S2, E9 - Lizzie Brown

Lizzie Brown is a photographer based in London, England. She experiments with photographic processes using her garden as a darkroom.  Lizzie's a member of London Independent Photography and Crouch End Studios. The episode was recorded in February 2022.

Lizzy's website and social media:
Website: www.elizabethhaybrown.com
Insta: @LizzieHayB

London Independent Photography:
www.londonphotography.org.uk

Crouch End Studios:
https://crouchendopenstudios.org.uk/

Podcast details:
Podcast email: artiststalespodcast@gmail.com
Website: www.artiststales.net
Instagram: @artists_tales_podcast
Threads: @artists_tales_podcast

Transcript

0:18

Welcome listeners to Artist Tales, the podcast that features and celebrates artists from different walks of life. I'm your host, Heather Martin, and in this episode, I'm chatting with Lizzie Brown, a photographer based in London, England. Welcome, Lizzie. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Tell me a bit about yourself and your photography and how you got into it. So how I got into photography really was because I went to art school. and I found I couldn't draw and I didn't like life drawing, which is one of the things in those days, so this was the 60s, where you needed to be able to draw. And then I moved from doing art to doing photography at what was then Leicester Polytechnic, that is now De Montfort University, and I went back some years later. to do an MA in photography, which is where I think my photographic career really begins. So I did have a background in art to start with. So that's where my photography began and I began to learn about other photographers from Paul Hill, who was leading the MA course at Demartre at that time. And I learnt the way of... working with projects. So before I did my MA, I'd done the single photo shot, you know, and that was some quite nice photos. And in actual fact, during that time, I'd lived in Newmarket and I won two awards for racehorse photography with the Sporting Life, which was a newspaper that was the sort of chronicle for horse racing. But I began to start working in projects and the first project I did in Miami was something photographing myself and the aging process, which was turning the camera on yourself, I think is quite frightening to start with and looking at yourself. I mean, the first photo I took of myself, I sort of went upstairs, put some makeup on and then took the photo again and definitely looked... better with makeup or I thought because it had all the wrinkles. So I did a major project for my MA, which was on myself, how I related to my family. So looking at parts of it's quite interesting. We often say things like, right, looking at this part of my body reminds me of my mother's hands, for instance, or, you know, I've got size, small shoes. And my father, who was a jockey, always said that to be a jockey you had to have small, small feet. He would never employ anyone in horse racing who had large feet. So there were things like that reminded me of my family. And the major part of the project I did after that was photographing people's bodies after they'd taken something off, or they'd sat on a chair. or something like that, so they got marks on them. And it was interesting that a younger person, it took them a lot longer to leave the marks on their body than it did a few years older. One of my neighbors went around for two hours with a hat, really tightly bandaged around his head to try and get mark on his head, his balls. Which was a really great photo in the end that came out very well. I moved on to when I completed my MA, I joined something called Cratchend Open Studios. A friend of mine had been exhibiting in it for a while and she said, oh, I think you ought to exhibit some of your work now you've done an MA. So I think it was 2008 where I did my first mounted exhibition as part of the Open Studios. a few images, which was really pleasing and quite motivating. But what I liked about that process was that with an open studio, people come in and look at your work and wander around. And I really liked the fact you can talk about your work to individuals as they came around, and it made you learn a bit more about it. And how did people react to your work? Once my body. Obviously they said things like, gosh, that was really daring. I had also included some landscapes, which they really liked. But the body ones were something that nobody bought any of them. I have to say, it was the rather nice landscapes. And I was particularly, or I am particularly interested in the way light hits an environment. changes the way it looks. I mean, this morning I went for a walk very early this morning along the banks of the River Lee and the bright, bright sunshine in contrast to last weekend when I went for a walk along there was just completely changed and brightened up the landscape. And you mentioned, you know, for your MA you turned your camera on yourself and people's bodies. Why? What drew you to that, doing that project? Well, I had never done that before. And one of the tasks I was given was to do something I'd never done before. So all of us on that MA course had to experiment it. We were told we were there to experiment and expand our photography. And that was when I did that. And I particularly looked at other artists' work almost rather more than other photographers. I was very interested in the work of Richard Long, who walks and makes marks in the landscape. And in some respects, the