Tammy Law

Tammy Law is a Brisbane based photographer who explores themes of migration and belonging. Working with a range of approaches including book making, participatory projects and a heavy investment in research which resulted in a PHD in 2018. Law speaks to us about her practice, photobooks and her in-depth approaches to image making.

There seems to be this reoccurring thread of displacement, belonging and the space between. How does this manifest in your work and what questions does it drive for you ?

My attitudes towards, and understanding of, migration and diaspora have been influenced by my family‘s long history of dispersal to different parts of the world. Questions around where we belong, who we are, how we are represented and who has the right to determine these choices continue to be contested throughout my work. I am deeply engaged in stories of home, identity and belonging, especially during this global climate of dislocation that we live in, this fragile constellation of belonging. I am interested in how the personal questions can become universal.

'Permission to Belong' emerged out of the RPS Photo-book As An Object workshop, can you tell us more about that process and how the work moved into a book ? 

 I’ll start with a bit of context long before the idea of making a book was conceived in my mind. I was more interested in understanding the situation of why people were fleeing Maynmar. There was very little media coverage of the uprisings and political unrest that was accessible via mainstream Australian media. I found it kind of crazy that I had to go looking for this news even though Maynmar is right next to Thailand - you know Thailand being a country that Australian’s visit a lot. So this was kind of a catalyst for me to do further research into what was going on within the country and across the borders for people to flee and resettle in places like Australia. 

A friend of mine was involved in some NGO work traveling to internally displaced camps within Myanmar and also delivering educational resources and setting up schools on the border. They were in contact with some schools based on both the Myanmar and Thai side of the border and put me in contact with the principal of a computer school that they had established in the Mae La refugee camp on the Thai side of the Thai-Myanmar border. I volunteered my photography skills and taught photography to the students there.

My interest in the ongoing conflict in Myanmar was really embedded in personal histories that I came across during my research, speaking to family members who had been resettled in my home city Brisbane and then following their family stories across to the United States, Thailand and back inside Burma. This project soon became something much larger and developed into my PhD which I finished in 2018. 

During the time of my research I found that there was a lot of scholarly literature that looked at the effects of migration from Myanmar on both their homeland and various host countries in both political and peacemaking contexts but not much about the personal stories and experiences of the people being displaced. In Australia our current government policy is shaped around border protection concerns and the idea that asylum seekers are breaking the rules. This book is a tribute to families who have been moving across continents in search for a place of home and belonging. 

The limited nature of the book and the acts of making lend to a very intimate process both for you as maker, and an audience, how has this process helped you and others engage with the work?  Permission to belong also realised itself as an exhibition, how did you find the relationship between the exhibition space and that of the book?

 I think photobooks offer a way of engaging with photography that is completely distinct from the experience of looking at work on a wall or on a screen. There is an intimacy that the book offers that is really difficult to replicate in a gallery space - even if the book is made specifically for the gallery space. People feel uncomfortable touching, turning, holding etc. By doing and creating actions by turning, unfolding, lifting etc. the audience become stakeholders in what they are reading. Placed in a book, photographs no longer simply represent a world out there, but become part of a tangible object. They can be shared and circulated across countries, books themselves becoming migratory and mobile. 

In 'Away from home' the projections deal with this sense of duality in location, and the experience of diaspora which are all so common in the history of South East Asia, can you tell us more about his work and how it has evolved ?

 During the research process I learnt about these families living against the backdrop of decades of oppressive military rule (1962 to 2011) and civil war, the renegotiation of their identities, which are as diverse and complex as the history of Myanmar. For many families refugee camps were home. Many lived in transition, between a place of impermanence and permanence, belonging and displacement. Resettlement has become a common survival method for ethnic minorities, who are persecuted for racial, religious or political reasons. This made me question how I represent these complex layers of movement through still images and the idea to incorporate projections of images that I had taken during the very early stages of working in refugee camps, into the resettled environments of people I met. The use of projections highlights the significance of concept of home as multiple sites of belonging and refer to the ongoing negotiation of uprootedness across time and place. I am interested in how communities maintain a sense of identity through their adopted homelands by looking backwards and forwards simultaneously. These images are telling of the separation families experience during experiences of forced migration. 

You received your doctorate in 2018, what impact did this process have on the work you make?

