Source Photographic Review: Archive RSS Feed

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Source Photographic Review: Archive RSS Feed

ARCHIVE: RSS FEED

An Online Repository of Articles and Photographic Works drawn from Source's online and print publishing. Spanning more than twenty-five years of photography publishing. Includes: feature articles, editorials, reviews, essays, interviews, portfolios and blog posts. Subscribe to this RSS Feed to stay notified of when this material is made available.

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‘Issue 116 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 28 Oct 2024 16:50:04 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 116 - Autumn 2024

The elements – Earth, Air, Water, and Fire – as described by Empedocles 2,500 years ago, are still relevant categories for thinking about our ecosystem and more particularly the way we are damaging it. As Conohar Scott writes, talking specifically about Fire, our assumption that we could harness combustion for our own ends without any consequences now looks hubristic, in a way that Empedocles would have recognised. Scott surveys the approaches photographers have taken to record uncontrollable fire’s devestating consequences. Holly Birtles is concerned with Fire, Air and Earth as embodied by volcanoes. Her photographic practice incorporates performance and making props. Volcano Mother presents moments from backstage rehearsals and a pseudo theatrical production in which the cast contemplate and practise their role as selected volcanoes. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2025 Selectors: Raquel Villar-Pérez’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Wed, 23 Oct 2025 17:30:15 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

We chat to Raquel Villar-Pérez, Academic, Curator & Writer and Selector for the BA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2025. / Tell us about your day-to-day routine as an independent researcher and art curator? What projects are you working on at present? / I am quite new to this realm of ‘independent researcher and art curator’. I have done independent curatorial projects and writing in the past, but I was also in a full-time job. It feels good being able to focus on the projects and artists that really interest me. In my experience, working independently allows you to develop your ideas and pitching them to initiatives and spaces you want to work with. Then, fundraising. It adds up to a lot of unpaid labour. I feel lucky that, at this point in my life, I have a generous and caring support network that enables me to take this time off full-time employment. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2024 Selectors: Hana Kaluznick’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Thu, 18 Jul 2024 08:32:04 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

We chat to Hana Kaluznick, Assistant Curator, Photography at the V&A and Selector for the MA/MFA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2024. / Tell us about your job? What does your core role at The Glucksman involve? / Across displays, research, conservation, publication, collection building and more, my job is to support the curatorial efforts of the wider Photography section. No day is the same, but my core tasks typically involve managing objects lists, overseeing the administration of new acquisitions, drafting various bits of texts (blog posts, object labels, cataloguing descriptions etc.), and supporting members of the public who wish to access the collection for research or creative purposes. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2024 BA Selections’
by: Darren Campion
Posted: Thu, 25 Jul 2024 10:48:33 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Thu, 25 Jul 2024 10:48:33 EST

While on one level a graduate project is the end of something, closing off a particular period of study, it also marks the start of what will hopefully be a long-term engagement with the possibilities of photography as a creative medium. My selection has been guided by a sense of how the stylistic or visual language that these photographers have evolved for their individual projects is linked in a fundamental way to what they want to talk about. That match is a key element of a successful work for me, that it ‘speaks’ in a way appropriate to the subject, and in doing so expands our understanding of what that subject is. While there are many accomplished projects in this year’s graduate selection, the six that I have chosen strike an interesting, open-ended balance between their thematic concerns and how these are realised visually. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2024 BA Selections’
by: Anne Adesolabomi Nwakalor
Posted: Thu, 25 Jul 2024 10:45:40 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Thu, 25 Jul 2024 10:45:40 EST

The Source Graduate Photography competition has been graced with an impressive array of submissions, showcasing the exceptional talent and creativity of this year's graduates. Each project stands out for its high standard and quality, reflecting a deep personal touch and unique artistic vision. The diversity of topics explored by the photographers adds a rich layer of intrigue and engagement to the collection. From poignant personal narratives to thought-provoking social commentaries, the projects demonstrate a remarkable breadth of subject matter. The sophisticated use of various photography techniques highlights the skills and knowledge acquired through their university education, underscoring the educational excellence and dedication of the participants. I am delighted to be a part of this years selecting panel as it has given me an opportunity to view these captivating and skillfully crafted works that truly embody the spirit of innovation and expression in contemporary photography. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2024 BA Selections’
by: Jilke Golbach
Posted: Thu, 25 Jul 2024 10:41:45 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Thu, 25 Jul 2024 10:41:45 EST

Reviewing the work of this year’s BA photography graduates has been a wonderfully stimulating and eye-opening experience. I was impressed by the wide range of visual approaches, technical skills and forms of storytelling on display whilst also feeling the palpable impact of covid-19 on this generation of photographers who completed their studies in the aftermath of the pandemic. Themes of mental health, illness, domestic space, belonging, loss, grief and melancholy were prevalent among the submissions and testify to photography’s ability to act as a therapeutic medium. In making my selection, I looked for compelling narratives, original visual approaches, a balance between conception and execution, and an overall sense of coherence within the project. My six choices reflect this year’s bold explorations of personal narratives, familial relations, cultural heritage, and connections across borders. I look forward to seeing many of these projects develop further in the future. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2024 Selectors: Chris Clarke’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Thu, 18 Jul 2024 08:32:04 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

We chat to Chris Clarke, Senior Curator, Exhibitions & Collections at The Glucksman and Selector for the MA/MFA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2024. / Tell us about your job? What does your core role at The Glucksman involve? / I am the Senior Curator for Exhibitions and Projects at the Glucksman, University College Cork. My main role is to research and prepare our gallery exhibition programme, working with Irish and international artists as well as galleries, museums and lenders to curate thematic group shows. The Project strand of our programme involves curating newly commissioned solo presentations by artists in off-site locations. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2024 Selectors: Katy Barron’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Thu, 18 Jul 2024 07:20:36 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

We chat to Katy Barron, Festival Director, Photo Oxford and Selector for the MA/MFA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2024. / Tell us about your work and particularly your recent appointment as Festival Director at Photo Oxford? What does your day-to-day routine as a curator involve? / I’ve been Director of Photo Oxford for nearly 6 months and my day-to-day routine is extremely varied. It might include meetings with festival partners who are in charge of the spaces that we hope to use for the festival – such as the public galleries attached to one of the Oxford university colleges or maybe a local museum. Equally, I might be meeting potential sponsors as we need to fundraise for the festival. I spend a lot of time talking to photographers and thinking about the form of the festival and how best to really consider and interrogate the theme. I’m also working with our Comms Team on how to announce the next festival this coming autumn, and how to keep our profile up during this interim period. I’ve initiated some exhibitions and outreach projects in and around Oxford and so these also have to be curated and delivered. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 115 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 17 Jul 2024 11:16:24 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 115 - Summer 2024

Is photography a wounding technology? Not necessarily. Jason Bate has collected stories from the relatives of injured First World War servicemen and discovered that domestic photography played an important role in easing their way back in to family and social life. Carefully including them in the small rituals of photographing significant family events could have a healing effect for someone with severe facial injuries. Deborah Padfield has been using photography to try and visualise chronic pain. Unlike a typical injury, with a known origin, chronic pain causes "a crisis in meaning making" because it has no obvious cause. Working with patients, she has been trying to find a way to represent it and thereby help them articulate their experience of this debilitating and destabilising condition. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: Clinical Photography’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Wed, 10 Jul 2024 07:15:18 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Medical

Separated from its original purpose, in a British twenty-first century charity shop, the 1972 American guide for the practising or aspiring medical photographer is unsettling. With detailed depictions on every double-page spread of wounds and skin conditions in adults and children, the viewer looks deep into the ears and mouths of patients, although rarely into their eyes. Clinical photography, as the book explains, is a rewarding potential career direction for a skilled photographic practitioner; professionally-produced photographs are needed for a range of purposes, from photographs of nursing care and medical apparatus for institutional promotion, through to record photographs for patient case histories and pathological symptoms for teaching diagnosis. It is the latter with which the book is principally concerned, with guidance given on the technical production of requisite images, including matters of hygiene and safety – blood and other fluids spattered onto photographic lamps may cause explosions, it is noted – but also on etiquette for the clinical photographer’s interactions with patients, where “kindly impersonality” is encouraged. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 114 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 15 Apr 2024 09:29:14 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 114 - Spring 2024

The idea of ‘home’ as a place of refuge is a modern one. As Danielle Patten from the Museum of Home explains, it is only in the 20th Century, with greater home ownership, more regulation of working hours and the pervasiveness of modern communication that we come to see our homes as bastions of privacy. With the advent of social media and the experience of a global pandemic that had us working in our front rooms again, perhaps that process is being reversed and our domestic space is becoming semi-public once more. Annie Ernaux and Wolfgang Tillmans in different ways (but with similar photographs) have recorded a particular intimacy associated with our living spaces. They have both photographed discarded clothes, suggesting the recent vulnerability of their wearers. Klara Fritz writes about the way a small domestic untidiness can point to larger philosophical themes of absence. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2024 Selectors: Darren Campion’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Fri, 09 Feb 2024 15:52:12 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

We chat to Darren Campion, Assistant Curator, Photo Museum Ireland and Selector for the BA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2024. / Tell us about your job, what does your core role at Photo Museum Ireland involve? What projects are you working on at present? / I'm Assistant Curator at Photo Museum Ireland. I work as part of the curatorial team with my colleagues Trish Lambe and Tanya Kiang to develop and realise exhibitions at the Museum. Planning involves discussions around how particular works and practices might fit into our artistic programme for a given year, meetings with artists to share new work and talk about prospective shows, as well as managing calendars and budgets. Designing exhibition layouts is also a vital part of working towards an exhibition. The way a visitor encounters the work is a key aspect of its meaning and something we give a lot of attention to. This extends to the framing of the show textually, through the writing of exhibitions texts, press releases, and wall labels, which give visitors an insight into the thinking behind the work we’re showing. Then there is the practical side of curation, which can be anything from scheduling international transport to finding a specific kind of screw. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 113 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Fri, 19 Jan 2024 06:52:18 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 113 - Winter 2023

If you cannot imagine a different world you cannot begin to make it. This is one of the basic principles behind Alejandro León Cannock’s essay about the role photography has in making a better world. It reads as a manifesto for a new model of photography made by photographers who work collaboratively Photography has often been considered unimaginative, a tool that merely captures the world as it is. Claire Anscomb shows the many choices that photographers make, and says that although the medium may have constraints, it is working within these that gives play to the imagination. These arguments about photography and the imagination are being given new relevance as they are applied in similar ways to AI-generated images. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2024 Selectors: Jilke Golbach’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Sun, 14 Jan 2024 16:34:55 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

We chat to Jilke Golbach, Curator, Writer & Researcher and Selector for the BA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2024. / Tell us all about the PhD you've been undertaking and what brought you to this specific area of interest? How much is your current research trajectory informed by photography? / By the time this interview gets published, my PhD should be completed! That is something I have looked forward to for a long time as I started this piece of research nearly ten years ago. All throughout this period, I worked in various curatorial roles (amongst others at the Museum of London and Barbican Art Gallery) and, as much as I loved undertaking my own research project, there were a few times the PhD had to take a backseat so that I could prioritise other projects. Thankfully I had supervisors who let me do this and supported quite a few stops and starts along the way. Probably not the most expedient (or sane!) way of undertaking a PhD but doing it this way did enable me to develop my interests along both an academic and curatorial track, which has been an enormous gift. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: The Carte de Visite Widow’
by: Annette Richardson
Posted: Wed, 29 Nov 2023 11:05:31 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Portraiture

On July 5th 1861, a young woman visited the fashionable London studio of French photographer Camille Silvy to have her portrait taken (Fig.1). Silvy was meticulous in keeping records of clients but on this occasion he initially made a mistake as to his sitter’s identity: recording her instead as the sister who accompanied her, then having to score through his flowing script and write the correct name. What is significant about this incident is not Silvy’s mistake – he had many sittings in a day – but how he identified the woman from her image. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: Beyond Romanticism’
by: Sarah-Jane Field
Posted: Wed, 29 Nov 2023 11:05:31 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Experimental

My relationship with the machine began the moment I did. I slid out of my mother's body with relative ease but was hurriedly popped into an incubator because I was too cold. I survived. And that was the start of our connection. Soon afterwards, my mother and I were carried by the machine through the sky to meet my father waiting in Southern Africa. But not before the machine suspended little moments of us in London, surrounded by geriatric ladies in floral dresses. And there I am again, suspended in time in Cape Town, wearing a feather boa behind some drums. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: Losing Your Head’
by: Sarah Crozier
Posted: Wed, 29 Nov 2023 11:05:31 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Historical

My relationship with the machine began the moment I did. I slid out of my mother's body with relative ease but was hurriedly popped into an incubator because I was too cold. I survived. And that was the start of our connection. Soon afterwards, my mother and I were carried by the machine through the sky to meet my father waiting in Southern Africa. But not before the machine suspended little moments of us in London, surrounded by geriatric ladies in floral dresses. And there I am again, suspended in time in Cape Town, wearing a feather boa behind some drums. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: Hold On’
by: Neva Elliott
Posted: Tue, 28 Nov 2023 12:03:20 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Gender

Our relationship was meant to be casual, an intermittent distraction. The first photograph I took of him was less than a month after we met. That night I dreamt of drowning. In the morning, I photographed his hand lying on his chest, Christ-like, corpse-like, too beautiful to be real or alive. We continued to see each other, more often than planned. I kept photographing him – in his flat, my house, hotel rooms, holiday apartments, forests, the back of my car. Naked, laying bare his human fragility. This is what we do we’d joke, sex and photography. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: What Remains’
by: Liam Etheridge
Posted: Tue, 28 Nov 2023 12:03:20 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Family

The last photo of my mum was taken shortly after she was. The photo is of our hands holding, and it is shut away in a folder where I can’t see it. This is because when I once glimpsed the picture by accident, it put me in a bad mood for days. Nevertheless, I couldn’t simply delete it – it seemed disrespectful somehow, like flushing her ashes down the toilet. So I am stuck with it, tucked away somewhere in the digital recesses of my old laptop. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 112 / Autumn 2023 - Zoom Launch’
by: The Editors
Posted: Fri, 27 Oct 2023 05:09:27 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Event

Join us for the Online Launch of Source Issue 112 - 'Work'. Featuring a live interview with Issue 112 contributors Moira Lovell and Ellie Howard, the launch will explore the impact of new areas of work such as online selling. Hosted by Source Editor Richard West, in partnership with Photo Museum Ireland. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 112 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 18 Oct 2023 10:22:06 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 112 - Autumn 2023

How do you photograph the world of work? In the past, where this involved physical tasks (like unloading ships, see below) perhaps this was obvious, but what about in an office? Then there are the relationships between companies and their employees, once mediated by a foreman or middle manager, now perhaps delineated by a non-disclosure agreement. How do you photograph that? The photographers Anna Fox and Mark Curran and the sociologist of work Rachel Cohen talk about negotiating this evolving environment. Cohen describes the changing nature of work, often part-time, insecure and invisible. Fox and Curran talk about their experience of getting access to workplaces to allow them to photograph. They each reaffirm the importance of work as a subject for photographers. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2023 MA/MFA Phase’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Mon, 21 Aug 2023 10:40:09 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Graduate

Welcome to the MA/MFA Phase of Graduate Photography Online 2023. Source Magazine's showcase for emerging photographic talent from photography courses across the UK and Ireland. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Stockists’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Tue, 15 Aug 2023 06:01:14 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing

A full, up-to-date listing of retail outlets and locations across the globe where you can purchase a copy of the current issue of the print edition of Source, including specialist bookstores, gallery shops and newsagents. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2023 Selectors: Sabina Jaskot Gill’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Wed, 26 Jul 2023 10:13:52 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