way that my photography of the body turned out was like a landscape as a body. And he made marks and either built them by walking or by placing stones and things like that. So... I found that really interesting. And Rachel White-Reed looking at the way she fills spaces because basically some of the images were of the way people had sat on a cane, somebody had sat on a cane chair and left the marks on the bottom. So they had interesting marks. So that was sort of filling the gaps, if you like, in the same way that Rachel Whiteread had done the interior space of a house in Hackney. And what you're describing seems different to what you just mentioned about you're drawn to lights. It almost seems like it's two different things, you know, the patterns or the marks versus kind of light or is there overlap between the two? Well, it was interesting because before I did the MA, I hadn't done any lighting, so artificial lighting. So I learned how to light doing that. So I learned the process of lighting in a way that made it look more dramatic or softer, for instance. So when I was photographing my face, I think as you get older, you have very delicate skin lines around your eyes. And I needed to photograph that very softly. or else it looked very hard. Whereas when the person sat down on the chair, we needed to accentuate the marks, so I learned the different ways of lighting. And how does that influence your photography, whatever you're doing? Because it sounds like you mentioned that you went out and you went for the walk and it was very different lighting from one week to the next. When you learned about lighting in your MA, did it make you much more aware of lighting or how did that influence? your photography in terms of lighting? I think it did make me more aware of looking at light, although I mean, I lived in the countryside as opposed to in urban environment. And I was quite aware of the lighting landscapes, if you like. Now, are you still with Crouch End Studios? Do you still- I am still with Crouch End Open Studios. So that has been a really good route for me to exhibit and now I select artists. I work with them to select artists for Crouch End Open Studios and we've got about 60 artists at the moment. So tell me a bit more about that process of selecting other artists to join. Well we set up a committee of about six of the artists or seven. We have to have a Nod number of the artists and we get other artists to send in six images, a CV and an artist statement. And then we look at those images and decide whether as a group and vote, you know, whether we'll select them or not. And is it for a fixed term or once they're in, they're in or? Well, once they're in, as long as they don't leave for more than three years, they're in. And it sounds like it's given you the opportunities, as you say, to exhibit work. Is that a very different process for you, you know, rather than just kind of doing images for, let's say, a publication or an organization? Do you approach it in a different way? I think I use a similar image for LAP, which I'm a member of. It's just London independent photography. Yeah. So I tend to use those images for exhibiting with L.I.P. But during Cratchend Open Studios, I met an artist who I worked with in a totally different way called Ahmed Farooqi, who has been quite big influence on me pushing my boundaries of photography. He set up in his house something called Space 36. He has a very big house and he set up a residency to cover particular themes that he wanted to exhibit. So for instance, the first one was House 36, the secret life of House 36. This is, it's 36 Ashley Road in Cratchend. So there were eight of us who did things for that. And what I needed to do was expand my photography. Just taking photographs wasn't quite right for that. So I looked at the work of Anna Atkins and her ferns and seaweed and things like that. And the HAT Space Statistics has an amazing garden which has lots of ferns and aces. So I made flags for the garden. at material and then using cyanotype, which is the blue and white process. It's an alternative photography process. I made Fledisard's garden. So that was one part of it. And the other thing, which is something that I've moved into doing quite a lot, I use social media to get people from all over the world to send me a picture a place which was 36 something road. So I had hundreds of folks of house 36, different houses 36 from Canada, India, America, Dubai, somebody on a plane, seat 36 and various things. And it was quite, that was quite interesting. And I made a sort of installation of that. So it sounds like you've done the residency at number 36. Yeah. How long did that last for? It ended in two long weekends showing the work and it was about four months, but it was on and off, so it wasn't every day we were there. We met and we talked about our different aspects of work and what I would do would be, well, I'm thinking of doing this. what are you doing? And we all talk about what we were doing. And we bounced ideas off each other, which was really helpful. And how did people who came to the exhibitions those two weekends, how, what was the response? Well, they really enjoyed it. We weren't selling anything. It was just really to make people aware of the different sorts of art, modern art, contemporary art, or photography, the way it could be pushed. the boundaries of photography. You mentioned London Independent Photography or LIP. Now I know you from LIP and I know you were the advanced organizer for quite a number of years. So how did you get involved with LIP? When I finished my MA, LIP had been set up by a group of photographers who had done an MA and didn't want to join a camera club because they thought it was judging. and they wanted to continue with the same sort of crit that you would get when you were doing an MA crit and support. And so LIP was set up because of that. And one of the people who helped set it up was Paul Hill. So he suggested that I contact LIP and offered to do something. So that's how I became involved. And I must admit, I've really enjoyed the events that, I know you've stepped down recently, but the events you put on are really engaging. So they range from like workshops through to talks through to, you know, quite a variety of different types of things. And how did you go about not only contacting people, but kind of deciding, okay, we're gonna do workshop or we're gonna do talk or whatever it was. To be honest, some of the workshops were ones that people whose work I'd seen. and I thought were very, very interesting. The first workshops really, like Jenny who's taken over from me, I worked together with the events organizer. So I became an assistant when I first took over the event. And there were a group of photographers that they used to use that they'd come across. And I use those. I suppose it was quite a lot of it was, whose work would I like to have seen, whose work would members like to have seen, because I remember various AGMs saying, what would you like? Is there anything you would like a workshop on, or is there any photographer you'd like to hear speak? And we had two levels of talks, one which was something called a Janet Hall. A member had died. and left some money. And every year we used to go for a really high level photographer to give the speech, talk about their work and answer questions. So we had people like Martin Power, Simon Norfolk, Anna Fox and various other photographers who we asked to talk about their work. And for some of the talks at the end, members could bring along some photographs and share them with these people and get some comments on them. As the talks developed we then stopped doing that because I think some people didn't really want to do that. Some of the photographers and also some of the members didn't really want to share their work. The workshops were things like we would do book making. binding, so you learn how to make books, very simple zines and things like that. We had somebody who goes through sequencing your work, which for a photographer, I think selecting and sequencing your work is probably one of the most difficult things. So there were things like that were quite interesting. Now you mentioned you do get into you started exploring alternative methods or alternative processes. Now I was just kind of wondering different projects and I kind of sense that's probably one project or one area you're starting to explore. I remember a project you did, I don't know if you're still doing it on shoes, which I found really quite interesting, so I was just wondering you know if you could give a little bit of or to talk a little bit about some of the projects that you've worked on. I suppose one side I mean, I suppose a lot of my work is working collaboratively, but one sort of work I did like doing, and I've done about four different projects, looking at people, I'm really interested in people and finding out more about them. And shoes for women and also I've discovered for a few men are a really important thing. And some people collect quite a lot of shoes. I thought it would be interesting to find out why they collect or wear particular shoes. And also I wanted to take photographs of these shoes after they'd taken them off. So I did a call on social media and asked people to bring their shoes to me in the library I was working in Cratchen. And I lit their shoes and they wrote things for me of them. And it was quite interesting because you saw them, there would be a group of people who would come in together and they'd end up having a long conversation about their shoes and writing up quite a lot about them. And so I photographed these shoes and displayed them with the text. And in some cases I had to edit the text down. They told some really wonderful stories about particular shoes. There was one lady who, had a pair of her husband's shoes that she came in with. And they were really dirty and covered in moss. And I said, what's this all about? And apparently these were shoes that her husband wouldn't get rid of. And her husband had died a couple of years earlier. And she put them in the garden, planted bulbs in them every year, but she had bought a pair of shoes for him. a new pair to replace these and he never wore them. They were in the cupboard waiting for him to wear them. But these shoes looked amazing. They were really covered in all sorts of things. And she wrote quite a nice story to go with that. And it just makes me think of the social history of shoes. So not only the trends in fashion or the fashion trends in shoes, but also the... know, it's the people's stories and I think it's often the merging of the two that actually is really quite interesting. I think it is, I find that really interesting actually. I did the first set of those, I think I did in about 2012 and I'm actually thinking of going back 10 years later and doing a similar thing and seeing if the shoes are very different. or