Brenda Burrell

20 Years Later Opens Today!

admin — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 09:08:16 +0000

My first Solo Show in some time is opening this afternoon at the Decisive Moment Gallery at the Arts Centre in Darlington.

This is an exerpt from my blurb:

The last Seaham coal mine was forcibly closed twenty years ago.

Brenda Burrell inhabits and documents the uneasy survival of this coastal pit village from the inside: its uniquely English architecture and vibrant, indefatigable people.

After a spirited struggle, the mine, one of the most productive in Europe, was finally closed in 1991, putting a whole community out of work, its buildings, and all surrounding supply industries shattered and then bulldozed.

The twenty intervening years has seen photographers Simon Norfolk, John Davies, Sirkka Liisa Konttinen and the Billy Elliot filmmaker Lee Hall walk the empty brown wastes of the former mine land, comb the now beautiful deserted beaches, making art where the pit waste once was dumped.

This latest and ongoing series of works shows the younger inhabitants of the village twenty years after the pit closed, those whose fathers were barely toddlers themselves during the days of coal, the neatly dressed windows and weather-washed streets embarking on a new century.

There’s going to be a buffet, wine and cake, and some of my family are coming, so I’m not as nervous as I thought I might be. But it’s a tough crowd, and I’ll be grateful and willing to hear all and any comments and criticisms, as ever.

Hopefully, I’ll see you later. If you can come another time, it’s on until the 17th December – please do let me know and we’ll meet for a cuppa.

Snaps from 1966

admin — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 07:57:50 +0000

The connections in recent work have been many and roll in continually, every day a new surprise.

Interactivism, the hack day for people wanting to work with Ideas for getting Elders more involved with the internet, meshes of course with my work with individual Elders on their life streams, and with work I’ve been doing on individual personal photography archives. And so what a joy it was to see these arrive in my inbox the yesterday. The sender now has a blog herself, of course, and full instructions for uploading these to her Facebook pages. Clearly I need to re-visit those with her.

At yesterday’s The Versatile Image: Photography in the Era of Web 2.0 conference, there was lots of talk comparing this kind of verancular photograph with today’s digital versions made with point-and-shoot cameras or phones. Cindy Sherman’s was work cited by someone as the precursor to this digital stuff we see all over Facebook and Flickr, but it was hard to discern whether that was a scathing about Sherman or the digital stuff, or both. Certainly these pictures would fit well within the Sherman aesthetic.

Much is being made at the conference about the death of the photograph as object, as a piece of art on a sheet of paper. My, it’s a strange old world. Two things:

- manufacturers of those rapid black & white and colour printing machines that were being taken out of college and Uni photography departments and sold for scrap 4, 5 years ago are reporting never better new sales. I’ll dig out a reference at some point.

- Harman, Fuji and the proliferation of Chinese and eastern European film manufacturers would not still be in production were there no demand. The new and thriving Impossible Project, too. Yes there have been losses, but there’s been losses across all manufacturing industries. Whether the move to digital will ever and finally replace fine art prints handmade in a darkroom, personally many of us very much doubt. They are different objects.

In any case, it’s too soon to call death of the photograph, but please, go ahead, be my guest. The more of you who stop making proper photographs, the more precious, the more desirable an object they will become among those of us who continue to make and appreciate them.

And finally *

Word of The Day yesterday: ANXIETY. Apparently there are too many ‘images’ in the world, and that makes some people, many people anxious, although by the end of the day there was also a rush to dis-associate from that anxiety too.

Contrast that with the big words LIMINAL and METONYMIC most spoken at the last two of the DCAP conferences, and ACTION, DOCUMENT and SUBLIME at the last three NPS events. I’ll put links in to these later, must go.

* ah well maybe not finally. A bit more from the conference, back there today for Day 2. Will edit stuff in to this post.

Alex Boyd’s Sonnets From Scotland

admin — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 17:31:16 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqoB7bnd26o

First saw Alex’s pictures when I went up to Glesga last year for a wet plate collodion demo with Carl Radford at Street Level.

