This semester’s teaching on the MA has been under the rubric of ‘professional development’. Throughout higher education in the UK, a focus on students’ ‘employability’ is predicated on a largely unexamined set of assumptions about the relationship between the individual and the labour market and about economic growth and investment in human capital. ‘Outcomes and learning gain’ are firmly embedded in the Teaching Excellence Framework, the latest bureaucratic instrument used to commodify teaching and learning and to regulate higher education. Hence it is no surprise to find a module like this on the MA programme.
Some of my colleagues on the MA take photographs for a living. A few are full time professional photographers; others teach photography or use their images for marketing or in sales. I, on the other hand, am retired – from work. So, for me, while the wider argument for devoting a semester to ‘employability’ (as commonly defined for HE purposes), will have to wait for another day, the issues were more immediate – how to find a useful definition of ‘professional development’ for someone who has not the slightest intention of developing professionally?
This was the challenge of this semester’s first assignment – to examine how/ where I thought my putative career in photography might develop and to demonstrate that I had a sense of the context in which any such development might take place. This post is an abbreviated version of my response.
The concept of ‘career’, understood in terms of job security, stability of income and the prospect of advancement, is losing its usefulness in contemporary analyses of employment and the experience of labour. Since the ending of the post-war era of ‘industrial citizenship’, advances in digital/ informational technologies continue to fracture the notion of what it means to have a job, let alone a career. When Jack Kerouac used the term ‘gig’ to describe his part-time job on the railways in 1952, he did so to signal an enviable sense of resistance and rebellion. As ‘gig’ jobs have become structurally embedded in the wider economy, they signify now only low-paid, exploitative and unprotected labour.
Disruptive technologies, on which the gig economy is largely predicated, historically begin their trajectories in this way, threatening to disturb not only the economic but also the socio-cultural worlds that arise from the pre-existing organisation of labour. With digitalisation, it has become commonplace to lament photography as yet another precarious profession, in a world where all creatives can be reduced to mere ‘content producers’. In truth, the prospect of a traditional ‘career’ in photography, or at least in photojournalism, has been receding since the collapse of photo-magazines in the 1970s and the decline of local and regional print media.
And yet, photography is more popular, in every sense, than ever before with estimates that more than 1.2 trillion photographs were taken in 2017 and the number rising every year. The majority of these photographs were taken with what we might think of as mobile phones with cameras. However, Samsung is marketing its 2018 handsets as cameras rather than as phones:
Huawei is promising even more (note also the ‘Leica’ branding):
With the increased technical sophistication of devices and the comparative ease and ubiquity of digital imaging, comes also a rise in interest in the ‘look’ of the photograph. For example, each additional Instagram filter testifies to an interest not just in the actuality but also in the art of the image. Even in the most mundane of contexts, such as the estate agent’s blurb, there is a rising aesthetic expectation of what a photograph needs to be, even to sell houses:
Aimee Crouch: 609 Bourke Street, Surry Hills, Sydney. (www.aimeecrouch.com)
Aimee Crouch: 102 Reservoir Street, Surry Hills, Sydney. (www.aimeecrouch.com)
Jade Nolan: 48 Queen Street, Newtown, Sydney. (https://www.facebook.com/iayphotographer/)
I acknowledge that this is to gloss over the way in which informational/ digital capitalism operates differentially in terms of class, gender and state interests, particularly in relation to consumerism, surveillance and the rise of non-sense. But I do so in order to make the simpler point that the making and trading of photographs also has to be understood in the context of the digital disruption of culture and the market for labour.
I am beginning to think of myself as a documentary photographer and the kind of projects in which I am interested need to develop in this ambiguous context where mass cultural engagement with photography and universality of production and consumption speak, not to a decline in what has been called the ‘documentary impulse’ – the human ‘passion to record the moments we experience and wish to preserve’ (Franklin, 2016 p. 5) – but to an expanded audience and for a different, democratised, participatory form of document(ary) – what Ritchin has called a ‘common, diaristic dialect based on showing and sharing with cellphones’ (2013 p.11).
Understanding photography as dispersed, immediate, as a ‘social everyday activity [more] than a memory-embalming activity, creating presence, relational situations, and communication’ (Sandbye, 2012 p.2) speaks to a new understanding of photography as the creation of ‘sociability and community’ and to the potential for a new form of citizen documentary to parallel developing forms of citizen journalism.
However, whether as a signal of ‘presence’, as memorial, as an expression of curiosity, through outrage, affection, a desire to witness, educate or to reform, the documentary impulse remains, at the level of the individual photographer, essentially, a personal, subjective and sometimes intimate narrative. The photographs I take are an extension of my former work in politics, as a researcher and writer on social policy and are based on my strong connection with Wales’ nascent sense of its own identity. I take photographs in and of Wales.
