Jenny Goodfellow

BA (Hons) Photography, Video and Digital Imaging | Class of 2021

Jenny is a photographer and researcher from Newcastle currently living in Sunderland. Her work focuses on current events or trends and their impact on society, wellbeing, and human experience; bringing together research and imagery to create informative projects reflecting the world we live in today. Each project usually includes an element of the handmade or use of analogue methods combined with digital technology, literature, and science to blend photographic disciplines and genres.

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Chance Favours the Prepared
Illness can affect us all and with it our wellbeing, sense of self, and opportunities. All a virus sees is a human host; it does not care where a person is from, how large their bank account is, or who they are. This project is a response to assumptions and stigma associated with illness, as well as increased incidents of Sinophobia at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The series combines portraits of student volunteers made in the studio, with overlaid images applied by hand of the most common viruses and illnesses that affect students, alongside information about prevention, treatment, and recovery. The project was due to be displayed in the Murray Library but due to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown restrictions, it was instead displayed at my student halls of residence, with a streamed exhibition launch on Facebook Live.

Cultigenesis
Cultigenesis analyses the history and journey of fruits and vegetables from their origins in the wild to their domesticated forms available in most supermarkets across the UK throughout the year. Much of the produce we eat today, and take for granted, has been on a journey of discovery, domestication, and cultivation, as well as a physical journey of thousands of years and miles through contested lands, colonialism, slavery, and eventually to plantations, industrial farms, warehouses, and supermarkets to reach our tables. While the discovery of agriculture and plant domestication marked the start of the age of the human (the Anthropocene) and a new genesis in human development, what was previously found in nature has become unrecognisable from its former self.

Aimless Days and Sterile Memories
Aimless Days and Sterile Memories connects excerpts from Albert Camus’ 1947 novel The Plague with 35mm photographs made over a period of six months from the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK. The photographs were shot in the Sunderland area during daily walks when people were advised that they should only leave their homes for essential journeys or for one hour of exercise and reflect my own feelings and observations during a time of uncertainty and isolation from my friends and family.

The images combine text from Camus’ work, applied using the photogram method in the darkroom, alongside black and white images exposed onto the same sheet of photographic paper from Retropan film; a film stock with a dreamy, soft, low contrast finish to reflect a feeling of being adrift from our usual routines and unsure of what the next day might hold.