Sometimes conversations with photography coalesce in a place: an exhibition here, a commission there, a publication to seal the moment. For me, this has recently happened in Oxford. Earlier this year, I was invited to speak at the seminar series for the Bible in Art, Music, and Literature hosted by Trinity College; and last month …
On a Thursday in Lent, I found myself at Chelsea College of Art, in their Banqueting Hall, for an evening performance/service by Mark Dean, Pastiche Mass. Supported in his position as Chaplain at the College, Mark presided over a service that included the invitation to receive communion, as well as the traditionally sung elements such …
Catching the last days of this exhibition at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, I went to see David LaChapelle’s Good News for Modern Man in October this year. Not quite a retrospective for the photographer, the show concentrates on his fine art photography with oversized tableaux prints produced in bold, searing, colours and drawing …
A brief holiday review here, with the chance discovery of the Festival Pil’Ours in France: an outdoor, multi-site exhibition of work by ten female documentary photographers across the region of St Gilles Croix de Vie. It’s a fitting reflection of the holiday mode that sometimes we encounter photography incidentally, without seeming to connect with its …
The Pallant House Gallery is showing the touring exhibition Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by Her Artworks, until 16th September (previously at the Tate St Ives, and continuing to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 2nd October – 9th December). The display of over 80 female artists, from 1854 to the present day, nominally explores the inspiration …
Feminist photo lines at the Pallant House Gallery Read More »
It’s a commonplace to find photography and the Bible linked through particularly simple illustration: if you pick up any modern guide to the Bible, you’ll invariably find a book or website with photographs of the landscape of Palestine and Syria, or of its flora & fauna, or of archaeological remains. Occasionally an image might zone …
Reading between the Bible lines in Tacita Dean’s desert Read More »
Overall winner and Photographer of the Year at this year’s Sony World Photography Awards is Alys Tomlinson for her series Ex-Voto. A British winner for the first time in ten years, Tomlinson presents a series of black and white photographs across the genres of portrait, landscape, and still life exploring the geography and legacies of …
The perspective of pilgrimage at the Sony World Photography Awards Read More »
2 weeks’ holiday on Hayling Island in April afforded me the first opportunity to go and visit Julia Margaret Cameron’s home on the Isle of Wight. Named Dimbola Lodge after Dimbula in Sri Lanka, where her husband’s business in tea and coffee plantations had taken her in the 1840s, Dimbola was her family home from …
Tribe is a photography exhibition currently on display at the Fox Talbot Museum, Lacock (3rd February – 20th May 2018). A group exhibition of 7 US women artists, the impetus behind the work is given its manifesto in the words of curator Lori Vrba: We are earnest American Women of Photography walking in the footsteps …
The season turns, and it’s time to re-emerge again in a more public frame for practice and research. It has been two years to the week since the last blog post, in which I declared a ‘going-to-ground’ period on arrival in Lacock, Wiltshire. The characteristics of such a long withdrawal are far from being blank, …
