Our first Guest lecture of the year was one of our very own lecturers Katy White, This was the only Lecture I am likely to get from Katy as she mainly teaches second and third years.
Katy White is in the process of completing her MA Degree as well as teaching. Her main focus is on animals, particularly greyhounds, to show how they are reduced to a spectacle.
One of Whites key methods of how she went about gathering information, on how to photograph these animals, was actually look outside the subject matter. to do this she looked at the colonial archive and how we viewed humans as others, allowing the subject to be dehumanised and treated like an animal. Photographed merely to document traits, there was no connection between subject and photographer.
Katy White also looked at other photographers such as Sally Mann who used Wet Plate Collodion printing in her work originally "invented" by Frederick Scott Archer. However instead of printing on to glass, White Photographed on to Tin, because Tin is cheap which helped to symbolise how cheap and "poorly" greyhounds are treated. Grey Hounds also have numbers tattooed in their ears which White also punched into the tin.
The main ethic Katy White has is that the Subject Welfare is more important than the subject, She would not subject the Grey Hounds to harsh flash when that would put them in more distress than they needed to be in.
White talked about how she had to consider how the viewer would interact and feel with and about the images. She wanted the view to get up close to the image so that they really had to look at each individual plate as they are only small sheets of Tin.
I really enjoyed this lecture and it interested me a lot because it had a lot of information and also gave us, as first years advice on how to synthesise our research into what we are photographing.
Thank You for Reading,
Becca x
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