The unnapointed guardians of morailty

A great quote from the legendary John Morris:
"The Picture Editor is the voyeurs' voyeur, the person who sees what the photographers themselves have seen but in the bloodless realm of the contact sheet... and now pixels on the screen. Picture Editors find the representative picture, the image that will be seen by others perhaps around the world. they are unwitting (or witting, as the case may be) tastemakers, the unnapointed guardians of morality, the talent brokers, the accomplices to celebrity. Most important - or disturbing - they are the fixers of 'reality and of 'history'.".......
John G Morris

Dave Wyatt

Last Saturday during the Cultivate Reviews (Organized by the Rhubarb folk) held at LCC I was lucky enough to see the work of Dave Wyatt, Dave recently finished his MA at Dalian Medical University in Dalian, North East China. He showed me a couple of projects, the following images are from Captive, images from Dalian Forest Zoo..."Our relationship with the natural environment has always been a fragile one and this is best exemplified by our need to encage and exhibit animals in zoos. On the one hand, zoos offer a valid opportunity for education for the young to learn about the animals they cannot see and yet their future actions serve to protect....
"By seeing these animals in the flesh it helps people relate to the animals they hear about in the wild facing extinction unless they adapt their consumption...."
"On the other hand holding any animal captive, including the process of breeding them for captivity surely cannot be argued to be anything but morally corrupt...."
"The portraits of the animals of Dalian Forest Zoo presented in this project depict not only the physical and mental situation of the zoo’s inhabitants but also allude to how the Chinese people are embracing the rapid transformation of their country. Importantly the work also addresses my own feelings of isolation living in a country as foreign as China for someone of British origin. This isolation I felt on an individual level is very similar to how the Chinese as a population feel as a country that only within the past 30 years since the end of the cultural revolution is starting to find its own voice in the world..." Dave Wyatt

Thunderbolts Way

Excitingly David Gray's new book is available,again from the series The Dreams That Day Break and I should have copies in the gallery very soon, as usual they come with a 10"x8" print are are typical of David's Fictitious photographic story telling...

"Thunderbolts Way is both real and imagined. It straddles the last few
kilometres of the habitable interior of New South Wales, a place where soft
tarmac dives for cover under the hot tundra of red dust and parched grass.
Where global capital meets the Kelly gang legend, where Melbourne Cup
winners are bred and a gambler’s dreams begin...." David Gray

New Cliches in Photography

This is quite funny from the Manchester Photography Blog, read it all here...
My favorite has to be:
Cliche #2: Mounds and Heaps

Work in Progress: Caroline Molloy

Here are some examples of Caroline Molloy’s work in progress from India:
"Over a number of visits I have been researching and photographing traditional photographic studios in Kerela, which were once an integral part of the venacular language of studio photography, steeped in both tradition and a colonial history.
With the introduction of modern technology, they are now rapidly becoming remnants of a time gone by...."These static pictorial spaces, now more or less ornamental, were symbolic of an idealised ‘fantasy’ background and a preferred space to record the ‘inspirational’ portraits. My intention is for the spaces void of sitter to act as a portrait in their own right.."

David Raymond Conroy

I greatly recommend going to see an exhibition that opened last night at Seventeen Gallery in London, its a show by artist David Raymond Conroy entitled It Was Part of It Before. And Now. Not exclusively Photography by any means but the work brings up some interesting thoughts regarding the re contextualizing of imagery... Well worth a look.... The Piece below is titled A History of Photography

Aeroplanes #4 David Moore

David Moore is most recently known for his project The Last Things, which became a book published by Dewi Lewis and also a touring show, recently though I came across another earlier project Planes, The below excerpt is an edited version of what David writes on his website here:

“I flew into New York JFK airport from London on the 10th of September 2001, arriving around 10 pm. An electrical storm lumbered and raged as cabs poured passengers into Manhattan leaving a wash of recent storm water flooding the sidewalks all the way downtown. It was warm with flickers of cool air and the unpredictable atmosphere was brought closer by jet lag and the bewilderment of stepping off a seven hour flight into this.

After 9/11, I stayed on in the city for ten days not photographing much at all, it didn’t feel like my job and there was too much of that going on already. I returned to London late September then went back again to New York in early November; Though the city smelt the same as it did in late September, all fused electrics and burning dust, everything was different.

Back in London; and continuing to this date, I have made more and more photographs of these planes, generally from the same place, and at the same time of year, near where I used to live in East London. The holding pattern on ‘westerly operations’, takes all incoming Heathrow aircraft over Hackney, Islington, The City, Westminster and most everywhere else over London and its populace.

The aircraft in these photographs, their altitude, fragility and commercial purpose, their routes over our lives, now offer us an altogether more ambivalent identity. The most banal yet beautiful modern objects.

European Fields comes to HOST!

22 players, no spectators and maybe a horse in the next meadow....
It has been well over a year in the making but finally and excitingly Hans van der Meer's show at HOST is upon us, we open the show on the 22nd October and on the 23rd Hans will be giving a talk about the work...