Output details

Stand Your Ground (New Works)

Lovell, M. (2008) "Stand Your Ground" exhibited in "New Works", at the National Media Museum, Bradford, UK, 13 September 2008 – 25 January 2009.

Stand Your Ground was the result of the 2008 Pavillion Commissions Programme (http://www.pavilion.org.uk/gallery.php?gid=25). This open call received 170 "strong applications" (Hobson, 2008, p.8), with five art photographers selected for our "...exceptional previous projects" and "robust, well considered proposals for new work" (p.8). Furthermore, the selected photographers "eloquently expressed the remarkable diversity of artistic practice in photography today" (ibid.). The commission allowed me to continue researching gender politics, using affect theory to examine awkwardness in contemporary photographic portraiture.

My photography contributes to a body of research around issues of awkwardness and social discomfort. Awkwardness is reflexive and embodied; the external registering of internal feelings and emotions in response to social situations. Kotsko (2010) describes awkwardness as providing "the best angle on our relationships with other people" (p.15). Probyn (2005) posits that it is "an affect of proximity... about bodies being close to one another and an acute sensitivity of one’s sense of self’"(p.34). My research engages with issues raised by the influential portraiture of photographer Diane Arbus, who sought "the gap between intention and effect", and whose work "ruthlessly pinpointed the threshold between how we think we appear and how we are actually perceived. The two states at odds, gaining potency from their conflict and uncertainty" (Arbus, 1972 p.2).

Photographing individual members of the Doncaster Belles women’s football team with their male coach offered a wry view of team relationships, the result complemented by a soundtrack of touchline directions during a crucial match against Arsenal. Apparently gentle portraits explored the subject’s inability to adapt to the context and setting of the photo-shoot, registering bodily through awkward poses.

A print publication accompanied the exhibition, in which feminist writer Professor Jennifer Doyle of The Sport Spectacle (http://thesportspectacle.com) wrote an essay to accompany my photographs.