No Pain Whatsoever

The exhibition related to this book is also in the Ulster Institution Repository, item number 27437.Progressing on 20 years of Grant's research that addressed the quieter, unmapped aspects of working class culture, referenced in the curated show ‘Nothing is in the place’, the photographs in this series foreground the small circles of trust or unorthodox working methods that prevail in former working class communities in the North West of England. The notion of stable working class lives are long outmoded –and the crude labelling of ‘the underclass’ has been a blunt and less than complex term that attempted to gather a sense of those who live outside of conventional work patterns. The photographs are a series that coalesce to relate Grant's attempts to articulate such social patterns –with lives lived through intimate circles of trust and dependency. The pictures involved sustained engagement and field research, drawing upon oral histories and extended periods of time photographing and returning to families and social groups in and around the Mersey River district. More sustained research was dominated by patterns of narrative, notions of the vernacular in documentary practice and the question of how to photograph and articulate those aspects of working class experience that exist -but which do not fall into traditional visual descriptions of the kind long outmoded and under performing in much photographic practice. Areas considered, though not explicitly titled, include unemployment, family engagement and the social tensions experienced in sustaining lives in difficult financial circumstances. The process involved photographing with and around social circumstances over many months, with work returned to those participating or granting access. The work exists as both an exhibition and a book during autumn 2013 after collaboration with the Swedish photographer and publisher, Gosta Flemming (Journal).