The question of identity has been central to Welsh political life for generations and what being Welsh means has been strongly evident in the work of Welsh photographers. Perhaps the best-known photographer of Wales is Magnum photographer David Hurn. His Land of My Father (2000) and Living in Wales (2003), share something of the gaze of Martin Parr or Tony Ray Jones but there is greater warmth than Parr and greater understanding than Jones:
David Hurn: Pub sing-along, Sennybridge. 1973. (Magnum Photos) 
David Hurn: Llanidloes, 1973. (Magnum Photos)
David Hurn: Christmas shopping, central Cardiff. 2004: (Magnum Photos)
The fictional sense of a lost, socially homogenous, impoverished, ‘coal and choirs’ Wales produced by the heritage industry is present in Hurn’s work but there is individuality too and an attitude of wry, self-deprecating humour that is itself very Welsh.
More recently, photographers like Pete Davis, Gawain Barnard,Abbie Trayler-Smith and the less optimistic Huw Alden-Davies have extended the narrative of what ‘being Welsh’ means, beyond the documentaries of previous generations.
Roger Tilley, whose moving work on the Rhondda post-strike, remains iconic, is now looking at a very different and changing Wales but with the same determined optimism (and good humour) that was evident in his earlier work:
Roger Tilley: ‘LGBT’ (http://www.rogertiley.com/lgbt.html) 
Roger Tilley: ‘Being Welsh’ (http://www.rogertiley.com/being-welsh.html)
Roger Tilley: ‘Being Welsh’ (http://www.rogertiley.com/being-welsh.html)
Abbie Traylor-Smith’s work on teenage obesity is poignant yet direct:
Abbie Traylor-Smith: ‘The Big O’ (http://www.afinebeginning.com/artists/abbie-trayler-smith/)
Whatever their subject and the quality of the work, the greatest challenge still to be faced by the individual (digital) photographer will be to find what Nancy Maynard described as the ‘front page in cyberspace’[i]. In other words, to find the curatorial infrastructure to help filter the good from the rest. In Wales, on-line communities such as Ffoton, A Fine Beginning and less formally #urbanwales) have developed to provide a point of reference for Welsh photographers and, increasingly often, some interesting physical meeting places and events (e.g. http://theeyefestival.co.uk).
Amongst photographers in Wales though, as anywhere, there is still a tendency to explore/ exploit the abject and the dysfunctional through documentary but there is also a form of, often youthful, resistance to doing so. Typical is Elijah Thomas’ Rhondda Valley’s Zine. Huckmagazine describes Thomas’ work as an ‘ode’ to where he grew up. The valleys are located not in a past ‘brittle with relics’ (to quote R.S. Thomas[ii]) but ‘in the buoyant, beating heart of South Wales’. It is not some heritage park but a ‘smattering of small communities with larger-than-life personalities, it’s a spot full of catholic, colourful characters – all of whom are equipped with the region’s habitual humour’ that Thomas records, with kindness and valley’s humour:
Elijah Thomas: ‘Reece. Ivor Hael pub, Llwynypia’. Rhondda Valleys Zine http://elijah-thomas.format.com/rhondda-valleys)
Elijah Thomas: ‘Paul “900 nails” asleep. Tonypandy’. Rhondda Valleys Zine (http://elijah-thomas.format.com/rhondda-valleys)
Elijah Thomas: untitled. Rhondda Valleys Zine. (http://elijah-thomas.format.com/rhondda-valleys)
Despite concerns over the death of print, the Rhondda Valley’s Zene is an example of the vibrant independent print sector that is developing in Wales. It exemplifies a growing appreciation of the tactile and the crafted and demonstrates a demand for text that is free(ish) from intrusive adverts and which exists solely for commercial purposes. Physical texts are more immersive, more substantial than a simple and quick click through for yet more content and reflect a growing appetite for ‘slow journalism’. It is for this reason that in my project for this semester (the work of a community building a new future on the site of an old colliery), the output will be a newspaper, after the fashion of Julian Germaine’s successful Ashington District Star project.
I have no intention of a career in photography although I do intend to develop a form of creative practice that, if not remunerative, has some purpose. I want to use my image making and storytelling as part of an active contribution to making visible the vibrancy, the edginess, the humour and the personality of a country that is getting on with the 21stcentury. The evolution of a form of mass, participatory documentary is exciting, especially given its potential for reach and inclusion while the development of new forms of material (as well as digital) artefacts offers the prospect of more personal and less mediated forms of visual communication.
References
Franklin, S. (2016) The Documentary Impulse. Phaidon Press: London and New York
Ritchen, F. (2013) Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary and the Citizen.Aperture: NY. USA
Sandbye, M. (2012) ‘It has not been—it is. The signaletic transformation of photography’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 4:1, 18159,
[i]Remarks to a Nieman Foundation conference in 1995.
[ii]R.S Thomas(1993) ‘A Welsh Landscape’ Collected Poems 1945-1990 p. 37 London: JM Dent
