Saturday 1 March 2014
9.30 - 10.45, Media Space Gallery
11.00 - 17.30, Dana Centre

In collaboration with Film and Video Umbrella

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Curated and introduced by Steven Bode
Speakers include:

Artists Natasha Caruana, Adam Broomberg, Oliver Chanarin, Julie Henry and Lucy Kimbell
Theorist and critic Sean Cubitt
Writer, lecturer and curator Julian Stallabrass
To coincide with the last days of Only in England, this symposium looks back on the influential legacy of Tony Ray-Jones, as it also looks ahead to the future. When Ray-Jones was taking the iconic photographs that made his name in the late 1960s, he did so to chronicle and celebrate the particular eccentricities and social rituals of the English, which he feared were at risk of disappearing with Americanisation.

In the increasingly globalised world of the early 21st century, are there equivalent expressions of cultural identity, or equally idiosyncratic social rituals and behaviours, that modern life seems to be passing by - and who are the contemporary artists and photographers who are recording them? Or, taking our cue from new technology, should we turn this question the other way round? In the age of the ‘selfie’ and social media, might it be the figure of the Photographer, as observer and recorder of social change, that is becoming passé, destined to be replaced by a new type of collective ‘portrait’ formed from the aggregation and analysis of big data?

Includes early-morning viewing of Only in England, 09.30–10.45, with an introduction to the exhibition at 10.15.

£15 adult
£10 concession

Image credit: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, The Brothers Non-Collaborative Portraiture, 2013 © Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin