The title of the curatorial collaboration undertaken by the Third Year students of the BA (Hons) photography course within DIT is project6048 and describes the number of days that the school of photography occupied the temple bat campus.
Text by Daniel Siberry

2014 BA (Hons) Photography Students

English

Arrow@TUDublin

Technological University Dublin ARROW@TU Dublin Other School of Media 2014 Project 6048 : Curatorial Collaboration 2014 BA (Hons) Photography Students Follow this and additional works at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/aaschmedoth  Part of the Visual Studies Commons Recommended Citation 2014 BA (Hons) Photography Students, "Project 6048 : Curatorial Collaboration" (2014). Other. 7. https://arrow.tudublin.ie/aaschmedoth/7 This Other is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Media at ARROW@TU Dublin. It has been accepted for inclusion in Other by an authorized administrator of ARROW@TU Dublin. For more information, please contact yvonne.desmond@tudublin.ie, arrow.admin@tudublin.ie, brian.widdis@tudublin.ie. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License By June, the college will be empty and ready for the next tenants. It is anopportune time to reflect on the seventeen years that DIT Photography has spentin a bespoke building, designed by the architects O'Donnell and Tuomey. As wewere discussing the plans for joining the other faculties in a shared buildingin Grangegorman, we started to question why Photography was separated tobegin with. What motivated DIT to position the school of photography in TempleBar? What can we say about how that decision has shaped the course, andwhat is the significance of our departure?All of this has prompted us to look at the building from a fresh perspective.We're at a point where we can reflect on how the plans and designs for DITPhotography in Temple Bar have materialised, both in terms of its location andits design. We're in a position to take stock before we leave, comparing theinitial aspirations for the building with the insight of seventeen years spent here.It isn't often, after all, that a photography school is housed in a bUilding that wasdesigned specifically for its needs. Our discussions are all the more interestinghaving considered how these needs have changed over time.A school of photography looks differently today than it did when the bUildingwas being designed. A recurring point in our conversations about this are thegradual changes that have occurred to the medium since we moved in to thebUilding. Digital photography has usurped analogue practices as the first pointof encounter between students and the medium. This change has reconfiguredhow we use the building. Gradually the facilities have been reshuffled toaccommodate the changes in technology. There are now fewer darkrooms thanthere were initially, since the colour processing facilities were converted into alocker-room and the printing rooms were converted to digital inkjet printers. Themajority of the remaining darkrooms are now a little cut off from the circulationof the rest of the building, since they are on the top floor with the finishing room.Having discussed this change in the bUilding's use, we started looking atfeatures of the building's design that reflected its use as a school of photography.Architecture pariante is a term used to describe structures in which the functionis reflected in the form of the building. When I came across this I thought it wasfitting for some of the features of our building in Temple Bar.The term translates from the French as talking architecture. A quick Googlesearch will reveal some entertaining examples of this. You could say that thisis on the agenda, in some shape or form, for any architect given ample reignover a project. But occasionally a subtle gesture becomes instead somethingmore literal. In room 27, for example, the architects have placed a tiny windowon the wall that is usually covered by the projector screen. Here they have in-corporated the feature of a camera obscura into the building's structure. Whilewe are not concerned with the architectural merits of the building, we areinterested in the peculiarities of its design that will be lost on future tenants. Itis unlikely after all that the building will continue to be used for photographicpurposes.But to return to the top floor, anyone who has worked in the printing darkroomsfor prolonged periods of the year will know how students come and go asdifferent briefs necessitated their use. Apart from this and the odd student whoprefers hand printing, there is tranquillity and a full range of the facilities foranyone availing of them. What might strike anyone using these darkrooms isthat the stairwell leading up there is often flooded in sunlight. While the roomsbelow are left wanting, the sun that streams in the large window above thestairs is absorbed by a heavy door and wall. O'Donnell and Tuomey's designintended for the building's extensive need for darkrooms, and so there arenot many rooms lit with direct sunlight. It's an oddity then that the remaininglight-proofed recesses of the building straddle its most exposed South-facingwindow. Hanging in-between these two spaces is a large image taken from aproject by Paul Seawright.The image shows an open book that is covered in dust. It is lying on whatlooks like a concrete surface, the image's frame just showing the corner thatthe book is sitting in. After looking online at Seawright's work we found the im-age as part of a set titled 'The Missing', that was commissioned by the Neth-erlands Foto Institute in 1997. The project engages with 'the landscape of theabsent - those who disappear from society, represented in visual fragmentsgathered from the street, homeless hostels and squats in Rotterdam' (Sea-wright, 1997). We agreed that it was of value to place images hanging in thebuilding in their context of production and be able to link them into a frame-work of makers and projects that people are familiar with. There are very littlespaces for exhibiting images in the building, both from the student's work andelsewhere. The few pieces that are hung up are left without supplementary in-formation. Some, like Clare Langan's backlit images, become part of the fabricof the building and are forgotten about. One of our objectives is to engage withthese four works and re-contextualise them before they are taken down.After the building has been vacated the pieces will be taken back into the