While wandering around London’s South Bank yesterday playing with cameras waiting for my other half to finish a course I stumbled across the Purdey Hicks photography gallery just round the corner from Tate Modern who were staging an exhibition by Tessa Traeger

I just spotted the photos through the window of the gallery and wandered in with no idea of what was going on, or even who was showing.  So naturally I ended up viewing it backwards (and awkwardly as I was lugging a camera bag and tripod).

The exhibition is titled “Voices of the Vivarais” and focuses on the Vivarais mountain people of France who I’d never heard of. The photos certainly show a people who live hard on the land, tending vegetables and animals with care and pride. You can really feel the pride of the people showing their best produce, or the care that’s been taken of the animals. You got a feeling of a people happy with their lot, despite not being a lot by other standards.

There were a lot of pictures of people holding things. I’ve always liked photos of hands holding something, with all the lines and wrinkles they look wonderful in high quality black  and white. And looking at these large prints I also realised that it means the photograph always has a full back ground with the subjects chest/stomach.

As always the quality of images shot on large format was stunning. I really hope I can eventually get something even approaching this sort of quality. Though there’s a long way to go as I’ve barely got the basics of 35mm into my head yet.

Very glad I came across this. Hopefully signing up to the mailing list will mean I’ll find out about other exhibits in plenty of time.

Shame I didn’t make it to the Tate’s Exposed exhibition as well, but a combination of misreading opening times and an overrunning conference meant we missed last admissions. Think we’ll try and make it in when we’re down next month for Specimen and Skinny Puppy.

Luckily some friends went to the opening of this exhibition before they met us for ‘Until the Light takes us’ so we knew it was on. And even more luckily, thanks to an early finish visiting Sudbury Hall we could come home via Derby to take a look at the show.

It was a very simple exhibition in a small area at the far end of the museum. Nothing very fancy about any of the hangings, but given the subject matter anything other than simple would have just looked strange. Maurice’s photos are all simplistic shots of people working, mainly in heavy industry so worked well in the simple frames used here. Much of the work seemed to be part of the general ‘Nobleness of work’ themes that appear in a lot of Soviet art, many of the men are shown in particularly ‘heroic’ poses and all the women seem to be showing some glamour from under their work clothes. Most of the work was Black and White with a couple of colour pieces, personal taste at the moment drew me to the B+W images. It was quite a small collection (~20 images), but there’s plenty to look at.

It was great to see actual proper large prints. Think having mainly been used to digital I’ve got used to seeing images just on a computer screen, seeing a high quality print from the original is just amazing. The amount of quality that’s visible (in the Yard Foreman picture you can see the veins and detail in the back of the eye) is wonderful. Seeing these has really made me want to start printing pictures as opposed to just scanning them. That and starting to think about medium and large format photography, though I think getting quarter way competent with 35mm might be a good start :).

This was also our first visit to The Silk Mill. Not knowing anything about it beforehand I was impressed when we walked in and were faced with a large display of Rolls-Royce’s finest aero engineering (including a complete RB211). And there’s rumoured to be a railway section as well. A return visit is planned, and given their enlightened attitude to photography (£1 donation for a photo pass) I think I’ll be taking some pictures as well.

Maurice Broomfield

Derby Silk Mill Museum

Got to see ‘Until the Light Takes Us” on Friday, and didn’t end up with either of the options I’d thought would happen. No sign of it coming to the Broadway yet, but I was informed of a couple of showing over at Quad in Derby. Having nothing better to do on a Friday evening for once we decided to books some tickets and head over.

Quad’s a nice little ‘art’ cinema over in Derby, I really liked it. The audience for the film were rather easy to pick out amongst the rest of the clientele. Only showing in the smaller screen, but we didn’t take up much room. The documentary itself was a mixed bag. If you don’t know the early black metal history of Mayhem then you’re going to be pretty lost, as the directors/producers pretty much assume you know it all and just want the details. The main focus is Fenriz of DarkThrone, who comes across in his usual music loving slightly doped style, coming out of it all pretty well. The other main antagonist is Varg (pre release from jail), who retells the Euronymous story again (differently, again), and proves that he was a strange individual well before meeing the Mayhem crew. Hellhammer comes off as a racist homophobe (quel surprise). And for some reason the do a ‘Jerry Adams’ on Faust blocking out his face and disguising his voice despite crediting him on screen, though this is apparently at his own request. It does quite happily show just how fucked up some of the originators were, and that they’re still out of the Norm. Frost turns up halfway through, but didn’t really seem to want to be there and I can’t remember any major points he made, did feel like he’d been dragged in as one of the ‘extreme’ current bands.

Overall not too bad a film, though some of the editing could have been tighter, and I get the feeling they were going for more of an arty production than their main audience would really want (the interpretive tap dance segment seemed to just provoke laughter). I’ll probably rewatch it if it comes out on DVD at a reasonable price.

In need of another culture fix we wandered over to the Nottingham Contemporary to catch the Star City exhibit before it closed. Billed as an exhibition about the “The Future Under Communism” and the “Race for Space” I had visions of lots of space geekery. Turns out I was wrong, but not in a bad way.

We started out in “The Space” with Mother, Earth, Sister, Moon by Tomaszewski and Malinowska. “The Space” appears to be a large almost performance space in the bowels of the contemporary, certainly tending towards the utilitarian, though I don’t necessarily mind ‘naked’ building spaces, and in this case the cold bare concrete walls worked well. The installation was a tribute to the first woman in space, though as it consists of a large fabric construction of a cosmonaut, this isn’t immediately apparent until you read the display notes. All very nice, but it did feel like it was missing something. Throughout the exhibition there have been fashion shows staged within the ‘Cosmonaut’, and for something like that it’d work well.

