Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery are calling for entries into the anual Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize.

As I visited the show for the 2012 winners in London (I posted on the exhibition earlier in the blog) and didn’t actually think it was anything spectacular I thought I may as well enter. Not expecting to win or even close of course but I thought I would enter my favourite of the work I have just completed. The image of the lovely Jo Last.

It only cost £25 which is nothing for the small possibility of your work ending up in the National Portrait Gallery! And there is always the minute prospect of £12,000…

White Cloth Gallery: Bowie Lyrical Artwork competition

The white cloth gallery are currently holding an exhibition to coincide with their current Duffy David Bowie exhibition.
The exhibition itself is an amazing collection of work. I’m a huge Bowie fan so having this work available to us in Leeds is exciting!

These images are a few of my favourites from the exhibition. I would definitely recommend checking it out!

Going back to the competition, the White Cloth Gallery have given a selection of Bowie lyrics for prospective artists to choose one of and create a piece of work to reflect it.

I have chosen: “Drifting into my solitude, over my head” Sound And Vision

I have a few ideas but nothing too constructed yet. Ill keep you posted…

Final images for my exhibition: Getting Late

I wanted to post all of my images for my final exhibition. Now on show at Holy Trinity Church Leeds until the 1st June.

These images are all displayed with the audio from the interview for each subject.

Above is the video which I displayed separately to ask the ultimate question of “Are you afraid of death?” to the subjects.

All of these images were taken on my Kiev 88 medium format camera using the Arsat 2.8mm lens, no hood. I wanted to use natural light in all of my images so made sure each of my subjects were near a window.
All ll images were scanned in and edited digitally using photoshop to adjust tones very slightly and remove any dust. I really like how no two images are the same, I feel this reflects the idea behind the work that no two people experience death and grief identically. Everyone has very different experiences in life and to reflect individual personalities I decided to edit the images minimally and use the ones that caught the most of what I know of the subjects to be “them”.

There are a few light flares and overlapping of film issues in the images but consider all as happy accidents. Again, I feel it nicely reflects the idea of individuality in experience.

Contact Photo Festival goings on…

The organisation for the festival requires quite a bit of attention, naturally. The members of the course have been taking on various tasks to make sure the whole thing comes together successfully. With various social media platforms being ran, promotional material to be designed, media to contact and maps to be drawn out, everybody is busy.

 

This map for the locations was created by course member, Lucy Newman. She also created the whole brochure and a couple of posters which will be displayed around Leeds and it’s Universities. 

I had some information from Scott, the creative director for Arts@Trinity, that there was a Leeds University Union Music Society concert on the same night as my opening night in the next room so I got in touch.

I spoke with Anna, the Chamber Music manager, and we decided to forge an alliance to promote one another around the city and in Universities. I sent her my own personal exhibition poster and the Contact Photo Festival poster. 

To increase promotion of the festival I have also arranged for a A0 poster, both my own and the festival poster, to be displayed outside the Holy Trinity Church right next to an entrance/exit to the new Trinity shopping centre. Hopefully this helps to draw in more of a crowd! 

My own images have come together nicely. They will be displayed accompanied by the conversation had with each individual subject on the topic of death and grief. Headphones will be provided with each image so to allow the viewer feel a stronger, more personal connection with each subject. 

I will update again soon with further updates on exhibition preparations!

FORMAT international photography festival, Derby. 8th March – 7th April 2013

The FORMAT festival, Derby is a bianual event. Work is spread throughout the city and can be enjoyed for a month. All sorts of talks and various events are held  but we were only there for a few hours so had to rush around to see what took our fancy.

We began at the QUAD to see the exhibition by Erik Kessels, Album Beauty. The work consisted of an enormous collection of found family album images. This is the description of the work as found on the FORMAT website:

“Album Beauty, an exhibition of found photographs curated by Erik Kessels, is an ode to the vanishing era of the photo album. Once commonplace in every home, the photo-album has been replaced by the digital age where images are now jpegs and live online and in hard drives. These visual narratives are testament to the once universal appeal to document and display the mundane. Often a repository for family history, they usually represent a manufactured family as edited for display. The albums speak of birth, death, beauty, sexuality, pride, happiness, youth, competition, exploration, complicity and friendship.”

