Ph Research Network: Group activity 2010-21 

Overview

As emerging, in 2010 (from Charlotte Cotton’s Either/And project at the National Media Museum) the Ph project held regular meetings, from 2012, at the new building for The Photographer’s Gallery, Soho. Due to various academic affiliations regular   meetings, also held at UCL, The Courtauld and Birkbeck College. These were often a combination of sharing current research, for critical discussion and feedback in a supportive environment, as well as planning group projects. From around 2016, with a more developed focus on independent practice, the group has become more mobile, also meeting in homes and studios of current members while considering new venues and partnerships for the next decade.   

Example activity:  

Either/And: An online project hosted by the National Media Museum

 Either/And has been devised as a framework within which to debate and share perspectives, using issues and questions posed by the National Media Museum and its partners as the catalyst for discussion and exchange relating to media. A series of commissioned essays, interviews, images and films will be published on the site to serve as the catalyst for online public discussion.

A Ph network public talk at The Courtauld, featuring directors (Ben Burbridge, Olga Smith, Annebella Pollen) in conversation with Charlotte Cotton

I was really impressed with the way that Ph had come together as a supportive group of postgraduates and photography educators to share ideas and create a wider sense of photography’s debates. Your collective pluralism seemed to me to be a very special and necessary energy for the field of photography and one that the wider community of photofiends would enjoy interacting with.  And I hope the project’s first year offers Ph a platform for discourse that is wider than the academic communities that you are part of.  (Charlotte Cotton, April 2012)

Photography Reframed: New Visions of Contemporary Photographic Culture

Ben Burbridge and Annebella Pollen (eds.)  IB Taurus 2018

This was the eventual outcome from the Either/And project as well as many conversations and presentations at the Ph meetings circa 2010-16. 

The book is the product of a lot of people’s work, a lot of other people’s energy and commitment, and as a result it feels like something quite important now it’s reaching a conclusion of sorts. Collectively, I think we’ve made a good stab at identifying some important routes of travel for discussions around photography which, in my view at least, should always be anchored in something else. (Ben Burbridge, 2018)

Bridging the Distance : Exhibition at FourCorners, London 2021

The exhibition, planned for the 10th anniversary of Ph, responds to the diversity of viewpoints found across the membership of the group as a microcosm of a wider diversity. This approach aims to collapse traditional hierarchies and initiates a levelling of the distinctions between theory and practice. It suggests the power and immediacy of photography to bridge the distances between perspectives. The works will manifest these ideas through studies that span notions of place and interactions, including between environment, portraiture, surveillance and resistance.

The collaborative spirit of the Ph Network is amplified by reaching out to the iconic Four Corners in East London, a space for radical filmmaking and photography for nearly half a century. Held in the gallery at Four Corners in June 2021, the exhibition was subject to several postponements due to the global pandemic. It includes visual, audio visual and text works from several Ph members and will be revisited in the near future.