Simon Keitch Photography Blog

A few months back I received a phonecall from Francesca Steele – a Plymouth based Performance Artist – who asked me to photograph her for an upcoming book being produced by the Plymouth Arts Centre to coincide with the Pigs Of Today Are The Hams Of Tomorrow performance arts show which is taking place at The Slaughterhouse – a nearly 200 year old dis-used slaughterhouse – at Royal William Yard in Plymouth this month which is being curated by Marina Abramovic. The deadline for the images was extremely tight but we pulled together a two location shoot over the course of two days; one studio shoot with a black background and a second on location at The Slaughterhouse itself; Francesca was great to work with and the images were delivered in time and so far with a lot of very positive feedback so I’m looking forward to seeing the finished book. Francesca’s current project – Routine – has involved her transforming her body within the relatively short space of a year through the adoption of bodybuilding training, diet, and finally competition, and we did another shoot together at Francesca’s first bodybuilding competition – Miss Plymouth 2009 – a few weeks later where I produced documentary photographs both backstage and front of house of the preparation and competition. I decided to do a little Q&A session with Francesca to give a better insight into what the project is all about.

SK: How did this project begin; where did the idea come from?

FS: The idea for the project grew initially from working with [bodybuilder and gym owner] Stuart Core on a different project – Horticultural Healing – a rehabilitation project for clients with acquired brain injury. Stuart collaborated on a series of photographic outcomes to the project, also working with a magician Christopher Howell; the photographer for this project was Manuel Vason – commissioned by Groundwork South West in Plymouth. Also around the same time I had been working at Derriford hospital in the Histopathology lab – which included the cytology unit and also the morgue – here I was working with the body in a dislocated, close up and visual way, using microscopes to examine, and learning more about bodily and cellular structures. With both of these projects on my mind and also at the time feeling a dissatisfaction with elements of my practice, the idea formed to use my own live body as more than a ‘tool’ within my work. To attempt to make the body/life into an artwork, in some sense. I started going to Stuart’s gym – Core Fitness – and felt aware it was unlike most gyms I had been to, and that the atmosphere was quite different. I felt fascinated when I heard men talk about food, and when they were so critical about their physical form and aimed for constant improvement. I talked my idea over with Stuart, and with his and Lewis Breed’s help and consistent advice and support I began to body-build. It took me some time to get around a few aspects of it; as a woman the focus had always been on eating less and losing weight, lots of cardio etc, but to body-build I had to completely change my diet and actually eat all the food I was told too and aim to gain weight. It did take me a while to really understand – and stop fighting what I’d been brought up culturally to believe about my body. To be honest this took me a couple of months – where initially I lost weight rather than gained, but it did eventually sink in! I set the goal of competing in a regional bodybuilding contest to have a goal and timetable to work to. This gave me 8 months of gaining and 4 months dieting down for competition. I gained a stone and a half in my gaining period and lost it during my diet – although my body changed dramatically over the year – and although I was the same weight at the beginning and the end of the year I looked completely different.

Backstage at Miss Plymouth 2009

SK: How does such a long term project translate into an individual live performance piece; for example the Pigs Of Today Are The Hams Of Tomorrow show which you’ll be appearing in?

FS: Simply – I don’t think it can. I have always thought that one of the biggest and more difficult tasks of being an artist is in the selection of what you show. Obviously with this work, it has become impossible show to everything – and really now this year is coming to an end it feels more that the process of making work has just started rather than finished. Competitive bodybuilding has two main elements  - the work that you put into your body, lifestyle, food & exercise – and the showmanship of posing and performing on stage. For the Pigs Of Today Are The Hams Of Tomorrow project, I am going back to my established one-to-one performance practice with some of what I have learnt from the performative side of bodybuilding. I am looking at the piece as a long slow tense piece of choreography where viewers have the opportunity to view one at a time.

SK: What you were aiming to achieve when you started this project; were there specific goals you had when you begun, and if you did do you think you’ve realised them or have they changed during the process?