I enjoyed how the work was exhibited. It was almost as if you had stepped into a giant album. The whole thing was very interesting. I particularly liked the blown up prints of which you could sift through at your own leisure.

We then moved on to The Chocolate Factory. Janet Delaney’s work was the first to grab my attention.

“I Am Your Address Of Happiness is a project which investigates the place where the past meets the future in India. 90% of India’s economy is built on independent workers. As Wal-Mart and globalised commerce enters the economy, a long established workforce will be dismantled. The guards of Delhi represent a sector of that vulnerable workforce.”

The image above was my favourite, though I enjoyed the whole series. her images speak volumes of the current issues surrounding jobs under pressure in a growing country.

The artist I was hoping to see was also situated at The Chocolate Factory, Edward Burtynsky and his series, China. Unfortunately only one image was on display but the large print captured me enough to be satisfied.

“In Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Burtynsky focuses his camera and artist’s eye on the human servitude and control needed to produce food on a factory basis, in which cost is the defining factor.”

The work looks at the manufacturing industry in china, focusing on the vastness of the industry, its cheap labour and costs. Burtynsky captures the industrial landscapes of the world in his visually time consuming (in the best possible way) images. I could stare at any of Burtynsky’s work for hours.

There was much other work but nothing that really grabbed my attention. though a lot of the work was displayed in some interesting ways. Overall a great variety of work on show across the city and well worth the trip down.

Joeri Bosma

I have just come across this self portrait from artist, Joeri Bosma. This young, dutch photographer took part in the whole take a photo ever day for a year thing on Flickr.com.

 

I love this.

Contact Photo Festival, Leeds.

My latest work to be displayed at Holy Trinity Church, Boar Lane, Leeds.

This work is part of a collection of students displaying their photography across the city in various locations.

You can view all the participants work on these various platforms:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ContactPhotoFestival

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Contact_Leeds

Katrina Gwynne-Jones Blog: http://katrinagwynnejones.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/contact-leeds-photo-festival/

“The inevitable summoning of death is an evaded topic today in our culture. We frequently choose to neglect and suppress emotions encompassing death by allowing a small period of time to grieve as we must “get on” with our busy lives. In reality, a death can have an ever lasting effect on your own life but if approached positively and you allow yourself to grieve appropriately, time will heal.

This work aims to address emotions surrounding death and influence a healthy recognition of grief.”

@contact_leeds
@artsattrinity

 

Exhibition space confirmed!

After thinking that I might end up with nowhere to display at all, I luckily ended up securing a spot at Leeds Holy Trinity Church. A beautiful building now run by Arts @ Trinity, providing leeds with various creative displays and events. Unfortunately the main room was already booked but the cafe at the back was free. Such a building seems to bare quite a bit of relevance to my somewhat morbid topic of death and grief so I snapped up the opportunity. It has great promotional opportunities for me and the festival due to its location, right next to an entrance/exit to the new Trinity shopping center so with a bit of luck, a few people may wander in to see my work. 

The work is designed to raise awareness of a subject I feel we all need to consider more openly and hopefully some people will benefit from the work positively and come to realisations of inevitability and be more at one with this matter.

The team from arts@trinity have been amazingly helpful, great bunch of people and very kindly asked me to exhibit the work for 3 weeks.

Contact festival promotion.

I have been working along side course mates to promote our exhibitions which all contribute to the anual Contact Photo Festival.

Two people, Liz and Carl, set up the facebook and twitter and we are all helping to promote it through these social platforms. By uploading images and various posts about the ongoings of our working process for final images we hope to generate a healthy following.

https://www.facebook.com/ContactPhotoFestival
https://twitter.com/Contact_Leeds

UPDATE:

149 likes on the facebook page
254 followers on the twitter page

Working with natural light indoors

 

 

 

 

A few photos I took playing around with minimal natural light indoors.