The Elephant Vanishes is a collaboration between the Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) and the London College of Communication Faculty of Media (LCC).
Initiated by Val Williams and Patrick Sutherland in 2004, and prompted by the coming regeneration of the Elephant and Castle area, the Elephant Vanishes project was launched with a Study Day on Wednesday 27 April 2005.
The Elephant Vanishes Study Day
Wednesday 27 April 2005
Podium Lecture Theatre
London College of Communication
Elephant and Castle
London SE1
Quotation: Norman Collins:
‘And London is the people’s city. That is why Petticoat Lane is more London than Park Lane. And that is why London is the Mile End Road and the Walworth Road and the Lambeth Road and the Elephant and Castle. Strange, isn’t it, how much of the real London still lies south of the river, just as it did in Shakespeare’s day, and in Chaucer’s day before him? It is as though across the Thames- in London’s Deep South- times and manners haven’t changed so much as in the Parliamentary North.’
London Belongs to Me. Published by William Collins, London. 1945
Introduction
The need to record and document is particularly acute at a time of change. The Elephant and Castle is now facing major transformation. Over the next decade, during which demolition and rebuilding will take place, the Elephant and Castle will become the focus of desires and ambitions, frustrations and regrets. It will be rebuilt because it is deemed as being ‘unsatisfactory’, its ageing pink shopping centre and the mirrored cube at the heart of the traffic roundabout being seen now as a somewhat shameful experiment in modernity. Its massive estates are now seen as being an antiquated and unsightly solution to the housing needs of this part of London. Elephant and Castle will undoubtedly, over the next ten years, become the focus for political, social and aesthetic debates. Sitting at the very centre of the Elephant, the London College of Communication is well positioned to both observe and contribute to those debates. It is as much a part of, and a landmark in, this part of South East London as is the Shopping Centre and the steel cube. The project, of documentation and interaction, which is emerging from the School of Media and the Photography and the Archive Research Centre will be a multi- layered one, to do with the present and the past, with histories and history, realities and all the fictions which emerge from them. It will involve photographers and filmmakers, sonic and graphic artists, architects, thinkers, writers and those who are curious about what has been, what might be, and what is.
This study day is the beginning of this process, a gathering together of different voices to begin on ongoing conversation about space, place and the city.
Programme
10:00 Study Day Opens
10:05 Welcome and Introduction: Val Williams
Val is a writer and curator, UAL Professor of the History and Culture of Photography and Director of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre.
10:15 Patrick Sutherland
Patrick is a documentary photographer and former leader of the postgraduate photojournalism course at LCC. He is now a Reader at LCC and, with Paul Lowe is developing the ‘Elephant Vanishes’ survey project.
For many years he has been documenting the Spiti Valley, a culturally Tibetan community in North India. This has led to a book and international touring exhibition. He is currently working on the Spiti Sound Archive, a community based sound recording project, funded by the LCC and the British Library.
10:30 Walter Hutton
Walter is a graphic designer and works at LCC Design Practice.
He has known the Elephant & Castle area for seven years. He decided to research and write about the Elephant because he found his experiences at odds with the prevailing perception of the E&C as an ‘urban hell hole’ His research covers the history of the area and an analysis of the architectural and urban environment past, present and future.
10:45 Roger Hargreaves
Roger is Photography Programme Manager at the National Portrait Gallery.
He will be talking about his latest book project Trafalgar Square Through the Camera.
11:00 Marek Siemaszko
Marek has owned Tlön Books in the E&C shopping centre for about 10 years.
He also also teaches English as a foreign language at a college in Wimbledon,and presents an internet radio programme on Raiders Broadcasting..He is Anglo-Polish and
is fascinated by the diversity of the human race.
He has MAs from St. Andrews and the School of Slavonic Studies in London, and a PGCE from the Institute of Education
He will present his thoughts on the past, present and future of the area, from the viewpoint of the owner of an established business.
11:15 Peter Wyeth
Peter has been a filmmaker for over twenty years, with awards and festival screenings around the world, (runner-up best documentary of the year Grierson Award) for '12 Views of Kensal House'. He was Head of Film and TV at LCC from 1999 to 2003 and is now Director of Development. Current projects include 'The Matter of Vision' , proposing a shift in understanding cinema from linguistics and semiotics to neurology and evolutionary biology, Dracula Weekend, a feature film, and a one-hour TV programme on the recently deceased John De Lorean for Channel Five.
