114 - Lisa Barnard
© Lisa Barnard
Lisa Barnard’s photographic practice is placed in the genre of documentary. Her work discusses real events, embracing complex and innovative visual strategies that utilise both traditional documentary techniques and more contemporary and conceptually rigorous forms of representation. Barnard connects her interest in aesthetics, current photographic debates around materiality, and the existing political climate. Of particular interest to her is global capitalism, the relationship between the military industrial complex, screen based new technologies and the psychological implication of conflict.
Lisa is an Associate Professor in photography and programme leader of the MA in Documentary Photography at The University of South Wales, where she also has PhD students and teaches on the BA in Documentary Photography course. She has published two monographs with GOST books: Chateau Despair and Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden which was funded by the Albert Renger Patzsch Book Award, and nominated for the Prix Du Livre at Rencontres D’Arles in 2015.
Lisa’s latest book, recently published by Mack, is The Canary and the Hammer, an ambitious, complex and wide-ranging project detailing our reverence for gold and its role in humanity’s ruthless pursuit of progress. Photographed across four years and four continents, the project was funded by the Prestige Grant from Getty Images in 2015.
On episode 114, Lisa discusses, among other things:
How teaching keeps her mentally on her toes
Growing up in the Thatcherite heartland of Sevenoaks, Kent
Her work from the San Diego Naval Medica Centre
Hyenas of the Battlefield, Machines in the Garden and how the title came about
Being an adventurist
Why the more conceptual the connection is, the more excited she gets
Her new project about gold, The Canary and the Hammer
Referenced:
The Dollop podcast
Javier Rebas
Gert Van Hesten
Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederick Jameson
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit
Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | The Gold Depository
“One of the things that I say to my students is you can never accept no as an answer. And the photographers that do well are tenacious, unfortunately. You know, if you’re shy it’s much harder to make documentary work. There are plenty of other ways in which you can make pictures but you have to think seriously about the skills that you need in order to get access and one of those things is confidence; and no fear; and feeling like you’ve got nothing to lose; and that everything is an adventure. Because, how amazing...!”
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