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6 news FaSt FOrward 10 YearS The research project Fast Forward was founded ten years ago to raise the profile of women in photography. Emma Jones spoke to its director Anna Fox about what’s changed in the decade since. eJ: it has been ten years since Fast Forward began as a panel discussion at tate Modern. why was this research group set up, and what was its aim? aF: Fast Forward really started back in 2013, a year before the Tate symposium. I was running the MFA in photography at University for the Creative Arts in Farnham with Karen Knorr. At times, we had up to 100% of women in the classroom and yet we weren’t seeing anything like that reflected in industry – both the artbased and commercial side of it. In 2014, the top book arts publishers output was dominated by men, only 2-5% of what they were publishing was created by women (bar one or two who were committed to publishing women). Cruel and Tender (2003), Tate’s first major photography exhibition, only featured three women. Fast Forward was created out of that need to make the stories of women in photography visible. We hired Maria Kapajeva with funding from our Head of School and approached Tate to host a symposium and then a conference programme. The 2014 symposium and 2015 conference were really well attended, and we received a lot of abstracts. However, we soon recognised that there were still a lot of women missing from the story we were trying to tell. Many of the abstracts for our first conference came from Western and Northern Europe and North America. We wanted to ensure that we were telling an international history of women in photography, and to encourage and support women working internationally in the field. With funding from the Leverhulme International Networks From the project Putting Ourselves in the Picture. Hannah, National Galleries of Scotland Award, we were able to visit institutions across the world and create a wide-reaching network, and update our call-out process so that it was more inclusive. By the time we ran the third conference we were able to choose from a much more diverse range of participants from a wider range of regions. eJ: in the UK, women occu- py senior positions within photography institutions – at the Photographers Gallery, at tate Modern, and the V&a has the Parasol Foundation women in Photography project. do you think that this has had a positive impact on the position of women within the photography sector in terms of collecting strategies, and visibility? aF: Women curators, writers and archivists have held positions in museums for a long time, and their work has had significant impact. There is a history of women writing about women photographers. Or women curating shows of women photographers. Then again, women working in the industry certainly feel more visible now, and there is space being made for them. For example, Elles x Paris Photo, where there’s a programme of talks and a curated pathway that highlights women’s contributions to the fair. However, I think it’s movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter that have had the biggest impact. And although I don’t like using the term ‘waves of feminism’, because waves make it sound like this momentum is going to disappear, I do think these two have started a new wave. They are grassroots movements that have affected the way people think about equality, diversity and inclusion, which is now reflected across academia, in grants and funding, and in museums and galleries. I’m not saying it’s all solved, not at all, but they have been an energizing force for material change. As well, I think women have gained a lot of confidence because of these changes, and we’re much more able to self-advocate. And I think it’s not something that we’ve been trained to do through our education and through class systems. We’ve been told to keep quiet most of the time. Today we’ve learnt that we don’t have to keep quiet, basically. eJ: what challenges do you think these institutions face when collecting photography? aF: I think the biggest problem is that museums don’t have the space or enough money to do the kind of collecting that one would hope to do to preserve the histories of photography, and that applies to both men’s work and women’s work. But also, as far as I understand it, they don’t have very updated collecting policies. We are currently working with the
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news 7 National Galleries of Scotland and Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales on developing a project to create a collecting policy that has equality, diversity and inclusion at its core. We have a Fast Forward funded PhD student, Alex Gow at NGS working on the initial stages of the research. eJ: do institutional archives have a role in telling histories of women in photography? aF: They have a role but the issue is that it is very difficult for a museum to collect a whole archive of a single photographer. So if you look at the people who have been reasonably well archived, someone like Jo Spence for example, her archive is split between four different places. There are some good examples in the UK and abroad. The Bishopsgate Institute in London has a particularly strong holding of LGBTQ stories. Or the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto, which has two really important archives – Jo Spence and Berenice Abbott. Or there’s someone like Martin Parr, who has created his own foundation to protect his archive, (as well as to collect British Photography), in response to these issues and the Hyman Foundation who are also collecting British Photography. I remember a wonderful talk for Fast Forward by Aldeide Delgado from WOPHA in Miami about Cuban women in the Cuban camera club. There’s lots, lots more research like that, but it’s not necessarily coming from inside institutions. The information is held in very different places. It has been revealed to us by academics doing the work. I think the archive is really relevant in the contemporary moment too, when thinking about the next generation of photographers and artists. Photographers working today need to take care to archive their work in case it’s looked back upon because we can’t expect or rely on the museum to be able to do this. We need to really embed the idea of From the project Putting Ourselves in the Picture. Group workshop at Autograph. Autograph & Women for Refugee Women. self-archiving. Then, at least people have this idea that it’s really important to archive the stories that you’re telling properly, to keep them safe. eJ: Can photography institu- tions foster artist networks and collaborative practice? aF: A project like Putting Ourselves in the Picture, which is being run by Fast Forward with Maria Kapajeva as project manager and Corinne Whitehouse as research officer, is a great example of this. Maria grew up on the border of Estonia and Russia and her current work is all about borders and migration, this interest inspired the start of Putting Ourselves in the Picture. Working with five distinct and innovative partners, we wanted to highlight the stories of women, non-binary and gender diverse people who were refugees and migrants. It set out to use photography to enable them to tell stories about their own lives. This kind of project only worked because Fast Forward already had a network of host institutions we could work with. EJ: What role do institutions play in supporting emerging artists? AF: I think that emerging artists are reasonably well supported. I want instead to think about older women, they’re the ones that get dropped out the most. And it’s particularly poignant for women, because they do have periods of time where they either want to or need to take a break. So, I don’t think the focus should just be on emerging artists (although they should not be dropped either!). I think, if anything, older women artists are the ones who are struggling the most right now and need institutional support.

