Co-working is a growing trend among mobile professionals and freelancers and there would seem no earthly reason why it wouldn’t work for photographers. Equipment is notoriously expensive, studio space hard to come by, and artist-led galleries few and far between. Early soundings were met with nothing but enthusiasm: great idea; count me in.

So, what went wrong? It’s probably far too early to say, and everyone involved will have their own theories, but here goes:

1. Location
An ordinary domestic property in an ordinary terraced street might have worked as a co-working space if it was in a large town or city. If you’ve got one of those, give it a go. Even with the excellent transport links (5 mins to the A19, excellent cheap buses and regular trains, free parking), this sleepy village feels like it’s miles away from anywhere and indeed that’s an undeniable part of its charm.

It’s also in an area suffering from the effects of industrial decline and with pockets of extreme poverty close by. While that can make for very strong subject matter for an editorial piece, it may not make such a desirable destination for visitors to a gallery.

2. Costs
Do not underestimate day to day expenses, the essential overheads of running even a small operation like this, and do not underestimate the willingness of all concerned to underestimate them. Gas or electricity for heating and lighting, water rates, and a liability for council tax, plus buildings and contents insurance are obviously just the basics. There may also be borrowing to repay on purchase or refurbishment costs. These need to be covered somehow, either by grant aid or by something like a membership fee and charges for occasional use.

If there aren’t enough people involved to cover these costs, or if most of the people involved are impoverished students or in early career, then somewhere, somehow, there’ll be an imbalance. Ultimately the responsibility for costs will be carried by the person or people whose names are on the mortgage or rental agreement. Ten people co-working, regularly using a space, will need to generously budget and split the costs equitably, taking account of the inevitable non-payers and the people who think they really needn’t pay as much because they’re not there quite as often as others. Remarkable really, how often that happens, and it’s quite reasonable for them to have that expectation.

3. Sabotage
The potential for this is minimal, isn’t it? Nobody is ever going to call your photograph ’shite’, let alone a whole portfolio of work. No-one is going to say another’s work is too conventional or too heavily retouched, or boring, are they? Surviving this kind of savage critique might well be possible in a mature organisation, or in a context which includes other supportive and inclusive behaviours, but may pretty much spell the death knell of someone’s participation in a new project, where people are unfamiliar with each other.

4. Management
Confusions about decision-making methods, how to operate democratically, what does and what doesn’t constitute a collective or co-operative, not moving quickly enough to a state where some combination of leadership and management, either stable or in rotation, is effective, and a general inability or unwillingness to make decisions may well be the biggest factors affecting not only day to day operation, but also overall viability.

It cannot be underestimated how unfamiliar people are with working within collective structures. When people are looking at one other to make decisions, and that person is looking back at the group for answers, perhaps nothing happens and people get impatient, or they drift away.

Unfamiliarity with or unwillingness to lead projects, and ineffective internal communication were also key.

5. Stages of Development of a Stable Work Group
The critical path goes: Form, Storm, Norm and Perform (Tuckman and Jensen 1977). There’s a link here from Lancaster University which goes into more detail. Brian Tuckman added Adjourn and Mourn to the categories in 2005 or thereabouts. It’s pretty certain that the Number Seven Project didn’t often get properly into stage one, even with efforts to share meals and outings of various kinds. Creating social cohesion is vital. Occasional forays into the storm stage may make good beginnings if they’re worked through, but many people come unprepared for conflict, and fear or flee even if it’s minimal. It is also unclear whether Brian Tuckman’s theory can apply, if people will be willing to work through the stages, when they’re under no compulsion to work together.

So, not one but a confluence of factors, all or some of the above working together, and undoubtedly there will be more theories, and it’s time to officially call it a day.

Regrets? Not one single minute of it.

There are currently two portfolios of work, and two sets of unframed prints from four photographers in total, plus several sets of work on the walls that will need to be reclaimed as soon as is practical. If these are not collected by three months from today’s date, 1st December 2009, they will be donated to charity.

The darkroom still exists, and the storage and facilities there are being re-organised currently so that there will be more usable space. On a personal level, it will be a relief to get back in there are do some real work. It’s been a while.Similar Posts:

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Topsy Qu’ret is a performance artist of local fame with a range of imaginative and inclusive pieces to his name and credit. His Goatshead Loop performance on the Gateshead-Newcastle Metro system was one of the first that brought him to our attention. There’s a short film online somewhere. If you’ve a link, please post.

Always inventive, always making art, like most artists, Topsy had to seek other ways to make a living than commissions and grants. The new Waygood studios and galleries in various premises seemed an ideal vehicle for someone so good at promotion and such a prosyletiser for his fellow artists and the local art scene. Even his name is a work of art.

