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Interview with SAnD DUNES

Houston based SAnD DUNES are Kitty, Isaac, and Dani. Defining themselves as sad girl pop, they have two really great tracks on bandcamp so far. Let’s hope we hear much more from them.

Could you tell me more about how SAnD DUNES started?

 -KB: It’s a long story. SAnDDUNES started last semester when I was in school- it was a dark time for me. Isaac showed me how to use Garage Band one night and it was all down hill from there. I was really depressed and started writing and recording all these songs I would come up with about my X boyfriend on my patio super late at night. I would send Isaac voice memos at 4:00 in the morning to get his opinion and he was always really into what I was doing, so I kept doing it.

A couple months later our best friend & The NYCQ band member (not SD member yet) Daniela Hernandez was getting married. Isaac and I were driving to Austin for the wedding and we started throwing around the idea of making a band out of my songs and playing them live together. I jokingly said we would be called SAnD DUNES (lower case ‘n’ because it’s really SAD DUNES since all my songs are sad) and our first EP will be called SAD GIRL/LONELY GIRL.

You guys are also in New York City Queens- is SAnD DUNES just a side project at the moment or is it musically more what you are into?

-KB: SD is just a side project for us at the moment. I don’t know how to make it not a side project. Maybe some day it will be a main project.

 What are you all up to/ interested in other than making music? Do you have day jobs or is it music full time?

-KB: all three of us actually work for the same company. We work with kids. It’s a great fit.

I’m sure we would all prefer if we could do music full time but that just isn’t possible for us right now.

Are you into skating too or is that just for larks in your videos?

DANI: We’re into finger banging.

KITTY: I think she means finger boarding. We’re into Tech Decks. Tech Decks are big right now.

Are you all from Houston? What do you like about the music/arts scene there at the moment?

 KB: We’re from here and there. But mostly here. The art and music scene is pretty cool. We’re into it.

What’s next? - you said on Facebook you’re working on your SAD G EP?

KB: That’s the plan. We joke a lot, but that would be a cool plan I think.

Listen/purchase: Whatever by SAnD DUNES

https://sanddunes.bandcamp.com

https://www.facebook.com/sanddunesmusic

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Interview with Sophie Davidson

Sophie Davidson is a photographer, currently based in South London. Her work is often portraits, presented in sequences that give context and narrative. She has a great observational eye and use of vivid colour and textures.

I sent Sophie a few questions about her work.

Natural light and the outdoors seems to feature heavily in your work- how has moving to Peckham affected your work in comparison to living in Falmouth? (I can see there are at least a lot of house plants!) Is it important, for you, to embrace and feature the place you live in your work? How much do you feel that where you live affects your work?

I think by the end of it I was kind of bored of taking photographs in Cornwall and it was a nice change to be somewhere else! But London can definitely feel quite uninspiring at times and I’ve actually found it a lot harder to find people I want to take photographs of in London. I think because of the personal nature of my work it does make a massive difference, whenever I go somewhere I’ve never been before seems to be the time when I want to take photos most so I was trying to go on day trips and things for a while, I feel like I need to leave the country for a bit at the minute and maybe I would come back with fresh eyes! 

 You work with the Groundnut- how did you start working with them, and is it something you will continue? Do you feel it’s effective to apply the seeing eye of an artist who usually photographs portraits, to food?

I just got an e-mail from Duval one day asking me to work with them and I went and took some photos of one of their nights at Lewisham Art House and I’ve been working with them since! I hope I will continue because I really love working with them, I shot some of their nights last week and I’m very excited to see what they will do next. I think stylistically my photos of them aren’t that different to any of my portraits and I hope it’s effective, it’s definitely easier to work with food in terms of putting it where you want it to go and it doesn’t move anywhere which is a plus. A lot of the photographers that I like work with food actually, like Wolfgang Tillmans, Nacho Alegre and Osma Harvilahti, I guess it’s just a human action to eat so it’s diaristic. I also do end up taking a lot of portraits of the boys (which they’re not necessarily after) so I think we both get what we want from working together, I also get a lot of free food which I am very much into. 

