Peter Kennard is an artist and teacher who has been creating photomontages for nearly half a century. Dubbed the “master of the medium” by the critic John Berger, Kennard’s ‘Broken Missile’ image for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is still deployed in protests today. Journalist and filmmaker Leah Borromeo is a former deputy foreign editor at Sky News and has over a decade’s experience covering stories on the arts and social justice from Gaza to Haiti to Pakistan to Iran across print, television and radio. She also knows Peter rather well and refuses to take any shit from him.

LB: Tell me about your latest project.

PK: @earth is a story without words, a completely visual pocketbook of photomontage essays about the world as it is today. I’ve used montages I’ve made over the last forty years combined with new digital ones made with a young Lebanese artist Tarek Salhany. I was his tutor at the Byam Shaw School of Art. The book tries to communicate through pictures in a way that can be understood across the world – it’s in seven chapters dealing with issues like oil, Palestine, climate change, war, poverty…. I’ve always been concerned with making work that can be understood by a non-art audience, especially now when it is up to young people to try to confront all the shit that’s hitting the fan.

LB: You’ve always been seen as pretty cool by younger artists, designers and activists.

PK: Dunno about that. I’ve just tried to use my art to fight against war and poverty. I’ve been at it for forty-five years, and sadly a lot of the images I made against the Vietnam War are just as relevant today as they were then.

LB: If that’s the case, then hasn’t it all been a bit pointless? What real change do you think your art has had?

PK: You can’t measure the effect of art like you do selling tins of baked beans. I see my work as being allied to social and political movements fighting current power structures. On its own, the work doesn’t change anything, but being used as part of movements of resistance, it becomes a visual expression of the possibility of change.

LB: It doesn’t show change. There’s a distinct lack of hope in your imagery.

PK: No, you got that wrong! By trying to be as direct and honest about what’s going on around the world today, there is an implicit assumption that things have got to change. It’s no good showing the resolution of conflict by inventing happy images of rainbows or people bopping around Empire State of Mind on their mp3s.… I’m not selling my idea of utopia. I’m using montage to get people to think critically – montage does this by cutting together images that are usually separate in our commercial culture. It rips apart the smooth surface of capitalism to reveal the interconnections of powers thrust on us when we wake up every morning.

LB: You started as a painter. What drove you to montage? Do you still paint?

PK: I studied painting at the Slade in the sixties but as I got more politically involved I wanted to find a way of working that corresponded with my politics. Painting seemed too gallery-bound and is heavy with its own history. But photography, however much you pummeled tore scraped scratched spat on a photograph, still took you back to the reality photographed. As Susan Sontag says, a photograph is a trace of reality. So I was able to use the photograph as a canvas.

I still use paint in relation to photographs because there’s still a mystery to painting where the paint takes over. You can get a direct relationship between your hand and your emotions with paint. I’ve found ways of using paint with digital and photographic imagery that deepens the weight of the work.

LB: But you know sod all about how to work a computer – what’s your process?

PK: I can do emails! And I can listen to YouTube! I just can’t deal with PhotoShop because I’m used to having piles of messy paper, cutting it up with number 10 blades and sticking them together with cow gum. But I’m not against digital imagery, which is why I’ve worked on this book with Tarek and crafted a large number of digital montages together.

LB: Is @earth your magnum opus? A bit of a greatest hits compilation. Musicians usually think when they put out a greatest hits, they’ve had it.

PK: It’s mashing work from the past with new work to do what I’ve always been trying to do, which is create a visual language of opposition that is accessible. This book feels like the best way I’ve found to do that. It’s an affordable way to get visual images through to people who may not have access to it normally. It’s different to the internet in that it exists as a material object. It’s real.

LB: Accessible and affordable? It’s published by Tate and is only available to a limited audience in the developed world – those who can afford the cover price. I can’t see this reaching farmers in Malawi or council estates in Glasgow where people would rather buy food than a book of pictures of why they don’t have food.

PK: Well obviously you need a tenner going spare, so it’s availability is limited by economic reality. But if one kid on a Glasgow estate gets hold of it, others will see it and get an idea that you can make pictures that are critical of our condition. I get lots of emails from kids who’ve come across my work and seeing it has encouraged them to try and make art that is about their own situations. Or encourages them to become activists who try to change their situations. They are more likely to come across a book than go to a gallery.

