My final version of this assignment submission differs slightly in that I have included my Introduction below (it is also in the book) and fixed the front and back cover layout to include a spine. I have also added a video of the book dummy that I made. A full portfolio of all images is available on the assessment G-drive.
My written introduction to my Body of Work is also included in the actual PDF following the copyright page and my evaluation is on a separate post.
Introduction
The Shuswap Lake in the province of British Columbia, Canada has a shoreline circumference of over 1,000 kilometres with various small communities scattered around it. The population ranges from 87 in the smallest community to 17,706 in the largest. The landscape surrounding the lake mainly consists of dense forests and is largely untamed. It is a landscape that has experienced three short-lived gold rushes, meriting scant mention in history books and tracings of miners’ log cabins can be found deep in the forests. Paddleboat ferries used to transport people and goods across the lake; today automobiles make the journey along the Trans-Canada Highway on the southern side or on dirt roads on the north shore. Even so, some areas are impossible to reach during the winter as the roads are unnavigable due to snowpacks. The Canadian Pacific trains no longer stop to pick up passengers at the stations along the southern side of the lake. Instead, they pass right by with their 80+ cars in length carrying goods to and from Asia.
It’s a space that has hidden conscription dodgers since World War I through the Vietnam War, necessitating those men to learn to live off the land in hostile terrain. As the gold rush dwindled, settlers turned to farming. These communities settled with many hopes and dreams, some envisioning their community as becoming the greatest summer resort along the Canadian Pacific rail line. I am interested in this space and the latent history of the immigrant settlers and homesteaders who chose to live in this beautiful yet harsh terrain. I hint at the physical transformations of the landscape as it changes seasonally as well as the passage of time through my photomontages. By using archival images provided by the settlers’ and homesteaders’ descendants juxtaposed with my own landscape images I create a dialogue between the settlers, descendants, and myself as newcomer to this area, and invite the viewer to encounter the gaze of the past looking back at us. This notion of collaborating and injecting my work with other voices, forms an ongoing conversation between the descendants, ourselves and future generations.
Fig. 1 Kuit, L (2022) Shuswap Lake Tales – Book Page Through
I really can’t believe that BOW has come to an end. It’s been a long road with many curves, hills and potholes to overcome and new techniques to learn. I have met three very interesting ladies along this journey who had so many memories to share and this project would not have been possible without them. Their voices have added so much flavour to mine. So thank you Pat, Heather and Faye for your wonderful contributions! I know a body of work is always considered a work in progress and I am sure there will be a few more iterations as I take this into SYP. But I am looking forward to experimenting with some techniques I came across during the period of making this project that I didn’t have time to explore at the time. I’m fairly certain that this body of work will form a nexus for other work incorporating voices of others.
Illustrations
Figure 1. Kuit, L. (2022) Shuswap Lake Tales – Book Page Through. [Online Video] At: https://vimeo.com/747435756 (Accessed 07/09/2022).
My Body of Work evolved from my Level 2 modules which were based on the landscape and underlying history of First Nations people near Shuswap Lake where I live. Shuswap Lake has a shoreline of over 1,400 km and my original intention was to create a project based solely on the landscape of this area. However, as I researched the various communities around the lake, I realised that there was interesting latent history that was worth exploring. Covid-19 restricted my access to the First Nations (Indigenous) communities, so I focused on delving into the history of the original homesteaders and settlers to this area. I put out an open call on social media to contact descendants of the homesteaders and received a few responses. I conducted interviews via Zoom and in- person and each interviewee provided archival photographs of their families and shared many entertaining stories imparting their oral history. It may be helpful for me to join a local historical society with the aim of presenting my work to a broader audience.
Fig. 1 Descendants of original homesteaders – my interviewees. From left to right: Pat Ogden, Faye Cassia via Zoom, Heather Lessard.
Using archival images contrasting with my own Landscape images I wanted to create a dialogue between the settlers and myself. As a relative newcomer to this area I would be inviting the viewer to join me in this encounter with the gaze of the past looking back at us.
I experimented using various backgrounds for my photomontages – water , icicles, and even burying photographs in the snow to achieve this hauntological effect before settling on the water/ice combination as these conveyed the passage of time that I was trying to achieve. Some had a wet-plate collodion feel to them which seemed to emphasis the passage of time and history. I further extended this concept by incorporating last century newspaper cuttings of the area.
Fig. 2 Collage of photomontages showing different backgrounds
These Individual family memories are shaped and perpetuated through stories, rituals and images that are passed down generationally forming the most important site of communicative memory. These are the memories we share with friends and family, and they have a time horizon of approximately 80 years before fading into obscurity (Erll, 2011). This notion of collaborating and injecting my work with other voices forms an ongoing conversation between the descendants, ourselves, and future generations, tying into my contextual studies regarding the concept of heteroglossia (the different ways people express themselves and their varying points of view on the world) (Bakhtin, 1981).
Looking Back
Where have you come from?
Initial intentions were to create a multimodal project with sound and/or video concentrating on the latent history of the First Nations and settler communities. While I did not end up using sound or video, the project is still multimodal in that I have used different modes (Kress, 2009), i.e. photos, text, news clippings and photomontages to communicate my ideas.
What have you learned?
