London College of Communication blog

Phillip and Anthony Reed are identical twin brothers based in very disparate locations. While Phillip (a 2010 LCC BA Photography graduate) lives and works in London, Anthony does so in China.

At the start of the year they launched the photographic collaboration In Between, an intriguing visual dialogue that explores both the polarities and – at times – uncanny resonances between their two environments; as well as the idiosyncratic way the pair engage with them.

Inspired by an interest in the creative potential of online sites such as Flickr, they have just launched a third series of photographs, taken between October and December. Photographs are uploaded chronologically and two – one from London, one from China – are paired together based on factors such as the time between each image being taken and the visual coherence between the two.

The images and accompanying Q&A shown below is the result of this one-year collaboration and a look back at the year.

Jan – Mar

Jul – Sep

Oct – Dec

You can see more photographs from the project on the In Between website.

How did you come up with the idea for the project?
The project came about during my second year at LCC. We were asked to produce some work that looked at how the Internet was affecting the way in which photography was being produced. Having an identical twin brother living in China and constantly being in touch via skype and flickr it seemed like the perfect platform for further exploration and experimentation.The project grew from that point, most people found the identical twin link to be the most interesting thing about the project and we continued because it felt like there was a lot more to be explored.

How do you decide what to photograph?
It made sense to explore the environments we encountered on a day to day basis. We thought it was best to try and avoid photos of anything too recognizably ‘London’ like big ben or Tower bridge for example, and the same with the images from China. It’s more about our own personal responses to the environments we inhabit and experience on a daily basis. I wanted to avoid any combinations that were too literal, we wanted to try and avoid pairing say a pagoda with a church but then sometimes you are surprised by what works together visually, say with the seagull and the kites combination, I find they work well together despite being very similar types of images. It’s quite a subjective process, some combinations just work, it’s very important to rely on intuition with this project, the combinations are much more interesting as a result.

Now that you have a full year’s set of photographs, have you had a chance to reflect on the work as a whole? Any thoughts?
As the year progressed the process of photographing, uploading, responding, editing, re editing and making final selections became more fluid / more intuitive and less of a chore, I think it comes across in the images. There are quite a lot of technical difficulties to overcome working on a project like this. Every now and then the internet restrictions in China are tightened, it’s impossible to get the images sent over for a week or two. Still we always manage to get them together within the deadlines.

What next?
It’s still early days for this project and I think it has plenty of room for further expansion and experimentation. For now its an online collaboration but in future it might be good to bring it to a gallery space or even to project the images onto the streets of the corresponding cities, we could try arrange a simultaneous show in London and China, there’s a lot to be explored!

Read more about Phillip’s work on his website: www.phillipreed.co.uk

Tags: ba photography

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 22nd, 2010 at 5:28 pm and is filed under alumni, photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.