This is a non-review of a show which may be good or bad, but which contains some things I like very much and which Londoners don’t get to see all that often. Continue reading
Edgelands
Reply
Category Archives: Photography
The Cloud of Unknowing – The Momentum Series of Alejandro Guijarro
Stanford II , 2012
Alejandro Guijarro, from the Momentum series ,
The Cloud of Unknowing is a well-known fourteenth century anonymous mystical text in Middle English. (As pretentious first sentences go, in a blog on photography, that’s not at all bad, but let it pass). I read it years ago (in a Penguin edition) and not much of it stuck — I hadn’t spared it a moment’s thought since, and would struggle to tell you much about it beyond the title. But it’s such a great title that I’ve carried that around with me. Now I feel I have a use for it. Continue reading
Who Says it’s Good?
Frank Brangwyn, Preparatory study for the Skinners’ Hall Murals, c.1905.
In photography we have no or few shared standards. The camera club virtues (perfection in the craft skills of photography at the expense of any or every notion of expressiveness) are not by any means to be mapped to the virtues aimed at by the members of World Press Photo, artists working in photography, or professional wedding photographers.
It is not, in general, a very controversial thing to say that “we have standards”. It is not awkward to expect that some jobs are better finished than others.
Try to get a little more specific than that, though, and standards are fiercely difficult to apply. Continue reading
An Unexpected Pleasure: Vintage photographs by Mari Mahr
[A piece to accompany an exhibition of works by Mari Mahr in a small gallery in Brighton.] Continue reading
Wide-Ranging Interview
Francis Hodgson is an interviewee in a long and wide-ranging conversation on matters photographic which appeared on Vikas Shah’s Thought Economics in April 2015. http://bit.ly/1JjAcUO .
Another One Bites the Dust
Library of Birmingham photography collections under urgent and pressing threat.
Veronica Bailey, Lectures on Art by Henry Weekes, 1880, from the Hours of Devotion series, (2006)
If you look at the date of today’s post (22 December 2014), you will see that I’d rather be with my family, winding down and gearing up for Christmas. But I can’t. On this occasion, I don’t think it possible to stay silent. Continue reading
Making a Mark
Caroline Fellowes.
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral 8. 2014
Caroline Fellowes.
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral 1. 2014
These extraordinary pictures are by Caroline Fellowes, an artist who lives in France but is represented by a gallery in Derry, in Northern Ireland. They are wonderful things, and I post them today because they happen to sit right in the middle of a number of conversations I seem to be having with increasingly frequency of late. Continue reading
Who Speaks for Photography?
If a museum needs to campaign against the cuts, or a change is mooted in the curriculum for ‘A’ Level study, or a failure in intellectual property law cries out for lobbying in Parliament – who speaks for photography? Continue reading
Ansel Adams in the Bath
[Partly on the curious provincialism that still keeps photography divided into camps.] Continue reading
Three Cheers for Mr. Yo Kaminagai
Open platforms were a civilizing influence, too
A little while ago I published here a little musing about the elegant human-scale double-ting that Paris buses make when in proximity with pedestrians. Today, the letter that I print below arrived, and I think it’s a delight. Continue reading
Francis Hodgson 