The Average British Family

The British press have a number of tried and tested stories they like to fall back on when there are column inches to fill. One popular genre is the reworked-press-release-plug-for-a-company-pseudo-scientific-study-reveals-shocka.

This week’s specimen was the news that a survey carried out by the home energy management service AlertMe (see what I did there?) had pinpointed the characteristics of the Average British Family. The ABF has 1.5 cars, has paid off 32% of the mortgage on their semi, watches nine hours of television a day, holidays twice a year, spends £12 a week on booze (is that all?), goes to bed before 11pm, and has two arguments a week.

You can see quite easily how they worked out the figures – they added up all the numbers and divided them by the appropriate amount to get the mean – but the statistics on the ABF’s average meal (it’s spag bol on Monday, for example) are a little more mystifying. The papers don’t specify, but presumably they’re talking about the mode rather than the mean here. Either that or there’s some special AlertMe mathematics that says that three chicken pies, two full englishes, seven cod and chips and a bangers and mash averages out to make a pasta bake, (Tuesday).

I heard about the ABF study from my friend N when I was round her parents’ house on Monday. I haven’t seen her since Christmas (she studies in New York now), but everything is as it always is at her parents’ house on one of the roads that slope down to the Mersey in south Manchester. It’s comfortable and chaotic in equal measure, the chaos coming partly because her parents run their businesses (a lingerie company and a scrap metal dealer) from an office in the front room, and partly because her dad is gradually filling it with paintings he buys online.

N has to get ready to go and model for a life drawing class in Littleborough and N’s mum is going to visit her Italian mother where she grew up in Rochdale. As N potters about the kitchen making a salad of tuna and chick peas they discuss the ABF study. “70% of people describe themselves as normal”, N tells her mum. “Would you describe us as normal mama?” “Definitely not,” she says. “We’re foreign.”

Why is life worth living?

“Well, alright, why is life worth living? That's a very good question. Well, there are certain things, I guess, that make it worthwhile.

Like what?

Ok... for me...

Ooh I would say Groucho Marx to name one thing.

And Willie Mays

And Louis Armstrong's recording of Potato Head Blues

Swedish movies, naturally.

Sentimental Education by Flaubert.

Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra.

Those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne.

The crabs at Sam Wo's...

Tracy's face."

That's from one of the last scenes in the Woody Allen film Manhattan. Isaac (well, Woody really, is there any distinction between the character and the writer?) is lying on his back on the sofa talking into a tape recorder.

I’ve decided, vaguely, to gradually write a blog entry about each of these things. It’ll take quite a long time (and a bit of research), but it could be fun.

Figures and Fictions

Here's another article I wrote for the brilliant OhDearism blog, this time about an exhibition of South African photography at the V and A in London....

Recalling her childhood in Cape Town, the curator of Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography, Tamar Garb, observed that “one’s way of negotiating the place was over determined by the social and political structures that taught you who you could talk to, how you could talk to people, how you could behave.” In this profoundly disturbing, disturbed society, photography offered the possibility that the social, cultural and moral distortions of Apartheid could be exposed by a documentary art form that could bring those contradictions right into the viewer’s face.

In South Africa, Garb argues, photographers have traditionally used three distinct modes of representation to tell the story of the place. One of these, dominant during the middle of the twentieth century, is the documentary mode described above. Another is the tradition of portraiture – I have a photo of my great-great-great-grandfather shot in a studio in Cape Town at the turn of the last century that can attest to the long roots of this genre. The third is the ethnographic, which collected and catalogued people, particularly non-whites, as nothing more than types, exemplars, specimens; almost an extension of the flora and fauna, Garb argues.

Having begun to think about the richness of contemporary South African photography after curating a show on contemporary art in London in 2007, Garb approached the V & A with the idea of putting on an exhibition which could challenge the dominance of these three modes, and show the subtleties and richness of contemporary photography in South Africa. She has succeeded in unearthing a number of photographers who are well aware of the role of these three traditions and capable of exposing the ironies and contradictions in South Africa’s photographic heritage.

Read the rest here: http://www.ohdearism.com/2011/07/01/photography-figures-fictions/