if their reasons for having them are very different. So, which is, I think is quite an interesting thing. Also, I did another project on things that you wouldn't, I was cleaning up one of my rooms at home. I was supposed to be decluttering and I found that it was really hard. It was taking me a very long time to do because I kept picking up the thing and thinking about it. What did it remind me of? What was so special about it? Why did I want to keep it? And so I went to some of the Cratchendogs and studio artists and asked them if they got any special things that they would like to have photographed and write something about. And so I did that with them. There were some quite interesting things. And at the time I was also working with some people who had learning disabilities, young people. And so I did a project with them as well, looking at what was really important to them. If they had a fire, they would say, what would they pick up and take with them? And that was quite tear-making at some time. You know, there were little things that say a picture, a selfie they'd had taken with somebody who they admire. So somebody had the photograph taken with J.K. Rowling. And so that was what she would have. In fact, she always had it with her in her handbag. And there were things like that I thought was interesting. I also did something where I got people to empty their handbags in front of me. It was very revealing. I didn't ask for any texts to go with that. It's just lots of photographs of the contents of handbags. And I remember looking at one quite recently where somebody had three different phones in her bag. And I was thinking, now if we did that today, which is probably about six years later. What would they have? Would they just have one phone? Or would they have, what do you carry around? I mean, on this walk this morning, I knew I was going to get coffee on the way back. I just had a phone in my pocket because that does everything now. So I didn't need to take purse, need to take any money. The phone also took photographs. And I was going to... mention when you said the person had three phones, I was thinking the phones have probably changed dramatically in six years for a start. But I remember in school and stuff, kind of like, you know, you had, you know, mobiles were just coming in or cell phones were just coming in probably in the late, you know, I think probably in eight, late eighties into nineties, you know, and there's not until probably the 2000s was a tipping point for a lot of people to get, you know, mobile phones. But even the phones over the last 20 years have changed dramatically. I remember, you know, like the little phones you'd get in the early 2000s, now you have the smartphones. And as you say, they do so much more. Like they're quite powerful things, you know, they're little computers really. And you're right, you know, like it does so much. You can pay for things, you can take pictures, you do phone calls and message, you know, it's just, if people are carrying things, what are they carrying? Yeah. So I might also revisit. that project, but I think I will leave that for 10 years. I might not. Well, technology changes so much. I mean. Well, exactly. Well, one of the things I did was to become attached to this group of photographers, organisation called Degrees of Freedom. And I went to one of their meetings, Ahmed Farooqi, the space 36 person. was one of the people who instigated it, along with a Spanish artist called Esperanza Gomez Carrera. And it was really the show that I was involved in to start with was something called the Antigallery Show. So it was against hanging plain pictures on the walls in the gallery. So it was at Espacio Gallery and we all had to choose something to do. And one of the things I did, we were all given spaces in the gallery. And what happened to me was I got there late. I'd only just been invited. And I said, well, what spaces left? The loo. So I said, oh, okay, right. What am I going to do with this? And so... What I did was using social media, I got people to sit on their loo seat and take a picture. And I sent this all over the world to various friends and relatives. And somebody in Australia actually sent me a picture of their horse looking through the door because they had a loo in their farm. My brother was on a boat somewhere. So there were... loads and loads of pictures of the Lou, and we papered them all over the Lou wall in the gallery. People sent them to me and I printed them out and papered. And in the end I made a collage, which I exhibited at LAP in the annual exhibition, and that hangs in my Lou here. So you don't have a picture of the Queen, you have pictures that montage the pictures of people's Lou's. So this group sounds like they were kind of challenging the traditional here's a gallery here's here pictures. Yes. That was the. That was exactly it. And wanting what was what was shown in Especie to be very interactive. I mean one thing when we were going through and to have, you know, if you're taken prisoner, you hold up something and you have the police shot taken of you with numbers at the front, all sorts of things. And so I put up a wall, I used a very big banner of a wall and got people to go and pose holding one of these pictures in front of them and it had the height. So when you photograph a police, it probably has a measurement behind you and your picture and then holding something. And because we didn't know what the rules were