Bryony Good - Women in Photography

Bryony Good

Bryony Good is a photographer, writer and teacher based in Hebden Bridge. In this interview we talk about her experiences as a working class woman in the Arts and her desire to give people a burning appreciation and enjoyment of Photography.

Bryony is candid about her own wellbeing and Photography being a lifeline for her physical and mental health.

She is part of Capturing the Chimera – a project based on the combined power of Photography and Creative Writing. Together with Sofia Smith they facilitate these workshops unleashing participants’ latent creativity.

Bryony also works for Miniclick – an organisation that offers talks, events, parties around Photography. She has a degree in Photography, a Masters in Visual Arts and a PGCE in Lifelong Learning.

Can you tell me a bit more about how you came to Photography?

From 'LANDSCAPE/FOLKLORE/THE NORTH' by Bryony Good

I remember always having this confusion that you had to pick one thing and make your whole life about it. At school I loved Art and Science and Geography and Maths and History. I just loved learning new things. Everything seemed magical and it pained me to keep making choices and narrowing my field of learning. When I went to art school I think I thought I’d cracked it - I can make art about anything and everything - trouble is I couldn’t paint. The Photography week on my Foundation was when it clicked into place. I found myself doing Chemistry and Maths in the darkroom one minute and in the forest taking photographs the next. You could take the world around you and use this witchcraft to make it your own. I was just in love. Since then I guess I’ve just wanted to show others what I found in Photography.

You're currently in the process of putting a book together to record people's experience with the DWP and Job Centres. What motivated you to pursue this work?

I first signed on when I had just left uni, like a lot of graduates that aren’t from big cities I was trying to ‘make it’ in the mysterious glamour of an art scene with no money, no contacts and nowhere to live. I would sign on and go to work in secret to unpaid internships that taught me nothing, pointlessly committing benefit fraud to sit in car parks in Dalston outside shipping containers of Art installations. In the end I did the sensible thing and trained to be a college teacher although anyone who works in FE will be laughing now. I wanted to be like my Foundation tutor - I wanted to be the woman who showed young people the power of photography. I found myself signing on again a year later. Colleges often hire you in zero hours fixed term contracts that end at the beginning of summer leaving you without an income for two or three months of the year.

So there I was signing on again surrounded by silence. No one had showed us the story of the graduate on the dole and I’d never seen the story of the qualified teacher at the job centre. I had no idea who the other people at the Job Centre were or why they were there. TV programmes and even photography to an extent can tell a story but from the story teller’s point of view. What I realised I wanted to do was to hear a number of voices, as many voices as possible, telling their stories to try and give some kind of contribution to breaking that silence.

Your previous work deals with folklore and the rich tapestry of stories that women tell each other about the landscape - witches, ghosts, etc? Was it important to you to tell multiple female perspectives rather than a more male centric view of history? Herstory?

From LANDSCAPE/FOLKLORE/THE NORTH by Bryony Good

I think most artists struggle with what story to tell with their work, especially photographers who are almost expected to be visual story tellers. During my degree I battled with the idea of telling my story, who would want to hear one woman’s story? How dare I do a project about my childhood or my home town, what an ego maniac! I got over it and did it of course, most of us do. Maybe because the idea of telling the story of all women or all Northern people or all of the working class is far more arrogant!

My childhood was full of eerie woodlands and tales of fairies who live by streams and giant black cats that roam the moors and the ghosts of witches that float across Pendle Hill. I grew up on camping holidays hunting stone circles and swimming in lakes or climbing trees. I grew up with a Mum who tore the labels of pop bottles at my birthday parties so no one knew they were own brand and a Dad who took me on the tops to do handbrake turns in rusty cars for a laugh. All of this made me a grown woman obsessed with Northern folklore and working class representations. Where I’m from, the social history of my environment and the lore of the land around me, has become a part of who I am.

What I try to do with my work is add to the collective portrayal of women’s experiences and of working class experiences and give new and contemporary perspectives on lore and history. I hope through my work as a photographer, a friend or a teacher I can support other women to do the same. I guess, much like with the Job Centres work, I’ve never liked a gap in representations and so female perspectives are very valuable to me. Off the back of that if you’re into contemporary female perspectives of landscape, folklore, art and the North you should look at the writing of Amy Liptrot and Adelle Stripe, the photography of Roz Doherty and the work of multi-disciplinary artist Kate Radford. There’s some pretty powerful stuff in there.