LB: So you want to get your images ‘out there’ to a non-art audience. Apart from the book, how do you propose doing this?

PK: Well, I’ve always used every available method to get my work out. I put work on the street, put it on T-shirts, badges, posters….

LB: Merchandise….

PK: No! It’s not to make money for me. Social movements and NGOs use my images to make things they sell to fundraise. CND have been using my images for the last thirty years. We still have the same fucking missiles now as we had then, so the images against them are still needed. I’ve always made a living from teaching in art schools so I haven’t had to rely on my work selling for thousands to keep going. This has allowed me the freedom to make the work I want to make instead of work that makes money for the art machine.

LB: If there was any real social change, would you be out of a job?

PK: [Laughs] I don’t see it as a job. I don’t see it as a career. At the moment, there are enormous social movements for change kicking off all over the world. There is a great need for oppositional art and I hope my work can encourage young people to develop new forms of visual protest.

LB: What have your students’ reactions been to the work you do? Many art teachers cease to practise once they start teaching. You’re prolific.

PK: It’s been different at different times. Now, because of what’s going on in the world, students are interested in more political work. In the nineties, when most of the art world believed in the hype over YBAs, students were taken over by the idea of being multimillionaires and instant success. At that time, they looked on me as more of a dinosaur who believed in art as a moral issue.

But my work and techniques have been taken up by street artists around the world who are making very direct statements on the street.

LB: Where do you stand on the art v. aesthetic divide? Isn’t there a tendency for self-consciously political work to come across as propaganda and lose the ‘art’ element?

PK: It’s vital if you want to make political work to hold on to the idea that it is art you’re making and not propaganda. The criteria for the work is the same for any other art. I’ve always been concerned with the materiality of my work and experimented as much as any other artist. I make work where the medium and the means matter as much as the message. I want my work to be measured against any other art.

LB: Is there anything outside art and politics that drives you?

PK: I’ve often felt more connection to writers than artists. Writers such as Harold Pinter, John Berger, Naomi Klein. And historically, Walter Benjamin’s work has been a great inspiration. He, working alongside Bertholt Brecht, theorised the need for artists to use montage to tear through the seamless reality sold to us by the state, and think of themselves as material producers – so artists are art workers.

I’d like my work to be used like I use Benjamin’s – as a resource and reference point for political engagement. You can take the daily bombardment of images through advertising and the media and create an image that fights back.

the world has just uncovered a new, great street photographer.

her name is vivian maier. she lived and worked in chicago as a nanny. on her days off she took photographs that rival the poetry and beauty walker evans, helen levitt and saul leiter.

without further adieu, read my article in the british journal of photography.

and give this a watch:

[many thanks to ph for the tip-off]

[thanks to mr alec s loth, i landed a commission to write this piece up for the bjp. thank you dear sloth]

[There's another reason why I chose to write it. And that reason comes clear in the copy. This is Cameron's Big Society and we all have to chip in. I'm just chipping in to chip away.]

Tuesday 7th December 6.30pm

RCA Café, Kensington

In response to widespread budget cuts by the Coalition government, students at the Royal College of Art are holding a late-night skill-sharing event at the College’s Student Union café in Kensington from 6.30pm on Tuesday, 7th December. A cold snap of unprecedented cuts to arts and humanities education and a proposed rise in tuition fees is upon us. As artists and educators, the land before us lies wasted and frozen. Unless we unite and fight.

The evening will open up networks and collaborative efforts by students, staff and artists – marry up thinkers and doers, join working hands with working solutions. A parliamentary vote on whether to lift the cap on university fees is set for Thursday, 9th December. The time for debate is over. We all know where we stand. We all know what we stand to lose. We need to resist. Now.

The Royal College of Art is the UK’s only postgraduate art institution. Its reputation is unparalleled – its teachers are masters in their craft and it draws its students from all walks of life. Uncapping university fees will put the College’s unique culture and legacy out of reach to all but the wealthiest students. Studying for an MA at the RCA is serious business. If the Coalition gets its way, it will just be a business.

Add your voice, bring big ideas. We know it’s bloody cold outside – warm us with the heat of political anger, not hot air. Come ready for action, not reaction.

