Abstracts
Juliet Baillie (Birkbeck) - Camera clubs, interwar amateurs and photography for profit
As the commercial and reportage uses of photography expanded during the interwar period a range of photographic literature emerged which encouraged amateur photographers to pursue ‘Photography for Profit’. These sources suggested that amateurs should use their skill as photographers to make their hobby pay for itself or even become an extra source of income. Aside from the regular competitions open to amateurs, the money making opportunities suggested for amateur photographers ranged from press photography for newspapers to picture postcard images and from advertising and commercial imagery to portraits in sitters’ home.
These types of photography were seemingly antithetical to the traditional pictorial photography which was the mainstay of camera clubs and photographic societies, indeed the much of the rhetoric of the time suggested that skilled amateur photographers would need to approach photography in a different way for it to become profitable. This paper will complicate this notion, indicating that pictorial photography was broader in scope and more compatible with commercial endeavour than might be expected. Rather than solely the domain of amateur enthusiasts camera clubs were places of interaction between amateurs and professionals and the photographs shown in salons and exhibitions were relatively diverse in nature. At the same time, it will become clear that amateurs taking opportunities to produce stock, advertising and even news photographs problematize the long standing notion of the aspirational photographer as consumer above all else.
Stephen Bull (University of the Creative Arts) - We are all photography geeks now: Aspiring amateurs and the global camera club
Once, in the 20th century, a select group of amateur photographers shared their images and opinions through monthly magazines, weekly camera club meetings and occasional domestic slideshows. Experts expounded advice to those that boldly sent their photographs to Amateur Photographer, while guest judges awarded marks out of 20 to anonymous camera club members during print and slide battles in musty village halls. Within the home, aspiring amateurs tested the patience of friends, relatives and neighbours by projecting endless carousels from their latest expeditions.
The limited audience for these periodicals, institutions, and domestic displays has expanded to become almost limitless in the 21st century. Websites such as Flickr have billions of affiliates, constantly uploading their own photographs and commenting on others. The specialised space of the amateur photographer has gone public. Simultaneously, everybody with a camera phone (which is pretty much everybody) seems to aspire to the status of an amateur photographer – recording any event and non-event with the dedication of a documentarist. Recently, the success of Instagram suggests that an obsession with filters is not just for those with a subscription to the British Journal of Photography. We are all photography geeks now. So what does it mean for photography if everyone is a member of the global camera club?
Karen Cross (Roehampton) – The relational amateur
With the snapshot and family album being viewed as disruptive memory forms, amateur practices have tended to be considered as oppositional modes of cultural production. This has left little space to think through the various ways that amateur photography is relationally defined. Work is emerging on camera clubs and other communities of practice, but there still little account of the amateur’s engagement with professional and institutional forms of knowledge. My focus on examples of amateur photography education and training is an attempt to pin this down and to also begin to understand the cultural processes at play within the moment of “aspiration” and in the “making-serious” of one’s photographic practice. Control over technology, process and aesthetics are paramount in training the eye of the amateur, sometimes reflecting a play of cultural distinction. But, as my research on beginner’s photography education courses revealed, there is a tension between the professional lens and the personal and social experience of doing photography. What is interesting is how this tension is both sustaining but also can be challenging for amateurs, institutions and markets of photography.
Annebella Pollen (Brighton) - When is a photographic cliché not a cliché?
Of all photographic clichés, none is more prevalent than the sunset. Despite sunsets themselves being unique, natural and frequently spectacular phenomena, photographs of sunsets have come to represent the most predictable, culturally devalued and banal of amateur image-making practices. For example, In Julian Stallabrass’s Sixty Billion Sunsets - a dismissive account of what he sees as the prescribed and commodified aesthetics of amateur and snapshot practices in a pre-digital age - the subject is synonymous with the apparently limited repertoire of non-professional photography. More recently, the photographer Penelope Umbrico, in work that reflects on the popular image culture of the internet, assembles montages of the most popularly posted and photographed subject in her on-going project, 8,730,221 Suns from Flickr (2011). Yet, despite their enduring ubiquity, not all photographs of sunsets are equal; they divide opinion. Tellingly, in his large-scale analysis of class-stratified taste practices in 1960s France, Pierre Bourdieu used a photograph of a sunset as a means of measuring aesthetic distinction. As a device to further explore aesthetic hierarchies, this paper examines ambitious sunsets: those entered into photographic competition and judged in the pages of the aspirational photo press. In these contexts, in order to rehabilitate what is most commonly associated with uneducated aesthetic appreciation and practice, an image of a sunset must distinguish itself if it is to achieve the most nebulous and contested of standards: that of the ‘good’ photograph.
Graham Rawle (Brighton) – Studio Studies: Photographic ‘artistry’ in 1950s men’s magazines
Laws on pornography in the 1950s ruled that material appealing to prurient interest in sex that did not have serious artistic value could be banned as obscene. In an attempt to circumvent these rules, certain men’s magazines began to take their lead from the high art that seemed to elude the ban, dubbing themselves as guides for the amateur art photographer and adopting titles like ‘Line and Form’ and ‘Studio Studies’ to suggest artistic integrity rather than salacious titillation. The new publications ‘explored the curves of the female form to demonstrate the artistry of lighting’. Their tawdry ‘nude studies’ were now captioned with technical data - f11 at 125th of a second - to substantiate their serious intent. As the loophole in the law stretched, censors were forced to ask ‘Is this Art?’
Meanwhile, the enthusiastic amateur photographer now had access to equipment that would allow him to process films in the privacy of his own home. No longer having to worry what the local chemist (who normally developed the amateur’s photographs) might think of their choice of subject, men could shut themselves away in a darkened cupboard under the stairs to print their own ‘artistic interpretations of the female form’.
In his presentation, Graham Rawle will talk about his book, Diary of An Amateur Photographer and its protagonist – an aspiring glamour photographer caught in this seamy but colourful ‘grey’ area between 1950s art and pornography.
Roger Tooth (The Guardian) – Guardian Camera Club
This presentation will explain the thinking behind the launching of the Guardian Camera Club and its initial aim of creating an online 'critting' service for keen amateurs and students of photography, including why the name “Camera Club” was chosen. It will show how this was part of the wider policy of open journalism at the Guardian and how it has enhanced the Guardian's photographic reputation. The presentation will include discussion of the Guardian’s experience of engaging with photographers and readers or reader photographers online, including the practicalities of using Flickr as a submitting and discussion medium, and how this works with the Guardian website and galleries. It will examine the demands of the members, their opinions and how much they influence the direction of the Club, alongside the financial aspects of commercial sponsorship and influences that were felt by Guardian staff working on the Club - for example instituting a monthly competition. Lastly, Roger will talk in this presentation about how running the Club has helped him identify the different strands in the photographic community, with a special focus on the place of citizen journalism in a national newspaper and website.
