Thanks to all those who came to LCC’s BA Photography symposium yesterday, and congratulations to fellow presenters Suzi Teal, Lechen Zheng, Noam Dee, Ying ying Li, and Flora Liu on their degree show.
My presentation — a shortened version of which is below — was written with no idea about the work of the students I would be presenting alongside. When writing it, I was reflecting back on my own feelings as a then-recent photographic art graduate. What I remember most about that time is how I was so desperate to engage more heavily with theory. I’d read the canon of photographic theory — Barthes, Sontag, etc. — but philosophy as a whole was dark territory for me. I remember picking up Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus not long after graduating in 2013, and also making my first few purchases from Urbanomic, having no clue how to make sense of any of it. I brought that uncertainty to LCC yesterday, and was not only surprised but also hugely impressed by a graduating cohort putting “theory in action”, responding both theoretically and photographically to the work of Griselda Pollock, Immanuel Kant, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous and others. It was so exciting to meet a group of students engaging with theory at a level that was miles ahead of my own engagement when I was in their position twelve years ago.
I went to Offprint afterwards to find some of NERO’s English-language output in the wild. It was a good day.
The Problems with the Stories We Are Told
I began an undergraduate degree in Photographic Art at the University of Wales, Newport, in 2010. Having been obsessed with photography since I was a teenager, I had every intention of pursuing some sort of photographic career, and after I graduated, I stuck to my guns and went out into the world with hopes of acquiring one.
Much to my surprise, I had some success. I spent the next seven years working on and off as a curatorial assistant and exhibitions coordinator for galleries and festivals in England and Wales, which included working on the Welsh pavilion at the Venice biennale in 2015 and later curating exhibitions in the private members’ space at BAFTA. On paper, all this might look quite impressive. But if I’m completely honest with you, I wasn’t very good at holding down any of those jobs.
This is because my work ethic probably left something to be desired. I did really like certain parts of those jobs. I loved working with my hands, erecting installations in some strange places. I even enjoyed all the heavy lifting – and there was a lot of heavy lifting. But whenever I was at my desk, tasked with a load of admin as we tried to get various exhibitions off the ground, I was constantly misbehaving, mostly by posting on my blog and, later, writing my first book, when I really should have been doing other things. This did not go unnoticed, so it is not an approach to a creative practice that I can recommend in good conscience.
Already, I might suggest that this constitutes one sort of problem with the stories we tell ourselves. There was this sort of presumption I felt that, in working for a big gallery or institution, I should have felt like I was exactly where I wanted to be. I was getting the sort of jobs that lots of people wanted, but once I was there, I found that there were far more exciting things (to me at least) that kept diverting my attention – specifically, I found myself newly excited by writing.
This obsession I developed with writing was another surprise to me. Back when I was preparing for my own degree show, I positioned myself entirely against writing as the expected way of contextualising my own work. I was primarily interested in the shifting relationships between images. It was this interest that led me to believe I’d enjoy curating. I spent all my time messing around with sequences of images to make zines, looking at how different iterations of the same body of work could completely change its narrative. I enjoyed making mixtapes and CDs in my spare time for the same reason, and even ended up making an mix CD for my degree show, as an alternative to an artist statement, refusing the pressure to use a bunch of buzzwords that I didn’t even understand.
A few years later, I ran with this concept and starting making sound art. On an artist residency in 2015, for example, I made another mix CD, with other people’s songs interspersed with recorded interviews, bits of spoken word and field recordings, putting together a guided walk through a small village in Carmarthenshire.
At that point, the emphasis of my artistic practice was no longer about privileging my own experiences, but trying to instigate them for other people, finding other ways of sharing a certain perspective on the world. It was about emphasising the underside of the photographic work itself. I don’t know if many of you may feel similarly, but at a certain point, I started to feel like the photographs themselves were secondary. It was the experiences had whilst taking them that came to predominate, and of course, that can feel like an impossible thing to replicate and share when you’re tasked with actually showing the results of your adventures. The photographs started to only feel like traces of the real work itself, which was ostensibly an artistic practice that involved a lot of walking around and, in my case, as much listening as there was looking.
Photography, for me, then, was always a medium for documenting encounters – and I mean, of course that is what photography is on a quite fundamental level. But I was curious about the other sensory experiences that photography left behind. There was something about trying to do justice to multisensory experiences, albeit in an exploded and disjointed way, that really interested me, or maybe a kind of cross-cultural hybridity that defied easy categorisation – and categorisation is arguably all that language is good for. It registers difference. It makes a claim on the distinction between this and that. And that’s how my photographic education was also constructed, in terms of different kinds of photography as well.
