Liberation Newspaper published today in Jersey Evening Post

A few more spreads from the 48-page Liberation - Occupation supplement in today's Jersey Evening Post. Visits to many of Jersey’s premier heritage institutions and working directly with public records made a vital difference in providing students with many starting points for their individual creative journeys. The images presented here in this newspaper only represents a fragment of the enormous amount of work that each student has produced. It provides a fascinating insight into how young people have used the language of photography to explore and interpret events which happened many years ago.

A planned joint exhibition with Masters students from École Européenne Supérieure d’art de Bretagne (The European Academy of Art in Brittany) to open at the Berni Gallery, Jersey Arts Centre on Wed 6 May has unfortunately been cancelled due to Covid-19 and so has a conference about some of the research undertaken scheduled for 7 May at the Société Jersiaise. We are currently working on re-programming this with the exhibition opening in Rennes (autumn 2020) later travelling to Jersey (spring 2021)

Photo-Archive Societe-JersiaiseJersey Heritage CIOS Jersey Jersey War Tunnels EESAB-site de Rennes Bureau des Iles Anglo-Normandes Liberation 75 #germanoccupation #liberation75 #jersey#channelislands

Images courtesy of Nathan Healey, Talal Bayat, Francesca Hogan, Will Masterman and Yordi Hogetoorn

More spreads from Liberation Newspaper

We would like to thank The Bailiff, Timothy Le Cocq for contributing a foreword for the newspaper and sharing his personal thoughts on the Occupation of Jersey. The project began partly as a response to 75 years of celebrating freedom in Jersey from the German Occupation in 1940-45. Sadly, islanders will not be able to commemorate this landmark event as initially planned and it is hoped that this newspaper will in some small way act as catalyst for remembering those years of hardship and subsequent joy when Churchill’s now famous speech was broadcast on the 8 May 1945 with the endearing words ‘our dear Channel Islands are also to be freed today’.

The 48-page supplement is included in tomorrow's edition of Jersey Evening Post.

Jersey Heritage CIOS Jersey Jersey War Tunnels EESAB-site de Rennes Bureau des Iles Anglo-Normandes Liberation 75 #germanoccupation #liberation75 #jersey#channelislands

Images courtesy of Charlie Dixon-Smith, Jack Tidy, Francesca Stubbings, Aimee Low and Gabrielle Le Clezio

Liberation Newspaper

The next few days I will be sharing a few spreads from LIBERATION / OCCUPATION newspaper produced with my students at Hautlieu School as part of an extensive programme of study that includes collaborations with French post-graduate students from EESAB-site de Rennes and Jersey archives and heritage institutions, such as Société Jersiaise, Jersey Heritage, CIOS Jersey, Jersey War Tunnels and Bureau des Iles Anglo-Normandes with funding from Liberation 75.

Students were challenged with responding to personal stories told by islanders experiencing the German Occupation first-hand and finding inspiration by looking through images, documents and objects held in various collections in Jersey’s public archives, producing a series of individual creative outcomes such as montages, photo-zines and collectively construct a visual narrative presented as a 48-page newspaper supplement printed and distributed by Jersey Evening Post on Friday 24 April. Make sure to get your copy!

#germanoccupation #liberation75 #jersey #channelislands

Images courtesy of Jazmin Gulley, Emily Cooper and Nathan Healey

Parish Portrait- an ongoing project in Jersey during island lockdown

Saint Lawrence is one of the twelve parishes of Jersey in the Channel Islands. The parish occupies the centre of the Island and much of it is inland, though it has a short stretch of coastline in St. Aubin's Bay. I live at Abbey Gate right in the heart of the village situated next to the parish church and its graveyard. The images here are all made in the vicinity and acts as metaphor for our contemplation of mortality at a time when real death is literally starring us in the face.

On completion a set of images will be part of the Island Lockdown collection at the Société Jersiaise Photographic Archive, the island’s principal photographic collection with over 100,000 images dating from the mid-1840s to the present day.

Parish Portrait VI, St Lawrence, Jersey, Channel Islands.

