[About] a Place

Every now and then, images arrive in the inbox or on social media which make one slow down, with their welcome window onto reality, a pause for thought. Below, Alicia Miller recently spoke with Julian McKenny about one such project, McKenny’s documentary series [About] A Place, to find out what resonates with him to make these images. 

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Alicia Miller: Tell me about the evolution of this work – what does it represent for you?

Julian McKenny: [About] A Place is the keynote series within the larger project About A Place, which consists of several series that explore life on a no-dig permaculture market garden. Made over a period of ten years, I have recently edited and sequenced the work with the intention of creating a tactile and emotional experience. At the heart of the work is the decision to focus on what is close at hand. As our farm gate stall encouraged customers to buy locally grown produce, I decided that the land and activities should be the ‘localised’ centre of my artistic interest in order to examine it in greater depth.

AM: You’ve described this work as an ‘accumulation’ – how does that describe the work?

JM: As the days of our lives could be said to be an accumulation that creates the person we are, the images of the land and our activities on it act as a mirror of that progress. The photographs I would make now are not the ones I would have made several years ago. The avoidance of repetition in my approach (as well as the knowing use of it), and striving to find the simplest way to say what I want within the images, means there is a history of response built in to the work, so that it becomes an extended self-portrait.

AM: You’re an artist, but also a ‘landworker’ and [About] a Place is on one level about your relationship with the particularity of the land you work. What led you to this site, this place? Why choose to work so hard?

JM: When we moved to the six and a half acres in remote west Wales we arrived to find two 34′ static caravans had been delivered on-site and they sat tipped on end where the tractor had dragged them. Our first hands-on task was to buy a bottle jack and set about levelling them! We had looked at roughly thirty parcels of land before we found one that met most of our criteria, not least that one field was actually ‘gently sloping’ – a term that can have a lot of interpretations where estate agents are concerned. My partner, a former head gardener, had reached a point where she only wanted to grow plants that were edible, so we sold our small house in Manchester, leaving the city after twenty years and moved to a bare field. We didn’t know it at the time but we were to live in one of those caravans for over ten years… The change was a visceral experience. Through the thin shell of a caravan you hear every sound, every hoot of an owl, feel every whip of the wind, and you are woken by rooks or buzzards landing on the aluminium roof and tip tapping around. For the first four years we worked solidly – rarely left the holding – driven by the demands of converting the land, putting up tunnels, nurturing crops, picking, packing, engaging with customers. Most growers would tell the same story. It felt important to give ourselves up to this, to build stamina and resilience and perhaps purge the city versions of ourselves. In making these choices, taking these actions, there is a deep political statement regarding how we all might face our futures with climate change becoming the defining issue of our times. I feel the only workable solution to this is to walk away from capitalism and its demand for constant growth and consumption – this political stance may not be directly visible in my work but collectively the series does make a statement on alternative choices and posit the idea of a different shared reality, be it growing our own food, thinking and acting locally, building environmentally friendly housing or changing our values so we can accept that less is often more, and that consumerism does not bring a contented or fulfilled life.

AM: What is it about the mundane that interests you? You’re interested in the work of photographers like Raymond Moore, John Myers and Peter Fraser, but the mundane plays out very differently in your work where it becomes a kind of meditation on the intimacy of place. Do you see yourself aligned with these photographers or are you exploring something different?

JM: I am always interested in the things that tend not to get photographed – dull days, dreary outlooks, quiet moments, the overlooked or the everyday. I do feel a strong connection with these and other photographers such as Mark Power, but I also originally trained as a painter (as did Raymond Moore) so there is a slight difference to the responses of ‘pure’ photographers. You mentioned the ‘New Topographics’ work in relation to mine and your observation that while they too look at the mundane or banal, where they are ‘cool’ in their observation I am ‘hot’, which is an interesting distinction between the objective and subjective approaches. With regard to the British photographers mentioned, I also think that time and an extended connection with a specific place, differentiates my response from theirs – perhaps by keeping my work ‘local’ there develops an intimate familiarity with details of the site that gains in importance to me but that would be overlooked by others as too insignificant to photograph. My approach in other projects such as my exploration of the coast of west Wales Seagulls Made Me Do It, whilst still seeking the intimacy of observation, is more akin to the tradition of visiting somewhere and moving through an unfamiliar space, ‘finding’ moments where the underlying oddity of the world shines through. The Shipping Forecast or 26 Different Endings by Mark Power would serve as examples of this – powerful images, uniquely seen, of somewhere visited once and once only. This kind of photography often has a punchline, a reward for the viewer when they ‘get it’, or a ‘decisive moment’. Although far from absent in my work, these are not something I aim for, mostly preferring the non-decisive and open-ended, something you might see in the work of Robert Adams or William Eggleston whose ‘democratic eye’ sees everything equally.

AM: The sequencing of images is clearly important to you; what are your concerns in this?

