By Åsa Johannesson practice-based PhD candidate, London College of Communication
Photographing the Colossal statue of a female divinity at Centrale Montemartini, Rome, Sept 2016.
Mead PhD Residency at the British School at Rome report by Åsa Johannesson, practice based PhD candidate London College of Communication.
I applied for the Mead residency at the British School at Rome (BSR) in order to study the relationship between photographic portraiture and figurative sculpture in the context of representations of gender fluidity.
My PhD research project examines the relationship between the photographic portrait and gender fluidity. Through photographic practice and critical writing I am looking at the ways in which the photographic portrait can be explored (in the studio) and presented (in the gallery) today in order to encouraging an understanding of gender as a nuanced and unfixed notion beyond the binary positions male and female.
At the time of my MEAD residency application to the British School at Rome I was predominantly focusing on addressing the parameters of the photographic studio portrait. By exploring the elements that the studio portrait depends on, for example the posing body and the backdrop, I was seeking to critically stress the fabrication of the photographic portrait, and further suggest an echoing of this fabrication in the construction of gender. My research on the photograph as a figurative and fabricated entity led me to look at Roman statues and busts.
My residency at the BSR developed into three major components: First, I executed photographic shoots with my large format camera at Musei Capitoline, Centrale Montemartini and Palazzo Massimo in Rome and at the Nazionale Archeologico in Naples. Second, I explored and analysed photographs of Roman statues from the BSR archive, and third, I used my studio space at the BSR to compare and contrast the research material that I continually was collecting and producing.
My photographic shoots were executed using a 5×4” large format camera and a fabric backdrop set up on a stand. I mainly focused on the facial expressions and the physicality of Roman busts together with the body language and body parts of statues. Prior to my residency I had identified a selection of sculptures that I thought could have a certain potential of being useful in my research. For example statues that, in my opinion, suggested a gender ambiguity, either in terms of facial features, body parts, or body language, such as sculptures of Hermaphrodite, Dionysus and the Amazons. I further had selected a set of sculptures, which myths carried allegorical potential in the context of gender fluidity, for example a bust of Emperor Elagabalus, who famously expressed an urge to change his sex to female.
The execution of my photographic shoots were rewarding but exhausting. The camera I used required to be built every time and the backdrop needed to be set up on a metal stands behind most subjects. The staff at the museums proved incredibly helpful and despite my occasionally limited time-slots I felt confident in completing the majority of my planned shoots, without interruptions from museum visitors.
I used large format black and white sheet film (5×4”) and colour Polaroid film. As I had limited opportunities to develop my black and white film, my Polaroids became invaluable; through these small photographs I had a continual visual insight into my work’s progress. I gradually began to use the Polaroids not only as a technical indicator of exposure and composition but also as an intended ‘final piece’. The Polaroids’ singularity and uniqueness, together with their instant physicality, offered an interruption of my own expectations of the photographic process that I found useful in my study of the photographic portrait.
I expended my exploration of the photographic portrait by attending to the photographic archive at the BSR. With help from the archivists Alessandra Giovenco and Valerie Scott I discovered a large collection of photographs depicting Roman statues and busts taken from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. This collection belonged to Eugenie Strong, who was the assisting director at the BSR from 1909 to 1925. This investigation was useful to my research on several levels. I considered these photographs as belonging to both portraiture and still life. They then became extensions and interruptions of the notion of the portrait and its expectation of being the result of a temporal fixity. Further, the photographic representations of marble busts and statues suggested a presence not only of the photographic subject but also of the photographer. Many photographs that I found in Strong’s collection commented on my own photographic expedition in Rome: The photographs were highly constructed and often shot in front of fabric backdrops, very similar to my own set-ups.
My studio space at the BSR proved integral to my residency project, acting as a space in which I could gather, compare, and contrast my findings from my studies at the museums and from the BSR archive. Through critical writing, drawing of diagrams, and juxtaposing my Polaroids with photocopies of prints from the BSR photographic archive, I sought to identifying new unexplored opportunities but also limitations in the use of the photographic portrait as a research tool for my PhD.
Summary/Conclusion
Through the work I produced and examined during this residency I found myself in new positionalities both in relation to my photographic subjects and to object that I am expected to produce; the photographic print. My photographic subjects, the marble sculptures, unlike humans, are static, stable, and fixed. Their fixed physicality suggests to me an exaggeration to the fixity that I, as a portrait photographer, repeatedly force upon my (human) sitters by first directing them into certain poses and gazes, and eventually fixing their posed bodies forever by pressing the shutter. The permanent fixity of the marble statues and busts meant that I, the photographer, was the only one who physically moved during the photographic sessions. Together with my tripod I circled around the statues in seeking for a successful portrait, somehow creating a reversed relationship to my subject.
Overall, this residency has helped me to gain a further understanding of how limited the photographic portrait is as a research tool for my research purposes. However, the acknowledgement of this limitation has become a crucial aspect to my PhD and has helped to furthering my work by addressing issues of photographic representation and viewership. I now intend to explore video and installations as research methods in order to attempt to unfix what the Roman sculptures taught me that the photograph cannot do itself.
I would like to thank everyone at the University of the Arts London, the British School at Rome, and at the museums in Rome and Naples for their support with my research.
Background:
Following a generous gift by photographer and philanthropist Scott Mead, UAL has for some years offered Mead Scholarships and Fellowships to its students and recent alumni. This new Rome PhD Studio Residency extends the programme of Mead Awards to PhD students, providing them with a four-week residency in a studio at the British School at Rome.
2017 Mead BSR Residency Open for Entries:
The Mead Residency will give three PhD students who are practice-based and who will be able to utilise the Studio the valuable opportunity to live and work at the British School at Rome (the BSR). The BSR offers studio, living and library facilities, as well as the chance to join its vibrant community of scholars and artists. This is a superb opportunity for students to research and focus on their work away from normal pressures, and to use the BSR as a base to explore Rome.
More information about the BSR can be found at http://www.bsr.ac.uk/.
The residencies will take place in September 2017, and the arrival and departure dates are 1-29 September.