The ‘Chobi Mela’ is an international festival of photography held in Bangladesh. The key organisers are Drik picture library and Pathshala (The South Asian Institute of Photography). Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam is the director of Chobi Mela.
Chobi Mela, the festival of photography in Asia is now recognised as the festival with the most diverse participation in the world. While most major festivals are situated in the west or are organised by western organisations, Chobi Mela is unique in being ‘home grown’ and has now gained its respectability through the variety and quality of the work exhibited. Chobi Mela V featured 63 exhibitions from 33 participating countries, spanning all continents of the globe. While most major photographic festivals are held in the west or organised by western curators, Chobi Mela was setup in Bangladesh and is being organised by Bangladeshis.
The outreach programme consisted of mobile exhibitions which went to schools, playgrounds, market places. The exhibitions were accompanied by community liaison staff who explained the context of the show to viewers. Visits to the exhibition by school children and guided tours by curators were also arranged. An exhibition on the plight of Bangladeshi Jute workers was shown on the walls of the courtyard of “Kalpana Boarding” a low cost motel in Old Dhaka. These programmes have been extremely successful and the model has been replicated in far flung countries, such as Bolivia, Mongolia, Sri Lanka and Tanzania.

KK Today I am about to embark on an airplane back to London. I am in Delhi, it is the monsoon and raining July 27, 2010.When did you first travel to India? Has travel to India affected your practice as a photographer? Maybe this is a way of beginning a conversation about photography, our own practices as women photographers. I hope you will have time to have an email conversation with me about your experiences in India and its culture.
I have just returned to London after my fourth trip to India. I seem to only scratch the surface of what is such an ancient and diverse culture incorporating all the world religions : Hindu, Buddhism, Jain, Parsee, Islam, Christian and Judaism. Migrations from as far as Greece, Asia Minor and China have influenced the religious cultural practices, infusing India’s architecture and visual culture as well as its stories from the Vedas to Bollywood. It is this fluidity and hybridity that I that made me feel comfortable. I am fascinated and curious about all the contradictions that cultural fusions entail. Remember, I grew up in Puerto Rico, in the 1960’s, an island which was also culturally mixed : Taino Indians, Spanish, African and American. A tropical climate warm and humid cooled by the tradewinds blowing off the central mountain range covered with tropical rainforest . I always miss the West Indies and the Caribbean .

AF Hi Karen – I first travelled to India when I was a student in 1985. I was studying with Martin Parr and Paul Graham as tutors and I went to India for two reasons, firstly to visit the home of one of my peers, my good friend Jazvinder Singh, and secondly to take photographs along the way. It was a mad trip and it became clear quite quickly that poor Jaz was not well, I mean had not been well for a long time, and this combined with my first experience outside of Europe made the trip an extraordinary one. We also had a friend from Manchester with us, a regular hippy Freddy was keen like me to make the pilgrimage to the grandest hippy destination of all times. We arrived in Bombay (as it was then) mid July, mid monsoon. We had been warned by traveller friends that this was the worst possible time to go but nothing could have prepared us for the smells and sights of a mid 1980’s Bombay night. The first thing I remember as we emerged from the airport was seeing half a dozen westerners lying on the floor in the entranceway to the airport, all incredibly emaciated, guys with long beards begging for money – they looked out of it.
“Brown sugar” someone murmured, “they probably want to get home” someone else volunteered, I couldn’t keep my eyes off them, the idea of not being able to get home was shocking, I had never been so close to seeing it. I was wearing a cotton dress and sandals, the road was thick with mud and I saw rats, a man grabbed our luggage and locked it in the back of his black and yellow cab, it was all a bit too fast for us and we panicked, thinking he was stealing out luggage – typical western anxiety! He hurried us on, it was 4 am and the wind was warm enough to feel like it was coming out of a hairdryer on low speed. The country amazed me – it was magical, chaotic
and life changing.
AF When did you first go to India? What were your first impressions?

KK I travelled to India very recently, only two years ago and it was thanks to your enthusiasm for India that I considered making work for the first time in a country I was unfamiliar with. I may have broken my own rules and risk plunging into a “new orientalism”, in my new work, a risk I am now willing to take! You suggested I contact Abhishek Poddar of Tasveer Arts , which I first did by writing him an email as I was travelling to India in October 2008. Unfortunately we did not meet during that first trip yet communicated by email. It was only during my second trip in April 2009 that I met Abhishek and was invited to stay at the family home in Bangalore. It is thanks to both your encouragement that I embarked upon a life changing experience using photography as a means of understanding the complexities of India and its cultural heritage. The Poddars have been the most generous friends, introducing me to people such as Shivi Singh who helped me gain access to palace sites and photograph them. Travelling to India I continue to climb a steep learning curve, each time I learn something new! What interested me most from a post-colonial perspective was the pre-British architectural heritage permeated by India’s Mughal past in Northern India. I wanted to consider women’s space in the zanana, in palaces and havelis, the area where upper caste women conducted their lives away from the gaze of men. The organization of the space around the mardana (men’s areas) intrigued me. The screens that women could look down at the meetings and discussions in the durbar halls; the possibility that women commented and discussed men’s actions from behind these screens, that they could also resist or comment on power; the animal life in the palaces: elephants, cows, bulls, langur monkeys, tigers and cheetahs which lived close. Animal life is disappearing at a rapid rate as forests found at the base of mountains continue to be cut down or sites developed for the raw materials that are feeding India’s development. There are fewer cows and bulls in the cities as rapid urbanization and road building takes hold. Also the forests once full of wildlife in the Aravali Hills are now threatened by development as are the Western Ghats.
I had read William Darymple’s books and found his excavation of Indian history very exciting, particularly the book The Last Mughal which was incredibly timely in its depth of research. I have read Stanley Wolpert’s India and Sen’s The Argumentative Indian. A book that captured my imagination was Alice Albinia’s Empires of the Indus about her travels following the river Indus upstream in Pakistan and back in time. To think that now that same river is overflowing and millions of people are homeless just shows how fragile countries in developing world are even with nuclear power.
These books captured my imagination and made me want to explore India and visit Delhi. I researched different architectural and archeological sites on the internet and found photographs which were extremely useful. I wanted to know more about the Mughal Empire which ruled large swathes of India from the 16th to the 19th century. Islamic influence was already present in Delhi
and Agra in the 11th century with the Delhi Sultanate, the incredibly erudite scientific research that took place in India under Emperors such as Ashoka and Akbar, with an incredibly inclusive world view which supported different religions and philosophies! Not at all the orientalist European phantasy of the despot!
I know what you mean about travellers and people sleeping outdoors on sidewalks and on train platforms. Very impressive arriving at Delhi train station with hundreds of people lying on the floor waiting for their trains. My first impressions were of a woman asleep on the cool marble floors of the women’s toilets in Delhi airport with rings on her bare feet … and the enveloping heat. During our first journey, Juliette Wilson (my travelling companion and dear friend) and I had a very tight schedule. From New Delhi as we hired a driver through an Indian travel company who was to drive us 3,000 miles back and forth across Rajasthan. We identified many of the architectural sites including palaces, temples and mausoleums dating from the 14th century onwards were in this region of India that later became the heritage sites I used in India Song. We decided to visit 16 different sites in 21 days which included two bird sanctuaries …a very intense travel rhythm with Annu Kapoor , a virtual stranger who became our friend and whom we trusted with our lives!
I remember vividly our exit out of Delhi with thousands of motorcyclists, animals, trucks some of which were heading straight at us, in and out of the city . That first week of October 2008 seemed unreal being in India as the global markets dipped in and the Great Recession began to take hold in Britain. The idea was to reconnaissance architectural sites that I could photograph in the near future with a large format Sinar 5 x 4 in. I was impressed by the animal life and the close proximity of animals to humans in cities such as Delhi, Jodphur, Jaipur and Udaipur. It was wonderful traveling with Juliette who took notes while I photographed potential sites, sharing an overwhelming cornucopia of the senses that traveling through remote country villages to Samode Palace near Jaipur and then to Shekawati, at the edges of the Thar desert to Bikaner, down southwest Rajasthan to Udaipur … to Lake Pichola , staying on an island palace yet moving on constantly…exhausting …arriving at Agra to view the national symbol of India: the Taj Mahal. I guess we fulfilled the stereotype of rich woman travelers! Travel was work and our intellectual parameters were stretched by the visual and aural spectacle of north west India. The more I saw the more curious I became. Geoff Blight, my partner and I traveled twice to India in 2009 taking the large format Sinar camera with us and photographed palaces in Samode, Jaipur, Dungarpur and Udaipur. Contemporary India in rapid development exists in the past, present and future all at once: a camel, an ox, three people on a motor scooter, a pile of dried cow dung used for fuel next to vast telecommunication mobile towers which connect you to the internet and the mobile phone network even in the Thar desert.
KK But do tell me more about your photographs in India…

AF My first photographs in India were about observing the way extraordinary things crashed together in front of my eyes: influences from east and west; living conditions rich and poor. I was astounded by the level of innovation and creativity people were using to get by – strange machines made out of odds and ends, ways of getting from one place to the next, recycling everywhere. And the animals living in a way I had not seen before: cows and dogs wandering around , more content than not, some ill but many more in good health. I really felt there was
something to be said with photography, something enormously rich, something soulful that counteracted the greed of the consumer driven west.
I was shocked when I returned home, I couldn’t get used to the way things were at home, it was if my mind had turned a corner and I didn’t fit back into the space I had left behind. I had lived all my life in a small village then a small town, I stayed one more year then moved to London.The work I shot in 1985 I exhibited in 1986 at the West End Centre in Aldershot and simply titled it From Agra to Srinigar; it was a road trip and the photographs reflected that. The journey we made was done as cheaply as possible on rickety buses on hair-raising roads, in boats and by foot, I never forgot it and constantly dreamt of returning.

