after the summer

Nearly two months since my last post! The holidays flew past and now I'm back at work. Amelia started school last week. I don't know where the last 4 years went, never mind the last couple of months. 

I am trying to assess what I achieved during my research leave before the summer. Need to go back and take another look at the 'High Gabble' rough cut. I think I will use mostly still images rather than video. Pick up shots are out of the question as Mum and Dad finally completed on the sale of the house a couple of weeks ago. I am pretty sure I have enough material to make something. I also want to use some of the photographs, scribblings, bits and pieces that we rescued(?) from the house on the last visit. I am still working my way through bags and boxes stacked in my office. It is very strange looking at all these fragments of the past and I have found Mum's refusal, even anger, about wanting to have, or look at, any of this stuff, very difficult to deal with. It feels like I'm on a very lonely journey which one would normally make after the death of a parent. But perhaps the death has already taken place. Mum is so changed and different to the woman that I see smiling in many of those photos. Yet in some ways she is so much better than this time last year. I just wish she would show some sign of affection towards her grandchildren and give some indication that she enjoys life. These type of expressions are very rarely, if ever, forthcoming. It's so sad. For me, for her and for Sam and Amelia. Dad seems oblivious! 

Anyway, I digress...

I also hope to finalise arrangements with Goldsmiths for the Exposures archive, but this is something else that I need child-free time to sort out. I do not feel ready to talk to Sam about my old work yet, although I hope I can at some point in the future. Goldsmiths have asked us to make an inventory of everything we have so I will put this together over the next few weeks and then meet them with Grace Lau hopefully sometime in October. 

So - not huge progress, but small steps. One can only do so much in 12.5 days! But this year I should be able to up this time considerably in the half of the week I am not lecturing. From November when Amelia starts full time, I hope to properly reassess my aims and objectives to reach a clearer methodology as regards my research.

exposures archive

A couple of months back I was looking through materials generated by the Women Photo Men and Men Review Women photo workshops that we used to run at Exposures after chatting to Steve Littman about future my research direction. There are many interesting photographs and the testimonials of participants are very poignant. I wondered whether there was any scope for a book or website to publish the material so it could be accessed by students or researchers interested in gender studies. Also there seems to be a resurgance of media interest in the definition of masculinity and the reluctance of some men to see their bodies as desirable.

To try to decide what to do with this material, I contacted dear friends and colleagues, Grace Lau and Robin Shaw, and they came to lunch yesterday. It was so lovely to see them. Nearly 5 years since I saw Grace and probably over 10 since Robin and I met up. After lots of catch up chat about our current projects and interests we started to look through the material. It is fairly certain that we would have a problem with releases if we tried to publish many of the images and it would be difficult to contact the models and participants since so much time has passed. None of us has the inclination or the time to take this on. We have decided to see whether the Womens' Library at London Metropolitan University or the Womens' Art Library at Goldsmiths would be interested in adding the materials to their collection.

Testing Testing 123

I have been thinking about creating a much-needed web presence for a while now. Daunted by the task of creating a 'proper' web site, here I am with a first attempt at blogging. Hopefully this will be a place for me to collect my thoughts about past, present and future projects. Let's see how it goes...