JM: Sequencing is crucial as it underpins what at a glance can appear random. In [About] A Place there is a very deliberate sequence of the progress of a day from early morning to night. There is also a considered sense of the progress of a year from Spring to Winter. This allows colour and mood to ‘clump’ in groups of images and you will see that at mid-day the colours are stronger and the images take on ‘heat’ and become more abstract before cooling again. The work is really meant to be seen in book form, where the linearity of that sequence would be evident and images could be sized or grouped to give different weighting. The sequence would become more musical, more rhythmic and recurrent motifs or themes that are built in to it would be discovered. You will see that yellow and red feature strongly as connective keynotes, and there is a recurrence of circles throughout. Nets and hosepipes and materials hanging make repeated appearances, almost like a click track. For presentation on the website, I have tried to show several images at once within the screen so that a connective network of emotion can form either through colour or content.

AM: There is a recurrence of hands in this series, which makes one think of their importance in terms of manual labour, which is what land work, certainly on the scale of your site, essentially is. Is this series, among other things, a way of valuing this land work?

JM: ‘Hands-on’ or ‘getting your hands dirty’ is to be taken literally in vegetable growing – all that weeding, pricking out, picking and packing. We learn to sense by touch, as well as sight, if salad leaves have vigour, if they need watering or are past their best, and so on. We can feel the roughness of the spade handle that has weathered from being left out in the rain or the cold wheelbarrow handles on a frosty morning. The images are tactile in this sense. They are part of the human portrait in the work and, hopefully, connect the viewer to the mundane objects and surfaces, to the banality of the oft-repeated everyday task. The greyscale images of my partner’s hands are one of several mini-sequences within the whole, intended to give a change of focus and pace, to draw the attention elsewhere. There are also wider establishing shots that give an overview and these are intended to sit alone, distanced by blank pages, punctuation that allows the viewer to draw breath, as we might straighten our back after weeding. Realising the work in book form is my intended outcome and, to me, is the ideal form for it to take, affording a slowness of contemplation we don’t allow ourselves when viewing online.

AM: Would you say that you are interested in the dissolution of form as much as in form itself?

JM: You highlight several images, the hand offering an apple, the yellow washing basket, focus sharp in the foreground, background melding, emphasising the focal point, amplifying its meaning. The out of focus or dissolved form does carry its own weight of meaning, more emotional than literal, a broad sense of ‘something’. The feeling of that out of focus area is determined by the quality of the lens used (technically called ‘bokeh’) – a good lens means the texture of the unfocussed areas is more pleasant to the eye and can have a cinematic effect. This can be used as a tactic and is often seen in product and garden images in the glossy lifestyle magazines and is something I am careful to use only when low light demands it or, creatively, if its use enhances what I am trying to say within the photograph. In the latter case that dissolved/blurred form can contribute a lot, beyond mere stylistic expression or affectation.

Looking at your question in a less literal way and extending the idea of the dissolution of form to include all the images that make [About] A Place, I might hope that having engaged with the whole sequence the viewer will be left with a broad sense of life here, a residue of connection and feeling that might be akin to what we are left with after reading a novel that has affected us – some highlights of sharp focus embedded in a wash of emotional colour and tone of voice bringing a deeper sense of a way of life and the texture of it than might be given in individual images or passages, a dissolution of form that perhaps makes the nuances of the form sharper for its contrast.

AM: There is a subtle equivalence of light and time – both of which are important in land. What is the relationship between the two?

JM: Light and time are key elements in land work and growing, just as their relationship is in photography – a fast shutter speed can freeze movement often at the expense of depth of field – we must choose our point of focus and therefore of emphasis and ultimately meaning. Throughout the growing season I often have a memory of a crop from the previous season, say of a polytunnel full of tomato plants; how they grew and how they yielded. The time of day or year or the quality of light can trigger those memories  – memories of past actions, of altered or improvised ways of growing based on prior experience. Growing in a permaculture system means observing, reflecting and reacting, considering holistically what is good for the plants and the land and everything that exists on the land, be it insects or humans, flora or fauna.

Repeatedly photographing in the same spaces can become a similar process, the whole considered in the singular, the finding or discovery of new reactions, of ways of framing, of ways of thinking about the land. And this is all based on light and the specific light of specific seasons or times of day or year, and I think this becomes embedded in both the work of the grower and of the artist.

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About the contributors:

Alicia Miller – Born in the United States, she’s a long way from home but loves her life in the wild west of Wales. She works as a freelance writer and editor and understands sustainable food from the hands-on perspective of growing food on a small family-run farm.

She graduated with distinction from Stanford University and has an MA in the history of photography from the University of New Mexico.  Alicia has worked for more than 20 years in the contemporary visual arts, as Associate Director at San Francisco Camerawork, Head of Education and Public Events at the Whitechapel Gallery, London and the Axisweb Associate in Wales, among other positions.

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Julian McKenny – Contemporary photographer and artist living near Cardigan in west Wales. MA in Photography with distinction from De Montfort University, Leicester. Part of the socially-engaged collaborative art practice RhysReeceRees and co-founder of Vegetable Agenda (Where Art & Vegetables Meet). email: info@vegetableagenda.co.uk

For further viewing:

julianmckenny.com

vegetableagenda.co.uk