KK I am curious as I never saw your series of photographs From Agra to Sringinar…

AF Yes it was all shot with colour 35mm film and I had a metz flash with me too – seems odd to think I carried that on my first trip to India, I don’t think I used it that much; it was so bulky and getting it set up was a hassle. Recently I have worked with a 5×4 on the street in India but I always have someone guarding me, mainly incase I get run over! The early work was quite classic colour documentary work, capturing gestures and expressions, looking for “decisive moments”, watching tourists and looking at the relationship between the advertising on the streets and the ‘real’ life on the streets. I have been going through it again recently and some of it has inspired the photographs I am taking now.

KK You took road trip photographs? How did you perceive this predominantly white male tradition of photography? Travel photography always seems more about the observer than the observed.

AF I like exploding the male photographic myths – woman on the road – I am not sure why it didn’t really take off. I mean there were women travelers in the past (you have mentioned one of them who I must read). You don’t have to be alone to make pictures on a road trip. I have a whole series of work around Road Trips named deliberately that way. In fact I am going to do that one day: with all my travel photographs create a diary of a woman on the road as a book. Regarding the observed being the only subject of travel photography I agree that seems to be the case, various documentarists such as Susan Mieselas, Bill Burke and Sharon Lockhart have tried different approaches each one taking care to broaden the perspective of the traditional documentarist. But travel photography is in a category of its own, usually incredibly clichéd – well there is a challenge!
AF Karen, your work has predominantly been about exploring myth and fable, blurring fact and fiction with fantastical spaces– What sort of storyteller are you? How does what you have done in India relate to the history of the work you have done to date in the UK and Europe?

KK A strange sort of storyteller in that my images although narrative are not exactly stories but rather allegories alluding to the foundation myths that have created the fine art heritage of Europe which include photography in museums and academies across Europe. Connoisseurs, a series
of framed photographs, used heightened cibachrome colour, with text on brass plaques to challenge taste and the search for authenticity in British high culture, tracing the geneology of the museum from the private country house mansion (Chiswick House to the public 19th century museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum). In that work I brought in objects and people staging scenarios which commented on the underlying assumptions of taste. In fact I installed temporary objects to photograph in these museum spaces such as a taxidermised monkey, a collection of telescopes or books. So the photographs photographed installed objects or asked friends to perform actions. I was interested in culture and how it contributed to national identity. I was trying understand what British culture was. I felt like an outsider observing a strange tribe.
My early 1980’s black and white work began to distance itself from social documentary in the classical sense. I wanted to use what I had learned from conceptual art (the use of text with image) and create a new critical documentary style that used the aesthetics of fine art print photography marrying it with a deconstructive, often humorous textual strategy. It attempted to use humour and irony through staging portrait and situations , using social actors to perform for the camera. My work looked at class distinction in Britain and role of women in that class but also how power was always legitimized and underscored by the material culture and architectural space in museums, clubs or fine art academies in Europe.
As a student of photography and film at the Polytechnic of Central London in the mid 1970’s (now University of Westminster) I saw my work idealistically as a political intervention critiquing a naïve social realism or humanist photography based on the decisive moment. I was using photography as a research tool enabling me to understand British history and its social structures.Under Thatcher’s conservative policies and cuts many people were marginalised and disenfranchised. Class distinctions were very visible as they are becoming once more. Inequality in Britain has always been an issue .
Before the institutionalisation of a research culture in higher education and its instrumentalisation through a PhDs in practice based research, I was engaging with methodologies that came from conceptual art and cultural studies which were considering the Western gaze (White Eurocentric) highly problematic.
I am now using photography in a similar way in India. I have begun with what is considered part “official” national culture and its heritage like I did in 1980’s England and later in 1990’s France photographing the Louvre and The D’Orsay Museum. In India I am a participant observer, collaborator of what is an upper caste culture that is opening up and liberalizing in terms of women’s position yet there is still more change coming! India’s emerging middle class is vast and it is producing highly literate and educated young women who are forming their own businesses. My photography in India so far pays homage to the extraordinary beauty and power of Rajput and Mughal architecture and the hybrid cultures represented in stories that are written and represented in miniature paintings, sculptures found in temples, palaces, havelis and mausoleums, but also folk and tribal art.
My thoughts were: How are women and animals represented ? Whose portraits are privileged in paintings? Whilst women are represented as goddesses yet still subordinated and abused for their insufficient dowries. (I am not deluded about inequalities that exist in the West either!) How
does early photography in India represent women under the British Raj? How to represent and portray high caste culture in a period of huge change in India …These are some of my ongoing concerns…Yet how to engage in a critically informed fashion .
KK Anna, do tell me more about your photographic work and your thoughts on India. We are both professors of photography now and we both teach photography. Teaching has always been intextricably linked to my practice as a photographer, students are our teachers: we learn from them as much as they learn from us.