It came as a big surprise therefore, to hear that this gentle, smiling fellow had been suspended from his job at Waygood over some sort of oh possibly dispute with his boss. We didn’t know, because taking advice from his union rep and solicitor, he didn’t tell even his friends.  It’s probably a wise move, not to say anything, but in his inimitable way he turned the act of silence into a performance piece of its own.

There are a few links online if you search, to the Journal story reporting on the tribunal case, quotes from his loyal partner and friends who were witnesses at the hearing, and the astonishing news that at the core of the whole sorry saga was a feeling that Topsy had looked at his boss in a way she felt was threatening. That he had hung paintings that were considered to be frightening or making a statement.

Today, the tribunal hearing is over. The Chairman Judge Hunter has found in Topsy’s favour – he was unfairly dismissed by Waygood.

Let’s hope that some much-needed funds can now be ploughed into creating some employer training for arts organisations in the NE and well, everywhere. With the millions of pounds that it seems to be costing to refurb the building at Waygood, a few sessions with an arts organisation specialist at something like £400 a day wouldn’t go amiss, would they? Ten, to include the members of the Board or Steering Group or whatever they have, say 10 people. That’d be a mere £4,000. Good grief, I’d do it. Might go some little way towards restoring some of the organisation’s tattered reputation.

In the meantime, Topsy deserves all due consideration and admiration for managing to not only keep quiet for almost two years, but never to utter a word against his employers or their representatives. Exemplary conduct. And please accept our warmest congratulations. We all hope there’ll be some money in compensation forthcoming, with which you can go on and make more of that plumb fool crazy art we know and love.

Will be dropping the relevant links in here as they show up. This is a good one – scroll down to the comments. Journal Live 1, 2 Front page of the Journal Sat 14th November (there will no doubt be more).Similar Posts:

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Butlins, Filey, 1963 was our first actual English proper family holiday. Bickering everywhere you looked, soggy food, bossy chilcare, grubby ‘chalets’. Oh dear. We never went again, anyway. We’d been abroad, on aeroplanes, though not on holidays. Troop shipments, we were.

There may have been a hint of optimism in that grin. He was coming out of the Army, after a series of worst nightmare postings, starting with Korea in 1952, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, through Bergen Belsen and Buchenwald and then the engineered civil war in Cyprus.

He’d always taken photographs, throughout all that miasma of chaos and devastation. Didn’t particularly like it when the camera was pointed at him, except when it was handed to my somewhat reluctant mother.

That top one’s probably shot on 127 film, a small bakelite Kodak Brownie, as I recall. He’s holding his treasured Super 8 wind-up cine. Still works to this day although I haven’t been able to face putting a film through it.

This second photo is by the Butlins staffer, taking people completely by surprise, flashes pinging off but really not expecting him to do us, and then realising he was doing everybody. Ah yes, half a crown per print. A lot of money in those days, although doubtless he didn’t get to keep it all himself.

One of this morning’s earliest tweets was from a Photography Symposium-goer whose Father’s Day treat had been breakfast in bed, and on they continued to flow, all day. Men, warmly loved and appreciated by their children, and evidently thrilled with little presents, cuddles, smiles, cards.

I think it was Bea Campbell who said that our birth decade’s fathers, psyches blighted by barely imaginable horrors of war, really weren’t up to the job, and that it would take us several generations to find men capable of more humane and tender parenting than we’d enjoyed. Well, maybe it’s happening sooner than we dared to hope.

Happy Father’s Day, all you generous, beloved, new wave dads. Enjoy!Similar Posts:

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There’s a debate in several places on the internet about whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that these darkrooms are now all closing or closed. Nice that someone, somewhere is running against this trend.

This is a postcard from the wall of a collaborative art piece called “I Wish…”

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..and contrast:

And there’s also this:

So, which is the photoshop disaster?

The integrity of the documentary nature of the photograph is sacrosanct, isn’t it? Do we always believe what we see when it’s a map, a trainspotter, a mobile phone picture? When is a photograph a true record? Is a satellite scanning the earth at however many frames a second a true photograph? What about if the frames overlap, or are allowed to overlap?

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Experimenting with a cloud creator for a new project or two. Revealing: there’s more website building, and real bricks-and-mortar building than actual photography going on of late, and time seems to be quite a factor. Another one made for the nascent Artemis Foundation:

The idea is to use these as inspiration, to link concepts and ideas from brainstorm sessions or collections of suggestions to see where they take us. A way of showing what’s important to a group of people, perhaps. An aid to decision making.

They’d also make interesting visual artist statements.

Where do the squirrels come in? They collect things, useful store cupboard and nesting materials, and stash them somewhere they’ll definitely be unearthed and made useful at a later date. We’re thinking of all that darkroom equipment that’s been stored up these past few years. It’s being dusted down, brushed off, found a shiny new home.Similar Posts:

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Exhibit A: As shot.

The Sage concert and learning halls on the banks of the Tyne in Gateshead is yet another one of those glassy, curvy structures appearing on city skylines all over the world. The Silver Slug as it’s known locally, the external structure is all wavy steel spines. Even its blue-green viewing barrier wriggles and writhes its way through the space.