I love the confident masculinity in them, the sureness of foot, those grand gullie wellies, crump, crump, splosh, through his deeply damp and misty landscape. The sense of a subtle power over those glowing hills, the violent 180º sky, a silent, empty Loch, those crags, where the man alone, his braces a near-Saltire in seal-black X, marks the spot.

Open up his film as big as your screen can go, and enjoy. Then go see his work for real, if you can.

Interactivism: Where Next?

admin — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 12:40:30 +0000

Cont’d from previous posts 1, 2….

Well, things didn’t get any better at Day 2 of the Simpl.co/Google Event, no. They got worse. Much worse.

In the 4 days since the end of the Event, running over what happened in my mind, deciding how to write things up, has presented a small dilemma. On the one hand, there’s a certain loyalty to Simpl for organising this, and I’m really very grateful to them. I met lots of people who’re very interested in Retrospective Life Streaming for Elders, in helping implement aspects of it, in hearing how things will progress, possible partnerships, collaborations, keeping in touch, you know: networking. So there have been lots of positive OUTCOMES. But in the two key areas a hack event is supposed to be all about, PROCESS and OUTPUT, and the real reason why I went along, it would be difficult to feel more despondent. And goodness, I am trying.

So this is what happened next.

I Was Here -- the working title of the baby prototype project…

• Apparently it lives as lines of code on Git Hub. Where, I do not know. Many, many times I asked to see the code, to be given the link. I have Python coder friends who have Git accounts, a couple of whom were on hand throughout the Event to answer questions & help out. I’m not a coder, but can pretty much read html5, very familiar with css and most common CMS and was longing to see it. A number of issues came up, including how to share code between the 3 devs, which led to the guys walking around the building with their laptops looking for help, when help & support was literally there and willing and on DM in the palm of my hand.

• The styling: there was a logo, and dark blue nav bars, and orange buttons, and this after I’d expressly asked, and emphatically, for clear and unbranded and unstyled. That I was very clear isn’t in doubt, but in any case one would have thought it was obvious. User Generated Content (UGC) needs to lead the ‘brand’, a lesson that has been learned and reinforced over and again by the likes of Flickr in the last century. It’s not a new concept, and it’s not mine. What’s the problem with going for best practice? Why make a site look like it’s been made in a 4th form IT class?

• Why would a website aimed at Elders, with one of its stated aims to encourage Elders to use the internet, be branded with silhouettes of young, skinny white males? Anyone know why so much of our very valuable dev time was spent finding generic versions of anonymous crowd, stock pictures, yes, able bodied white people, when one of the project team, ie me, had a HD full of images like this, and this and many more right there on the desk? Illustrators, too, friends online, Elders who can make images of themselves. It’s not even as if I were in another room, or that they didn’t know.

Drowning.

What in? Prejudice? Could it really be that? Surely not. Everyone else seemed to be getting on okay with their devs, why was ours taking no notice of anything we were suggesting, I was suggesting?

This:

…gone. Nothing left of it at all. We were being given a website, with a homepage requiring a login,when a single-website solution really isn’t always (or usually) a solution to any or every problem. It’s certainly not addressed any of the issues my users are concerned with, and cosmetically, isn’t fit for purpose. Functionally, we don’t know, a prototype didn’t deploy.

Maybe making a standalone website was seen as a quick hit? Maybe it had been predetermined? Maybe, maybe, who knows, who knows.

No app, no feeds in or out of single user profiles with flexible locations on the internet, no use of existing tech or values. No tablet-ready, no work on accessibility, or on stickability features. What would make my clients/users feel happy with, use or feed information into this site? I couldn’t think of anything, couldn’t see anything.

And then came the three issues that called a halt to my participation, my sense of shared ownership over what had been going on.

• “You are going to steal our code and use it commercially.”