for Brexit, so anyone wearing anything, whatever, was breaking the rules. So their picture went up on the wall. So they would take an iPhone picture of themselves in front of this wall, and then it would be printed and put up on the wall. And we had hundreds of people coming and doing that, photographing themselves on their phone and then posting it and being part of it. So they were being interactive with them. Is this group still going? Yes, they do. And they do things. They obviously haven't been doing things during lockdown, so the last couple of years. And they don't do things all the time. And when people visit What sorts of reactions do you get from people visiting the exhibitions put on by this group? I think they get, well, they get really good reaction. And they do tend to, the footfall at Espacio tends to go up quite a lot because they're also very good at social media, which seems to be so important nowadays. Another one they did for Brexit, and I, my piece for that was actually, they call the gallery, Brexitopia. And I did a piece which was a quilt. So I got people to send pictures of the birds and they were all stitched together with an English pattern. I mean, I did this on computer and the title of that one was, Patched Together or Torn Apart. What was the answer going to be? Were all these European beds going to be patched together or torn apart? And that's Actually, I've still got that down there. It's the same size as a double bed. So it's not strictly traditional, let's put a picture in a wall. It's you pushing, it sounds like you're pushing the boundaries really. Exactly. So I've done a lot of banner making things and it's a very, very inexpensive way of producing your artwork to show in a gallery. And I think it would probably be more and more as materials get more expensive. When we were chatting before recording, you mentioned you, did you work for the British Museum? I did work for the British Museum. Before I did my MA, I worked for the British Museum and I was photographing some of the objects. It was very, it was actually demotivating, I have to say, because you weren't allowed to light them in any other way than what they wanted. and you weren't allowed to handle them. So the curators of that particular section would handle them. And you just were there pressing the shutter. So that I found the photographing of them was quite difficult. I also worked in the print department, got into trouble with it. This was actually in the three-day week time. I got into trouble for printing too fast. Too efficient. I mean, I did love that place because I mean, I really used to like history at school and I loved the idea of working there. But when it came to being a photographer there, it wasn't as interesting. I would say when they had the Big Tooth and Carmen exhibition, which was very exciting, photographing it there again was quite difficult. It sounded quite restrictive in many ways. It was very restrictive. And so I sort of broke out of it by going into education because something that was called media resources, developing materials for teachers and teaching them how to use them. How did you find that? Like what was... Oh, that was great fun because you had access to film cameras, still cameras, art materials and things. You just made films or made videos, learnt how to project films. That's another story. Yeah, it was just really good because it was then the Inner London Education Authority. And what was really sad was when it was broken up into all the different boroughs, because when it was the Inner London Education Authority, you were able to share... materials, equipment, resources across the whole of London, which now is just borough-wide and not very good use of resources. So you teased us with the projecting being a different story. Do you want to tell us a bit more about that? Well, yeah, you had to learn how to, you got a 16-millimetre projection certificate, or you were supposed to get one. We were all trained at South Thames College, as it was then. And it was during the time when there were bomb alerts because there's problems in Ireland. And I was in the middle of doing my 16 millimeter projection certificate. And my colleagues were standing around watching and we were being examined and we had to leave the room because there was an alert. When we came back, I was told I'd failed that test. And my colleagues stood there and said, That's not fair. She did exactly what you said she should do. So they had to go back on it and I was allowed to do it. Just one of those things. I think I've probably been a bit of a rebel most of my life, quietly. It's good that we have these rebels. We need more of them. Yeah. Tell me a bit about the alternative processes, you know, for the photography that you do. Sort of what is it and what do you do? I regularly use my garden as a darkroom. So a lot of the processes I use are with using the sun as my enlarger or my lighting source. I've recently done some work, which is chlorophyll printing. So taking a black and white image of a leaf or something and exposing that to the sunlight. So I put down a leaf, I have to choose the right sort of leaf. I try and either use a leaf from my garden or from, if I'm doing it for Space36, from Space36's garden. So that it has some contact with the place it comes from. And then I expose an image on it. So one of the things I did for Space36 was to take leaves from their garden. And these were honesty leaves that they