We chat to Sabina Jaskot Gill, Senior Curator, Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery and Selector for the MA/MFA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2023. / Tell us about your job? What does your day-to-day routine as a curator involve? / One of the best things about being a curator at the National Portrait Gallery is how varied the job is, no two days are the same. At its core, the purpose of my role is to care for a national collection of photographs, and to grow that collection through new acquisitions and commissions, which means that I’m constantly working with living artists, photographers’ archives and commercial galleries. This is a really exciting part of the job, but I also keenly feel a responsibility to make sure we are developing the collection to be more inclusive and representative of British society today. There are also more practical aspects of collection care embedded in the role such as conservation, cataloguing and digitisation. Photography has a real presence in the Gallery’s programme, so the other main focus of my job is curating exhibitions and displays of photography. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: What’s in a Title?’
by: Francesca Butterfield
Posted: Tue, 25 Jul 2023 12:03:20 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Historical

The 1962 Italian film 'Mondo Cane' is not suitable for all audiences. It is filled to the brim with taboos—some harmless, some not—such as nudity, polyandry, animal cruelty, cross dressing, and violence. Written and directed by Paolo Cavara, Franco Prosperi, and Gualtiero Jacopetti, the film has a runtime of 108 minutes and is comprised of thirty-six Technicolor vignettes shot around the world. Despite being denounced as low-brow exploitation and 'shockumentary', 'Mondo Cane’s' box office success is a testament to the power of the masses.(1) It was used internationally as the model for a throng of successive films that featured graphic content under the guise of factuality. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: Mandy O'Neill's Photograph of Diane’
by: Oana Sânziana Marian
Posted: Mon, 24 Jul 2023 10:35:03 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Portraiture

I don’t know Diane, but when I catch her gaze at eye level (as the photographer Mandy O’Neill captured her), there’s a complicated pain I haven’t felt since I was a teenager. But first, the photograph: Diane, a young woman of 17-18, standing, wearing a school uniform – white button-down shirt, navy-blue tie with thin diagonal stripes of maroon, yellow and green – against a featureless light blue background. There’s something retro, and institutional, about it: the pastel backdrop of school portraits in the 80’s and 90’s, when I was coming up. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: Smile Though Your Heart is Aching’
by: Xaver Könneker
Posted: Fri, 21 Jul 2023 04:28:09 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Forensic

Before Carole’s smile became an object of study to be forensically examined in a mortuary, she lay dead in her English council estate apartment for over two years. Her body was slowly withering away in front of the flickering lights of a television that was left running the whole time. It was an automated payment system that, on behalf of benefit agencies, transferred half of her rent every month to the Metropolitan Housing Trust, leading officials to believe that she was still alive. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: The Body of Ulrike Meinhof’
by: Chris Milton
Posted: Fri, 21 Jul 2023 02:18:22 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Police

Victors displayed the heads of the vanquished upon pikes, held aloft for yokel delectation and warning. This photo of Ulrike Meinhof, taken shortly after her suicide in the Stannheim prison mortuary in 1976 for police archives, leaked to the press by a police photographer to 'Stern' magazine, was intended to signal a victory and serve as deterrent to the public. But on its own terms, it fails. How could it not make the viewer question just what could have pushed this famously fervent, iron-willed woman to the point of self-murder? What they did to her? Whether it was indeed suicide and not murder? It is an image that sabotages itself through its very squalor. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: Bad Photography’
by: Jimi Cullen
Posted: Thu, 20 Jul 2023 04:32:08 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Nature

The Scottish poet William McGonagall died in 1902, but is celebrated to this day, with dinners and events held in his memory well into the 21st century. Yet by every formal standard, McGonagall was a terrible poet. His work doesn’t scan, with lines of wildly varying rhythm and length, and he sacrificed imagery, metaphor, and meaning in service of painfully simple rhymes. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2023 Selectors: Cynthia MaiWa Sitei’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Mon, 17 Jul 2023 14:22:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

We chat to Cynthia MaiWa Sitei, Artist & Creative Producer and Selector for the MA/MFA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2023. / Tell us about your job? What does your day-to-day routine as a curator involve? / I am the curator at Ffotogallery Wales which is the leading photography and lens-based media organisation in Wales. Our work primarily involves supporting visual artists in and from Wales as well as Internationally – including giving artists a platform to use us as a channel to share their ideas and engage in discussions and conversations with the audience through their practice. Recently my day-to-day has been quite exciting and has involved a lot of work travels, internationally engaging in conversations about curation and learning along the way. But usually, my day-to-day involves a lot of research, working on funding applications, portfolio reviews and meetings including admin work such as responding to emails and connecting with artists and educators. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2023 BA Selections’
by: Taous Dahmani
Posted: Fri, 14 Jul 2023 12:12:00 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Fri, 14 Jul 2023 12:12:00 EST

I have selected these six young artists/photographers — You Liang, Matilda Baxendale-Kirby, Amber Gent, Heather S. Roberts, Rica Tumanguil, Maya Brasington — because they all have a unique visual language and a strong sense of conceptualisation. Most of the projects selected evolve in the space of identity politics; and most of them use the photographic medium as a way to explore ideas around nationality/heritage/diaspora and do so always at the intersection at gender/race and even ability. These young photographers all seem to be in the process of crafting and shaping their own subjective feminist lens to tackle their subject of interest. Whatever the genre or style, they are all irreverent in the best way possible. Inspired by the history of their medium, yet non-conformists, I feel like they will all be able to further develop their practice into sustained and solid photography-based paths. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2023 BA Selections’
by: Sebah Chaudhry
Posted: Fri, 14 Jul 2023 12:01:00 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Fri, 14 Jul 2023 12:12:01 EST

I was grateful to be asked to be on the selection panel for Graduate Photography Online 2023. Having been a jury member on different prizes, I am glad I am able to see the work of so many students and be able to make a selection for Source Magazine. I really enjoyed viewing the submissions from the BA Graduates. As well as seeing the difference in everyone’s work, it was interesting to see similar themes emerge throughout the UK. These students spent the first and some of second year in lockdown, and it will have had an impact on their learning. To see such high quality work, even though they have been through Covid, was a testament to their hard work. It was also good to see less projects explored Covid, and though this is something in the not so distant past, it will not control the future. I wish all the students the best of luck in their careers! . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2023 BA Selections’
by: Chris Boot
Posted: Fri, 14 Jul 2023 12:01:00 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Fri, 14 Jul 2023 11:48:00 EST

What came across strongest to me through all the entries was the sense of students exploring their environments through their photographs – feeling their way around the world visually, experimenting, discovering (as Gary Winogrand once said) what things look like when photographed. There is a lot of darkness and human fragility here, and quite a lot of the work speaks to experiences of isolation, which seems appropriate, perhaps inevitable, given COVID and the effects of lockdown. But the prevalence of introspective observations made me hanker for joy - pictures and projects less concerned with our interiority and more with uplifting viewers, looking outward. Choosing only six series to single out feels tough, perhaps random, when the overall standard is so high. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 111 / Summer 2023 - Zoom Launch’
by: The Editors
Posted: Fri, 14 Jul 2023 05:00:23 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Event

Join us for the Online Launch of Source Issue 111 - 'Emotion'. Featuring a live interview with Issue 111 contributor David Bate, who in his feature - 'Where is the Emotion in Photography?' - explores the overall theme of the magazine. He considers the emotional aspects of the production of photographs, their reception and their content. In doing so, he looks at the history and theory of portraiture, going back to the Renaissance and up to contemporary advertising. Hosted by Source Editor Richard West, in partnership with Photo Museum Ireland. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 111 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 21 Jun 2023 10:33:54 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 111 - Summer 2023

A significant part of our contemporary communications infrastructure is dedicated to the circulation of photographs of cats, apparently because of the way they make us feel. But cats themselves have an exceptionally limited range of expression, so where are these feelings coming from? Julia Tanner explores this paradox. In fact, the question of how emotions are bound up with images can be confusing. Looking at photographs can prompt an emotional reaction and photographs can be made to convey a feeling. Photographs might depict an emotion. But are these the same thing? Is showing an emotion the same as sharing it? David Bate disentangles these different relationships between pictures and the way we feel about them. Wiebke Leister’s research explores the intersections between photography and theatre and what this might bring to bear on questions about authenticity and artificiality. In recent research Leister has become interested in Japanese Noh Theatre and how she might transpose non-representational elements from it to develop an understanding of photography that is not characterised by being a representation or imitation of the real world. Leister’s portfolio comes out of the performance of 'Echoes and Callings', which was performed at the Noh Reimagined festival. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 110 / Spring 2023 - Zoom Launch’
by: The Editors
Posted: Fri, 31 Mar 2023 06:17:22 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Event

Join us for the Online Launch of Source Issue 110 - 'Knowledge'. Featuring a live interview with Issue 110 contributor Morwenna Kearsley and a discussion about our Writers’ Prize and forthcoming Publication Opportunity Day. Hosted by Editor Richard West in partnership with the Gallery of Photography Ireland. We often believe that photography imparts us with knowledge. Morwenna Kearsley’s series, 'Notch Code', presents a catalogue of precisely photographed objects. The objects resemble the contents of a museum display cabinet but they are each titled as if from a folk tale. Morwenna will introduce the series and discuss the questions it raises about the relationship between photographs and their titles. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2023 Selectors: Jodi Kwok’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Thu, 23 Mar 2023 06:04:40 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

We chat to Jodi Kwok, Creative Producer, Curator and Selector for the MA/MFA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2023. / Tell us about your job? What does your day-to-day routine as a curator involve? / As Assistant Curator at Derby QUAD, I am responsible for curating and producing exhibitions in the main gallery and the extra gallery space (stairwells and office foyer areas in the building). My role is to work between artists and the technical team, to present the artists’ works in the best and most understandable way for our visitors. As part of the programme team, I am also working on delivering and suggesting different public programmes for our community and audiences, like events, talks, workshops and gallery tours alongside the exhibitions, doing research and connecting with other galleries and museums for potential cooperations, supporting artists with physical and virtual residency programmes, doing social media for our gallery exhibitions and events and visiting different exhibitions for inspiration about the curation and installation. Our team has been working on the return of FORMAT International Photography Festival, emerging from the days of the global pandemic with renewed purpose. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 110 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 20 Feb 2023 07:49:10 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 110 - Spring 2023

We know about many places we have never visited via photographs. Many of those photographs could be described as tourist or travel photography, a category that extends from traveller’s pictures to those commissioned by tourist boards and travel companies. Sara Dominici outlines the development of this genre, from surprisingly early on in the history of photography to the present day, and shows that these images are as much a product of market forces as anyone’s desire to learn about the world. We might have more confidence in science as a foundation for our knowledge. If you are not a scientist then you could come to understand scientific insights via images, in particular those generated by recent technologies like MRI scanners, Electron Microscopes and the latest telescopes, all of which show us things that would otherwise be invisible to us. The Science Photo Library was set up to distribute these images to a market beyond the narrow scientific literature that they were originally created for. Rose Taylor, the Creative Director, explains how these images circulate and what transformation they undego to reach a general public. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2023 Selectors: Sebah Chaudhry’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Tue, 07 Feb 2023 12:57:05 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

We chat to Sebah Chaudhry, Creative Producer, Curator and Selector for the BA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2023. / Tell us about your job? What does your day-to-day routine as a curator and producer involve? / My day is very varied, as are my roles. As a freelance producer and curator, I often work on different projects at the same time/same day. As exciting as all my jobs are, there is a lot of admin. So, often my days are spent checking my email accounts, replying to emails, creating doodle polls for meetings, or joining a meeting. Some days, I have no meetings at all, but on others, I have as many as eight! If I am very busy (which I often am), I often work late into the evenings. / How did you make your way into the career you're now in? Did you always want to work in a field that involved photography? / I grew up in Birmingham and studied photography as a GCSE. I was never very academic, but enjoyed photography. And so I did a BTEC National Diploma in Photography, and at the same time, looked for work experience or volunteering in the arts. I emailed all the offices at the Custard Factory (a creative hub), in hopes of an opportunity to volunteer. Rhubarb-Rhubarb International Festival was the only organisation to reply, inviting me to volunteer at their festival in 2004. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2023 Selectors: Taous Dahmani’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Thu, 26 Jan 2023 12:31:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

We chat to Taous Dahmani, Art Historian, Writer, Curator and Selector for the BA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2023. / Tell us about your work? What does your day-to-day routine as an art historian and curator involve? / As an art historian stepping out of academia, I carry out research for various projects including publications, essays, or exhibitions. As a freelancer, my day-to-day is very much project-led but involves research (in libraries, conversations with photographers or other knowledgeable people, etc.); writing (and reading), and project management (admin etc.). / How did you make your way into the career you're now in? Did you always want to work in a field that involved photography? / I wanted to work ‘in art’ from a very young age, I always felt like galleries and museums were a ‘safe space’ — something I now look back on with irony. So as soon as I was legally allowed to work, I did, and did so in commercial galleries at first. However, it was my professor at the Sorbonne, Michel Poivert, who put me on the path to photography and opened my eyes to the versatility of the medium, realising that it was a great way-into other subjects — to address aspects of society, politics, human relationships, etc. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: The Stock Photography Source Book’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Mon, 16 Jan 2023 08:10:00 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Advertising

As “the ultimate visual tool for the creative person”, 'The Stock Photography Source Book' represented “the most saleable stock images available anywhere” in 1987. 3,904 photographs compiled from four years of “outstandingly successful” catalogues were distilled from the 3 million-strong holdings of The Image Bank, “the largest and most successful” stock agency in the world. ESTablished in 1974 as a means of selling photographers’ work to the advertising industry under a single corporation, The Image Bank cashed in on the expanding need for a ready repository of visual material for license. Bypassing bespoke photography by assignment, they instead sold “existing photographs” by “photography greats”. By the time the weighty volume launched, they boasted 37 offices worldwide. 'The Stock Photography Source Book' was a visual hypermarket from which advertising designers could browse numbered photographs in 4 x 6 cm previews. Each colour-coded category – People, Sports, Scenics, Travel, Industry and Abstracts / Special Effects – finished with a lined shopping list. 'The Source Book' was also a glossy manual in its own right. For “the photographer, whether he is professional or a serious amateur” it was “an invaluable guide for generating the stock image that will sell”. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2023 Selectors: Chris Boot’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Thu, 12 Jan 2023 05:49:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

We chat to Chris Boot, Curator, Book Publisher and Selector for the BA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2023. / Tell us about your job? What does your day-to-day routine involve? Both currently, as an independent photography editor/publisher and formerly in your role at Aperture? / My last job was as Executive Director of Aperture, the not-for-profit publishing house in New York. Working closely with a board and staff team, I was responsible for the organization’s direction, management, and finances, and for the institutional narrative. About half my time involved working with the organization’s main supporters and on matters of finance. I led a team of four commissioning editors, editing and making new titles and the magazine. I approved the proposals and signed the budgets, and tried to ensure the organization’s projects threaded coherently. I got the chance to work directly on a few books and photography projects of my own, but that was on the side of the main part of the job. After a decade in New York, I came back to London last year, and am pursuing independent projects. I don’t have much of a daily routine. A book I edited and produced was just published by Aperture, 'Presence: The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder'; I’m working as a consultant for Autograph ABP; and I’m editing and producing new work about Muslims in America by photographer Mahtab Hussain. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Best of Source: Archive Selections’
by: Richard West
Posted: Wed, 30 Nov 2022 04:22:00 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Archive

