I have recently become a frequent visitor to the Side Gallery in my home city of Newcastle Upon Tyne (I now live in Durham but I was born and raised on the banks of the Tyne and I will always consider Newcastle my home. You can take the Geordie out of Newcastle..............).
The Side Gallery is located on Newcastle's Quayside, it opened in 1977 and is dedicated to documentary photography and film. I attended a presentation there a couple of months ago and was so moved by the passion and energy in the building that day that I have become a bit of a regular.
The presentation was given by a local photographer by the name of Keith Pattison and entitled 'No Redemtion'. The photographs can be seen here http://www.keithpattison.com/noredemption. It was a series of slideshows set to music. The images documented the lives of the people of the village of Easington in County Durham during the miners strikes in the 1980's. The opening slides were accompanied by text, a series of random street scenes, people and places. The text with each image said "We are more than a cobbled street....................we are more than a face at the window".... etc etc and ended with the line "We are more than this!" This struck a huge chord with me as I related it to the People and Place course I am studying and also to my current personal journey through life. The combination of very strong images and very poignant music moved me almost to tears which both shocked and surprised me.
I think the words "We are more than this" can be used to accompany almost any image, particularly documentary style images as what we see in a photograph is only part of the moment in time - there is almost always more behind the scenes, out of the frame or even from another viewer of the image. By this I mean that what one person sees in a photograph may be very different from what another person sees. There is always a degree of verisimilitude, a degree of assumption about what is happening or has happened the moment a photograph was taken, the facts are only known by the photographer and/or the subject but it is this not knowing which stirs the viewers imagination and holds interest in the images.
Of course, the same can be said of people. You can look and see the physical person but there is always so much more going on behind the scenes so to speak. The words of the great David Bailey spring to mind, "Everyone looks but it takes a long time to see".
I hope that my images will one day say to their viewers "We are more than this".
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