His talk will be about visual strategies for a (film) archaeology of the Elephant.
11:30 Peter Cusack
Peter is a sound artist with a long-term interest in environmental sound and acoustic ecology.
He will speak about recent projects, such as Your Favourite London Sounds and Baku in 5 Quarters, which have attempted to illuminated the vital role of everyday sound in our sense(s) of place.
11:45 Sophie Howarth: Responder
Sophie Howarth is Curator of Adult Programmes at Tate Modern. She has organized many lecture series and workshops around photography at Tate.
End of Morning Programme
Quotation: Peter Ackroyd:
‘The erection of Westminster Bridge in 1750 and the completion of Blackfriars Bridge nineteen years later, marked the real development of south London. Highways led from the newly established bridges, and moved towards Kennington and the Elephant and Castle; in addition roads were laid across open fields to join these major thoroughfares. The new road led to fresh industrial development, so that the vinegar and dye works were complemented by potteries’ lime kilns and blacking factories. By 1800, Lambeth had assumed all the characteristics of a slum.
Yet the area still grew; it expanded and developed, acquiring its shape along with the other ribbon developments which snaked southwards.
From London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd. Chatto and Windus, London, 2000.
12:00 Lunch
12.20- Screenings (to be projected throughout the lunch period- please feel free to come and go)
Two short films by Mark Lewis made on the Heygate Estate Children’s Games and Tenement Yard to be shown in the Podium Lecture Theatre. Courtesy Film and Video Umbrella, London.
Mark Lewis
Mark Lewis' work functions as a critique of cinema, encouraging the viewer's awareness of the clichés, conventions and fragmentary nature of film, and how it has been constructed historically. In so doing, he also acknowledges its suggestive power, and the alluring, seductive visual qualities of the medium, whilst maintaining a certain critical distance in his extraction and re-evaluation of its components.
Projections of work by photographer Leigh Hirst
Leigh Hirst
Leigh was the 'official photographer' for the Elephant & Castle
shopping centre from 1994until 2002. She snapped events in the centre; tea dances,
family portraits, days trips to the seaside for pensioners, etc. After six
years she traced a number of sitters from the very first event, who
commented and wrote on the pictures. An exhibition of the resulting
portraits, Elephant & Castle Families: 1994/200 , was shown at the
Museum of London in 2000, alongside a show on shopping centres in and
around London.
Quotation: Michael Collins
It was concrete all around. It covered much of what was once Lock’s Fields. The Estate was built over land where previously there were streets of houses, tenements, a stretch of shops, a small tabernacle and a synagogue. It was the last of those three megalithic estates that would alter the make-up of the borough, each of which was completed in the 1970s. These had not become joined as part of that original plan of ‘south London link-ups’. Nevertheless, Southwark was one of the boroughs used as a testing ground for the revolutionary deck system. This was an attempt to create a ‘street in mid-air’ – a ‘safe pathway’ free of the noise, dirt and fumes on the ground.
The Likes of Us: Michael Collins. Published by Granta, London 2004
Afternoon Session
13:00 Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg
Adam and Oliver are a photographic team based in London. They have published three books: Trust , , to accompany their solo-show at The Hasselblad Center in Sweden; Ghetto, a compilation of their three years of work as editors and principle photographers for Colors Magazine. Their most recent book, Mr. Mkhize's Portrait was published as a catalogue for their solo-show at The Photographer's Gallery. The book was the result of a commission by South Africa's Constitutional Court, to make a portrait of the country ten years after the end of apartheid. Adam and Oliver also work for magazines. including The Observer Magazine, The Guardian Weekend and Life. They have recently directed their first documentary, commissioned by Channel 4.
They will talk about their most recent project, photographed and filmed in Israel. They visited an Israeli Defence Force counter-terrorist training base. The base is located in the middle of the Negev Desert, and bizarrely called Chicago. The base consists of a fake middle-eastern town built by the Israeli's for low-intensity urban conflict training. The base has also served both American troops before both the Gulf war and the recent invasion of Iraq. The design of the fake town is based on "refugee camps in the occupied territories, towns in Lebanon, Iraq and all over the middle-east". It is a perfect example of Orientalism, the occidents’ muddled view of an inscrutable middle-east.
13:15 Donald Hyslop
Donald manages community and external relationships for Tate, primarily developing the social role of the museum in the regeneration process of South London.
