Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Westminster
'Leicestershire 2012'
This output comprises a series of 13 images documenting the now crumbling factories of the cities of Leicester and Loughborough – and the lives of some of the people who worked in them. Though few people are actually visible in these pictures, the series can also be seen as part of Tabrizian’s continuing efforts to rework the documentary genre by persuading real people to act out their own lives (see Outputs 1, 2 and 3), with the aim of exploring the possibilities for political art. The series grew out of a 2012 commission from Loughborough University to produce two pieces of public art in the form of billboards. In creating the images, Tabrizian aimed to capture a sense of abandonment – of forgotten lives and labour – and the cities’ dislocation from their past.
Please see portfolio for full documentation of research dimensions.
This project can be located within the substantial body of photographic art that has focussed on buildings, from the industrial compositions of the Bechers to Thomas Struth’s cityscapes and more. What sets it apart from a more straightforward documentation of a city is Tabrizian’s attempt to allude to the now invisible role that workers – both native and immigrant – played in these once major industrial cities. In 'Leicestershire 2012', Tabrizian has created an elegiac portrait of an era of industrial production whose last remaining traces are disappearing fast. Here, in contrast to the people-centred nature of most of her work, the architecture dominates: human beings are few and far between. One might be tempted to see similarities with the contemporary ‘landscape without people’ sub-genre, but Tabrizian’s relegation of her human subjects to fewer than half the images in this series is part of a strategy to evoke the past presence of the workers whose efforts were so crucial to the cities’ growth and prosperity – through their absence. Former factory workers were in practice hard to find, the artist discovered; most seemed to have vanished, like their employment. In the series, absence is used to make a political point: a poetic study of the architectural ruins of a city thus becomes a meditation on the nature of capitalist production; the role of the workers of the past, whose labour built British cities and the uncertain future of their children today, in the face of unemployment and recurrent economic crisis. The 13 images were shot in 5 x 4 format, with a crew of four people, and outputted as 10 x 8 negative. For the billboards, one is a composite of five – and the other of two – images.
