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 …
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 …
By way of an introduction to the conference Rethinking Early Photography held at Lincoln University earlier this month, Prof Larry Schaaf presented a lecture called ‘The Damned Leaf: Musings on History, Hysteria and Historiography’. In the whirlwind speculation that swirled around this particular photograph, which had come up for auction in 2008 as part of …
Back from a trip to Germany, having made the Gernsheim exhibition at the REM in Mannheim the primary stopping point, I found myself popping in to the MMK in Frankfurt before flying home. Here, Rineke Dijkstra has been given free rein of the entire jumpy triangulated space and its contents, to produce a solo show …
On to the National Gallery’s Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present, where the language of borrowed symbolism from art, or classical and biblical literature opens the door on a style which might be called iconic relating. Here, the influence of the fine art tradition is presented as the “engine for early photographic innovation, and …