Life will throw you a curve ball. Covid lockdowns effectively blocked my access to the First Nations communities. Also it takes a long time to transcribe interviews. Having some help doing this would have been nice.
What mistakes did you make?
I didn’t manage to shoot all the areas around the lake that I had intended to due to impassable roads during winter and extremely bad visibility during the wild fire season in summer. I also lost momentum and took too long in doing the transcripts. Juggling my time between BOW and CS was difficult and I frequently missed my own deadlines. This led to a lack of motivation towards the latter half of both modules.
What were the low points? High points? Who influenced you?
Low points: my increasing lack of mobility due to hip arthritis and subsequent hip replacement surgery. High points: receiving positive feedback from the LensCulture Art Photography portfolio reviewer on my photomontages which I submitted towards the end of 2021. Who influenced you? The list would be very long, but as a shortlist I would single out Aaron Schuman’s work Slant. His strategy of using newspaper cuttings played a huge role in my choice of text. The photos don’t overwhelm the text and the text doesn’t overwhelm the photos. The photos don’t illustrate the text, nor does the text anchor the photographs, but there is some sort of relationship between the two. I hope I have achieved a similar relationship with my newspaper cuttings and captions.
My BOW is tied to the concept of a journey around the Shuswap Lake and therefore I studied the work of Alec Soth (Sleeping by the Mississippi) whose work provided a stepping stone to my CS as Soth regards photography as a language that is full of dialects, which in turn refers to heteroglossia, my main theme in my dissertation. I was also interested in how Soth sequenced his images following a specific colour palette flow. Frank Watson and Freya Najade also provided inspiration around bodies of work around water. Both included elements of climate change and pollution in their projects.
For my photomontage work I drew inspiration from Gilvan Barretto who uses archival imagery, documents, poetry to create his photomontages. I was very drawn to the fact that he also used a single background colour in his work creating a unifying narrative which imparts a symbolic connotation. Lorie Novak’s work also resonated with me as her process was quite similar to mine, allowing the landscape image to bleed through to the forefront of the archival image.
How are you critically positioned within photography as a result of your work on this course?
My work is a mix of landscape and conceptual photography and I explore abstract concepts such as memory, language and latent history. The archival photographs of the Shuswap Lake ancestors function as signifiers of time looking back at us into the present. The collaboration with the descendants via their photographs and narratives has added extra layers to my authorial voice. My contextual studies research into heteroglossia, memory and the archive have given me a greater insight into how interlinked these three themes can be.
How might what you’ve produced impact on your future projects?
While I could easily expand this project by putting out for a few more open calls for descendants to come forward with their stories and photos, and this is something I am thinking of doing, I would really like to explore my own family archive and create a project around pre-emigration/post immigration using similar techniques and perhaps a few new techniques that I discovered during various artists’ talks I attended.
Have you found a personal voice that you’d like to develop?
Looking back over my OCA modules I believe my voice has steadily developed to address issues of immigration, identity, memory and language.
How did your technical decisions impact on, or impair the final outcome?
The most difficult decisions were choosing the appropriate unifying backgrounds for the photomontages. I feel the water/ice backgrounds with their added texture of grasses and twigs and presence of water and ice allowed for more depth to convey a passage of time than the water or icicle backgrounds I experimented with. I was careful to choose elements or lines in the background images that matched or echoed the archival images so that the photomontage was more integrated. Based on some feedback I received during a LensCulture Critics Choice portfolio review I elected to substitute a few photo collages and standalone archival images to create more variety.
Were you true to your artistic intentions?
Yes. I did set out to explore the communities around the Shuswap Lake, but what changed was that I delved more into the latent history of the area and accompanying memories contributed by the descendants. This was a result of my contextual studies research into heteroglossia.
What did you learn from the editing process?
That the editing process never ends. It is dynamic and fluid and is a subjective process based on form, line, colour and content.
What are the main lessons you will take away as a result of this course?
One of the main lessons I would take away is to experiment more widely. Looking back there could have been opportunities where I could have experimented more with Chlorophyll prints (had we not been inundated with 4 months of wild fire smoke) and possibly night photography too.
Looking Forward
How would you like your audience to experience your body of work? Do you have any ideas for venues or production formats ?
My original thoughts were to create a multimodal presentation with sound and video. However, as my research progressed and Covid lockdown continued, I decided on presenting my body of work in a book format. I think it lends itself well to this format as it allows the viewer to spend time examining the photos and reading the text. I will be exploring various book formats in SYP. I also plan on creating a website for my BOW. I will be presenting each of my interviewees with a copy of the book, sustainably wrapped in a scarf featuring a photomontage of one of their ancestral images they provided for the project.
What do you need for this to happen ?
I need to source printers here in Canada that will do short runs or bespoke books or self- publishing as well as looking at different formats.
Do you need to make any changes to your portfolio ?
I view my portfolio as a dynamic document, and it will always be subject to changes depending on the context in which it is used. I may have to edit down drastically for a portfolio review or gallery submission, or it could expand as a result of extra work done on the project. It will always be a work in progress.
Bibliography
Bakhtin, M. (1981) ‘Discourse in the Novel’ In: Holquist, M. (ed.) The Dialogic Imagination | Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. pp.259–422.
Erll, A. (2011) Memory in Culture. Translated by Young, S. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lynda Kuit Photography Level 3 