Luke Fowler’s activities in installation, performance, music and film-making often involve appropriating other people’s materials. Recently he shared the authorship of a series of amateur photos with the person who took them over three decades ago, Alec Hill.

Fowler reformatted and framed the original snaps, but more importantly made the images part of a larger project that encompassed collages and a film that was shown alongside the photographs.

Pilgrimage from Scattered Points (2006), marks Luke Fowler’s second foray into a world that had vanished before he was born in 1978: England’s counter-culture. A previous film, What You See is Where You’re At, focused on the controversial psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Newspaper clippings about Laing make a furtive appearance in the intriguing title sequence of the new production – this time about the English composer Cornelius Cardew and his experimental scratch orchestra. We learn that the orchestra – a ragbag of composers, music students and hangers-on came about quite by accident in the late 1960s. This openness to change and willingness to transgress boundaries between music, theatre and noise gave the scratch orchestra its avant-garde credentials.

For the critic John Berger the defining thing about photography is that it confronts us with “the shock of discontinuity,” and meaning demands that we supply each image with a “past and a future”. The gap in question is 30-odd years and the narrative – as supplied in Fowler’s stylish film – is provided by former members of the orchestra that the artist interviewed about their recollections. In addition, the voice of Cardew is eerily woven into the polyphony from archive material – the bulk of which comprises scenes from Hanne Boenisch’s 1971 TV documentary, Journey to the North Pole.

The photographs represent members of the orchestra in rural settings and in various social situations, but really tell us nothing much. By the time they appear in the film, however [rather solemnly shot with a rostrum camera], we have heard how artistic and political differences between Cardew and some of the performers presaged the acrimonious disbanding of the orchestra. We have learned that some of Hill’s snaps depict moments during a badly organised tour that the orchestra made around small British villages. One interviewee recalls the confusion and the surprise performers experienced at the hostility of the locals towards this “people’s music”. Another former member describes the gradual politicisation of the orchestra and the grim tensions that arose after Cardew declared the avant-garde to be the enemy of the working classes.

It is Fowler’s film – not history – that produces the narrative that gives the photos their possible meanings. It puts viewers in the privileged place that Barthes referred to when he exclaimed – in front of a vintage portrait of a condemned killer – that: “He is dead and he is going to die!” From our distance in time we know what the subjects, in their moment of idealism, have yet to know – that the project is doomed.

Interestingly, Fowler’s film does not suggest that the avant-garde as such is dead and resists sentimentality. Barthes believed that photography had superseded the monument [that is modern society’s way of remembering]. These pictures are Luke Fowler’s memorial to one section of the avant-garde. As someone who grew up after it was all over, he has arguably made it a very personal one.