BRIXTON PEOPLE: Book Launch

Almost two years have passed since I set up a pop-up studio in Brixon Market and spent a week photographing passers by. And how much the market has changed! Now it is full of award winning eateries, with some of the best independent restaurants in London.

A good time, then, to finally launch the book I have made to go with this project. Do come down to Brixton Village on the evening of Friday 2 December to help me celebrate the occasion at Brick Box, just a couple of units down from where my studio was. There will be a chance to view the book, buy it (just in time for Xmas!) and taste the delights of the market around you... Festivities begin from 7pm.

Wrap up warm, this is a night not to be missed!

Exhibition Listings Nov/Dec

This blog post is more for the benefit of my students. There are so many shows to see at the moment, I thought I'd list them here so they're all in one place. They are in chronological order of when the show ends.
To non students reading this; feel free to add any I've missed in the comments!

Other I; Alec Soth, WassinkLundgrun, Vivanne Sassen
Hotshoe Gallery, til 27 November
This is a show not to be missed. Curated by Aaron Schumann, it brings together three of the most interesting contemporary photographers.

Simon Roberts at Flowers
You've only got til Friday to see this, but go if you can! Simon is quickly establishing himself as one of the best British photographers around, and these landscapes of Britain are truly something.

Cabinet of Curiosities, Bill Jackson
The Front Room, til 30 November
Still time to catch this show in the tiny Front Room, run by Troika Editions. It is what it says on the tin; a collection of photographs of curios and stuff the photographer has found lying around, meticulously taken on a 5x4 camera.

Jeff Wall
White Cube, Mason's Yard
23 November - 7 January
I CANNOT WAIT for this! Jeff Wall rose to fame in the nineties with his large, staged photographs mounted on lightboxes. They are almost filmic in production, creating complex scenes and narratives. This show will be of new work, and shows a departure from lightboxes.. will be dead interesting, promise!

Michael Wolf at Flowers
25 November - 7 January
Wolf trawls Google Street View to find humorous goings-on, and isolates these scenarios into their own images. There are some featured in World Press Photo, and I have blogged about his work here.

AMPS/11 at Photofusion, 25 November - 27 January
Starting next week is the annual members show at Photofusion, showcasing work from 11 photographers. The work is diverse, complete with camera less photographs, digitally manipulated pics, and more traditional portraiture.

Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, at the National Portrait Gallery
10 November - 12 February 2011, £2 admission fee.
An important show on the photographic calender, showcasing the best of contemporary portrait photography which has been selected from an open competition.

Shaped By War, Photographs by Don McCullin
Imperial War Museum, til 15 April 2012
This is a rare chance to see a broad collection of works by war photographer Don McCullin. McCullin has photographed in Berlin, Vietnam, Cambodia, Biafra, Bangladesh and the Middle East. There are loads of interesting events with this, too.

World Press Photo Award
Royal Festival Hall, Southbank
Important but often difficult viewing of some of the best photojournalism which has been selected for the World Press Photo award.

The Photographs Gallery at the V&A.
This has just opened and will be a permanent fixture at the museum. But it shows some really important work, including Julia Margaret Cameron, Henri Cartier Bresson and Man Ray.

Wapping Bankside
Always has good shows, and worth popping in as it's close to Tate Modern. Details of latest show on the website.

Other shows which should be seen:

Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern
til 8 January
Gerhard Richter is an important artist who uses a variety of media, including photography, which he often paints over. His work comprises of collections of vernacular photography, paintings, and mixed media. I haven't seen this show yet but I can guarantee it's not one to be missed!

And a couple of events which may interest you:
Portrait Salon
30 November, Roxy Bar and Screen
This was set up as a Salon des Refusés of work which was rejected from the aforementioned Taylor Wessing award at the NPG. The award gets 6000 entries, and they only show 60, so there are many which are rejected. This event will show a selection of those unsuccessful entries in the form of a projection, so it's a one off event with a bar etc.