DITThe Missing, 1997, Paul SeawrightThe Missing, in its current state, 2014collection. Where exactly this collection resides, and what it consists of, is atask that we are currently occupied with. DITs photography collection is scat-tered throughout the campuses in the city, made up partially of graduate piec-es bought from end of year shows. Some pieces, such as the Paul Seawrightimage, are individual acquisitions.It's only by word of mouth that we were informed about the origin of Seaw-right's image. Without any information beside the piece itself, it had no doubttaken on many interpretations from passers by as to what it depicts and why itwas placed there.Looking at the image on Seawright's website, there are considerable differenc-es between it and the reproduction that hangs outside the darkrooms. Our ver-sion, the mysterious orphan, has had its already semi-monochromatic surfacebleached by the sun for about seventeen years. For what can be consideredirreparable damage to a valuable piece of work, the results are not withouttheir own charm. When we consider the processes that are taking place ona controlled scale in the darkrooms behind it, the slow deterioration of theimage's surface under the sun's occasional appearance seems like an instal-lation in itself. We found it hard to decide how much of this was just a coinci-dence and how much might have been anticipated when the piece was hungthere. Much of this was dispelled after considering the monetary loss for DITof letting an esteemed photographer's work be toasted to the point of beingbarely recognisable. But for others, the (rather expensive) installation outsidethe darkrooms is a successful version of the window that stays hidden behindthe projector screen in room 27. It is a live photographic process that hasbeen integrated into the building, letting the sunlight act on the pigment-basedprint as a seventeen-year exposure.The pages of the book in the image bring to mind the tactile element of print-ing by hand. Contact prints, along with other steps in the analogue process,are often lost as we move away form working with images in a solid andtangible form. The dusty pages of the book conjure this ephemerality of theprinted page in contrast with its ever immaculate on-screen counterpart. Ourreproduction hangs outside the rooms in which photographers became inti-mately familiar with darkness as their working environment. Through the useof photosensitive materials and chemical baths students refined a set of skillsthat were intrinsic for anyone practicing the medium. Seawright's image is aninadvertent reminder of some of the changes to the experience of learning thecraft of photography as it progresses in the digital era.Our forthcoming program engages with these ambient spaces in the buildingso that we can reflect on the time spent here before we leave. Through this we1J,can produce a dialogue between the occupants of the building and the every-day environment that we work in.BibliographySeawright, P (1997) The Missing [Online]. [10 March 2014]. Available formWorld Wide Web: http://www.paulseawright.com/themissing/Text by Daniel SiberryClare Langan, Untitted, 1997Temple Bar Staff1999 - 2014Tony Murray Anthony HaugheyAnn Curran Tim KovarAnne Marie Walker GeoffWhite Michael Durand CiaranO'Keeffe Dave MonahanMark Curran Shakira EnnisTim Parry Paul Kate BoulezLisa Godson Justin CarvilleEvan Murphy Martin McCabeVal Connor Niamh McColeRashmi Sawnhi Monica FlynnCliona Barnes Sarah LincolnAoife Leahy Mick MuldoonMichael Crotty Robby BanksGerry McDonnel1 Gerry MoranNiamh Barnes Silvia MassanoAnn Donohoe GrainneO'Rourke Roisin O'HaganSinead Murphy Mandy O'NeillThomas Woods Emer NoreenO'Callaghan Pia HolmesTony Brazil Michael TobinTim Stott Alan Wong AlanPike David Davison StephenCoonan Mella Travers MaeveRobinson Paul Nulty BrianHand Brigid Fitzgerald RossKavanagh Anaele "Adis"Iroh Brenda McGuire TaraO'Reilly Tom Grace EllenThornton Marie Byrnewww.project6048.com3·1·1;11'I-c::===d1b-I ,1111 '1PROJECT 6048The title of the curatorial collaboration undertaken by the Third Yearstudents of the BA (Hons) Photography course within OIT is Project6048,and describes the number of days that the school of photography occupiedthe Temple Bar campus. The collaboration was designed to mark thetransition of the Photography Campus in OIT from it's current location to theGrangegorman site in September of 2014, when all the OIT campuses begintheir amalgamation. The lease to the OIT building in Temple Bar is up in June2014 and OIT Photography will exist in Grangegorman alongside the Schoolof Art, Design and Printing and the School of Social Sciences and Law. Themove is both an exciting and challenging time for the students and staff of OITTemple Bar, exciting because the course will finally reside in a typical collegecampus set up, which has been problematic until now due to the separationof all the currentcampus' within 01T. The challenges, like with all changesin life, are far greater. The challenges that face the students of Templebar include worries about being left with fewer facilities than are currentlyavailable, whether the new facilities will be shared across other coursesand one of the predominant challenges that face both the students and staffis being away from the photography community that exists in Temple Bar.The community consists of The National Photographic Archive, The Galleryof Photography (both of which OIT Photography has great ties with), TheIrish Film Institute and not to mention the newly established Library Projectestablished and run by OIT Photography graduate, Angel Luis GonziilezFernandez. What will it mean to the course to be so far removed from acommunity that clearly promoted and nurtured a greater understanding ofPhotography and it's practices?ti"--• •~Ireland's richphotographic heritage,, ('and the keen interest in,photography amongtoday's students, 'willsoon be in evidence inone new building.The Irish Times, 1992Meeting House Square OutdoorCinema, Tim Kovar, 1993Tim Kovar, circa 1995 (right)CRE[DIT]SSophie Barr Lauren McKennaElena Benedettini Eva MurphyAmy Clarke Karl LeonardSiobhan Dillon Mel O'ReillyCiara Gibbons Daniel SiberryNiamh Hannon Francesco TaurisanoGrace Kiernan Roisin Whitewww.project6048.comTop Floor Stairwell, circa 1998 (left)

Project 6048 : Curatorial Collaboration

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Project 6048 : Curatorial Collaboration

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