Britain and its national psyche are at the core of London based photographer Luke Stephenson’s work. For over a decade he has been photographing subjects that, for him, epitomise British eccentricity and culture, including puppets, the iconic ‘99’ ice cream and the World Beard and Moustache Championships.

In 2009 Stephenson discovered the peculiar and insular world of show bird competitions and began to immerse himself in the subculture of ‘bird fancying’. He has spent the past seven years tracking down and gaining access to ever more exotic species to photograph, inadvertently becoming an avid collector of these prized birds himself.   

In this interview, Alexandra Olczak discusses the newest works in the series An Incomplete Dictionary of Show Birds with the photographer, which is currently on view in our Print Sales Gallery and at Selfridges, London, as part of a new display In Fine Feather. By combining his unique style of photography with the formal language of studio portraiture, the artist lends his feathered subjects an affectionate and often human presence.

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Alexandra Olczak: Your previous series, for example 99 x 99s (2014), which documents 99 types of 99 ice creams across various British seaside locations, have led you to be considered a ‘portraitist’ of sorts. Do you think this is an accurate description of your approach to photography?

Luke Stephenson: I think it’s a very interesting idea that someone can take a picture of an object or thing, and that in doing so it gives an audience some sort of insight into the person who made it. With the 99 project, I wanted to see the various differences between ice creams from around the country, but as I looked at them – and maybe I’m the only one to see this – I noticed particular differences specific to certain counties. I suppose in a strange way this could be classed as a quasi-portrait of Great Britain through its ice cream!

With the Show Birds project I took the decision very early on that I didn’t want to take portraits of the people who owned and bred the birds, as I thought they would be showing themselves through the animals. For many of these breeders these birds have been a life’s work, so to show their achievements in that respect says something about them. I think it’s always nice to not give the viewer too much information, but allow them to join the dots.

Bearded Reedlings #1, 2016 © Luke Stephenson

AO: How did you figure out the best way to photograph the birds?

LS: Well, there was quite a bit of trial and error. When I first photographed some budgies back in 2006 I naively thought they would calmly sit on their owner’s finger but soon realised this wasn’t the case; I discovered you needed to use some sort of cage or box.

There was a photographer called Dennis Avon who was a very prolific in bird photographer, and I learnt he had a box that he photographed the birds in but had very little information as to how it was made.

My dad helped me make various boxes; the first was made with chicken wire but the birds hung on to the sides and rarely sat where I wanted them to! So after a few more failed versions, someone told me that a bird will generally sit at the highest point and I finally came up with a wooden box which only gives the bird one place to sit (which is exactly where I need them to be).  My bird ‘studio’ is constantly evolving as I think of ways to improve it. I very much enjoy the DIY nature and challenge of photographing something that isn’t a typical portrait subject.

AO: As I understand it, there are several stages to producing these stark and detailed close-ups: tracking down new species, gaining permission from the breeders, travelling to different locations with your bird studio, testing different backgrounds, and editing the resulting images to find the best shots. Which parts of the process did you find most enjoyable or challenging?

LS: Yes there are many elements as you say… I’m lucky to have met some lovely people along the way who have been happy to share their knowledge. During the first part of this project I met a former policeman called Alan, who bred canaries and was very active in that scene. He was happy to vouch for me in case anyone had any reservations – there can be a bit of suspicion in the bird world due to past bird thefts. That helped a lot in gaining access to the birds. More recently, I’ve been looking for more exotic and native breeds to photograph, and have travelled to Europe to meet some keen collectors who’ve been invaluable in their help.

I think the most satisfy part of the whole process is when I’m looking though the lens at the bird in my box, and all the planning has worked and I press the shutter and just know I’ve got a beautiful shot.

Luke Stephenson, Installation view, In Fine Feather, Selfridges, London

AO: What’s the furthest place you have travelled to for a photo session? Have all your pursuits been successful to date?

