Post-modernism (exhibition at the V+A)

Here is a link to the photographic display ...
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/s/signs-of-a-struggle-photography-in-the-wake-of-postmodernism/

OCA informal meeting of students in the South West

M5 Somerset : photo made without my looking through the viewfinder

Thanks to Teresa Milk from Torquay who arranged a meeting of students at the Royal West Academy in Bristol. This is how at 10.30 a.m before the gallery began to fill up, 7 of us (3 men, 4 women) found themselves around a table sipping away at their bevvies and chatting.

The RWA in Bristol with Charity, a statue installation by Damien Hirst, standing outside

I was not sure I would be able to come until more or less the last minute. I had also had reservations about meeting in an art gallery. I am not one of those photographers who wants their work to be taken seriously as art rather I would like it to be accepted as photography; "photography for photography's sake!"

no sign for photography magazines !

Before I arrived at the gallery, I dropped into Smiths, the newsagents, and was struck to see there was no actual mention of photography in their extensive shelves of magazines; the current term is "imaging". This further stirred my concerns about photography as a medium.

a piece of art work in the academy that did interest me!

What would the day be like without a tutor to give some input? It was slightly haphazard as we lost each other on more than one occasion but the RWA is not a big place and there was a natural gravitation towards Papdilo, the cafe there!

Tutors in fact were one topic of conversation. Are they really worth the course fee? Do they earn their keep? It seems tutors do vary quite a bit in the way they respond to their students. There was a feeling that tutors do not go in for personal communication with their students over the practicalities of doing a course and personal issues the students might be facing over caring for a senile parent for instance. Tutors can also be rather brief when commenting on the work of students. Personally, I have got on fine with the tutors I have had although one did send me an introductory letter for a course different to the one I was doing!! I find it has taken me time to get into the mode of studying again.

A part of the course is keeping either a log book or an online blog. At first, I found the software difficult to handle and still find Blogger a bit tricky. Wordpress can be a good alternative; this software is available for download and so one does not have to be online all the time.

Tutors had another criticism thrown at them concerning their criticism of contemporary artists! Martin Parr is a leading UK photographer yet gets criticism as does the doyenne of landscape photographer, Charlie Waite. One can find oneself accused of being too commercially orientated rather than producing one's own work and finding style rather than borrowing it. This strikes me as a bit of a conundrum. I remember once being criticised for producing commercial images that were being used to advertise a holiday; I did not tell the photographer that I had actually made the photographs before the idea came up for the holidays and there were also in black and white, not a usually a choice for for holidays. The photographer happened to be well known and widely respected so I took the criticism on board in a kind of respective way but found myself questioning it too. I guess if you have a Marxist outlook then anything that looks like it might sell is considered inappropriate.

One topic that drew me to the day was UVC (Understanding Visual Communication) a course that I have considered doing. This sounds really interesting but I wonder about studying Mark and Freud; what about Darwin whose thinking is becoming more relevant as science continues to verify his theories? Both Mark and Freud have been discredited by those who have followed in their footsteps. UVC seems intellectual though and not really in tune with the more intuitive approach of photography which happened thanks to scientific theory not aesthetic theorising. Liz Wells writes, "Theory informs practice." yet without practice there would be no theory. Still, UVC is clearly a fascinating line of study and as a photographer I feel the need to understand theory to some extent.

Reading around one's topic can be rewarding even if one does go off at tangents thanks to the mass of available information on the internet.

The Landscape module of photography might seem attractive yet it is also demanding. One needs to photograph the same location at different times of the year and even different times of the day which can be very time consuming.

OCA student informal meet at the RWA: students from left to right -
Theresa and Dorothy then Ushma, Peter,  Sally? and David.

As the conversation continued, I got up and walked around the room to look at the large format inkjet prints on the walls of buildings at night from different places around the world; the cost of one print was £320 and there were a couple of signs to inform one of this but no sign containing the name of the photographer although a man at the entrance to the museum selling tickets to the exhibitions did mention it to me.

sign for The Ballroom Spy exhibition

There was one exhibition I did want to see since it was about dance, a subject I have covered quite extensively in Asia, and also because it also contained paintings of dance; it was interesting to see photographs and paintings hung in the same gallery as part of the same exhibition since the dialogue between these tow art forms has always interested me, largely as a way to define my own photographic practice.

The exhibition was called "The Ballroom Spy" and was about ballroom dancing and the world this particular form of dance encompasses. A lady on duty at the exhibition told me that the two were good friends and admired each others work; in fact, the artist Jack Vettriano uses the photographer's images to paint from. The photographer Jeanette Jones is a trained dancer herself and uses this knowledge to help her make images that relate to particular points in the dance moves.

