Photography
Markie Robson-Scott
When it’s 33 degrees and rising, boarding a ferry in New York has to be a good plan. One of the newest and weirdest of the city’s watery destinations is Governors Island (no apostrophe - it was removed in 1783 when the British, who used it to house His Majesty’s Governors, surrendered it to New York state). It’s just 800 yards and 10 minutes away from Battery Park, with a terminal next to Staten Island’s, though the free ferry only runs on Fridays and weekends, when the island is open to the public. When the last ferry boat to New York leaves at seven - that is when there’s no evening concert Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Life changes at such speed in cities that it seems as if all the world must move at the same pace. Photographs prove otherwise. Looking at the two portfolios of West Country photographs below, you could surely not readily believe that more than a century separates them. James Ravilious's Devonian sheepfarmers and John Wheeley Gutch's Cornish fishermen have worked natural resources for centuries - the fact that the images lie 130 years apart are purely an indication that while technique changes, human interest does not. James Ravilious The son of the renowned engraver and Read more ...
sue.steward
To Futureproof is to ensure that we don’t become technologically obsolete, but keep in touch with as yet undeveloped technologies and exploit those already in the ether. It’s an apt title for this exhibition of work by 16 graduates from the five Scottish university photography departments. That most are already future-proofing themselves is apparent in their diverse approaches to their work.But that leaves those who choose to walk backwards in time, away from the digital world and into the dark room, from phones, camera and pens, screens and keyboards to ancient image-recording methods and Read more ...
sue.steward
International photography festivals are rivalling rock festivals this summer - and rock festivals are featuring photographers. PhotoEspaña (PHE) Madrid beats the lot. Packed with surprise revelations, with central Madrid as the main stage, the fringe all around it, and the whole city involved in the Night of Photography PhotoMaratón, it’s a highly ambitious, even labyrinthine affair.Sixty-nine exhibitions by 379 photographers from 42 countries occupied the city’s elegant state institutions and museums, international cultural centres, a former water tower, and a bank or two. The latter are Read more ...
sue.steward
“There is a tradition of photographing people with Down’s syndrome, but not of positive, strong images of people staring back at you, challenging you to look at them. This exhibition reverses that. The images we produce are not sympathetic or sentimental, but strong and covering all aspects of life, and using contemporary photography to get our message across. We’ve turned the camera 180 degrees and now the former subjects are in control.”
Xanthe Breen, Campaigns Officer for the Down’s Syndrome Association, was talking to me amongst excited exhibitors and their families at the launch of My Read more ...
theartsdesk
Charlotte MacMillan took these exclusive pictures last week of the Bolshoi corps de ballet in class. The pictures brought back memories of his training to English National Ballet's Kirov-trained principal dancer Dmitri Gruzdyev, as he prepares to perform Michael Corder's Cinderella at the Coliseum next month. A regular coach for younger dancers after 17 years in the company, he has a keen eye for the training differences between his native land and his adopted country.DMITRI GRUZDYEV: "Looking at the pictures I see some familiar things from my training - the open shoulders, standing tall, and Read more ...
sarvenaz.sheybany
While most will be familiar with him as an actor, and some will know him also as a photographer and painter, few will be aware of the full extent of the late Dennis Hopper’s artistic practice. Hopper, who died in May of this year, did everything from taking photographs of Dr Martin Luther King Jr during the historic Selma-Montgomery marches through producing oil paintings inspired by the scale of billboards to making pop-art assemblages, abstracts, and painting large-scale figures appropriated from commercial advertising.But then Hopper was always a terribly tricky person to pin down. While Read more ...
judith.flanders
Camille Silvy may be the least recognised of all the great photographic innovators of the 19th century. After a decade of almost ceaseless technical innovation, and astonishing output as the society portrait-photographer of the 1860s, he abruptly closed his London studio, aged only 34, returned to France, and, after a brief stint in the garde mobile in the Franco-Prussian War, spent much of the rest of his life in and out of asylums. It has been suggested that the chemicals used in these pioneering decades of photography caused mental illness; but given his prodigious output - 17,000 sittings Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No need to take your clothes off. You’ve heard of those mass photography events in which Spencer Tunick persuades whole crowds to go buck naked for his lens. Adam Magyar's requirements are not quite so specific. He is asking members of the public to take part in a different sort of mass-participation shoot. Magyar's signature is to create images using the same technology found at the finish line in athletics sprints. His style is to take thousands of photos in quick succession from a single point. Each only one pixel wide, they are lined up side by side in their thousands to form a Read more ...
sue.steward
The fourth Brighton Photography Festival (BPB) has been launched amid dramatic economic hardships, but my money is on it being a roaring success. It will put Brighton on the map as somewhere other than a gay clubbers’ delight and a hen-party hub. The reason for my confidence? The guest curator, Martin Parr. He's a Zelig-like character who spends his life dropping into every photo festival around the world and is the best-known UK photographer on the international stage today, his reputation made through his controversial high-colour documentary photographs and the touring exhibition Read more ...
judith.flanders
One of the most difficult questions to answer is what makes a great performer great? So much that happens on stage takes place in an eye-blink. Dancer A is "better" than Dancer B, but why? Critics talk about "line", about "extension", about how dancers use and shape space. But it is hard to see shapes in words. Now portrait photographer and installation artist David Michalek has, with one deft blow, solved this problem. Plastered over three big screens in Trafalgar Square (and later in the month in Shoreditch), 50 dancers perform five seconds each of dance – five seconds that Michalek then Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Last week I watched a tiny tot being photographed by her father, on a beach in southern Turkey. There was no girlish giggling or splashing about in the sea; rather than a show of carefree happiness, she delivered a studied pose. She assumed an expression of supreme indifference and, with hand on hip and weight on one leg, twisted her body into a seductive coil. The four-year-old was imitating a supermodel! I didn’t see the pictures, of course, but I would still classify this kind of premature sexualisation as child pornography.The American photographer, Sally Mann was accused of kiddy porn in Read more ...