Photography
Bill Knight
We are sitting in the lobby of the National Theatre in the early afternoon waiting for the photocall for Dara to begin. Six or seven photographers, one woman, all dressed in jeans and dark jackets with large camera bags, some on wheels. There is not much conversation. As a relative newcomer I don't normally speak, but on this occasion I venture a remark.“I have seen this play.”After a pause one of the company says, “You're keen.”I explain that I went to a preview. Another silence then, “In one sentence, what's it about?”“It's about Sharia law.”Complete silence.Then Susie arrives and ushers us Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Alice is always with us; the most quoted work of literature, after the Bible and Shakespeare. In fact, Desert Island Discs should probably add Alice to the mandatory Bible and Shakespeare as an automatic inclusion for the survival kit. Now 150 years after the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by a celibate mathematics don at Christ Church, Oxford, real name Charles Lutwidge Dogdson (pictured, below right), there are translations into countless languages, including that of the Australian aboriginals, who historically did not even have a written language.In the past few Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Photographer Rena Effendi’s current exhibition, "Zones of Silence", at London's Mosaic Rooms includes work from four of her recent series, and it’s hard not to see a link between them – displacement. As the exhibition notes explain: these are lives lived in areas of the world that have become invisible.The first room shows work from Azerbaijan-born Effendi’s long study (2006-2012) of life around her native Baku, “Liquid Land”, where refugees from the now distant Nagorno-Karabakh conflict still live improvised lives in the oilfields that surround the city. It arouses strange impressions: there Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This huge exhibition is an awesome and terrifying compilation of photographs of the sites of conflict, and the remnants of wars and conflicts of all kinds – local, civil, short, long, global, technological, industrial and hand-to-hand. Taken from the mid 19th century to the present, the images – hundreds, perhaps even well over a thousand – are oblique and often incomprehensible or unidentifiable without the expansive wall captions. This is a show requiring us to read as well as look. Some of the blandest or quietest imagery turns out to be of landscapes that have witnessed what we Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Printed large in glorious colour is a row of photographs of Russian women wearing bobble hats (main picture and pictured below). There’s a fuzzy red one, a woolly brown one, one with red stripes against black and another with raised white stripes. Seen from behind, these hand-knitted globes look like a newly discovered breed of sea anemone or a display of exotic cacti.An accompanying drawing shows a woman in a bobble hat standing in front of a church whose onion domes are the same shape as her headgear. The drawing is black and white, but the domes of many Russian churches, including Saint Read more ...
Florence Hallett
It is hard to know whether the thematic and stylistic threads running through this year’s Taylor Wessing Prize are evidence of some general shift in approach, or simply reflect the judges’ tastes. In any case, where last year’s shortlist featured stark portraits highlighting the tricky power relationships between photographer and subject, this year’s competition tends towards something gentler and more empathetic – an altogether homelier sort of photography. Submitted by over 1,700 photographers from all over the world, including amateurs, students and well-known professionals, many of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It is an extraordinary scene. John Maloof stands over box after box after box of the belongings of Vivian Maier. They contain photographic negatives, undeveloped film, address labels, receipts, tickets and even teeth. In all, there are around 100,000 negatives and 700 undeveloped rolls of film. Soon after acquiring this material, Maloof scanned some of the photos, put them on the internet and it took off. The formerly unknown Chicago-based nanny and housekeeper became a buzz photographer, compared with greats like Diane Arbus and Weegee.Subsequently, she has been exhibited, prints of her Read more ...
theartsdesk
Chris Christodoulou is the official Proms photographer, writes David Nice. From his uniquely privileged position behind a velvet curtain, he captures the white heat of performance. The official shots roll off the press a couple of hours after the concert, but for the past five years our man in the Albert Hall has supplied theartsdesk with unofficial contraband images of conductors in action.No doubt the presence of only two women in the roster will provoke comment. Blame the Proms for not doing more: the change is happening, but not fast enough. Some of these conductor portraits will make you Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Francesca Woodman killed herself at the age of 22, the biographical fact that colours her work and which it is de riguer to mention. She left behind paintings, it is said, as yet publicly unseen, and literally hundreds upon hundreds of negatives and 800 proofs of black and white pre-digital photography. And since that very early death – and early death, whether suicide, accident, disease or murder has been sometimes seen with rabid cynicism as an outstanding career move – she has, over the past two decades, become something of a cult figure. Or rather her imagery has, collected by the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There’s war in the world outside and much conflict at home in Norwegian director Eric Poppe’s A Thousand Times Good Night. The film is centred in every sense around the poised, taut performance of Juliette Binoche as war photographer Rebecca, whom we first encounter at work in Afghanistan, as she follows the detailed preparations of a female suicide-bomber being prepared for martyrdom. The opening minutes are extremely gripping cinema, quietly understated but no less powerful for that, and raise the question of whether Binoche’s character has stepped over a professional line.But it’s the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
If events in the Middle East, the prospect of the school run or the onset of autumn are conspiring to lower your spirits, then escape to the V&A and immerse yourself in the dreamy elegance of Horst P. Horst’s magical fashion photographs spanning a career that lasted 60 years.One of his most famous pictures (pictured below right: Mainbocher corset © Condé Nast/ Horst Estate) was taken in 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. It's of a woman in a corset – not a promising subject – yet from this banal starting point Horst creates something supremely memorable Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
What makes an exciting “genuine” photographer is fairly simple: what do you see in the photographs? Do they compel you to look at them? How evocative are the images? How interesting are the compositions? These are among the criteria which separate the merely good from the truly great – and who would have expected that there are truly great photographers yet undiscovered, or even some that didn’t want to be discovered? This is the backstory of Finding Vivian Maier, an exceptional and exceptionally compelling documentary co-directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel.It was Maloof’s own Read more ...