How did Miniclick come about and why are discussions about Photography important?

Lumb Falls by Bryony Good

Miniclick was set up by Jim Stephenson and Lou Miller in Brighton in 2010, the year I graduated and moved away from Brighton! I missed its birth unfortunately but caught up with them in 2014 when I graduated from my MA and wanted to get involved with this photography community run by friends of friends that had completely passed me by. I actually didn’t know much about what Miniclick did when I contacted Lou and asked if I could help out in any way. They asked me to write some reviews of recent publications they’d put out for their blog in return for free copies. After that Jim wrote to me telling me he had been referring to me as one of the team and asked if that was okay, I’ve been referring to myself as one of the team with everlasting pride since.

There are two things that led me to realise that these were my people. Everything Miniclick does is free. It means I’ve never made a penny from the work I’ve done for them, in fact I’ve spent a lot of money on Miniclick, we all have. It’s still the cheapest education I’ve ever received. The idea that anyone can just come along to Miniclick even with nothing and leave knowing something they didn’t, questioning something they hadn’t before or just having had a laugh is a beautiful one and what education should be about. Socialising, learning, creating, questioning.

The second is that we try and focus our talks and events on ideas and stories rather than cameras and kit, this is done in the hope that it makes our events accessible to everyone. Also I just hate talking about kit, it’s pretentious and boring and normally a conversation between people with money.

Discussing ideas, stories and concepts develops the photographic landscape, keeps audiences engaged and keeps photographers inspired. Sometimes we will be having a few drinks after a talk and find ourselves talking about natural burials or space travel or stand-up comedy. Photography can be a gateway to just explore the world around us and see some different points of view.

Can you tell me about the links between Photography and Creative Writing within Capturing the Chimera?

Capturing the Chimera was born out of the event - The School of Miniclick - where we took over a floor of The Photographers Gallery to deliver a curriculum of photography workshops based on traditional school lessons. Sofia Smith ran a photography and creative writing workshop as the English lesson and I took part. She was such an encouraging, creatively open and inspiring teacher. We wrote stories based on images and created images with our words and the barrier between written representations of experience and visual language was blurred. After the workshop (and a few glasses of wine) I told Sofia she had to do this as a living and she asked me to do it with her.

Since then we have been running photography and creative writing workshops on a number of different themes. We usually look at books and films and atmospheres, characters, settings, archetype and semiotics and eat a lot of Tunnock’s Teacakes (important!). The underlying goal of our workshops is to show that these two disciplines can inform and support each other so that any practitioner of either subject can develop their own work beyond conventional borders and limiting labels.

Why is Arts for Health important?

Wild and Red by Bryony Good

I think as a teacher you see a lot of people struggling with mental and physical health issues and I have seen the variety of ways in which people deal with their grief, trauma and mental health. One of these has undeniably been through a creative output. Almost every artist is working though their emotions and their wellbeing while creating, no matter what their subject matter is.

This work is not only important to the artist but its existence gives us all something to relate to, shared experiences and struggles let us know we are not alone. It is noticeable recently that the volume of the mental health discussion had been turned up and the effects of this have been varied. Importantly it has led to more ease and openness towards attitudes in mental health and wellbeing.

My own experience with Arts for Health has never been more relevant. In December I was diagnosed with a lymphoma that is not curable, it’s very treatable, but my life was changed forever by my health. The effect this had on my mental health was kind of hard to pin down. For months I was just living at my Mum’s and going into hospital for treatment and driving onto hilltops and photographing locations of folkloric interest. I was surviving on Photography and home-cooked meals. Then I processed the films in a batch and none of them came out - my camera had been broken the whole time. I couldn’t talk to anyone. I totally shut down. What I realised then is that photography had been my lifeline and the only way I was keeping my head above water. I had a purpose and identity beyond my illness. I fixed my camera, and got straight back out onto those hills because there’s no way on Earth I am getting through this without it. If Art can provide others with that kind of lifeline it’s invaluable.