I have been an editor at Source since 1998. These articles and portfolios are among those that have stayed with me since the time they were published. I am always glad to recommend them, like a favourite recipe or a good place to buy socks. Now you too may have this privileged information. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Privacy for the French’
by: Annabelle Lever
Posted: Thu, 24 Nov 2022 06:52:01 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Photojournalism
First Published: Issue 96 - Winter 2018

France is traditionally thought to have the strictest privacy regime in Europe for photographs. Camille Simon is a Picture Editor of L’Obs, the most prominent weekly news magazine. Annabelle Lever is a political philosopher and author of On Privacy. We brought them together to talk about how the French attitude to privacy influences the photographs that are published. / AL: Do you think the protection of privacy constrains your work at L’Obs? / CS: No, not so much actually. It depends on who you are talking about, a public figure or random people? / AL: For example, do you have to think twice about publishing photos of Dominique Strauss-Kahn or even of Sarközy. You have this amazing photo of Sarközy running in the July issue and he really looks horrendous, he looks haggard and anxious and actually quite aggressive. / CS: We won’t think of the image of the person so much as the story we’re telling. For this picture, the article was about Sarközy’s running, so it works well. As he is a public figure, he knows he is photographed when he runs so it is not a problem. He will usually run with a few photographers following him. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 109 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 23 Nov 2022 06:25:15 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 109 - Autumn 2022

Your position in society may be determined by many intangible things but one concrete mark of status is being the subject of a portrait. An even greater distinction is to have your picture in a national portrait collection. Josh Allen has been talking to the curators of the different national portrait collections to find out on what basis pictures are selected, how new portraits are commissioned and the changing profile of those deemed worthy of this accolade. Do pictures of high status people look different from those of ordinary people, and if so, why? Mike Trow was the picture editor of British Vogue. He explains to Richard West what goes on behind the scenes in the photographing of people who have most likely been photographed many times before and can choose how they want to be pictured. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Genius of Television’
by: Daniel Jewesbury
Posted: Tue, 22 Nov 2022 12:06:48 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Historical
First Published: Issue 52 - Autumn 2007

This new series has been trailed by its production company as ‘the first comprehensive history of the most influential art form of the present day’. This claim might seem a little grand, but, amazingly, no major TV series, until now, has looked at the medium in quite this depth or detail. This is, then, an important moment for photographers, for historians of photography and other scholars in the field of visual culture. Not since John Berger’s still-influential 'Ways of Seeing' and 'Another Way of Telling' has photography received this much serious small-screen attention. 'The Genius of Photography' comprises six one-hour considerations of different aspects of the medium. This is, self-consciously, not ‘the history of photography’ nor even ‘the histories of photography’: the idea of a single history is replaced, after the introductory first episode, 'Fixing the Shadows', with a set of more or less parallel, non-chronological themes. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Watching the Meme Wars’
by: Angela Nagle
Posted: Tue, 22 Nov 2022 11:09:51 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Political
First Published: Issue 89 - Spring 2017

The online culture wars of recent years have been fought through imagery as much as they have through text. Issues such as immigration, gay marriage, feminism and racism have been contested between and within right and left factions, in the political arena and newspaper commentary. Meanwhile, a parallel youthful online cultural battle has played out through rival political movements and subcultures trading in witty, funny, weird, sometimes cruel, crossfire communicated through memes adapted from collages, crude cartoons and ironically captioned photographs. The anarchic image messaging board 4chan, which has been called a 'meme factory' of the internet, gained widespread public attention around the time of the emergence of the Occupy movement in 2011 when Guy Fawkes masks were being worn by protesters and leaderless hackers known as Anonymous – whose symbol was the mask and whose name came from the anonymous online culture of 4chan – started making headlines. It was a subterranean and politically ambiguous world of impenetrable argot and abundant in-jokes, which loved to prank the mainstream. But long before, and ever since, it has defined more of the aesthetic sensibilities of the English speaking internet than any other space, from lolcats: an early variety of image macro (a captioned picture) involving cute cats; to Rickrolling: the prank of linking someone to something seemingly serious only to lead them to a video of the song 'Never gonna give you up' by Rick Astley. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Media Against Modernity’
by: Robert Hariman
Posted: Mon, 21 Nov 2022 09:29:05 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Political
First Published: Issue 85 - Spring 2016

It is well documented that religious fundamentalists have had no problem adopting communication technologies. In the US, examples include influential use of radio, magazine publishing, television, direct mail and telephone marketing, cable television, and now the Internet and social media. There are other examples worldwide, and now any social, political, or cultural movement has to become media savvy, whatever its ideology. So it is that a movement such as the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/Daesh) can promote its comprehensive rejection of all modern ideas, values, and institutions by using modern communication media. One example is their glossy magazine, 'Dabiq'. Published in several languages including English, the first issue came out in July 2014 and the 13th appeared in January of this year. If you have an appetite for pictures of victorious warriors and justifications of sexual slavery, this is the magazine for you. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Queer in Practice’
by: Laura Guy
Posted: Mon, 21 Nov 2022 08:51:27 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Gender
First Published: Issue 79 - Summer 2014

'Queer' was reclaimed by members of the AIDS activist community during the late 1980s as a sign under which to organise politically. Within these recent histories of gay and lesbian struggle, queer also became a means for some to trouble the hard and fast categories implied by naming either of those orientations. Functioning as a kind of umbrella under which it is possible to assemble a plethora of identifications, queer simultaneously disturbs the logic that binds a subject to a fixed identity. Given this, how does one reconcile something so unstable as queer with something as amorphous as photography? Like many communities, groups that ally through queerness often affirm relationships through photographs that circulate both off and online. Yet, if there is nothing essential about queer, there also cannot be anything essentially queer about photography. In order to think of the two together, it seems only possible to look at how they coincide at particular moments. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Best of Source: Archive Selections’
by: Vanya Lambrecht Ward
Posted: Thu, 17 Nov 2022 03:18:00 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Archive

When making the selections from the archive I did not come with a list of predetermined ideas but let the themes emerge from the archive itself, keeping only in mind what I thought might be of interest from a practical, thematic or a contemporary point of view for a 16-18 year old audience. Political and social subjects including themes such as the environment and climate change struck me as particularly relevant, as are portraiture (of society, the self or others) and identity. Following these threads through taken, found and constructed images, thoughts are framed and stories are created. With a shortlist made I aimed to select a cross-section of ideas and topics, which hopefully leads to further exploration. Inevitably, I have picked things using my own aesthetic preferences, for the composition, the humour or the historical relevance. All of the works chosen bring contemporary and (still) relevant topics as well as useful and inspirational ideas. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Best of Source: Archive Selections’
by: Mahtab Hussain
Posted: Tue, 08 Nov 2022 05:43:00 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Archive

Initially, I spent a lot of time looking through the complete library of Source but the process of actually choosing the majority of pieces to discuss began by evaluating my initial emotional response to them. I resisted any form of intellectual reasoning. I then return to these pieces again after a couple of days. The pause enabled the work to settle and allowed for a process of ‘looking again’, which encouraged further curiosity and eventually led to an articulation of the piece. This is how I approach my own work – my gut reaction is the overriding force that guides my practice, though it is closely supported by a period of reflection. But I was also fascinated with the purely intellectual, almost philosophical, pieces by David Campany, John Taylor, the joint interview with Emma Dexter and Frances Morris, and finally, Lucy Soutter. The extraordinary wealth of knowledge, their deeply engaging discussions drew me into the theorising aspect of photography, and in particular its relationship with fine art. Like so many articles in Source, each piece will surely become an invaluable historic document which future photographers and inquirers of the medium will look back on for decades to come. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Best of Source: Archive Selections’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Tue, 08 Nov 2022 08:20:00 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Archive

I have been one of the editors of Source from 1994 and although I have periodically gone through our back catalogue, preparing for talks about the magazine, this has been an opportunity to look back with a more specific remit: choosing work by photographers based in or from the island of Ireland. Source has returned to some of the photographers’ work a number of times over the years and I have met many of the photographers through our open submission days. Both these forms of encounter inform my choices and thoughts on the work. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Asylum Archive’
by: Vukašin Nedeljković
Posted: Mon, 24 Oct 2022 10:21:50 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 74 - Spring 2013

I took part in the protests and artistic ferment that culminated in the fall of Miloševic in Serbia in 2000. Following the assassination of Zoran Djindjic in 2003, I made a broadcast on Radio B92 in Belgrade, which resulted in me having to leave Serbia. I arrived in Ireland in 2005, and subsequently spent almost three years seeking asylum, living in the Direct Provision system in the Old Convent hostel in Ballyhaunis, Co.Mayo. As a coping mechanism during this time I made a number of images of my surroundings and as well as photographs of fellow asylum seekers. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Best of Source: Archive Selections’
by: Jessie McLaughlin
Posted: Wed, 12 Oct 2022 06:12:00 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Archive

When Source got in touch and asked if I’d like to be a part of this project exploring the magazine’s archive, it sounded great. What I didn’t expect is how moving the process turned out to be. I moved to Sweden just over a year ago, and have been (like everyone else) stuck in the pandemic for most of that time. In other words, stuck in an in-between space, not able to visit friends and family back in the U.K. and yet also not really able to roam and explore my new home. To be given this opportunity to reflect and look back through Source’s back issues has in many ways given me an unexpected but much needed window to old friends and peers in and around photography, to places I miss, artists whose work takes me back to falling in love with photography, being confronted by photography, being drawn into what it can be and do. My selection is therefore a personal one, in many ways even a sentimental one and yet still, I hope, offers you a true sense of the sheer volume and scope of photographic practice Source has covered over the years. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Failed Realist’
by: Siún Hanrahan
Posted: Mon, 10 Oct 2022 12:25:41 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 71 - Summer 2012

The nexus explored through Morrissey’s work combines the conventions of portraiture, revealing that which is normally hidden, and ‘everyday anxieties’. In the 1990s, Morrissey’s Women with Moustaches series (Source 22) explored the anxieties surrounding facial hair, and the challenges they pose to the conventions and ideals of femininity. In 2005, Seven Years took the family photo album and family relations as subject matter, elaborately restaging real and imagined snaps to probe the construction of childhood and family. In the series of photographs presented here, 'The Failed Realist', the proposed object of enquiry is (once again) situated within family life but what is met through these photographs of face-paintings is not entirely straightforward. The photographs were made in collaboration with the artist’s daughter, when she was between the ages of four and five years. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Failed Realist’
by: Trish Morrissey
Posted: Mon, 10 Oct 2022 12:08:18 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 71 - Summer 2012

A Portfolio of photographic work by Trish Morrissey. Published in Issue 71 of Source, Summer 2012. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Unspeakable’
by: Stephen Baker
Posted: Mon, 10 Oct 2022 08:37:20 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 64 - Autumn 2010

At times it has felt like the fall-out and debris of Northern Ireland’s violent past has been swept up with indecent haste to make way for the new political dispensation; that culture has been pressed into the service of ‘rebranding’ Northern Ireland as a place in which to do business; and that ‘the troubles’ have been dismissed as a period of collective madness from which Northern Ireland is now recovering. There has, for instance, been no process of ‘truth and reconciliation’ and no agreed or ‘official’ version of the past to underpin a museum exhibition or the teaching of history in schools. Ennui, indifference and economic expediency have seen to it that there is precious little public reflection upon a period that for many people was formative in both a personal and political sense. It is in this context that we might consider Malcolm Gilbert’s 'Post Traumatic Exorcism', a collection that renders violent acts in vivid detail, with a mise-enscene that is often recognizably Northern Irish and an iconography that at times recalls the ‘Troubles’. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Post Traumatic Exorcism’
by: Malcolm Craig Gilbert
Posted: Mon, 10 Oct 2022 08:24:09 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 64 - Autumn 2010

A Portfolio of photographic work by Malcolm Craig Gilbert. Published in Issue 64 of Source, Autumn 2010. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Known Unknowns’
by: Chris Clarke
Posted: Mon, 10 Oct 2022 07:47:58 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 72 - Autumn 2012

There are some things I know about Patrick Hogan; that he is from and later lived for a period in Tipperary; that his images vary across genre and scale; that he often allows the negatives of his images to sit for some time before printing in order to accumulate dust and marks; that these prints are displayed in a non-linear, ‘loose’ arrangement that doesn’t prioritise any set, standard reading; that he keeps re-arranging, even repeating these images. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Still’
by: Patrick Hogan
Posted: Mon, 10 Oct 2022 07:19:59 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 72 - Autumn 2012

A Portfolio of photographic work by Patrick Hogan. Published in Issue 72 of Source, Autumn 2012. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘If You Can Piss...’
by: Darren Thiel
Posted: Fri, 07 Oct 2022 10:06:31 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 90 - Summer 2017

Darren Thiel is a sociologist. His book Builders involved field research in the building trade. He spoke to David O'Mara about photographing on building sites. Darren Thiel: How did you come to be photographing on construction sites? / David O’Mara: I moved from Ireland to London in 2001 and I happened to get a job on construction sites. I thought it would be a temporary thing but, as time went on, it became a much more long-term job. I was working as an artist and using the job to fund the practice and also living in London. A relative of my partner was friends with someone who had a painting company so they introduced me. Their words were, ‘Oh you’ve been to art college, then you’ll know how to hold a brush, that’s ok’. I think it was a bit of overestimation of my abilities! It was some time before I started taking photographs. The whole building site environment was very alien to me so I didn’t really have the confidence to introduce a camera. I was just trying to get along with people and find my place. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘If You Can Piss...’
by: David O'Mara
Posted: Fri, 07 Oct 2022 09:40:21 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 90 - Summer 2017

A Portfolio of photographic work by David O'Mara. Published in Issue 90 of Source, Summer 2017. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘God Knows What Is In Your Head’
by: Zuzana Hruskova
Posted: Thu, 06 Oct 2022 08:28:29 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Found
First Published: Issue 43 - Summer 2005

Sometimes I take photographs to defend myself. I also photograph to feel the place or understand the specificity of moment or situation. I am sick of photography, and this is another reason I photograph. There is lot of silence in my work and I don’t necessarily like to be seen taking the photograph. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Portraiture’
by: Richard West
Posted: Thu, 06 Oct 2022 07:15:17 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 32 - Autumn 2002

Richard: Were you interested in portraiture before you were interested in photography? / Thomas: No. I must confess that I was only interested in photography. I didn’t have any art classes the five years before my high school exam and I wasn’t interested in art at all. I think it was just by chance that a friend of mine bought a 35mm camera and I saw him photographing and I thought, ‘this looks good’, no special interest in portraits. / Richard: Do you have a memory of family albums? / Thomas: Yes of course I have, this kind of photography is covered by the family itself, this doesn’t have to be done by professional photographers. / Richard: What meaning do these photographs have for you, do they serve a different function from the work that you’re doing now? / Thomas: Of course they have a meaning for everybody who has their own family album. I think these albums prove a very important thing in photography, that is using photography as a prosthesis. These family albums are used as a prosthesis for the history of the family. You probably don’t remember precisely the street where you grew up but if you look at the photographs, looking at you running through the street you remember every single detail. Even if it is not high or intended photography it is still very essential for everybody. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Here Comes The Tate’
by: Helen James
Posted: Fri, 30 Sep 2022 07:11:15 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Gallery-Based
First Published: Issue 35 - Summer 2003

