Narrative: Interview with Katy Richardson

A Interview between myself and Katy Richardson about how she uses narrative within her practice and the family album in regards to narrative.

Within your practice how do you use narrative?

I’ll give you two examples. In Relic (2016) I used narration, archive footage and recordings from the time periods mentioned, in order to set up a chronological context for the main aim of the work, which was to attempt to visualise how those elements and memories might start to blend and leak into each other in the mind of a person with dementia. My grandmother had begun developing dementia when I was still too young to be interested in her life and experiences. Therefore, constructing a narrative was a way to relate the things I had learnt about this person I had never really known, and which she had apparently not told my father, but which she clearly wanted to be told. It was the fact of her giving me a narrative which inspired me to do it in this way. Therefore, this work is very personal to me, and made in celebration of a particular person with whom I had a close relationship. You can see Relic here. Now, I’m working with a small box of found materials that I call Ghost Box. This box was ‘given’ to me in unusual circumstances, and I have no personal connection with the original owners of the contents (as far as I know). I’m using this project to explore what constitutes narrative when it is not a ‘story’. It’s a difficult job. There isn’t time to write here all the avenues I’ve been going down, but if you want to take a look at some of my blog posts about it, I’d start with this one, this one and this one.

When finding the images how do you create a narrative?

I think we can’t help ourselves but to create narrative when seeing images, especially family photographs or images of people we know well or can relate to. I think we’re so aware that a photo is a document of something ‘that happened’ or ‘that was’ (and I’m talking about family photos / school photos / passport photos / holiday snaps etc here, not experimental photography), that we can’t help but imagine what led to that image being created and what happened next. When I first proposed making Relic, I did not plan to use so much archive footage in it. But when I saw the huge amount of material at SWFTA I decided to try to find the images which would support my intended narrative. This was for two main reasons. First, I’m not very confident with a video camera. Second, I didn’t have any money to pay decent actors or build sets or buy period costumes. What I found, by doing this, is that a single narrative can be told using a much wider range of imagery than I had previously thought. In Relic, none of the moving imagery is of my family at all (because nobody ever owned a video camera). But I found enough of the message that I wanted to communicate in other people’s home movies that it doesn’t matter.

What is the importance of narrative within your practice?

It’s simply what I’ve chosen to research at the moment, because of a love of imagination, stories, narrative film, fairytales, myths, fables, etc.

How do you use the family album in regards to narrative?

With Relic, I borrowed my grandfather’s entire pre-1970s photo archive (approximately 800-1000 images) and scanned them all one by one so that I could give them back as quickly as possible and he would not be anxious about them. I used probably about 25% of them in the performance (almost every still image you see in the film is one of my grandfather’s, including all the images I had made into slides which are what you see on the small left-hand screen). The album was really just support to the main source of the narrative, which was the journal. The fact that most of the photos I looked at were in some kind of album was really helpful though, because it was like a library which could be referred to in order to understand generally when, where, who etc. My grandad has written very few annotations on the photos themselves, but there are several pages with contextual information on them, like this one:

Does personal memory of the family album inform the decisions whilst creating work?

No. I saw most of my grandfather’s photos for the first time when making Relic, so I had no prior relationship with them, and with Ghost Box, the family concerned is not mine.

Dose annotations on backs of photographs help you create a narrative?

Annotations are simply another piece of information that the artist can choose to use or to ignore. There could be some useful information about when an image was taken, or where, or the identity of any human subjects, which would be useful if you wanted to be accurate with those factors. However, it would be unwise to assume that all annotations are accurate. During the making of Relic, for example, I found this photograph of my grandmother aged about 3, which would mean the image was taken around 1925. It was not annotated on the back, but she had wrapped a note around it at a later time with the words “This is the only surviving photo of me with my mother. I wish I could see her”. By the time I saw this photo, my grandmother had died, so I was unable to ask her why she believed the image contained a representation of her mother. I have scanned the image and zoomed right into it and I can’t see anybody else in it except for my grandmother as a child. There is nobody else in the image. I would love to know what she thought she saw, or what she knew that made her able to see outside the edges of the image. There is also the huge range of other errors or untruths which could be found in annotations and accepted as fact. It is not difficult to imagine that someone would be annotating a stack of photographs, turn two over together, and write the wrong name on the back of the second one, believing it to be the first, for example. Look at my grandad’s annotations on the album page above. The dates and location might be helpful (though we’re assuming he’s correct), but the comments “In Step”, “Taken by Walkee” and “Ready for Anything” could be any number of things: something he remembers when looking at the image, nicknames of people involved, a feeling he remembers having when the image was taken, some kind of poem…. While you could certainly use any of these things to create narrative, you probably would be creating, in the sense of making it up to fit your agenda. Which could be interesting. But it might have little to do with the narrative that resulted in the images.