Accidents of community

VISUAL ART :JACKIE NICKERSON was born in Boston and became involved in the world of commercial photography in New York when she was in her late teens.

She worked as an assistant to several photographers in portraiture and fashion, a first class though demanding apprenticeship. She took the next logical step by working for herself in these areas but felt increasingly that there was little of herself in the work she was doing. Her point of maximum exasperation coincided with an invitation from a friend to visit Zimbabwe. Without intending to, she spent several years travelling in southern Africa, accumulating a substantial body of photographs. She went on to spend time in Paris and London, working on assignments. Eventually she looked at the photographs she’d taken in Africa and, prompted by friends, decided to do something with them.

That something became a series of exhibitions and a substantial book, Farm, published in the UK, France and Germany. In the meantime, she met an Irishman – the graphic designer Kevin Gurry – in Paris and moved to Ireland with him in 2002. They live on the coast in Co Louth.

Here, she embarked on another major project, an exploration of Irish religious communities, eventually exhibited and published as Faith.

Nickerson is not a reportage photographer. She is more aligned with a contemporary fine art tradition. The history of photography and, very much, Western painting, informs her images. Yet rather than working within long established genres, she pushes and extends their boundaries with an edgy visual intelligence. In 2008 she won the AIB Prize, having been nominated by the Gallery of Photography for another project, under the title Ten Miles Round, currently showing at the gallery and which will, in time, be published by Steidl together with a short story by Colm Tóibín inspired by the photographs.

In Ten Miles Round, Nickerson sets out to explore her immediate surroundings in Co Louth, a predominantly rural, coastal community where farming, fishing and related activities are the main occupations. The idea and the fact of community have been central to her work from the beginning. Given that, in one sense, her main subject has been and continues to be the individual portrait subject, that may seem slightly contradictory.

But, to paraphrase Margaret Thatcher in her 1987 interview with Douglas Keay, an interview which has often been misquoted: “Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women.” Who is society? The question is not a bad way of summing up the impetus behind Nickerson’s photographs. In them we usually see individuals, but they are invariably enmeshed in communities on myriad levels.

Mrs Thatcher was being critical of individuals who appealed to an abstraction, society, to cope with their needs and solve their problems. Nickerson doesn’t seem to be that interested in abstractions, but she is acutely interested in the reality of how people make, relate to, are variously nurtured and disadvantaged and, inevitably, shaped by their communities. Those communities might be in some respects elective, as with the Catholic religious orders that feature in the photographs that make up Faith, or they might be economically induced, as they are for the workers who struggle to survive in her African photographs, based on farm labourers’ experiences in Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Or they might, as in Ten Miles Round, have to do primarily with accidents of birth and upbringing. More often than not, community in the sense that interests Nickerson is all but invisible. That is, what is most familiar to us attains a kind of invisibility. Vision is short-circuited by familiarity, recognition requires just a few habitual clues rather than attentive looking, and our everyday world, with its relationships, rituals and routines, its well-worn environments, becomes second nature to us. The everyday is the space, both the physical space and the psychic space, in which we live, in which we love and hate, work and think, in which we are, to varying degrees, ourselves, and that is what fascinates her more than anything.

People and places: in conventional pictorial terms, we might divide Nickerson’s photographs into those two subjects, except that it’s clear there is no division. She doesn’t make studies of landscapes, on the one hand, and people, on the other. Each is inextricably bound up with the other. Landscape cannot be separated off into a settled tradition of the picturesque, for example. It intrudes, it’s lived in, it’s often muddy and grubby, and of course it’s beautiful, but not conventionally, comfortably beautiful. It’s noticeable that, while painting is often identifiable as an influence in her work, it’s usually painting from the early Renaissance, when artists were fundamentally figuring out how to depict the world, and people in the world, rather than painting in the more recent sense of the term, as an exercise in visual style.

In an interview with Vince Aletti included in Faith, Nickerson is at pains to make clear that she is not a "day in the life of" photographer, although she is interested in documentary photography, "in who we are and how we live". What's important, perhaps, is that she doesn't start with the presumption of a known entity in any sense. The individuals she photographs are unknowns, as are their relationships with the community in which they live. As is, just as importantly, the community itself: there are no reassuring national or cultural stereotypes to appeal to, no ready-made identities.

We can’t presume anything. It’s all thrown open to question, and nothing is neatly formulaic. Her photographs are a way of making visible what is otherwise unseen. We think we know who we are, we think we know the world we inhabit, but she is fairly sure that we don’t, and she sets out to try and show us what we might look like if we could, for a moment, see ourselves, and the world we actually live in.

Ten Miles Round: Photographs by Jackie Nickerson, is at the Gallery of Photography, Meeting House Square, Dublin, until Jan 24