Zemni Manifesto

About Zemni

I am a photographer, writer and artist based in Cambridge, UK.

My professional life as global consultant in participatory development in Africa, Asia and Latin America is very intense. I see stunningly beautiful scenery – both ‘wild natural’ remote environments and managed rural and urban landscapes. I also see shocking examples of environmental degradation, waste and poverty.

Life

I grew up on the outskirts of Manchester. Although I could see the sunrise over the hills of the Peak District from my bedroom window, my father was generally out and my mother preferred to go shopping at weekends, so visits there were only once or twice a year on large family summer picnics to gather bilberries. And from the car window on the frequent visits to family in Bradford and Yorkshire – where the world was particularly magical at night with all the stars, and in the snow at Xmas.

I went to school in the middle of Manchester and so lived a long way from my school friends. My main companion was a cocker spaniel called Kim, and when he was run over by a lorry, by Jason his replacement springer spaniel. With these dogs for company I was relatively free to go for walks on my own through the pathways and horse fields just down the road from our house. Those places were bot magical – early morning dew, sunsets and many different types of bird. But also rather scary, with periodic reports of murders that worried my mother. So going out in the countryside became also an act of defiance and bravery against a world that seemed to conspire to make women and children victims of a violent unknown. I was not exactly scared of people (generally men) I met on my walks, but I saw them as a nuisance, something I should be wary of and avoid.

As an adult in Cambridge my connection with dogs and walking continued. This time in the much safer and tamer countryside with winding rivers and reflections in water. But again, it was really the peace and quiet I wanted. Though it was more common to meet women on their own, not only men. So I started to see people more as possible kindred spirits rather than people to avoid – except during the years of the Cambridge rapist when country walks on my own continued to be heightened with adrenaline rush. As soon as I could I got a big dog, so the freedom could be enjoyed in relative peace, except when I was busy trying to get the dog back from chasing rabbits or swimming across the river to chase another dog or the swans.

Nowadays I still live by the same Cambridge river I have walked for the past 30 years. There have been very many changes. The area was traditionally where ‘lower classes’ employed in Cambridge or local farms were housed, with large council estates for ‘problem families’ as well as private semi-detached housing. Large new estates were built in the 1990s as council house tenants also bought and sold their houses. Much of the very recent influx has been of middle class and more affluent people working in the Cambridge Science Park who (like me) want a healthier lifestyle and like the cycle ride into town and river walks. This is likely to increase with the new station at the end of the Cambridge to London line in May 2017. Tensions with the traveller community down the road have become markedly more tense since Brexit. The place is now quite crowded and much of the empty space has been built on – an example now of suburban living rather than rural outskirts. No longer a wild place to escape to, but a tamer friendlier place looking with new cycle routes to the fens far beyond….This is the area I am working on in my project Transitions.

From the age of 18 I  started to travel a lot, first to Asia (Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan) and later to Central America and Africa. My first travels as a student were on a very low budget, often hitch-hiking. Later as an anthropologist I lived for long periods in quite remote villages. I saw the countryside both as an outsider in all its beauty, also as an insider guest – a place of snakes and scorpions and mosquitoes and where one should not go around at night because of bandits (or gossip about impropriety as a woman). Now when I travel for work I have more money, generally travelling by car with local people and development workers, and staying in hotels in urban areas or a very honoured temporary guest in villages.  I still get to know local people well as friends. But I have much less time outside my core work to explore, so my views these days of ‘landscapes’ and photographic opportunities are more as a tourist. It is the conflicting views and my own conflicting reactions about the countryside seen from a car that I explore in Assignment 4 ‘safari’ and work on travel books and on-line slideshows for Assignment 5.

Design

I enjoy a wide range of approaches, particularly:

• creating my own images and text and experimenting with different design and layout options. I enjoyed making the sketchbook for On the Road drawing while listening to the text. I also enjoy drawing, painting and photography as both illustration and fine art. I do a lot of academic writing for my professional work and improving my visual presentation on manuals, reports and other professional outputs was one of my initial motivations for studying graphic design.
• exploration of different letterforms and calligraphy as in: Islamic Typography and my initial work on Western Typography in Type Samples Sketchbook
• exploration of expressive type Experimental Typography and some of the work of other typographers in Experimental Typography and Concrete Poetry
• physical manipulation and exploration of different types of paper and materials, including collage
• exploration of different types of drawing and painting tools and printmaking processes and how these interact with different types of paper as I have done in other courses: Illustration 2: Draw, draw and draw again and Hybrids: Mixing and Matching Tools, and experiments with Pencil drawing, Glue drawing, Mesh drawing and Charcoal drawing. I also enjoy different types of printmaking: see my Printmaking blog where I looked at many different techniques for monoprint, linocut, experimental relief prints, collagraph, chine colle and combination prints.
• working digitally to either combine analogue images, or produce purely digital output. I have enjoy pushing the creative boundaries of InDesign and Illustrator in Experimental Typography and Identity .

