategies (photography, installation, socially engaged collaborations) and urban theory to map the complex relationship between the shanty towns and the city centre in Lisbon, Portugal. http://www.underconstruction.cc/. At Tate, Paul creates platforms for cultural engagement by programming talks, symposia, workshops and live art events including The Status of Difference (ideas/debate series, 2008-2010), Conversation Pieces (ongoing artist talks series), Global Modernities (Tate Triennial conference, March 2009) and Polish Connections (Late at Tate, May 2009).

Paul Halliday is a photographer, filmmaker and sociologist based at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He studied social anthropology and art history at Goldsmiths College and Oxford University. He originally trained in photojournalism and fine art film at the London College of Communication, and Central Saint Martins Art College. His professional experience includes having directed a Channel Four TV documentary, freelance photographic projects for The Guardian and Independent Magazine, along with various media and arts consultancies. He is also a former media advisor for the British Refugee Council. He completed a twenty-year photographic project in 2006, about London’s street cultures, on which he gave a talk at Tate Modern, and is currently completing a photographic project about global cities. Further details about his London work are on his website http://www.paulhalliday.org/. Paul is the course leader of the MA in Photography and Urban Cultures, a Director of Photofusion, and co-founder of the Urban Encounters conference.

Caroline Knowles is professor of Sociology and director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her recent research is concerned with the circulation of people and objects and developed in collaboration with photographers/artists. She is currently working with Michael Tan on a project called 'Shoes and Social Fabrics’ which traces the journeys of a pair of flip-flop sandals from China to Ethiopia. Her book on British and Southeast Asian migrants living in Hong Kong, in collaboration with Douglas Harper, will be published by Chicago University Press this year. She has published extensively on race, ethnicity, whiteness, belonging and urban landscape.

Alison Rooke is a visual sociologist based in the Sociology department at Goldsmiths College. Alison’s teaching and research interests span issues such as  visual methodologies, citizenship,  visibility, embodiment and belonging in urban settings. The possibilities on multi-modal methodologies and art-based practice is central to Alison’s research  She has conducted  on a variety of participative visual  research projects including Sci:dentity: a project which worked with young transgendered people exploring the science of sex and gender through creative practices, and Signs of the City, a European arts project which employs photography and web2  technology to investigate young peoples right to the city. Alison has also has conducted evaluative research concerned with socio-cultural impact of creativity (with TrinityLaban)  and the social dimensions of arts based interventions (with the Serpentine Gallery).

Susan Schwartzenberg is a photographer/visual artist. Her work is realized in multiple forms, investigating themes including; biography, memory, urban life and the psychology of place. She exhibits internationally, and has public works in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix and Seattle. Published works include: Cento: A Market St. Journal; Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism; and Becoming Citizens: Family Life and the Politics of Disability. She is currently developing a project with the School of Medicine, Stanford University and holds a senior staff position at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

Susan Trangmar's projection and light based installations, photographs and moving image works have been widely exhibited internationally since the 1980's. Her practice explores differing cultural productions and representations of space including a concern with ‘site’ as the enactment of social relations. The art works arise from specific landscape, architectural and social contexts and they amplify through their structure and duration, subjective experiences of recognition and recollection. The materiality of light is a constant concern. Recent works include: A Question of Distance, a multimedia work exploring identity and belonging through landscape in Israel/Palestine, touring to Israel, Palestine, Greece and UK 2003-6; Road Map, Waygood Gallery Newcastle 2004; Conditions of Visibility, a projection installation in  Between Land and Sea, Box 38 Gallery Ostend and Peninsular Arts Plymouth 2007-8; A Play in Time, a film installation exploring practices of space within a public park, Photoworks UK and Brighton Museum and Art Gallery 2008. Susan Trangmar is currently Reader in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, UAL London.

Abstracts

 

 

Keynote Address: Markéta Luskačová

Luskačová's photographic work in Spitalfields, London has spanned more than thirty years. In this talk, she will focus on her work on the rapidly changing Brick Lane, Sclater Street and Cheshire Street Sunday markets. This work chronicles the remarkable vivacity, spirit and fortitude of the traders and their customers who come to these markets with the regularity of pilgrims to take part in the great act of recycling goods. Recording faces of East End people and their struggle for everyday survival in the city, Luskačová's photographs speak of their stories, as well as her own.

 

 

Panel 1, chaired by Paul Goodwin

 

Paul Halliday

Geographies of Nowhere

My paper will explore the relationship between the concept of ‘somewhere-ness’ and its apparent binary opposite of ‘nowhere-ness’.  The paper begins with a critical examination of some of the core precepts held as disciplinary truths within geography, anthropology, sociology and other social science disciplines concerned with the study of place, space and related epistemologies.  Alice in Wonderland provides a suitable theoretical starting point to this talk as the character of Alice wanders through a geographic terrain characterized by mutability and instability, encountering mythic characters that occupy a psychological hinterland that defies logic and refuses to conform to a traditional cartography of fairytale-land. This enduring children’s book, rich in metaphors and symbolism, provides an intellectual touchstone for photographic artists concerned with space and surrealism.  The notion of nowhere-ness will be explored through an on-going photographic project based on global cities, concerned less with the geographic particular, and more with temporal, spatial and semiotic slippage.