AF My work comes out of the documentary tradition, I love the classic tales related by roaming photographers. I am fascinated that they are told by predominantly men, the few women who have made this kind of work are role models for me and I am also intrigued by the early women travelers (always wealthy) and sometimes with camera. I am intending to research further some of these women and have been highly influenced by engaging with the history of Indian photography introduced to me via numerous photographers and friends in India.
My project in India has been to try to discover the essence of contemporary life as experienced by Indian women. It is an incredibly broad area to study and I will clearly have to make some generalizations though I will do this with great care. My work is intended for audiences both in the West and in India it will read differently in different places but this is not important; what matters is that I want to tell a story about the everyday lives of different women in different parts of India, it might be that I concentrate wholly on the middle classes but I will decide that at a later stage. Middle class women are the women I relate to and I have found it fascinating how different my life might have been had I grown up an Indian in India. Today higher education is free for women in India and many of the graduates I have met are battling between their parents desire to see them married and their own desire to progress their careers. Middle class women in India have, in some ways, more freedom than middle class Western women: in the sense that we work all day at work then come home and work in the house and for the kids yet my equivalent in India would employ a number of people to do some of the jobs I do at home and in the office. However an Indian woman, once married, may have to move in with her in-laws (something that has really surprised me for a nation that seems in tune with its inner emotions) or move to fit in with her husband (though this obviously happens in the West too). So there are interesting dilemmas, advantages and disadvantages and somehow I want to capture an idea of all this in my pictures. There is also the academic side, as a photography professor from the University for the Creative Arts working to develop the new Post Graduate Photography Diploma at the National Institute of Design with Dr Deepak John Mathews has also been inspiring; the students, so enthusiastic, have taken on a range of subjects and translated them into images and stories that no foreign traveler would be able to see or find – their works and their knowledge has informed my direction.
AF Can you tell me something about how the past and present come together in your work?

KK All my work since the Gentlemen series (1981- 1983) has used heritage and historical interiors in which to collaboratively stage portraits and scenarios to reflect on contemporary discourses of power and their legitimization through stories and “master narratives”. In Gentlemen it was patriarchy, in Capital early globalisation and capitalism, in Academies art history, fine art education and museum studies. The past always pervades the present in my photography. Of course it is a revised past, not an authentic past …that is now lost and now the struggle is around whose history. What does our version of history choose to privilege?
My recent series, named in homage to Marguerite Duras’ seminal 1975 film India Song, (a seminal French film about unrequited love in Kolkata and dying colonialism) celebrates the animals and characters out of stories in the Ramayana, Panchatanatra and Mahabharata … The animals occupy women’s rooms and men’s rooms in palaces and havelis standing in for avatars, atmans. They are the symbolic animals of India: Hanuman the langur monkey God, Ganesh the elephant, peacock s and Tigers consorts of Goddesses Shiva anad Laksmi. These rooms have become museums open to visitors but also heritage hotels run by today’s maharaja’s family. With the captions I have also tried to allude to women that have affected Indian history . The palaces rooms in Samode, Jaipur and Dungarpur are material remnants of a way of life that is now past and the memories they hold are harder to access. Miniatures, wall paintings and early photographs are now being archived and studied. Glimpses of these archives can be seen publicly when photographs of the past are hung up as in the Maharaja of Mysore’s Palace in Bangalore or encrusted into palace walls of the Juna Mahal in Dungarpur. There is also an extensive palace archive of the Arvind Singh Mewar in Udaipur which has just opened a new museum of photography in Udaipur palace.

AF Are you creating new myths? And if yes what do you want them to say? Will they speak differently to different audiences?

KK I hope that by referencing Indian myths but not illustrating them in their excessive visuality and colour remind us through the animal’s gaze that the “incredible India” promoted by tourism is also fragile. With global warming and climate change created by mass industrialization both animal and heritage are under threat. As the work celebrates and shows the beauty there is also the transience and decay of life. How many Bengal tigers roam freely? How many liontailed macaques? How many black buck? Where have the cheetahs gone? Are they all destined to be trophies in the grand palaces and homes of contemporary Maharajas?
Some of us may achieve spiritual/ financial freedom but at what cost to those millions of citizen’s pouring into Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkatta hoping for a better life? The tribals are resisting land development of their natural sacred sites …the same old story of human
“progress”…development carries with it heavy consequences . I do think context is important as all my work and that this work will resonate most in India. It is made with an Indian audience in mind. They will recognize the references and I dedicate this work to them.

AF Can you say something about using colour in India?

KK I am very self conscious of exoticism and its links to colour often disparaged by Europeans of the North who may still prefer their cool pastels, soft greens grays and objective typologies and tasteful minimalism. There is a puritanical chromophobia which sees rich visuality as linked to a consumerist culture of excess or kitsch.
Colour is very much part of Indian popular culture found in giant advertising posters and film posters. Colour in India is all pervasive; even in the desert the bright clothes of people, the drawings on the mud houses, mirrors on women’s skirts, the make up of the Katakali dancers in the south. Colour is a powerful visual tool that is absolutely right for my new work in India.

AF What process do you go through when making a body of work?

