Port of Call

Islam in the UK, as a theme and subject for exploration is inseparable from the broader canvas of identity and citizenship politics in a culturally diverse and contemporary Britain. Port of Call interrogates the terminology, bureaucratic language and inference (defining the issue of asylum and nationality) as contained in the British Government's White Paper ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven: Integration with Diversity in Modern Britain’. In utilising these texts within new ‘pictorial’ representatRead moreions of England, the intention is to subvert the classical imagining and imaging of the country. And in so doing, tease out the accompanying romanticized notions of a green, pleasant and genteel land. Ideals which seem redundant and at odds with present reality. These visual texts update and critically reflect the social landscape of a 21st Century England. This photographic inquiry into the psychology and politics of borders, identity and culture, and migration seems especially appropriate in this current period of international debate and discourse concerning globalisation, the West versus the rest (of the World) and the mass movement of peoples across continents to new countries of ‘safe haven’. Port of Call was a commission for Common Ground: Aspects of contemporary British Muslim experience and comprised 15 images on archival giclée prints on rag paper, 2002. http://www.anthonylam.co.uk Read less