This week’s task has been a bit perplexing. Being asked to think outside the box about exhibitions when you don’t know anything about exhibitions requires less of a leap of the imagination for me than putting one on in a ‘white box’ would have needed. Actually, one of the reasons I’m studying at Falmouth is to learn more about such things, and I very much hope that at some point someone will pass on their knowledge about this.

What’s been useful in considering all this is helping consolidate how I see myself as a photographer – and an arts practitioner generally. I don’t come from a fine art background. I don’t have fine art friends. I didn’t study fine art or photography. I don’t work in either. So it’s probably unsurprising that I struggle to see my work ever being put on those hallowed white walls. I can’t see the circumstances which would lead up to it. I can’t see my work fitting in. And I have to say in many ways the hallowed hush of the white box feels to me somewhat exclusive, alien, and just a teensy bit pretentious if a work fails to live up to all that such reverence implies.

Many of my favourite contemporary artists create work outside the gallery. Andy Goldsworthy is one, Keith Haring is another, Grayson Petty yet another. I bounced on Jeremy Deller’s inflatable Stonehenge in my local park, and I was a part of Anthony Gormley’s One and Other, reading childrens’ fiction from the Fourth Plinth of Trafalgar Square. I like these artists because they work with rather than against the general public, and understand that for art to be broadly accessible means neither dumbing down nor preaching nor belittling. And that art can also be enormous fun. The filmmaker Agnes Varda is a perfect example of someone who knows how to do this.

The project I’m working on with the Pebblebed Heaths Conservation Trust is all about connecting with the artwork that untrained photographers make, looking for images that communicate affect rather than technical and aesthetic accomplishment – though without excluding those that do. I’d been reticent to then extract such work and transplant it somewhere I don’t think it belongs, but also been at a loss as to where exactly to place it. Similarly, I don’t want to position my practice above anyone, and I have to say, I’ve seen work in amateur camera clubs that has more about it than some of the most revered contemporary photographers. I’ll post later about my plans for Landings, but this week has given me the opportunity to reevaluate where my work sits, because it’s given me the chance to look hard at where it doesn’t. My work belongs in the thick of things. A gap does not need to be opened up, a break does not need to be made, a translation does not need to occur. Placing my work in a white box – perhaps, also, in a costly photobook – risks doing all of these things.