The Faculty of Arts new Professor in the Culture of Photography Francis Hodgson talks about his career to date and his thoughts about his new role at the University of Brighton.
23 Jan 2014
Q. You have been a specialist in photography for a long time, but you have worked across a number of quite different areas. Can you say that there has been a central theme to your career to date?
A. I am afraid that if there is a central theme it is a very naïve one. I continue to believe that photographs are important and yet rarely treated as such. Central to my thinking has been a conviction that making and using photographs adds up to perfectly ordinary cultural activity. Photographs respond to analysis, yet thinking about them tends to fall into two contradictory camps, neither of which would be acceptable in the study of other media. At the ordinary level, people too often still hardly think about photographs at all: given the volume of excellent photographic activity there are remarkably few critics of photography in the broadsheet newspapers, for example. At the purportedly higher level, including that of much academic thinking, photographs are too often treated merely as the vehicle for the elucidation of one or another theory; they are treated, in fact, just as a high-falutin’ version of illustration.
Somewhere in the middle, I have believed that one can find useful sensitive non-prescriptive careful analysis of photographs and what they do. I’m not sure that adds up to a theme, but it certainly has driven me for many years.
Q. You are listed as a founder of the Prix Pictet. Can you say a little about that?
A. The Prix Pictet is still, I believe by prize money, the largest award in photography, with 100,000 Swiss Francs (£67k) to the winner and a substantial commission available to another photographer. It is a prize that seeks to promote and circulate all that is best in photography pertaining to sustainable development and the environment. It has the peculiarity of being quite deliberately neither an art prize nor a prize in photojournalism, but one which seeks to reward the strength of messaging that great photographers have, whatever particular idiom they work in. I have, as you say, been involved with the Prize from its outset, and am very proud of what it has become.
A circulating programme of exhibitions brings these important pictures to a huge audience annually, and the catalogue we produce every year reaches even further. The prize reaches policy-makers in public and decision-makers in private and has used the transcultural power of photography to draw attention to a wide range of environmental problems.
Q. Do you have specific ambitions for photography within the University of Brighton?
A. I think the obvious: that Brighton has the potential to be a world-class centre of excellence in photography. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we should aim to produce only world-class photographers. Across the whole range of visual literacy and visual culture, including practising photographers but including also numbers of people who have no intention of ever holding a camera, I believe that there is an opportunity to bind people and practices together around photography. I believe, in other words, that photography is a lot more central to our shared intellectual experience than sometimes seems apparent, and that there are great synergies to be gained from promoting it nearer that central position across the university.
Q. What was your own training in photography?
A. I have none. I was glad to take a job at the Photographers’ Gallery when I had already been writing about photographs for some years, and I learnt a great deal from some very inspiring people there. Ever since, in a succession of jobs and roles ranging widely across the possible range of photographic activity, I have learnt more each time.
Q. How do you feel photography as a medium has evolved over the last 30 years?
A. In very broad terms, that it has peaked, after being (perhaps in the latter half of the twentieth century) by far the most important medium of communication that we had, to something a lot more diffuse. I suppose I think that photography had a Big Bang: it exploded through its early history. It touched everything, and it profoundly affected and altered everything that it touched. As that prodigious explosion slows down, and photography forseeably will hand over some of its role as cutting edge leader in the communication field, so it will become a more malleable, less defined set of habits. It is part of my job to track those changes, and part of my pleasure to rejoice in them.
Q. Who inspires/continues to inspire you within the field of photography?
A. I am a fan. There are dozens of photographers I should list, and dozens of people who do extraordinary things with photographs, including gallerists, designers, collectors and all sorts, but I will confine myself to just two I have worked with:
Sue Davies founded the Photographers’ Gallery on the simple principle that she believed in photography and went out on every conceivable limb to do something about that. One of those limbs, by the way, was taking a long chance on me. I wish I had half her courage.
Stephen Mayes (a colleague in several different jobs), the former head of the VII photo agency, of Art & Commerce, and of Network Photographers, has found wonderful ways to bring both high principle and high imagination to the distribution and use of pictures. I wish I had half his commitment.