LS: As I mentioned, I travelled to Europe recently as the hobby is still very popular in Belgium, Germany and Holland. I visited a bird show outside Eindhoven, which is very highly thought of and was very different to any other bird show I’ve attended. They spend a week or so building very elaborate habitats for exotic species that various members own – it was better than most zoo collections and very impressive to see. I spoke to a few people while I was there and met a helpful guy called Rick; he helped put me in touch with some of the members and I then got permission to return to Holland with my bird studio to capture some wonderful birds.

Generally because of the research I do before a shoot I usually come away with some good pictures, but sometimes I don’t always select the right colour backgrounds and that can often make or break a shot, which is annoying.

I once drove for two hours to visit a breeder in the borders of Scotland! He had, amongst other species, a Pekin Robin, which I had wanted to photograph for some time. As soon as I arrived I realised I’d forgotten the lights for my box – which are crucial – so couldn’t get any shots that trip. I was invited to return the following week but by that time the Pekin Robin had sadly died, which was a real shame… it took me another 3 years to track another one down.

AO: You once said that your initial collection of avian portraits for this series started with budgies, as they were “ accessible, familiar, and wonderfully beautiful.” Apart from new species, how does this new collection of birds differ?

LS: As well as travelling further afield and discovering more diverse species, I’ve also managed to photograph a lot more native British birds. They tend to be my favourites as they’re so familiar.

I think I’ve matured a lot as a photographer and have learnt so much through the project. Since publishing a photo-book in 2012 I have been living with the pictures and looking at them a lot – you start to learn what works in the images and what doesn’t after a while, so I think the latest work is a bit more refined thanks to that.

Paradise Tanager #1, 2016 © Luke Stephenson

AO: In a way you could say you have become somewhat of a photographic “ collector” of these birds – have you ever owned a show bird yourself? Would you consider yourself a bit of a show bird connoisseur thanks to this project?

LS: Yes, I would say a lot of my work is based around collections of things; I enjoy getting deeply involved in a subject and learning about its various elements.

With the Show Bird series it has unexpectedly grown into a large collection that has taken me a number of years to amass. Having met so many enthusiasts over the years, you can’t help but pick up various bits of information and it sometimes surprises me when I’m chatting about birds how much I actually know! In that respect I suppose I have become a bit of a connoisseur, but there’s always more to learn with something like this.

My wife actually bought me a yellow canary for my birthday a couple of years ago. He was called Bobby and was lovely to have in my flat – he would sing all day and keep me company. I kept his cage door open for him so he could fly around my living room whenever he wanted and go back to his cage at night to sleep. Sadly he’s no longer with us, but I’ve been thinking more and more about getting another bird lately… maybe something a bit more exotic. I enjoyed the sound of him singing all day.

Luke Stephenson, Installation view, In Fine Feather, Selfridges, London

AO: Your countrywide road trip for the 99 ice cream series lasted 25 days, whereas you’ve been photographing show birds over the past 7 years now. Did you ever expect this to be such a long-term project? Do you think your ‘Dictionary’ will ever be complete?

LS: It has been a long process, and not something I ever imagined doing when I first photographed some budgies! I like the way these long-term projects evolve and change as you get to understand the subject matter more and more. There are still so many birds I’d like to photograph and so many variations of each species I don’t know if it will be ever finished! I’m going abroad to other countries and learning how they do things, so that could be a way of expanding the collection in the future.

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Luke Stephenson (born in 1983, Darlington, England) lives and works in London. Since graduating in 2005 and winning the Jerwood Photography Prize the same year, Stephenson has been working as a freelance photographer focusing on eccentric British hobbies and exposing fascinating “ archaeological layers of English culture” hidden from the mainstream. His work has been published in a variety of publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Dazed & Confused, Foam, Art Review and Wallpaper*.

Alexandra Olczak is print sales gallery co-ordinator at The Photographers’ Gallery.

Image: Birgit Jürgenssen, Nest, 1979

For the exhibition Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970sat The Photographers’ Gallery, the acclaimed writer Ali Smith was commissioned to write a short story for the gallery’s publication Loose Associations, in response to Birgit Jürgenssen’s photograph Nest (1979). From the perspective of the woman in the photograph, Smith’s protagonist experiences her genitalia metamorphosing into a nest which incubates two delicate eggs. This transformation reveals the biological power of her body to procreate, and more importantly the reproductive metaphor the nest evokes – suggesting that maternity is not just simply a beatific phenomenon in this story, but is also disturbed by various other signifiers that allude to the ways in which femininity is constructed.