Helen James: Could you start off by telling me a little bit about your role here at Tate Modern? / Emma Dexter: I’m a Senior Curator here at Tate Modern, I’m a contemporary art specialist and I used to run the gallery as Director of Exhibitions at the ICA for 8 years and I was previously Deputy Director there so I was at the ICA for the whole of the 90s. Before that I was at Chisenhale Gallery. I’ve been part of a team of curators that have been based here at Tate Modern since it opened. I’ve taken part in programming discussion with our Directors, in particular the previous Director Lars Nittve and more recently with Nicholas Serota. Often in these programming discussions the question of photography would come up because we were being offered monographic exhibitions by significant photographers of 20th Century. After much debate and heart searching we turned these exhibitions down. That was because we felt that it important to see Tate Modern as a new start. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Dark Set Place’
by: Becky Beasley
Posted: Fri, 30 Sep 2022 06:31:50 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 37 - Winter 2003

A Portfolio of photographic work by Becky Beasley. Published in Issue 37 of Source, Winter 2003. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: Off-Beat Photography’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Wed, 28 Sep 2022 07:20:31 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Photomontage

Many of the photographs in this publication, its author begins perversely, 'were taken for no reason at all'. They offer 'diverting evidence of what can be done on the lunatic fringe of orthodox photography'. As per the jazz reference of the title in its higgledy-piggledy font, the book takes an eclectic view of what might be described as an alternative photographic vision. Much is whimsy - demonstrated by the cover image of the author’s assistant, smirking as an axe protrudes from his forehead - but there are serious messages too, visualising risk, threat and tragedy. Maurice Rickards [1919-1998] was described as an artist, photographer, author and journalist in 1959. His work as a publicity designer had already secured him 'an international reputation for the unexpected'. Off-Beat Photography was Rickards’ first non-fiction book and he had yet to focus on the passion that would ESTablish his later reputation as a major collector and a pioneer scholar of paper ephemera. In his many later writings on the subject, including 2000’s authoritative Encyclopaedia of Ephemera, published posthumously by the British Library as his life’s work, he makes no reference to his earlier photographic career. Nonetheless, it is highly distinctive. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Other Side of Hedonism’
by: Francis Halsall
Posted: Wed, 28 Sep 2022 06:29:35 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 76 - Autumn 2013

When we were bored, as kids, there was a stupid game we played. You’d start at night in a garden and head off creeping through neighbours’ back gardens. Climbing over fences, squeezing through hedges and dodging through yards the game was to see how far one could go. Inevitably, at some point, you’d have to stop as you’d run into a prickly thicket, unclimbable wall or vicious looking dog. Occasionally a security light would be triggered and you’d be held captive for a moment in its blue-ish flare, rendered visible to anyone looking out. More often than not you’d catch odd glimpses of lives going on inside, framed by a window. These were boring, normal lives that seemed exotic in their banality: family meals; couples watching television; petty bickering; and people just sitting, waiting for something to happen. I’d almost forgotten about this but it came back to me when I started looking at Gareth McConnell’s pictures. He offers pictures of boredom too. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Ibiza Index, Nothing is Ever the Same as They Said it Was’
by: Gareth McConnell
Posted: Wed, 28 Sep 2022 06:00:20 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 76 - Autumn 2013

A Portfolio of photographic work by Gareth McConnell. Published in Issue 76 of Source, Autumn 2013. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Caravan Gallery’
by: Jan Williams
Posted: Thu, 22 Sep 2022 13:19:52 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 38 - Spring 2004

A Portfolio of photographic work by Jan Williams and Chris Teasdale. Published in Issue 38 of Source, Spring 2004. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The People's Taxis’
by: Nicholas Allen
Posted: Mon, 19 Sep 2022 12:12:28 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 16 - Autumn 1998

The images that form Patrick McCoy's 'The People's Taxis' were originally produced as part of the photographer's degree show. The fourteen photographs that I saw from this collection all took for their immediate subject matter the passengers of the Falls Road Taxi Association in West Belfast. Known locally as 'Black Taxis', McCoy's own notes tell us that the Association, to which the drivers are affiliated, was founded in 1973. Later it was joined by ex- internees who found it difficult to gain employment on release. The Black Taxis still service West Belfast today, just as their Protestant counterparts journey to their separate areas. This culturally charged background provided part of the initial interest for McCoy in his subject. The point for McCoy of photographing these taxis (and the people in them) is corrective. As the photographer's notes tell us, the taxis provide for an understanding of Belfast that need not resort "to the stock cliched images of graffiti daubed walls, political murals and British army foot patrols". Furthermore, McCoy hoped his project would prove to be an "antidote to the spectacular images produced by visiting foreign photojournalists". . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The People's Taxis’
by: Patrick McCoy
Posted: Mon, 19 Sep 2022 11:56:40 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 16 - Autumn 1998

A Portfolio of photographic work by Patrick McCoy. Published in Issue 16 of Source, Autumn 1998. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘A Commitment To Merseyside’
by: Siobhan Davis
Posted: Wed, 14 Sep 2022 14:55:31 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Social
First Published: Issue 61 - Winter 2009

Siobhan davis examines the collection of open eye gallery and its history of working with local photographers. The dark interior of a traditional pub, unevenly lit by large windows and a scattering of old fashioned light fittings, is crowded with men enjoying a lunchtime pint. Suit clad customers rub shoulders with casually dressed locals as their combined attention is directed toward a figure on the right of the frame. A woman, her back to the camera, is picked out by the chiaroscuro lighting. Dressed in a loose fitting white basque. frilled around the top of the thigh, she leans forward unhooking a suspender fastening. Barely visible in front of the woman, a man's face concentrates on the spectacle before him. The content of the photograph is not immediately apparent. It demands that the viewer takes time to examine its depths, to question what it's about. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘More than Nature’
by: Colin Graham
Posted: Wed, 14 Sep 2022 08:39:58 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 94 - Summer 2018

Thirteen years ago I accidentally became a farmer. My wife and I inherited a farm that had been in her family for centuries. But neither of us had any knowledge of farming. My wife’s uncle had passed away – he had owned the land but was too much an old-style gentleman to actually get involved in the day to day of farming. He had employed, for decades, a farm manager and a farm hand, who were as elderly and set in their ways as him. And when Joe, the farm worker, sadly took his own life in his late 70s, we were suddenly left with a flock of pregnant ewes to look after. Learning to farm has been, for me, the accumulation of new knowledge and a new argot. But more than that, it has been an accumulation of things in their actuality and materiality, and of a new sense of how time passes. Farms and farmland, are the slow, slow build-up of nature worked on by humans. Fields are grass which has been sown, land which has been ploughed for grass to be sown, drains which have been laid, so that grass will grow. Nature is cultivated and encouraged in one place, cut down and put away in others. Every part of a farm is work, layer upon layer of human labour and endeavour. Some farmers love their land, others simply inhabit it. But being on a farm is to know, implicitly, that it is lived and layered and worked land, the accumulation of things laboured on and moved around. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Tomorrow is Sunday’
by: Miriam O'Connor
Posted: Wed, 14 Sep 2022 07:55:27 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 94 - Summer 2018

A Portfolio of photographic work by Miriam O'Connor. Published in Issue 94 of Source, Summer 2018. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Unusual Gestures’
by: Gavin Murphy
Posted: Wed, 14 Sep 2022 07:01:23 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Family
First Published: Issue 102 - Autumn 2020

You never quite know when to trust your instincts. I look at these photographs and another set of images, unseen for many years, keeps coming back into my head. It is a scene from 'The Night of the Hunter' (1955) when the two children escape in a boat from the monstrous figure of the preacher. As the boat floats down the river, the scene becomes quite fantastical, beginning with a starry night and an eerie lullaby. The boat passes a spider’s web, then an owl, a turtle, rabbits, and finally a fox – all framed large in the foreground with the boat set against a silhouetted landscape. The film is transformed into a Southern Gothic fairytale through this dreamlike theatre. The children are in a realm of their own, their moment of repose framed by the looming figure of the preacher stalking the landscape: 'Does he ever sleep?', asks the young boy. The instinct to retreat to what you know in the face of what you do not know is not necessarily one to be trusted. A challenging story has at its core a request that you, the listener, retain an openness so that judgement is suspended and so allows the possibility that you, as a person, can understand and even change for the better. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Unusual Gestures’
by: Lorraine Tuck
Posted: Wed, 14 Sep 2022 06:33:37 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Family
First Published: Issue 102 - Autumn 2020

A Portfolio of photographic work by Lorraine Tuck. Published in Issue 102 of Source, Autumn 2020. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: The Shabbiness of Beauty’
by: Odette England
Posted: Wed, 07 Sep 2022 06:24:51 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Multi-Genre

I dismember the book page by page. Isn't taking a photograph a sort of dismembering of the world? Consider subbing dismemberment for another word. Word is in world. There is no L in Moyra or Davey or Peter or Hujar or The Shabbiness of Beauty or Vanishing. Rather, lots of love, lonesomeness, lust, looking, and light. I tape the pages to my walls. Regret ensues. My daughter wants to know about the chickens. She grills me with questions. Whatever, she sniffs at the elephants, waves, babies, and the penis. What's for dinner? We rhumba for a week or so these pages and me. I stroke their edges, smile. I whisper to the high heels I love you. None of us says that often enough, much less mean it. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 108 / Summer 2022 - Zoom Launch’
by: The Editors
Posted: Sat, 20 Aug 2022 11:50:20 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Event

Join us for the Online Launch of Source Issue 108 - 'Generations'. Featuring live interviews with Trish Morrissey and Julian Germain, two of this issue's contributors. Hosted by Editor Richard West in partnership with the Gallery of Photography Ireland. 'Generations' by Julian Germain is a collection of family group portraits, made across the UK since 2004, documenting four and five generation families in their homes. Recently, Germain has been focusing his efforts on Birmingham and the Black Country as part of a public space commission by GRAIN Projects and Multistory for Birmingham 2022. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 108 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 01 Aug 2022 04:51:04 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 108 - Summer 2022

The last thirty years have seen a transformation in photography. We have spoken to three photographers, Trish Morrissey, Jon Tonks and Heather Agyepong, who each started their career in a different decade during this period, and asked them how these changes have affected them. This period has seen the switch from analogue to digital, the advent of social media as well as a host of social and cultural changes. As the conversation reveals, this has created some common experiences – like a weariness with Instagram – and some unexpected differences, like varied attitudes to the long-term preservation of work. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: A Sinister Memoriam’
by: Harvey Dimond
Posted: Sat, 16 Jul 2022 06:05:44 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Photojournalism

A photograph from Christina Sharpe’s book 'In the Wake: On Blackness and Being' has been branded on my memory ever since I first saw it two years ago. Reproduced as a black and white image in Sharpe’s book, the photograph shows a young Black girl, maybe around 10 years old, in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. She had been pulled, miraculously, from the rubble of a building more than two weeks after the disaster, by which time most hopes of finding people alive would have abated. She is shown lying down, staring directly into the lens; stuck on her forehead is a piece of adhesive material with Ship written on it, in black marker pen. The material has been stuck on her head, branded almost, by US Army soldiers, as they wait to evacuate her from Port-au-Prince to an unknown destination. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: Black Cats’
by: Morwenna Kearsley
Posted: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 07:07:44 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Portraiture

Pluto is often described as God of the Dead or Lord of the Underworld and I would add Photographer to that list. For what is a photograph if not a death? Down in the deep, dark shadows of his subterranean city, I imagine him printing photographs. Negative to positive, light to dark. Perhaps he uses the summer time, when Proserpina departs the Underworld, to really get to grips with the darkroom backlog. In his 1843 story 'The Black Cat', Edgar Allan Poe’s mercurial narrator names his pet cat Pluto. This brutal malefactor confesses to a pattern of abuse and violence meted out not only to Pluto but his wife also; a response to their consistent love and care and fear. Writing at a time when photography was still in its infancy, Poe plays on the prophetic image-apparition as central to superstitious beliefs and dreadful outcomes. In one scene, an image of the murdered Pluto appears on a scorched wall after fire consumes the narrator’s house. The white, negative image of the black cat communicates to observers the brutal manner of its death. In another scene, a replacement black cat’s tuft of white chest hair slowly begins to form a prophetic image of gallows. Poe tells us, through the use of black and white images that the positive photograph is bound to its negative in perpetuity, like a crime to its punishment. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Best of Source: Archive Selections’
by: Susanna Galbraith
Posted: Thu, 28 Apr 2022 05:35:00 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Archive

I have been part of the 'Source' editorial team in the capacity of Audience Development Officer for just over a year. Outside of 'Source' I am a writer of poems and an editor of literary and interdisciplinary publications and projects, and have been part of 'Abridged' magazine for ten years. No doubt some of what I have recommended here will chime with certain preoccupations of the Abridged project, such as a strong interest in the operations of ambiguity, myth and the uncanny in the contemporary world, as well as a curatorial interest in how visual and linguistic mediums intersect and affect each other. With a background in literature, it will come as no surprise that I have been particularly drawn to features that look beyond photography into its relationship with other mediums and wider cultural questions, introductions with a particular poetic angle or quality, portfolios wherein a sense of storytelling or the mythopoetic might be strongly felt. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: Photographic Make-Up’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Wed, 20 Apr 2022 17:07:22 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Portraiture

Portrait photographers at mid-century faced a new problem, according to Jack Emerald, one of their number. "In the good old days", soft focus lenses enabled sitters to look their “impossible best”. Other time-honoured techniques included retouching the negative with knife and pencil, "removing a wrinkle here, or a piece of the jaw-line there". Emerald complained that this work is tedious and costly, and that a discerning public increasingly recognises a retouched photograph when it sees it, much to the embarrassment of its sitter. His solution is photographic make-up, which he says is steadily becoming part of the working equipment of portraitists worldwide. In this approach, retouching takes place before the photograph is taken, and thus "the lily is gilded first". Emerald supplies fifteen exhausting pages of guidance on women’s make-up. Beginning with a base coat to cover all imperfections, multiple products are then used to draw improved features back in. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: The Only Photograph of Mr Pencil’
by: Sinéad Corcoran
Posted: Thu, 14 Apr 2022 10:42:48 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Portraiture

Mr Pencil survived the War by turning sideways. Every movement of his comrades looked like the worst case of having a fleshy body that Mr Pencil had ever seen. They heaved and dragged themselves up and down the mountainsides. Blinded by their own sweat and slowed by their own feet that rejected their duty to move, move, move, hide, hide, hide. They staggered under the weight of their own selves and when they fell, he – like a sliver, a ripple, a faint glint against the sky – watched the shrapnel and the bullets press into the thickness of them. Since childhood, Mr Pencil was always looking at the sky: the chance of rain, the chance of wind, the chance of a sudden summer storm. His mother said he was of a delicate constitution, a nervous disposition, running inside at any sign of danger. In fair weather, however, he was the finest scout in all of Western Macedonia. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 107 / Spring 2022 - Zoom Launch’
by: The Editors
Posted: Sun, 10 Apr 2022 12:55:02 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Event

Join us for the Online Launch of Issue 107 'Signs'. Live interviews with Judith Williamson and Jonathan Long, two of this issue’s contributors. Hosted by Editor Richard West in partnership with the Gallery of Photography Ireland. Judith Williamson examines the photographic evidence for partygate. Jonathan Long introduces this issue’s archive feature, which is made up of images from a photographic album held in the collection of the Wiener Holocaust Library in London. The album was made in 1935 by German-Jewish businessman Fritz Fürstenberg and his fiancée, Käthe Smoszewski, who, at considerable personal risk, documented antisemitic signs dotted throughout the German countryside, its towns, and villages. The album was created to be disseminated as evidence of antisemitism in Germany. In his introduction to the pictures, Long notes the perturbing way that ‘propaganda has become so much part of the everyday’. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 107 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Tue, 05 Apr 2022 12:00:29 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 107 - Spring 2022