 

Susan Trangmar

A Play in Time

I will be discussing and presenting an extract from A Play in Time, a double screen video installation recently made in St Anne’s Well Gardens in Hove and commissioned by Photoworks UK and Brighton and Hove City Council. The main issues I will be addressing concern the park as a public space of recreation; the historical resonance of site; the significance of the nondescript; visibility, the wandering gaze and observation; return over time as a methodological principle; the trajectory of vision through double screen editing and the video itself as ‘meeting place’ of incidentals. A Play in Time makes an implicit plea for the right to engage in the pleasure of the gaze in public and resists the constrictions of the right to visually record in urban space, constrictions which come with the increasing privatisation of public space and accompanying technologies of surveillance.

 

 

Caroline Knowles

Urban Landscapes of Migration

Drawing on recent research in Hong Kong in collaboration with photographer Douglas Harper, this paper examines the journeys that converge on this urban landscape from China, from the Philippines, from the UK and through the circuits drawn by key global corporations. Through these multiple mobilities and forces in city composition, critical questions are posed about the production of urban landscape and what it means to be a migrant.

 

Panel 2, chaired by Peter Coles 

Davide Deriu

Picturing a City's Soul: Photographs and Memories in Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul

In his non-fiction book Istanbul: Memories of a City (2003), the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk excavates his own past to explore the complex blend of Eastern and Western cultures that constitute his native city. Personal recollections and critical reflections on the city's history, myths, and images are woven together into a thick narrative tapestry interspersed with black-and-white photographs – many of which were taken by the renowned photographer Ara Güler. With echoes of his labyrinthine novel The Black Book (1990), Pamuk depicts an urban landscape in which people and places are equally pervaded by a distinct sense of melancholy (hüzün), which is repeatedly evoked with reference to the city's atmospheric conditions. The paper explores the role of photographs in conveying the texture of this elemental city, whose soul is, for Pamuk, in black and white. It suggests that urban photographs function like 'pockets of memory' wherein the disappearing aura of Istanbul is wilfully preserved. In conclusion, a comparison with the work of photographer and filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan will raise wider questions as to how contemporary urban photography reflects the changing identity of this metropolis.

 

Susan Schwartzenberg

Space, Place and Existence

Human life is situated in time and space with much of a person’s life expressed within their surrounding environment. This extended or embodied landscape is part physical, part cognitive and part archival. This presentation will discuss the ways in which mind, memory and history are infused/ networked within the physical objects and environments of the everyday landscape. Finding tactics to uncover this web of relationships also suggests forms of representation where the resulting narrative creates its own set of spatial relationships. The talk will use as case study Schwarztenberg's documentary project and book recently published by University of Washington Press, Becoming Citizens, Family Life and the Politics of Disability.

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

Guided Tours: The Layered Dynamics of Self, Place and Image in Two American Neighbourhoods

This work complicates our understanding of the creation, knowledge and experience of everyday experience in two heterogeneous neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, New York and Oakland, California. Challenging conceptions of the role of the expressive, the individual, and the visual in research, the work explores how a combination of embodied walking and expressive representational photographic strategies—my “guided tours” method—can show us new ways of knowing about the physical and phenomenal everyday world. The evocative and embodied power of being physically in place—through walks or drives—is juxtaposed with a process of photographic production and reflection, utilizing photography’s evocative relationship to the real as a prompt for storytelling. From this unique method, this work develops a typology of “layered dynamics” to understand how everydayness is continually created through processes of knowing, negotiating and experiencing, as places and lives are woven together.

 

 

Panel 3, chaired by Alison Rooke

 

Les Back

London’s Finished?:  Developing an Inventory of Multicultural Life

This paper seeks to explore issues of racism and belonging in everyday life through competing claims about the rhythms of life in contemporary London.  While multiculturalism is routinely pronounced dead, encounters in and through difference is a banal fact of everyday life.  How can this be?  What modes of attention may artists, photographers, and even sociologists, train to better understand the paradoxical combinations of encounter and division within the city?  Taking a London market as the social stage to explore these questions, the presentation will focus on the tale of two fishmongers.  A biography of objects, commerce and people is used to suggest that in order to really understand the challenges of the present it is necessary to first develop an inventory of multicultural life that is equally attentive to the place of racism within it. 

 

Janet Delaney
Form Follows Finance: The South of Market Project
Janet Delaney will look at the way the camera creates history in a split second.  She will highlight her documentary project, Form Follows Finance, A Survey of the South of Market District, San Francisco. This project addresses the impact of gentrification in the early 1980's as a new convention centre promised to transform a working class neighbourhood of San Francisco.  Delaney will also discuss the work of her UC Berkeley students who have documented a distressed downtown Berkeley as a way to understand how cities work and how they transform over time.

Tiffany Fairey
New Londoners: Separated young refugees frame their views on London

New Londoners: Reflections on Home is a book of photo essays on London by young refugees who have been making the city their home.  The book is the culmination of a PhotoVoice project that aims to support young refugees to settle and integrate into the UK. Through the project, 15 New Londoners were mentored by 15 London photographers to create personalised photo stories about their views and experiences of the city.  This talk will present some of the work, discuss the project’s conceptual purpose and the participatory process it entailed.  It will reflect on ethical tensions underlying participatory photography work and touch on some of the debates and learning that came out of the project.