Jürgenssen’s image suggests that an ideological possession is enacted when people operate in compliance with prescribed gender roles. She implies that one’s gender is performatively constituted in the same way that one’s choice of clothes is curtailed, perhaps even socially and contextually predetermined. Moreover, this woman’s femininity is compromised of the imperfections written on her body. The nest itself is redolent of a mass of unkept public hair which women often feel obliged to shave off or hide from public viewing. Jürgenssen’s feminist deconstruction of femininity is further infiltrated by the subtleness of the ladders in the tights. The rips are reminiscent of the perils of womanhood and indicate an inner battle; unveiling the constraining obligation to be and act feminine and the limits this has in articulating one’s own sense of authenticity. Jürgenssen’s clothing analogy can be applied to illustrate and simplify Judith Butler’s conception of gender performativity, discussed in the writer’s groundbreaking publication Gender Trouble (1990). 

René Magritte, Elective Affinities, 1933

Smith might have just as easily responded to René Magritte’s painting Elective Affinities (1933). I want to suggest that this painting – as it depicts an oversized egg trapped in a constrictive cage – effectively articulates the physical and ideological alienation women experience in the ways femininity is variably constructed. Magritte’s work could have had feminist intentions akin to Helene Cixous’s, reflecting upon the idea that “ there are no [feminine] grounds for establishing a discourse”, and that some women, bound to normative social identities, lack the means to discuss and challenge their prescribed gender roles. An entrapped egg shows the painful constraints the patriarchal order has on the female psyche. Yet, Magritte has appropriated the egg symbol to represent an existential crisis: that a person lacks free will in the world due to external forces out of their control. This, however, has some alignment with gender performativity, confirming how cis-females are ‘hatched’ into a capitalist society and thusly enclosed by an ideological imperative to maintain the normative order of childbirth.

Sarah Lucas, Chicken Knickers, 1997

It would seem appropriate to claim that Sarah Lucas’ Chicken Knickers(1997) refers to, or is at least influenced by, the lesser known photograph Nest. The feminist significance of the eggs have hatched in Lucas’s image, proving that the egg does indeed come before the chicken. Lucas presents the female genitalia as a headless plucked chicken, replacing the innocence of delicate egg imagery with carnal meat, traditionally associated with patriarchal and familiar food consumption. Meat has connotations to masculinity, wealth, and virility; to replace the female genitalia with a plucked chicken, then, effectively draws parallels with contemporary feminist theories such the male gaze, which demotes the subjectivity of the female. Lucas illustrates a brutal reductionist return to female body parts through chicken imagery, demonstrating how the ‘masculine’ consumption of meat is related to the sexual consumption and objectification of women. Again, a symbol to represent femininity (this time more vulgar) is attached to a garment worn by women. The increased crudeness of the symbol is matched to the intimacy of the garment, this time a private pair of knickers. Moreover, the nest which previously symbolised pubic hair is now a red raw chicken. Imagine how constraining it would be to wear a pair of ‘chicken knickers’ under ‘nest tights’. These constructed garments entrap female sovereignty, illustrating how women may sacrifice comfort and authenticity for the sake of being, or acting, feminine.

