A lightening fast guide to my work

I’m all too aware that the images I constantly hoist upon the world might bring about some bemusement. So if you’ve ever wondered what its all about, here is my two minute guide.

Is photography art? Oh how the debate raged for over a century (it was 2008 when the English National Gallery first held a photographic exhibition, that of Tom Hunter).
Thanks to some cunning champions, not least Alfred Stieglitz and his 291 Gallery and Camera Work publication, that the likes of myself were born into a world, where only occasionally would we have to hear that most annoying of phrases, ‘but is it Art?’ usually followed by a few of the persons brain cells committing suicide from lack of purpose.

So it’s art. For the most part this was supported by the equation, it looks like art, it has the qualities of art and it transposes a meaning. In reality this meant, most probably black and white, printed with great craft and with the artist stating, ‘My work speaks for itself’, followed by an hour long speech, some lengthy reviews and the adding of a zero to the price.

Then one day a disgruntled and bored American aristocrat, William Eggleston, asked his friend, a certain Mr Warhol, “But what do I photograph, Memphis is so ugly?”
To which his deconstructionist friend replied. “Then photograph the ugliness.”
So shooting in colour the daring Mr Eggleston started a more democratic approach to the medium. You might say, he was the first to seek out the meaningful moments we all experience, each day. Those moments when your eyes briefly alights upon something pleasing; the light that spills in over the curtain top in the morning as you lay in bed, a shadow that crosses the yellow lines on the road or porcelain lovers embracing in a tat shop window. And for once this artist said nothing, for years, until at last fame would badger Mr Eggleston into submission and insist on a few odd but enlightening interviews.

This championing of the everyday has been one of the loudest cries to be heard in the art world these past thirty years, becoming almost deafening of late. The artfully printed black and white, framed print, almost lost to the contemporary galleries, as the championing of ever more democratic art becomes the order of the day; using disposable or poorly made plastic cameras, printing cheaply, celebrating imperfection, giving cameras to children or even dogs and hanging these works with drawing pins or any way but in a frame, are all de rigueur.  Like any new movement, it becomes a little too self aware and as I write there is a feeling that maybe its time to move on, to balance things up a little, like with the Sally Man exhibition (see previous blog). Photographers, like ducks, in a flooded market place, find there is there is room for all.

Take a beautiful landscape or a beautiful person and produce a beautiful picture, well there’s a knack to it, but so much more of a challenge to find beauty in that which is overlooked, in the flotsam of the city.

You can see aspects of this approach in the works of all the great photographers, going back as far as you’d like, but it’s with the likes of Eggleston and my personal favourite Keld Helmer Petersen, that you find whole bodies of work dedicated to this system. And this is where you’ll find me. Ambling around with my camera, trusting my instincts to notice these visually engaging moments, and then attempting to capture them in a way that might allow others to engage and respond.

I hope with some of my images, you find a moments resonance, but it’s a very personal journey and we’re on different paths, but maybe I’ve shone a little light onto mine that you might see it a little clearer.

Sally Mann - The Family and the Land

Going to this Sally Mann exhibition felt like a trip down memory lane, for as a photographic lecturer I have become so familiar with the images of Jessie, Emmett and Virginia, that it feels more like looking at pictures of my extended family. I’ve read so many essays on the ethereal qualities, captured innocence and deliberate provocation, that I am now incapable of decoding these images, it feels like an argument that has gone on to late into the night, the origins of which have long been lost. This early work of man, Immediate Family, now feels to me like stills from a favourite film, filling me with a warm nostalgic reminiscence for the first time I experienced them.
If you are anything other than completely familiar with this early work of Mann’s, then I urge you to go along and see this show, which remains at The Photographer Gallery, London until Sept 19th.
Also on show are her truly engaging ‘Civil War’ landscapes, entitled, Deep South, these images record significant sites from the war; only in true Mann style, there is a sense of narrative, of a visual journey to be had when looking at these images. They feel like gateways to a story, as if they might open up and allow you to step into the world beyond.
The final series on display is What Remains, a set of images or portraits of decomposing bodies; Mann seems to take the same sensitive, loving approach to these macabre images as she employs when shooting her children at play. Ultimately, despite their beauty, I found it difficult to dwell in this part of the gallery and headed back out for one last moment with Emmitt, Virginia and Jessie.
For more details on this show click here.

