We can design, build and implement a unique and memorable experiential campaign or stunt that is right for your brand. Seamlessly positioning your product in the minds, hearts and hands of even the most discerning festival goer.

Jack has exclusive access to the some of the worlds largest and best-loved festivals and can offer a variety of advertising opportunities to reach out to the mass of festival goers.

We can put together the best package for you, from 4 sheets and 48 sheets, to area dominations and special builds, your advertising will be tailor-made to optimise your brand’s requirements and creative. We know you need to be seen, be present and be part of the festival’s atmosphere and our strategies let you do this.

Don’t wait until the tickets are sold, set lists confirmed and wellies bought before you secure your place in the most exciting of the 2013 UK summer music scene.

Long time friend of Jack, Kate Scanlan (of Scanner’s Inc), was instrumental in bringing Popinʼ Pete together with the UK’s dance talent for a whole bunch of amazing workshops and performances. Originally inspired by Chris Brown’s ‘Yeah, Yeah, Yeah’ video, which features Popin’ Pete with his own shop, Kate set about creating a real life popping shop. Which Jack was proud to help spread the word about, street-poster-style:

“I really wanted to find new ways of taking great artists from the stage into local communities”. Kate Scanlan, Scannerʼs Inc

The fantastic project is funded by the Arts Council in association with partners BoxPark, East London Dance, Hackney Council, Rich Mix and Jack.

As for us, we’re already planning to help even more next time – including hosting some live ‘pop’ art takeovers on some of Jack’s best East London sites. Thanks to Scanners Inc for making seriously good stuff happen!

The ‘Schuh Piles’, designed, built and installed by Jack, were part of a stunt announcing the opening of new SCHUH destination stores. Schuh teams were on hand to help baffled passersby, inviting them to take their old wedges to a pop-up shoe swap happening in store the next day. A pair of old shoes would get people at least a £10 discount and the first 20 off the mark would get a brand new pair completely free!

The quirky installations helped drive more than 5000 people into each new outlet on shoe swap day in Market Place Kingston and St Stephens Hull. In fact, the promo was such a success, long queues formed around the block from the early hours of the morning and Kingston busted their sales forecasts by 60%. Hull also beat theirs by 25%!

It’s nice when a plan comes together.

The campaign was rightly picked up by the press for hitting the right tone, proving that simple is often the best.

International Day for Street Children is an initiative by the Consortium of Street Children charity (CSC) and they enlisted the help of The Partners and us here at Jack, to help bring the issue home.

Our special build team created four giant signs, the kind you’d usually see on a kid’s bedroom door, and we put them high up in grimy locations around London, pointing to the kind of places kids forced to sleep rough would have to use for a makeshift bed. The signs were part of a hard-hitting poster and press campaign and Jack was happy to donate 40 poster sites across the UK to get behind the cause. We also put signs up in Old Street Station, where CSC Brand Ambassadors, armed with iPads and moving stories, chatted to people about what was happening.

We managed to get more than 1,500 signatures down in Old Street and 3,000 more followed. The numbers keep rising and the petition hopes to persuade the United Nations to adopt the day internationally. Please add your voice to the list.

I first became aware of Gill’s photography with his Billboard series, the formal beauty of the images of course attract the eye. But further it was the witty acknowledgement of two ‘opposing’ surfaces in the urban spectacle that endowed this whole project – not just the images – with an enduring fascination. It helps, I suppose, that I spent some years myself ‘on the brush’, pasting fences, walls, billboards, having to climb up them, venture behind them to recover huge swathes of discarded posters, the sloughed off skins of consumerism. And avoid rats, anonymous chemicals, needles, shit, improvised beds, sumps of stench… Gill’s images don’t merely document the worlds of front and back but show how they are of a piece. So, not simply a record of binary opposition, rather a way of seeing and being that re-presents a multiple engagement with space and place. I sensed the photographer wasn’t only standing back and framing the city, rather he’d had his back strafed by speeding traffic, got his foot caught in the hollow of a discarded lorry tyre whilst in the process of unearthing and sharing how we might be woven into these sights and sites. As Henri Lefebvre says in his meditation on contradictory spaces, ‘Someone who knows only how to see ends up, moreover, seeing badly.’ Gill questions any easy readability in the city, helps us to perhaps reverse that flattening of our planned urban space bought about by the ‘materialised, mechanised, technicized,’ trajectories of contemporary urban life. How to begin to achieve this multiplicity through the archetypal flat medium of photography was where our conversation began…

