Sunday 30 January 2011

Ingrid Pollard, 'Postcards Home'

Ingrid Pollard’s photographic work 'Postcards Home', calls attention to generalizations and assumptions made about race and colour within Lake District discourses. She inhabits the gaps and silences and inserts herself into the mis-en-scene of typified Lake District landscapes. By doing so, she substantiates an idea I share: that the Lakes are not a landscape that allows space for a dynamic variety of peoples and human experiences. Rather, she focuses upon the isolation and menace of being the ‘other’ in this culturally and visually constructed part of England. ‘It’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment. I thought I liked the Lake District where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white. A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease, of dread’. The text which accompanies Pollard’s ‘Postcards Home’ is interesting, as it asserts a radical and politically-charged – and yet poetic – vocabulary. Her linguistic deviation highlights the presence of a conventional language of the Lakes – a way of prizing and describing the landscape that is seen to be inclusive, and which orients that landscape as a site of wholesomeness, nurture and inspiration. Much has been made of the Lake District as ‘Real England’ and its capacity to restore health and peace of mind: a place to ‘get away from it all’ and ‘return to nature’. Pollard challenges such notions with a rhetorical style that is steeped in violence and objection – “Death is the bottom line. The owners of these fields, these trees and sheep, they want me off their green and pleasant land. NO TRESPASS, they want me dead. A slow death through eyes that slide away from me...” Pollard’s final sentence in this quotation is telling – she suggests that as a Guyanan immigrant, hers is a face not recognized and affirmed through others’ gaze. With ‘the eyes that slide away from me’ she is reduced and annihilated, not accepted as a legitimate symbol within the order of the ‘true’ Lake District semiotic code. This leads to a sensation of non-existence, affirmed in Pollard’s exploration of ‘feelings I don’t belong. Walks through leafy glades with a baseball bat by my side’. Pollard’s awareness of her own face and colour as a politicized aesthetic symbol means she is able to treat her personal experiences as a microcosm through which to explore much greater relations of power. “I heard black people talk about the [postcard] image. Heritage? Whose heritage?”


Pollard attempts to find answers to this question through the particularities of her chosen medium. She exploits the conventional aesthetic code of the holiday photograph as a stable norm from which to then deviate. By inserting her own black skin into the pastoral mis-en-scene of the Lake District she plays with the initial shock that comes from seeing a Black presence in a 'natural' setting to affirm the existence of conservative conventions and assumption of pastoral heritage. Pollard explores notions of her outsider-status in the photograph below – a piece which registers multiple levels of otherness and alienation. The barbed wire fence acts as a visual signifier of the barrier that exists between her and the landscape beyond – a physical articulation of the ideological gap between her and the ‘Real England’ of the Lake District. Pollard’s look settles out of frame exacerbating the photograph’s unsettled quality. The tone and colour of the project parodies 18th century painting, shown more clearly in the photograph below which gives a conventional ‘view’ or ‘vista’ - one then challenged by Pollard’s lack of belonging to the scene she is parodying. Her work 'Pastoral Interludes' drives at not some ‘essence’ of the Lake District – it does not attempt to argue that popular conceptions of the Lake District are right or wrong – more, Pollard recognizes that they are informed by our reading of and repeated encounters with public artifacts such as postcards, photographs, and advertising literature. Pollard quizzes the stability of these artifacts as bearers of certain ‘truths’.




Photography continues to carry assumptions of truth-making – as Jean Francis Lyotard in his ‘The Postmodern Condition’ observes, “photography retains its place in the hierarchy of devices of realistic representation”. Her photographs toe a fine line between parody and documentary - Pollard’s photographs defy the naturalness of nature and expose the cultural definition that lies behind so much of the purported photographic ‘truth’. Pollard represents the experience of the Lakes through codified objects – she rewrites culture with her subversive take on existing modes of cultural ephemera.

In her words: 'the leisure industry dominates the surface, but there’s all this other stuff underneath, hidden.'

No comments:

Post a Comment