Photomonitor: Reflections on the past seven years’ archive

As Photomonitor celebrates the milestone of publishing more than 1,000 features online, we are grateful to Sarah Allen for reflecting here on some of her favourite features that Photomonitor has posted in the past seven years.  In green, we’ve included links to the original features to navigate you through Sarah’s edit.  

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As Photomonitor celebrates its seventh birthday I have had the pleasure of looking back through the archive to bring together some of my highlights from the past years.

One theme that quickly surfaced in this review was the number of insightful pieces on female artists and feminist practice. The Photographers’ Gallery 2016 show Feminist Avant- Garde of the 1970s showcased works from the Verbund Collection and Philomena Epps’ review touches on the seminal work included in the survey show by artists such as Martha Rosler, Valie Export, Hannah Wilke. Epps makes the important point that this cross-section of the Verbund collection tracks a specifically white, western and heterosexual feminist history and in doing so perhaps prompts us to consider the visibility of a more diverse view of feminism in photography, particularly in the UK.


In 2017 The National Portrait Gallery showcased a strong double act – Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun. Anna McNay’s review revisits these two pioneers of masquerade and performance. Wearing’s name power, coupled with the scale and colour of her work, could have overshadowed the smaller black and white work of Cahun. Yet, if anything, it was Cahun that stole the show. The artist’s biography alone is fascinating. Cahun began photographing as early as 1912, working together with her partner (and later step-sister) Suzanne Malherbe. In 1937 they were both imprisoned and sentenced to death for anti-Nazi resistance. They attempted suicide but survived to then be released on the eve of liberation. Add to this an approach to portraiture that abounded in creativity. Cahun, a master of the shifting persona, would use masks and props to fluidly move between masculine and feminine alter egos. In a book published in 1930 she wrote “Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that suits me” – an artist completely ahead of their time.


Also working across performance and photography is British artist Sian Bonnell. Camilla Brown’s essay reviews her practice which since the 1990s has engaged with themes of domesticity through absurd and performative compositions. Bonnell’s early work encompasses still-life arrangements of domestic objects such as pan scrubbers amid the landscape or slices of luncheon meat on bathroom tiles. In Health and Safety (2007) she inserts herself into the photograph. This series consists of several deadpan full-length portraits of the artist wearing pink overalls – in each photograph she adds another item of protective gear such as arm-pads, kneepads or a helmet. The artist calls these works self-staged photographs as opposed to self-portraits and they embrace what she calls ‘Wilful Amateurism’ an approach fuelled by “play, imagination, dysfunction, irreverence, absurdity, chance and fiction.” In one of the most striking series How to be Holy (2011 – 2013) , which was made while on residency in Rome, Bonnell mimics the gestures found in religious paintings while wearing a halo fashioned from a disposable party plate. Brown rightly points out that “the awkwardness in the poses she attempts to reach are moving and touching; whatever their specific context they seem to speak volumes about the contrast between the ideal and the lived experience.”


In my review of the archives I was particularly drawn to bodies of work that have stood the test of time. Broomberg and Chanarin‘s War Primer II was an obvious inclusion here. For this project the artistic duo responded to Bertolt Brecht’s seminal 1955 photobook War Primer which was a visual and lyrical attack on WWII. In the work Brecht brought together his self-termed ‘photo-epigrams’ – images culled from newspapers and magazines combined with short poems. Through lacerating combinations of image and text Brecht problematises any claims photography could make to the portrayal of truth. Broomberg and Chanarin reboot Brecht for the contemporary day by including images from The War on Terror. In our era of fake news and ‘alternative facts’, War Primer looses nothing of its power 64 years on, and Broomberg and Chanarin’s interview with Emilia Terracciano delves into the inspiration for their modern update. 


Broomberg and Chanarin’s work reflects on a seismic change in image culture born of the internet age. In a similar vein, it was interesting to consider projects which co-opt specific technologies made accessible through the internet for artistic means. In particular, reflecting on a time around 2010 when artists such as Doug Rickard, Mishka Henner, Joachim Schmid and Jon Rafman began experimenting with Google Street Photography. Here, Marco Bohr’s review of Mishka Henner is one to re-read. Henner’s series No Man’s Land brings together appropriated images from Google Street View which show prostitutes waiting on streets on the outskirts of Spanish and Italian cities.

The essay flags up a common misconception for this type of photography – that to realise the work the artist wanders aimlessly down virtual roads in search of the interesting. Rather, as Bohr flags “Henner’s methodology partially relies on other internet users making a discovery of the odd, the curious, or, in this case, the deeply voyeuristic image from Google’s image archive. In that sense, Henner sources the dynamics of the masses both in the sense that he is searching for individual images amongst an immeasurable mass of images, and also, that this search is facilitated by an anonymous mass of people unwittingly aiding Henner in his project.” It is this approach, as Bohr points out, that has resulted in the same images appearing in both Henner and Rafman’s work. When released, Henner’s series was criticised by some as voyeuristic and exploitative. The issue seems to pivot on questions of consent which in turn brings into sharp focus the reality of everyday mass surveillance without consent by global companies often motivated by financial gains.

While Henner embraces advancements born of the digital age, other artists look to the past – to archives and the found image. For Thomas Sauvin this involved salvaging photographs by the kilo which had been fated for destruction. For his project Beijing Silvermine Sauvin rescued half a million negatives from Beijing recycling plants over a period of seven years. British artist Melinda Gibson teamed up with Sauvin to select and develop negatives from the archive resulting in the series Lunar Caustic. The collection of images reveal something of their past life – scenes of everyday life in China but now overlaid with colorful and tactile abstractions, a result of the corrosive effect of degrading photographic chemicals.


Finally, perhaps the most rewarding aspects of this archive review was to discover new work. Here, the portfolio of Spencer Murphy caught my eye. The Abyss Gazes Into You combines landscape, still-life and portraiture – a result of the artist returning to his own archive to select work from various projects and to juxtapose and sequence them in order to make a new series. Murphy’s handling of light and free movement from barren landscapes to ambiguous portraiture is very successful.


Needless to say there were plenty of other articles I could have chosen for this whistle-stop review. Many congratulations to Photomonitor for a incredibly successful seven years and looking forward to the next exciting chapter.

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