The College warmly congratulates current History and English student Tom Greany who has won the University’s Laurence Binyon Prize. We asked him what he’s planning to do for his prize-winning project in Vietnam.
The Laurence Binyon Prize is awarded by the History of Art department to support travel to a country outside Europe, especially in Asia. It’s designed to encourage students to explore art and culture beyond their usual academic focus, helping to broaden their understanding and appreciation of the visual arts around the world.
Can you tell us a bit about the project or research interest that led to you winning the Laurence Binyon Prize?
The history of art faculty, who award the Laurence Binyon Prize annually, are adamant that “applications will only be considered from candidates whose travel plans are completely unrelated to their course syllabi or subject of academic research.” This makes for an unconventional and counterintuitive application process; I’m used to falling back on my academic interests and qualifications when filling out applications, but here I had to think laterally about the deeper connection between those interests and my creative and non-academic life. This task was made significantly easier by the skills gained in my interdisciplinary degree, where students are encouraged to think about the applications of certain ideas and methodologies within other disciplinary contexts. This is a lovely part of my degree, and something which I think draws it apart from others in which the idea of applying disciplinary knowledge is often associated with practical, or commercially profitable ends.
This task was made significantly easier by the skills gained in my interdisciplinary degree, where students are encouraged to think about the applications of certain ideas and methodologies within other disciplinary contexts.
I applied to the Prize with the following pitch: I would travel to Vietnam in mid-July to explore the country’s burgeoning street photography scene and develop a portfolio of my own photographs. I would then exhibit this portfolio next year at a small gallery in Jericho which I had contacted before applying to the Prize. I also noted in my application that I would plan to visit Hanoi’s inaugural ‘International Art Exhibition’, an expo in Hanoi which will bring the country’s young artists together in a single show for the first time.
What sparked your interest in photography?
I became interested in photography, specifically film photography, when my next-door neighbour gave me a small film camera and some of his old photography books midway through secondary school. I went on to take photography classes at high school, where I was infatuated with weird and wonderful ‘alternative’ photographic methods, such as cyanotype and van dyke brown printing. I hope to use these as I piece together my portfolio this summer! I imagine it was this demonstrable interest in something “completely unrelated to [my course syllabi]” (although I bet I could find a connection!), paired with the contemporary relevance of my pitch which won me the prize.
What drew you to the visual arts in the first place and how has your interest developed at Oxford?
I have always enjoyed people watching, I think partly because it’s easy to construct narratives about people you don’t know. It’s a practice which lends itself to the (probably mistaken) belief that every chance encounter encodes its own mysterious meaning. Street photography, I think, takes this idea a step further, and allows you to preserve a certain configuration of people that has meaning at the moment the camera shutter closes. In his book, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes proffers the following definition of a photograph: “What I see is not a memory, an imagination, a reconstitution, a piece of Maya, such as art lavishes upon us, but reality in a past state.” To be able to see “reality in a past state” is obviously pleasing to the history student in me, but it’s the way that a photograph competes with memory and with the imagination which I find more interesting still. The bulk of the representational work done in photography is achieved by the camera, not by the artists, as in other media. This means that the content of a picture is perhaps more ‘objective’ than the content of other art forms. And yet only one eye can fit in the viewfinder, and only one finger on the shutter button.
The prize honours Laurence Binyon’s legacy at the Ashmolean Museum. How has working with or thinking about collections shaped your work?
My English tutor at Queen’s, Rebecca Beasley, provided a helpful list of tips for my cohort as we began our coursework submissions in our second year. I remember that she was emphatic about the value of consulting archives and collections, and this got me thinking about how I might apply her advice in my five coursework exams. I think I probably went overboard.
In my English papers, I consulted Yale’s digitised collections, the Estorick collection of modern Italian art in London, the Globe performance archives, and the Weston library’s manuscripts. With the generosity of the College’s academic support grant, I was able to fly to the US and visit Harvard’s Houghton library, where I found the wartime notebooks of EE Cummings which became the basis of my interdisciplinary dissertation. In my last history exam, I used an exhibition at the Ashmolean on the drawings of Dutch renaissance artists Bruegel and Rubens as a case study in a question about patronage! What’s so rewarding about working with collections is a feeling that you are in touch with the moment at which the finger closes on the shutter button and the photo is taken. The materials you get to work with at an archive or a collection mark a kind of irreversible historical event, and it has been a massive help to my degree and to my intellectual development to have been able to work with this kind of source material over the last three years.
