I'm always aware of light being the origin of the photograph Well this is the first time I've seen
this in quite a few years
I'm Catherine Yass and I'm an artist working with photography and film
My photographs are generally shown on light boxes, to see a negative you have to look at
it on a light source so I'm keeping that connection to what made the photograph
Iwas actually the conservator for these works when they came into Tate's collection in 1996
and it's delightful actually to be revisiting these with the artist Catherine Yass in the context
of the project Encounters on the Shop Floor with the Victoria and Albert Museum
I was commissioned to do this work by the Public Art Development Trust in 1994 and it was in a psychiatric hospital
I took probably about a year making the photographs and a lot of it was to do with
waiting for the corridors to be empty waiting for the sun to be in the right place
there's a lot to do with time in there, I became really interested just in the backgrounds, when you
took the people away so these images are the scale of somebody that you would do a portrait in a way
but there's a missing centre so I was interested in that gap that you could fall into
and yourself be in this place where identity is so unstable in a way
All of these areas here are these quite sort of sickly weird bluey yellow colours and they put you in a really strange
space which is a kind of psychological space and the way that the corridors sort of
smother you and mother you and pull you in and the colours here almost work like smells
and obviously there's all those institutional smells in hospital
I've taken one shot which is a positive image just like a normal image like you would see in
a normal camera and then the other one I've loaded incorrectly and processed incorrectly
and superimposed on top and that one comes out as a kind of blue negative
and the two kind of fight each other and disrupts any easy reading
This project really allows us to work very closely with the artist to understand what it is that we're trying to preserve about
the work and actually how it was made has impact on how we think about its conservation
In the world of photography we have the lone artist trying to realise their vision from
their studio but we also have a whole host of different practitioners that they depend upon
in order to produce their work so one of the things we've done through this process of field
work is really follow Catherine on a journey around quite a small part of London in which
her network of making colleagues are situated to try to make visible what is often invisible to the
viewer who might be seeing a photograph in the museum
I've got some film to process
- So if you could just do 43 and 44 and hold the others for now - Certainly, and obviously identify them
Although the artist is the end person exhibiting the work there are a team of
people that help them to achieve what they're actually setting out to do
What this project has really told us is that it requires so many very specific things to do
with materials, people with particular skills and these networks which are quite fluid and changing
I spent quite a long time trying to work with different printers and realising that they all
have very different sensibilities that you have to kind of key into
First and foremost you've got to have a good eye the same as with a photographer and so it's having that eye that you can
help and guide clients to the result that they want because you see it too, they've seen it when
they've taken the shot you have to see it when you're printing the shot
The more you get to know the printer the more you kind of understand each other and so it's a very collaborative process
Clouds over the piano are working, the piano is... I wouldn't want to take it any lighter
and I did go darker but the writing on the piano was starting to fill in
It almost becomes a rite of passage that they trust you with their work and they know they're
going to get the good result
One of the things we've been doing is actually trying to create a map not just of the contemporary networks that Catherine depends upon but also of the historical
networks of how studios have amalgamated, closed down, reopened in other locations
and the movement of people across all of those different studios in the photographic processing world of London
and it's a very I'd say quite a close-knit community really most people know each
other or know of each other And at every stage we've been able to track networks within networks
so all of the people in these studios which artists have come to depend upon for their work
really our main finding is that we're complicating a whole host of assumptions that come out around
the world of contemporary photography particularly in relation to digital technologies so people tend
to think that with the analogue to digital shift there's a shift away from the kind of master
crafts person in the dark room to machines that you press the button in and they just spit out
images at the other side and what we've seen is that there's actually a tremendous amount of
skilled practice that goes into managing digital technologies, machines and processes
I'm still a photographic printer it's always been about photographic printing by any means available so it
used to be in the dark room with enlargers and now it's with the digital imaging machines with lasers
This project helped us to understand what parts of those networks are stable, what we might be
able to go back to to really inform future thoughts about reprinting or remaking the prints themselves
We've also seen that just as much as there is change within the photographic industry
and technologies are rapidly becoming obsolete or being replaced with new technologies there's
a tremendous amount of persistence and resilience so we've seen in photographic printing studios
that there's a huge social network people depend upon to consolidate their knowledge to bring
people together to get the job done and to find workarounds when technologies do become obsolete
when machines do stop working or programs are no longer supported
Now i'm beginning to understand it through the research we're doing that it's a process of care and of looking after the images
in order to make sure that they have the full life that they can have
you