"The charm of the simple solution is very understandable" says Jennifer Evans in our feature interview. Increasingly, those beguiling explanations for life’s difficulties are being offered by authoritarian politicians and part of the way they are selling them are through photographs. Jennifer Evans and Jonathan Long are scholars of Fascism in the 1930s and we have asked them to compare that period with today. Is there a visual culture of far right politics that we can recognise in today’s political communications? Are there lessons to be learnt? Felicity Hammond talks to Curator Hannah Redler-Hawes about her work made over the last fourteen years starting with Restore to Factory Settings" which was part of her Royal College of Art MA show. The work flags enduring concerns; a critically nostalgic engagement with industry, materiality and the digitally constructed image, and a theatrical engagement with the “tableau”". They discuss Hammond’s interest in how the technologies that we rely upon conceal the "labour and all the messy things that live beneath the surface’ and considers how digitised images using the language of photography inform our material world". As part of a commission over several years for Household Belfast, an organisation that creates critical, engaged, site-specific projects, Jan McCullough used the A.E. McAlpine photographic archive as a starting point to explore East Belfast. Taken by local photographer Albert McAlpine primarily in the 80s and early 90s, it documents local people at work and the changes that were taking place in the neighbourhood. As the project developed McCullough spent a year researching and documenting one new industry in the area, that of scenic carpenters, who fabricate and stage scenery for the TV and film industry. The resulting work, Jigs, shows the tools custom built to assist in the repeated cutting and securing of materials, and was originally shown as a billboard in East Belfast, intended as a temporary monument to the "inventive nature and evocative gestures of this usually invisible labour". For John MacLean as a child growing up in America "a trip to McDonald’s was only one notch less exciting than a trip to Disneyland". Fifty years later, he presents a photo series of buildings in England repurposed into McDonald’s branches. The images are "an accumulation of stacked moments – closer to how I perceived my reality and further from photography’s pre-programmed shutter slice of these places". The work is introduced by Owen Hatherley, author of The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity, who notes "‘There’s no real here at all, but for the real people eating real chips and real burgers and drinking real cokes. It’s a vision of radical inauthenticity, a series about historical cosplay".
