My name is Ulysse I'm a cyclist and photographer from Paris living in Liverpool and studying in Manchester (MA photography MMU). This is my second photographic website, you can see some of my previous work there: http://ulysse-photography.weebly.com
On going MA project
My project is to do a photographic bicycle journey around England documenting housing cooperatives. I want to look at a depth of field somewhere between travel photography and social documentary.
By looking for photographs of travels and social documentaries at the same time, I quickly came across the work of Paul Graham and his book A1: “The great North road”.
These photographs inspired me by their sense of travelling and the diversity encountered in the landscapes seen, the places visited and the people met.
I looked at older photographs made along the road, in particular american road trip albums.
The beginning and also the 'golden age' of road trip photography takes place in a post-war north-america, through deserts, motels and highways. An exhibition curated by David Campany and Denise Wolff entitle The Open Road (http://www.aperture.org/traveling-exhibitions/open-road/), defines and explores the genre of road trip photography.
Showing open, free spaces, revealing the possibility of an elsewhere and freedom, this visual culture is in a way premonitory of the beatnik movement. Later, photographers like Stephen Shore and William Eggleston perpetuated the genre through the seventies and eighties.
Therefore I looked at Graham's photographs of the English road from a different perspective and I realized how much his work can be approached in terms of a road trip photographic culture and genre, but in a place slightly less exotic. This shift from the American wild west to England is interesting to question philosophically what is travelling. Is travelling going far from home? Far yes, but not necessarily geographically. Graham is travelling in his own country and has a surprised attitude to the landscapes and people he encounters. Travelling is not a place but an idea that can be thought of anywhere. For the traveller, the elsewhere is actually everywhere, and photography stresses this feeling.
Inspired by Graham's shift from post-war american road trip photography to the English eighties, I would like to propose a new shift, from cars to bicycles.
The road trip visual culture is so far leaned on a motorized culture where the vehicle itself has an important role in the process of making pictures.
Bicycles, cameras and travelling were associated a very long time before, almost at the very beginning of photography (http://www.oldbike.eu/cyclecamera/). Cameras were still heavy at the end of the twentieth century and the bicycle quickly revealed itself as a companion to the camera. It's also during this period that young aristocrats after their studies started “to tour” and the bicycle-camera duo started to developed through the industrialized world.
To train myself in making travelling photographs, I copied Graham's idea and I adapted it to the bicycle.
On a more bicycle friendly scale, I picked up a segment of a road, the A57 from Liverpool to Manchester, and I started taking photos along the way from my road bicycle with a cheap automatic 35mm.
For five weeks, I cycled every Monday from Liverpool to Manchester with one film of 24 frames that I would process in the same day. I tried to 'spread' the film as most as I can out the forty miles of the journey, capturing my personal landmarks in order to do a review and a survey of the road.
To describe this cycle ride, I made a photographic zine, the 'A57 Bicycle's log'.
To document housing cooperatives through a cycling road trip around the country I planned a longer bicycle journey according to the contacts I made in different places. The journey itself will bring together the two fields of image in the main project, travel photography and social documenting.
I started to do a database of photographs of different housing coops and their dwellers.
To explore the diversity of these houses having a similar organization and status, I defined have a frame of study according to three main photographic subjects:
1- Building and environment Whether urban or rural, housing cooperatives can be found in any kind of habitat, from caravans to mansions. Since coop members don't have landlords, they are free to take full control of their home, and all transformation of the initial home is, at least inside, legally possible. I want to photograph specific (if there are any) indoors and outdoors of housing cooperatives.
2- Non-domestic activities and projects run by the dwellers in their homes. House cooperatives have in common the fact that they host non-traditional (non purely domestic in the first place) activities in the home space, sometimes through a charity/association based in the house itself. Often a house cooperative is 'specialized' in an activity, it could be gardening/farming, fixing bicycle, providing a night shelter, providing home education for children etc.
3- Kitchens. The kitchen is often if not always the heart of the home and can be both relevant of the organization of a house and of the intensity of the communal living.
Keeping these three panels of photographs through the different homes will allow to give a general overview of the housing cooperative movement today and hopefully a further understanding of it.
Method and rules, rather than limiting creativity and imagination will make possible an organized exploration and study of this alternative culture. Also, as I live in a house cooperative, rules will allow myself to step back and document these places and people beyond my personal experience.
I also want to extend my database by collecting images with other methods, like collecting images and transform them into postcards I would send to my own home while I'm travelling, or leaving disposable cameras in each visited places, so I could gather them at the end of the journey. By these secondary methods, I want to give a 'cooperative tune' to the project by involving people I meet in the building of a visual database about housing cooperatives.
In terms of presentation and format of work in social documentary I was inspired by the work of a French photographer, Julien Brygo, who did a photographic film (a slide show with voices of interviews) about social inequalities in Glasgow (http://www.julienbrygo.com/films-photographiques).
Concerning the combination of cycling and photography, I think a tall bike would offer many advantages: more space to fix cameras on the bicycle, a wider range of angles, the safety it provides on long distance riding etc. Because the bicycle is a fully mechanical object, I ideally want to use fully mechanical cameras and remote controls, to create a fusion of the two objects. Moreover, specific bicycles were used in the 1890s to take cameras onboard and I'd like to gear my travelling photographs in this tradition.