The top photo is as shot, with a point-and-click GR film camera, on the run. My companion was anxious about his train, but I did think the light was good, so took the chance. Correcting in Lightroom (or Photoshop, or iPhoto), following the grid system, which of the horizontals or verticals would you follow?

Exhibit B: The picture directly above uses the top of the blue-green barrier as it’s nominal straight line. The steel skeleton is no help at all, and neither are the chairs. It’s a wide angle 28mm lens, so there is some keystone distortion, visible mainly in the shapes of the humans, but it’s not too disruptive, or at least not to my eye.

Exhibit C has been straightened against the perpendiculars of the table legs and the visually important spire of All Saints Church across the River.

Which one of these looks straight, to you?

There is a fascinating discussion going on about wonk on Mrs Deane’s blog here. After looking keenly at the exhibits in Street and Studio at the Tate, I’m convinced that for many genres, wonk doesn’t matter at all. The Dutch Angle is big wonk used in cinema to add drama. There’s a copy of The Third Man out on DVD which makes intensive use of the device.

In architectural photography, the intent surely is to make the most of the perspective elements, the position of the horizon, the deliberately vertical uprights in the structure or its surrounds. In these cases, straightness with accuracy is important, isn’t it? And just to show that it can be done:

Exhibit D above was taken with the camera held resting on the table, so there’s more chance that it’s straight, and Lightroom says it’s level against the blue barrier, but it doesn’t look straight, does it? It is possible, even given the challenge the Sage presents. But does it really matter?

For those who like to know, the film is 400ISO Vista colour neg, developed at Asda in Hartlepool for 97p. I like the colours, and the contrast is right, the daylight was very bright and shiny.Similar Posts:

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- the black and white developing cells, with the deep tanks full of the all right chemicals kept at the all right temperatures, and the darkroom with its zippy machine printer and deep zinc sinks, drying cabinets and that huge lightbox.

(who said a P&S couldn’t do DOF?)

We won’t miss:

- the digital ‘darkroom’ with its dazzling flourescent lights and those beachballing, beachballing, beachballing iMacs, and the scanners with their speciality vertical line-creation feature. We especially won’t miss equipment we were never allowed to use.

We’ll miss:

- every single instance that a technician or instructor spent that bit of extra time beyond the call of duty mixing chemicals, adjusting reflectors, flagging lights, checking bulbs, testing batteries, cleaning lenses, loading and unloading dark slides. You know who you are and you’ll never be forgotten.

We won’t miss:

- the bod who wants a full time contract so that they can leave early at 4pm. Does every single organisation have one of those? Perhaps.

We’ll miss:

- Judith’s ready smile and her perfect Fair Trade coffee.

We won’t miss:

- Nestle and Cocacola machines. Why does every single educational institution have those damnable things? Everywhere? Some students have been known to get them turfed out, and there was at least one NSU effort to get rid of them altogether. Ah well.

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We don’t often talk about equipment on this site. It’s not that camera type or whatever isn’t important. The school of thought that goes along the lines that it’s the photographer that matters is quite true, of course, but the right tool in the right hands is the key. Whether that’s a £10 Holga or a 50p charity shop buy, simply finding what those tools might be for you, an individual photographer, is probably half the battle.

Two cameras went at the end of last week, at the beginning of what will be the start of a major equipment cull. The Linhof Technica simply wasn’t being used enough, but there are some fine 6×9 black and white lith prints drying to attest to the loveliness of its camera movements. If you’re interested, contact Paul Cordes at Classic Photographics. It’s a truly lovely kit: roll film with plate camera actions.

The Xpan is much missed, but is actually gone once and forever to a very happy buyer. The results of a year in 2.71 is going to be completed on these pages when all have been scanned. Other cameras are going to be sold (or given away), and listed on these pages.

The slide show linked above is the first Roll of film from the new 35mm camera in full time use from now on. The Kodakcolor VR Plus was 50p per roll in Aldi, and is still in date to Sept 09. Developed at Asda in Hartlepool for something like £0.97p. Be good to know what you folks think. Duplicates were taken out, but apart from that, this is the complete roll, testing for sharpness, contrast handling, you know.Similar Posts:

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Sharp as a tack, as the old guard used to say. More to come, obviously. There are a couple of rolls of Ilford HP5 hanging in a drying cabinet as well as the rest of this Roll 1, a 50p Kodak 200 ISO something-or-other that came out rather well.

The photograph here was to test sharpness: it’s of one of the exhibits in the Rye Hill Graphics course final show. There’s some really great work to see, most obsessed with death or Python or both. Marvelous.

Not quite so sharp are the results from a digital and a film camera, same manufacturer, both compacts. More on this to follow, since it’s something photographers get asked about an awful lot.Similar Posts:

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