Through a Northern Lens: Women, Picture, Place

Photography workshop/ seminar study day on October 28th 2016 at Glasgow School of Art (Reid Principal Seminar Room 1) to be developed in collaboration between Frances Robertson, Jenny Brownrigg, Nicky Bird and visiting researcher Mervi Lofgren (University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland), with invited guest speakers Shona Main and Sarah Neely This was an event with 4 speakers (Lofgren, Brownrigg, Main and Neely) who spoke for around 35 minutes each on their research, in order to develop a discussion and promote research links around the topic of the role of early women photographers / filmmakers and representations of ‘the North’. All the photographers /filmmakers discussed started work in the politically charged atmosphere of the inter-war period, with class- and international conflicts and allegiances very present in the minds of artists and their publics. Writer and filmmaker Shona Main, who is writing a biography on Jenny Gilbertson, is looking at the ethics of early filmmaking regarding the subject of northern communities, whilst Dr Sarah Neely’s work on film makers such as Jenny Gilbertson, Margaret Tait or Isobel Wylie Hutchison has looked at their relationship with perceptions of ‘the North’ and portraits of people and place, Jenny Brownrigg’s research examines the distinctive (and deliberately non-exotic) approach taken by women provincial documentary photographers in their presentation of such peripheral outlying regions of Scotland such as the Western Isles, while Mervi Lofgren presents the work of resolutely avant-garde ‘metropolitan’ and liberated female photographers running a commercial photographic studio in the regional centre of Rovaniemi, on the Arctic Circle, in Finnish Lapland in the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout all these strands, we see various connections and echoes, such as the presentation of the domestic and the everyday, the relationship of peripheries to the centres of culture, the question of earning a living and how the photographers perceived their own work (i.e were they commercial photographers, documentary journalists, artists, etc?), how work was funded and distributed, and perhaps most importantly, why, or whether, women were seen as amateurs in relation to their male contemporaries. We ran this event as a public seminar, with places allocated via Eventbrite, with proposed readings/ viewings by the participants in advance, in order to promote an informed discussion, and closing the event with wine and a short film screening