On being curated for the first time

When I graduated from Brighton University in 2007 I had no expectations of having a career focused on exhibiting. At Brighton there was little emphasis on this method of disseminating photography, probably because the tutors didn’t want to raise too many hopes, and I graduated having only contributed to a couple of internal student shows.

For many years the tradition for Brighton photography students was to take their degree show onto London, but our Year took the collective decision not to do this, especially after reports reached us that previous years had felt drowned amongst all the other graduate exhibitions happening in the same building.

But I was still keen to show somewhere and so I got together with six friends – also Brighton graduates – and we put on our own small group exhibition at an independent gallery in London. We funded, curated and hung it ourselves, and it was open to the public for a couple of weeks. Although we learnt a lot in the process – mainly practical things like how to find a venue, and how to advertise – we all felt a bit deflated afterwards. I think we were expecting it to lead directly to new opportunities. But of course it’s not that easy and, looking back, I for one wasn’t ready. My work still needed time to develop.

The following year, in 2008, I got together with three of those original six photographers to mount an exhibition for the Brighton Photo Fringe, part of the Biennale. Once again we did everything ourselves, but this time it was much more considered; the show was built around a central theme and we received funding from the Arts Council. The exhibition was much more successful and being part of a major international festival meant we had a much bigger audience. It was at that show that Anne McNeill of Impressions Gallery first saw my work; fortunately I happened to be invigilating that day and we struck up a conversation. Coincidently, I had just been selected for Redeye’s exhibition workshops for emerging photographers, which were to be held in association with Impressions. So, over the period of the workshops, Anne saw my project progress and afterwards she approached me with the idea of developing the work into a solo show.

The best thing about working with a curator for the first time was to have someone else – someone with a sizeable knowledge of photography – really sink their teeth into my work. The dialogue that ensued was really interesting and gave me a much better understanding of my work. That might sound strange, since you might expect that a photographer should really understand their own work, but I was often too close to it to be able to see it clearly. Anne was able to look at it quite dispassionately, from a distance, and that really helped. For three years since my graduation I had continued to work on the project with very little feedback from other people. I really missed the input I had had at university and, in hindsight, I should have been more proactive in seeking the opinions of others, but frankly that’s just not in my character; I’m more inclined to keep my work close to my chest and quietly get on with it. As a consequence I think I lost some perspective on what I was doing and stopped thinking about how other people would read the work.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the greatest asset a photographer could have is the ability to see your own work with fresh eyes, as if you were viewing it for the first time. That, I now know, is the key role of the curator. It’s almost impossible for the photographer to retain that necessary distance from their work. I remember a couple of occasions when Anne would question why I wanted to include certain pictures. To justify this I started to tell her the stories behind the images, and soon realised I was clinging to them because of the experience I’d had making them – be it difficult, or humorous, or whatever – rather than coldly looking at the strength of the results. Anne explained the need for the pictures to stand on their own without extended captions and so, for that reason, a couple of them got dropped from the show.

I learnt a lot during the process of editing the photographs for the exhibition. We began with my own edit of the work and then Anne took the time to look over a much wider selection of photographs, making her own edit, and picking out a number of photographs I had overlooked or disregarded. Then followed a rather lengthy process of discussing which pictures should make the final exhibition. We comfortably agreed on about two-thirds of the edit, but the remaining third was the subject of much debate and discussion.

In retrospect I stand guilty of the classic photographer’s desire to include as many pictures as possible. Anne referred to this as my ‘editorial training’ because I had a tendency to over-illustrate certain points by using several pictures, when often just one would do. She emphasised the idea that photography is about limitation, when less is definitely more.

I also had quite fixed ideas about how the photographs should be sequenced in the exhibition, which I suppose was again quite ‘editorial’ and probably a bit obvious. Anne introduced a number of new possibilities, seeing connections between pictures that I just hadn’t noticed.

The project was photographed in three different countries: UK, USA and Russia. I had always imagined the exhibition divided into these three distinct chapters. To an extent that’s what happened, but Anne merged the ‘chapters’ so that relationships developed between different locations and the transition from one country to the next wasn’t so marked.

I think I also held fixed ideas about how I wanted people to read the work. I had written extended captions for each photograph, with detailed explanations about the content. However, I soon understood that once work is in a gallery it’s more interesting to leave it open to interpretation so we agreed to minimize the text in order to open the pictures up. In many cases the extended captions took something away from what was interesting about the picture.