Like ESTranged cousins, the road sign and the photograph appear to be related in only a formal sense, perhaps part of some larger family of objects that convey meanings, one clear and direct, the other prone to vagueness. But recently what is obvious or not obvious has seemed less straightforward; we ask ‘Is this the speed limit?’ and ‘Is this a party?’ as if they were the same type of question. Partygate is only the most recent instance of Prime Minister Boris Johnson making simple rules uncertain, Judith Williamson helps us interpret the photographic evidence to find out what has occured. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Best of Source: Archive Selections’
by: Stephen Bull
Posted: Wed, 30 Mar 2022 07:32:00 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Archive

Chances are so important in photography - and in real life. Sometime in late 1995 or early 1996 I chanced upon my former fellow student Patrick McCoy at Brighton station. He showed me an issue of a magazine I had never seen before called 'Source: The Photographic Review'. Turning to the inside front page, Patrick proudly pointed out that he was one of the editors. He then noted with obvious pleasure that one of his photographs was reproduced on the inside back page. I congratulated him and, before parting, Patrick gave me the magazine. The same copy is beside me as I write this a quarter of a century later. Over the past 25 years many visual and verbal practitioners have shared the pride and pleasure of their work or their words appearing in 'Source' (I am one of them). Every issue from that 1995/96 edition up to now sits on my shelves. Looking through their pages to select twelve pieces has been both a trip back in time and a refreshing reminder of the ongoing relevance of the vast array of photographs and writings that Source has published. They should be seen and be read. These are my choices. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Best of Source: Archive Selections’
by: Sarah Allen
Posted: Tue, 29 Mar 2022 07:22:00 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Archive

For the very lucky among us the pandemic has forcibly shoved us off life’s merry-go-round and offered a moment to pause and reflect. For some this has involved looking back, which feels like a strange luxury in a future-focused culture that privileges productivity. With that in mind it was a pleasure to take a deep dive into the archive of 'Source' magazine and concertina decades worth of photographic production in Ireland and beyond. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: How to Judge Character from the Face’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Tue, 22 Mar 2022 11:40:05 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Portraiture

Illustrated with 133 photographs, mostly of facial features in isolation, Jacques Penry's system for personality analysis is, in the author's ESTimation, both a "comprehensive pictorial survey" and a "quick and easy guide". It serves dual purposes, as "fireside or party entertainment" and a study rooted in "medical-scientific foundations". Anyone wanting to know more of the latter is warned from the first page that "no attempt has been made to explain [them] in any detail". The reader, instead, "is asked to accept the assurance that these foundations exist". Physiognomy as a diagnostic science was already discredited by the mid-1950s but that didn't stop Penry from evoking a scholarly mood. With a confident writing style, he briskly delivers, first, a Question-and-Answer section to address uncertainties and then provides a complex structural formula that connotes rigour even as it obscures. Seven pictorial chapters, designated A to H, compartmentalise the face into Nose, Forehead, Eyes, Eyebrows, Mouth, Chin and Ears; a final section, on Lines-Wrinkles-Dimples, completes the set. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: Things To Do With Photographs’
by: Blaine O'Donnell
Posted: Tue, 15 Mar 2022 12:12:13 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Family

Individually, featherlight. Together, they are a weight in our house, the box casting shadows as the sun passes over the apples. I know they are there, always, waiting in the crate, as we move in and out of rooms, seasons. I come home for a week when the trees are in blossom and the rain batters the petals down into the earth. Some of the albums have shifted. Has my mother been in here looking? Her life is another life entirely. I draw a diagram of our overlapping lives. When everyone is elsewhere, I go back to the box of past happenings, the kaleidoscopic, overlapping mound of the camera's glances. A surfeit of existence has been gathered here, skimmed from the swim of things. I can not stop looking. I look at eyes looking into the future. I look at the family features appearing in faces. A gamut of facets. I look for their frst appearance, their most recent iteration. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Do We Still Need Photography Galleries?’
by: Rebecca Hopkinson
Posted: Thu, 03 Mar 2022 07:02:48 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Gallery-Based
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

Many galleries now exhibit photography. This prompts the question, do we need specialist photography galleries? To answer this question we have conducted a survey to find out just how much photography is shown in contemporary art spaces and asked curators what they think of the role of medium-specific galleries. If you are a photography enthusiast the answer is simple: photography shows make up just less than 10% of the programmes of contemporary art galleries (151 exhibitions) and the small number of photo-galleries stage nearly as many photo shows (128 exhibitions). But there are more subtle questions about what photography is being shown. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: Cats and My Camera’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Wed, 23 Feb 2022 08:25:54 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Portraiture

'Cats and My Camera' is a slight volume of 127 pages and 40 black-and-white cat portraits, mostly singular and in static poses, and mostly titled by the feline's name, from Bunty and Kittiwinks to Tarzan and Tony. Evelyn Glover [1873-1941] describes herself as a "very ordinary person" and a spinster; she also notes her grey hair. She lives in a flat with a female friend, who does not want to reveal her identity. Her friend, Glover warns, is "more devoted to cats than I am". That the author is an enthusiast is in no doubt but, from the start, she points out that she is no "cat connoiseusse". Equally, she emphasises, she is no expert in photography. If anyone declares, "Your cat photographs are wonderful!” she retorts, "You don't see my dustbin." Without training and expensive equipment, she is merely someone who "owes some of the pleasant moments in my life to cats and my camera", and who wishes to share this with anyone who has not, by this point, put the book down. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: Shaking Out of Polaroid Nostalgia’
by: Robert Lewis
Posted: Tue, 15 Feb 2022 10:56:22 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Family

During the last week of the 2020-21 school year, one of my middle school students asked to take a picture with his friends. The student, a seventh grader in my English Language Learners class, was a bit of a handful; he didn’t really ask, he told. 'We’re going to take a picture,' he said. But just as I was ready to verbally pounce, I saw him slip his hand into his knapsack and pull out a modern, instant camera. I melted. He unbuttoned the black case of his black Fujifilm Instamax Mini 11 and looked at me. I nodded. 'Great choice,' I said. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Embodied Meanings’
by: Elizabeth Edwards
Posted: Thu, 03 Feb 2022 12:05:50 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Experimental
First Published: Issue 42 - Spring 2005

Photographs, quite common-sensically, are always explained in terms of the visual. However, arguably their effect, and thus meaning, is not contained solely in the visual but in the embodied experience inherent in the social use of photographs. Photographs are not merely looked at- they are handled, caressed, stroked, kissed torn, wept over, lamented over, talked to, talked about, sung to, written on, exchanged, displayed and performed in a multitude of material ways; all of which are stimulated by the visual but cannot be explained wholly by it. There has been increasing concern over the way in which the primacy of the visual in Western thinking about photographs have suppressed their sensory and emotional impact. The increasing awareness of the materiality of photographs, and the exploration of oral, tactile and embodied ways of thinking about them is part of a broader response to concern about the way in which the senses have been marginalised in a mind-body dichotomy. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Arrivals Kew’
by: Doug Ross
Posted: Mon, 31 Jan 2022 11:58:53 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 38 - Spring 2004

A Portfolio of photographic work by Doug Ross. Published in Issue 38 of Source, Spring 2004. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Summer of Love’
by: Ian Walker
Posted: Fri, 28 Jan 2022 10:57:17 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 40 - Autumn 2004

I think I have always been half in love with her. As she leans back against her lover, eyes closed, absorbed in sensuality and oblivious to the people around her, this girl should really be in some European art film of the period – by Antonioni or Truffaut perhaps – rather than here on a pleasure boat off the English coast. I’ve known this picture now for thirty years. It was a sunny day in London in 1974 or 1975 when I walked into a secondhand bookshop on Great Russell Street along from the British Museum to find a copy of Tony Ray-Jones’ book 'A Day Off'. It was marked down to £1.50 (the original price was £4.75). I bought it and, right now, it’s propped up on the table in front of me. I’m not sure if this was my first sight of the picture – there was an Arts Council exhibition of Ray-Jones’ work called The English Seen going round the country at the same time. But the version in the book, the second image in, is the one I return to and have shown in lectures ever since to say something about the decisive moment, traditions in documentary, the English seaside and so on . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘This Is This’
by: John Taylor
Posted: Sun, 23 Jan 2022 17:24:31 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Photojournalism
First Published: Issue 29 - Winter 2001

My friend Dr Death – named for his diligence in gathering representations of war – confessed that he had been unable to collect the newspapers from 12 September onwards. He had bought his daily 'Guardian', but had not been able to study it closely. I confessed to buying all the papers for that week, as my collecting habits extend to all types of catastrophe in photographs. Though we are both squeamish and only look at pictures, I am a greater ghoul than he. Nonetheless I attend the lowest (armchair) class in the tourism of death. I have already collected numerous examples of photographs that were taken moments before death, or at the moment of death, or after death. Some of them are gruesome, most are not; almost none are medical or forensic in their detail. Some are less affecting, emotionally, than photographs of grief. I realise that picture agencies and picture editors protect me from the worst sights. I expect photojournalism to disturb me, incidentally to satisfy a morbid curiosity and perhaps (rarely) to politicise me. I do not expect it to induce Post Traumatic Stress syndrome. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Playing with Enigmas’
by: David Campany
Posted: Sun, 16 Jan 2022 10:04:29 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 74 - Spring 2013

Finally we have a book that surveys one of the most interesting artistic collaborations of the post-war era. In 1973 Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel began a long career that traced an erratic but always intriguing arc from the playful, image-savvy conceptualism of America’s west coast to that strain of postmodern appropriation that concerned itself with the increasingly sinister machinations of the mass media. With billboards, books, films and exhibitions the duo coaxed photography and audiences into a realm in which equal weight could be given to humour and rigour, curiosity and the intellect, history and autobiography, sober documents and spontaneous invention. The collaboration lasted until Sultan’s death in 2009. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Man Who Wasn't There’
by: John Taylor
Posted: Sun, 16 Jan 2022 07:49:16 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Photojournalism
First Published: Issue 29 - Winter 2001

At the time of writing – the second week in November – the war against terrorism has no limit. According to the military and politicians, it may endure for years, or even never end. As in the Cold War, the present and future is filled with propaganda. As in the Cold War, pictures of actual events are stereotypical and contain little information. The stereotypical images of leaders, mobs, hardware and refugees are a mix of familiar types. The pictures, like the leaders, create expectations and purport to show the gradual achievement of war aims, such as bombed airfields and ammunition dumps. The ‘degradation’ of the enemy is supposedly matched by the simplification of complex politics. That move in propaganda means that everything about the war, even as it deals out death to more innocents, appears in the West as a mélange of back-list, Cold War movies, in which ‘civilisation’ narrowly survives some horrible alien threat or other. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Oana Stanciu’
by: Nora Labo
Posted: Thu, 06 Jan 2022 10:56:37 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 102 - Autumn 2020

In Oana Stanciu’s photographs, the inconceivable and the mundane collide, and the locus for this unsettling cohabitation is the artist’s own body. Her self-portraits, usually on plain studio backdrops, use minimalist props – often comical in their banality – and clever perspective to transform and distort her body. The resulting scenes are presented to the viewer with no suggestion of a symbolic key or a heavy conceptual framework. They do little more than assert an unlikely presence, stating ‘this too is real’. It is precisely this simplicity which opens up new spaces for reflection and often arouses the discomfort needed to renew our thinking and sensibility. By engaging with unthinkable situations as if they were on a level footing with everyday realities, she subtly encourages the viewer to question accepted notions of normality, and to welcome the legitimacy of experiences different from their own. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Oana Stanciu
Posted: Thu, 06 Jan 2022 09:35:39 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 102 - Autumn 2020

A Portfolio of photographic work by Oana Stanciu. Published in Issue 102 of Source, Autumn 2020. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Peripatetic’
by: Ray McKenzie
Posted: Thu, 25 Nov 2021 16:26:33 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Still Life
First Published: Issue 62 - Spring 2010

The immediate impression made by the eight works that comprise 'Peripatetic' is of their striking elegance as images together with a poignant sense of the care with which their contents have been arranged for display. And this is just as it should be. Flowers, after all, are among those privileged objects that have been designated by our culture as not merely beautiful but inherently so,generating entire traditions of visual and literary representation that seek to explain why such fragile and physically vulnerable objects have so powerful a hold on our minds. These traditions go back a long way and take many different forms. In the West, the decorative potential of plant forms was exploited right from the start, achieving its most resolved manifestation in the stylised runs of acanthus and honeysuckle used by the Greeks on their ceramic ware, textiles and buildings. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Peripatetic’
by: Rita Soromenho
Posted: Wed, 24 Nov 2021 16:29:10 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Still Life
First Published: Issue 62 - Spring 2010

A Portfolio of photographic work by Rita Soromenho. Published in Issue 62 of Source, Spring 2010. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘What do we See?’
by: Alexandra Moschovi
Posted: Mon, 22 Nov 2021 18:06:59 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 79 - Summer 2014

‘I could hear the voices of a couple arguing in the distance. It sounds as though they have entered the arcade, but only their voices have entered, and linger for a while even after they have passed the opening and continue on their way… It seems as though even if they had walked through they would not have noticed the presence of anyone, let alone anyone having sex…’, 'The Car', text panel (1995) This caption details the memory of a sexual encounter taking place in public in the privacy of a parked car. However, the presences implied in the text are absent from the black-and-white photographic image it anchors: a mundane people-less scene featuring a lone car parked under a vaulted arcade. Part of the series 'Public Sex', Lorna Simpson’s work 'The Car' is a screen print on twelve felt panels pinned against the wall in grid format. On close inspection the picture disintegrates onto the felt surface whilst it recomposes itself from a distance. It seems as if the tactility of the flesh suggested in the spoken but unseen intimation, also a focal feature in Simpson’s earlier work, has been transposed onto the sensory experience of the woolly surface of the felt. 'The Car' is the opening picture that greets the visitor to Simpson’s retrospective exhibition; an apt selection, for it establishes the central role of the beholder/voyeur in Simpson’s work while also preparing us for the shifts and turns in the artist’s multidimensional oeuvre. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Gillian Wearing
Posted: Mon, 22 Nov 2021 06:58:31 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 96 - Winter 2018

A Portfolio of photographic work by Gillian Wearing. Published in Issue 96 of Source, Winter 2018. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Gillian Wearing’
by: Catherine Grant
Posted: Sun, 21 Nov 2021 18:31:35 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 96 - Winter 2018

We look back at the work of Gillian Wearing with an interview by Catherine Grant. The artist talks about the development of her work since 1991 and the feature concludes with two new photographs from her current series, published for the first time. / In 'Me: Me' from 1991, Gillian Wearing is shown with her eyes downcast, apparently reading a magazine. On the magazine the same photograph is reproduced, so that multiple images of Wearing lead the viewer in whilst also repelling any investment in the photograph as an authentic representation of self. The work visualises the adage ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, and gently plays with the idea that a photographic portrait can reveal inner depths. With its deadpan humour, this self-portrait is emblematic of Wearing’s work. Across her career she has explored the ways in which people present themselves to others, including herself. She examines the conventions of photography, video and portraiture, with a keen eye for the absurd along with a sincere desire to let people speak. She is a very famous British artist, but unlike some of her contemporaries who are known for their larger-thanlife characters as well as their artworks, she remains an enigmatic figure. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Photography Needs Drawing’
by: Jennifer Good
Posted: Thu, 18 Nov 2021 12:49:50 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 95 - Autumn 2018