HABITAT - a chain store that is closing !

the rear view of Charity by Damien Hirst - coins spilling from the collection box
could be seen around the base of the statue and on the pavement outside 

I started my blog at a cafe further up Whiteladies Road

Shaw exhibition at Laycock 1 ; Guardian review by Maev Kennedy

George Bernard Shaw, who frequently posed for his own pictures, often experimented with lighting and early colour printing. Photograph: LSE/National Trust

George Bernard Shaw will be exposed, stripped bare as never before, when the contents of cupboards and drawers, albums and boxes crammed into his last home go on display for the first time – the thousands of photographs that were the Nobel laureate's other great passion in life.

An exhibition of original prints will open at the National Trust's Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock, Wiltshire, on Thursday, while the guardian of Shaw's photographic archive, the London School of Economics, has mounted anonline exhibition as well. Both have astonishing images, including several of Shaw naked, apart from his whiskers.

From 10,000 images, mostly printed by Shaw, Roger Watson, curator of the Lacock exhibition, has chosen a startling self-portrait of the playwright lying on a sofa, lit by a single overhead lamp, naked apart from a strategically placed book. Shaw's long, skinny body could be a medieval tomb carving, apart from the hints in the shadows of a 20th-century background.

"It really is a very striking and unusual image," Watson said. "A more conventional photographer would have cropped the lamp out of the print, but to me that makes the picture. "

Karyn Stuckey, the curator at the LSE who has been cataloguing the vast collection and created the online exhibition, was taken aback when she discovered the image of a naked Shaw bending over to set his camera, reflected in a mirror. "I was ploughing through hundreds of slightly dull prints, and expecting something entirely different to come up next, and I suddenly went 'Whoa, what's that?'"

Shaw, who took up photography in 1898, frequently photographed himself nude, and also posed on a beach as Rodin's Thinker for the actor Harley Granville Barker, but admitted "I merely looked constipated".

Both exhibitions are full of biographical hints for the curious. There are relatively few photographs of men, but many of beautiful and sensuously photographed – if fully clothed – women friends. They include the actor Lillah McCarthy and the even more ravishing Beatrice Webb, co-founder of the LSE with the Shaws and her husband and fellow Fabian, Sidney Webb. His most famous leading lady, Mrs Patrick Campbell, was captured lying in bed. He wrote to her: "I want the lighter of my seven lamps of beauty, honour, laughter, music, love, life and immortality", but the relationship smouldered almost entirely on paper.

There are many photographs of his wife, Charlotte. Long before his writing made him rich, Shaw's money problems were solved by marrying the Irish heiress in 1898. One frank portrait shows her looking trustingly straight to camera: on the back he captioned it "nee Charlotte Payne-Townshend Mrs Bernard Shaw" – then crossed that out and wrote "The green-eyed millionairess".

By the time Shaw died at Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire in 1950, aged 94 – after falling out of an apple tree he was trying to prune – he had accumulated 10,000 prints and more than 10,000 negatives.

The house and contents were left to the National Trust. In 1979 the photographs, still uncatalogued and many on mouldering and potentially dangerous old film, were transferred to the archives of the London School of Economics for safe storage. In a marathon joint LSE and National Trust project all have been conserved, digitised – almost crashing the LSE website – and catalogued over the past two years.

Shaw was typically writing thundering reviews of photographic exhibitions long before he started photograpy. Stuckey and Watson agree that the best were taken with Shaw's earliest cameras, when he was experimenting with lighting and early colour printing, and creating strikingly composed shots that demanded careful planning and minutes of immobility from his subjects, rather than the snapshots he produced when he bought a Leica and began using 35mm film in the 1930s.

A handful of his photographs were reproduced or exhibited in his lifetime, but thousands had never been seen by anyone since Shaw last looked at them.

"He's not perhaps a first-rank photographer, but he's very high in the second rank, at least in his early days," Watson said. "If somebody brought these in and said they were their grandfather's and asked if we would exhibit them, the truthful answer would probably be no. I'd say they'd be lovely to have, lovely to go through the albums, but I'm not sure how many outsiders would come to see them. But as the work of Shaw, they're a different story entirely. I think people will be fascinated."

George Bernard Shaw: Man & Cameraman, will be showing at the Fox Talbot museum, Lacock Abbey, Wiltshire, from 7 July to 11 December 2011