AB: Graham Clarke suggests a single photograph can represent a larger condition: social, cultural, psychological, etc. Can you share some thoughts on what your work ‘points to’ beyond the level of denotation? Also perhaps say why you choose to work in series of photographs?

SG: I think there is that burden of expectation on a single image, some photographic practice can force a point [of view], its tendency is to amplify, to enhance, and perhaps that confers a pressure on the photograph to be all things. I like to think with a series there is more breathing space, more room for both inclusion and exclusion. I often consider the absence of things these days as a key part of the image. And the single images I make or am drawn to which appear to me in some way successful are the ones that remain open, that can breathe.

AB: Landscape and Urban photography have histories and concerns that arguably suggest something of an oppositional relationship between the two genres. In your work, however, this binary appears to dissolve. With this in mind can you talk a bit about how your approach to photographing the city has evolved over the years?

SG: My approach changes really from series to series. For example, with my earlier photo studies, they were quite detached and in many ways I would work closely with some of photography’s strengths as a descriptive tool to explore a single chosen subject. I would leave my house or studio already with a subject in mind and very often the subject parameters would be very narrow. A few examples of this way of working could be my Invisible series, Billboard series and Trolley portraits. A subject would get such a strong hold until one day either it had exhausted you or I felt I had exhausted the subject. This was a good way to try and grapple with the chaos of a city, by attempting to make photo studies with tiny subject parameters but to explore them in great depth. This way of working is something I continue to do from time to time: direct, descriptive studies. And, as was the case with Off Ground or A Series of Disappointments, such was the pared down nature of this direct, descriptive approach that, in the case of those two series, there seemed no need even for colour.

Another way of working that was a kind of turning point for me was when the subjects became much broader. This time I was not leaving my house or studio with things in my mind’s eye that I was looking for. The subject parameters became geographical and once I had decided on the geographical parameters then I tended to be directed as much by the place itself and allowed the place to carry me and for the work to almost make itself. I suppose with that I was constantly trying to jump outside of photography’s technical parameters and explore photography’s weaknesses over or alongside its subjective descriptive strengths. And this was incredibly liberating for me. It felt closer to recording the spirit of place, though without over-packing an image with information.

I say this not wanting undermine straight descriptive photography, there are just limitations to conveying certain ideas when working that way.

What Gill seems to be practicing is a modus operandi that admits not simply a gathering of information, of visual data but rather evokes knowledge of his subjects. The difference is that knowledge(s) in this instance can suggest the meagerness or majesty or messiness or the poetic mundanity of urban experience whereas visual data is a void. Worse than that, its apparent neutrality makes it a vehicle for bureaucratic or institutional appropriation or calculated neglect. Gill’s work insists we don’t dismiss even what at first appears to be the most anonymous of places.

AB: I’m interested in the differences between images that are rooted in a particular locality and those that might be termed more dislocated. I remember when your series Hackney Flowers was displayed on billboards in the borough of Hackney, can you talk about any added affect on viewers (and yourself) that might have resulted from this mode of display?

SG: This way of exhibiting the Hackney Flowers series was ideal for the work really as both the process and pictures seem to come full circle. All of the objects, plants and seeds were sourced from the Borough, then with careful positioning and manual intervention the objects were laid on top of other photography and re-photographed. It was for me like a kind of extraction of place rather than a description. The images on billboards worked for me especially well as this series really plays with scale and the confusion of scale. It was also important to me that this particular series of giant posters were image only, with no text.

