[A celebration of the Sunday Times Magazine reaching 50 years of publication.]
The Sunday Times Magazine – 50 Years
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Author Archives: Francis Hodgson
David Hockney – Moving Away from Photography
[There is a considerable buzz in London about a David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy.]
The New Pictorialism
[Way back in the nineteenth century a rift split photography. On one side were those who self-consciously wanted to make art out of it, and who pursued effects of various kinds. Ranged against them were the Moderns, who believed that the camera’s technology made an aesthetic of its own, and who admired only plain photography. By and large, the Moderns won, and the other camp – let’s call them Pictorialists – have had to retreat, but they have never disappeared.]
Claire de Rouen
I learn that Claire de Rouen has died. For years she ran the Zwemmer bookstore devoted to photography in the Charing Cross Road. In the mid 1990s, she was instrumental in my setting up a gallery in an unused Zwemmer building. She helped lots of people like that, with boundless enthusiasm and warmth and real care for the medium and people who believed in it as she did. Latterly she ran a wonderful specialist bookshop above a sex bookstore in the same street, a tiny place which you could treat as a library as long as you had the right stuff in her eyes. Claire did more for photography in the UK than legions of second- and third-rate teachers, more than many photographers, and arts administrators and curators, and publishers, too. Claire was a huge person, and she’ll be hugely missed.
Tomio Seike – Overlook
Simon Roberts – We English
Edgar Martins – The Time Machine
[Contains among other things the beginnings of a discussion on pretension in the way we talk of photographs.] Continue reading
Sanctuary – Gregory Crewdson
Every so often, a piece I write for the paper (the Financial Times) is not printed for one reason or another. From time to time I will salvage one and print it here. This was a review of a January 2011 exhibition at White Cube of Gregory Crewdson’s Sanctuary. I don’t think the show is currently visible, but the book was published by Abrams in 2010. Continue reading
John Beasley Greene (1832 – 1856)
A striking group of photographs comes up for sale next week which merits wider attention than it is likely to get.
John Beasley Greene (1832 – 1856) was an American archaeologist based in Paris. As a glance at his dates will show, he died shockingly young, yet not before leaving a quite remarkable body of work. The website of the Getty Museum furnishes this simple information: Continue reading
Michael Wolf – Tokyo Compression Revisited
A middle-aged man with freckles leans his head forward. His eyes are shut. We can just make him out him through a spray of moisture on the glass which divides him from us. A simple frame on our left curves gently around the top of his head, but it’s metal; it gives him no comfort. He looks in pain. He’s a worry to a viewer, a bit of a frightener.
Francis Hodgson 