Back in Bradford now, following my exhibition in Lincoln, I have the opportunity to reflect on that experience. It was possible for me to spend about an hour and a half in the Cathedral each day, mainly observing the responses of visitors. Occasionally, also, it was possible to engage them in conversation, and on these occasions sometimes I found that I learned a great deal about how people relate to art in general and to my work in particular.
On one occasion I found myself in conversation with a photographer. His reason for being there was to photograph the architecture, but as a result of our discussion I found that I was noticing things about the behaviour of visitors in relation to my art. Our discussion began with a focus on the difficulty of taking photographs in a building with such strong contrasts between the illuminated and the shadowed areas, and the devices he had to adopt in particular when attempting to photograph the stained glass windows. His remarks really brought home to me the fact that what the camera “sees” is in many cases quite a long way from what we see directly.
I was struck by the fact that some visitors appeared to relate to my work entirely through the lens of a camera. If the purpose of this was to provide them with souvenirs of the experience on which they might reflect on their return home, then their record of the occasion is likely to be quite different from anything they might have experienced actually looking at the pictures. In extreme cases I did wonder whether what they were interested in was not the content of any of my works but a simple token that proved that they had been there. (Thank goodness nobody actually took a selfie in front of any of my pictures!)
The most curious of these encounters took place when I spotted a young woman who was simply walking around the place holding her iPad in front of her face. As far as I could tell there was no occasion at all on which she had a direct and unmediated experience of anything she was “seeing”. Her contact with and understanding of everything was via the camera.
My most puzzling experience along these lines was the occasion when I spotted a young man who walked into the Chapter House, took a photograph of the panel in which I had explained my intentions in the exhibition, and then left without ever having confronted any of the pictures! I really do wonder what was going on there.
Not all of my experiences by any means were as strange as these, as I hope you all discover in my posts over the next few days.