An antidote of sorts then, at least an alternative to the ubiquity of advertising image/text shouting at passersby. Gill’s wordless gigantic photographs punctuated the retail horizon, interrupted expectations. Whereas our eye has a tendency to bounce off omnipresent advertising, Hackney Flowers appearing on the streets of East London afforded moments of wonder and contemplation, a curiosity regarding the superimposition of introduced material and image and further the occasional distress or deterioration of the images. These multiple elements work both together and in opposition, jostling for our attention individually as well as part and parcel of a more or less coherent depiction or collage of unified subject. An apprehension that involved more than the usual visual bounce off, that invited listening for the crunch of seedpods, touching the shaved brittle peelings of electric cable, smelling the juice of crushed berries, the tastes of Hackney streets and peri-urban waterways and cramped interiors.

AB: Following from above, you’re known for producing original, beautiful books of photographic essays, can you say something further about the affect of various different means of dissemination and reception?

SG: I started making books in 2005 and it was then I founded Nobody. It just made sense to me as I was so immersed in these projects. There is though a danger you can fall too much in love with that end phase of the whole process. I had to be careful then and still remain so. I wouldn’t make a series of pictures with a book in mind. I tend to keep the two aspects of my work separate. I think this is very important, to protect it. You can’t let any impetus to package or present work stymie the evolution of its making. Otherwise I think you could easily derail a project or suffocate it, you have to be careful, not rush.

AB: While you make work that is ostensibly situated in ‘place’, on reflection for me they do sometimes appear be more autonomous representations: concerned with a – for want of a better word – painters’ approach to making images. I mean to say your photographs appear less captured, more put together. Can you share your thoughts on this?

SG: I think that is true say of Hackney Flowers as the images are so carefully constructed. Otherwise though, I still see the newer images like the Covered series, even often the very abstract images, as pictures that describe or aim to emit something relating to the times we live in. I have been thinking also recently about a lack of clarity and lack of information and I really feel that even when a picture is really out of focus or super overexposed – of course some things are halted, mostly information – but I really feel that other things with a lack of focus, which don’t rely on that degree of descriptive clarity, continue to flow through. So, in fact, clarity sometimes interferes with the essence of the picture. For example when I made pictures in Trinidad, I worked in this way. I just could not make a super clear series of images to describe a place that I did not know. I didn’t want to try and attempt to say, ‘This is Trinidad.’ And it is perhaps out of respect for these thoughts I chose to make muted, diffused pictures with the hope that the spirit of the place would still pass through even though detailed information was denied.

AB: Diarmuid Costello (in Elkins (Ed.) 2007:75-89) explores the idea that, ‘the photographer Jeff Wall emerges, albeit with certain important qualifications, as a ‘painter’ who paints photographically, and the painter Gerhard Richter emerges as a ‘photographer’ who makes photographs with the means of painting.’ Clearly, there’s a lot more to your work than what might be termed medium-specific practices. What’s your take on this sort of debate?

SG: I have enjoyed looking at these exchanges over the years and I think it’s healthy, leaping outside of a certain medium into another. Although I think what might be somewhat less healthy is photography’s recent – perhaps for the last eight years or so – it’s obsession with itself. For me that is when photography can start to implode: photography about photography. I tend to prefer photography that looks outside of itself.

AB: Much more so than a lot of photography your work evokes the extra-ocular senses – I have in mind V. Burgin arguing that sight is psychologically related to orality; J. Pallasmaa’s eyes of the skin conceit; L. Back’s conflation of the ear and the eye; etc. – can you talk about how sense perception (other than sight) plays a part in your practice?

SG: In terms of inspiration, I think like many visual practitioners the audio experience does fuel and evoke so many visual thoughts with almost a physical presence that you can hold. The idea of photographing things that are impossible to photograph, this is one of the aspects I was referring to when I talked about working with photography’s weaknesses, of course it’s not literally possible to photograph things such as smell or sound or a felt texture or a lack of oxygen, but it’s incredible how close you can get to photographing such things.