FS: Apart from the duration act of bodybuilding for a year, there were initially a number of aims or ideas; these were partly to do with data collection and to investigate masculinity and feminity. The data collection I found fell to pieces as I went along. I found the process of bodybuilding itself to kind of wipe it out; it seemed to become irrelevant - and the data really didn’t change much! As I became more immersed in the lifestyle of bodybuilding it seemed less verbal or intellectual – but almost more of a meditative act – more about calm concentration and attitude making it possible to push yourself further and further; which somehow left less room for diary keeping. I was also interested in investigating masculine and feminine beauty; what attributes a female could take on or borrow from masculinity and where these boundaries between feminine and masculine lay in terms of the aesthetic of the body. I gave myself the goal to compete to give me a real objective to work towards and to help me to try to follow the process to the best of my ability, and also for the work to exist in the world of bodybuilding rather than just that of art. During the process most of my goals have changed as I have begun to understand more about competitive bodybuilding and can contemplate more of what its potential is within my art practice. I have decided to continue bodybuilding and competing, and using it as source and fuel for my artwork; I feel a year is really only enough time to get started and I am still enthusiastic and excited about what the future possibilities and dialogues can be for this work.

Francesca Steele will be performing ‘Routine’ at the Pigs Of Today Are The Hams Of Tomorrow taking place at Royal William Yard in Plymouth over the 22nd/23rd/24th of January 2010 with the book publication launch taking place on the 21st.

Plymouth Arts Centre presents The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow, a curatorial collaboration with the Marina Abramović Institute for Preservation of Performance Art. The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow will stage, document and discuss groundbreaking international performance art in order to examine and sustain the future of the medium. The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow takes place over three days at Royal William Yard with performances by six renowned artists and artist-collectives.

This is the first curatorial project of the Marina Abramović Institute. Marina Abramović has pioneered performance art for over four decades on an international scale. Her major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, opens in March 2010.

The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow is a translation of the title of a conceptual piece of writing by Georg Jappe published by KunstForum International in 1978 on the contemporary state of art practice in relation to global political agendas.

One of my previously unpublished portraits of Nicolas Roche ran in Ireland’s best selling newspaper the Irish Independent recently. It’s always great to see unpublished photos finally go to print especially as this image was one of my own personal favourites from the shoot.

Issue 51 of Shred magazine is now available featuring my photos of British cross-country mountain bike legend and Giant Global Team rider Oli Beckingsale on the cover and illustrating the feature interview; I shot these images way back in the summer in Oli’s hometown of Bristol and it’s great to finally see them in print. Read on-line or order a good old fashioned hard-copy HERE or pick one up from any good UK bike shop.

I’ve been meaning to experiment a little more with the Holga 120N since I picked one up nearly a year ago; if you’re unfamiliar with Holga they’re a Chinese company that produce 120 film format ‘toy’ cameras that feature not only a plastic body but also a plastic lens; the cheap construction produces photographs that have a distinctive quality (or lack of it), plus you never know what you’re going to get back from the lab. I specifically ordered the Holga 120N as it features a hotshoe for mounting a flash, with the intention of hooking it up to some lights; there’s something pretty hilarious about plugging a Pocket Wizard radio transceiver into the hotshoe of a camera that costs less than £20 including shipping from China, and then syncing it with a 750 watt flash head and power pack… The frame on the left is (obviously…) from the Holga, shot on Kodak Tri-X 400 and straight out of the film scanner (no additional post production), while the right hand frame is from the Nikon D3. The subject is Devon based artist Clem So who’s a huge talent and was a great pleasure to work with; we got a lot of great images from the shoot so I’ll blog some more about my sitting with him in due course.

Update: finally got a decent scan of the Holga/Tri-X negative (the above was a lo-res scan straight from the lab); what a difference… You can really see the Holga weirdness on this; looks like something from a drunken dream.

I recently photographed the 2009 Tour of Britain winner, Norwegian cyclist Edvald Boasson Hagen of the Columbia team for an interview featured in the current December 2009 issue of Cycle Sport Magazine. Boasson Hagen and the Columbia team dominated this year’s Tour of Britain with Edvald winning four of the eight stages along with the overall win. At just 22 years old he’s an incredible talent and unusually quiet for a sprinter; the sitting was on location at a team hotel during the Tour of Britain so I only spent a few minutes with him, but he was very quiet, a little awkward and self conscious which I found endearing bearing in mind that he’s just signed a deal with the new Sky cycling team reported to be worth 2.5 million pounds.