His talk, ‘The Elephant Talks Back’ will discuss creatively involving people in the regeneration processes.
13:30 Warren Neidich
Warren is Artist in Residence and the ACE AHRB Fellow in Computing at Goldsmiths College London. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues, which include the ICA London, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Ludwig Museum and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. He is the author of many books including American History Reinvented and more recently Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain published by DAP and the University of California, Riverside.
Warren will be talking about his Earthling Project as it directly relates to ideas of global flows of information, people and economy of which Elephant & Castle is a microculture.
13:45 Hannah Guy
Hannah was born in Cornwall in 1978, and graduated from the University of Brighton in 2002. She has been living in the Elephant and Castle for two years. Her main body of work, being developed during the MA in Photography at LCC, revolves around the photographic archive.
‘My first knowledge of Africa was standing, at age nine, on the rock of Gibraltar, with my father gazing over the Straits towards the Atlas Mountains of Northern Morocco. Africa. I could not believe that this place from the storybooks, a continent defined by descriptions of slavery, voodoo and ‘The British Empire’, was only twenty miles from the edge of Europe.’
A childish intrigue and curiosity are two elements that brought this body of work together. Through the desire to establish a connection with her surroundings and to develop a rapport with the community, Hannah has been making portraits of the mainly West African congregation of the Club Land Methodist Church. The resulting series begins to explore and elucidate part of the community. Through the simple portraits that look at the ‘traditional African’ fabrics, the work raises question of origin and national identity, without over simplifying the complex issues that surround them.
14:00 Mark Haworth- Booth
Mark worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1970-2004, serving as senior curator of photographs from 1977to 2004. He has curated many photographic exhibitions, beginning with The Compassionate Camera: Dustbowl Pictures (1973) – the first UK exhibition devoted to the US Farm Security Administration. He published a history of the V&A photography collection, Photography: An Independent Art in 1997. Mark Haworth-Booth retired from the V&A in August 2004. His most recent book, Things: A Spectrum of Photography 1850-2001, was published by the V&A in association with Jonathan Cape in March 2005. He is curating a centenary retrospective of Lee Miller’s photographs for the V&A (2007). He is Visiting Professor of Photography at University of the Arts London and Honorary Research Fellow at the V&A.
He will be speaking about the Farm Security Administration survey project in Thirties’ USA.
14:15 Elizabeth Edwards: Responder
Elizabeth is Head of Photograph Collections at Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford and Lecturer in Visual Anthropology. In September she is taking up the post of Senior Research Fellow at the University of the Arts London (LCC). Originally trained as an historian she has written extensively about the relationship between photography and history, especially in cross-cultural contexts. She edited Anthropology and Photography 1865-1920 (Yale 1992), her most recent books are Raw Histories: Photographs Anthropology and Museums (Oxford 2001) and an edited volume with Janice Hart Photographs Objects Histories: on the materiality of images (London 2004). She is
currently extending her work on materiality and is also working on a book of the relationship between photography, collective memory and Englishness between 1890 and 1914.
14:20 Tea
Quotation: Patrick Wright
‘On one hand stands Brideshead- a countervailing and predominantly rural world based on private values and culturally sanctioned hierarchy, where history is venerated as tradition and culture is based on ancestry and descent. On the other side, where the communist menace was for James Lees-Milne, lies the wreckage of 1945 piled up under the sign of the urban tower block: the commitment to public as opposed to private values, the anti-hierarchical egalitarianism, the hope that history could be made through the progressive works of an expert and newly enlightened State, the idea of a society based on more consent than descent. This polarized imagery is grounded in the true failures of post-war modernization, but the polemical drama it has spawned offers no real answers to the problems it expresses. ’
A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London by Patrick Wright. Radius, London 1991.
14:35 Sheena Macrae
Sheena is an artist who has worked with local women devising and producing film projects under the auspices of ‘In the Picture. MORE DETAILS ASKED FOR.
14:50 Hannah Liley:
Hannah is a freelance curator. She is currently researching and programming a series of exhibitions and public/performance works by visual artists and architects on the ephemeral nature of cities. She was Exhibitions Organiser at the Institute of Visual Culture, Cambridge, during which time she organised and developed an artist’s project for the 2003 Venice Biennale. From 1996-2000 she worked at Cambridge Darkroom Gallery, organising and curating numerous artists’ commissions.