AB: Finally, can you share some thoughts on how the (now not so) new digital media has changed photography? And who, photographers or otherwise, are the people that inspire you?

SG: I think, and this clearly predates digital photography, any finite idea of what makes ‘a good picture’ worries me, the fulfilling of appetites is dangerous. And with the digital media came this other kind of good taste thing. Perhaps it’s that the ingredients of so-called ‘good pictures’ overtook content and I think that strain of thought only intensified when people became obsessed with DPI and megapixels. Content was pushed to the side. So we were left with lots of ‘good pictures’. As a practitioner I think it’s important to try and jump outside of what is considered a good photograph or series. I would often say to students that if their tutors do not like their work it means they could be onto something, not to undermine the tutors but it could be the work goes beyond people’s current appetites. And that, in a sense, is a constant inspiration. Then it’s my day-to-day life that informs my work really, often it’s a reaction. I try to leap from the mind to the images and bypass words, working this way I find generates a clearer response to a subject. All sorts of things prompt the work really, for example, when I had a slipped disc in my back the doctor told me to get a trolley and that started my obsession which resulted in the series Trolleys, that lasted a couple of years.

I love the photographic work of many including Eugène Atget, Sergio Larrain… John Cage has been an influence. And Nina Simone’s bravery, bluntness and poetry is something that I have always been inspired by.

It is bravery and bluntness that characterises Gill’s current series Covered (featured in YSOM.P.2). Brave in that the images bring to our attention aspects of urban life that many people would prefer to avert their eyes from. But bound up with the blunt, unflinching or perhaps patient and porous approach is a poetic concern. Again, these images far surpass the sort of information transfer we associate with pat documentary photography. Time and dwelling, erasure and re-inscription, more and less visible boundaries, identities, tactics are suggested through this exploration of the palimpsestic nature of urban surfaces. Of course these are records of material, historical, economic activity (inactivity) but whereas a prosaic approach seeks to efface the means by which it communicates, effect a certain transparency, Gill’s poetic engagement allows us to sense an everyday alchemy, an enigmatic thickness and mutability attendant on even the most anonymous and quiet stories of city life.

Adrian Burnham

Stephen Gill: Born Bristol, UK 1971. Lives in London. He was introduced to photography at an early age by his father, and his first photographs reflected his interests in birds, animals and music.

Gill’s photographs are now held in various private and public collections and have also been exhibited at many international galleries and museums including London’s National Portrait Gallery, The Victoria and Albert Museum, Agnes B, Victoria Miro Gallery, Sprengel Museum, Tate, Centre National de l’audiovisual, Galerie Zur Stockeregg, Archive of Modern Conflict, Gun Gallery, The Photographers’ Gallery, Palais des Beaux Arts, Leighton House Museum, Haus Der Kunst and has had solo shows in festivals including – Recontres d’Arles, The Toronto photography festival and PHotoEspaña.

Best Before End – A major solo exhibition of Stephen Gill’s London series made between 2000 and 2013 will be on show at Foam Museum, Amsterdam from 17 May 2013 until 15 July 2013.

www.stephengill.co.uk/portfolio/portfolio

According to Halliday – convenor of the Photography and Urban Culture MA at Goldsmiths University of London – the very term street photography is something of a non-starter. It doesn’t begin to account for the most interesting work being made now or in the past. ‘Street based urban photographic practice’ might be more of a mouthful but there’s good reason here to venture beyond easy labels. Popular tips on the genre begin to illustrate some of what might make Halliday uncomfortable. ‘Shoot from the hip!’ Or ‘Hold your camera above your head and shoot over the crowd.’ This gives a flavour of just the sort of unthinking, smash and grab, overtly macho (ejaculatory, even) attitude that sums up popular characterisations of the street photographer.