KK It is an extensive, ongoing process… reading as much as I can about the stories that relate to Indian visual culture … collecting images , researching the history of the architectural sites. Trying to grasp the complexity of the rich philosophical traditions in India that intermingle. I am reading the foundation stories of India which include The Vedas, Ramayana, Mahabharata and Panchatantra… these are very old stories based on an oral tradition and they get performed and visualized in dances, paintings, miniatures throughout India. Bollywood and Bhangra music is part of Indian popular culture that has a huge audience. I am studying the Indian cinema of Satyajit Ray and the Mahabharata of Peter Brooks, also Black Narcissus, the extraordinary film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger . .

AF How do you relate to the insider/outsider debate?

KK There has always been a confusion about my identity and where I fit in. In the 1980s I represented British photography internationally in arts council and British Council touring shows. I represented Britain in the Fifth Sydney Biennale in 1984. Yet now I have not had a major exhibition in Britain for over 9 years although I have retrospectives of my work across France, Spain, Belgium and Italy. My work is in museum collections in France yet very poorly represented in public collections in Britain. My work rarely gets included in British survey shows because it does not fit comfortably yet I have taught many of the photographers in these shows. I have lived for most of my life in Britain, I am a resident yet still hold an American passport. My mother tongue was German yet it is now lost and I speak English, Puerto Rican and French.
I am an outsider, I have never felt totally at home in England and even though I have been part of the British art world I operate discretely eschewing the celebrity culture endorsed by the auction houses and Charles Saatchi. I doubt I will ever become a ‘national treasure’ as I find the inequality in a still-class based Britain unacceptable. This is an important space for me to operate
in. It has become part of my identity. It may be a romantic position but it is also a critical position which entails self critique.
KK Has making work in India changed us?

AF The opportunity to exhibit work in India has been vital to me. I really wanted to engage an Indian audience in what I have done in the past before I presented a final version of the work I am making in India, to provide an identity for my work and some context for who I am. This seemed particularly important for a documentarist. I was thrilled to be invited to exhibit at Tasveer Arts and the opportunity has been very beneficial for me. I have also gained enormous knowledge from the staff and students at the various institutions that I have worked in, particularly the National Institute of Design. None of the work I have done would have been possible without the generous support of The University for the Creative Arts and The British Council. Being in India has undoubtedly changed me: the nature of the people and the country, so gentle and generous, has rubbed off on me – it has enabled me to look at the world through very different eyes.

KK Like you I feel absolutely privileged to be accepted as a fine art photographer in India. To be asked to make work in India has changed my life at time when I least expected it. It has also been thanks to time given to me to pursue travels and research by my colleagues at the University of the Creative Arts that has helped me make this work possible. I am inspired and hope to continue to develop this project into a film project in the near future. My dream is to work with the Indian film industry in an experimental way using simple methods and High Definition video to tell new stories about contemporary India .

15.05.2010 – 12.09.2010
The Contemporary Photography Museum presents the Karen Knorr Favole exhibition: eighteen great photographic works and a video of the Fables series. An evocative and silent dialogue between nature and culture.

http://www.museofotografiacontemporanea.org/fotografia/index.html?docume…

http://www.abitare.it/events/karen-knorr-fablesstories/

‘Network Week U.K’ is a weeklong series of visits to many of the UK’s leading photographers and photographic institutions. This is a great opportunity for the students to have first hand experience of some of the work methods and business practices of these eminent individuals and institutions. This is an annual event, which was preceded by our students participating in a series of similar visits to eminent Dutch practitioners in Holland. The UK visits included visits to the following people:

Anna Fox, Martin Parr, Nigel Shafran, Magnum, Karren Knorr, Brian Griffin, Mark Power, Clare Strand, Photoworks, Simon Norfolk, Victoria and Albert Museum, The Photographers Gallery, Simon Roberts, Boot Books, Smith Design, Val Williams, Am Nuden Da, Broomberg and Chanarin, Stuart Griffiths, Foto 8, Wyatt Clarke Jones, Jocelyn Bain Hogg, Adam Hinton, Tom Hunter, Melanie Friend, David Moore, Marco Santucci, Andrew Buurman and Ed Clarke.

Karen Knorr – Network Week 2010 from Newport School Art Media Design.

- Why did you choose a uniform format for your earlier black and white work? What determined the choice of typographies?

A conceptual approach structured the series. Similar lighting, camera angles and conventions of environmental portraiture were employed throughout the work. The typographies vary depending on the series: Gentlemen uses ‘Garamond,’ Country Life uses ‘Boldoni’ and Connoisseurs ‘Times.’ Belgravia utilises ‘Century Schoolbook,’ evoking a school textbook on upper class ideas and attitudes constructed out of conversations. In order to point to the artificial nature of the text composed beneath the photographic image certain key words are capitalised, such as “Privilege” in “There is nothing wrong with Privilege, as long as you are ready to pay for it.” A very privileged position indeed!

- After several series in black and white why did you decide to work in colour?

To change and challenge my working methodology, but I also thought the bright cibachrome colours, verging on “kitsch,” were appropriate for disturbing aesthetic judgements on taste. In England bright colours are considered “garish.” Recently at the Courtauld symposium on Indian wall paintings I witnessed that such discourse still seems to underpin academic notions of taste.