Lampedusa is a Mediterranean island with a divided identity. Italian, but geographically closer to Tunisia, its pedigree as a tourist destination has been overtaken in recent years as its tiny community has found itself at the centre of the international migrant crisis. The huge numbers of migrants arriving on its beaches have begun to alter the island’s infrastructure and daily life; never more so than in October 2013 when a boat carrying over 500 people sank off its shores with the loss of approximately 360 lives, and the island became a household name. The challenge of visually representing the migrant crisis has been approached in a range of ways in recent years, including creative documentary projects such as Carlos Spottorno and Guillermo Abril’s photo-based non-fiction graphic novel 'La Grieta' (2016) and Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s film installation 'The Bureaucracy of Angels' (2017). These works and others are prompted by what might once have been called ‘compassion fatigue’ but is, more accurately, ‘form fatigue’ – a search for new forms of storytelling that sometimes needs to resort to the jarring, bizarre or simply novel in order to help viewers comprehend such an overwhelming humanitarian disaster. 'Lampedusa' is a valuable contribution to this effort, which can best be compared to a kind of portfolio or dossier; an experimental exploration of as many aspects of the ‘migrant image crisis’ as possible. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘If You Know The Beginning, The End Is No Trouble’
by: Melissa Bennett
Posted: Wed, 17 Nov 2021 05:36:47 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 99 - Autumn 2019

'The only way for me to understand why I took all these pictures... is that, it’s like when you start eating you realise how hungry you are... and when it came down to pictures... I now realise how hungry I was'. Liz Johnson Artur’s first UK solo show is a visual banquet. It features around 100 images from her personal archive of photographs that she has built up with a focus on the richness and complexity of the black British community in South London where she has lived since 1991. I arrived to an empty gallery, perfect for digesting a show like Artur’s that requires you to engage with the photographs from a number of different angles. The layout has the photographs displayed on four bamboo cane structures of varying sizes and shapes. The images themselves are printed on a variety of different surfaces. Some are printed on photographic paper, some on cloth, some on acetate sheets and a number have been arranged into a book. The diverse ways in which the images are treated echoes the diversity of their content. As well as an eclectic mix of people in portraits and group portraits there are photographs of shops, streets and still lifes of artefacts, some of which refer to traditional African culture. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Language Of Photography’
by: Rosamund Moon
Posted: Tue, 16 Nov 2021 06:02:57 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Historical
First Published: Issue 22 - Spring 2000

The history of photography could as well be demonstrated by the history of its terminology as by the pictures themselves or the devices used to produce them. Core terms - 'photography' itself, 'camera' and 'film' - were ESTablished as words in English within a matter of weeks of the first public announcements of the invention in 1839: the annus mirabilis in both the history of photography and in the history of its words. Pioneering techniques and processes produced the early coinages. As technology stabilized, interest in aesthetic aspects led to specialist descriptive and qualitative vocabulary: meanwhile, popularization led to less formal words. In this way, linguistic developments paralleled the developing visual vocabulary and grammar of photography, as well as its mechanics. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Dad’s Clothes’
by: Andre Penteado
Posted: Mon, 15 Nov 2021 10:48:46 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 63 - Summer 2010

A Portfolio of photographic work by Andre Penteado. Published in Issue 63 of Source, Summer 2010. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 106 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 15 Nov 2021 03:48:54 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 106 - Autumn 2021

Time is made manifest in photographs in different ways. We are familiar with the frozen movement of a high speed exposure. Less familiar are images that record slow processes or that simply take a long time to register as in geology or astronomy. Jem Southam talks about his work, which has often been slow to make, using cumbersome equipment, and photographing apparently static subject matter like ponds and cliff faces. Yet his patient and precise method, as well as reflecting his temperament, draws our attention to the small details of incremental change. An extreme example of slow image making would be the 5,200 day exposure to record an image of the sun made by the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector in Japan. Jost Migenda explains how this detector operates, what neutrinos are and how the most violent and extreme events in the galaxy give rise to the faintest, almost imperceptible signals. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Talking 'bout My Generation’
by: Shirley Read
Posted: Sun, 14 Nov 2021 19:51:33 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Social
First Published: Issue 33 - Winter 2002

Writing about community photography is something of a daunting task. Not simply because of the complexity and diversity of its history the relative paucity of source material, because it is disputed territory or because the 1970s seem more than a life time ago but because trying to define community photography is so difficult. Community photography was not a single movement but a loose term used to describe a huge diversity of practices and politics - it was above all a movement of very many small projects often working in isolation and completely independent of each other. Furthermore many photographers and organisations working in the area resisted being called community photographers or community projects. This was because they saw the term as derogatory and implying amateurism at a time when photography was struggling for recognition and funding. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘A Cover With Spin’
by: Slavka Sverakova
Posted: Sun, 14 Nov 2021 17:27:16 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 15 - Summer 1998

I have assumed that: (i) there was a clear brief for the design, (ii) the McCann-Erickson agency offered alternatives, (iii) the client selected this design as a sign of approval. If I turn to the observer some contradictions become obvious: "it is a sunset at the West of Ireland", "it is like a firemen's handbook", "it is threatening", "it makes you reject the Agreement", "it dictates to you to agree", "the figures are about to fall", "it is discomforting", "it puts me off", "it is not inviting". My small and random sample illustrates that expectancies give rise to perceptions (Hochberg 1978), but above all it suggests the design's low control over the recipient. That a cover may act like a referent is not surprising, since we expect it to convey the subject and its treatment. A cover is expected to interpret in visual terms the essential quality and spirit of authors' work. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Hidden People’
by: Gail Baylis
Posted: Thu, 21 Oct 2021 13:37:49 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 87 - Autumn 2016

Making photographs is a performative act for Trish Morrissey, one that allows her to explore the boundaries of the language of photography. This is a strategy that she continues in 'Ten People in a Suitcase'. As with previous work, Morrissey inserts herself as the subject in these photographs. This introduces a fiction into the key authority claim of analogue photography, its indexical link. Comparisons between Morrissey’s practice and the work of Cindy Sherman are often drawn, most notably in that both photographers choose to make themselves the subject of the work. However the aims differ: where Sherman in the 'Untitled Film Stills' sought to expose how collective popular fantasies are based on interchangeable visual signs that render femininity a masquerade, Morrissey, in this series, works to both embody the image and also to acknowledge the presence of the original subject. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Ten People in a Suitcase’
by: Trish Morrissey
Posted: Thu, 21 Oct 2021 12:27:40 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 87 - Autumn 2016

A Portfolio of photographic work by Trish Morrissey. Published in Issue 87 of Source, Autumn 2016. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘It's Your Decision?’
by: Richard West
Posted: Thu, 14 Oct 2021 10:15:04 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 15 - Summer 1998

The photograph used on the cover of the political agreement has been sent to every household in Northern Ireland and has been used on posters advertising the May 22nd referendum. As a ubiquitous image, and one carrying such political significance, questions were immediately asked as to its origins and efficacy. Attempts to discover who had taken the picture and where they had taken it have proved laborious.On first seeing the image an average member of the public, as conceived by advertising agency psychologists, might have responded to the beautiful sunset, the youthful, nuclear family with children of both sexes and concluded that standing together watching the sun set must be bliss indeed. Then reading the slogan -'it's your decision'- the citizens of Northern Ireland would put two and two together and realize that the decision they must make and being on the beach are connected in some way; if only they can make the correct decision all this can be theirs, family, beach, and setting sun. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 105 / Summer 2021 - Zoom Launch’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 02 Sep 2021 03:30:42 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Event

Join us for the Online Launch of Issue 105 'Local'. Live interviews with contributors: Curator Ella Ravilious and Professor Colin Samson. Hosted by SOURCE Editor Richard West. In association with Gallery of Photography Ireland. Ella Ravilious is a Curator at the V and A, a trustee of Beaford Arts and the daughter of the photographer James Ravilious. In Issue 105 she talks about her father's work and to Mark Lawrence from Oxfordshire History Centre about photographic collections in local archives. Colin Samson is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. In Issue 105 he reviews 'Through a Native Lens: American Indian Photography' by Nicole Dawn Strathman and 'The Grass Shall Grow: Helen Post Photographs the Native American West' by Mick Gidley. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 105 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 26 Jul 2021 04:55:29 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 105 - Summer 2021

Photographic projects are often described as relating to ‘place’, ‘land’ or ‘community’, each with their own specific dimension. The ‘local’ however has more negative associations, neatly encapsulated by the catchphrase of the deranged shopkeeper from the 'League of Gentlemen': "This is a local shop for local people; there’s nothing for you here." The local represents the civic function of society – local government, education, reporting, services – and, probably not coincidentally, has been the most severely affected by the rise of social media and the financial crash of 2008. These local functions have always used photography and in this issue we look at local photojournalism, archives and council services. How are they managing with reduced resources and do they continue to have a role or, as the shopkeeper says, is there ‘nothing for you here’? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Sexism on Show’
by: Emma Campbell
Posted: Tue, 06 Jul 2021 08:48:23 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Gender
First Published: Issue 79 - Summer 2014

In April of this year the 'British Journal of Photography' (BJP) published a ‘Women Only’ issue featuring women photographers, projects run by women and conversations about the paucity of women in photography. It touched lightly on the reasons behind this disparity and briefly, in an almost embarrassed tone, highlighted the magazine’s own past sexism, showing some of the easier to digest sexualised advertising that had filled its pages in the past. But why now? The role of women in photography has become a vital issue once again, tallying with wider public discussions about women’s involvement in other arenas. A conference at the Tate Gallery 'Fast Forward: Women and Photography then and now' has also taken place this year (part of a larger research project at the University College of the Arts, Farnham). Other initiatives include Firecracker, the European women photographers project, started by Fiona Rogers, a Magnum employee, to showcase women’s work. As was highlighted in 'Source 76' women now make up a majority of the photography curators in Ireland and the UK (62%). . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Photographs Explain Empire to Me’
by: Drew Thompson
Posted: Fri, 02 Jul 2021 11:21:50 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Historical
First Published: Issue 98 - Summer 2019

During World War I and II, the Ministry of Information produced wartime propaganda for the British government. In 1946, the Central Office of Information (COI) replaced the Ministry of Information, marking a shift and new front in the British government’s attempts to influence public opinion. From its opening, the COI operated a photographic section that amassed and circulated news agency style photographs of Africa and Asia, sites of British imperial rule. Then, in 1966 just as the UK recognised the independence of its colonies in Africa and Asia, the COI photographic section ceased its Africa and Asia coverage. The COI used its expansive archive for public relations and disinformation campaigns that targeted audiences in Great Britain at a time when the British government transformed itself into a social welfare state and grappled with decolonisation. The reality portrayed by the COI photographs greatly differed from the one that colonial states and populations native to Africa experienced while living under British colonial rule. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Can Photographs tell the Story of Black History and the Black Present?’
by: Caroline Molloy
Posted: Thu, 01 Jul 2021 12:18:47 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Historical
First Published: Issue 101 - Summer 2020

Caroline Molloy: First of all, I would like to ask you how you would like to introduce yourself for this piece? Your professional self? / Tina Campt: My professional self is a little schizophrenic because I come to my position and my research through various routes. I have a PhD in German history and I began my career as an Intellectual Historian who then became a Social and Oral Historian in order to do the work that I did on black Germans. Then, based on those oral histories, I was invited to curate an exhibition that was showcasing those life histories. That led me to photography because I found that photography told their stories even more vividly through a different medium. So I find it important to emphasise that I’m not a scholar trained in either the history of photography or art history or media studies. I am theorist who has come to photography and visual culture because it speaks to people and speaks for people in ways that animate what they think of themselves in a different way than language and text. In my work I engage photography and visual culture as a textual formation but I think it’s a formation that also demands other kinds of engagement as well. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Big Brother’
by: Yvonne Kennan
Posted: Thu, 01 Jul 2021 06:34:39 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 90 - Summer 2017

Yvonne Kennan: What inspired you to create such an intimate project? / Louis Quail: I think Justin is a survivor. I want to celebrate that along with his individuality. I started this book shortly after my mother died. Part of me would liked to have photographed my mother but I didn’t feel comfortable. I thought I might be exploiting my relationship on some level. My mother had schizophrenia as well. By the time my mother died I was older and more confident in the idea that it is really important to give people like Justin a voice. I am a believer that worse than being intruded upon is to be ignored. Another theme to the book is that mental health is part of us, it’s not all of us. It is important to show Justin’s hobbies and the rest of his life. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Big Brother’
by: Louis Quail
Posted: Thu, 01 Jul 2021 05:42:37 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 90 - Summer 2017

A Portfolio of photographic work by Louis Quail. Published in Issue 90 of Source, Summer 2017. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Maurice Hobson’
by: Declan Long
Posted: Wed, 30 Jun 2021 07:47:49 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 96 - Winter 2018

At the end of the summer this year, I travelled to the village of Caledon in Co. Tyrone to meet David Hobson, the brother of the late photographer Maurice Hobson: an extraordinarily talented, daringly experimental artist who passed away, far too early, in 1987. The family home, where both Maurice and David had grown up (along with other brothers and sisters) was on a pretty remote patch of farmland, a significant drive from Caledon itself. During the Troubles years, the relative isolation of such places – particularly in these contested, close-to-theborder areas – could potentially make one vulnerable. But the dispersed communities of these expanded rural townlands have always remained close-knit too. People know who’s who. Every face has a name. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Maurice Hobson
Posted: Wed, 30 Jun 2021 07:03:11 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 96 - Winter 2018

A Portfolio of photographic work by Maurice Hobson. Published in Issue 96 of Source, Winter 2018. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 104 / Spring 2021 - Zoom Launch’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 14 Jun 2021 02:45:15 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Event

Join us for the Online Launch of Issue 104 'Legacy'. Live interviews with featured photographer Ori Gersht and contributor Dr Emily Mark-FitzGerald. Hosted by SOURCE Editor Richard West. In association with Gallery of Photography Ireland. Ori Gersht was born in Isreal but has lived in London for over 30 years. Throughout his career his work has been concerned with the relationships between history, memory and landscape. He repeatedly uses the tension between creation and destruction in order to discover something new. In his new work he has been working with postcard imagery from historic museum collections and considering how these collections are defined and the way their historical story is being narrated. Issue 104 features a retrospective portfolio with selections from Gersht's photographic work to date, and an interview by Declan Long. Dr Emily Mark-FitzGerald's acedemic specialisations include the visual culture of famine, poverty, migration, and diaspora (painting, engraving, photography, cinema and material culture); memory, commemoration and public art; museum studies and heritage; and Irish cultural policy and institutions. She is the author of 'Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument' (Liverpool University Press, 2013). In her Issue 104 article 'Tinted History' she discusses recent trends in the colourisation of old photographs. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 104 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Tue, 27 Apr 2021 10:57:31 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 104 - Spring 2021

From the moment a photograph is made and a small part of the past lingers into the ongoing present, a question is posed as to what is going to be done with it. Photographs form both a material legacy and one of meaning. A librarian like Richard Ovenden has to look after his old photographs, for example to prevent Fox Talbot's first experiments fading from view, but also to see how they relate to other knowledge. As he says to April Yee about the work he has recently added to the Bodleian library collection, this is part of a 'great enterprise' that extends beyond the life of any individual. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: Photographs of the Unknown’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Tue, 20 Apr 2021 18:13:41 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Paranormal

‘It is not easy to take photographs of things which are not supposed to exist’, the authors of 'Photographs of the Unknown' put it, with considerable understatement. ‘You don’t just go out and photograph “the impossible”.’ Paranormal photographs have particular perils in the making. Even when a camera is present at ‘erratic, anomalous, short-lived and unexpected events’, photographers can find their operations supernaturally jinxed or otherwise ‘bungled’ in the excitement of the moment. This, the authors observe, is ‘the main reason for the badly framed, out of focus and under or over exposed views of UFOs, sea serpents and ghosts familiar to us all’. 'Photographs of the Unknown', in its large-scale hardback format, claimed to present ‘the greatest single collection of photographs’ from this diverse area. Its 300 illustrations offer ‘an astonishing album of evidence’, with the camera as ‘witness to the frontiers of human experience’. With examples ranging from the historic to the recent, the result is certainly compelling, especially in lesser-known examples from the years leading up to the book’s release. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Matters of Duration’
by: Christopher Haworth
Posted: Tue, 20 Apr 2021 09:06:27 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Experimental
First Published: Issue 85 - Spring 2016