To give you a little extra context, I should probably explain that there was an unfortunate if unintentional hierarchy in place between the photography courses at Newport when I was there. There may even be a similar hierarchy here. As I’ve already mentioned, I studied photographic art (which we abbreviated affectionately to ‘photo art’), but there were also courses in documentary photography (which we called ‘doc phot’) and photography for fashion and advertising (or PFA), and a sort of tension was always felt between them.
Doc phot saw itself as the most important, and it was the longest-running and most prestigious course, with very some famous alumni, like Martin Parr. PFA, by contrast, was the newest course. It was very commercial, and generally seen as unserious. Photo Art was stuck somewhere in middle, and what I noticed was that, although PFA were derided for its focus on the business of fashion photography, it was also the most openly experimental course, and I always found the work produced by its students, despite its commercial nature, to be the most visually exciting.
Absorbing as much as I could from these different courses, I think I wanted my own work to be a hybrid of everything that I was looking at. A kind of garish street photography, interested in moments where the commercial failed itself, or where a kind of capitalistic visual culture began to fall apart and reveal something strange and new underneath itself. So I set about documenting joyful visual experiences in daily life, which were nonetheless constructed out of what was essentially visual trash. And here I’m reminded of that line from the end of Philip K Dick’s novel VALIS, which I’ve always loved: “The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.” Here we can think of images of Jesus Christ that someone finds burnt into a piece of toast. But what I was interested in was a kind of understated sublime found on the visual trash heap of all that surrounds us.
What I was trying to make, then, was a sort of visual poetry that refused any relationship to the written word, and in interrogating this tension between art and commerce, I was drawn increasingly towards photography’s relationship with music in particular, or the music industry. This wasn’t simply through gig photography, but rather the visual culture that music exists alongside. I was an enthusiastic record collector back then, for example – and feel free to call me a hipster, but even now I don’t think there’s a comparable feeling to putting on a record and holding that big artwork in your hands, as its own kind of art object. I really liked the output of ECM Records in particular, which emphasised the improvisational relationship between photography and jazz.
The problem that I found, however, on graduating and making some preliminary steps into the art world, is that people still wanted you to talk about your work – which was something that, at that time, I just wasn’t very good at. And that’s not for lack of trying. I still had to defend my work in my final crit, and I think I did so successfully. And despite a refusal to write an artist statement at my own degree show, I had really enjoyed writing my dissertation, which again was about anxiety and photography, and overcoming a fear of failure – a failure to do justice to what was happening in front of me. So I wasn’t suffering from an anti-intellectualism, but was rather interested in the moments were forms of expression failed or couldn’t be so easily explained away. I wanted to rebel against the artist statement, then, as a prescribed format of summation, because I didn’t feel that whatever meaning I could contain within it was any more stable than any other form of meaningful expression. I wanted to summarise my own work in another, more open-ended way, with the making of mix CDs being as much an informed practice of borrowing from what already existed in the world as photography itself was.
I soon came to realise, then, that it wasn’t the written word as such that I had a problem with, but the pretentiousness of a kind of International Art English, which wasn’t really as intellectual as it professed itself to be and only seemed to try to plug the gaps in and explain away photography’s more poetic tendencies. I had read too many texts at exhibitions that felt like a sort of stolen valour in that regard, misusing concepts only to perform a kind of borrowed legitimacy, when I wasn’t personally bothered about whether someone else saw my own work as legitimate or not. I wanted to disrupt that habit you will see in art galleries the world over, where someone is confronted by something that challenges their preconceptions and values, and so they turn to a piece of wall text as if it would tell them how they were supposed to understand what they’re looking at. I didn’t want to rely on writing for that. I wanted to use something that was as fun to engage with as the work itself.
What I wanted, then, to highlight a disparity I felt between different modes of expression and disrupt a hierarchy of the senses. But I came to realise further still that this disparity wasn’t only applicable to art and writing, but other modes of expression as well. For example, as I tried to make moves into doing some sort of music photography of my own, I discovered that, despite working with bands that were proudly experimental, the ways they were written about or even photographed often made no attempt to reflect or enter into dialogue with the affects produced by the music itself. Photography and writing instead took on the task of a kind of sense-making and lazy contextualisation, rather than expanding on the elusiveness of meaning altogether and instead trying to engage on a more affective level.
