John Paul Evans
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‘Matrimonial ties’ is an umbrella title that covers various projects in which my husband Peter and I respond to ideas of marriage and how traditional unions are memorialised in the photographic ‘family album’.
As an academic, I was always critical of what the photographic ‘family album’ represented in terms of normality and otherness. As a consequence, there is little evidence of domestic photography to represent the 33 years that Peter and I have spent together.
As Peter is now in his 80s, and almost 30 years my senior, there seemed to be an urgency to make work together exploring concepts of couples and family representation. Not to recreate a family album as such, rather, to leave a record or trace of how I would wish to be remembered as an ‘odd couple’.
In an early series works dating from 2013 ‘home and away’ was a response to the government bill proposing same sex marriage into law in the UK. The Civil Partnership bill had been introduced in 2005 and there had been few issues other than some heterosexual couples demanding civil partnerships under equality legislation.
As a Radio 4 listener, I was surprised to hear the voice of opposition to the proposed bill on same sex marriage in 2013. There seemed to be a vociferous view from certain sectors of the community that “if this is allowed to go ahead, then life will never be the same again”. Our performative response to this opposition was the obvious visual metaphor of Peter and I positioned outside the home looking in through the windows.
But rather than a representation of two sad, lonely outsiders, the suited figures introduce a potentially ‘troubling presence’ in the domestic environment which I saw in line with queer theory, of taking ownership of a negative as a mode of empowerment. The works were exhibited as part of the Ffotogallery Diffusion Festival in a group exhibition ‘from common
differences’.
This led to a series of images in which Peter and I were positioned within the domestic environment enacting a series of absurd poses. The resulting images reflect a couple who are at odds with the situation that surrounds them. It is this sense of the uncanny which Freud talked about in terms of heimlich and unheimlich– homely/unhomely or familiar/unfamiliar.
The works were titled till death us do part after the BBC TV sitcom from the late 1960s in which the ageing patriarch Alf Garnet rants about modern society, sexual liberation and immigration. I wondered what Alf Garnet would make of Peter and I getting married when the common vernacular in his day would have been to describe us as a pair of poofters or a pair of pansies.
This series of works received various international awards including the 2016 Hasselblad Masters Award.
My current exhibition what is lost…what has been at Ffotogallery Wales is a visual soliloquy to ‘absent friends’, people I considered my family. The works are also a coda to my installation ‘in the sweet bye & bye’ which was a photographic cathexis in response to the death of my closest friend in Dec 2017.
His death brought back memories of my father’s close friend, who died some years before.
My father’s friend was a kind and caring man, who had helped me through some very difficult times in early adulthood. The autoethnographic process of weaving one’s personal history into a visual dialogue is useful to explore photography’s tendency towards memorialisation and also to analyse ideas of belonging/otherness, mourning and melancholia in relation to domestic photography.
The performative gestures I would describe as tragi/comic, depicting a couple who are at a different point in life’s journey, evoking a state of ‘anticipatory grief’. “Even before the loved one is gone, the ghost of their disappearance is set into place” (Darian Leader)
The concept of memorialisation is particularly pertinent to Photography. Roland Barthes famously declared “the photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been” We try to capture our loved ones through the photographic moment, but the attempt to freeze/capture/isolate time only testifies to the fact that this moment has passed, ‘this has been’.
The works were initially commissioned for the Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock Abbey and they were also exhibited at the Mission Gallery in Swansea. For each exhibition new works were presented particular to each gallery setting.
Today’s lesson is a series of performative juxtapositions-focussing on 7 biblical texts that have been cited to condemn homosexuality.
The images referencing particular passages are balanced with interventions in which my husband Peter and I perform ideas of queerness.
It seemed fitting to re-present these works within the setting of a de-consecrated church space at Mission Gallery and also a former religious school which is now the home of Ffotogallery Wales.
Note: while some may argue that the battle for homosexual rights has been won with the introduction of same sex marriage, it is interesting to note this week the open letter that Sandy Toksvig sent to Justin Welby the archbishop of Canterbury after he affirmed the validity of a past declaration that gay sex is a sin.
It makes one realise that complacency is a dangerous strategy and there will always be people who for various reasons will seek to remove hard won rights.
See also:
https://talking-pictures.net.au/2020/05/09/john-paul-evans-at-home-with-otherness/
http://www.johnpaulevans.co.uk
https://www.lensculture.com/john-paul-evans
https://www.instagram.com/mail4johnpaul/