Between 20th April and 10th June 2011, the Photon Gallery presents Tales from the North, a project bringing together the works of three English artists of younger and middle generation: photographers Jonathan Olley and Stephen J. Morgan, and video artist Simon Aeppli.

Tales from the North addresses the persistence of memory and sensitivity to the effects of specific historical circumstances; and in so doing, it is interesting to note how the artists investigate the processes of collective memory formation and reflect the current situation in the North of UK. Through their selected works, as well as their artistic endeavours in general, two Anglo-Irish and a Welsh artist establish a context relevant to exploring the impacts of historical and ideological factors on the formation of the individual’s identity. In this, their attention is not diverted by such issues as the contemporary politics of Anglo-Irish relations, or national historical discourse, but they instead share a common interest in personal (family) history, and that of the particular environments they refer to in their works or periods marking their lives. The question raised by the project is the ability to treat a delicate personal, historical or national topic in an engaged and simultaneously subtle way, and how this is addressed by these young British artists.

Poet W.H. Auden said that “we can neither repeat our past nor leave it behind”. Recalling and evoking the past, images telling “this is the way it was”; this is actually the principal function of Photography. As to the process of remembrance and oblivion through photographic images, Roland Barthes once even used the phrase “emanation of past reality”. Indeed, the works of three artists in the Tales from the North address the question as to how collective (historical) memory is “emanated” or reflected in defining individual identities. Remembrance has different forms: it might be the “Proustian” search of lost time through “pieces of the present” as is the case with Morgan, or more rational strategies of evocation and preservation such as Jonathan Olley’s topographic and typological study of the changes to Ulster’s urban landscape in Castles of Ulster. Simon Aeppli deals with the “objectification of memory” through diary entries; Aeppli’s urge to remember is clear in the title of his work In Case I Disappear. In all three pieces he symbolically keeps returning to Eden, the place of his birth, which could hardly have a more meaningful name… By focusing on particular social practices and objects from his close environment, Stephen Morgan as well constantly alludes to his youth, his own memorable “paradise”.

The three artists apply various strategies in their dealing with memory. Aeppli’s and Morgan’s oeuvre is characterised by intimate diary notes, which tell their own tale or illustrate the stories of individuals in their close proximity. Thus the subject of their narrative construction is imbued with a strong emotional component, whilst the style or the use of medium to a large extent adopts the vernacular, in that their works look like home-made snapshots as one might find in a family album. The major portion of Stephen Morgan’s series – despite their apparent objective and documentary approach – deals with subjective reminiscence of his own life and close environment, whereas through image editing Aeppli sublimes his own intimate history in the metaphor of time and space. In Aeppli’s videos, which are to a large extent a collage of existing images, family photos, diary notes, documents, cuttings and sections, Morgan’s “snapshot” is substituted by actual vernacular material.

In Morgan’s and Aeppli’s works, the ideological context is to a certain extent established with references and associations to Christianity or, more accurately, the Catholicism of Irish people as a significant identifier of personal identity. Stephen Morgan “literally” establishes the subject in his series I was Born an English Catholic. Further to this, a number of his series feature images of saints whilst one series is entirely dedicated to Cardinal Newman from the artist’s hometown of Birmingham. Aeppli’s collages contain numerous images with religious references; let us just mention an eloquent image of hands clasped in prayer, which, for a brief moment, interrupts the flow of images in In Case I Disappear. All these works allude to the Garden of Eden, a mythical place of Genesis lost for ever which gives them an additional nostalgic and melancholic character.

Jonathan Olley takes a different approach in both his series presented at this exhibition. He is basically committed to the documentary, moreover: his work is strongly dedicated to the most objective illustration of things “the way they are” or “the way they used to be”. Although he is able to overcome the actuality of photo-reportage through motif selection and subtle interpretation, it is immediately clear that we are dealing with aesthetics entirely different to both younger colleagues. Basically, Olley’s approach is topographical or even of the “new-topographics”, to use the term and definition coined in the mid-1970s to refer to more distant landscape photography. Such an approach is in all respects opposite to the intimate snapshot aesthetics of Morgan. The basic topographic dimension of Olley’s work is additionally intensified by the artist’s obvious need for material classification which defines – at least in his Castles of Ulster series – a typological investigation of specific architectural modification. Thus the series features a number of buildings which, in the process of affirming British authority, acquired features characteristic of fortifications; indeed, they are all enclosed within protective walls, with watch-towers, floodlights and cameras.

Today, both media – photography and video – relate considerable intimacy and documentary style in their portrayal of the world. Prevalent artistic practices in contemporary photography don’t deal with manipulation, inscenation or experiment, but rather tend to maintain both original qualities of photography: its documentary character as well as its intimacy. Contemporary artistic video doesn’t basically differ from contemporary photography in this respect. There have been a great many short documentary forms and narrations over the last decade, which are – one way or another – intimately based. Thus we deal with relevant – if not dominant – principles of contemporary photography and video which affirm similar constitutive and aesthetic platform of both media. In the time when technology for the first time in the history produces uniform devices for static and motion reflections of reality with unprecedented speed, this exhibition seems to be an excellent opportunity to draw attention to such convergence of photography and video which will in their future creative practice undoubtedly evolve even further.

Exhibition curated by Dejan Sluga.