My name is Cocoa Laney and I'm a documentary photographer originally from Alabama, in the US
and my work focuses on gender, religion, shame, sexuality in the south of the US.
I'm the recipient of the 2019 postgraduate bursary with the Royal Photographic Society
and it was one of those things that I applied for, really hoped I got, didn't hear about for a few months
and then when I found out that I was the recipient it was, oh I don't know
I'm still a bit in shock! It's really, really an honour
and that grant has allowed me to pretty much do everything with this project
so I was able to use the funds to pay for the journey, but also the development of the final book, the prints -
pretty much everything that this project is, is funded by this grant and I'm very thankful for that
So my recent project is entitled Belle, and it's my sort of
journey road trip through Alabama. For about six weeks during the summer
I stayed on the couches of various young women and non-binary people in the South
talking about themes of religion, shame, gender
and basically what it means to be a Southern woman in Alabama today.
Say you think of a Southern woman, and you think of the 'southern belle'
you think of this very prim-and-proper, generally white, upper-middle-class young woman
who is just entering into society and she's very strong but she's also very demure in that strength
and she tends to encapsulate a lot of the contradictions
that you see in this sort of archetype of southern femininity.
The reality is that doesn't really exist, that archetype,
and the people that I talk to in this project all spoke about
their own experiences with these expectations of what a woman should be in the South
which is a region that has evolved quite a lot
but at the same time, does tend to hold more traditional views in respect to the rest of the US
it tends to be much more religious, much more fundamentalist in that sort of religious orientation.
There were about 30 different women that I talked to,
I wrote a letter to the next person basically saying
"hello, this is me, this is a bit of my experience", words of encouragement, really
whatever that particular person wanted to share with the next anonymous person I'd meet on my next stop,
and the great thing about the project was everybody that I met
had a very different view of what they think womanhood is
and what they see their place sort of in the society as.
This is a subject that is quite close to me, given that I spent 21, 22 years of my life in Alabama
and I have still quite a few mixed feelings about it, especially with what's happened politically this year.
The abortion ban that was attempted and thankfully blocked, temporarily.
All the discourse around feminism, women's issues in the South in the run-up to the presidential election.
At the end of the day, Alabama is quite unequal in quite a few ways, even now
and that's something that I wanted to highlight within the project
it's this ranged experiences, and also not say that
"Ah yes you know I'm from there, my voice is sort of the encapsulation of all of this", because it's not.
In all honesty, I've never been so much of a fan of the term giving voice,
because the reality is the people that are in the projects have voices and they use them
and that was something that I wanted to give space to, rather than say that "I am the conduit for these voices"
that already are quite capable
So I think I look at the project as more of a collection of a bunch of different voices
that already stand quite well on their own.
One of my absolute favourite authors, Rebecca Solnit, wrote in her last book
that a lot of activism stems from not anger, but a place of love,
and I think I went into the work quite angry at Alabama,
at these issues of inequality, at these issues of injustice that I saw growing up and I've felt quite strongly about
but then over the duration of making the work,
of having these very intimate connections with the participants and allowing the themes to grow,
I realised that I'm not as angry as I thought I was
I think my motivation for doing this was more out of love
and out of a very complicated sort of respect for the place that I grew up in.
It was a bit of a transformative experience in the end,
both on the one hand in terms of going back and facing some things that I was quite uncomfortable about,
some elements of the culture in which I grew up that I found quite difficult to navigate.
My family growing up was very silent on certain issues
and I always had a lot of tension and a lot of shame
around ideas of gender, ideas around sexuality, religion,
things that are quite close to me but I was always very afraid of confronting and talking about.
Going into making a photographic project do you have to wear so many different hats
so not only sort of being the conceptual force behind it and photographing it,
but also the book design, for example learning InDesign,
how to set up a layout and I am probably the least numerically-minded person on the face of the planet
so working with measurements and figuring out how to lay things out on the wall
and working with printers and all of the nitty-gritty technical things,
that was definitely a learning curve for me.
It pushed me out of my comfort zone, making those more technical choices
and I'm very glad to be in a context where I have help with that and guidance.
It works eventually, but it was an exciting period making those choices.
So the centerpiece of the exhibition is a light box of this lit-up cross
that I found at about two in the morning driving down some random highway
and yeah I could not not stop and take a photograph of that
because it does sum up a lot of the themes of the project,
religion is quite important in the narrative that I want to convey,
both in the book and in the exhibition, and as an overall theme within the work.
So I built the exhibition around this lightbox
and you have two constellations that meet in the middle.
