Beatrice Gibson lives and works in London. She is an artist-filmmaker whose films explore the pull between chaos and control in the process of their making. Drawing on figures from experimental modernist composition and literature such as Cornelius Cardew, Robert Ashley and Gertrude Stein, Gibson's films are often participatory and incorporate co-creative and collaborative processes and ideas.

Stuart Marshall was a founding member of London Video Arts in 1976, and was a committed advocate of British video art, as a practitioner, curator and theorist. He curated the first UK/Canadian Video Exhange in 1984 and his videos and writings were amongst the first to explore the relationship between video, television and the media. Within his later works, he explored and challenged misrepresentations of homosexuality during the AIDS epidemice of the 1980s, at a time when lesbian and gay lifestyles and sexuality were under attack as a result of Clause 28 and the media-encouraged prejudice surrounding the spread of AIDS. Towards the end of his life, working with Maya Vision, Marshall made a number of Channel 4 commissioned documentaries concerning gay identity and he continued to be a passionate campaigner for gay rights.

Katharine Meynell is interested in the personal and the political, humour and feminist strategies. In addition to video installations, she creates artists' books, performances and drawings, which are often in series and mutiples. She has collaborated with Susan Johanknecht at the Gefn Press and in 2005 she completed 'It's Inside' with Alistair Skinner, a large-scale work funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Charlotte Prodger (born Bournemouth; 1974) studied at Goldsmiths College (now Goldsmiths, University of London) and The Glasgow School of Art.  Prodger explores the shifting representations of self that arise through meetings of language and technology and her works often combine video taken from YouTube with spoken text taken from internet forums and personal emails. The equipment used to play audio and video content is a vital part of Prodger’s work and she is interested in its sculptural properties, design history and associated subcultures. For each new project she reworks previous themes, images and technical paraphernalia to create a distinct visual language.

Max the Bull Terrier Trancing shows YouTube footage of bull terriers ‘trancing’: a state that they enter into when their back is lightly stroked, for example by leaves around pot plants. In this work the vertical form of the custom made Hantarex monitor and stand become anthropomorphic in height and Prodger has previously installed the work with spoken word pieces underlining the human parallels: ‘Do you ever get this thing, I get it sometimes when I’m doing a task that involves systems and logging… It’s a sudden, very brief flash of a place from my past – not places of significance. Just a particular part of pavement on the way to school or a point on some route I’ve forgotten about. It’s not nostalgic and it’s not emotional. It’s just like co-ordinates being triggered and fired off and then it disappears again.’[1]

[1]AAB,  “Charlotte Prodger” ...ment: 06 , 2015, http://journalment.org/article/aab

Stephen Sutcliffe creates film collages from an extensive archive of British television, film, sound, broadcast images and spoken word recordings which he has been collecting since childhood. Often reflecting on aspects of British culture and identity, the results are melancholic, poetic and satirical amalgams which subtly tease out and critique ideas of class-consciousness and cultural authority. Through an extensive editing process Sutcliffe's works pitch sound against image to subvert predominant narratives and generate alternative readings through the juxtaposition and synchronization of visual and aural material.

Rehana Zaman (b 1982, Heckmondwike UK) is based in London, working with moving image and performance. Her work is concerned with the effect of multiple social dynamics on how individuals and groups relate. These narrative based pieces, often deadpan and neurotic, are frequently generated through conversation and collaboration with others. A driving question within Zaman’s work is how socio-political concerns, in addition to providing content, can structure how an artwork is produced.

Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

A person who creates exhibitions or who is employed to look after and research museum objects.

The term ‘Documentary’ was not coined until the 1920s, and then used by the British film-maker, John Grierson, to refer to moving pictures. It has a long and continuous history in British photography, reaching back to the invention of the medium. Many critics claimed that the documentary impulse, which can perhaps be best defined as the systematic recording of visual reality for the purpose of providing information and encouraging understanding of the world, is inherent in the medium itself. It was this view which came to be known as the realist paradigm - the belief that a photograph represents a ‘slice of reality’ easily understood by the viewer. This belief governed understanding of photography from the moment of its invention in the era of positivism in the 19th Century, until it was itself subject to interrogation in the 1980s.

Early British practitioners included John Thomson whose visual essay Street Life in London (1876) documented the life of the London poor, and Hill and Adamson who portrayed, in the mid 1840s, the customs and way of life of the fisher folk of Newhaven near Edinburgh. In the early 20th century, following the emergence of documentary film-making and Mass Observation (a study undertaken in the North of England by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson), this new aesthetic found its most persuasive outlet in the mass circulation weekly magazines, such as Picture Post and Life. In time, however, pressure from advertisers combined with the restrictions of group journalism and curtailed the independence of creative photographers, with only exceptional individuals such as Bill Brandt able to survive as both a photojournalist and an independent photographer. His images of Britain’s class-ridden society along with his more experimental nudes, portraits and landscapes had a profound influence on a younger generation and established Brant as a major creative force in the development of modernism in Britain.

Mass Observation was designed to emulate the radical achievements of the worker-photography movement which had arisen in Germany during the 1920s. It proved influential on the evolution of British documentary, especially on those photographers associated with the Side Gallery in Newcastle. The gallery fostered a regional, community-oriented form of documentary practice. Its philosophy was rooted firmly in the notion that an authentic document can only be generated by those familiar with the local community. Photographers associated with Side Gallery included Sirkka Konttinen, Isabella Jedrecyck, Graham Smith, Peter Fryer, Chris Killip and Julian Germain.

It was, however, across the Atlantic that the more enduring legacy concerning the ethics and status of documentary was to be found in the work of the photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration to document the plight of the American rural poor during the Depression. One of its outstanding photographers was Walker Evans whose use of signs and symbols (such as billboards and advertising hoardings) as images of desire created a text or narrative to accompany the careful sequencing of images. The direct inheritors of the photograph as social sign were the American photographers of the ‘social landscape’, namely Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus whose unsympathetic vision of the American landscape reflected the anxieties of urban life during the booming consumer decade - store fronts, billboards, graffiti and advertising. They chose to portray people, situations and artefacts in a casual and objective way that allowed the viewer to interpret the work freely; a strategy that became known as the ‘snapshot aesthetic’. One of those who experienced many of these developments first hand was the British photographer Tony Ray-Jones. His work was widely reproduced in the 1960s and his book A Day Off (1974) proved a particular inspiration for the generation of documentary photographers who developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Relevant websites:
The work of early documentary photographs can be found in the collections of the Royal Photographic Society www.rps.org)
The Mass Observation archive is held by the University of Sussex www.sussex.ac.uk/library/massobs/
The work of the Side Gallery can be seen at www.amber-online.com/gallery/
The archive for the Farm Security Administration is now in the Print and Reading Room Collections of the Library of Congress in Washington www.loc.gov/rr/print

The depiction of shapes and forms on a flat surface chiefly by means of lines although colour and shading may also be included. Materials most commonly used are pencil, ink, crayon, charcoal, chalk and pastel, although other materials, including paint, can be used in combination.

A transparent, flexible plastic material, usually of cellulose acetate or polyester, on which light-sensitive emulsion is coated, or on which an image can be formed by various transfer processes.