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news

FaSt FOrward 10 YearS

The research project Fast Forward was founded ten years ago to raise the profile of women in photography. Emma Jones spoke to its director Anna Fox about what’s changed in the decade since.

eJ: it has been ten years since

Fast Forward began as a panel discussion at tate Modern. why was this research group set up, and what was its aim? aF: Fast Forward really started back in 2013, a year before the Tate symposium. I was running the MFA in photography at University for the Creative Arts in Farnham with Karen Knorr. At times, we had up to 100% of women in the classroom and yet we weren’t seeing anything like that reflected in industry – both the artbased and commercial side of it. In 2014, the top book arts publishers output was dominated by men, only 2-5% of what they were publishing was created by women (bar one or two who were committed to publishing women). Cruel and Tender (2003), Tate’s first major photography exhibition, only featured three women. Fast Forward was created out of that need to make the stories of women in photography visible. We hired Maria Kapajeva with funding from our Head of School and approached Tate to host a symposium and then a conference programme. The 2014 symposium and 2015 conference were really well attended, and we received a lot of abstracts. However, we soon recognised that there were still a lot of women missing from the story we were trying to tell. Many of the abstracts for our first conference came from Western and Northern Europe and North America. We wanted to ensure that we were telling an international history of women in photography, and to encourage and support women working internationally in the field. With funding from the Leverhulme International Networks

From the project Putting Ourselves in the Picture. Hannah, National Galleries of Scotland

Award, we were able to visit institutions across the world and create a wide-reaching network, and update our call-out process so that it was more inclusive. By the time we ran the third conference we were able to choose from a much more diverse range of participants from a wider range of regions.

eJ: in the UK, women occu-

py senior positions within photography institutions – at the Photographers Gallery, at tate Modern, and the V&a has the Parasol Foundation women in Photography project. do you think that this has had a positive impact on the position of women within the photography sector in terms of collecting strategies, and visibility? aF: Women curators, writers and archivists have held positions in museums for a long time, and their work has had significant impact. There is a history of women writing about women photographers. Or women curating shows of women photographers. Then again, women working in the industry certainly feel more visible now, and there is space being made for them. For example, Elles x Paris Photo, where there’s a programme of talks and a curated pathway that highlights women’s contributions to the fair. However, I think it’s movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter that have had the biggest impact. And although I don’t like using the term ‘waves of feminism’, because waves make it sound like this momentum is going to disappear, I do think these two have started a new wave. They are grassroots movements that have affected the way people think about equality, diversity and inclusion, which is now reflected across academia, in grants and funding, and in museums and galleries. I’m not saying it’s all solved, not at all, but they have been an energizing force for material change. As well, I think women have gained a lot of confidence because of these changes, and we’re much more able to self-advocate. And I think it’s not something that we’ve been trained to do through our education and through class systems. We’ve been told to keep quiet most of the time. Today we’ve learnt that we don’t have to keep quiet, basically.

eJ: what challenges do you think these institutions face when collecting photography? aF: I think the biggest problem is that museums don’t have the space or enough money to do the kind of collecting that one would hope to do to preserve the histories of photography, and that applies to both men’s work and women’s work. But also, as far as I understand it, they don’t have very updated collecting policies. We are currently working with the

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