Difficult to get enthusiastic about the physical exterior of the NEC, the national exhibition centre conveniently located in the centre of the UK and so accessible by rail and car without too much difficulty. Nor really much to enthuse over at The Photography Show 2017 inside Hall 5. Some talks about techniques, motivational speakers and many gadgets and hardware. There are stands of the makers of prints and then the exhibitions of finished prints which have been laboured over by fellow photographers. It seems a pity that so little attention is given to them but images have become cheap, not just in cost to produce.
Was it worth the day trip outside the M25? Yes I flashed my card a couple of times in response to some juicy discounts but it's the chats with people that have been the value in my trip, chats with suppliers, face to face meetings with a couple of friends and serendipitous browsing which has maybe stimulated some ideas to move my photography forwards.
Take a View - Landscape Photographer of the Year at London Waterloo
A couple of dozen landscape photos in nice prints on display at The Balcony at London Waterloo railway station. I particularly liked the Urban View category; recognition of how much urban landscapes figure in our day-to-day visual experience.
The exhibition is dominated by views but I noted a number of techniques: long exposure, subtle HDR, monochrome, colour and geometry. A couple of images featuring people in the landscape, which I find refreshing as it both gives scale and changes a “view” to a “moment”. Some very successful images in square format as well as the expected horizontal rectangle “landscape” format; extreme panoramics appear to be out of fashion. I don’t recall any entirely abstract images and not much metaphor in evidence although a couple of photographers pulled the “Your View” category in this direction.
It’s been a long while: this exhibition is the welcome return to The Camera Club's Gallery 1885 of the exhibition of the Male Figure Group with their 11th Male Nudes photographic exhibition. The evident comfortableness of the models with the photographers must surely be because the majority of the images shown were made at the relaxed studio of The Camera Club in Kennington, south-east London.
The quality of the photographs shown is excellent, nearly forty interesting and varied images despite the well-known challenge of creating a new style within the bare-all, in-yer-face format of the Male Nude.
Artist Richard Dickson with his work No Rehearsal, featured in the window of Camden Image Gallery, packed with visitors for the opening night of the collective installation Indelible - NFTL Art 2016. It’s a striking and uncompromising piece in stoneware and copper placed to lead the eye in to the packed gallery featuring another distinctive show of just under fifty new pieces by Nude For Thought London, a loose collective formed in 2012. The pieces in the collective installation are thoughtful, exactly as the group's title suggests, the topic for the group's rhetoric is the human form and so clothing does not figure.
Public displays in the square outside Brighton Library show it’s Brighton Photo Biennial time again, a month of events and exhibitions both for the official Biennial and for the Fringe. The headline images on the publicity remain challenging to the eye and demand thinking through: as well as enjoying the work of some major photographers (in exhibitions which are free to visit) I’m looking to see how much we have moved on from the idea (aka “concept”) of an image is more important than how attractive it is to the eye.
See also