Hi I'm Ruth Medjber and welcome to Out of the Darkroom on AdoramaTV.
Today I'm not going to be speaking with a photographer, but with someone who is
heavily involved in the photographic arts world
here in the UK. Behind me you'll see the Photographers Gallery
and inside we're going to chatting to Claire Grafik, who
is the head of the exhibitions team.
AdoramaTV presents, Out of the Darkroom
with Ruth Medjber.
Hi Claire thanks so much for inviting us here in to the Photographers Gallery in London,
I love this place, I'm always, always here every time I'm in London I like
to pop in.
Maybe you could start by telling us a little bit about
what it is you do, what is your role and what it involves?
Yeah sure, so my official title is Head of Expeditions,
and essentially this means that I
support and oversee a very, very
capable group of curator's and assistant curator's
to run the exhibitions program here.
When you say you oversee curator's, what is it that a curator does in a gallery?
Well a curator is many different things and different curator's will have very
different sorts of
daily lives so a freelance curator may have a very different life to an
institutional curator, so somebody who works
at the photographers gallery spends lots of their time
really in a sense, administrating exhibitions,
making show everything is booked in,
run smoothly but also is the main port of call for the artists who work with us.
Ok so it's more like the preparation to getting a show ready rather than
the day-to-day maintaining a show, it's building it up,
it's setting it, it's putting it in place.
So your role then is looking after all them and making sure they all work together as a
team I suppose. How do you come to select what goes on here?
We really look at a 12- to 18-month
overview of our exhibition program and our commitment to photography is
perhaps unusually not just to
solo exhibitions to living artists it is to photography in all its forms,
so we may look at a 12 to 18 months slot and say okay within this time we
know that we want
a group show, a thematic show looking at something pertinent
you know something that feels that current now. So would you pick a theme then
in that regard? It may it be, yeah, we work in
very different ways for different shows so we may
curate something internally or we may work with external
curator's. So say someone may come to us and say I've had this
idea for a show, it's something I've I've done research on
you know, and we can start a conversation.
So it may be that we actually collaborate not just with artists
externally but also with curator's
and other institutions as well. You must get a lot of
applicants looking to put a show on here,
how do you then find the photographers, or do you already know in your mind like who is
out there? No, not necessarily, I mean we generally
try and keep an eye on who's showing in other galleries,
who is producing very interesting work,
obviously artists websites now mean that you can have access to
anyone's work,
you don't have to wait for them to have an expression somewhere else.
I mean as an institution we, on the one hand we have very strong
institutional relationships on an international basis, so you may look at
what
other institutions in other countries are also working on
at the moment and in terms of that it's very important,
I mean in these particular times to share resources with people
so it may be that you take, you work with another institution on an exhibition. So your
bringing in their expertise as well as your own
to perhaps put together a thematic show.
I suppose, I mean, I'm looking at it from the point of view of maybe
an amateur photographer or someone here has built up
you know a project and want to show case it to the best people,
you guys do portfolio review days don't you? Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit
about what that entails? Yeah sure, so I mean the idea of portfolio
review days is really to just try and somehow give a structure to
photographers to come to the gallery and to have their work looked at,
and also for us, you know we can't spend every day looking at
people's work, it also is a very important time where we get to see
people's work as well
so generally what we try and to do is see as many people as we can in one day
but
our education team put together a sort of panel of
a number of experts the so they may be internal curator's
but also external curator's, writers people working in the industry
who may come in as well to do this, and people can generally book with
someone.
That is specific to them?
Yes, a certain slot or they may be allocated someone, who we feel is
appropriate for that practice. That's fantastic, so it's almost tailored then exactly to what you know you
will get the best out of it.
Yeah. So if I'm coming along for your portfolio review day and I've been given
you know, the person that I'm going to see, what should I bring? What should I present
on the day?
So what I suppose I want to see when I see someone's portfolio is,
of their work quite quickly
and that is not necessarily seeing absolutely loads of work,
it's actually seeing perhaps two or three
well edited projects
that will give me a clear idea of you know, where someone's interests lie
but also in a sense more importantly where they're going.
So I'm not, if I was a publisher I may be looking for something that's quite a
coherent project
already, as a curator in a public gallery I'm not necessarily looking for that
because the the point is not necessarily to
give someone a show and a photo review, it's for them to have some
useful
advice about where to go, you know where to take their work
and get advice, I mean because often people come in and they say look I've been
working on this project
two years, I'm stuck, I've got to the point
and I don't know whether to take it in this direction or this
direction
because there's many different ways a project can go and actually sometimes
better than your own head you know, you can sort of get some external... You can get some
outside help to get you through, that's fantastic. And maybe I say something that
they totally disagree with but at least tit gives them something to... At least it's an opinion.
To bounce off.
Absolutely. You trained, you did the MA in Photography in Goldsmiths which is probably
one of the most prestigious London colleges
I mean when you leave that course you can get a little bit lost especially because
you don't have that guidance anymore so these portfolio days sound absolutely
fantastic. They are important and we also do the graduate show
every year
which is called Fresh Faced + Wild Eyed and that was specifically set up
for people that had already graduated
and in that kind of cold moment where they leave college
they don't have access to teachers, technology
it's very intimidating and it takes a lot of guts to keep going and I think we felt
it was the right moment then to give people a chance to apply
to show work here. Do you find most people are
formally trained in photography. Not necessarily no, I mean I think it
totally depends how
you work as an artist and
I got to to the end of my MA and thought, I do not have what it takes to be an artist
I'm not interested enough in my own ideas,
I don't want to spend all of my time on my own working
it can be quite solitary,
I'm not driven enough to make my own work
and that's what I realized, it was very useful for me, because I realized actually I wanted to work
with people who did feel like that. But a lot of people that are artists
I think they find being in higher education
can be very useful because they have colleagues they can,
they have peers that they can bounce ideas off they can
push their practice in a way that maybe they wouldn't
if they weren't in that structure, but there are plenty of very, very successful artists who
are self-thought or... so I wouldn't, it's not a carte blanche.
Claire thank you so much for chatting to me today, it was absolutely lovely and
really, really love the gallery, so maybe we've inspired some people to
come and visit you here just off Oxford Street as well.
I hope so. Yeah me too. Thanks so much. Cheers.
Thanks for joining me today, tune in again when I'm going to be speaking to some
more great photographers and industry professionals.
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