Structural forerunner to both the photo essay and the television news segment which succeeded it, contact sheets, like the ones shown here, encourage a meditation on what will be lost without them. More than an editor’s tool, a presentation of sequential frames, they are in fact a cinema, a behind-the-scenes glimpse of unfolding events and a record of the photographer’s mental process. Some record a wandering eye; others an eye “zeroing in.” Some are fluid in narrative, others — owing to the photographer’s alternating use of several cameras—disjointed. Most are black and white, some color. But whether shot in 35mm, medium, or panoramic format, all offer an increasingly rare commodity: unvarnished, unmanipulated, and unrepeatable truth.
17 May - 14 June 2008 Locations around Hereford Entrance free
This year’s festival develops from a focus on international work from South Africa that was initiated last October, but is also linked to work that looks at life in and around Herefordshire itself. It looks at the theme of rural change and disruption in a globalising world: work from Africa will be shown alongside projects developed with local groups.
For an image by our own Mary Weinberger click here.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Leaf image sparks rewrite of photographic history
One of the earliest photographic images attributed to William Henry Fox Talbot - a leaf photogram is to come up for sale at Sotheby's. Recent investigations however propose that the image is actually much older then previously thought and dates from the 1790s. For the full story click here.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
London Skyline Time-Slip Photos
This is very cool! At the South Bank over the weekend and then travels to Edinburgh and Liverpool. Watch the story by clicking here.
Landscape Photographer of the Year 2008 Enter by July 12 2008. There are several categories including one for images from a mobile phone - so there is no excuse not to enter!
Lens Culture Photo Magazine available online For those of you who have not already discovered it - Lens Culture is well worth checking out. Check out: http://www.lensculture.com/index.html
Make sure you sign up for the newsletter so you get every issue!
Current issue features some great work: World Press Photo winners Deutsche Photo Prize nonimees
Work by Saul Leiter
And lots more ...
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Mark Power: Signs Exhibition at Churchill College, Cambridge From 10th April - 18th May 2008 Entrance free For more info click here.
Steve McCurry: Asia Exhibition at Magnum Print Room, Gee Street, London Entrance free Until 16th May 2008 For more details click here.
How to Take Good Photos Tutorials on BBC Website by Tom Ang
There is an informative series of tutorials on the Photography section of the BBC website. Some top tips are given so well worth browsing through if you wish to update your skills or need a refresher course.
Click here for a link to a blog where you can see Simon Norfolk discussing his work and influences.
Essential if you are a fan of his work - his influences are wide ranging and his work does require further explanation.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Philip Jones Griffithsdies
Philip Jones Griffiths, the Magnum photographer whose images of the Vietnam War helped turn the tide of public opinion in the US, died at home in London on Wednesday (19 March), following a long illness from cancer.
His 1971 book, Vietnam Inc, included harrowing images of a blackened burn victim, a woman's frail body splattered with blood and a South Vietnamese boy in army fatigues, showing the brutal and devastating effects of the war on the Vietnamese people and culture. But it also captured rural life and village collectivism away from the war zones, in an attempt to show why America's campaign was bound to fail.
'All journalists share two concerns: first, for the truth; second for the suffering of innocents,' he stated in aninterview earlier this year. 'No man can see what I've seen and not be moved to tell others about it.'
Griffiths was born in Rhuddlan, Wales in 1936, and became a photographer after a short career in pharmacy. He started working for The Guardian whilst working nights at a London chemist, becoming a full-time freelance for The Observer in 1961. 'When I look back on my work there, more than half the articles were projects I suggested myself,' he told BJP in May 2007. 'There is nothing an editor likes better than a photographer coming in and saying, "I've got these pics" or "I've got this idea".'
Influenced early on by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Griffiths became an associate member of Magnum Photos in 1966 and a full member in 1971. In 1980 he moved to New York to become president of the agency, a post he held for a record five years.
In his latter years he criticised the 'triviality' which he believed had crept into Magnum, but he remained committed to photojournalism to the end. 'I am not depressed by the state of photojournalism today,' he told BJP in May 2007. 'It is obvious that photography is more powerful than ever before. The Abu Graib pictures, for example, did enormous damage to America's intentions in Iraq.'
In one of his last interviews, for The Independent this January, he added: 'Journalism is about obliterating distances, bringing far away things closer home and impressing it on peoples' senses. You excite your humanity every time you take a photo; lose your humanity and you stop being able to judge, to know, to see.'