In 2015 there were over a trillion photographs taken worldwide. More pictures are produced in a single day than in the history of the world prior to the advent of digital imaging. Coupled with the rise of free publishing and social media sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Instagram, this increase in the quantity of images and image-taking devices has contributed to a shift in the temporal nature of photography. Photographs, for Susan Murray, (in her essay 'Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics') become less about the act of collecting ‘special or rarefied moments of domestic living’, and more about the immediate, rather fleeting display of the small and the mundane. In photo-messaging and ‘meme’ culture as the photograph becomes a medium for instant conversation and dialogue it is increasingly transitory, while in Snapchat image becomes utterance, as photographs ‘die’ just moments after being seen. What persists across these cases is a sense of time compressed: of the lag between production, consumption, and disposal being reduced to zero. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Photographic Scores’
by: Jez riley French
Posted: Mon, 19 Apr 2021 07:02:29 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Experimental
First Published: Issue 85 - Spring 2016

A Portfolio of photographic work by Jez riley French. Published in Issue 85 of Source, Spring 2016. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Air of the Anthropocene’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Sun, 18 Apr 2021 17:49:03 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Experimental
First Published: Issue 93 - Spring 2018

The artist Robin Price has been working with the environmental atmospheric scientist Francis Pope on creating images that show air pollution that would otherwise be invisible. Source editor John Duncan talks to them both about how the project was developed. / John Duncan: Francis, can you tell me about your own research and how it relates to Robin’s work? / Francis: I am interested in aerosol particles which are the small particles found in the air, typically less than ten microns in size. To give you some scale, human hair is about seventy microns in diameter. So these are small particles floating around in the air. They are everywhere, even in the most pristine environments but are also produced by pollution emissions, things like cars and industry and dust resuspension and they are harmful for health. Most of my work in one way or the other revolves around aerosol particles. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Air of the Anthropocene’
by: Robin Price
Posted: Sun, 18 Apr 2021 14:21:30 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Experimental
First Published: Issue 93 - Spring 2018

A Portfolio of photographic work by Robin Price. Published in Issue 93 of Source, Spring 2018. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Erbgericht’
by: Gavin Murphy
Posted: Wed, 14 Apr 2021 18:40:56 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Architectural
First Published: Issue 80 - Autumn 2014

Once, when travelling in Norway, I kicked the gate of a guesthouse we were to be staying at. It opened the wrong way. It was the final act of a long frustrating day. I was not aware our host was standing in the doorway ready to greet us. He looked in horror at my behaviour. This was the beginning of an excruciating weekend under his roof. On departing I felt obliged to leave behind my copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters from her Scandinavian travels. This was as much a declaration of civility as an act of appeasement. I had broken the ancient law of xenia: the bond of hospitality between host and stranger. In Homeric times xenia was a strong social bond in the absence of civil institutions. All strangers and travellers are sacred in the eyes of Zeus. The host was obliged to offer hospitality and the guest was to reciprocate. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Erbgericht’
by: Andrea Grützner
Posted: Wed, 14 Apr 2021 17:57:38 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Architectural
First Published: Issue 80 - Autumn 2014

A Portfolio of photographic work by Andrea Grützner. Published in Issue 80 of Source, Autumn 2014. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Advertising: Climate Change’
by: Judith Williamson
Posted: Wed, 14 Apr 2021 17:29:15 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 62 - Spring 2010

These ads show perfectly the two main responses to climate change within capitalist marketing. One could be seen as representing the unconscious, where an image of climate change is at once present, and denied; the other speaks directly to the superego, offering a conscious expiation of an acknowledged guilt. The ads ran in the same issue of a recent colour supplement, and though they tell us very little about climate change, together they tell us a great deal about the cultural climate. Our society is deeply ambivalent about climate change. The issue hovers constantly within public discourse: in the consistent warnings from scientists and those who take their findings seriously, and in an equally persistent counter force, insisting on business as usual and unable to contemplate any lasting change in our way of life. These are not merely two opposing groups – ‘believers’ and ‘doubters’ – but represent the conflicting impulses in all of us who live, inevitably, within a consumer capitalism which appears headed towards destruction of the biosphere. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘In Development: Fiona Filipidis’
by: Susanna Galbraith
Posted: Tue, 13 Apr 2021 10:27:57 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Documentary

I took this image in my brother’s house in Comporta - a small Portuguese fishing village - on the 6th May 2020, which just so happens to be my brother’s birthday. I left London at the very start of lockdown to be with my family and ended up staying in Portugal for 6 months. I began taking pictures randomly then as a means of passing time and staying creative. I took this one about a month in; I was still experimenting then. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Bliss Of Conformity / Experimental Relationship Vol 1’
by: Rachel Marsden
Posted: Sun, 11 Apr 2021 14:38:03 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Gender
First Published: Issue 96 - Winter 2018

The growth of discipline-focused galleries, fairs and festivals, art and photobook platforms have developed new international momentum for contemporary photography in and of the broader Chinese context. These include Jiazazhi Press (China), 3030 Press (Hong Kong), Closing Ceremony (China), 'Genda Magazine' (Italy/ China), Brownie Publishing (Hong Kong), La Maison de Z (China/France) and Photography of China (France/ China), the annual events ‘abC (Art Book in China)’ (Shanghai) and ‘Shanghai Art Book Fair’. Here are two examples of this trend, from two new publishers, with photobooks focusing on the development of long-term and marital relationships. The 'Bliss of Conformity' by Yingguang Guo focuses on the renowned marriage markets held in People’s Park, Shanghai. Seen as a national phenomenon and societal norm, it is where parents go to matchmake their children, both men and women, for forced or arranged marriages (although the author also describes it as for ‘women on the shelf’). Through a complex set of largely monochromatic images she shows the markets in progress. She includes covertly taken portraits, flora from the park, and blank, delicate pieces of white paper with text like those exchanged at the market. Yingguang attempts to present the vulnerability of both parents and prospective brides and grooms when building new relationships. The monochrome documentary approach she adopts is well suited to presenting what can be a hostile environment, fraught with parental and familial expectation, where children can go unacknowledged or be rejected. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Sunil Gupta’
by: Anthony Luvera
Posted: Sun, 11 Apr 2021 09:36:10 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Gender
First Published: Issue 79 - Summer 2014

Anthony Luvera talks to the photographer Sunil Gupta about how he got started in photography, his influences and his ongoing series of portraits Mr Malhotra’s Party. / Anthony Luvera: Did you see or read any representations of homosexuality in film or literature in your childhood in India? / Sunil Gupta: There was no mention of homosexuality. And there were no images of it. But you know what? There were no negative images either. There was no name calling. But you did see – because India is marvellous for visuals – a lot of guys holding hands. And you see a lot of guys who are extremely effeminate in public. You see Hidras turning up for rituals and nearly naked men covered in ash walking down the road. You’ve seen pictures of India. People hold onto each other for dear life even if they are just friends. It’s very touchy-feely. The extra step to something sexual is very little and a whole lot goes on under your nose but you don’t see it. So I had this funny experience growing up. There was a lot of marvellous sexuality and possibilities around, but at the same time nobody talked about it. We didn’t have any language for it. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Mr Malhotra’s Party’
by: Sunil Gupta
Posted: Sun, 11 Apr 2021 07:44:32 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 79 - Summer 2014

A Portfolio of photographic work by Sunil Gupta. Published in Issue 79 of Source, Summer 2014. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Year 3’
by: Catherine Grant
Posted: Sun, 11 Apr 2021 07:17:17 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 100 - Winter 2019

"THE GALLERY IS FULL OF CHILDREN!" proclaims a large noticeboard at the entrance to Tate Britain. The rest of the notice proceeds to inform more mature visitors that the Tate is ‘excited’ to welcome many school groups to the usually quiet Duveen Gallery as they visit their class portraits that cover the walls. ‘Excited’ seems to be a way of communicating to adults that children will be heard as well as seen in this large-scale photographic installation. This notice was the first indication that this project is participatory, as well as documentary: the capital letters reading almost as a comedic warning to the viewer. When I had read about Steve McQueen’s collaboration with numerous photographers and educators to photograph Year 3 children (who are 7-8 years old) in primary schools across London, I expected to find an interesting social document of the vibrant diversity of the city. As a series of over three thousand portraits depicting 76,146 pupils seated in various school halls and classrooms, it is a documentary project on an epic scale. However, it has also been a huge outreach project, working with creative education specialists A New Direction. A team of photographers visited two thirds of London’s primary schools, engaging children in a series of workshops as well as taking their portraits, with a range of educational resources for teachers that use photography to explore issues of identity and belonging. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘In the Company of Mothers’
by: Lucy Soutter
Posted: Sat, 10 Apr 2021 15:44:27 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Gender
First Published: Issue 75 - Summer 2013

Jeff Wall once made a photograph called 'Picture for Women' (1979). An elaborate mirror composition, it features a female model gazing out at the viewer (and thus at her own reflection) while being gazed at by Wall. The camera stands between the two figures and the photographer holds a cable-release in his hand. Numerous publications, including a 2011 book by David Campany, have supported Wall’s contention that this self-conscious reconfiguration of Edouard Manet’s 'Bar at the Folies-Bergère' (1881-2) transforms the power relationship between male artist and female subject in a way that is empowering for women. Personally, I’ve always found Wall’s picture rather pedantic and patronizing. For why should a picture for women necessarily need a man at all? Why can’t women look at themselves and at other women without men telling them how to do so? Hannah Starkey has photographed women in the city since the mid-1990s. Working with models, acquaintances and with strangers she encounters on the street, she constructs large, elegant colour tableaux that depict their subjects in moments of reverie or absorption. Highly pleasurable to look at—with striking architectural echoes of modernism and intriguing female figures—they convey an interiority that is rare in contemporary images of women. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘In the Company of Mothers’
by: Hannah Starkey
Posted: Sat, 10 Apr 2021 15:07:40 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Gender
First Published: Issue 75 - Summer 2013

A Portfolio of photographic work by Hannah Starkey. Published in Issue 75 of Source, Summer 2013. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Advertising: Adler’
by: Judith Williamson
Posted: Mon, 05 Apr 2021 17:24:31 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 69 - Winter 2011

This ad provides a fascinating illustration of the fact that images cannot be made to mean at will. The montaged photo of an African woman carrying a giant bracelet has been created with the intention of giving a positive meaning to the product, yet it functions in ways that are the very opposite of what the advertisers must have intended. Adler is a Swiss jewellery company based in Geneva, with outposts in Gstaad, London, Hong Kong and Tokyo. This information is given in small print at the bottom of the ad: it suggests a global reach, an international brand. However, there is no Adler outpost in any African country – the market for luxury jewellery on that continent must be extremely limited. This is relevant, since it is hard to imagine the image here being used to advertise to an African audience: placed in 'Vogue', the ad uses Africa to evoke universality and timelessness to an audience for whom it is definitively ‘other’. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Self-Defense for Women’
by: Joanna Bourke
Posted: Thu, 01 Apr 2021 13:03:51 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 97 - Spring 2019

In the 1870s, middle-class women carried ‘dagger-fans’ when alone in public places; in the early 1900s, they hosted ‘jujitsu parties’ for friends; by the 1970s, no consciousness-raising group would be complete without the equivalent of the feminist self defence programme called the ‘Nutcracker’s [sic] Suite’; and in the twenty-first century, enterprising young women are designing and marketing ‘anti-rape’ underwear. ‘How to’ guidelines for women showing them ways to physically fend off attacks have a long and provocative history. One of the earliest books in this genre was published in 1906 by Emily Diana Watts (usually known as Mrs. Roger Watts), one of the first female instructors of the Japanese art of self-defence in the western world. Entitled 'The Fine Art of Jujutsu', Watts’ book was introduced by Mary Russell, Duchess of Bedford. It spread the word that even women from elite backgrounds could become martial athletes and fight off as well as with men. This message was spread further in a series of photographs by a woman known only as ‘Miss Sanderson’. Sanderson was a prominent fencer and instructor in self defence in Edwardian London. The photographs illustrates her unique system of self defence, which invariably used an umbrella or parasol. Commentators were clearly in awe of Miss Sanderson. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Self-Defense for Women’
by: Getty Images
Posted: Thu, 01 Apr 2021 12:08:49 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 97 - Spring 2019

The writer Joanna Bourke presents a selection of images demonstrating self defence for women. These pictures were chosen following a period of research into ‘how to’ photographs in the Getty Images Archive and from other collections Getty Images represents. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Advertising: Nissan Qashqai’
by: Judith Williamson
Posted: Mon, 29 Mar 2021 17:12:00 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 56 - Autumn 2008

Urban industrial landscapes have been used to invoke a range of different meanings in ads over the last few decades. During the 1980s and 90s they provided the backdrop for a super-cool image of yuppified loft-living, mainly involving young men lounging in leather chairs in minimally furnished converted warehouses. There was a historical logic to this fantasy: it showed a city-financed lifestyle literally filling the shells of an earlier, manufacturing-based, capitalism – inhabiting the spaces made empty by its own advance. This picture gradually gave way to a more threatening view of the inner-city landscape as urban jungle, no longer merely an accessory to the lifestyle of an ascendant class but a potential danger to it. The sense of cities as wild terrain, from which rugged protection is required for each individual, goes well beyond advertising in a culture where children are driven to school in Land Rovers and pedestrians are rigged out in mountain boots and rucksacks. Car ads during this period have been dominated by images of wilderness, and alongside the glaciers, deserts and savannas has run a version one might call ‘urban safari’. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: Wedding Photography’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Mon, 29 Mar 2021 12:59:07 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Education

As per its straight-talking title, wedding photography is the principal concern of this pocket guide. Closer scrutiny, however, betrays that wartime nuptials are its particular focus. Uniforms are more common that tailcoats among the grooms depicted. Throughout the book, the social conditions of the period inflect the narrative. The photography for which tuition is given is aimed at the formal white wedding; no deviations are provided for register office settings or those outside of the Christian church. The opening words ESTablish that wedding photography is not "a creative job in an artistic sense". Strategies for image-making are highly conventionalised, arranged around a given set of photographable ‘incidents’, from the arrival of the bridesmaids to the cutting of the cake. These are choreographed minute-by-minute through detailed spreadsheets and pictorial diagrams in the style of a military operation. The author, Gordon Catling, who at the time of writing was serving as a captain in the army, claims to have attended over 700 weddings as a professional photographer; he knows the drill. His comprehensive systems for success are shared, from how to secure a first paid job to templates of threatening letters for when clients do not cough up. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘An Unkindness of Ravens’
by: Jennifer Good
Posted: Mon, 29 Mar 2021 08:38:28 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Narrative
First Published: Issue 102 - Autumn 2020