Soon enough, I ended up being haunted by an anecdote that one of my lecturers told me about. Jason Evans is a photographer and artist best known for doing all the record covers for Caribou and Four Tet. Jason was the biggest influence on me whilst I was an undergraduate student, and they once told me about shooting for a cover story about the band Lightning Bolt for The Wire magazine, and being initially told by the editorial team that the images were too fuzzy – despite the fact that ‘fuzzy’ is a very apt description of how Lightning Bolt’s music already sounds. They clearly ended up making the case for their approach to the band, but the fact that such a case would even need to be argued for came as a shock to me.
It was an obstacle that I met myself repeatedly in working with various bands and magazines who were oddly alienated from any attempt to document culture in a way that directly responded to the sounds being made. The same was true when I started pitching my writing to music magazines, in fact. I was once invited to write for the Guardian’s music column, for instance, after one of the editors had enjoyed something I’d written on my blog. But despite liking what I did, they never liked any of the ideas I’d bring to them. I was always told that my writing or my ideas would alienate their intended audience, even when writing about music that they liked and which was itself aesthetically alienating. And so, more often than not, the bands or magazines I worked with just wanted photos of musicians looking handsome and cool, and the music press wanted some sort of journalistic puff piece. It bored the life out of me.
There were exceptions, it must be said. The last professional photographic project I ended up working on, before my life took a very different turn, was making the album art for William Doyle’s 2017 album Your Wilderness Revisited – an album of songs that sought to explore a kind of suburban psychedelia. I spent at least two years on that project, going for long walks with Will, making images as he came up with song ideas, and it was a really beautiful way of working with someone on the visual context for an album whilst the album itself was actively being made, rather than being brought on board when the music itself was already completed. We shared a really fruitful and exciting dialogue, and I’m still really proud of what we made.
We even had a exhibition in the bar of a music venue when Will was debuting the new material live for the first time. But for all the work that went into it, the project ran out of steam once the album had been released, with nothing much to show for those two years of work for myself. I ended up jaded, and I effectively gave up on any professional photographic practice soon afterwards. (Although, some eight years later, I’d really like to get back into it.)
Ultimately, all of these experiences only confirmed my suspicions that there were lingering problems within contemporary culture that some people had identified almost two decades earlier. There was a sense that certain modes of expression were subordinated to others. To be afforded the freedom to express yourself how you wish — responding to other forms of art directly rather than tethering yourself in advance to the expectations to a hypothetical audience — was a rare luxury. It is for that reason that I have primarily remained attached to blogging, where freedom of expression is total…
Shortly after finishing my undergraduate degree, I read Kodwo Eshun’s 1998 book, More Brilliant than the Sun – a book about black music, dance music, and music that looks to the future – in which he polemically jostles with a sort of music industry anti-intellectualism that I’d also begun to feel so sharply. Here’s what Kodwo had to say about music writing in the late Nineties:
All today’s journalism is nothing more than a giant inertia engine to put the brakes on breaks, a moronizer placing all thought on permanent pause, a futureshock absorber, forever shielding its readers from the future’s cuts, tracks, scratches. Behind the assumed virtue of keeping rhythm mute, there is a none-too-veiled hostility towards analyzing rhythm at all. Too many ideas spoil the party. Too much speculation kills ‘dance music’, by ‘intellectualizing’ it to death
The fuel this inertia engine runs on is fossil fuel: the live show, the proper album, the Real Song, the Real Voice, the mature, the musical, the pure, the true, the proper, the intelligent, breaking America: all notions that stink of the past, that maintain a hierarchy of the senses, that petrify music into a solid state in which everyone knows where they stand, and what real music really is.
And this is why nothing is more fun than spoiling this terminally stupid sublime, this insistence that Great Music speaks for itself.
It was Kodwo, then, that made me realise how writing could be as provocative and disruptive as music or visual art. His work had such an impact on me, as someone who had begun to feel this ‘hierarchy of the senses’ so deeply, that I went to Goldsmiths in 2016 to study on the postgraduate course he was then teaching on: the MA in Contemporary Art Theory. Although I was still hoping to keep working in the arts and as a photographer at the time, it was a course that only led me further astray, in part due to what ultimately transpired that year.
Kodwo wasn’t the only person at Goldsmiths I hoped to learn from – I was also excited to be taught by Mark Fisher, whose k-punk blog had been essential reading for me for about a decade. But when Mark passed away at the start of our second semester, in January 2017, the hierarchy I’d been wrestling against was suddenly razed to the ground. That is to say that, suddenly, writing, photography, art, music – all felt like inappropriate ways to mediate an experience of grief that was felt so profoundly.