The materials you get to work with at an archive or a collection mark a kind of irreversible historical event.
Is there a particular object, artist, or visual form that inspires you?
I love the street photography of Enzo Sellerio, a 20th century Italian photographer who worked mostly in Palermo. His work, so geographically and historically specific, reveals a rare depth and compositional ease; the subjects look at the camera as if at a friend or family member, and the camera reciprocates by locating the facial quirks and architectural oddities that only a friendly local could capture.
You’re reading History and English; what do you enjoy most about the interplay between these subjects?
If you compare the source material which each discipline calls their own, the distinction between history and English becomes almost artificial. What counts as a historical source, and what we can call ‘literary language’ are contested issues. Often, then, it feels like I’m studying one, wide-spanning subject, before I’m called to attention by disciplinary politics or the distinctive architecture of one faculty building rather than another. What I most appreciate about the interplay between my two subjects is the constant reminder that humans like to record things: whether events, memories, images, musical notation, births, or deaths. With this in mind, I’ve found that one way to differentiate history from English, as disciplines, is to think about the kind of records they’re interested in. The work of my dissertation, which looked at the wartime notebooks of the American poet EE Cummings, was to try to think about examples of records which can be read for what they say about the internal (a writer’s thoughts and creative aspirations, for instance) and for what they say about the external (Europe at war, the intersection of the economy and culture etc.).
What I most appreciate about the interplay between my two subjects is the constant reminder that humans like to record things: whether events, memories, images, musical notation, births, or deaths.
How do you think visual culture helps us understand history?
My trips to the Ashmolean have added to the historical element of my degree in really meaningful ways over the last three years. In first year, I went to see the Alfred Jewel while completing paper in Anglo-Saxon history and then wrote about the visit in my final exam; last summer I saw the exhibition on Dutch Golden Age drawing, which became a key component of one of my finals essays. Part of the value of these trips comes from the unparalleled experience of seeing one’s source material in the flesh, which helps us to empathise with the people and objects of the past. Another motivation for integrating visual culture into my degree has come from reading widely in ‘New Materialism’, a philosophy and cultural theory which emphasises the role of objects (rather than particular historical agents, for instance) in creating cultural networks. As with any fresh new theory, it has its limitations, but in widening the parameters of what historians consider ‘strong’ evidence to include visual and material culture it is, I think, very valuable.
Would you encourage students in other subjects to engage with collections/the visual arts and if so, where should they start?
Yes! As I’ve said, the Ashmolean is a wonderful resource for Oxford students. I’ve also had great fun in using collections to reconstruct the lives of the authors and historical figures I’ve studied from different disciplinary perspectives. Last Michaelmas, for instance, I wrote a coursework piece on the British poet Mina Loy, whose practice as a painter and artisan manufacturer of novelty lamps (!) was integral to her poetry. To contextualise her poetry within her artistic practice as an expat in Florence during the 1910s, I visited the Estorick collection of modern Italian art, where I found the work of Loy’s Florentine contemporaries.
What are your plans for when you travel to Asia?
The current plan is to spend two weeks working my way up from Ho Chi Minh city to Hanoi for the inaugural ‘International Exhibition’, a kind of expo organised by the Vietnamese government in late July. I’ve compiled a list of independent photography galleries I’d like to visit, too. Besides all the art, I’m planning to compile a portfolio of film photos which will hope to take in the geographic variety of the country.
What are you most looking forward to about spending time in Vietnam?
Almost certainly the food! Cooking in the JCR kitchen, while a great exercise in self-control and anger management, isn’t always the best for putting together a satisfying meal, so I’m really looking forward to the variety and novelty that Vietnamese cuisine has to offer!
Can you recommend a book?
Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg. A mixture of autobiography and fiction, it offers an affectionate study of the author’s family through her childhood and early adulthood in Turin in the mid-twentieth century. The book covers an enormous amount of emotional, psychological, and political ground, all alongside a wry critique of a big shift in the Italian publishing world, led by Giulio Einaudi, who would boost writers like Italo Calvino and Primo Levi to fame in the last decades of the 20th century.