Meret Oppenheim, My Nurse, 1936

Before the creation of both these artworks, the Surrealist Meret Oppenheim created an object-sculpture which she named My Nurse (1936). Over forty years prior to Nest and sixty years prior to Chicken Knickers, Oppenheim displaced the feminine connotations of a pair of stiletto heels for a meaning more provocative. In the work, shoes are tied together with string, bound to a silver platter, and decorated with paper crowns, traditionally used to embellish chicken roasts when they are served. By comparing feminine conventions to the plight of a butchered chicken, Oppenheim subverts this strong, seemingly natural connection to femininity using constraint, immobility and subordination – though this is not to discredit or dispute the sexual pleasure women may gain from bondage. Oppenheim’s critique of the feminine predicament interacts with debates instigated by Carol J. Adams in her book The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990). In this fascinating study, which engages feminism, animal activism, vegetarianism and literary theory, Adams posits that meat eating, violence and oppression against women are interconnected. The killing of the animal that haunts the presence of meat on our plates becomes an absent referent, she writes, hence the language used to describe animal flesh-laden diets obscure its socio-political origins. In a similar way, she argues that a woman is routinely reduced to little more than “ a piece of meat”, and subsequently treated as such: “ The woman, animalised; the animal, sexualised. That’s the sexual politics of meat.”

Stephanie Metz, Chicken Legs, 2004

In conclusion, I’ll take this analysis out of the 20th century and bring it into the contemporary moment by focusing on the less well known artist Stephanie Metz, who deserves more recognition. The above photograph, Chicken Legs (2004), shows Metz’s soft sculpture, which presents the female body as a headless plucked chicken with wings for arms, human shaped legs and painted red toe nails. This chicken-female is positioned on a chopping board, a platform that crudely mimics an eroticised model strutting on a fashion show catwalk. ‘She’ is presented as meat to be butchered and sexually devoured, articulating the disturbing effects of bodily objectification on female subjectivity. Not only engaging with the feminist debates that Lucas and Oppenheim anticipated, the mise en scène of the above photograph exhibits uncanny similarities to Chicken Knickers and My Nurse, in which symbols of femininity are centred and spotlighted in the darkness. Consider the ways in which the chopping board compares to the silver platter in My Nurse; both staging femininity as something to be served and consumed.

The artists I have discussed here all produce works which conjure a brutal reductionist return to the biological essence of the female body, by way of crude images that symbolise the vagina. They respond to, and satirise, the dominant hegemony which constructs the female body as meat to be consumed through the masculine eye, by extrapolating the male gaze to its logical extreme. These artworks are in dialogue. Through the use of clothing and other domestic objects, these artists question the female obligation to dress according to a fixed gender role (the higher the heels does not necessarily entail the more feminine the woman). With this in mind, one might consider how uncomfortable it would be to wear Chicken Knickers or Nest tights.

—Rachel Ashenden

Rachel Ashenden is an English Literature undergraduate at the University of Exeter, hoping to further her studies in Art History after completing her BA, and break into the realm of academia and art criticism in the future. Her primary research interests include the dialogue between Surrealism and feminism, and the reclamation of female artists and their artwork from phallogocentric art movements. Alongside her studies, she is the News Editor for the University’s official newspaper,Exeposé.

References

Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. London: Bloomsbury. 1990.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. 1999.

Cixous, Hélène. ‘The Laugh of Medusa’. In: Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 875-893. The University of Chicago Press. 1976.

Smith, Ali. “ Nest of all”. In: Loose Associations, Vol. 2, Issue IV. London: The Photographers’ Gallery, 2016.

Image: Aura Satz, Joan the Woman – with Voice (detail), Duratrans print lightbox with sound, 2013

Alongside our current exhibition Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s: Works From the Verbund Collection, the new issue of Loose Associations takes feminism as its subject. In this short text and single accompanying image – which is available along with other writing and images in the publication via our shop – Aura Satz responds to the question: How do you visualise a woman in the 21st century?

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Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake, accused of hearing voices, of having a voice, of stirring up the voices of her countrymen. Cecile B. deMille’s silent feature Joan the Woman (1916), ironically starring opera singer Geraldine Farrar, is mostly monochrome except for the culminating flame sequence in which Joan of Arc is burned for heresy. Joan’s hands are only just discernible from the dense abstraction of smoke, flame, and colour. She is a voice that does not fit her cross-dressing body, a voice straining to be heard, to materialise in the realm of the audible and visible. And yet she glows through the smoke, resilient, a voice that has become louder over time. She has been reclaimed as a martyr, canonised as a saint, declared a national symbol, an icon of feminism, a voice so powerful yet protean it has come to stand for contradictory ideologies – both fascists and the resistance.

