Welcome to the MMU Photography podcast, a weekly informal conversation with the guests that have been kind enough to join us during our wednesday morning village green lecture series. The lectures this term are centred around the theme of Photographic Communities. We will be welcoming a range of photographers, artists, organisers and academics to talk about the importance of working collectively in their research and practice. This is a space to consider photography and creative activity as essentially a collaborative activity. Emma Bäcklund is a Swedish artist whose practice includes photography, performance and installation. Bäcklund draws from her background in dance and interest in neuroscience to make work that is deeply influenced by both cognitive and physical experiences. She is interested in performative aspects of the photograph and the influence images have on habitual and gestural relations. She approaches photography as a corporeal process in which the audience’s own bodies often play an important role. Her focus continually returns to the ambiguities of both the physical and the photographic. Central aspects of Bäcklund’s research involve everyday bodily gestures, physical labour, the history of dance, philosophical theory and the image-culture. Recent works explore attempts to create situations of intimacy when social distance is everyday life. She is interested in how the still image can explore movement by situating the body in a sphere of fictive construction and turning it into an “image-body”. www.emmabacklund.com