But there’s an elephant in the museum. As you move from room to room laid out with videos and photographs by the likes of Walker Evans and Bruce Nauman, look up into the corners. What do you see? The Tate’s own CCTV. “When people go into a gallery, they expect to be watched. There’s a lot of expensive work here and it has to be protected,” said Simon Baker, Tate’s new curator of photography. Well, it obviously works for the French. By failing to directly address the security setup in the Tate Modern’s own halls, they’ve undermined what is otherwise a beautiful, intelligent and informed show. The Tate has accepted that we’re indifferent to living under the gaze of a Panopticon and is wholly complicit in it.

No one knows how many CCTV cameras there are in the UK. The best estimations put the number at 5m, or one camera for every 12 people. That’s 20% of the world’s CCTV cameras on a whingey North Sea island. It used to be that we were only six feet away from a rat. Now we’re only six feet away from a camera. This exhibition showcases everything from super-secret American military bases, aerial landscapes of the Kuwaiti oil fields after the first Gulf War to people dogging in cars. It shows the theft of privacy and questions the basic notion of privacy.

Early photographic subjects were ignorant as to what was happening to them. Faces of people in early albumen prints resembled deer in headlights, intrigued but unsure what that man behind a box with a cloth on his head was doing. Ignorance became acceptance as the power of the camera became a tool for the media and the state. We grew aware of the gaze. A photograph of the artist Edgar Degas leaving a pissoir echoes its way to a snap of Paris Hilton crying pathetically in the back of a police car on her way to jail. A surveillance photograph of militant suffragettes used by police in 1913 bears an uncanny resemblance to modern police spotter cards used to identify “potential troublemakers” at demonstrations.

Launching the show in London highlights and mocks our current indifference to surveillance. The Tate boasts of the show’s timeliness “due to the increasing availability and use of street surveillance and mobile phones”. It celebrates and attacks our voyeuristic culture.

If you feel dirty viewing Gilles Peress’s images of the Rwandan genocide, you should. If you’re captivated by Merry Alpern’s sneaked shots through a bordello’s window, brilliant. If you feel the horror in Jonathan Olley’s photo of a static oppression palace, the Gold Five Zero watchtower in South Armagh, good. You’re meant to be shocked, and you’re meant to think.

But where is Wikileaks’ Collateral Murder video? Curators say that it’s a testament to the strength of the show’s message that everyone who comes can think of other things that should also feature. Not having the most current and devastating piece of surveillance in the public domain in a show that purports to provide a “provocative perspective” on the “iconic and taboo” is negligent. This show is the closest the BP-sponsored Tate will come to being overtly political. They usually wait until an issue has become vanilla until they wield a sword of topical criticism.

The show is not so much timely, but backtimed. It uses history and reflection in the hope people will be clever enough to flesh out topical issues the Tate is too cowardly to tackle head-on. It is politicisation by proxy. Then again, the Tate is a bit slow. They only opened a modern art museum 10 years ago.

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This article was first published on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free, 28 May 2010 and subsequently republished on The Comment Factory.

Its curators concede that words used in photography are also used in hunting. Capture. Shoot. Release. Like a hunter, a photographer either sneaks up on prey or chases after it. The strength in Walker Evans’ composition lies not only in a clever use of thirds, but in his covert methods. Nobody knows their photos are being taken candidly. Yale Joel photographed people as they arranged themselves in a one-way mirror – spying on people going about the everyday and capturing them at their most vain. Some people made a television programme based on that idea, franchised it and called it Big Brother.

Exposed is an intelligent and informed show. Everywhere you go in the exhibition, you cannot escape what artyfarts call “the gaze”. If you feel dirty viewing Gilles Peress’ images of the Rwandan Genocide, you should. If you’re captivated by Merry Alpern’s sneaked shots through a bordello’s window, brilliant. The show is showcasing the theft of privacy and questions the basic notion of privacy. You should walk out of it feeling like a thieving pervert. What steals your soul isn’t the act of photography, but consuming the image and walking away without considering it. You ask yourself at what point does nosiness and prying become art? At what point does the documentation of death and oppression become pornography?

Surveillance is a “functional image taken with purposeful intent”. As you walk around the show, look up. Find one of the five million CCTV cameras in the UK gazing at you with impassive regard. Then see if you can view the show with your new, more complicit eyes.

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This article was first published in Juxtapoz Magazine, 28 May 2010. Click thru for the photos.