On the left hand side the images that I chose tend to be a bit darker,
a little bit more foreboding in the sense that you get when you look at them.
One of them is a woman sitting in a chair
there's a post obscuring her face, and that image in particular speaks to the ideas
of shame and silence, and that particular narrative thread of the project.
I also have a self-portrait in it, which is definitely a first.
I never ever thought if you'd asked me this a year ago that I would be actually in the work,
but there's a photograph of me sitting in my car
and then you also have some images that speak to this idealised vision of very traditional binary femininity.
So there's a photograph of a music box and this thin, white, sort-of perfect dancer next to a Bible
and that again sort of encapsulates a lot of the themes that I wanted to talk about in the work.
And then some portraits going along with that of some of the women that I interviewed
and those interviews are in the book.
I think the book and exhibition work quite closely together
I have some of the letters from the book on the wall but if you want to go in deeper,
if you want to read about each individual story, you can pick up the book flip through that.
So I went into the project thinking that I would use a mix of digital and film
and it ended up being mostly digital I think in the final edits
which does make sense, given that there was quite a bit of moving around,
being in a car, a very hot car, in Alabama.
And also I should mention that my background prior to this course was in commercial photography,
so I spent about seven years photographing small children on the beach in Florida,
which was actually a fantastic job and it really set me up for all of the things that I'm doing now
but the kit that I have leftover from that is a Canon 5D mk III,
and the lens that I use probably 90% of the time is an 85mm f/1.2.
I have a 24-70mm as well that I used a bit for some of the landscapes
but I think 90% of the digital images were shot with the 85mm.
The Canon 5D gave me the flexibility to shoot in lower lighting situations, being full-frame
as well as having the f/1.2 aperture.
I did have the flexibility that I needed in somewhat unpredictable situations.
Going into strangers houses
and not really knowing where I was going to be sleeping the next night
and what I'd be photographing.
It did give me the flexibility that I needed.
I wish that I was a bit more technical than I am
I tend to get much more excited about the human elements, the connection and the storytelling
than I do about the technical aspects, so keeping a very simple kit is an important thing for me,
just knowing that this is the body that I'm using, this is the lens,
and that's another reason why the kit was sort of paired down as the project went on.
I think especially as a young photographer going into this field
and seeing so many well-thought-out, well-executed projects
I at least had this idea that it just must come so naturally
and it must come so organically
and nobody else is doubting themselves as much as I am right now,
nobody else is as terrified as I am right now.
And I think a big thing for me is learning how to balance that self-doubt and criticism,
all the fear and anxiety that comes into making something
and putting that out into the world to be judged and to be looked at,
with being able to stand by that thing and say:
"Yes, this is a thing that I made, and I might do this differently, this might be an area that I could improve on,
or maybe I don't stand by this element of it, but on the whole yeah I'm okay with this."
I think if I could go back and talk to myself a few years ago,
the first thing that I would say would be, "follow your instincts"
and that is maybe the most cliché piece of advice ever, but it is true
I think I spent a lot of time in between working commercially and doing the things that I'm doing now -
this particular project, the themes that I'm touching on in my work currently,
I spent a good bit of time doing the projects that I thought other people wanted to see
and you fall into that trap, especially in documentary photography, of:
"oh, you know this is an interesting kind of exotic-sounding subject"
which is not really the way to go if you want to make work that's meaningful,
if you want to make work that is insightful
and that's something that I learned the hard way, doing a lot of projects that maybe weren't where I needed to be.
I learned from that, and it's taken me into a level that...
I can finally articulate why I'm doing the things that I'm doing
beyond just "this seems exciting and interesting and the industry will like this".
So yeah follow your instincts and take a lot of photos, take a lot of really bad photos,
go out and walk, and write down pictures - don't even take the pictures,
just notice things and write about them.
Get to know your eye, get to know your vision.
I'm sure that I'm gonna watch this interview in about five years and laugh at myself
because all of my future plans, which have been well enough laid out,
have gone in very different directions than what I thought originally.
So what do I say now? Who knows.
But I went into this MA and just studying photography at a postgraduate level
with the intention of eventually wanting to teach
and I really do like being in the setting where there are so many ideas and energy and creativity.
Eventually, down the line, I would hopefully like to be back in this sort of setting - but on the other side of it
but I do think there's quite a bit of work that I need to do before I'm at that level
so in the near future, probably just continuing to develop my own projects as well as working freelance
I'm not closed to the idea of picture editing as well, working with publications on a more editorial level.
I mean I'm not entirely sure, but I'm excited.
Terrified, but excited.