In episode 96 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed considering photography’s need to be at the centre of the creative arts, setting up collaborative collectives, and the positive creative aspects of difficulty!
Plus this week photographer Vinca Petersen takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which she answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’
Vinca Petersen got her first camera at the age of seven or eight. In 1990, age 17 she moved to London, telling her parents she was going to art school. Instead, she moved into a squat, and got involved in alternative politics as well as the rave/free party scene, occasionally working as a model in fashion spreads and music videos. Vinca met the photographer Corinne Day, who became a mentor of sorts, occasionally giving her cameras, film, and confidence to continue taking her pictures. She adopted a nomadic lifestyle travelling Europe, living in trucks until her son was born in 2005. Throughout, this time she took photographs, eventually collecting them into a book, No System published by Steidl in 1999 and reissued in 2019, when it was included in one of the first ever displays of photo books at Tate Modern, London. In 2010, Petersen created Future Youth Project, working with children in Thanet, Kent and in the Ukraine, where provision for children with learning difficulties has been limited. Her alter ego ArtNurse, popped up at the 2010 Paris Photo festival, Arles Photo and Brighton Photo Fringe dispensing gold glitter and administering vodka shots by syringe as well as dancing with strangers and selling postcards to raise funds for FYP. Before FYP, she persuaded the designer and founder of the fashion brand Maharishi, Hardy Blechman, to design and donate a monumental inflatable that she took to orphanages and schools through Europe, Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Romania and Ukraine. Recent photo books include Future Fantasy examining her earliest years during the second summer of love, and Deuce and a Quarter, created during a road trip across the American South made with three girlfriends. Vinca has participated in multiple group exhibitions and solo exhibitions of images and this year her work will be exhibited at the Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol. Petersen has never worked to commission. https://vincapetersen.com
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Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Focal Press 2014) and The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Focal Press 2015). His book New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019.
His documentary film, Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay can now be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd47549knOU&t=3915s.
© Grant Scott 2020