Hang on -- what? You think I am going to steal code that was written to express the realisation of a project that I am an integral part of, that uses my own Idea as a launching-point? Code that is open source and publicly available on GitHub to other developers? Code that is being written as part of this Interactivism Event which might be developed by other people (or not) anyway, and probably uses (or should) lots of other bits of code from Pythoners all over the world? Steal that?

• “That is a threat”

Blogging, writing this, my notes, that was what he was referring to. Is being Granny-age and a blogger, and an Ideas developer, a threat? Credit where it’s due and all that, I tweet and blog often, as accurately as I can and from my own perspective. I love to publicly recommend good people, great photography, helpful interventions, and rarely do I mention difficult or contentious experiences, except in educational or supportive contexts. Why would me, blogging my own experience of Interactivism feel threatening to you? Is it that you know you’ve ignored my every suggestion, every approach, that the context for what you’re doing is yours, and not mine, not ours, that you know, even at this late stage that you are making something we might not use?

• “We are only doing this to get grants for the students”

Oh I see! I thought we were doing this to help Elder people better make use of the internet, and to enable student developers to have real life projects to work on to that goal. We’re so delighted that there are grants, and will do all possible to help, but the students will need to be working on a project we want to use, and not something they invented on their own. Or is that wrong? What am I missing?

The Amateur Photographer at a Wedding.

The family uncle: he’s laden with cameras, flashes, often has a slew of great lenses in an expensive bag. What does any good wedding photographer do? Engage him, gain his trust. Chat briefly about his choice of system and thumbs-up his angles. Ask him to get the shots you know you’re bound to miss, garner his support to shepherd the family, organise the toddler bridesmaids (they know and trust him, after all). An uncle will tell you who are the important people at the reception, the grandad with cancer who might soon die (last chance to get his picture), the newest baby, the row of second cousins, all looking alike. You can borrow his spare batteries, he’ll hold your reflector. Nothing would be too much trouble for him, and after the event, he’ll big you up to the rest of his family so you do more work for them, that essential word-of-mouth, the customer relationship management we all want to get so right.

A foolish wedding photographer will get competitive, ignore him, will nudge the family uncle out of the way, complain about him to the groom, at best ignore him, at worst alienate, silence and sideline him.

Which is the best approach?

Was I the family uncle photographer at the Interactivism wedding? A nuisance, an irritation in the development of my own project?

Lunch was pizza and camera-talk with the wonderful dev who made the Spotted! App for PeskyPeople and Enabled By Design, and talking to a Manchester Evening News journalist who’d come with the Gransnet contingent. Gathering these different constituencies of interest in one place was a fabulous idea, and I feel so privileged to have been a part of it.

Working at LBi was fantastic, they were really great hosts, all the service people were exactly right in their levels of support & professionalism. The Brick Lane location was perfect too. Lots of great photography galleries and studios round and about, The AOP in Leonard St, Seamus Ryan in the Flower Market, Free Range just opposite. And as many samosa shops and scrummy cafes as your heart desires.

The Winners were announced at 5 on Saturday, but this feels like only a beginning for most of them. Lucy Watt posted her quick fire review this morning. Go see, there’s some wonderful stuff being made, some wonderful people making them.

There’s definitely stuff me and my generation and our Elders would definitely use, including:

• EZPZ the easy-peasy browser

This is a completely stripped down browser that you could for example install on a computer used by an elder or in classrooms and training workshops. It does exactly what it says on the tin, and there’s some potential for making an EZ email client, an EZ twitter skin and so on. It would be great if this were here NOW. I’d download & install on my 83 year old’s friend’s computer. She’d be far happier than with Firefox. Also, the Mozdevs could offer the likes of EZPZ as skins. Couldn’t they?

“We want to create an “aha” moment for older people with little or no internet experience.” Magnificent.

• Spotted -- (rolling together Accessify Places and On The Go)

The reporting access/incident app from Pesky People and Enabled By Design. Want one of these NOW! The android version is pretty much there already, apparently there’s a need for more students to work on this, and clearly some pent up demand. I’d LOVE to alpha-test, please ask me. I’ll also review and promo and so on.