Brixton People; Book Launch
2 December, 7pm, Brick Box, Brixton Market.
This the launch of my book! Come and buy one ready for Xmas!

A little gem

It's rare that I come across a photography show which I haven't heard about. But that's what happened today. On my way back from Tate Modern I popped into the Purdy Hicks gallery. And there... was a little gem.

It's Bettina von Zwehl's new work, a series of miniatures made while on a residency at the V&A museum. Inspired by original miniatures, von Zwehl took photographs of the assistants of the museum, facing a window which emits a glowing yellow light. One particular work, Made up Love Song, is a series of 32 miniatures of the same woman, Sophia, an assistant at the museum. Shot in exactly the same position, two or three times a week, on first looking the photographs appear exactly the same. On closer inspection, slight differences become apparent, as time passes, light changes and the relationship between sitter and subject develops over the six months.

©Bettina von Zwehl

There are single portraits of other assistants too; all women, all photographed in the same way and in the same location. The resulting photographs are so peaceful, so timeless. And there is something about seeing photographic miniatures in an industry which seems so obsessed with enormous images. These objects are precious, each one a little treasure. This gives them a status similiar to the painted miniatures back in the 16th, 17th century, used amongst the wealthy classes as a form of introduction; fathers would send miniatures of their daughter to possible suitors for example. The dagurrotype eventually replaced the painted miniatures, and I can't help feeling that this exhibition brings this history full circle...

The exhibition is on til the 7 November, and it is not one to be missed. Go see!

The Apocalypse

Today I went to Tate Britain with my Dad... the John Martin show is dramatic and a little kitsch; the 19th  century version of the Hollywood film. But the poster and the surrounding abstract design on the stairs inspired some colourful portraits...

The show's over...

If you didn't get to see my show this Summer at Collyer Bristow Gallery, here are a few installation shots:

Momento Mori

For a while now I've wanted to write about the subject of photography and death, but have struggled to find a context with which to write. The theme has been on my mind for the last month for a number of reasons...

Firstly, I am organisng an exhibition at Photofusion (which opens next week, on 22 September) featuring two photographers whose work is concerned with the death of a parent. When André Penteado's father committed suicide, he picked up his camera and took pictures... of the funeral, of his journey to and from the funeral (which was in Brazil), and then for a year later in the form of a visual diary. Striving to have one last physical contact with his father, André took photographs of himself wearing his father's clothes, eyes closed, pensive, on a stone grey background. He then took pictures of the left over empty hangers.

©Andre Penteado, Dad's Clothes

The other photographer is Joachim Froese, who has made quite a few bodies of work following the death of his mother, and the possessions she left behind. The work he will show at Photofusion is from Archive, a study of what happens to possessions once they have been taken out of context; when his mother's belongings were sent to him in Australia, he found they had no meaning for him anymore. His photographs show precarious stacks of china and books, a comment on the constructions of our own personal memory.

While working closely with these photographers, I have had the pleasure to meet (if only on the phone for now) Sue Steward, a journalist and independent curator who, on the death of her mother in 2009, found an urge to photograph the dead body. In an article she wrote for The Guardian, she describes the sense of guilt she felt as she committed this act, looking round to check no one was looking. But then she found that many other photographers had also had this impulse; most famously Annie Leibowitz photographing her partner Susan Sontag.

©Annie Liebowitz, November 2004, Untitled

All these conversations got me thinking about the link between photography and death, and then it became rather too relevant when I heard that my uncle died. He had been very sick, so it wasn't unexpected, but it doesn't make the sense of loss any less painful for us all. At the funeral, my father asked if I had brought my camera... and, although I had thought about it, I felt that it was inappropriate.

