A Storied Ground

Photographer Jermaine Francis’ recent series, A Storied Ground, situates portraits of Black Britons within the English pastoral landscape, prompting viewers to reimagine who is considered the natural or rightful inhabitant of such spaces. Madeleine Bazil, editor of The Rhizome newsletter, caught up with him to discuss his work, the politics of the image, and the connection between landscape and identity.

Madeleine Bazil: Could you give us a brief introduction to yourself and your work, in particular A Storied Ground? How did this project come about, and where did your interest in landscape portraiture originate?

Jermaine Francis: My practice is always engaged in some form of story or an investigation of a negotiation of our space. It’s always been something I have been interested in - being aware of my early upbringing, my colour and class background. That negotiation of space appeared to be not so neutral. A Storied Ground is a continuation of this journey.

The genre of landscape has always interested me; it began when I was a student. In the case of the rural landscape, it was the work of [photographer] Ingrid Pollard that helped me to contextualise the feelings that I had in regards to my experience in this particular environment. For me, Pollard’s work was so important. I felt, and still feel, no one had dealt with the complexities of the English pastoral in such a way. It was nuanced and layered, and also not all about alienation. The work of the Canadian artist Stan Douglas in the late 90s also made a great impression on me.

A Storied Ground, I suppose, is my attempt to address some of the issues of the pastoral: an absence of the Black figure - but not in a one-dimensional sense of just a comment of alienation and the outsider, but one of belonging, and narratives of Black identity that is not reduced to hegemony.

Madeleine: I’m struck by the montage or collage effect throughout A Storied Ground - these sort of shadow images, secondary subjects, that linger in the margins of the primary images. You also opted against any textual narrative to accompany the exhibition; the subjects exist - at ease, taking up space - in landscapes without offering justification or rationalising their presence. Could you speak about the impetus behind these aesthetic choices?

Jermaine: The choice of the montage was based on a strategy that could place the viewing experience as one which was layered and also disrupted: this inability to just read it as a single fixed point within the space. I wanted to suggest construction - not just as physical, or picture-making context, but also psychological. What appear to be secondary objects are as primary as the less shadowy images; neither can function without each other. It’s much the same as how we experience, with a single photograph, both the signifier and the signified. In this sense, the image within an image - the black and white space, negative space - is still readable; the shadow figures suggest something slightly intangible but still affect our reading and experience. It also refers to hauntology, [a neologism] coined by Jacques Derrida, where he suggests it’s not the ghosts but the spirits that haunt Marx. I see this very much in how ideological positions play out: the past informing the present in terms of immigration, multiculturalism in the UK. It’s not the ghost of [British politician] Enoch Powell but the spirit of his speech - ‘Rivers of Blood’ - that reverberates in the present day.

Madeleine: Your earlier project, The Invisibles, documents the UK’s homelessness epidemic. Throughout your work, you look at individuals’ relationships to place as well as examine societal understandings of who belongs or is welcomed into spaces. I wonder if you could expand a bit on these themes and ideas that your work engages with?

Jermaine: I think it relates to the idea of the everyday, [which] especially in documentary photography has always been a subject that the medium has been concerned with. The Invisibles, on one hand, was a metaphor for how our current system has failed the vulnerable. It was also about how we are complicit, how we can ignore the most vulnerable while in our space of consumption.

[With] Rhythms from the Metroplex, l looked at unfolding narratives, patterns and performances that appear in our everyday space. The street can be a conduit for social and cultural conversations. For example, in the scenario at Bank [Underground station] in London we see various exchanges of labour, the blue-collar and white-collar worker, and examples of how a demographic can be rendered invisible. The vendor trying to hand out the free newspaper to City of London workers; in this case a magazine, a vessel that distributes, data, information, ideas, reflections of consumerism and its production. In this theatre of the city, despite wearing hi-vis which itself signifies class or economic demographic of labour, they are ignored in an everyday performance. I think these can be conduits to a dialogue to reflect on contemporary society.

Madeleine: What do you see as the role of the photographer (or artist, more broadly) in today’s world?

Jermaine: I think there are many roles for the artist, photographer, whatever category that people place on a practitioner in their chosen medium. I am more interested in image in terms of photography. For me, when you think about a photograph in these terms, it presents a framework to explore. I think [about] how image is distributed, and spaces of distribution, and how we navigate these spaces in society. I think that there are various roles; some are to try and make people think, not tell them what to think, nourish the tools of how to process our world. I also think that visual stimulating and pushing boundaries are also important - but also to include ourselves in the process of self-reflection.