 You’ve mentioned on your blog that you have a new project -a body of work on women who have been sexually violated or abused. Can you tell me any more about it? And do you consider it to be a natural progression on from your Girl Zine, in terms of presenting a female narrative/ portrait? Do you think your work benefits from having a narrative, or suggested narrative?

Yeah, to start from the beginning I actually made the 'Girl Zine’ because of something not so nice that happened to me, at the time I was really frustrated about being a girl and some of the issues that I’ve faced because of it but that ended up being quite a positive project, which I think in the end was for the best. But now yet again I have found myself frustrated because of my gender, since moving to London especially actually and so I wanted to do a project which would use my own experiences and hopefully help others as well. I had to take a months break from it already because I had to confront a few personal issues because of it but I think now I’m ready to have another go, it’s definitely going to be quite a long term project because I want to make sure I’ve covered my ground in the best way. I want to make a book in the end, with out saying what the project is about until the end so people who don’t know what it’s about will not immediately see the women shown as “victims,” which is something I’m very conscious of not wanting to do, I want to make something that makes people see that they shouldn’t be embarrassed if this has happened to them, that it happens a lot more than perhaps people realise and that being open about it is ok. I am just tired, it’s such a prolific issue right now and we’re always seeing statistics but then that it’s so un-relatable because it’s faceless, I want to create something more human. I think having a narrative is normally beneficial yes, although I normally think my work is ok as long as I think things look ok in a line together.  

Following from the theme of a narrative, I feel that having a group of photographic subjects (for example, your housemates) makes for work that is really interesting to view and follow. Is there a sort of ‘time’s up’ for you on who you are photographing, and do you think it’s a natural human inquisitiveness that makes a progressive portrait so appealing - much like we experience on other social medias.

Oh god I hope there’s no ‘time’s up!’ Although I definitely go through phases in terms of who I want to photograph. I definitely think that’s true for me, I am so nosy, all the work I like is very personal, like I really like Araki’s more personal work and Lina Scheynius. I guess I just hope other people are as nosy as me, at uni one of my tutors said ‘but Sophie, WHY would people care about your life,’ which is definitely something I am not thinking about because I can’t think of any reasons, I‘m just going to carry on and hope for the best. 

 Finally, what are you working on at the moment- other than the new project mentioned above?

 I’m not actually working on anything else at the minute, I’m trying to sort out working with a few of my friends on projects they’re working on but other than that I’m mainly trying to catch up with my reading! 

http://cargocollective.com/sophiedavidson 

http://sophiedavidson.tumblr.com

https://instagram.com/sophieedavidson/

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An interview with Craig Atkinson, Café Royal Books

Southport based Craig Atkinson is the man behind Café Royal Books, an independent publisher that started in 2005. CRB currently publishes a photobook a week, mostly examining the theme of social change in some way. The books have a strong identity, all A5 in size and usually black and white (but not always!). Working with artists and archives, the books provide an accessible, affordable means of publishing work and getting it out to the public. From what started for Craig as a way of publishing his own work, it has become an important social document. Craig now also supplements the books with Notes- a reference resource of social documentary photography from the UK- at the moment it is focusing on the Talking Pictures from The Daniel Meadows Archive. I sent Craig some questions about CRB and his own work.

(Homer Sykes, Café Royal Books)

Do you think that images hold more power as a collection or series? Does the scope for a more over reaching narrative play a part in this- for example your exploration on the theme of change?

Yes and no. Some images don’t work as stand alone. A series can make sense of several images. Can create a narrative. Pairings of otherwise non-related images can also be made within a series.

Was the theme of social change in CRB something that developed naturally from the content of the photographs you were using, or was it a focus that you brought in consciously from the start?

