In Conversation: Kate O'Neill and Jessica McDermott

Photography is often a solo endeavour, and embarking on a new career after regular work or full-time study can be daunting. However, online and around the country, the photographic community is thriving. Networks of existing and emerging artists collaborate and support each other in many ways allowing ideas to form and new connections to be made. There is more to photography than taking photographs.

Kate O’Neill has been working in the photography industry for over 10 years across the UK & Ireland - from project management and marketing to curation and mentoring. As Marketing & Partnerships manager at Metro Imaging, her role is mainly client facing; working with artists, advising on production and/or promotion, helping them get their work from concept to physical art (Secret Life of Pencil, Free Range Awards, But We Are Still Here). She is Director of The Old Girls’ Club (‘The OGC’), an initiative to support women across the visual arts industry and last year managed Brighton Photo Fringe as well as curating ELASTIC, a collective exhibition for the biennial Cork Photo Festival.

Jessica McDermott is a London-based photographer whose work explores patterns in history, memory, and the legacies we leave behind. Her ongoing series, Recollection, tells the life stories of people living with dementia in a single image, while Fifty Decades To Visit Before You Die takes you on a journey through lost and misunderstood herstory. She is currently working for Tate on Steve McQueen’s Year 3 Project and is the Host and Producer of Scenario, a podcast about the hidden stories from behind the camera.

Kate and Jess have known each other for just over four years and in that time a professional collaboration has been born out of a genuine friendship. They have collaborated on The OGC, Scenario and ELASTIC becoming part of a movement for championing visual artists through storytelling and visibility of female photographers.

Brighton Photo Fringe 2018

JM: When Kate and I met, I hadn’t long moved back from Glasgow where I’d been for 8 years. After moving, I spent 18 months going back and forth to Scotland working on a commission, so I didn’t know that many people on the London photography scene. However, Kate, who is amazing at keeping abreast of new work, found me through my book Females Of The Fringe. We met up to talk about that work, and that led to Kate asking me to be part of the first ‘Close Up’ event that she organised. We were chatting in a bar after that event and that’s when The OGC emerged as an idea. I remember her talking so passionately about how it needed to exist, and the very next day, or a few days later, there was a website and I thought, wow, this woman means business!

KON: Yes, The OGC was established after an event I hosted at IdeasTap in October 2014, focusing on the pros and cons of our industry for women working within it. The conversation continued online for a few days afterwards and that’s when I and Alice Widger, my colleague at the time, decided we needed a platform for women to voice their opinions on the industry, and also to showcase their work. We work with visual artists via mentorship, our online journal, and a series of professional development talks - ‘Close Up’. It’s an organisation entirely run by volunteers - from our speakers to mentors to marketing - and our events are entirely free to attend, ensuring that we continue our ethos to be ‘inclusive and not exclusive’. Jess would regularly attend our talks, support me with events, and showcase her work in our journal, so it was only natural that she became a key member of The OGC team. I think a pivotal moment for this creative partnership was back in 2016, when I invited Jess to officially join The OGC as a Contributing Editor and Project Manager, on that same day we discussed the concept of the storytelling podcast - we spent hours coming up with a name for it - ‘Scenario’ - it just worked!

JM: That was a big day for two of our big projects! That was right at the start of Scenario. I knew taking on a podcast like this, with in-depth storytelling, was going to be a big undertaking, and it really was - the first season took over a year to produce! Going into it though, knowing I would have Kate there as a sounding board for ideas and anything that came up, was fantastic.

With the podcast, I wanted to create something that I would love to listen to myself, and I thought about how much is going on behind the scenes when a photographer is making new work, and how exciting it can be when you’re right in the middle of it - when you don’t necessarily know what’s driving you, or what the end product will look like.