What colour do you see when you dream? Today’s image is in monochrome to remove it a little further away from reality, although photography has always been a copy of the real thing. I found this discarded headstone left at the back of the cemetery, next to the sexton’s tool shed. It made me wonder whose grave this once belonged to and why it was no longer in use. The book shaped stone has a text engraved which is illegible due to wear and tear. It could be seen as a blank page upon which you could write your own epitaph. 

As this project develops in response to Covid-19 I realise that living next door to a burial ground is affecting me. From my bedroom window a wide view of the cemetery is visible and at some point in time this room was a carpenter’s workshop where coffins were made. The names of some of the deceased are still inscribed in chalk on the beams in the ceiling, which at night glows likes ghosts. 

Research during self-isolation lockdown are showing that sleeping patterns are disturbed and vivid, bizarre dreams are occurring more frequently. Perhaps, our nightmares are not narratives played out in our subconscious mind, but in fact a new reality we have to accept! In Camera Lucida, French thinker, Roland Barthes’ most celebrated book on photographic images, he famously reflects on the medium’s relationship with time, and in particularly death when looking at photographs of his mother who had recently passed away. He writes: ‘I dream about her, I do not dream her. 

In an interview in 1977, shortly before he began writing his masterpiece Barthes’ describes his encounter with photography, ‘as a contact with death….at least, this is how I experience photography: as a fascinating and funeral enigma.’ In more recent times, photography’s own demise has been frequently predicted, by a combination of its own success (everyone is a photographer) and digital technologies (undermining truth values.) In Photography Degree Zero, Photographic Historian Geoffrey Batchen provides new perspectives 25 years on from Barthes’s seminal book and asks again; ‘what the essence of a photograph is’, when ‘photography simultaneously conjures past, present and future in a single frame.’ 

Parish Portrait V, St Lawrence, Jersey, Channel Islands.

Brian Pipon whose family have lived in the parish for centuries are visiting the graves of his ancestors. In An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, art historian and theorist Hans Belting talks about the relationship between image and death in different religions and cultures and highlights the inherent paradoxical nature of photography, or more precisely the symbolic function of ‘images [making] a physical (a body’s) absence visible by transforming it into iconic presence.’ It is however not the meaning of death that Belting is concerned with but the quest for the image; both the physical image (either as print or pixels on a screen) and the mental image ‘that live only in our thinking and in our imagination’. Belting cites Gaston Bachelard’s formula that ‘death had first been an image, and it will ever remain an image’, since we do not know what death looks like. In order to understand the intangible nature of the mental image, Belting introduces ‘the gaze as a vector for transmitting mental images to material picture and back.’ In other words; ‘the gaze [is] the force that turns a picture into an image and an image into a picture.’ Maybe Mr Pipon, who because of his age is at risk in a pandemic that appears to kill the most vulnerable first is contemplating the nature of death and how it may appear.

Parish Portrait- a new project during Coronavirus lockdown

Saint Lawrence is one of the twelve parishes of Jersey in the Channel Islands. The parish occupies the centre of the Island and much of it is inland, though it has a short stretch of coastline in St. Aubin's Bay. I live at Abbey Gate right in the heart of the village situated next to the parish church and its graveyard. The images here are all made in the vicinity and acts as metaphor for our contemplation of mortality at a time when real death is literally starring us in the face.

On completion a set of images will be part of the Island Lockdown collection at the Société Jersiaise Photographic Archive, the island’s principal photographic collection with over 100,000 images dating from the mid-1840s to the present day.

Official launch of ED.EM at CCA Galleries International

Éditions Emile was launched at CCA Galleries International on 26 February 5:30-7:30pm with an illuminating talk by Olga Finch, Curator of Archaeology at Jersey Heritage. Thanks to everyone who came along to support. If you missed last night, copies of the first edition ED.EM.01 - La Cotte de Saint Brélade at work 1910-2019 alongside a selection of six Limited Edition prints and five Special Prints can still be purchased at the gallery until tomorrow. Alternatively visit www.edem.je for online sales.