Griffiths is survived by two daughters, Katherine Holden of London and Fenella Ferrato of New York and Damascus. He never married, reportedly because he 'would never let bourgeois society dictate my behaviour'.
No - not making this one up!! The United Nations has launched an international photography contest celebrating the UN Year of the Potato.
Photographers are asked to submit images relating to potatoes and potato production to highlight the vegetable's role as a source of food, employment and income in developing countries. The competition is being run by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and Nikon.
Photographers can enter separate professional and amateur categories and submit single digital images or photo stories of four to eight related images, in black-and-white or colour. Participants can submit files by uploading them directly via internet or sending them by normal post on a CD.
The winning photographs will be chosen by a judging panel including Lucy Conticello, Adrian Evans, Steve McCurry, Maria Wood and Francesco Zizola. Winners in the professional and amateur categories will be awarded cash prizes of up to £2000.
New exhibition at National Media Museum, Bradford - until 1 June 2008. Entrance free.
Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Scrapbook exhibition contains over 300 exquisite, small photographs taken by Cartier-Bresson between 1932 – 46.
The photographs, some of the last that he printed himself, represent the most richly creative period in his career and the exhibition contains some of his most familiar and enduring images.
For Henri Cartier-Bresson talking about his work - see links below.
Monday, March 03, 2008
New at The Photographers Gallery Deutsche Borse Photography Prize On until 6th April. Free entrance.
Featuring work by: Esko Mannikko - WINNER
Fazel Sheikh
Jacob Hodlt
John Davies
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Wild East by Chris Gomersall at University of Cambridge Museum of Zoology on Downing Street. Until 17th March.
The show will be a personal account of wildest East Anglia, depicting birds and wildlife from the murkiest mudflats of the Wash to the manicured fields of cereal city.
Opens 7th February until 27th April. Entrance fee applies.
Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) was one of the great figures of early 20th-century avant-garde art, and also one of its most versatile practitioners. After gaining an international reputation as a painter, sculptor and graphic artist, Rodchenko turned to photography in the early 1920s, convinced that it would become the artistic medium of his era.
Fleeting Arcadias contrasts and compares the work of photographers as diverse as Fay Godwin, John Blakemore, Ray Moore, Martin Parr and Chris Wainwright. Martin Parr’s humorous picture of a sightseer at Glastonbury Tor, Beauty Spots, Glastonbury Tor, is in stark contrast to the ominous image of a Nuclear Power Station, in Gateshead , by Chris Wainwright. Keith Arnatt’s series of photographs Pictures from a Rubbish Tip includes a close-up shot of a teabag rotting on a plastic sheet. The highly coloured and decorative quality of the image, obscures the underlying environmental message. Paul Joyce’s atmospheric black and white photograph captures the sheer scale and beauty of the Brecon Beacons.
"Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." Lisette Model
The link below is for an article that was in Newsweek this week and from where I found the above quotation which I think most photographers would agree with. Anyway the article is called
Seeing is Believing Until 27 January 2008 Seeing is Believing explores photography's strong relationship to the non-rational, the unknown and the ethereal. It brings together vintage photographs from the archive of the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature, with work by seven international artists who share a fascination for the unexplained.
Antonie d'Agata: Insomnia Until 27 January 2008 Considered one of a new breed of Magnum photographers, Antoine d’Agata’s images appear to exist between time and space in an alternately bleak, painterly and carnivalesque atmosphere. From his native Marseilles to New York, Mexico and Central America, d'Agata has drawn from over 10 years of travelling as the inspiration for his photography.
Lee Miller in The Print Sales Gallery Until 3rd February 2008 Celebrating the centenary of one of the most significant contributors to the history of photography, Print Sales exhibits the work of Lee Miller.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Nick Waplington at Whitechapel Laboratory, Aldgate East, E1 12 December 2007 - 20 January 2008 Admission free www.whitechapel.org
For the Whitechapel, he has created an installation which continues this investigation, leading from the Gallery out into the streets of Whitechapel. Nick Waplington is an amazing photography who came to prominence with his project 'Living Room'. This is a fantastic opportunity to catch his work in exhibition.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Ageless Snapshots Photographer Robb Kendrick demonstrates the making of tintype portraits. This is a fascinating video and a real insight into large format and historic processes in photography.