It was lovely to meet Alison properly at last we’ve many connections via the disability action activists in my former life in lovely old Birmingham, and we intend to catch up on those when time allows.

So, what now?

1. There are those grants for the student devs.

Google has offered £1,500 per student for some further work on one of these ideas, and another £1,500 after that if there’s useful progression (or even if there isn’t). I’ve emailed both of the students offering my support, have tweeted recommending them to Dominic Campbell & to Andrew Eland who responded thus. Have also suggested other projects from the weekend they might develop which don’t have enough bodies. Of course if they want to work further on ‘I Was Here’ with Gransnet, I’m sure there’d be that option too, and I’d support that 100%.

2. The code on GitHub

I’ve written to our Google dev asking for the link. I’ve asked so many times, so I’m pretty sure I’m not going to get a reply. For completeness though, it would be good to see. I wonder what role model he’s been using for the ‘say-yes-do-no’ modus operandi?

3. The GoogleDoc

It’s clear now, from the very sketchy outline of the shared project plan on Google docs, that there had been no intention to do any of the things I’d been showing and asking of our team, but hey that’s only with benefit of hindsight. ‘Nice to Have’ means not now, probably not ever. Well, it means ‘nice to have.’ Stickability isn’t a priority, nothing about feeds or access, and oh, nor does it seem useful to use the Google Doc to carry anything forward. Good try, though. If you want to see it, let me know.

So, I feel I’ve discharged my responsibility to that side of our team, and would be more than happy to assist more, but the metaphorical ball is in their court. I hope at least one of them replies, but if they don’t, that’s fine too.

4. Greenham Common

Maureen Evershed and I had time to talk only very briefly about sharing experiences of the protests in the 1980s, and she and her friends have material to share. As a first step, I am delighted to just blog what we have. I have photos too, and we could easily gather together a bit of a links library, since there are indeed others out there thinking the same. Simple to do, and rewarding, uses existing tech, not ptickly contentious, doesn’t require posturing or pride. I am proud to have met her, I’m glad she came.

5. Gransnet

We were lucky to have Geraldine Bedell, the Gransnet (what’s the word -- CEO maybe?) in our group working on the bundled-in Memories Idea. There might be some things we can do together, there’s certainly a lot of synergy across other user platforms like Ravelry and a tech user group might be helpful to her. Tech aware ‘Grannies’ could feed back into the Gransnet system, a healthy loop, enriching and with the potential to extend confidence & self worth. But it’s a start-up, they have lots on, we’ll see.

Where to next with Retrospective Life Streaming For Elders?

Well, the Idea is still sitting on Simpl, and could do with local government or other public sector partners, people who’re interested in helping with the business development side, scaling, some pilots in care contexts, other people to work on it, do some [more] real life examples, stuff like that. It’s a shame that there were other LocalGov conferencey things on at the same time as Interactivism, or there might well have been some public policy wonks or SSD Directors, managers in care contexts, or heritage, or education, who might like to get involved. If that’s you, I’d love to hear from you.

Am completely open to suggestions and offers, my processes are transparent and my working patterns are flexible. Do let me know.

Some thoughts on the Interactivism Event as a whole? Here are a few.

1. Is this the first time hackers/geeks/coders have been invited to work with older people, with ‘Grannies’ in a hack event? Other contexts include a tuition relationship in the likes of local evening classes or the computer training rooms of Age UK, where outputs are to teach someone to send an email or to shop.

Any more examples? Would love to hear of any. If you know of any, please add link/s to the comments or tweet me. I feel we have to learn from them.

Hubmum wrote this. I’m so grateful to her. Loads of helpful stuff right there. I’d love to come to another one, if I can be useful, that is.