Clare Hewitt - Featured in Scenario (The Penfriend)

JM: With most photography podcasts and interviews you’re looking back on that process, when the work is finished, and so naturally some of that spark has gone. With Scenario though, I wanted to give the listener the opportunity to go on the journey with the photographer, and actually be there as it’s all unfolding. As the podcast is all about the behind-the-scenes story, you don’t need to be interested in photography to enjoy it. In fact, that was really important to me. I shy away from technical and industry talk specifically, so that it has this broader appeal, and hopefully opens up the photographers’ work to a much wider audience.

The first episode I recorded was with Clare Hewitt. When I met her at Photo Scratch, I knew straight away that her story would make for a great episode. She is so genuine, and her work is so beautiful and intriguing, it was just a perfect place to start! With each episode, I tried to record one cycle of the project. With Clare, that was her receiving a letter from her pen friend on death row, Duke, and then following her as she made a landscape image for him before she decides what to send to him in her reply. With Jennifer Balcombe, one cycle meant recording one of her photo shoots in the studio with her brother, Dev. They’re collaborating to document Dev’s gender transition and Jen is photographing the physical changes, while Dev writes about how the changes feel at each stage.

Jennifer Balcombe - Featured in Scenario (The Brother)

I also made an episode with Kate about a series she curated and had work in – ‘The Precursor Project’. That one required a slightly different approach as all of the work happened to have been made in the run up to a major terrorist attack in Paris, and so the episode was about making sense of the images as they were put together for an exhibition.

Kate O’Neill - Featured in Scenario (The Precursor)

My episode was something I’d thought about for a while. I’d had this video of my dad for fourteen years which my mum and I had made about six months before he died. My dad was an actor with a lot of tales to tell. And the video is full of his amazing stories, but as he would happily embellish them to make for an even better story, it was hard to tell whether to take them all with a pinch of salt. The episode is about me trying to get to the bottom of one of his anecdotes, and a passage he recited at drama school, when he was in his late teens. I had no idea where it would lead me, but at the end I realised that like a lot of my work, the project is really all about legacy - how quickly we forget the past and, without sounding too bleak about it, how quickly we are forgotten.

Jessica McDermott - Featured in Scenario (The Ruse)

JM: My work often looks at people and stories that are forgotten or misremembered, though usually I focus on creating and reigniting legacies. I have two ongoing projects. ‘Recollection’ explores the lives of people who have dementia, and attempts to tell their stories in a single image. I’ve always been pretty obsessed with Renaissance-style symbolism, and this project is about turning objects in the picture into symbols that allude to events, and anecdotes, from their lives. The work is supported by a charity called Resonate Arts, and I was awarded the IdeasTap Ideas Fund, and Highly Commended for The Sir Simon Milton Award for the project. It can be difficult to make at times, especially as the people I’m working with forget what we’re doing from week to week, but it’s collaborative, and hopeful, and I like making work that celebrates people who might otherwise be overlooked.

Jessica McDermott - Gina (from the series Recollection)

Within some of my commissions, and my current job for the Tate, I’ve been able to photograph people in a similar way and capture a small piece of history, which have been amazing opportunities. A few years ago, I took portraits of 400 different people who were working on The Theatre Royal renovation in Glasgow for Scottish Opera. It encompassed everyone from construction workers to backdrop painters - and is on permanent display in the theatre’s new foyer.

The other large project I’m working on is called ‘Fifty Decades To Visit Before You Die’. It’s predominantly about women - amazing women, who lived interesting lives, or who were dealt an unfair hand in life, and have become a footnote in history. I spend a long-time doing research, and then make an image as a self-portrait for each character. I like to ‘become’ the character because I want to put myself in their shoes and go back to that period to understand what it was like, if only for a brief moment. Some of my work from this series was featured in an exhibition that Kate produced last year.

Jessica McDermott - Anne Boleyn (from the series Fifty Decades To Visit Before You Die)

KON: Early last year I was lucky enough to be guest curator at the biennial Cork Photo festival. I was assigned the wonderful St. Peter’s Church gallery in the city centre, and left to my own devices - heaven! (no pun intended). I enjoy creating exhibitions that contribute to conversations on a social issue or engage with a particular community so, using this as a foundation, I created the group show ‘ELASTIC’ with members of The OGC team and our mentorship programme.

