Mark Neville
Documentary, much like criticism, always comes from a subjective point of view, though documentary makers often make every effort to evade detection. Mark Neville’s book of photographs, Port Glasgow (2005), is styled as a public art project. Neville spent a year visiting this small town, a former world centre for the ship building industry, 20 miles down the Clyde from its mighty namesake. Port Glasgow is a typical recipient of arts regeneration money; perceived as a shadow of its former self, a place that once had a clear purpose and is now adrift in economic uncertainty.
Rather than attempt social or political commentary on the truth or otherwise of this status, Neville chose to make an artwork for the people of the town. A hardback book comprising about 80 images was produced and 8,000 copies distributed free to residents, delivered to their doors by members of the local Boys Football Club. The book is not available commercially. It is not one of those coffee table tomes that bring images of the working classes into the homes of the wealthy, differing from these not just in its different type of exclusivity, but in the images themselves, which lack the uniform stamp of one of Martin Parr’s ‘nowt-so-queer-as-folk’ meditations on the quotidian. Neville is a mercurial photographer who wilfully resists a signature style.
The most consistent set of pictures come from the Town Hall Christmas Party. Neville spent the day setting up a lighting rig to illuminate the space with flood flash, revealing a room full of dancing revellers of all ages, each bearing their individual markers of class and status, but readable as a united community in celebration. On other pages gorgeous landscapes of dereliction sit next to black and white verité snaps. In case we get immersed in notions of social anthropology, Neville further disrupts the study with random elements. Clothes designer Louise Duggan made a number of 1920s-style felt hats, which are gamely modelled by girls drinking in the Prince of Wales pub. Maybe the haunting overhead photos of workers in the only remaining shipyard are mementos of all the ones that are closed down, but we might as well say that the living remind us of the dead.
By littering his work with references to many photographic genres and historical documentary styles, Neville systematically undoes any attempt to place him in an artistic context. The selection of images for the book – from over 4000 taken – is largely aesthetic rather than representative, however even then there is political tinkering in an attempt to balance sensitivities towards local religious sectarianism. (Not entirely successful: some Protestant residents dumped their books at the back of a local Catholic Club and set fire to them.)
The production and distribution of the work is true to its aim of questioning the inherent framework of exploitation in documentary photography. Putting it in an art gallery raises the stakes. Images from the book have been made into traditional large-scale framed works, first for a group exhibition at Modern Art Oxford in 2006, and now closer to home at the Dick Institute in Kilmarnock. Also at the Dick is a new work, again made in Port Glasgow, which draws together some of the disparate aspects of Neville’s practice – a school sports day sack race filmed with a high speed camera; an oblique reference to the artists’ own ‘Jump Films’ (1996) and an intimate portrait of struggle.
Neville is well aware of the potential compromise in placing the Port Glasgow images in the art world, and therefore also presents copious documentation of the community’s responses to the work, both positive and negative. But this is equally exploitative, particularly where small-minded provincialism becomes a spectacle for the urbane cogniscenti. These criticisms underline the other contradictions in the project, all of which are acknowledged and many deliberately provoked. Port Glasgow isn’t about conceptual integrity or purity of intent. The photographs, book, exhibition and responses all serve to unsettle any thought that there is a correct and proper way of going about things. More than anything the exhibition reveals this conflict to be the work’s subject.