An anecdote further points up what’s most disturbing about this attitude. When Halliday was running a photographic workshop on Brick Lane with a group of international students they were approached by a man equipped with a camera in one palm and flash in the other who was shooting without preamble right into the faces of individuals. It wasn’t only the female Saudi student who found this practice invasive if not downright intimidating. I countered with the thought it may well have been the ‘artist’s’ intention to shock, elicit fear and cause expressions of defensive aggression in his subjects but took the point. The problem with an approach that evinces or is sometimes solely predicated on an unthinking ‘just get out there and do what you’ve got to do’ attitude is that the practice becomes inward looking, absorbed in its own narrow concerns. And images resulting from this approach whilst perhaps retaining a superficial shock quality are ultimately often glib if not barbarous.

There is a spectrum where aggressive capture or, arguably worse, the interrogation of the subject and what’s termed candid are very far apart. Compare the modus operandi Walker Evans employed to produce his Many Are Called series, albeit a subterranean project, he used a concealed camera hidden beneath his coat and the result was hauntingly intimate portraits of private reverie in a public domain. All the Brick Lane assailant gathered were snaps of fear or egregious offence. Beyond the blatantly criminal, perhaps there shouldn’t be rules regarding making photographs in the street. There are after all a panoply of techniques: the observational, the encounter, the staged shot, but whether we are talking about ‘documentary’ or ‘fine art’ works, what the best urban photography has in common is an awareness of interdisciplinarity, an assumption of hybridity. Sociology, architecture, film-making, visual anthropology… These and many more disciplines are multiply interwoven into and inform the concerns of the very best street based urban photographic practice.

Halliday insists that a meaningful engagement with theory is material to producing excellent photographic images. And, knowing Goldsmiths, this is not theory solely in any dry academic sense but rather in the manner defined by Anne D’Alleva (2005), not necessarily relying on texts lauded and labelled as ‘critical’ but whatever helps us to think better, whatever enlarges perspective and generates fresh questions. It could be Benjamin, Barthes, Burgin or it could be ‘a song, a poem, a novel, a dance performance…’ Whatever helps develop lines of enquiry, leads towards some productive insight.

A consideration of procedures then as to thinking and action is relevant not only personally but ethically, critically and creatively. It’s also worth paying attention to one’s locale whatever the observational mode adopted. The smash and grab merchant in Brick Lane perhaps ‘got away with it’ because the area is bohemian, arty, porous. If he’d tried the same trick in Streatham or Lewisham or on high streets outside the capital he may have met with a smack in the face rather than high-principled remonstrance. So, whether it be more or less unthinking aggressive ‘capture’ versus candid ‘gathering’ or any of the other myriad binaries, or multiplicities regarding the production of urban photography, what Halliday advocates is a critical attitude towards both visual and theoretical practice.

Technological and social developments are continually impacting on this debate as to how and by which means we explore and represent cities. The ubiquity and easy use of digital, of camera phones cannot be severed from an ever growing public awareness of, and more often than not, an inclination to question if not challenge or forestall public photography in the street, market place, the mall… Not to mention an enhanced official or institutional policing of image making in urban public places and spaces. And this minefield of individual agency and social etiquette or ethics is only going to become more fraught with difficulty. For a future generation Google Glass and similar developments will add further degrees of possibility and opprobrium when it comes to making and disseminating images made in urban environments.

Of course, throughout the conversation names of individuals who arguably do enact best analytical practice and make fascinating images kept cropping up. I’ll pick only three of the photographers mentioned and a quick look at their work exemplifies what Halliday means by his thesis that the most interesting street based urban photographs are being made by those with a depth and spectrum of concern. Whether it be the visual anthropology of Markéta Luskačová (see, for example, her Spitalfields work www.marketaluskacova.com); Michael Frank’s background in architecture (see his Leica Oskar Barnack 2012 Award work www.mickfrank.com) or the psychogeographic and sociological frames of reference that inform Rut Blees Luxemburg’s poetic visions of the city (see her urban landscapes at night www.rutbleesluxemburg.com). What results is so much more than can be accommodated by any narrow definition of street photography.

Adrian Burnham