Now in its third year, Brighton Photo Fringe is rapidly making a name as one of the biggest photography events of its kind in the UK and this year saw Lisa Barnard receive the inaugural Danny Wilson Memorial Award 2008 for her multimedia installation Virtual Iraq. This award for best emerging or early-career photographer showing as part of the photo festival was established to commemorate the life and work of Danny Wilson, the late Director of the Brighton Photo Fringe who passed away in April this year.
Documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield presented Barnard, who graduated from the University of Brighton in 2005 and was chosen from a shortlist of five photographers, with a cheque for £1,000 and a specially-designed glass trophy commissioned by Danny's father, Ray Wilson, at the award ceremony. Virtual Iraq explores the use of interactive media by the US army in recruiting, training and treating military personnel before and after embarking on a Tour of Duty to the Middle East. The work was shot over 18 months on location at the University of Southern California’s research centre, the Institute of Creative Technology. Barnard’s choice of venue and approach marked a deliberate move away from what she describes as “photography exhibitions that, typologically, all look the same, to the engaging of a more fluid use of different media”. Furthermore, the work also plays “with ideas about whether work is documentary or art and the blurring of very clear lines and boundaries between the two genres”.
Taking over Unit 9, a warehouse located outside Brighton in the village of Lewes, Barnard invited the audience to immerse themselves in virtual realities as she skilfully combined different media including colour photographs shot on a 6x7 camera, computer-generated images, video footage and sound recordings to reveal the diversity of strategies used to train and treat soldiers. These include the use of interrogation sets with real objects and simulacra and the development of sophisticated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder treatments. Using virtual reality headsets, sound recordings and a gruesome line up of smells, the aim is to recreate the trauma experience. Indeed, the main psychologist on the programme Skip Rizzo – a name which itself seems fabricated – aptly sums up the programme in a piece filmed by Barnard as “the unholy alliance between Hollywood, the military and academia”.
The shortlist included Helen Cammock, who coordinated the festival with Woodrow Kernohan after Wilson’s sudden departure and also showed as part of the group exhibition Affinity; Penny Klepuszewska, whose work has previously featured in Hotshoe, for Living Arrangements; Jonathan Swain’s Holed Up and Toby Smith who exhibited as part of the group show Spectre that ran for a week at the Brighton Media Centre. Spectre showed the work of six recent graduates from the London College of Communication’s (LCC) part-time MA in Photography and was cohesive, making good use of the basement space. Like Barnard, Smith created a bespoke environment for his colour photographs and recreated the conditions under which he had photographed the former East German ‘secret’ nuclear Bunker 17/5001 by curtaining off a space. He then invited the viewer to enter a darkened room lit only by short flash-like bursts of light; the effect was both disorientating and slightly disturbing. Also on display was the work of fellow LCC student, Wendy Pye who took a more traditional curatorial approach to the display of her on-going project Beachy Head, which takes its title from south east England’s well-known beauty spot. A well-known location for suicide attempts, Pye exhibited five large-scale colour photographs, taken at twilight and night, from her first series In Memory Of, which documents the growing number of memorials to those who have taken their life from Britain’s highest cliff edge.
Other shows of interest included Iraq: a process of resistance at Ink_d Gallery
by Peter Kennard and Cat Picton Phillipps. This collaborative body of work documents their personal response to the invasion of Iraq from 2002-2008 and uses media images drawn from a variety of sources to create mixed media work, the show included the series Award using war medal ribbons and dust, blood and oil thrown across the surface of a flatbed scanner in a physical anti-war gesture. Sarah Pickering’s solo show Incident at the Phoenix Brighton was produced as Artist in Residence at the UK Fires Service College from 2006-8 and documents spaces that were set on fire as part of training exercises. Drawing attention to the large-scale monotone photographs as an object, the matt print finish was exhibited without glass and effectively echoed the carbon-covered surface of the purpose-built environments.
With over 60 exhibitions to choose from over the duration of the festival it was impossible to see all, or even a fair percentage of the shows, especially as some were located further afield and were on show for only a week of the six week festival period. This means that the choice of show often fell back on word-of-mouth recommendations coupled with the logistical concerns in accessing the various venues. However, the experience of seeing such diverse work presented in a variety of exhibition settings as opposed to on a computer screen or in print was a major plus and far outweighed any minuses.
Street address: 
