Michael Freeman talks to Simon Barber

Simon Barber, one of our photography tutors at the OCA, has a special commitment to collaborative photography, and for me personally provides a fascinating contrast to the more self-absorbed method of photography that I grew up with. Indeed, Simon’s photographic career began after a very sharp change of direction from a science education — a degree in medicinal chemistry. Teaching and workshops play a central role in his work, as he describes below, and his commissioned photography includes assignments for a variety of health and social care organizations in North and Central London, such as NHS Direct, hospitals and Primary Care trusts.

MF: How did you start in photography? After a medical science background it looks anything but ordinary.

SB: My career path has been anything but straightforward. I first got interested in photography at university while studying for a degree in medicinal chemistry. I knew some people who were taking and developing their own pictures and tried it out for myself. I was taken with the notion of controlling the whole process from camera to print and cutting out the middleman. Up until then I had dropped off my film at the local chemist for processing and usually been disappointed with the results that I got back a week or so later. A whole new avenue of possibilities opened up in the darkroom and I was hooked.

I persevered with the degree, graduated and even went for a few medically-related jobs with drug companies. But it became abundantly clear that this was not for me so armed with my self-taught experience and a box full of prints, I trawled round looking for photography jobs and wound up working as a medical photographer.

This provided a wealth of experience as I was basically working as an apprentice to the senior photographer. Time was split between a wide variety of tasks: wrestling to faithfully copy faint traces in X – rays, photographing bodies, bits of bodies with a variety of light sources including Infra red and ultra violet. This was followed by various jobs in the public/academic sector and provided a very good grounding in photographic techniques but didn’t pay very well. With a young family to support, I branched out into the world of what was then called press and public relations and now goes under various titles including communications and media management. I carried on with photography on a freelance basis.

MF: You recently attended two Magnum workshops. What encouraged you to do that?

SB: Not having gone to study photography at College and with my photography being self directed I was conscious of being somewhat isolated and lacking the benefit of discussing ideas and approaches with other photographers. Reading about other people’s work and viewing it at exhibitions is all well and good but I needed the benefit of face to face encounters with photographers who were at different levels and working in areas that I hadn’t hitherto been involved in.

The first workshop was practically-based and lead by Donovan Wylie. Over a five-day period we went out each day to make images under related to urban environment, bringing our work back for a critique and group discussion at the end of the day . This would influence and dictate the following day’s shoot. The end product was a showing of work at the last day of the London International Documentary Festival.

The second workshop was not practically based but was a series of lectures/discussions over a weekend. Topics included social networking and web promotion, book publishing, editorial features, commercial photography, stock sale photographs, photographic print sales and exhibition structures. The list of speakers includes Monica Allende, David Birkitt, David Hurn, Steve Macleod, Christian Payne, Chris Barwick, Michael Mack, Fiona Rodgers and Sophie Wright.

MF: What was your view of that experience, and did they fulfill expectations?

SB: For me these were really useful and provided a great basis for new ideas on where and how to progress my own work. In the Wylie workshop, it was fairly nerve racking to have to work on an unfamiliar topic and in quite a challenging way both in terms of taking the images and in having the results of your work laid bare and discussed.

I was given the task of getting some environmental portraits of people living in Trellick Tower in North London. I wasn’t allowed in to the block of flats and had to resort to stopping people in the street, asking if they lived in the tower and if they would let me come in and photograph them in their flat.

I was amazed that some people did agree to let a complete stranger into their home. It did teach me the benefit of pushing myself out of my comfort zone, but most of all I gained a tremendous amount from meeting and discussing photography with a wide variety of people: the little snippets of information, new ways of doing things, the networking and links this gives you I don’t think can be achieved without face to face meetings.

The second workshop was more chalk and talk and provided a lot of useful food for thought on how you might want to progress your own work. However, there was less time and opportunity for participants to chat and discuss stuff.

MF: Between collaborative photography, debating the value of captions and opening up one’s work to discussion and re-appraisal, it looks like you have an underlying general interest in photography’s role within society — or should I say societies?

SB: Photography I feel provides a tremendously rich opportunity for people at so many different levels to express how they feel about issues, what they feel is important and how they want to show this to others. There are so many different ways of using images to express feelings and who is to say that one is more valid than another? There are many different opinions but no one “right answer”.

This is why I think it is so important to show your work because it opens you up to different possible interpretations – different people will see different things in your images. This is why I’m interested in the value of captions: should you guide people to what you are trying to communicate in an image (and if so how prescriptive do you want to be?) or let them make up their own minds? The often-spoken phrase springs to mind – there is no right or wrong answer.