Kate O’Neill - ELASTIC - Cork Photo Festival 2018

“Elastic considers the concept that our minds are a malleable but resilient structures, continually flexing to accommodate our highs and lows. Many artists (consciously or not) tend to harness and explore this flexibility to create their bodies of work. Connected by an ‘invisible’ theme, the exhibition is a coming together of individuals who acknowledge mental health within their practice or process. It includes work by artists Jo Coates, Lynda Laird, Ruth Guest, Naomi Kamat, Jessica McDermott, and Courtney Husselmann.”

Working with Jess on this was fantastic, she immediately knew how her work would sit within the narrative and how she could apply the theme to a particular portrait from ‘Fifty Decades To Visit Before You Die’ – an ongoing body of work which presents her images and research as a Time Travellers’ Guide to the past. Jess’s piece was a self-portrait as Rosemary Kennedy in the 1940s and looked at the embryonic, yet ghoulish, stage of neuroscience and mental health; the lobotomy. The exhibition enabled me to move forward with my curatorial project and also helped lead to my role as Festival Manager for the Brighton Photo Fringe 2018. The fringe was an exciting but intense experience, working with an amazing line-up of artists and a superb team, lead by Rebecca Drew and project managed by Lucy Smith, which allowed me to gather in-depth experience, in a multitude of areas, over a short space of time.

Jessica McDermott - Featured in ELASTIC (From the series Fifty Decades To Visit Before You Die)

Collaboration, and being part of a team like this, is key to progressing in any area of the industry. In fact, I always round-up The OGC talks with the phrase; “The industry is big, but the community is small” as I believe that, even though there is a lone-wolf element to being an artist, overall it is a collaborative effort supported by a wider community.

Marie Smith - Blown Out Like a Candle - OGC Mentorship 2019

KON: The mentorship programme is a key part of The OGC. It ensures that all our efforts encourage their careers and create a legacy of support moving forward. Right now, we’re working with film photographer and writer Marie Smith; a hugely talented and thoughtful artist who we chose as part of Photofusion’s Salon 2018. We are constantly learning from Marie, and are truly inspired by the work she makes; she keeps us on our toes and we love working with her. This goes for our past mentorship participants too, we have been fortunate to work with an extremely talented selection of female artists such as Joanne Coates, Eleanor Marielle, and Lynda Laird - we are always excited, and honoured, when they come to us with new work.

Joanne Coates - OGC Mentorship 2017

Beyond The OGC and Metro, I am always exploring ways to encourage people (from all backgrounds) to engage more with the visual arts. Currently, I’m in the process of creating a series of talks ‘Art: Untitled Not Entitled’ about how the creative and corporate communities work together. These talks are kicking off in May and will travel around the UK and Ireland over the rest of the year, ideally connecting and informing like-minded people from both industries. You can find out more about the art-talks programme on instagram via @kateo_neill or Marie’s mentorship via The OGC @theoldgirlsclub.

JM: I am gearing towards Scenario: Season 2. The first series was made without funding, and I was lucky enough to have help from amazingly talented and generous individuals and companies (Daniel Drever, Pindrop, and Silje Aure) who gave their time for free to create the music, mix the episodes, and create the logo. We’re currently asking listeners to give us feedback that will help to gain potential sponsors and funders going forward. We also launched a blog at the beginning of this year and we’ve been sharing some great work from photographers such as James Hopkirk, Jayne Lloyd, Daniel Regan and Marie Smith. The blog follows in a similar style to the podcast - focusing on the journey and stories behind the images. I’m also continuing to work on my projects ‘Fifty Decades To Visit Before You Die’ and ‘Recollection’. You can follow the blog and my work at www.scenariopodcast.com, www.jessicamcdermott.com, and on Instagram: @podcastscenario and @jessmcfilm.

Kate O’Neill - The Fear Gallery of Photography Ireland