David Batchelor’s book Chromophobia discusses this fear of corruption through colour. The idea of a classicism based on a phantasized Greek ideal of the pure white temple was much cherished by English connoisseurs during the Victorian era when colour may have been considered effeminate. In fact these Greek temples and statues were once painted and coloured. Yet there are beautiful coloured rooms designed by the Adams in Kenwood House and Osterley Park House which delight in the use of colour and the Etruscan Italian style. It is in this rooms that I staged a contestation of the “canon’ of the collector’s taste bringing in the allegorical motifs of chimpanzee and Diana the huntress to disrupt the symmetry and proportion of taste.

- You have been worked in series since 1979. What makes the serial form possible?

It is a matter of meaning, with different tensions to be found in the work. As one goes from “room” to “room” there are different stories and ideas being told. Irony and humour are difficult to produce in one photograph; several are necessary to make various points about class, power and privilege.

- Your work has an element of social conscience. Is there a documentary tradition in your photography?

Yes it is social documentary. The Belgravia series, exhibited at Photo España, describes class and power amongst the international and wealthy during the beginning of Thatcherism and Reagonomics in 1979. I was also interested in showing the different gender positions within the family: women talk about kitchens, motherhood, marriage; men about the stock market and cattle breeding. The work looks at the lifestyle of youth, who are wearing designer clothes, clubbing, thinking about their debutante parties, but who are also interested in power, glamour and rebellion.

The photographic works Gentlemen (1981-1983) and Country Life (1983-1984) further elaborate on the social aspirations of the English middle classes, investigating the marks of distinction that ally these classes to conservative aristocratic values where primogeniture is still an issue. Until the early 1970’s married women still needed her husband’s endorsement for any household purchases. Whilst woman now have full property rights, they still remain under represented in key positions of governance and in financial and academic worlds. It is still a boys club in which some women are honorary members.

I wanted to make critical work that used humour to tackle attitudes prevalent amongst the English establishment in the 1980’s under Margaret Thatcher. Despite being Prime Minister and head of the Conservative party, Thatcher as a woman was not allowed full membership at the Conservative Gentlemen’s club ‘The Carlton.’ Old Etonians, like the present leader of opposition David Cameron, still belong to such Gentlemen’s clubs.

- Could you tell us a little bit about your work Belgravia? Could you describe the relationship between images and text? How would you describe the relationship between your work and “the everyday,” the theme of this year’s festival?

Belgravia is a cosmopolitan and rich neighbourhood in London near Harrods in Knightsbridge with many non-domiciled residents. My parents lived in Belgravia and the first image of the series is a photograph of my mother and grandmother in the front room of our “maisonette” on Lowndes Square. Whilst certain members of my close family held relatively conservative views I did not share the same lifestyle positions or opinions as those of other Belgravia residents. Belgravia is therefore a critique of class using the tools available to me as an ‘outsider’ on the inside. I think the work becomes grotesquely funny when one does not agree with the ideology described. A few of the people in the photographs could not see this humour or irony, since they lived completely within the ideas and attitudes I was critiquing. The work was produced in anger against social injustice, provoked by a desire to challenge the lack of fairness and equality in life.

When I made this work there was already a well developed celebrity culture appearing in the gossip pages of Tatler, Vogue and Harpers & Queen magazines, yet simultaneously there existed this very private world of the rich and privileged that I wanted to show. I was an implicated observer documenting what I thought at the time would be the last dying embers of class distinctions in Britain yet it still lingers.Prince Charles recently used his royal power and influence to dissuade investment in a Richard Rogers’ project on the site of the former Chelsea barracks.

The meaning of the work can be found in the space between image and text: neither text nor image illustrate each other, but create a “third meaning” to be completed by the spectator. The text slows down the viewing process as we study the text and return to re-evaluate the image in light of what we have read.

The work describes the ‘everyday’ of a privileged minority. Historically, portraiture of the upper classes has tended to be flattering but the combination of image and text brings this work closer to satire and caricature, without losing the strong reality effect specific to photographic typology. All the people portrayed become actors and perform their identities in a collaborative fashion with me. At times there is a real complicity between us.

- How has your work evolved since the photographs we see in the Photo España exhibit up to the present day?

Academies, a series started in 1993, researches the history of ideas that underpin western aesthetics, exploring the transmission and reproduction of such ideas through the fine art academy and the museum. The work explores the foundation myths of European fine art culture and the link to national identity and patrimony, traces of which remain today in art institutions such as Goldsmiths College where I was a visiting tutor. Photography and women have changed the academy, more than 50% of my students at the University for the Creative Arts are women. Things are changing but resistance still remains and an even playing field is difficult to achieve.

Elements exist in my work that continue to ‘trouble’ the realist endeavour: captioning and use of titles, taking different points of view of the same room, the framing and presentation of the photographic object. Each series searches for different ways of disturbing everyday conceptions of reality and taste. Photographing animals from a natural history collection in a fine art old masters painting; the use of furniture to disturb the immutability of the Wallace collections at Hertford House in London; a woman tracing a shadow on the wall of the Royal Academy in Stockholm, referencing Butades’ daughter; a black hand lovingly stroking Canova’s Psyche, transgressing the taboo of touch.

