I’ve felt, throughout this MA, that I don’t belong. I don’t speak the language of photography, I don’t connect with the criticism about it, and I don’t understand the fine art context of much contemporary photography. I often wonder by what sleight of hand I ended up here. I’ve rejected the majority of what I’ve been presented with; it reflects neither my background, nor what makes me take photos, nor how it feels for me to do so. But inasmuchas this course is all about positioning myself in relation to contemporary photography, I’m nevertheless doing exactly what is asked of me. 

So, I know what I’m not, and what it’s pointless trying to become, and I’m fine with that. I know how my writing, my academic background, and my filmmaking have shaped my photography, and why that makes my work distinctive. But there’s not getting away from the idea that photography is art in a way that film just isn’t. So the question needs to be thought through carefully: if I’m in the business of making art, what kind of artist am I? 

I was fascinated to come across Charles Russell’s Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught and Outsider Artists. Just the title alone had me interested. Outsider and Self-Taught art is a well-researched and well-respected field, though seemingly little-known to the overwhelming majority of the public. Outsider artists are those who do not belong to the mainstream (not here used in any pejorative sense) of the word, especially those whose living circumstances make them outsiders to the mainstream of society; mediums, institutionalised schizophrenics, the homeless. While all of these are self-taught, the term self-taught artists also includes those who otherwise are part of society, often coming to create art as an expression of their profound religious feelings, or as an unheralded outpouring of creativity unleashed late in life. Like all terms, they are slippery – self-taught artists have to some extent been taught by their exposure to other artists. Outsider artists can continue to create work after critical recognition and with financial support – so are they outsider artists? Flawed terms, yes, but useful. 

In many ways, such artists are, simply, artists. They take from and reconfigure the worlds around them, its art-objects, material manifestations. They frequently do so to externalise their interior lives. And while the intensity with which they do so is markedly different from the majority of artists working within the academy, such primal ferocity is found in, say, Bacon or Pollock, such intense illusions are found in Grayson Perry and Magritte, such obsessively prolific activity is found in Warhol. What marks outsider and self-taught artists out is that such elements are typical, even defining of this type of work, simply because such art is created not for the art crowd, or the critics, and often it is not created for anyone at all, but the art is first and foremost created for the self. There is no, or very little, dialogue with art as an idea; relationships with other art-objects are direct, personal responses rather than coolly critical contextualisations. It is not art about art, but art begat of art. 

I recognise in this much of my passion for creating photography; I am similarly interested in finding reconciliation of difficult oppositions – nature and culture, self and other, rejection and acceptance. I am similarly interested in drawing on a hotchpotch of influences – Matisse, EH Sheppard, Chrystal Lebas, HP Lovecraft – to create illusions in which to escape. I am similarly more interested in my own direct responses to photography than elaborate philosophical contextualisations. I am similarly unconvinced in critical discourse’s claim – and that of photographers closely working in this register – to speak to the universal, seemingly unaware of its frequently solipsistic, closed loop of self-referencing. 

It’s important, however, to recognise a key difference: until fairly recently, nearly all working photographers were self-taught, and many still are. And while photography, so it seems to me, is in the process of transitioning to the academy more and more firmly, it still embraces outsider photographers like Vivian Meier in a way that fine art still does not. 

This is the beginning of a train of thought for me, one I will return to. Outsider art is a powerful means for me to understand my position as a misfit on this course not as a weakness, but as a strength. It will give me something on which to draw for confidence and for direction, to prevent me from hankering after ways of thinking and working that seem ‘correct’ but are ultimately alien to me. 

Russell, C. 2011. Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Outsider and Self-Taught Artists. New York: Prestel.