In the future our voices will rise and burn, shape-shift, remember and dismember.

—Aura Satz

Aura Satz is a Spanish artist based in London.

With thanks to Club des Femmes for providing the question, ‘How do you visualise a 21st Century Woman?’ from an ongoing project, which also formed the basis of a studio activity during the exhibition, Feminist Avant-Garde of the 70s.

Image: Linder. Pretty Girls (detail), 1977. Courtesy of the artist and Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London

Inspired by our Autumn 2016 exhibition, Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s: Works from the Verbund Collection, we have asked a diverse range of artists, writers, performers and feminist thinkers to respond to the subject of feminism – both historical and contemporary – and collected them together in the new issue of our quarterly publication Loose Associations. We wanted to consider what impact (conscious or otherwise) such ideology and actions have had on artistic practice today, and to explore the current face(s) of feminism within this framework. It feels both signicant and essential to be addressing such a subject now, at a point where feminism as a term and movement feels so fractured, and so subsumed, for better or worse, by popular culture.

Birgit Jürgenssen, Nest, 1979 © Estate Birgit Jürgenssen. Courtesy of Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna / VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2015 / SAMMLUNG VERBUND, Vienna

In an exclusive short story by acclaimed Scottish writer Ali Smith, she visualises, and fictionalises, her female character thus:

“ I’d been browsing in a bookshop to get out of the rain and someone had left a book open on top of a pile of books on a table next to the stationery section. The picture, of a woman’s lower body in which, instead of a genital area, the woman had a nest with a couple of eggs in it, was what it was open at. I glanced at it and something about it made me look again. A woman sitting on a fur sort of rug was balancing a nest with eggs in it at her crotch. I smiled. Then I laughed. Then I wandered round the bookshop for a bit and went back out into the wet afternoon. I didn’t think any more of it, until a couple of days later at home when I began to feel scratchy and irritated below the waist and found, when I went to the bathroom to have a look, why.”

Relatedly, one key concern of this project, central to the new issue of Loose Associations, is the question: How do you visualise a woman in the 21st century? We have posed this question directly to a number of contributors in the book, who include ANOHNI, Juno Calypso, Helen Cammock, Emma Dabiri, Eva Dawoud, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Paloma Faith, Juliet Jacques, Linder, Nina Power, Aura Satz, Tomoko Sawada, Sebastian Scheming, Tai Shani and Linda Stupart. In various ways, some have responded with writing, others with images and some with both.

In her response, Nina Power states:

“ If the photograph changed the way we see, the internet has changed the way we read. ‘Visualisation’ is another language game, and ‘woman’ a particularly contested term, yet subject to exactly the same kinds of fort-da promotion and erasure as women’s bodies always have been.”

Lorraine O’Grady, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middle-Class), 1980–1983/2009. Untitled (Mlle Bourgeoise Noire shouts out her poem) © Alexander Gray Ass., New York / The SAMMLUNG VERBUND Collection, Vienna

Reni Eddo-Lodge, in her essay Black is a Feminist Issue, writes:

“ Black feminism drags the movement back to its revolutionary roots. It is first and foremost a movement to dismantle all oppression. To fundamentally transform the world we live in so that it works for all, and marginalises none, and to trace the links that lock women out of prosperity, power, and autonomy.”

In another essay, artist Linda Stupart responds to the question in part by recalling something they wrote on Facebook, which combines image and text and considers the role of the artist with respect to gender and the body today:

“ Two days ago I posted a request on my Facebook ‘wall’. It reads:

‘Hi friends could people please use they/them pronouns for me and ask other people to do the same also I really don’t want to talk about it tbh thx’.

The text is accompanied by a low res. 3D modeled blob GIF – one of my own. It spins slowly in space.”

Image courtesy Linda Stupart, 2016.

The many passionate and multifarious voices that inform the debate today are necessarily and rightfully seeking to broaden any singular definition of femimism and feminists; to address wider and interrelated cultural patterns of oppression that are bound together by intersectional systems of society which include race, gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity and religious belief. We encourage you to have your say in the comments feed below. How do you visualise a woman in the 21st century?