BlackLab: Adventures in Still Pictures

Remix: Adam Wilson’s Uncommon Places

A couple of months ago, BlackLab were invited to run a series of workshops with final year BA Photography students at Blackpool & The Fylde College. Our focus was on understanding what goes into producing a themed body of work and the aesthetic, technical, and design considerations one has to take into account. Students were asked to choose a photo book, deconstruct each and every single element of it, present their findings and produce an image that could fit seamlessly into their chosen body of work.

Of course, there are problems setting this kind of brief. Not least that we are prioritizing the style and visual vocabulary of established figures rather than encouraging students to develop their own. But questioning the role of the individual author in producing unique works (which we like to do), one inevitably has to consider photography as a language that can be appropriated and used to tackle subjects closer to home.

Thus, this exercise was as much about learning to read and ‘write’ images as anything else. The quality of the resulting work produced by the students raised even more questions than answers about authorship. For example, if an author’s style can be appropriated so well, should the quest for individual authorship be so fundamental to students’ creative development over and above their ability to communicate an idea? Is style merely a vehicle for conveying content? Or has the style of established photographers begun to over-ride the actual content of their images? Over the course of the next few weeks, you can judge for yourself.

This week, we start with Adam Wilson, whose works were shot in and around Blackpool with the intention of fitting within Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places, an epic journey through America.

We asked Adam to write a statement about the work he produced, which we include below.

Adam Wilson – New Fleetwood Banks, Southport, August 3, 2009

“Shore is really an idol of mine; his work to me is the essence of photography and he is a master of capturing a moment or space. ‘Uncommon Places’ depicts Shores travels across America during the 70’s and 80’s. The images become a record of the time and culture that he immersed himself in. The images blend together seamlessly through his style and strong through-running theme. The main consideration was the theme of Shores work; it’s so definitive and anchored in an American culture of the past. This made it a real challenge to be able to produce images that would bear relevance to his work without just copying his themes and style.

I decided to create images that were more of a British representation of his work, adapting his themes to suit, rather than discarding them completely. In terms of the aesthetic of the work, I wanted to remain as true as I could to his working methods and his rules of composition. The scene in front of the camera though would not be the big sky, big roads of the 1970’s American images. Instead, an ‘over the wall, escapist’ view would be replaced by a much more dowdy British scene, and it is that which I have tried to depict in these images.

Shores images are also very linear in their construction and use a strong framework of edges, blocks and lines in order to compose the scene. This strong use of composition is found throughout his series, so it also became a major consideration when producing my own work.

Adam Wilson – New Fleetwood Banks, Southport, August 3, 2009

Choosing locations of my own that would work in my personal take on his ‘Uncommon Places’ proved tough. I didn’t want to just re-render his work by simply going out and finding a large inner town road junction or car park, which is so typical of the series. Instead I wanted the locations I photographed to be more of a relation to those of Shore’s work. Again the two key thematic considerations that I kept in mind throughout were those of producing work that gave the viewer a sense of looking ‘over and in’ at a scene and also that of the escapist feel that I got from Shores work.”