But since I was still a student at the time of Mark’s death, who had a dissertation to write, I had a go at mediating it anyway. I kept writing and photographing to try and capture some sort of experience I ultimately knew I could not do justice to – some cascading melancholic present, defined by Mark’s death, but also the Grenfell Tower fire, Jeremy Corbyn’s first electoral defeat, and more. Over the next few years, that attempt grew from a 15,000-word dissertation into a book – my first book – which was published in March 2020 with the title, Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher, and which was followed soon afterwards by an editorial project, bringing together Mark’s final lectures at Goldsmiths before his death, published in January 2021 as Postcapitalist Desire.
I have primarily been recognised as a writer ever since then, but each book I’ve written has nonetheless been heavily concerned with the visual, with an attempt to flatten writing and photography as two complementary documentary impulses. It has still been difficult to situate these practices on an equal footing. These books, after all, are not photo books, even though they contain many images – including many of my own images. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to publish something more recognisable as a photobook that is accompanied by some sort of 90,000-word essay. It would undoubtedly be a ridiculous object, but all the more interesting for subverting what Kodwo calls the Trad Sublime, that is, the habitual ways through which we enjoy consuming culture.
I must confess that, at present, the book I’m working on isn’t visual at all. Right now, I’m wrestling with a PhD in Philosophy at Newcastle University. I’d originally considered doing English Literature instead, writing a thesis on the relationship between modernist photography and poetry, specifically imagism. I chose to write about the figure of the orphan in twentieth-century French philosophy instead, and anyway, whether I’d pursued English Literature or Philosophy, it has been fun to take on a very unorthodox academic route, trying to get a doctorate in something that you don’t actually have any prior formal training in. But my photographic education has still proven indispensable to me. In fact, I see this interdisciplinary approach to be an advantage that a lot of people don’t have, and I think everything that I learnt whilst studying photography has been invaluable in whatever else I’ve wanted to do. I think that’s because photography, first and foremost, helped me develop a sensitivity to representations of things.
This probably sounds vague, but stick with me.
Take my last book, Narcissus in Bloom, which was published in 2023 and which Paul tells me might already be familiar to some of you. It’s a book about narcissism, and even now I’m not entirely happy with the subtitle I ended up giving it. Originally, I didn’t want it to have a subtitle at all, but my publisher insisted. In hindsight, I wish I’d couched the end of that last word in some brackets – “An Alternative History of the Self(ie)”. Because the book is ostensibly about how we have come to understand the self – a story which I tell through art and photographic history, that is, by considering the ways in which we have become accustomed to representing ourselves. It was a book I wanted to write because, although no one knew me as a professional photographer by that point, I still had a lot of unfinished business with the medium and an understanding of it that I’d never seen written down by anyone else.
But the subtitle as it stands is still fitting, because I think if you were to judge this book by its cover, and you saw this flagged preoccupation with the selfie as that most ubiquitous and unserious thing, you’d probably think it was either an unserious book or maybe something a little too pretentious. To be honest, I think I’ve long run the risk of being seen as an unserious or pretentious person in general, ever since I decided to use a song by The Supremes to frame my final degree show work. But I remember, when talking to my editor about the subtitle, he said something that made me laugh. He acknowledged that it was a subtitle that might presuppose some level of unseriousness, and so it would – and I quote – “piss off those snobs at the Royal Academy”, but it might also draw in other people who aren’t looking for something so serious to begin with. I liked that, and I think I have long hoped to be a thorn in the side of culture in that same way. Not in terms of a kind of punk attitude, but at least a contrarian one. I have long hoped that, no matter what kind of preconceptions someone might bring to my work, they’d ultimately find themselves surprised by it. And I suppose that the whole idea of not judging a book by its cover is something that the book itself deals with implicitly.
In the book, I argue that narcissism has only very recently become a shorthand for arrogance and self-obsession. But really, to be a narcissist is to have a questioning relationship to the self. According to modern psychoanalysis, for example, everybody’s ego is an image, or an imago, that we construct for ourselves. It is an imaginary thing that allows us to understand the self, whilst ‘the subject’ – the person that we are on an unconscious level – is otherwise inaccessible to us. The subject of the unconscious is that base-level version of ourselves that sort of gets in way, that leads to slips of the tongue, that dreams, that makes errors, and it is this disconnection between the ego and the unconscious that means we have to constantly correct ourselves. The story of Narcissus, we must remember, is about one man’s encounter with this ego-image after having never acquired one previously. He falls in love with it, but is also horrified by it, and though the myth is often read superficially today, we should perhaps put ourselves in Narcissus’s position and consider the mental strain we would undergo if we suddenly saw our own reflection today, having had no sense whatsoever what we look like. Perhaps it is not really understanding what we look like that leads us to investigate ourselves so incessantly. And the problem is that, if we look a little too closely, I imagine we might all go a little mad, like Narcissus did.
