Infrastructure as Form: In Conversation with Brett Rogers and Sarah Turner
Recorded on 22 November 2021.
In this episode of ASAP Cast, we continue our discussion with Brett Rogers and Sarah Turner about the ongoing conference Concerning Photography. Brett Rogers is Director of The Photographers’ Gallery, London, the first publicly funded Gallery dedicated solely to photography in the UK. Founded in 1971, it established a reputation for its independent approach to curating and its promotion of photography in all its myriad forms. Sarah Turner is an art historian, curator and writer. She is Deputy Director at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London, which is part of Yale University; and has taught art history at the University of York and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Concerning Photography: The Photographers’ Gallery and Photographic Networks in Britain (c. 1971 to the Present) is being organised to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of The Photographers’ Gallery.
Rogers and Turner discuss their approaches towards charting institutional histories as slippages, hauntings and ephemera. They speak of the role of the historian as one requiring the preservation of embodied histories, narratives of sporadic experiments and transient initiatives, which may be muted in organisational archives. They also shed a light on the challenges of pedagogical and engaged programming in times of resource constraints. They go on to talk about the waning of coalitional gestures among institutions and regard the networked, rhizomatic structure of creative practices within the field of photography and lens-based media. Turner discusses Karin Zitzewitz’s notion of "Infrastructure as Form," which is defined as “…a mixture of institutions of patronage, material structures of transmission or travel, and frameworks of thought” in movement with and against each other, as a way to think beyond single-agent or institutional paradigms.
We conclude by thinking about expanding and troubling “territorialised” imaginations, destabilising notions of region and country through inter-institutional and cross-regional research, and how these are transcended in the work and programming of the conference organised by The Photographer’s Gallery and the Paul Mellon Centre.
(Featured Image: Sue Davies, Founding Director of The Photographers' Gallery, pictured with the New European Colour photography posters. Unknown photographer. 1978. Image courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery Archive.)
To learn more about Concerning Photography, please visit the Conference webpage.
In case you missed the firs part of this connversation, you can listen to it here.
