Dan Burwood…photography

Work in progress… see Resurgence post below.

Since February I’ve been working on this project:

It’s been really good, hard work but very interesting. The showcase went down well at the Drum on Tuesday.

The photos below were made working with students from schools in Aston and Nechells, around the theme of ‘Our Shared Future’

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Many thanks to all those involved.

A couple of years ago, I found a skip full of boxes of geological samples, powdered stone and earth from all over the world. I strapped some of the boxes I’d emptied to the back of the bike, as they now seemed full of the possibilities of future use.

Of the flat kind, I have a small pile, still empty but one, in a filing cabinet full of negatives and photographs. The one that is filling up has the irregular shaped, stained and bad-dry-distorted test prints from my black and white printing within. Torn strips of people’s faces, broken images of… well, a variety of things.

The cube boxes I saved I took to school to make pinhole cameras. Yesterday we made one with a bin, a binhole camera perhaps, and had the group sit on the steps for the 15 minute exposure, in the cold, complaining a bit, listening too to the tinny phone beats, chatting, warning cars away from our array of cameras. We’re a little blurred, but you can see a few details; the flowers on my shirt are white stains there. I built the 12 or so 10×8″ sheets up into an image in photoshop. It’s okay. The Edifice of the school is there clean lining it against the Sky, and we merge with ourselves reflected, into indistinction.

This isn’t from the bin, it’s from one of the boxes from the bin.

…is a free improvisation night, occasional, amongst other places, at the Anchor, one of the best pubs around, on Barford St in Digbethish

this from some long rolls i shot with a 1906 folding pocket kodak that friends found in a skip, to sit alongside the surprising music… this is them. and this is some of them too:

I’ve been looking at edges; now that I think about it maybe this has to do with Permaculture’s interest in the generative potential of edge zones- the seashore, the delta, the hedgerow, the riverbank. In this city, the urban and the rural have edges that are closer to the surface than is often evident at first glance. All the place names, Balsall Heath, Kings Heath, Acocks Green, Small Heath etc., point to what was here relatively recently, before industrialisation. And in other places the rural pokes through, and what it meant and means changes, and impinges on what we think of as our urbanness.

I saw an irritating programme on ITV last year sometime about what the world would look like without humans. They’d CGI’d bridges and towers weakening and collapsing without maintenance, and had footage from inside the exclusion zone at Chernobyl. I thought it was bad tv, but it stuck in my mind too I suppose. Without being alarmist, or maudlin, it seems the shape of things is changing, and I’ve been wondering how much if it is evident in these edges I’ve begun to see, or think into existence.

I was going to leave out the burned bible I found at these empty offices, but that too is a kind of edge

This was it.

We thought it might be good to document some of the spirit at the Firebird social centre in Balsall Heath. This is the first part of what I’ve done to make a record. More, and more collaborations to follow.

see Justice not Crisis for details of the protest.

I’m adding sets of pictures to the archive here to give a fuller picture of some of the work I’ve made. Click here

to look at work shot in 2006 in Cuba.

These are images from the recent Rescue Geography Project.

See www.rescuegeography.org.uk for more details.