Field Work (2010)

My engagement with the ideas and practices of fieldwork stems from my interest in anthropology and the classification of human “types” through the “science” of anthropometry in the mid-nineteenth century.

Field Work is my attempt to address contemporary visual ethnographic practice from the position of a photographic practitioner.

I felt it was essential that I worked in and among the communities where my project would be exhibited. I explicitly wanted to develop relationships with the informants I would question and picture. The ethnographic intent was to create a series of photo-documents in two specific sites: the village of Sway in the New Forest; and Newtown in mid-Wales. As the project developed I began to use the video camera as a means to gather firsthand information and to re-imagine using the moving image the black body of the mythical ‘stranger’ who ventures into an unknown place. I aimed to deliberately confront the landscape with the black male body and also, by visibly positioning myself as the outsider/stranger/protagonist, to ‘puncture’ the social landscape.

I decided to film myself within the “alien landscape.” This forced me to reflect on my presence both as an observer and as an influence on the subjects’ reactions and responses. I wanted to suggest contemporary lines of connection between the practices of ethnography and photography—the processes of gathering firsthand evidence, similar methods of investigation and intent, and mining the image for data or visual evidence.