- In Fables you introduced animals into a variety of different places including palaces and museums. What are you trying to achieve with this series?

Fables develops some of my earlier issues around power but in a more playful manner. The work is staged in national heritage sites around France, including Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. Museums of national collections become animated by animals, creating scenes that allude to the stories of Aesop and La Fontaine. Some of the animals are dead but others are alive, photographed in zoos and studios. The rooms themselves have been photographed from a very low position in order to identify with the animal’s gaze.

The work marks a transition between analogue and digital photography. I still shoot on film that is then scanned before postproduction on Photoshop. There are now multiple times which are brought together and become layered in the photograph: the time of the animals photographed in their environments or studio, the very slow time of photographing the interiors with a large format Sinar camera. Some photographs now take months to make whilst others are quicker. I compare this work in its infinite detail to “phototissage,” a form of photographic stitching or weaving, rendering the pixels like threads in a tapestry.

- Which kind of current photography interests you? How do you see your work in this context?

Photography of all types and places interests me. My work enters into a dialogue with bird photography, architectural photography, documentary photography but also pre-photographic forms such as painting and sculpture.

- What projects are you currently working on?

A series of images and films exploring Mughal architecture in Rajasthan, India and the stories engendered by such spaces. Making work for an Indian audience referencing the myths of one of the oldest cultures on earth is both challenging and frightening. In addition I am completing a commission at the Louvre museum in Paris that explores its collection of paintings and antiquities, whilst also helping set up a transnational photography research centre with a digital archive at the University for the Creative Arts with my colleagues at Farnham, Surrey, where I continue to teach undergraduates and postgraduates in photography.

The museum pays homage to American/British photographer Karen Knorr, of international renown, who will present 15 photographs throughout the period rooms.
Some of the photographs will be placed in the rooms where they were taken in 2003/2004 and others will be exhibited in the gallery on the first floor of the museum. Additional photographs taken in the Conde Museum at Chantilly and the rooms of the Museum of Hunt and Nature will augment the selection. For this occasion Deyrolle will be lending taxidermised animals from their collection. These animals will be placed throughout the first floor, adding a touch of bucolic lyricism to the museum rooms.

In Karen Knorr’s work, animals roam among the furniture and artworks of the ‘cultural sanctuaries’ which exist to elevate culture from desecration by animal nature. This transgression conjures up the marvelous universe of Lewis Caroll and Angela Carter. The unsettling aspect of these photographs resides in the construction of the images mixing analogue with digital photography. It is this ambiguity between the different discordant realities and spatial registers that troubles the observer’s gaze.

Karen Knorr’s bestiary invites the visitor to rediscover one of the most beautiful museums and hotel particuliers in the Marais neighborhood of Paris.

Opens Tues 9 February 4pm to 9pm
Exhibition continues to 30 May 2010

INDIA SONG
Photo & Co, Turin, Italy
24 Sept – 30 Oct 2010

FABLES
Centre Photographique, Toulon, France
25 Oct 2010 – 15 Jan 2011

INDIA SONG
Tasveer Arts, Bangalore, India
8 Oct – 30 Oct 2010

Gallery Art Motif, Delhi
21 Jan 2011 – 2 Feb 2011

Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre, Kolkatta
11 Mar 2011 – 21 Mar 2011

Institute of Contemporary Indian Art, Mumbai
22 Apr 2011 – 2 May 2011

National Institute of Art and Design (NID), Ahmadabad
17 Jun 2011 - 27 Jun 2011

Venues:

Milan:
Museo Fotografia Contemporanea

Toulon:
Musee des Beaux Arts, Maison de la Photographie
113 Boulevard Mar Leclerc
83000 Toulon, France

Bangalore:
Tasveer Arts
Sua House
26/1 Kasturba Cross Road
Bangalore 560001,
www.tasveerarts.com

New Delhi:
Gallery Art Motif
213 C Lado Sarai New Delhi-110030.

http://www.galleryartmotif.com/

Kolkatta:
Seagull Arts and Media Resource Centre
36C S. P. Mukherjee Road
Kolkata 700 025, India.

http://www.seagullindia.com

Mumbai:
Institute of Contemporary Indian Art
CIA Building, 22/26, K. Dubhash Marg
Rampart Row
Next to Rampart House
Kala Ghoda
Mumbai – 400 023

http://www.theartstrust.com

Ahmadebad:
National Institute of Design
Design Gallery,National Institute of Design
Paldi, Ahmadebad 38007

