My contribution will discuss a project currently in development, in which the role of contemporary photography, and other kinds of art-related outcomes, are yet to be determined. However, by focusing on the current research process, I will discuss the key issues that are emerging from looking back, revisiting and retracing a specific series of photographs made in 1982, with people who have particular connection to the photographs’ subject matter.

In 2018, I viewed un-digitalised letters, photographic contact sheets and prints of the American photographer Milton Rogovin (1909-2011) in the Library of Congress, Washington. A social documentary photographer, whose work is often discussed in the tradition of Lewis Hine et al, Rogovin departed from objective approaches by creating portraits ‘showing these people as workers, members of a family’ (Rogovin, 1985). His photographic method was to make two portraits of a miner: one at work, the other at home. Names and locations were provided, having negotiated access through the National Union of Miners (Scotland). His ‘Family of Miners’ (1981-1987) took place in the USA, the USSR, Mexico and Scotland. A number of his photographs are now in the National Galleries of Scotland collection.

Rogovin travelled through the Scottish Coalfields for three weeks in 1982. He shot 61 rolls of medium format film, producing his series of portrait photographs of miners, their families and wider community activities. Following my Library of Congress visit, and with specific attention to his contact sheets, I have been retracing his steps, meeting people who have put names to faces and places. Details within images, easily overlooked by outsiders, hold significant – sometimes politically inspired - meanings that move between the past to the present. This is building up a picture not only of the photographer’s visit to Scotland, but also a complex contemporary picture of communities, people, place – and politics - prompted by his contact sheets. Within two years of Families of Miners, Scotland 1982 the miners’ strike (1984-85) to stop pit closures took place. Over 30 years later, the cultural and physical landscape of his photographs has dramatically changed. Ongoing legacies (of the strike and consequent pit closures) means responses to Rogovin’s photographs range from fatigue to desires to preserve a distinct heritage or to address overlooked narratives.

Therefore, while Shadowing Rogovin has much in common with previous projects of mine, where the processes of looking back, revisiting, retracing and identification bring specific memories, histories and ways forward for final artworks, in this case, the latter is only just emerging. This is in a context where a loaded history, still within living memory, means that naming names can be contentious. As Martha Langford (2008) suggests, photographs not only have parts of lives already lived, but lives are continuing to be lived. For me, ethical questions (such as the gaps and ambiguities of ownership, permissions, consent related to the original images) come into sharp focus, with two other central questions: what is the role of the contemporary photographic artist and what kinds of artworks can be realised within this context and at this point in time?