In one area of your work you may want to highlight some of the issues behind the image; but should this be done with a caption alongside the image, text adjacent to the image, explanatory text that appears in an appendix or introductory text to accompanying an exhibition. Simon Roberts’ Motherland and We English, interestingly use different techniques but I haven’t had the chance yet to ask him why.

MF: How and why did your interest in collaborative shooting develop?

SB: This first started with my collaboration on the Moroccan Memories project which involved me in running workshops for young adults who were second or third generation Moroccans who had been born and brought up in Britain. We used a twin-track approach to capturing their feelings of where and how they fitted into both British and Moroccan society: first to produce portraits of them and second to give them cameras to capture what they felt was important about being both British and Moroccan.

This has progressed on to working with a variety of people who are on the periphery of mainstream society to show what it is like being in their situation. This has included working with socially excluded young adults, homeless, disabled and people have suffered a variety of setbacks.

Having looked at the work of photographers such as Jim Goldberg (Rich and Poor, Raised by Wolves, Open See), Wendy Ewald (Towards a promised land) and Jo Spence (Putting myself in the picture) and Anthony Luvera (Residency), I have been keen to explore my representation of their situation in conjunction with how they feel and how they would like to be represented to an audience.

In my work with homeless and the Eden Project this has led to an exhibition at Eden where my portrait of them on their Great Day Out is exhibited along side an image that they have taken that means something to them.

MF: Collaboration like this goes further than cooperation. Who then becomes the creator, the author, of the image?

SB: With an individual image it is dependent on how involved and deep the collaboration has been. With Great Day Out the discussion took the form of us discussing what elements in Eden meant something to them and then me selecting a suitable location and making the portrait under the prevailing conditions. So in this instance I would judge that I was the author of the image but that I would point out in publication or exhibition that this was a collaborative piece of work.

It is important I feel also to bear in mind other factors that have a bearing on authorship: The fact that the idea behind the images and the organisation of the event and the enabling of the circumstances came from me, that the participants also have an input in that they have agreed to participate in the event and cooperate with the process, that it’s the photographer that has done the post-production work and produced the image.

In Jim Goldberg’s Rich and Poor, it was Goldberg who took the photos but the sitters who chose which images they liked – the ones that they didn’t like weren’t used. Clearly though, the author of the work is Jim Goldberg.

So in the round I would say that it is the photographer that is the principle author but along side this there must be an acknowledgement of the collaboration.

MF: Following on from this, do you think it’s valuable to subsume the personality of the photographer?

SB: I think this begs the question of who is the photographer. In Anthony Luvera’s work with the homeless, he has facilitated self portraits and the individual images are just that – self portraits that build and contribute to an archive. In this instance, the photographer is the sitter. However, in my images of the homeless at Eden I am the photographer.

There is a blurring of the usual photographer/sitter relationship but I think that the bottom line is who is taking control of the making of the image and who is helping. In some circumstances it could be the sitter in others it could be the photographer.

It becomes more complicated when a number of individual images are then incorporated into an installation/book/exhibition… Is there just one author then? Taking a leaf out of scientific papers produced by a number of scientists collaborating there is often a lead author that the work tends to get associated with the work but all collaborators are listed in the title and references to the work.

MF: I have a particular interest in the role of captions because of a current project on storytelling and the photo essay. It’s an issue that tends to divide photographers — there are those who believe an image should speak for itself, and others who agree that text/commentary can assist the reading of photographs without detracting from the power of the image. Do you have a position on this?

SB: I don’t think it’s as simple as being for or against captions in all photographs. For a start I think that the nature of the work and what the author intends has a bearing on this. With my images of homeless at Eden, I think an enormous amount would be lost with out the handwritten text from the sitter. Equally, I can see that other work can be left open to the viewer to interpret/react to.

I tend to be in the camp which has some sort of additional text – whether this accompanies the image or is as an appendix – or at least some sort of explanation from author about the image. At the moment, I’m leaning towards having a simple caption and then having accompanying text in an appendix. This gives readers/viewers the option of either interpreting the image for themselves, and/or referring to the appendix text. People will form their own opinions/interpretations but I think it is useful to have access somewhere to the author thoughts about the image so that opinions/interpretations can be made in light of this rather than with out this information. One doesn’t have to preclude the other.

MF: What next?

SB: Leading on from my work with homeless I am currently looking to work with school children who have special needs. Using a collaborative style to explore with them how to tell their story and tell what it’s like to be them – their dreams, their frustrations and how they see themselves fitting in with those around them.

This article also appears on Michael Freeman’s photography blog The Freeman View.