2. There’s a huge range of age, expectation and ability in the Elder group -- 50-60ish may have lots of net experience, and some or perhaps a fair amount of geekery. Those 80ish may not have been in work or education when the net began to seem an imperative, so entry levels for them are far steeper. There are also many degrees of disability in this group, some people are fit as a 20 year old, others may have physical and/or hidden disabilities or capacity issues. We’re talking FOUR + decades here.

Imagine your 21 year old self being bundled up with people aged from 10-40! Do you think many of you would have much in common?

Services do need to delineate, not treat our whole cohort as polyglot with all the same offerings, the same needs or expectations.

3. Granny! Lots of people disliked being called a Granny or being lumped in with Grannyism, or Gransnet, this having negative stereotypes and connotations, maybe seen as flaky or wittery or somehow incapable.

There was a ready expectation that Gransnet members, well all the Elders at the Event, knew nothing, which to only a very partial extent and only in a tiny minority might be true, but the level of condescension was startling eavesdropping in on many interactions. And the concept that young people know how to fix things, or make things possible for old people is amusing, but also very kind and can often be welcome, if pitched right.

4. If you give a free weekend, all expenses paid, to any group of people, they are going to exercise some warmth towards the giver, and if you offer a volunteer opt-in to something like this, people who want to go will be the people who care the most about Elders and the internet. So naturally these attendees will say warm and grateful things about their experiences, who wouldn’t?

People who paid their own way, working on chargeable-out day rates and who have expectations about the development of their own Ideas, may be a different matter. We pay to play. I’m certainly very glad I went, but I certainly didn’t do it for the money, and cannot glow when two full working days + 2 travel days plus costs were taken up in what in the end seems like a win for a student (potentially) and a big net loss for my project.

What would be really excellent would be to develop a network of tech Elders, who can help and advise and be integrated at early stages of these kinds of initiatives. If students can be paid to develop for Google, why not Elders?

5. What is the objective of hack events, and how do we help clarify this, ongoing?

Coders’ stated objectives in coming to Interactivism was to get grant/s from Google, overwhelmingly the most important thing for them, other considerations secondary. Elders may have many & various objectives but some don’t know what’s already out there so may find it difficult to articulate what they need that is new. Ideas people want a way to develop their idea to give practical support to their Elder group. Not all of these areas are compatible, nor should they be.

If other hack days are free form events where people work in collaboration, what is different about the relationship where coders work with Elders on their ideas? It might be more of a commissioning relationship, it’s certainly not a collaboration when there is no reference being made to the idea beyond a one line title.

Getting this clear from the outset would have helped enormously.

6. All the -isms

In the example of my working group, thus. Three old(er) women, excluded from the geeky development process, three young male devs, the senior top-dog white, firmly in the middle, each group of 3 sitting opposite each other at a large table. So much was lost in translation, but who really tried? Could we have done better, tried harder? I’m certain we could.

(As things stood, if our group had worked only in Hindi, with periodic round-ups in English, more people would’ve known what was going on.)

7. Lost in Translation

Some further thoughts.

As a result of Interactivism, I’m becoming convinced that we need a bridge or a series of bridges between those Elder needs/access on one side of the metaphorical river, and to tech or application support and geekery on the other. A series of ropes, ladders, a few cranes, some flyers of planes. When these shiny new tools have been made, who tests them to breaking point, and who then goes out to the care homes and isolated villages with examples of EZPZ (say) on a touchscreen?

Do we need an Elder flying squad?

There are challenges around building a translation model and fostering some/more mutual understanding between the cohorts. Several Elders were wanting a glossary or dictionary, so very clear they were that the devs were speaking a whole other language. Is that a training issue or do both sides need to learn how and when to flip between essential jargon required among professionals to do a job, and when and how to share that without sounding patronising or partial?

Training and personal development, strategies for overcoming cross-cohort prejudice and the promotion of understanding -- could we begin by using ablement/racism awareness models? Loose structures, dynamic, self-curating systems are fabulous but do exclude people who are unfamiliar with them or who are invisible.

