Anna Frances Douglas

Profile

I am a curator, researcher and writer with a particular interest in the practices and theories of visual media, particularly photography in its many forms (that I term ‘photographies’) and filmic medias.  Over the past ten years, I have curated five major photographic-based projects engaging little known archives and collections of ‘documentary’ and ‘record’ photography unsettling, shifting and expanding received historical and interpretative narratives of photographic meaning, highlighting the medium’s polyvocality.

I consider and argue in my Phd-by-practice, that curating is a research practice, through which counter-narratives and new knowledges about media images can be uniquely accessed.  This is explored through the curation of a major exhibition project engaging the photographic works of North West photographer Shirley Baker, a hitherto ‘overlooked’ actor in the history of post-war British ‘documentary’ photography.  Through challenging the documentary/record framework through which Baker’s work has hitherto been classified, I seek to shift the emphasis from what ‘is’ the work of Shirley Baker?, to what is the work of Shirley Baker ‘doing’?  This move considers how attending to meaning as performed in relation to context (location and space), to time and with people, not only challenges the notion of documentary truth, it opens up Baker’s work to greater narrativising potential and interpretation that, I argue, brings her ‘historical’ works into present-day relationalities and engagements, including personal and collective remembering and forms of resonance and affiliation.

Borrowing from the theoretical framework of Peter Reason and action research, through curation (‘fieldwork’), I seek to experiment with participatory processes through which ‘experiential knowledges’ add to, and indeed challenge, the ‘propositional knowledge’ of my performance as informed art historian/curator.  In employing photo elicitation and oral history, prior to and during the exhibition installation, I contribute to these emergent visual methods yet also seek to explore their potential both for counter-memory, for imaginative affiliations and fictionalisation that may  not only bring us closer to the idea of ‘the truth of an image’ (Berger), than its assumed indexicality, but that also engages with exhibitions as practices and spaces of reparation (Hirsch) and citizenship (Azoulay)

My thesis additionally raises questions regarding researching and writing ‘about’ practice, and researching, exhibiting and writing ‘as’ practice.  Formally, the thesis transposes material theories of photography (journeying through time) addressing alternative methods and contexts for understanding Baker ‘the photographer’ and her photographs in sequential chapters. This structure borrows from Berger’s notion of ‘radial meaning’, and the photographer’s own suggestion that her works both communicate ‘a truth’ and tell ‘a story’, though incomplete, which is hers to tell.  The notion of storytelling, thus, structures the thesis, with chapters providing alternate’ stories’ narrated about and through the images of Shirley Baker. One of these stories also belongs to myself, and why I was drawn to the photographer’s work in the first place - a visualisation of my own memories of a childhood in inner city Leeds at the same time Baker was photographing children in Manchester.

Research interests

Memory studies, with particular reference to photography, affect and connective histories

Material approaches to photographies

Photo elicitation and oral history/ theories of testimony and narrativisation 

Curating as research and as reparative artistic practice

Participatory epistemologies

Autoethnography

 

Research outputs, covering the PhD period 2016-2020 only

Exhibitions:

2015 The Photographer’s Gallery, London, curated the critically acclaimed exhibition ‘Shirley Baker: Women and Children; and Loitering Men’.

2016 PhotoEspagne, Madrid: Europas,˜Shirley Baker: Women and Children’; and Loitering Men’

2016 PhotoLondon, Photofusion, curated ˜On the Beach’, visioning national identity, sexuality and beach culture in France and Blackpool in 1970s.

2017 Manchester Art Gallery, adapted ‘Shirley Baker: Women and Children’; and Loitering Men’ into a full scale participatory project.

2016, Salford Darkroom/Redeye, Photography and Materialism, paper ‘What do Photographs want’ curating with vintage prints.

2017 The Foundling Museum,  International Rights of Children to Play ‘Shirley Baker: ‘The astonishing task of achieving adult sanity’.

2018 Greenwich University, Children on the Move conference, ‘Children’s mobility in the

photographs of Shirley Baker, co-presented with Prof. Penny Tinkler.

 

Conferences

2016, Salford Darkroom/Redeye, Photography and Materialism, paper ‘What do Photographs want’ curating with vintage prints.

2017 The Foundling Museum,  International Rights of Children to Play ‘Shirley Baker: ‘The astonishing task of achieving adult sanity’.

2018 Greenwich University, Children on the Move conference, ‘Children’s mobility in the

photographs of Shirley Baker, co-presented with Prof. Penny Tinkler.

2019 University of Derby/Format Festival, Photogarphy and Memory, ‘Experiencing the work of Shirley Baker: personal, collective and postmemory’.

 

Professional engagements and presentations

2017 Four Corners, London, ‘Roger Mayne: committed photographer or artist?

2017 TPG, Roger Mayne, panel discussion with Selina Scott and Shiobhan Davies.

2017 The Djanogly Gallery, University of Nottingham, ‘What is the work of Roger Mayne’?

2018 Chorlton Girls High, presentation to 6th Form Art Students, ‘Shirley Baker: The Presence of Absence’

2018 The Lancashire Photography Society, ‘Shirley Baker and Roger Mayne’.

2018 Huddersfield University, Collaborative Doctorates, PhD guest presentation discussing photoelicitation and grounded theory methodologies.

2018, SS1, Sheffield, ‘A breath of fresh air and streets in the sky: Roger Mayne and Park Hill Estate’

2018 University of Warwick, Ethnographic Circle, methodology presentation on photo elicitation, oral history and grounded theory.

2019 University of Warwick, Film Dept, ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’.

Publications:

2015 Shirley Baker: Women and Children; and Loitering Men, picture editor, commissioning editor and catalogue essay, (TPG, London), 2015, 2016, 2017.
2017 ‘Roger Mayne’ catalogue essay, (TPG, London), 2017.

 

Forthcoming presentations and events

January 11th 2020, ‘Shirley Baker: 50 years of photography’, panel discussion with Lou Stoppard, Griselda Pollock, Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds.

 

Forthcoming publications:

2020, ‘Experiencing the work of Shirley Baker: personal, collective and postmemory’, in collected anthology of conference proceedings Photography and Memory.

 

Forthcoming research exhibitions:

2020 ‘Roger Mayne and the Early Years: Leeds and Yorkshire’.

 

Qualifications

• BA Hons History of Art, UEA
• MA Social History of Art, University of Leeds
• Post-Diploma, Radio Production, UCE