John Askew
27th April 2012 to 26th May 2012
Gallery open: Friday 12pm to 5pm and by appointment
For John Askew, the act of photography is as much metaphysical as it is physical and tangible an act of both attention and absorption. The photograph may be an image, beautifully seen, simple and enchanting. It may also be a physical and sculptural object. At the heart of the work is a continual response to the perpetual, circular processes of looking, production and editing.
Askew’s collected observations also reflect an ongoing idiosyncratic enquiry into the ontology of photography. By drawing attention to the world and its simplicity through the everyday act of seeing, he also calls to our attention the irreducible strangeness of photography and how, one hundred and seventy two years after its invention, its identity remains as intractable and ellusive as ever
This exhibition puts together a number of interlinking strands from Askews vast body of work including his ongoing series of Archive Selection Sculptures. These originate from editing tables in the artist's studio and a selection from Askew's Three Sisters series - an archive of thousands of photographs taken during the artist's many visits to the Urals in Russia, where he has been visiting the Chulakov family since 1996. The gradual accumulation of images, both attentive and informal, has built up an intimate, though necessarily fugitive portrayal of the family and of Akews, increasingly close friendship with them
In 1996 I had my photographs exhibited in Perm State Puppet Theatre, Russia. Giorgi Chulakov, a partner in an electronics repair firm, sponsored my show. He paid for my train ticket to and from Moscow, printed the advertising posters for the show and for much of my month in Perm I stayed with his family. There wasn’t much money around then, it was only five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and this was a significant gesture. I returned a year later for a residency at the theatre. This time I stayed all my time with the Chulakov family. Giorgi’s business involved buying up broken electronic telephones and computers in Moscow to repair and resell inPerm. I was met at Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport with their van overloaded with stuff. It was deep winter. Outside Moscow, under blue skies, the roads dissolved into frozen streams of snow and ice for the 1200km drive east to Perm: a dreamlike journey into the heart of a white continent. Giorgi and his eldest daughter Lyuba visited England the following summer. We spent a week on Colonsay, an enchanted island off the West coast of Scotland. The sea to them was an unimagined, magical world, as their winter was to me. I spent the subsequent New Years eve in St Petersburg with Lyuba who was now studying painting there at Herzen Pedagogical University. Then Giorgi died of cancer. My visits to Perm continued and always I thought my work was elsewhere, giving little attention to the photographs I was making of my friends and their lives. Perhaps this accounts for the unselfconscious nature of many of the images, an aspect that first drew my attention in 2008. It led me to begin thinking of my archive of over ten thousand images, stretching back almost fourteen years and encompassing four generations of the Chulakov family, as a body of work. The Chulakovs are a family of three sisters and a brother just as in Chekhov’s play Three Sisters. I discovered too, that Chekhov had written to Maxim Gorky, saying that when he set his play in an imaginary provincial town, he was thinking of a town like Perm. John Berger begins a novel by writing ‘I remember most of what I hear, and I listen all day but sometimes I do not know how to fit everything together. When this happens I cling to words or phases that seem to ring true'. As an outsider, and as one who can't even speak Russian, I can only ever create my own story, my own play of the Chulakovs’ lives. Lying at the heart of Chekhov's play is arguably the sense of difficulty that human beings have in living in the present (in the play the three sisters long to return to Moscow where they see their real lives to be). At the centre of my work is the desire to pay respect to the things I photograph: a person, a teapot, a tree, a cat and to show them in their best light. The action of paying respect to people, things, life, not only gives a reason for, and a meaning to, living in the present, it is a stepping-stone towards fundamental and lasting political change. These are photographs of friends, food, flowers, pets and smiles. They are tokens of love. I want them to be seen as family photographs and I'm happy how such a position is at odds with my position as an outsider. It reflects the contradictions that are inherent to photography, the bizarre mix of reality and fiction that makes its identity illusive and the ambivalence of being a conscious being in the world: how we must always be on the outside to even those people and those things that are closest to our hearts
John Askew 2012
Later this year John Askew's Three Sisters archive will be published as a limited edition zine by Editions Bessard, Paris, accompanied by an essay by Ian Jeffrey. John Askew has exhibited widely in Europe including: The Photographers Gallery, London; the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; the National Museum of Photography Film and Television, Bradford, England; the National Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic; and Recontres International de la Photographie, Arles, France. This will be his first solo exhibition in London.
Carter Presents
59 Old Bethnal Green Road
London
E2 6QA
email: info@carterpresents.org
tel: 07828 553080
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