A303 work in progress

one of my favourites from "A Decade in China" by Polly Braden

We went to see Poly Braden's show of photographs of China at the Hua Gallery. It made more sense on the wall than when I'd first seen it in her book - having said that it made me want to go back to the book again. Her use of colour is delightful.

contacts

A303 - work in progress

Large format workshop

Today we had an introduction to using the large format 5X4 camera by Asa Johannesson http://www.asajohannesson.com/ who uses just large format for her work.

 I love the way the whole camera comes to pieces - it all becomes beautifully obvious how it works. Shot portraits on polaroid to experiment with changing the point of focus and DOF using tilt on the lens. There's something about the slowing down and the care and attention to each image that is very appealing.

Abject Poverty / Object Poverty

I remember feeling somewhat queasy when seeing Lee Jefferies grid of photographs of homeless people in the Guardian last month - chatted with S. about it and then forgot it. Madeleine Corcoran's blog post Abject Poverty / Object Poverty here on duckrabbit grapples with some of the crunchy issues - also how a work's meaning is influenced by context. http://duckrabbit.info/blog/2012/02/abject-poverty-object-poverty/

Zarina Bhimji

Met with Laura, Marion and Valerie to see Zarina Bhimji's exhibition of film and photography at the Whitechapel gallery.
The prints downstairs are large and sumptuous while the light boxes and installations upstairs are both densely elusive and searingly pointed in their meanings. But for me it was the films that drew me in - particularly "Out of Blue" 2002 http://www.zarinabhimji.com/dspseries/12/1FW.htm reminiscent of Tarlovsky in its slow rich uncoverings but mostly the sound, it's describing and drawing us into an immersion in the images.

"I’ve never worked with sound before, I’ve always been interested in writing but somehow with sound you can be more atmospheric. You can in writing but it’s dependent on being able to read the English language whereas I wanted the work to reach people who don’t read and write English. Sound is universal and also quite powerful and atmospheric. Sound is used a lot to heal and move people, it’s multi-layered; it’s not definite. I don’t know why I was interested in bad sounds, crow sounds, gun sounds, but I liked them and I listened to those sounds and looked at the picture, and at some stage they came together. A bit like cooking I suppose, you get different ingredients and put them together. But actually the sound is 90% as far as I am concerned in the film because without sound it doesn’t hold in the same way."


Zarina Bhimji 
from an interview from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 20 Number 4 and 21 Number 1, 2002
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/audioarts/cd4_4_transcript.htm

We all find ways of loosing ourselves

Content - Chris Petit

Radio On - Chris Petit

Radio On (1979) by BFIfilms

tools of the trade

Going Analogue -

around London Bridge

Some more street photography this morning around London Bridge.

Radio On

amazingly you can watch the whole film "Radio On" here:
http://www.apieceofmonologue.com/2010/08/petit-radio-on-watch-free.html

I like the framing of the road from inside the car - a shot that in it's iconic nature might just give a hint of road movie - of movement in counterpoint to the static - here and now slices - looking straight across the road - like strata - mining the seams of nostalgia -