Mean Time

Contemporary image-based artists' work treads a fine line between the real and the imagined. Taking the real world as its subject matter, it weaves narratives which may or may not have their roots in fiction. ways Artists make their work into theatres of experiences, records of personal journeys, investigations into the intimate corners of the human condition.  As audience, we become eavesdroppers on a myriad of conversations, witnesses to some strange events, participants in the constructions of fragments in time.

Photographers and film makers, artists who use 'real life' as a basis for the making of fictions are the most consummate of magicians, even if, as many photographers do, they see their purpose as being to record or document the real, they are implicitly involved in the making of fictions.  As their audience, we are willing to be deceived

Toril Brancher’s photographs document a group of young teenage friends living in mid Wales. It is a scenario which many of us are familiar with, the emergence of a fragile adulthood from the ending of childhood, poses assumed, obsessions paramount, the clutter of temporary enthusiasms. The teenagers who Toril Brancher photographs are residents of a strange never-never land, its’ boundaries the park and the bedroom, a tumultuous landscape of physical energy and lassitude. From an upside down ride on a swing to the silent absorption of gameboy, through to introspection, personal display and the never ending preoccupation with friendship, Toril Brancher has made a portrait of adolescence which captures the ambivalence, joy and doubt of the in-between years.

Photography and film can, as we know, create worlds that seem so real that we can hardly believe that they are complex fiction. They depict places, characters and events which we recognise, not through being there but because of their cultural familiarity.

These stories of this strange world we all inhabit-this fantastic theatre of anxiety and hope, of passing gestures and introspective gazes, of extravagant gestures, of wistful recognition, of pain and energy- are not the grand narratives which exclude us from the pattern of history. Rather, they are fragments of all our stories, but re-staged and choreographed by the storyteller's art. They are tragi-comedies of the absurd, exercises in melancholy and memory, explorations, anthropologies. Whole worlds in a grain of sand.

Toril Brancher’s photographic methodology  is based upon the entering into of the intimacy of shared moments, a whisper between friends, a phone call, the applying of lipstick, the solitary dance in the bedroom. Brancher is a sympathetic, but nonetheless realistic observer, and as such, she works within a space between the edgy idylls of Sally Mann and the relentless (an even voyeuristic) realism of Larry Clark. She does not wish to expose the traumas and tribulations of teenage life, but rather, one suspects, to catch at the passing of time, to still a moment, to keep something, via photography, for ever. 

In Mean Time, Toril Brancher presents a scenario of adolescence, which is bittersweet. It is portrait of an intimate tribalism, bounded by rules which are unwritten but deeply known. It is a chronicle of fragile friendship, based on the moment and on memories, on the mythology of childhood to which adolescents cling so tenaciously and yet so unwillingly. Brancher has made oral interviews with her subjects, asking them to reflect on their lives, and on the photographs which she has made of them. They notice how much has changed since the picture were made- clothes grown out of, hairstyles changed, friendships mutated. They reflect on the durability of friendship, music, days in the snow, days in the sun, gifts and parties and school uniform. They are as remarkable and as unremarkable as any other teenagers, using these photographs to reconstruct the past.

Toril Brancher’s Mean Time is a fragment of a longer narrative about this adolescent group of friends. It is a deep toned richly coloured document which explores the notion of community. Like all photographic documents, it is revealing not just of the subjects, but of the photographer. There is an underlying wistfulness in these photographs, the adult’s knowledge that friendships do not last for ever, that circumstances intervene and that the solidarity of adolescence is not fixed. There is also, despite the richness and optimism of these photographs, a sense of loss and of longing, for children who have already gone, for teenagers who will soon be grown up. The endearing clutter of the adolescent bedroom, its combination of childhood toys and grown up things, stilled forever by photography, but, in reality, constantly mutating, a bewildering mish- mash of the artefacts of change.

So many photographers have been entranced by adolescence, from Lady Hawarden (in the mid 19th century) portraying her daughters in flowing ball gowns in the empty interior of a London mansion, to New York documentarist Tina Barney chronicling the social rituals of Upper East Siders in Eighties New York. For adolescents have those qualities which all documentarists prize- a certain unease, a certain grace, a languorous energy, a flexibility and fluidity which is both unpredictable and vulnerable. Toril Brancher’s work is both a tribute to a group of young people with whom she has a close and knowing relationship and a photographer’s questioning of our times, our culture and our fleeting glimpses of happiness.

Val Williams
London

Prior to moving to Wales in 1989 I had lived in Yokohama, California, Bristol and London. I grew up in Oslo.

1998 first class BA(Hons) Documentary Photography – University Wales Newport

1999 MA Documentary Photography - University Wales Newport

since 2002 tutor at Cardiff University/Ffotogallery – Photographing People

since 2003 visiting tutor University Wales Newport – MA Documentary Photography

2004-2007 trustee for Hereford Photography Festival

since 2005 photographer in residence at Glamorgan GATES in Merthyr Tydfil

2006 keynote speaker at UWN conference in Newport – plenum speaker at IPRN conference Finland

since 2006 young people and photography projects with Arts Alive in Abergavenny