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We Still Stand

Lovell, M. (2013) "We Still Stand" exhibited in "Exposure" at "Format 13 International Photography Festival" from 8 March 2013 to 27 April 2013 at Déda, Derby, UK

(http://www.formatfestival.com/artists/moira-lovell)

Established in 2004 by Louise Clements and Mike Brown, Format 13 is one of the UK’s leading international photography festivals (http://www.formatfestival.com). The biennale takes place in Derby and in 2013 the event was organised around the theme of 'the factory and mass production’. I exhibited my series We Still Stand as part of the festival’s "Exposure" section (http://www.formatfestival.com/exhibitions/exposure), which is dedicated to artists who have submitted through an open call. Format 13 invited artists from all around the globe to submit work that responded to the festival's theme. Submissions underwent a rigorous selection process with an expert jury. Successful artists exhibited alongside some of the best-known practitioners in contemporary photography.

We Still Stand is an ‘after-the-fact’ photography project that quietly observes communities of men deeply affected by the 1984–5 Miners’ Strike. I photographed individuals and groups of former coal miners and comrades at night on the sites of their former colliery and picket grounds, 25 years after battles were fought and lost. Men loom out of the dark, standing in stark contrast to their past media representations as ‘the enemy within’ (Milne, 1994).

This work extends my research interest in the ways in which gendered subjects encounter the camera. Utilising Bordieu’s notion of the habitus, I examine the gestural and attitudinal dispositions of groups of working-class men who are partly defined by their dangerous and labour-intensive profession and partly by tradition, locality and meaningful social interactions—aspects that were forcefully ruptured by the pit closure programme of the 1980's.

My photographs observe the effects of time as well as the ‘affective capacity’ of bodies, environments and the photo-shoot as social exchange. All of these build to an uncomfortable examination of awkwardness in photographic portraiture.

http://www.formatfestival.com/artists/moira-lovell