She will be speaking about how architecture and urbanism, as means of planning, have been the traditional sites for utopian projection in imagining ideal cities. The works highlighted in this discussion consider artists’ processes that do not fit within the plan, but exist to articulate a utopian horizon and consider the frictions between centralised controls and autonomous initiatives. The artists and their work are not about solutions but an analysis and rethinking of lived and built space.
15:05 Dave Clark
Dave lectures in photography at the University of Bolton
He will speak about China, Photography and Famine, a critical investigation into the development of Chinese photographic culture and its representation during the period
1958-62.
He will discuss the photographic representation of China during the period 1958-62 in particular reference to the absence of images of the famine that engulfed the country at the time. It argues that a unique combination of cultural and political factors led to what is widely regarded as the world's worst humanitarian disaster, passing unrecorded, although there were photographers present. The paper critically analyses the development of photographic culture in China, and uses this example to discuss the relationship of photography with humanitarian disaster.
15:20 Simon Herron and Susanne Isa
"There are two kinds of stories - fact and fiction"
Simon and Susanne studied architecture at the
Architectural Association London and the Steadelschule Frankfurt.
They currently teach diploma and masters design units at the Bartlett
School of Architecture UCL, University of Westminster and are
visiting Professors at Southern California Institute of Architecture,
Los Angeles. They are also in private practice and run the Ron Herron Archive.
15:35 Sandra Koa-Wing
Sandra is the Development Officer at the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex.
She will be speaking about the work of the archive in documenting the lives and opinions of British people from the Thirties onwards.
15:50 Grace Robertson
Grace was one of the very few women photographers to succeed in photojournalism in the 1950s. As a Picture Post photographer, she made many important photo stories.
She will be talking about a ‘typical group of women living in two adjacent areas south of the river in the 1950s, women whose life- style and homes were very similar to those of the Elephant and Castle. All the pubs in those areas arranged women only outings each year and my pictures show the preparations for a day out in Margate, that was typical of those times when working women spent a well-earned day off, away from their responsibilities’
16:05 Paul Halliday
Paul Halliday is a photographer, film-maker and sociologist based in Goldsmiths College where he is the Course Leader on the MA Photography and Urban Cultures. He studied photojournalism and digital media at LCC, fine art film at Central Saint Martins and anthropology at Goldsmiths College. His research interests focus on the sociology of art, the visual cultures of urban space, film ethnography, human rights campaigning and urban photography.
He will talk about interdisciplinarity within urban visual practice focusing on his photographic work in London.
16:20 David Chandler: Responder
David is Director of Photoworks UK and Senior Lecturer in Photography at LCC.
He has been responsible for many exhibitions and publications around photography both at Photoworks and previously at the Photographers’ Gallery.
Endword: Julian Rodriguez, Dean, School of Media.
The Elephant Vanishes Study Day is a collaboration between the Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) (Val Williams and Lorna Crabbe) and LCC School of Media (Patrick Sutherland and Paul Lowe). The day has been funded by UAL Research Support Office, LCC Research, LCC School of Media. Programme compiled by PARC and designed by Walter Hutton, LCC Design Unit.
Book Launch in the Atrium Gallery, LCC
Paul Lowe’s new book Bosnians will be launched in the Atrium Gallery at LCC after the Study Day. All welcome.
Paul Lowe is an award-winning freelance photographer and teacher living and working between Sarajevo and London. His work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, Life, Der Spiegel, The Observer and The Independent amongst others. He has covered breaking news the world over, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nelson Mandela’s release, the Rwandan genocide and the destruction of Grozny. He is currently developing an online educational programme for developing-world photographers in conjunction with the World Press Photo Foundation in Amsterdam. Since 2004, Paul has been leader of the MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at LCC.
The Elephant Vanishes Workshop, with Tate Modern.
July 2006
!2 students working with artists, historians and writers, made their own interpretations of the area, which were exhibited for one night in the East Room at Tate Modern .
The group was led by Val Wiiliams(PARC) and Sophie Howarth (Tate Modern).
LCC MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography
MA students, led by Patrick Sutherland, Paul Lowe and John Easterby work on the Elephant project as part of their MA studies, tutored by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. The resulting work has been shown in 4 exhibitions and two books have been produced, edited by Patrick Sutherland: Home: the Elephant and Castle and Community: The Elephant and Castle, both published by the University of the Arts.