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INTERVIEW: Karen McQuaid Senior Curator - The Photographers' Gallery

2 July 2020

Karen McQuaid copy

We catch up with Senior Curator at The Photographers' Gallery Karen McQuaid, who will join us as a guest speaker at the AOP Breakfast Club talk taking place on Tuesday 7 July. We talk to Karen about the changes, challenges and benefits faced with online exhibitions.  Karen offers her top tips for submitting exhibition proposals along with an inspirational list of platforms to visit.

With the pandemic we have had no choice but to shift to an online world, taking exhibitions out of the gallery space can you talk about the challenges of online exhibitions? 

It’s obviously been hard to see that a lot of physical exhibitions have lost foot fall and opportunities for audiences to see great shows, but it’s nothing the wider arts and culture aren’t all experiencing - live music and theatre especially, and of course we have to keep everything in perspective in the middle of a major public health threat.

Some spaces have adapted by sharing filmed online walk throughs, or 3-D simulations, whereas some have approached it more editorially and tried to share written and audio content along with exhibition visuals. I’ve been looking through a lot of graduate online galleries - one of the particular challenges I often see there is making sure quieter processed based work can translate on screen. Work that demands different engagement being seen on the same platform or portal, but these are exciting challenges.

 

What are the benefits?

We have done a wonderful programme called Screenwalks at the moment in collaboration with Fotomuseum Winterthur and The Photographers’ Gallery where the digital curators from both institutions invited a range of artists to give guided tours of their online digital spaces - sharing their artistic research and digital practice via Zoom, Youtube and Twitch. Some even showed us digital exhibitions they’d mounted online in virtual worlds. Part workshops and part online talks, they have really opened my eyes to the possibilities and benefits of connecting with a networked global audience and looking at how artists are innovatively using online space.

 

As curator of the Portrait Category of this years Photography Awards 2020, can you talk about the importance of entering competitions along with exhibiting, publishing a photo book and/or signing up with a gallery.

Getting your work seen by industry professionals in the museum, gallery, publishing worlds is sadly quite difficult for obvious reasons; everyone is working hard, schedules are busy, competitions and reviews are a solid block of time that professionals give over to look at new work. They can certainly be a good way to get your work seen by a number of those people in one go, and even if you don’t win, that doesn’t mean one of those judges haven’t taken note of your work, and when they see it again in another context will have a quicker register and be more likely to pay attention. I do also think we all have a shared responsibility to interrogate competitions and ensure that emerging photographers aren’t being taken advantage of. Questioning the fee structures attached to these opportunities and asking for transparency is something we all need to do. Some smaller platforms and festivals use the fees to keep going and provide public programmes, but some bigger platforms get enormous amounts of charged submissions for competitions as a central part of their business model. Of course there are free options too - so be cautious, take full advantage of the free ones and make sure you’re comfortable with the economics of the paid competitions you do apply for.

 

Do you have any top tips for photographers submitting exhibition proposals?

Be respectful of people’s time and inboxes, make the initial contact reasonably brief and small in file size for any attachments. A pdf of a few (say up to 12) images and a paragraph introducing the project- with the offer of a follow up file share with larger files or more detail.

 

Which online photographic platforms that you visit for inspiration?

The standard social media platforms as well as a few reliable places that I revisit time and time again. A few off the top of my head, this is not at all a comprehensive list- the usual suspects of 1000words magazine, American suburb X, Self Publish Be Happy, Photomonitor, Aperture, Conscientious Magazine, ArtFCity, Foam, Photoworks, blogs by people like Morgan Quintance, George Vaesy, A. D. Coleman, Marco Bohr, Teju Cole, Johny Pitts. This list only a snippet and is always shifting and changing.

 

Tune in on Tuesday 7 July to hear Karen talk further about online exhibitions alongside host Carol Allen-Storey, With Tracey Marshall (Northern Narrative/Trace Art Collective), Karen McQuaid (The Photographers' Gallery), Anne Braybon (National Portrait Gallery), Del Barrett (100 Heroines). All Breakfast Club talks are free, book here 

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