378,432,000,000 Seconds Of Exposure: An Interview with Esther May Campbell
Image by Kitchen Table Photo Club
For this blogpost, we spoke to Esther May Campbell, founder of Kitchen Table Photo Club and lead artist on MAYK’s upcoming live art and photo show 378,432,000,000 Seconds Of Exposure alongside Chiz Williams. Through the exhibition, Esther and Kitchen Table Photo Club (KTPC) invites us into a world where analogue photography becomes a gateway to storytelling, community, and connection. A space where play, nature, and old cameras transform the everyday into the extraordinary.
Delve into the origins of KTPC, the importance of play in their practice, as well as the process for curating 378,432,000,000 Seconds Of Exposure. The exhibition spans 5 – 13 December 2024 in the Pulp Room of St Anne’s House.
Find out more here.
How did you first start Kitchen Table Photo Club?
It wasn't planned. I was working on a writing commission from the British Film Institute. I remember one day, home alone, getting this ghostly sense of fear. It was like something blew into the house leaving me discombobulated, but awake. I realised how much time I had been alone in my own imagination and I decided it was time to turn towards what was around me, on my doorstep, in my community.
That coincided with a time when I had been taking pictures with an old analogue camera and occasionally putting them up on Facebook. I would walk my daughter to school and on the school run, parents who had seen some of the pictures would approach me and say they loved them; “Uncle Terry left me some cameras, and I think my son would really enjoy learning photography, he’s struggling at school” or “I think my daughter would engage with the old camera I used to have.” I wasn't thinking of myself as a photographer, it was just something I did and loved and kept me in the present.
So I thought of creating a weekly photo club for young people. Initially, six kids came around the kitchen table, three quid in the pot, and I started to share some ideas about cameras and images. That grew from once a week to twice a week, to three. We were looking at images and exploring together how they made us feel, what we were seeing in the image, maybe some of the craft that went into that image to create that feeling. Then, things like emotional literacy, visual storytelling, deepening friendships in the community. All these things started to grow out of that initial impulse.
What I realised quickly was that I wasn't really teaching them. What started to happen early on was, through play and our imaginations, that me and the kids were collectively discovering how images emerge.
How does using analogue cameras deepen the learning or creative process for the club members?
I don't think there's one answer. There are all sorts of gifts that happen because we're using analogue photography that I couldn't have predicted.
Firstly, we inherit old cameras that people are chucking away rather than, for example, going online and buying the latest kit – that would be a fairly faceless experience. Instead, I open the door, often to somebody bereaved who’s lost someone they love, and they've inherited some cameras they're not going to use. Or it's someone who once imagined they'd have a career in photography and have since left it behind, or moved on to digital, and so there's a kind of an emotional conversation that goes on when it's passed to the club.
Then me and the kids explore the cameras. We smell them, touch them, draw them. There's a tactility there. We imagine what the cameras might have been used for and when they might have been used. Some of them are 80 or 100 years old, so there's culture building in the simple act of receiving these old analogue cameras and a sense of reciprocity because now we want to give something back.
Secondly, getting analogue pictures back is a slower process. It means the young people I work with don't receive immediate feedback, seeing themselves, and adjust how they come across in the world visually because of that. I think that shifts something in their capacity to make images collectively.
Finally, pictures taken on analogue are more painterly, I would say. The way that light works with chemicals on film, as opposed to digital, is more like the human eye in the way that we process light. That creates something other worldly but familiar. Digital, I find, is more extractive.
How did you go about curating the exhibition?
I suppose there's three key factors. One was that it's a kids club in an exhibition space. How can we be playful with that space? How can we change pictures on a wall into something that the kids feel they can kick about in? We've got a collage that's going to develop over the week long exhibition. The kids are coming for a sleepover on the Saturday night where they'll do everything but actually sleep over; it's pajamas, stories, workshops and food and time with each other. Then they get scooped up just before sleep. We've also got musician t l k coming on the Thursday to respond to the pictures and sounds the children made in the woods.
We're inviting audiences to participate with the work in multiple ways, and rest. We hope it becomes a space that can be occupied by the people that come through it. It's a place to sit down and do some doodling, make a cardboard camera, nap.
The woods were both the setting and inspiration for the trail. How do you think the environment influenced the art created, and what role does nature play in your storytelling?
I'm interested in how land creates culture. I'm working with some people in the centre of town where there's a load of redevelopment going on and, before we start taking pictures, we are exploring our relationship to the land that we're on. The natural world, human-made, concrete, seagulls, the sky, a crack, a tunnel, a piece of litter. We're trying to find processes whereby the world around us is animate and in relationship with us. Once that spell has been cast, images start to arise.
When we were in Nightingale Valley, a key principle – and children are really, really, good at this – was coming into relationship with the imaginal world. That's not a fantasy world. It is the place between this and that, human and non human, a liminal space of possibility and relations with mystery and the unseen.
Nightingale Valley is a sumptuous space where there are layers and layers of history. The valley was formed in the ice age. It's had many iterations. It was once a pilgrims path. It would have looked and felt completely different then and yet somehow we can sense that history when we go through there. There's also a tree that is filled with bricks and all these elements of human intervention going through that space, but with nature present at all times. That layering and sense of time really lends itself to photography, which is all about finding those moments.
What different elements are you hoping t l k’s work brings to 378,432,000,000 Seconds Of Exposure?
I've got no projected outcome of how their work will emerge. That's why it's so exciting to have them respond. I love t l k as a human being, the way that they interact with the world in the moments I'm with them. We've spoken of lullabies and setting spells, integrating the voices and the play of the children. Other than that, I'm going to go to Thursday evening very much as an audience member seeing how another artist is responding to the material, and to be inspired.
You describe deep play as a primary concern of the Kitchen Table Photo Club. How does this concept influence the creative process, and what do you think it unlocks in the young artists?
Play is a birthright that, as we get older, some of us might lose access to. There are many aspects of play that enable us to live well. As I spoke about before, there's an imaginal realm that exists. Children can access that with their imagination easily. They can turn the space under a table into a palace, a little nook in Nightingale Woods into a pharmacy where they're selling various concoctions that can heal you. They can create cameras that put spells on you and enable you to fall in love.
In these times, we are generally more anxious. When we're stressed out, we're not able to access the area of our imagination which is to do with play and problem solving. We need that area to imagine better times so we can figure out how to get there. The other thing that we should ask is how we get back into our bodies and learn from how our bodies are responding to place, as opposed to our heads trying to fix everything. We can’t be cynical, over stressed, and play at the same time. I feel that play is a form of activism.
How do you feel that your practice and perspective as an artist have transformed through the creation of KTPC?
I listened to people talk a lot about process before I started KTPC. I would begin a project with an idea of what it was going to be and how it was going to transmit into the world. I found it extremely difficult to enter something not knowing where it was going to go.
When I started KTPC, I just loved it. I loved what I was learning with the kids. I loved the emotional growth that I could see happen for the young people. I loved seeing their connection to themselves, to each other, to the community and land that they were on deepening. I loved watching images emerge. What KTPC has given me is a huge amount of confidence and strength in surrendering to process and then seeing what emerges, as opposed to forcing something through.
I came to realise that the greatest benefit of KTPC is that it's a club. I'm there every week and people turn up. That commitment and regularity is transformative.
What do you hope visitors take away from the exhibition?
I hope that there are multiple experiences because I think the images are varied, interesting and curious. I hope that people are moved, that it reminds them of childhood; of times with their socks and shoes off, of radical play and mucking about, of dirt and chaos and beauty.
I really hope that people laugh, because it's funny, and I really hope that people rest and make the exhibition space a home.