Ada Marino, Adéọlá & Catriona Abuneke, Holly Davey & Jessie Edwards-Thomas
© Jessie Edwards-Thomas
“I only wanted Uncle Vern standing by his new car (a Hudson) on a clear day. I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary’s laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on a fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and seventy-eight trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It’s a generous medium, photography.” - American photographer Lee Friedlander
Most photographic and other archives are full of works labelled ‘Uncle Vern with his new Hudson car.’ But who is Aunt Mary and what happened to her laundry? Was Beau Jack her pet dog or the terror of the neighbourhood? Did the begonias have to be repotted, and are all those trees and pebbles still there?
All those vignettes can be found lurking in archives, at the edges, in the interstices, overshadowed by the proverbial Uncle Verns and their new Hudson cars. Indeed, visual anthropologists Elizabeth Edwards and Christopher Morton strongly advocate a critical and methodological awareness of the peripheral and the boundary areas of the photograph, beyond the central subject matter, which act as sites of alternative readings and meanings. They consider this especially pertinent in relation to historical imagery.
As part of Ffoto Cymru, Ffotogallery has invited four female or non-binary artists to look critically at various archives based in Wales and create a response. Ada Marino, artist duo Adéọlá Dewis and Catriona Abuneke, Holly Davey, and Jessie Edwards-Thomas have each in their own way excavated stories to offer an alternative and more complete reading of photographs and artworks usually labelled ‘Uncle Vern with his new Hudson car’.
The University of South Wales invites you to a ‘fireside’-style chat, in which the commissioned artists converse with each other and with documentary photography lecturer Karin Bareman about their artist practice, about the work they have created in response to the commission, but more importantly, about those partially obscured stories encountered in their chosen archives and lovingly rescued from oblivion.