Moving back upstairs it was nice to see that someone’s got better with both the paintbrush and the floor brush :). On the upper floor there were a mix of arists works on display. Can’t say I was hugely bothered by most of the Video installs but that’s just my taste. I did like Tobias Putrih’s Solaris, a small cinema constructed from cardboard tubes and plywood offcuts which was right up my particular alley. Also taken by Micol Assaël’s, Elsewhere, which appeared to be an installed minimalist glitch sound system constructed from rusting electronics sat in a pool of water, I could have sat there listening for a good long time.

So a bit hit and miss, but it was a nice way to spend an hour.

Treated myself to an ‘Origami Space ships’ kit in the shop on the way out.

Well it appears that either the Arts Council or Nottingham Contemporary have decided that blog spam is the best way to advertise the The Nottingham Contemporary (aka “The Fag Packet”).

They seem to have decided to use the following google query – http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=leave+a+reply+nottingham+contemporary – to get a list of sites where they could dump a vague advertisment with a link to a site of adverts and poor photos of the Fag Packet. A quick whizz through the google results shows a fairly standard boilerplate reposted by ‘Andy’. ‘Andy’ also appears to be posting from the BBC, which is an interesting stitch up of public bodies.

Quite amusing how the photos they use manage to not show just how badly the building fits in with the area. And also how they’ve not managed to capture what is the only redeeming feature , which is the lace cut steel, by not using a high enough resolution.

Will still probably toddle down at some point in the next couple of weeks to have a look at the Star City exhibition before it closes.

Wonder if they’ll rerun the idea at some point and this post will get a response?

These images are taken from the Iconic Photos blog (which is well worth reading).

The first is an iconic photo of Lisa Fonssagrives posing on the Eiffel Tower:

And from this interview it appears that she was actually there dancing on the edge. Now compare that with a modern ‘inspired’¹ version:

Which is Marion Cotillard going absolutely nowhere near the Eiffel Tower except in a Photoshop layer. It’s not even a convincing shop either, the photo’s cropped to hide the fact she’s stood on the floor, her left hand is obviously leaning on a vertical support rather than the angled girder she’s meant to be and the backdrop looks awful. Even leaving aside the technical complaints the newer photo just doesn’t have the energy or ‘Joie de vivre’ of the original.

Just goes to show that combining famous people, dramatic scenery and technical photography doesn’t mean you’ll actually get a good photograph.

[1] – Notice how inspired is so close to insipid?

Looks like I’ll be making a return vist to the Nottingham Contemporary (aka The Fag Packet). Running through Febuary to April they are running an exhibition called Star City that appears to be based around 60′s Russian space imagery. Looks interesting to me, so we’ll give it a go. Plus I’ll probably pick up that nice book of pushout cardboard rocket models they had last time.

And in other incoming nottingham space news, Cels are having another Open Dome event on the 22nd, after the last one I’ll be there again. Details are here

So we decided to head down to the Nottingham Contemporary to have a look at the David Hockney exhibit. Not a huge fan of Hockney’s, so can’t say too much about that other than that I still find the earlier stuff a little too abstract/primitve for my tastes, and the later colour stuff just doesn’t do anything for me.

The venue though, well. It still looks awful from the outside and doesn’t do anything for the area it’s stood in, surely someone could have come up with a design that fitted into that area? I know Broadmarsh is just across the way, but even that blends in better than this. The inside though is a nice viewing area with good lighting and plenty of space. But, it could do with a clean already. there was huge amounts of dust/crud floating on the floor below pictures. And someone realy wants to mask the floor off next time they paint the walls. And some of the hanging was a bit strange, “A Bigger Splash” (probably the most famous painting there) was hung right by the exit door, and due to the restrictions on the number of people in and out of the rooms meant there was nearly always a queue in front of it. Plus the etchings for a Rake’s progress were hung in 2 rows running left to right, and then left to right again, so to follow them along you had to walk the board twice. But the bucket made famous by Private Eye at least appears to have vanished (though the warning signs appeared to be ready for quick deployment behind the shop counter).

So a bit of a mixed experience. Nice to have a quality display space in nottingham, just a slight shame about the implementation.

While passing through London for the Carter gig we decided to visit the National Gallery for “The Sacred made Real” exhibition. The exhibition is being shown in the Sainsbury wing in the 6 rooms downstairs

The exhibition tries to explore the connection between Spanish religous painting and Sculpture during the 17th Century. The Catholicism prevalent in Spain at the time seemed to encourage a wish to share with the passion of Christ or the saints, so there was a ‘demand’ from religious orders and wealthy patrons from objects to contemplate/venerate. Many of these tried hard to convery the pain and brutality that the subject had undergone. These look very graphic (the head of John the baptist as you enter the first room is a prime example, the artist has gone to great lengths to show all the viscera in the cut neck, or the image of the Dead christ where the opening in his side from the spear seems to still be oozing) compared to many other religious artworks.

The lifelikeness of the wooden sculptures had a big affect on the painters as well. The artists could now work from a very realised model who wouldn’t move and could be lit as needed. This ability to light the models shows through in many of the paintings where they’ve been painted as though the light was coming through the windows in the room they were intended for. There’s a wonderful example of this in the exhibition where the painting was designed to be hung between 2 windows, and the artist has taken care to show this in the subject (and the gallery has lit it based on the original room) and the effect is wonderful. I do like the way that the figures in the paintings seem to emerge from the dark (an effect I like in photography as well, so seeing it down with oils is very pleasing).

There’s also a good documentary in the small video room about the development of the movement, covering the process of making the sculptures and their impact on the paintings.

A very good exhibition, very glad we went along.