As a support to my own design exploration I have been inspired by:

• looking at the work of Modernist and experimental designers and typographers in the Western tradition, including designers like: Dan Eldon, Muller Brockman, Marinetti and the different uses of visual dynamics of line, shape and colour.
• looking at design in different cultures and the different uses of line, shape and colour as for example Islamic Design in Saudi Art, Iranian Art: Geometric, Iranian Art: Miniatures, Iranian Art: Modern, Islamic Geometric Design. I have also looked in detail at Japanese and African traditions, and this is something that is very much part of my scope of interest.

But my interest is more in relation to how I can learn from these for my own practice, rather than interest in those designers per se as a topic for in-depth research.

Photography

I am a photographer and artist based in Cambridge, UK. My professional life as global consultant in participatory development in Africa, Asia and Latin America is very intense. I see stunningly beautiful scenery – both ‘wild natural’ remote environments and managed rural and urban landscapes. I also see shocking examples of environmental degradation, waste and poverty.

Part the my motivation in my landscape photography is therefore political. Photography as a referential image, or series of images, can raise questions about the complexities, contradictions and challenges in the ‘real world’ in a way that other types of art do not.  ‘Landscapes’ are multi-layered, changing and often manipulated in attempts to shape power relationships between people and groups of people and peoples’ control over and use of ‘nature’ and other resources. ‘Simple images’ are generally inadequate to sustain attention in the deluge of ‘compassion/guilt fatigue’. I am interested in how to make visual messages understandable without oversimplifying from any one particular standpoint. In structuring and juxtaposing information to inspire people to want to think things through for themselves.

In order to attract and sustain attention I am also concerned about aesthetics and design, and underlying feelings and meanings – flashes of light darting across layers of reflection, fascination with transition states and half-glimpsed images as the brain attempts to make sense of random patterns and sensations.  I am particularly interested in the power of suggestion and the process of abstraction and the degree to which images can be simplified in different ways for different effects and still remain readable to the viewer.

In my photography I am not aiming at any one style or type of output. I like exploring both more journalistic and abstract fine art styles, colour and monochrome, and different ways of processing and presenting images. As a process of increasing my own understanding, and finding different ways of communicating to a wide range of different audiences.

Above all my photography is also a process of self-questioning, examining and trying to articulate my own responses and thoughts about what I see. Exploration of different ways of photographing, and different post-photographic interpretation and representation is also a way of examining and broadening my own understanding of a complex world, and my own place in it. And hopefully communicating my sense of wonder, sometimes anger, but above all questions about the only world we have.

Part the my motivation in my landscape photography is therefore political. Photography as a referential image, or series of images, can raise questions about the complexities, contradictions and challenges in the ‘real world’ in a way that other types of art do not.  ‘Landscapes’ are multi-layered, changing and often manipulated in attempts to shape power relationships between people and groups of people and peoples’ control over and use of ‘nature’ and other resources. ‘Simple images’ are generally inadequate to sustain attention in the deluge of ‘compassion/guilt fatigue’. I am interested in how to make visual messages understandable without oversimplifying from any one particular standpoint. In structuring and juxtaposing information to inspire people to want to think things through for themselves.

In order to attract and sustain attention I am also concerned about aesthetics and design, and underlying feelings and meanings – flashes of light darting across layers of reflection, fascination with transition states and half-glimpsed images as the brain attempts to make sense of random patterns and sensations.  I am particularly interested in the power of suggestion and the process of abstraction and the degree to which images can be simplified in different ways for different effects and still remain readable to the viewer.

In my photography I am not aiming at any one style or type of output. I like exploring both more journalistic and abstract fine art styles, colour and monochrome, and different ways of processing and presenting images. As a process of increasing my own understanding, and finding different ways of communicating to a wide range of different audiences.

Above all my photography is also a process of self-questioning, examining and trying to articulate my own responses and thoughts about what I see. Exploration of different ways of photographing, and different post-photographic interpretation and representation is also a way of examining and broadening my own understanding of a complex world, and my own place in it. And hopefully communicating my sense of wonder, sometimes anger, but above all questions about the only world we have.

Future

Things I would like to explore further in future:

• visual dynamics of design
• calligraphy and expressive type and visual dynamics of letterforms.
• using different papers and materials for printing and then seeing how to enhance the effects through further digital manipulation in Photoshop.
• commercial self-publishing options and process, including further work on Layout and Narrative.