Street searching
Saturday, March 30th, 2013 I’m always looking for ideas and great places to shoot. It’s been so grey and cold for so many weeks, I have been researching online rather than getting out there.
When you get a bit of sun through, it brings everything to life and there is nothing like seeing people and places for real.
Laura Letinsky
Thursday, January 31st, 2013
The Photographer’s Gallery are showing Ill Form and Void Full, the new series by Letinsky. The still life works include objects, cut-outs of previously shot and printed subject matter and found magazine images. The resulting large format prints are so subtle of light and colour it’s hard to believe they weren’t painted. Whispers of Sellotape holding pieces of paper in place are visible only through textural change.
My favourite image is a dented, white paper cup hit by light in a sea of grey. Above is Untitled #37 from ‘To Say It Isn’t So’ series, 2006.
Photography from the 60s & 70s
Tuesday, October 9th, 2012
The focus of this exhibition at the Barbican is on human rights and politics. David Goldblatt, the 1st of 12 photographers on show, took very detailed notes at the time and his writing is as interesting as the photographs.
Visually, my favourite work was of Raghubir Singh. Like William Eggleston, he is considered a pioneer of colour photography and the quality of the light and colour in the prints is beautiful. The colours melt into one another in a way that makes me feel nostalgic for film over digital.
This amazing image is Coca-cola by Shomei Tomatsu.
Conversations
Monday, September 24th, 2012
Reading David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous men gave me the idea for Conversations, a series of images shown in the Time issue of 125 magazine. Styled by Georgina Hodson, we shot the story with Georgie Wass and a selection of interesting men – street cast and with agencies.
Hisaji Hara
Saturday, March 17th, 2012
The Japanese photographer has made a series of images meticulously recreating the Balthus paintings of young girls. Relocating the staged scenes to Japan and working in b/w, the photographs have a formal purity rather than the awkwardness of the original paintings. Much is made of the old-fashioned method of multiple exposures Hara uses in the tableaux rather than digital post production, but I think it’s a shame he doesn’t carry that through to silver prints rather than digital archival prints.
His prints are on show at the Michael Hoppen Gallery.
Acne Paper
Monday, March 12th, 2012
Thomas Persson is editor-in-chief and creative director of Acne Paper. Originally from Norway, he has bought a corner of Scandinavia to his East London offices where I found him for a feature in Soma magazine. He was busy preparing to launch the new body issue in NY.
“Fashion is as serious and interesting to us as art, literature, history, philosophy and all the other areas that we present,” says Persson. “Nothing lives in isolation, everything belongs together. The magazine wouldn’t be half as good without the fashion. The fashion brings the ‘now’ and the ‘wow’.”
Click on the right for another photo.
Chocolate eclairs
Thursday, April 7th, 2011
There is no excuse for breaking street casting for tea and chocolate eclairs, but when it looks like this . . .
Bare
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011
We made these bare shots as backgrounds for a Soma shoot featuring Mary Katrantzou dresses. We printed the images out 2m high.
There are more in the series, click on the arrows to see them.