Henryk Ross - Lodz Ghetto

April 30, 1940. Today marks the seventieth anniversary of the Nazis sealing off the Lodz Ghetto from the outside world, with 230.000 Jews confined within.
One of these Jews, Henryk Ross, has provided us with a unique perspective of what life was really like within the confines of a ghetto.



In these pictures taken in the Lodz Ghetto, we see the holocaust from some unfamiliar perspectives; this Jewish photographer, employed by the Nazi statistics department to document the production of goods for the Nazis, created the broadest portrait of life during one of mankind’s darkest hours.
Although there is an ultimate sadness in these images, for the simple reason that we have the knowledge that almost all of those portrayed lost their lives in the holocaust; the emotions felt when looking at the scenes portrayed are complex and many; there is the unfamiliar depiction of moments of joy, a wedding or bar mitzvah, yet I feel a sense of unease sharing these moments with those depicted, for it is difficult to comprehend the idea of happiness or joy in a ghetto that acted as a staging post to the death camps; there are depictions which show complicity with the Nazis and hints at a surviving order of social status within the ghetto; all things which momentarily confuse my desire for a black and white sense of what is right and wrong, but these images merely show us the complex nature of being human and of the ability to seek out moments of joy in situations where it is almost incomprehensible. I have heard tale of a passenger in a lifeboat watching the titanic sinking who commented on the beauty of the moon lit scene. These images of Ross’ remind me that we are complex creatures, capable of complex behaviour, emotions and responses.
Click here for more images.
On Aug 6th 1944 the 60.000 remaining Jews at Lodz were sent to Auschwitz as the ghetto was liquidated. Henryk is one a handful that where to survive, he returned to Lodz to reclaim the negatives he had wisely buried; affording us this unique portrait.

Una Corda, by David Creedon

As photographers we’ve all stumbled upon locations which make the heart race, the kind of environments where you could trip up with a camera and still end up with a good shot (in fact I did just that in Hungary a few years back, whilst belly flopping to the ground, camera in hand, I saw that I was about to loose the shot to an oncoming bus, so managed to keep the camera straight, I released the shutter and snapped a rather good shot, just prior to my elbow bruising landing). This seeking out and transposing of locations is at the heart of what so many photographers do, so I am in no way taking anything away from the David Creedon’s work, which does this with such aplomb.
Entitled “Una Corda” after the unique arrangement between Ireland and Cuba, where visitors from Ireland take piano pieces to the trade embargoed tuners of Cuba. Creedon visited and photographed the piano-tuning workshops in the heart of Havana, where once all the tuners had been blind, a communist matching of skills to ability that is unthinkable today. These images which imbue in me the kind of romanticism I first felt, when aged fourteen, as I looked at a small reproduction of ‘from the Back Window, 291’, By Alfred Stieglits, 1915, NY (right).

They transpose you to an almost mythical place, that were you able to visit, could only fail to live up to the beauty captured so precisely and soulfully by such artists as Creedon and Stieglitz.
David Creed sets out to illuminate a story about Irish compassion and the musical heritage of Cuba; but these images are far more than illustrations of an international pact, these depictions of deserted workshops speak of a different world before the iron curtain fell, of tropical sunlight and soulful musicians, who’s only presence is now to be found in handprints left in the dust.
This and other work by David Creedon can be seen here:
Click here:

New Trees by Robert Voit, a typology of sorts

As a man with a few typologies to my name, I am always on the look out for intriguing new examples, and in this set by Robert Voit, we find a real treat; over a period of seven years he has collected image of ‘disguised’ telephone masts from around the globe, from one in the guise of a cactus in Arizona to the rather less obvious choice of a withered tree in Hundon Haverhill, UK; these modern day portals of communication hide their true ‘nature’ as they pretend to be just that. New trees, is worth a view.

Click here

Adobe Photoshop hits 20!

It was in the ignogral year of Photoshop in 1990, that I was taken into a small college computer room, at Exeter College. The room was equipt with black and white Apple Mac classics. I did not know then that I was using cutting edge software, but the now familair names of Thomas Knoll and John Knoll greeted me on the loading page with the words Photoshop Copyrigh 1989-90 Adobe Systems Incorporate.
Bewitched by the ability to grafitti my name on a picture of a wall, or add a third eye to someones head, I started a long romance with PS. Layers came along in Photoshop 3, followed by an extensive range of Blending modes etc. Photoshop itslef has become so powerful a creative tool, that of late I have switched to its brother application, the more work load friendly Adobe Lightroom, to manage and subtly manipulate my files; but Photoshop is still the daddy.
I raise a glass to you Photoshop, may the romance continue.