http://www.nid.edu/

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Established in 1768, the Royal Academy of Arts aimed to elevate the status of the artist. Instead of teaching practical skills to the commercial artist, the Royal Academy encouraged its students to create works of high moral and artistic worth. The monkey perched before the easel in Karen Knorr’s ‘Painting after Nature,’ photographed in the Life Class Room of the Academy, can be seen as an example of a civilised post-Darwinian gentleman engaged in a refined and educated endeavour. Yet traditionally the monkey is known for its ability to ‘ape’ or imitate reality. In photographing the monkey, Knorr draws upon a nineteenth century trope of the photographer as an organ-grinding monkey who cranks a handle to generate a tune. Photography was satirised as an unskilled and repetitive endeavour that could be performed without thought, even by a mindless monkey. Comparisons were also drawn between the artist and the monkey: both were able to copy without thought, but neither were believed capable of creating an original art work. Such beliefs are compounded by the teaching methods employed within the Royal Academy. The importance of copying old master paintings was stressed to students, alongside drawing from casts of Antique sculpture, examples of which are documented by Knorr in ‘The Order of Things.’ Knorr inserts her own naked body into the space of the Royal Academy, mimicking the pose of Manet’s 1863 painting ‘Olympia’ and using the same title to make her quotation explicit. The ruse of Manet’s motif suggests a criticism of such teaching based on the duplication of copies, indicating how academic training of this kind may result in a lack of creative originality.

In composing her portrait in the Life Class Room, Knorr draws attention to the contentious practice of life drawing within nineteenth century art institutions. Whilst studying the human body was considered vital to academic training, the naked body was often cited as possessing the ability to morally corrupt students. Consequently, male students had to slavishly copy engravings and anatomical figures before they were permitted entry into the life class; women, in their brief two year admittance to the Academy, were forbidden from witnessing the naked form. The brutal castration of the sinewy male figure in ‘The Order of Things’ testifies to the conservative values of the time. Defiantly confronting the viewer’s gaze, Knorr’s ‘Olympia’ disrupts the academic institution in which she is located on several levels: as a woman, Knorr trespasses into the exclusively male domain of the Life Class Room; as a photographer she intrudes into the sanctuary of the ‘creative’ artist; and in her nakedness she confronts a taboo of conservative Victorian society.

The viewer must therefore consider how far society has since evolved, or alternatively, contemplate the possibility that the values represented by the Academy still persist today. Issues of preservation permeate Knorr’s images. As photographs they fulfil the desire in man, identified by André Bazin, to “preserve, artificially, his bodily appearance […] to snatch it from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life.” In photographing statuary and taxidermised animals, stuffed and preserved after death, Knorr also documents attempts by others to fix the corporeality of the body. The Wallace Collection, in which several of Knorr’s photographs are set, is similarly preserved within a specific moment of time. Amassed by generations of Marquises and Lords, the collection of art works and artefacts was bequeathed to the British nation in 1897. The bequest dictated that no item was to ever leave the collection, even for temporary exhibition, and that no new works were to be added. The Wallace collection remains hermetically sealed and impervious to change, embalmed within the moment of its donation, a relic from the end of the nineteenth century that registers as anachronistic to a modern day audience.

The animals that appear to wander through the rooms of the Wallace collection exist, much like the museum itself, in a space suspended between life and death. A monkey and parrot resting on the back of a wolf in ‘High Art Life After the Deluge’ are artificially kept in the hold of life: as taxidermised animals they are irrevocably deceased but appear at their most animate in the photograph. Freud discussed this uncertainty over an object’s status as alive or inanimate in terms of the uncanny. Yet the uncanny element of Knorr’s photographs is not located in the potential animation of the dead animals; rather it concerns the value systems preserved in the patriarchal and aristocratic spaces she photographs. Freud stated that uncanny experiences can be prompted “when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.” The uncanny makes itself felt in Knorr’s images through a realisation that the antiquated values embodied by institutions such as the Royal Academy and the Wallace Collection, values which should have been relegated to the past, still linger over the production and reception of art today.

The title ‘High Art Life After the Deluge’ offers a clue to interpreting Knorr’s photographs. The flood metaphor, with its biblical allusions, threatens a destruction of old values in order to make way for a new culture. The satire that runs throughout Academies suggests that we should look towards a renaissance in culture that will finally allow outdated beliefs to be relegated to the storerooms of the past, alongside the ornate gilded frames and antique sculpture casts.

International Corporate Art (ICArt), an art consultancy firm based in Miami, London and Oslo, maintains the tradition in developing the artistic direction or red thread for the Celebrity Art Collection on the Solstice-class ships.

Comprised of selected artworks from the Celebrity Art Collection on Galaxy, as well as new acquisitions from a combination of internationally established, mid-career and emerging artists, the Celebrity Art Collection on Equinox offers a scope of work that represents some of the most iconic artists in the world. Serving as a point of departure for Equinox, the Galaxy artwork includes renowned artists Louise Bourgeois, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Mitchell , Karen Knorr and Jack Pierson, among others. Adding to this exclusive roster of artists, the Collection on Equinox includes new works by Anselm Reyle, Sandra Cinto, Johan Creten, Damien Hirst and Erwin Wurm, in renowned Cuban-American artist Jorge Pardo.

This unique and important art collection consists of work by 97 artists from 25 countries. It is the result of over two years of curating, creative planning, purchasing, production and installation. No other cruise line in the world invests as much to create a truly beautiful environment for their guests through art.

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