And some out-takes that didn’t make the final article:

This past Saturday I was assigned by Groundwork South West to photograph Lucy Orta‘s 31st 70 x 7 The Meal on location at Sherwell Hall in Plymouth. 70 x 7 The Meal, act XXXI was a collaboration between internationally renowned artists Lucy and Jorge Orta and local artists Anne-Marie Culhane and Jo Salter. The concept of this 31st act of the dining project was a celebration of wild and local food: growing it, eating it and sharing it with the aim to provide an opportunity for an invited audience to enjoy a special meal in friendly discussion around the theme of food and sustainability. Regional foods from the South-West area of England were harvested and prepared by chefs from Fat Hen a small rural family enterprise set up by forager and professional ecologist Caroline Davey. Jamie Mclaren-Smith, environmental business manager from Groundwork South West carried out a carbon footprint calculation, taking in the total distances travelled by guests and food alike and the electricity and gas used on the night, therefore enabling him to work out a representative figure of the event’s approximate carbon footprint, comparing it to more commercial practices. Photographed above is the venue during the meal, and below is Lucy Orta herself photographed just as the guests were arriving. The next 70 x 7 Meal will take place in the ever so slightly more glamorous location of Venice…

The launch party for the new 2009 – 2010 Shred Brochure and Price Guide took place last Friday at Carpe Diem in Plymouth and the brochure will now be distributed to nearly 3000 businesses across Plymouth and the surrounding Devon and Cornwall districts. The commercial portraits were shot by myself (all but one) on location at various Shred Ltd Clients’ premises; each one an environmental location portrait of the client featured in the brochure, to be run full page vertical and composed to allow room for the graphics laid over the images featuring a short bio of the business. Featured above is the opening spread featuring Shred Managing Director Steve Toze alongside Designer Jim, and below is John Crouch of the National Marine Aquarium, Myles Hutchins of surf goods (including Dragon Eyeware) distributor Hectic Ltd, and finally Gary Bees of PC Towbar Services. I had a great time working on the photos for the brochure and look forward to producing images for future Shred projects; check out the full brochure at http://www.shredpublishing.co.uk/page2.htm

Portraits I was assigned to produce of the Irish National Champion and AG2R La Mondiale rider Nicolas Roche can be found illustrating an interview in the new November 2009 issue of Cycle Sport Magazine (race photos by Graham Watson). The photographs were shot on location at this year’s Tour of Britain at an overnight hotel which was taken over by most of the race entourage and participating teams. There was a lot of waiting around at the location and very little time with the subjects in an extremely limiting setting – as you would expect when trying to shoot professional cyclists in the middle of a major eight-day stage race – but I love the challenge of working on location and the finished article looks great with a nice choice of images and good layout. A couple of the highlights during the downtime included seeing the eventual overall Tour of Britain winner Edvald Boasson Hagen roll into the hotel car park on his time trial bike after riding back to the hotel (after winning that day’s stage), followed a little later in the evening by the entire police cavalcade. Also worth a mention is the photo below of Agritubel team riders Nicolas Vogondy and Freddy Bichot who walked straight in to the studio I’d set up in a conference room on the ground floor of the hotel, sat down and demanded to have their photo taken; I figured why not, squeezed off a single frame and they jumped up, gave me their email addresses and were off…

One of the previously unpublished portraits I shot of American professional cyclist (currently with Garmin) Tyler Farrar earlier in the year in his adopted home town of Ghent in Belgium has finally seen it into print in the new November 2009 issue of US cycling magazine VeloNews. I’m not too sure where you can pick up a copy in the UK but you can buy a subscription (including a digital subscription) at VeloNews.com

Swiss rider Fabian Cancellara took his third World Championship jersey today when he won the 2009 World Time Trial Championships by an incredible 27 seconds over the Silver medallist Gustav Larsson of Sweden; Cancellara showing once again that when on form he’s unbeatable in the discipline. I thought I’d take this opportunity to pull a few unpublished photographs from my Procycling Magazine cover shoot earlier in the year; a much tighter cropped alternative photo from the above set-up ran double page spread in the original interview but this one and the two out takes below have never been published or publicly shown previously. Fabian was a pleasure to work with and a true gent, he even went back to his hotel room to find a team jersey to wear for the shoot when the team management didn’t deliver one to the location (a not so glamorous but very large conference room in the team hotel’s basement) as arranged.