It something I was documenting myself without realising. I had to get my research together for one thing and another and by reviewing what I had been doing, and the work I was publishing, I realised  ‘change’ summed it up, mostly.

You’ve spoken in other interviews about moving from time-intensive painting in your own work to the further reaching multiples of printed matter. What impact has this had on your own practice?

It was more the other way round. Initially I used publications as a way to exhibit the faster drawing I had started to make having quit painting. So it was and is driven by my own practice.

 Once you moved from painting, to printing your own drawings and work in zines, when was the point when you started collaborating with artists on what was to become Café Royal Books? And what do you think led you to that process of collaboration? – Was there a key person, or body of work, that started you off on collaborating with other artists?

It was fairly immediate. I started to swap books for others’ books, then said why don’t we make something together…Went from there. It’s a lot more organised and focused now but essentially the same. No key element. I liked collectives like some of those exhibit in ‘In Numbers’ at the ICA a few years ago, but I knew I didn’t want to be a collective, but did want to present a collection of people / ideas / work.

It is a powerful thing, to provide affordable artworks for people to own and have at home, to look at in a completely different context from a gallery and therefore take something different from it. I know you’ve said you invite artists to submit work not meant for a gallery, but does it every go the other way for you- when you are working with an artist on a book, do you think ‘gosh this would look fantastic in a gallery’, or have there been occasions where the work really didn’t work with the book format?

Submissions don’t have to be ‘not meant for a gallery’. I think that was just one specific project. I welcome all submissions. But, no, that’s never happened. I always see things as books. To be honest, I don’t like photographs in galleries that much. Often there seems no benefit to the photographs showing them in such an environment, unless you’re Gursky.

(Geoff Howard, Café Royal Books)

Do you think that blogging and other imaging platforms online can be successful for some of the same reasons that photobooks are- human inquisitiveness and curiosity in an honest narrative? Apart from the physical pleasure of a book, what do you think is lost when an image is digital rather than physical? 

Digital is fine but if its just a version of a printed book, that’s really dull and there is no reason for it to happen. If someone embraces digital media and creates something that can’t be done in print, then of course that’s a great reason to use digital. Digital loses the physical qualities of print and print loses the possibilities of digital…There’s no argument, neither can replace the other…It’s a boring and over discussed discussion (but good question!)

How has doing Café Royal Books affected your own photography work? Do you think they have both progressed together? How much of an impact does it have on your work as a lecturer?

 They feed each other. Café Royal takes up a lot of time, so I have less for making my own. But that’s good,  it makes me more focused with the time I get. Teaching…Well it informs it I suppose. The more I know, the more I can pass on.

(Craig Atkinson, Café Royal Books)

Do you think there is a point where a public photography archive becomes viewed as art, apart from through curation?

Interesting question…for a PhD perhaps.

Viewed as art as rather than what? Photography? No…Depends on the work in the archive I suppose. Depends on the intent of the photographer — fine art or photography. Depends on the context of the archive. Duchamp would argue the archive as object could be art. I’d argue it’s a resource, or collection or an aid.

What are your thoughts on publishing found photography?

 Depends on context and reason. I do it, but I do it differently to Stephen Gill or Joachim Schmid, or Sarah Bodman or Martin Parr. Like anything, if it’s done with absolutely no reason or idea that chances are it’ll be pretty weak. There needs to be something there, even a thought. 

You’ve talked before about photobooks encouraging learning- do you think there is an accessible archive of social change comparable to Café Royal Books?

I don’t know. There are things, the DPA in Manchester but it’s local. The Co-optic but that’s gone. There’s Mass Observation but that’s directed. There are company archives but they’re specific. Feedback I’ve had from many would suggest Café Royal Books is unique, and I hope so, but if not it doesn’t really matter.

(Stewart Weir, Café Royal Books) 

https://crbnotes.wordpress.com

http://www.craigatkinson.co.uk

http://www.caferoyalbooks.com

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The Units- High Pressure Days