had there and exposed photographs of the artists on them. So all the artists who were exhibiting at that time. So how do you expose the image to them? You put the leaf with the positive transparency, if you like, something that's transparent on top and then leave it in the weather. And it depends how long it takes to expose. depends on how often the sun comes out in those few days. So I had some which were exposing for a week, night and day, and some which were exposing for just a day. So I did it in May, so we had some very hot days at that time, and those would take about 36 hours, whereas some of them took something like 72 hours or more. So that's one process and that is using the leaf's chlorophyll that's in the leaf. It's basically if you put a bucket on the lawn on your grass and leave it there for a bit and move it you have yellow underneath and you're using that process. You can't then expose the leaf once you've done it. to the light very much unless you put it through some unsustainable process, like putting it between acetate or something that doesn't allow sun's rays through or UV rays through. And I know one of our members does that quite successfully. She coats them in something, but I don't do that. I tend to keep them in a book. And if I'm exhibiting them, they usually have piece of rolled black material in front of them and the person who sees them just lifts up the covering to have a look at the image and they will fade within time. I was gonna ask you that, how long do they last? Well, they think to have lasted at least about three years so far without changing very much. But obviously if I want to keep that image, I'd photograph it and carry on that way. I've also experimented with etching, so printmaking, and changed some of my photographs into etching. And that is obviously using all sorts of acids and things, which are not very nice, but the result is quite interesting. Etching is one of the older forms of printmaking, and it does unfortunately use acid. although we're looking at different ways of making it with something that is less detrimental to the environment. The inks I use are now water-based as opposed to being oil-based and things. So at least I'm going in the right direction. I mean, one of the things I am very interested in is the processing and developing of analogue film and printing. using non-detrimental to the environment things. So, I mean, there are quite a few people who've been making developer out of coffee or fixer out of coffee and sugar, mixtures of things. And I'm looking at those at the moment. That sounds very interesting. And I'd love to see the results. Yeah. So last question, what's next? Where do you think your photography is going? Well, at the moment, during lock time, I did a lot of walks, which is what we could normally could do. And I have got thousands of pictures of one particular stretch of the New River in London, which I walked with my husband every day. And I started to take pictures from a bridge every day, at the same point on the bridge, because there was markings on the bridge that I could line up with. and I'm working on that at the moment trying to, I've done that for two years every day, well virtually every day, and I've got the times that I did it etc. So I'm looking at a way of presenting that in some interesting way. I also want to look at doing some work merging images and experimenting obviously with new different ways of processing them. And I'm sure there are other things. I'm afraid I'm one of these people who flips in and out of things. I'm a Gemini and I'm a typical Gemini. So I have my beautiful photography pictures, if you like, on one side and on the other is my experimental side. Really, I do love experimenting and getting new things from it, actually. And I love learning all the time. I think you never stop learning. So learning new techniques, I know I've got to get a smaller camera because carrying my big 35 mil camera around with me is really getting quite difficult for me at my age. So I do need a smaller camera. I use my phone too much. And I think sometimes that's the detriment to your photographic skills, although it is really handy. So I shall try and perfect more the work I'm doing, learn more about different methods and things like that. Thank you. Yeah, I really look forward to seeing some of what you produce and what you're experimenting with. Well, thank you. It's been lovely chatting with you. Well, thank you very much. Thanks for listening to this episode with Lizzie. I hope you enjoyed it. More information about Lizzie, as well as the podcast. can be found in the episode notes. If you're able to, please rate and review the podcast in the podcast apps. In the next episode, I speak with Jenny Klein, who's a mixed media artist based in London, England. Here's a clipper for conversation. I think mixed media is the most appropriate way to describe what I do because I'm working with photography, I'm working with stitch. I think a lot about terms like assemblage and collage. because although when you're looking at the work, you might not necessarily think of those words. In my head, I'm always pulling together different ideas and seeing how they fit together. And those ideas might be physical ideas like a piece of stitch on a photograph or a painting or a drawn image, but they might also be concepts that I'm thinking about in terms of text and how words and processes might fit together. in the next episode with Jenny.