But we don’t have that experience. Our self-image is something we begin to construct from a very young age, which is shaped from without by our cultural circumstances, and it is often the case that, when we consider how we understand ourselves and how we’re supposed to act, our relationship to ourselves can become unbalanced. We self-consciously notice some sort of error we’ve made, perhaps, or something we don’t like about how we look or behave or respond to things. Sometimes we overcorrect, sometimes we don’t do very well at correcting at all – but either way, this is a fundamentally creative and experimental process. And this is also the spectrum of narcissism, if I can put it that way. Donald Trump is often denigrated as a narcissist, for example, because we are very aware that he has tried to construct an overinflated image of himself as some sort of god-emperor, which is wholly disjointed from the bumbling idiot of a man that he actually is. But someone struggling with depression is no less narcissistic, as they might have a totally degraded sense of themselves that doesn’t align with how wonderful they are. So really, we’re all narcissists in one way or another, but most of us have a less disruptive relationship to this image we construct of ourselves than others.
As photographers, I think an acknowledgement of this is useful, and may even be more obvious to us than it is to other people. This symposium, after all, has been framed around “the problem with the stories we are told”. Narcissus in Bloom argues that the stories we’ve been told about narcissism are totally disconnected from what it initially symbolised. But the further point to be emphasised, in the context of the book, is that the stories we tell ourselves in general can also constitute a problem as well, which we can spend our whole lives working through.
This is something that is probably applicable to your own work. I remember my friend Amy Ireland, for example, co-author with Maya B. Kronic of Cute Accelerationism, once telling me about how we are all “fated to a problem”, which reminded me of something one of my lecturers at uni told us: that we will all probably have only one idea, which we will end up exploring in an infinite number of permutations. It shocked us then, but it’s something that has so far borne true for me. No matter what subject matter I end up taking photographs of or writing about, I have this fascination with trying to represent what otherwise feels unrepresentable, coming at things from disorienting perspectives, constructing this wild and living archive of all of my experiences online that, when taken together in its entirety, produces this sort of cubist perspective that would probably be impossible to make coherent sense of.
Take the relationship between Egress and Narcissus in Bloom. On the surface, they appear to be entirely different books. The first was a book about community, written in the first person; it was about my personal experience of things gone through collectively, thinking through the frictions produced by that collision of perspectives and the implications it has for our political imaginations. My second book was a book about the individual, written in the third person; it is about our collective understanding of what it means to have a self-image. As far as I’m concerned, these are two very different books that nonetheless orbit the same problematic, approaching it from opposing perspectives. All of my work as a whole is concerned with the same problem: how we are constructed by our experiences, and the difficulties we have in representing them, particularly experiences that contradict or challenge a prevailing understanding of how things should be for all of us.
In pursing this problem, my postgraduate life has taken many turns, and I’m left wondering what the value of this story is that I’m trying to tell you. On the one hand, I’m someone who has made a lot of stuff. I have contributed to the culture of my time, and it has taken about a decade for me to feel like that contribution has been recognised, at least in some ways. It is very nice to be told that my work has been taught on this course, for example. But I’m also someone who still lives in their overdraft, who works in a pub, and who still has no idea what the future holds for me. If the purpose of this sort of talk is to give you an example of how to approach postgraduate life and find some material comfort, I might not be the best choice of speaker. But that lack of material comfort is also a result of a life spent failing to do what I’m supposed to, or failing to think about the world in the way that my education has encouraged me to. This is to say that, whilst I think it is essential that we question the world in which we live and identify the problems with the stories we tell, it is also true that people don’t like being told that they’re wrong or that things aren’t how they appear to be.
But I think, as artists, that is precisely the load that we have to bear. To quote Mark Fisher: “has there ever been a time when finding gaps in the seamless surfaces of ‘reality’ has ever felt more pressing?” I think not. And whilst finding those gaps might not be the most financially lucrative way to spend a lifetime, some things are bigger than one’s own personal circumstances. If I can make any sort of claim to having found those gaps, and make some contribution to changing the culture in which we live by widening them, I’ll be happy. And if I can inspire you today to feel like that sort of life is one worth living – a life in which you question what is expected of you in the months and years ahead, even (or especially) in ways that run contrary to any sense of professionalism or cultural acceptability – I will be just as happy. It is difficult, for sure, but more affirming than I ever previously imagined it could be.
Anyway, that’s my story. And I invite you to question it as much as you like. But what I’d like to do now is hear some of yours.
Thanks for listening.