In as much as I'm the person who makes the pictures, I'm always the subject of my own work.
It's me expressing something about a landscape or a person or an issue so
I'm always in it. My name's Ingrid Pollard and I'm an artist and photographer.
I was born in Guyana in the Caribbean. I was brought over when I was about four
with my sister to join my parents who were already over here.
I stayed in London until I moved to Northumberland when I was 65.
My dad always had a little 35 mil camera. He must have given me a lesson and I got my own
second hand and then I got a brand new one and I was around lots of people taking photos.
Just around the house, not 'art world'. It was just when we on holiday took pictures.
But I took pictures all the time, which was a bit different. Then this job came up at this feminist
screen printing photography project and I thought 'Oh I could do that'. I got that job
and in the art world then, working and socializing and activism they were all mixed in together.
When they were courting, my parents, my dad he made her a photo album. So it would be a fun
thing, once I left home I'd go home and my mother, she'd bring out the photo album and she told me
who they all were. So looking at photographs was always an important part. I started working with
those because I was very familiar with them and I was doing a piece of work 'Oceans Apart' about
being separated. Being born in the Caribbean and being brought up here and that particular history
of crossing the Atlantic for the last 500 years. Both ways. Because my grandmother came from Europe
to Guyana and then my parents came from Guyana to England. So there's a lot of criss-crossing.
So it's kind of good I'm going through these test images from 'Pastoral Interlude' to think
about race and landscape. This is one of the first pieces of work I did based on my holidays
to the Lake District with groups of friends. We might be on a holiday for a whole week,
and then I wouldn't see another Black person and what that meant and responses to me.
It was a way of articulating that but I think the work is much more about Britishness than
race. If you talk about Britishness, which is statehood, it includes white people, Black people,
brown people. So it is about race but it's not only about Black people. It's about
them, always has to be in relation to someone else and how those ideas are constructed. So if we look
at this landscape particularly, we've got a dry stone wall, we've got telegraph wire,
we've got boundaries in the fields. Certain things are allowed to be grown here,
but not here. So all this is totally manufactured and made. It's a working industrial site. Negative
ideas about Black people as just constructed, just as historical as this landscape, and
ideas about women of African descent. Things are changing but some of those ideas are still there.
They're in the hand of bedrock of psyche, ideas about Englishness realized through landscape.
Because I use friends and real people I know rather than models, I always have a relationship
to them so it always feels like a collaboration or they're standing in for me. They are me.
With photography there's a range of mediums I can use to tell that story or convey a particular set
of ideas that I'm interested in. A lot of texts, either pre-existing text in books, or print media.
There's poetry that's in there. There's stuff that I might write myself.
Existing things that I've cut out of magazines and books, redacting some of them.
So all of those convey a story and if you join them with this bit and that bit,
there's something else going on that the audience can start to work out.
I was invited to look at archives by Autograph Association of Black Photographers.
It's an archive from 1890s in Jamaica. So I spent a lot of time tinting those but the tinting also
felt like it gave agency to the people who were central to the image. So there's a lot
of things going on in tinting. I was interested in who's important which gaze and I didn't want the
audience looking at those to forget that I am also a photographer and I'm manipulating everything
I present the pictures and the audience see them, they are looking, they have the view of the
Imperialist photographer still. You know I place the audience there. You're not just looking
passively at a photograph. You're actively engaged in viewing. I think over the years
photography's connection to sculpture is the biggest gap so I thought I should get
over myself and actually engage with it. 'Bow Down And Very Low' the kinetic piece,
there's a young girl from a charming film made in 1947. I was interested in her bowing. That gesture
in terms of the power dynamic. The difference between a curtsy and a bow and how the body
drops or it bends forward. Even though there's very harsh things. There's saws. There's baseball
bats. There's something very sweet about all the elements and then the movement is very
particular. It's about power abuse I think and the body in relation to that and the repetition.
The hidden and the unhidden are the basis most of the work I do. So that's the bedrock of it
all. How to place myself in any environment or any location and how other people have done that
throughout history. It's also about encounter. When you go somewhere new, how you express being
part of that community or not wanting to belong or having a particular understanding about belonging.
It's all a story or clues. I know people are coming with their life's experience and
then meeting the work and they'll think whatever they want to think. I assume
we share some things in common and that's the beginning of the conversation.