10.55 AM – 11.40 AM
University of Brighton, 154 Edward Street, BN2 0JG
Fergus Heron and Aliki Braine both engage with landscape through photography — Heron through an ecological lens on woodlands and watercourses, Braine through the material and compositional conventions of landscape representation.
In/visible ecologies: photography, woodlands and watercourses
This presentation discusses the context and methods of Fergus Heron‘s ongoing practice-based research photographing woodlands and watercourses. He proposes that photography can be considered ecological when practiced in relation with the natural world and acknowledged as part of networked systems that include established and emerging technologies. Through discussion of recent project work, he addresses themes of personal and collective geographies, exploring how photography pictures nature differently. With reference to Walter Benjamin’s Optical Unconscious in reflecting on depictions of the natural world with photography from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he suggests attachments to place formed by pictures can be reconsidered through ancient and modern understandings of nature together with the convergence of technologies that led to the early development of photography. Rethinking photography as a network of agencies where human activity is de-centered is possible and urgent, as T.J. Demos has written: “to resituate ourselves in the larger network of life.” With presentation of selected images from his ongoing projects, Heron elaborates on how his work acknowledges chance and contingency, considering how different developing technologies, both new and old, subject photography itself to ecologies from which it originates and with which it is inextricably interconnected.
Fergus Heron is a British photographer known for his pictures with natural formations and urban environments. He lives and works in Brighton, England and Nairn, Scotland. Heron studied Photography at the Royal College of Art and the University for the Creative Arts at Farnham. Exhibitions featuring his work have taken place at venues including Tate Britain. Publications include contributions to A Companion to Photography (Oxford: Blackwell) Emerging Landscapes (Abingdon: Routledge) and Visible Economies(Brighton: Photoworks). He is a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for MA Photography at the University of Brighton.
Exploring the material nature and compositional construction of images, Aliki Braine‘s works are made in dialogue with the history of western landscape painting and seek to address the complex interplay between images of the land and its representation as landscape. Working either with medium format photography or with historical art albums, she uses simple and playful tools such as stickers, paper shredders and hole-punches to cut, rearrange, or fold her negatives or printed reproductions. These iconoclastic strategies aim to underline the fabricated nature of pictures and tease out the complex relationships between painting, photography and mass-produced images.
Aliki Braine studied at the Ruskin School, Oxford, the Slade School of Fine Art, London and at the Courtauld Institute of Art where she was awarded a distinction for her thesis on 17th century landscape painting. Recent exhibitions include solo shows in Oxford, London, Birmingham, Vienna, Madrid and Paris.