But a couple of days later I had a Roland Barthes moment. At the wake, my cousin told me that he had found many old photographs of our parents when they were children, and he emailed the scans to me shortly after. I felt like Barthes in his Camera Lucida... I was looking at picture of my uncle at a very young age and recognised him completely. This wasn't the sick old man I had last seen on a hospital bed at Christmas time, thin and wizzened, struggling to hear and lethargic with drugs. Here, in the eyes of this 10 year old boy, I saw the man I wanted to remember; the man with an amazing brain and an insatiable curiosity.

My late Uncle Rémi is on the left, my mother in the middle, and their brother Eric on the right. My mother told me she remembers going to get this picture taken, and she was scared as she thought it would hurt. How differently children respond to the camera these days!

At the beginning of this week I came across this film on the Guardian website, and I finally found the context with which to write this post. In the wake of the Japanese tsunami, hundreds of volunteers from the Fujifilm factory are collecting photographs found in the damaged areas, cleaning them, and archiving them in order to "save the memories of a nation". Many of the images have washed off the paper, a reference rather too close to what happened to the people depicted on them, and yet the volunteers still feel it is important to keep the indecipherable images. As one volunteer reads out the caption on the back of a photograph (dated 1954!) he turns it over to find the image completely gone. But we must keep it, he says, as it may help to identify the other pictures in the album.



The cleaned photographs are then organised by where they were found and sent to a centre where people can browse for their memories. As one man says, the people who go there "have lost their homes and their past". Photographs are such an important key to our past.  I was so pleased to see the old photographs of my uncle, which still exist seventy years later, but I can't help wondering whether the children of our children of this digital age will be blessed with such tools as they get older. When, in eighty years time, my friend's daughter passes away, will her children have photographs of her as she is now? Or will they be locked in some digital timewarp, following the fate of floppy disks and the like. For all we know, we may be living in what will become the Dark Ages.

It's time to start printing pictures. As for photographing the dead, or the impulse to photograph what's left behind, it's a theme that occupies many photographers, and has inspired a book by Audrey Linkman. For my part, I am looking forward to hearing Sue Steward in conversation with André and Joachim at Photofusion on 11 October; I think it will be an interesting discussion, if perhaps not a very up-beat one.

Ways of Seeing

Last Thursday, I went to the Private View of Nine Point Perspective; Ways of Seeing, at Hotshoe Gallery. The exhibition is a group show of photographers who form part of the Tri-pod group, set up by Hotshoe Deputy Editor Miranda Gavin, and photographer Wendy Pye. The group was conceived as a support network for "emerging and established artists and photographers to create a personal project in the context of a closed research and development group." The work made in the first year is shown in this exhibition.

Curating a show of nine photographers with such diverse work is always tricky, but curators Miranda Gavin and Sacha Lehrfreund have used the space to the full, creating separate spaces for each photographer's work, but succeeding in creating a flow. Every part of the gallery is used; including the glass front of the office, where Natasha Caruana has installed her piece Fairytale for Sale. This work is a collection of wedding photographs, with the bride and groom's faces blanked out in a variety of ways; using photoshop, black pen, blue tac or even bits of tissue paper. The effect is eerie, and it's only on reading the emails that are interspersed with the images that the viewer understands these pictures have come from a website where brides are selling their wedding dresses. For me, this project questions the act of marriage, reducing it to something farcical; all the effort which goes into buying the perfect dress is so easily frittered away when a little bit of cash is needed.

©Natasha Caruana

A far cry from Natasha's collection of digital images from the Internet is Dean Hollowood's project The Chase, which takes us back to the origins of photographic printing. His colour photographs of china animals are layered with test strips from the darkroom, with their different hues and tones, and including Dean's notes of exposure times. The visual effect is quite beautiful, and questions our "ways of seeing". And we get it; we've had experience in the colour darkroom and the work brings back all those agonising hours of trying to get the right colour. Most younger people, however, won't. The Chase is a project about photography, it's history and how it's changed.

© Dean Hollowood

In between these two bodies of work are seven other very strong examples of contemporary photography. Far too many for me to outline here... you best go and see for yourself. The exhibition runs until 30 August.