 Writing the thesis, showing work in exhibitions, collaborating on digital projects with participants and producing a photobook for my PhD enabled me reflect on how objects within the home; portraits of those families who inhabit these transnational spaces and projections of past imagery onto environments that are in transition, become poetic references to demonstrate the absence that pervades photography, but also the absence that pervades these family‘s experiences of displacement. The outcome of the photobook during the PhD also allowed me to see that in relation to the other components of the project, the photobook offered that intimate context for people to engage with personal stories and engage with experiences of migration that move beyond representations of suffering.

You have written about your practice and its multi-method approach which is  beyond just medium but also immersion ? how have the approaches become so important to your practice ?

 Over the course of the PhD, I used a multi-method approach that included audio, video, photography, letter-writing, fieldwork, immersion, informal interviews, forms of participation and collaboration, within the context of photography and ethnography. One methodology referenced Burmese scholar and anthropologist Violet Cho and her approaches in relation to Burmese diasporic identity. I try to employ methodologies that are culturally appropriate to the community I am working amongst and acknowledge my position as a researcher from another ethnic background and cultural landscape and being mindful of how that shaped the research and knowledge produced. 

 Through informal interviews, participants were able to guide me towards topics they found important, rather than answering a list of prescriptive questions. This was an important to unveil personal accounts of family histories, experiences and offer a deeper understanding of what it means to uncover the unspoken. Field notes taken during the interview process reveal and reference experiences and actual events (past and present) that act as linking devices throughout the photographic essays. 

 As a researcher, my presence, questioning and participation in the interviews were a partial catalyst for much of the emotion participants displayed. My active listening to their stories of longing and of missing people and places encouraged them to speak in depth and at length about their feelings. Immersion into the community allows for the identification of the nuances, the minute and the unspoken and to understand what lies behind public perception. Participants trust and respect is of the utmost importance in the way that I conduct my research. Prior to photographing, I work very slowly and respectfully in order to build social relationships with the families who take part in the research. 

The approaches throughout the process of my PhD highlighted the importance of that sense of rapport that is needed between researcher and participant/s. 

 As an extension of practice you also engage with participatory projects, what have you found of significant in this approach to inclusion, ownership and identity  ?

 Journeying Through Home was a participatory project held in the second year of my candidature to not only question the expectations we have of documentary photography but also to facilitate the dissemination of personal experiences of young refugee women in Brisbane. I invited five participants to take part in an ongoing mentorship and workshop program to help them piece together their own narratives of lived experience, through photography from their own perspectives as refugees living in Brisbane. This was one way that seemed appropriate not only because it enabled participants to socially disseminate their personal narratives, but also because it effectively addressed the power imbalance between researcher and participant. From there, I established an informal workshop where we wandered through their chosen environments which consisted of both public and private space, like Brisbane city, botanical parklands, their homes and backyards. This was also an effort to enable the participants to feel more comfortable with sharing and articulating their thoughts, feelings and desires to a broader audience and offer a space where participants could have the freedom to express themselves. 

 After a year of meetings and lengthy discussions over how the participants wanted others to engage with the images, a consensus was reached. The Journeying Through Hope Instagram feed was established as an open source for visual expressions about family, home, impermanence and permanence. It felt like the participants really took ownership of the feed to create powerful images of self-representation for the wider community. The primary aim of the Journeying From Home project was to initiate an awareness of the broader understandings of what it means to be a refugee through empowering community members to share their experiences publically. 

Building on the collaborative and participatory process you established  Fragile Constellations, can you tell us about your hopes for this project ?

 A sort of stakeholder-driven network like Fragile Constellations can act as a platform to give the power to citizens to disseminate their everyday experiences from within their own communities. Photographers taking part in Fragile Constellations were approached through Yangon based photography not-for-profit gallery and educational art space Myanmar Deitta, the YPF community who is responsible for educating some of the leading photographers from Burma and the Thuma Collective, a photography collective established by seven local female photographers from Myanmar. The aim ofFragile Constellations is to foster further understandings of everyday experiences through the collaborative lens of locally emerging photographers and artists within Myanmar, as well as local artists in Australia. The network was launched across Instagram, Facebook and a website, where artists were invited to collaborate on a series of photographs on the concept of 'home‘ and belonging‘. The images produced in these projects can offer a deeper understanding of the experiences of conflict and displacement. Given the distances of time and geography, a sense of shared presence can be constructed virtually. Through these collaborative works, I hope the visual inquiries made through this network will expand arts, cultural and cross-border exchanges between Australia and Burma. Collaboration works in synergy with my research intentions. I believe that audiences should interpret, deconstruct, question and analyse what is being offered to them as knowledge, but also what they intuitively gather from their own understandings.