Tokenism is VERY useful for demonstrating inclusion, exposing role models to a wider community, and helping to break stereotypes, but and but we need to be aware that the job of a token is to open the entry chink to the excluded, and help kick wide the doors.

To all those Gransnet members who came along, who helped me with my thinking, who shared their ideas and processes, I am extremely grateful. We might be tokens now, but there are many thousands more where we came from.

Just for fun:

“All of Google is open source” -- a Google dev

Well, no it isn’t. It’s built on Linux servers but its search algorithms, adwords and aspects of its api are closed and opaque. So no, unless you’re an insider, Google isn’t Open Source.

“We need a yellow pages for the internet.” -- an elder

Well, no we don’t. We perhaps need new ways of organising information on the internet to make it more accessible, but work on that is ongoing all the time. There is skewing towards shopping of course, and political interference a-plenty, but no, we don’t need a yellow pages. There’s Yell.com, but Google is doing the job, we don’t even need Yell any more.

“Everything you put on the internet stays there for ever.” -- a coder and separately, an elder

Well, to some extent that’s true and it’s important to behave as if it does, but actually, there are lots of examples of servers going kaput and unplugged in China or bombed Libya, the good old USofA wanting to wipe out protest or activism, and we’ll soon see how complex that simple statement is in practice. And of course anything can be hidden from search, just by coding it badly or by deliberate interference.

So, no.

“We could change history by writing lies (like Holocaust deniers).” -- an elder

I love this one. It’s true! If there are enough of us who agree, and who write our own stories, we can change the course of history. Yes!

Do you have examples of your own? [That's for @bounder]

Happy to take discussion or dissent or any of your thoughts here or on #twitter -- the hashtag is #interactivism.

And finally -- Google is hiring!!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=blB_X38YSxQ

More to come….

Leith Arts Festival

admin — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 15:13:24 +0000

In among all the mega-busy, it was such a delight to be invited by Alastair Cook to send a few pictures to Leith for the Art Fair at the Festival there. A real honour to be asked! Among the company showing their work is Carl Radford, Deborah Parkin, Alex Boyd (whose work I saw while at Street Level last year), Alison McWhirter, Emily Workman, and the very clever Katie Cooke (who was helping at Carl’s demo last year, so I’ve met her), and I so wish I could get there to see it, but simply don’t have time.

Deborah has just put some of Alastair’s pictures of the Exhibition on Facebook, so you’ll have to follow one of us to see them. My follow button is just over there, top right. This is Deborah’s page, this is Alastair’s.

Of the two pictures above, from the Dene Series, only the upper is left in print form currently, until I can carve out the time to get back into the darkroom. Yes, I’ll have to properly edition them; they’re unique so only 1/1 so far.

Serious darkroom withdrawal symptoms at the moment. There are a few deep grisly pictures that are scanning pretty well, so they should also make good prints. Soft powdery matt finish, low contrast thick fibre paper, again. The depth is amazing: I want to feel as though I might fall right in, just like Alice.

Feedback from my new friend and critic Robert Burns: “Ach, bit o’ this, bit o’ that, Brenda you’re all over the bliddy place!” He’s right, I am. Taking that completely on board, I’m deliberately limiting my tools and scope, focusing right down, and I’m going to concentrate on getting the printing right, or at least better, as soon as I can. Andrew Sanderson has offered to help me, and oh my what an offer that is. The master, and not too far away either, do-able in a day, anyway.

So two rangefinders have already been sold, lots of stuff’s been given away, lenses and so on, so it’s started already, but before the fragmention’s cut completely, I’m awa’ on one of Carl‘s Wet Plate courses at the beginning of July. I was committed before I’d made these promises, and I’m going to enjoy it whatever happens. If I can conquer my fear of the darkslide with a sweet, wet plate, might be exactly what I need.

The Clock Tower, Low Wood, Cumbria. I think there’s one place left, perhaps if you’re really quick….