"Certain violations of the social contract are too terrible to utter aloud", writes psychologist Judith Lewis Herman, "This is the meaning of the word unspeakable." Violence shatters and creates fragments where there was once a whole – a whole sense of self, of safety, of place in the world. In the shattering, language often fails too, because it is a system that depends on a consensus of referents, understanding, the naming of more-or-less stable things and concepts. Hence survivors of traumatic events often struggle to name or express their experience in words. Herman says that it can be difficult ‘to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time, to retain all the pieces, and to fit them together. It is even more difficult to find a language that conveys fully and persuasively what one has seen.’ In fact, Herman, who has written about traumas from the collective (such as war) to the individual (such as rape), likens traumatic memory to ‘a series of still snapshots or a silent movie’. Beginning with the fragmented raw material of sensation and images, which may be concrete objects or reside solely in the mind, the goal of recovery is to re-integrate these pieces into some kind of cohesive story. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘An Unkindness of Ravens’
by: Claire Maxfield
Posted: Mon, 29 Mar 2021 08:03:37 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Narrative
First Published: Issue 102 - Autumn 2020

A Portfolio of photographic work by Claire Maxfield. Published in Issue 102 of Source, Autumn 2020. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Those’
by: Gavin Murphy
Posted: Sun, 28 Mar 2021 18:32:51 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Forensic
First Published: Issue 76 - Autumn 2013

While we may aspire to understanding, we still figure the unknown through ghosts, gods, aliens and demons. Our doubts over biogenetic developments and the new controls promised over nature also find cultural form in the monstrous and in re-articulations of Prometheus’ downfall. Indeed, our origins are imagined in violent primal myths. Our future can be seen as a grim ecological uncertainty. We draw upon and wrestle with these states in the search for purpose. And sill we aspire to understand. 'Those' have stemmed from 'Them'. This is an ongoing project where Treacy gathers abandoned clothing found in offbeat grounds and neglected spaces. These are dark underpasses, desolate riverbanks and lay-by overgrowth. They are on the other side of the hoarding. His finds are assembled as if to appear as figures of retribution. They are perverse and macabre. Deviant. 'Those' are forms recomposed from these assemblages. They are described by Treacy as the furtive fruit of these fertile grounds. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Those’
by: Danny Treacy
Posted: Sun, 28 Mar 2021 14:03:15 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Forensic
First Published: Issue 76 - Autumn 2013

A Portfolio of photographic work by Danny Treacy. Published in Issue 76 of Source, Autumn 2013. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Annabel Elgar’
by: John Mathews
Posted: Fri, 26 Mar 2021 13:17:38 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 69 - Winter 2011

Could you tell me about your process and how you go about creating the scenes in your photographs? / The starting point of my work is the imagined fantasies of someone outside of society. Someone who appears to live a, so called, normal life but who, within the confines of their home, finds it hard to keep a lid on their desires. I might begin with a news story for the preparation of a work, or something else that I have read or seen, and build it up from there. An example would be the story of the American creationist teacher John Freshwater who insisted on having the bible on his desk at school and who branded crosses on the arms of several students. The starting point of 'Trophy' was the story of the American Pentecostal sect ‘The Church of God with Signs Following’. As part of this religion they drank strychnine poison and handled serpents. If the serpents bit you then it was seen as a sign of lack of faith. I am fascinated by the details of these stories: the Russian cult who retreated into a cave because they thought Armageddon was going to happen and who also believed that supermarket barcodes were Satanic, which seems like a really strange fear to have. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Annabel Elgar
Posted: Fri, 26 Mar 2021 12:56:33 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 69 - Winter 2011

A Portfolio of photographic work by Annabel Elgar. Published in Issue 69 of Source, Winter 2011. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Circular Time’
by: Will Rea
Posted: Wed, 24 Mar 2021 13:40:13 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 101 - Summer 2020

Amongst the Igbo people of South Eastern Nigeria there is a tradition of building a two-story shrine house, known as Mbari, to appease the goddess Ala. She, the goddess of the earth, is the central figure of representation, sculpted in clay and dressed in her finery. There is no convention to her representation and through time she has been portrayed in various contemporary guises. Mbari is also the name given to the club of writers and artists that formed in the Yoruba town of Ibadan in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The name was suggested by Chinua Achebe. In 1958 Achebe published 'Things Fall Apart' and revolutionised writing in, about and from Africa. 'Things Fall Apart' is not simply an ‘African’ novel. It is a novel firmly located within a specific time and a specific place in Africa. The story is one of universal human tragedy, but the characters, the events, the place are all a part of Achebe’s own culture and what he knows. Set within the fictional village Umuofia, in the eastern region of Nigeria, the novel is Igbo in its genesis and its philosophy. Although a fictional text its engagement is in the articulation between that philosophy and the imposition of colonial structures of knowledge. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Igbo Women’
by: Adaeze Ihebom
Posted: Wed, 24 Mar 2021 13:08:54 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 101 - Summer 2020

A Portfolio of photographic work by Adaeze Ihebom. Published in Issue 101 of Source, Summer 2020. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Nature Gone Wild?’
by: Dorothea Born
Posted: Wed, 24 Mar 2021 12:26:39 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Environmental
First Published: Issue 99 - Autumn 2019

"How is global warming affecting the UK?" Under this heading, Friends of the Earth UK put different images on their website, displaying climate change impacts. Scrolling down, we see Saddleworth Moor burning, flooded streets in York, burnt fields and a toppled seawall. While the pictures are specific to the UK, the images’ overall theme is widely used in visual representations of climate change, especially when the intention is to show the effects of global warming. Type ‘climate change’ into a Google picture search and images of fires, droughts, flooding and storms will pop up. Some may show stretches of forest going up in flames or parched soil and seared crops, others display flooded cities or the aftermath of devastating storms. And most media articles, NGO websites, information videos or campaign leaflets will include similar pictures of some kind of catastrophic event when talking about climate change. Among other common visual themes, such as the iconic polar bear adrift on an ice shelf or the famous hockey stick graph (of mean global temperature), images showing natural catastrophes have become canonical for its visualisation. They are part of an iconography that has been built up to represent this issue ever since it became a ‘hot topic’. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Nature of Facts’
by: David Bate
Posted: Tue, 23 Mar 2021 08:11:58 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Photojournalism
First Published: Issue 95 - Autumn 2018

The 2017 Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award is the latest in a string of incidents to challenge the authority of the photographic image. When the Natural History Museum in London took down Marcio Cabral’s nocturnal photograph of an anteater because it had been deemed ‘fake’, the photographer protested that they were wrong. It had been noticed that the anteater in his night time photograph bore an uncanny resemblance to the stuffed animal on display at the entrance to Brazil’s National Park, Emas, where the picture was taken. Five ‘scientists’, experts in animals and taxidermy concluded the photograph was ‘faked’ (a montage of a live natural scene with this stuffed animal). Such examples of fakery are not new, but they are part of a new narrative about photography and its users being untrustworthy. People are using photographs to create their ‘own fictions’. Thus we need to do more ‘fact-checking’ it is claimed. Journalists protest that the truth must be preserved. Others claim this is all part of some social transformation of our times, where truth is no longer so relevant: an age of ‘post-truth’. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Q and A With Ciara Moloney’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Mon, 22 Mar 2021 10:13:22 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

Tell us about your job? / As a curator I work with contemporary artists to create exhibitions, often of new work, usually at institutions but sometimes in public spaces. My role is to mediate between artists and audiences, ensuring that the artist's vision is realised in the best possible way - on time and in budget! At the moment, I am working as the PS² Freelands Artist Programme Curator, for which I support a small group of artists with their creative and professional development. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: Through a Kitchen Window’
by: Julie Dawn Dennis
Posted: Mon, 22 Mar 2021 08:25:56 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Landscape

At home I am, in normal circumstances, liberated by limitation, free to be myself inside my own room. Through my window I can be both seen and hidden. With soft curtains closed, I redact the outside world; with them open, I may gaze across the outside, and (if I choose to) photograph what I see. Looking through the viewfinder it is as though I am present in both places at once. Both the window and the camera complicate my interior and exterior worlds. If the human eye is window to one’s soul, is a camera an extension to this ‘soul-window’? You look into my eye to read me, to know me. I want to share with you an image of what my eye sees so that you may read me further and know me deeper. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: Photoanalysis’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Mon, 15 Mar 2021 19:05:30 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Education

The nuclear family depicted on the cover of 'Photoanalysis' comprise a suited father, a fashionably-dressed mother and two blonde primary-school age children. Smiling and embracing, they are, at first glance, an idealised cereal packet image of domestic accord in the 1970s. At the hands of a book that claims "to read the hidden psychological clues in any photo", however, the sitters become specimens for critique. White circles highlight photographic details linked to probing questions. Of the mother’s hand on her son’s shoulder: "Is this real affection?" Of the father, whose face is turned away from the camera: "Is this man really happy?" 'Photoanalysis', first published in 1973, was the first book by New York shrink, Dr Robert U. Akeret. Swiss-born and trained under Erich Fromm, Akeret’s system was informed by more than 20 years of therapeutic practice. The opening pages provide accounts of his analysands and their complex psychological blocks; these were only resolved when Akeret’s suggested that each brought family photographs to the couch. In a method close to what visual sociologists now call photo-elicitation, photographs provided prompts for psychological revelation. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Q and A With Karin Andreasson’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Wed, 10 Mar 2021 06:13:24 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

Tell us about your job? / I am part of a small team of picture editors who work on The Guardian's daily print edition. The role is a combination of sourcing images for specific stories, commissioning for a fast news schedule and presenting photography that surprises and captures readers’ imagination. I scour tens of thousands of images daily that are filed from agencies and freelance photographers. This relentless search reveals images that fill standalone spaces, including our Eyewitness centre spread, and can inspire a written news piece. Finding the front page image is an important part of the day and varies from finding the perfect expression on a politician’s face that speaks to the headline, to being asked to come up with a striking image of the day that doesn’t relate to any story. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘In Development: Robert Darch’
by: Susanna Galbraith
Posted: Mon, 08 Mar 2021 17:14:42 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Landscape

I took these photographs during the first lockdown, just outside of Exeter, Devon, where I live. I used my daily exercise to cycle up to the tree on a hill, just to the south of the city. I hadn’t planned to start a project during lockdown. Instead I wanted to use the time to catch up with editing finished work and to take a break. I was just drawn to the tree, so started taking pictures of it. It became a new positive routine, cycling up to the tree each day. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: Water Babies’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Mon, 01 Mar 2021 10:24:16 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Underwater

The record sleeve for Nirvana’s 1991 album, 'Nevermind', of a baby swimming underwater after a dollar bank note, has achieved iconic status. Posed in a Californian pool, Kirk Weddle’s photograph was apparently inspired by a documentary that the band’s frontman, Kurt Cobain, had watched about water births. Images of infants swimming underwater unassisted have long captivated: the cover and end papers of the 1983 book, 'Water Babies', feature very similar photographs. 'Water Babies' is ostensibly a study of the philosophies of Igor Tjarkovsky, a Russian experimental midwife who, since the 1960s, has sought to develop "a new kind of people, the children of the Ocean". Tjarkovsky, a one-time boat-builder and athletics coach, holds mystical ideas about the importance of water for healing but, as the book’s blurb notes, he has "created a sensation around the world with his photographs of swimming and diving babies". These photographs, as the first line of the first chapter attests, inspired Swedish journalist Erik Sidenbladh to visit Tjarkovsky at his Moscow research lab in the All-Union Scientific Institute for Physical Culture and produce the book. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Q and A With Mariama Attah’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Thu, 25 Feb 2021 04:47:11 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

Tell us about your job? What does your core role at Open Eye involve? / We have a wide range of exhibitions and events that happen off site, in communities or informal spaces. My day-to-day role varies a lot depending on where we are in our exhibition schedule but my core role is curating the exhibitions for the physical gallery space. I spend time finding artists through research, word of mouth, or being introduced to practitioners. I’m also spending time getting to know our audiences and communities, understanding how I can continue these relationships and understanding what role the gallery plays in their lives. That’s a hugely exciting part of my role but it isn’t the majority of how I spend my time. Curating the gallery program includes everything from managing budgets, creating installation schedules, painting walls and condition reporting artworks to coming up with suggestions for the public program. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: Looking at My Parents’
by: Julia Tanner
Posted: Mon, 22 Feb 2021 07:38:59 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Portraiture

“This is the last time you’ll see me in my twenties,” I said to my father in the car. He turned around and stretched his face into a smile with dancing eyes. My father is a quiet man, and rarely makes eye contact. His affection is as genuine as it is awkwardly expressed: he makes a caricature of himself in order to show it. His father was a photographer whose photographs rarely contained people. Those that did normally held faces turned away. When I think of portraits in photography - posed, the smiling gaze looking out - I think of the brief moments of eye contact between myself and my father before we hug goodbye. These are the rare times I look directly at him looking directly at me. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Before Inkjet’
by: Simon Denison
Posted: Thu, 18 Feb 2021 17:34:21 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Narrative
First Published: Issue 66 - Spring 2011

The inevitable has happened: the photographic darkroom has now joined that long list of institutions, locations and site types recorded by the camera just as they are swept aside by history. The darkroom has long been mythologised as a place of alchemy and mysterious practices, and Canadian photographer Michel Campeau’s series emphasises the strangeness of it all by focusing on the peculiar tools and materials of darkroom craft: the hand-made dodgers, the negative carriers and masks in assorted shapes and sizes, the clothes pegs, the discarded spools of backing paper, the packed files of negatives, the clipped film ends, the clock-timers, the safety lights, the darkroom coats stained with fixer. His untitled photographs show everything but explain nothing. They will leave anyone without experience of a darkroom – which will be virtually everyone in a few years’ time – little the wiser. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Photography and Love’
by: Matt Packer
Posted: Thu, 18 Feb 2021 17:10:22 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Family
First Published: Issue 66 - Spring 2011

With it’s focus on ‘love, family, and relationships’, 'All My Lovin’' was an ambitious exhibition in both scale and proposition, seemingly unintimidated by themes so blindingly universal and perennial. Organised across two floors of the Crawford Art Gallery, the exhibition spaces were punctuated with video rooms, temporary wall constructions, and a reading table. The work itself was installed in a variety of irregular clusters and wall configurations – all perhaps a subtle nod to Edward Steichen’s 1955 exhibition 'Family of Man' that dealt, along similar thematic lines, with extravagant scenography. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The International Street’
by: Mick Gidley
Posted: Wed, 17 Feb 2021 17:26:03 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Street
First Published: Issue 66 - Spring 2011

On entering Quad’s exhibition space, opposite the door, the first group of images to demand our attention are six colour prints by Joel Meyerowitz, one of Format 11’s two patrons, and it soon becomes evident that he – in his practice as an artist as well as through his critical admonitions in 'Bystander' (with Colin Westerbrook, 2001) – has been a guiding light for this generous show of street photography curated by Louise Clements. So much goes on within his images: in 'Blind Man, Malaga' (1966) the obviously sightless male figure at a café table concentrates on his drink, oblivious of the diverse activity around him that we take in, including behind at middle distance a large woolly animal, itself displaced from some other world. As well as a talk, Meyerowitz’ other specific contribution to 'Right Here, Right Now' is his selection of mostly unpublished Gary Winogrand colour photographs made between 1958 and 1964. It is a privilege to be able to see so many of these works, which parallel and punctuate Winogrand’s prolific black and white output. Almost every one of them, despite countless imitations (including some in this show), are still eye-catching. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: Amberstar’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Mon, 15 Feb 2021 08:52:28 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Photomontage

Neville Scott, a 28-year-old ‘space jockey and freelance rocket man’ lives a Bohemian life, drifting from planet to planet in an unspecified future. Having spent his money on "wine, women and wine", he finds himself unable to pay his fines and has his spaceship, 'Amberstar', impounded by monks on the highly moral planet, Cylis 4. The book that carries the spaceship’s name follows Scott as he survives a series of intergalactic scrapes. Its space opera plot barely stands up to scrutiny but 'Amberstar’s' visual narrative is sublime. The book’s blurb claims that ‘through the miracle of the PHOTO-MULTIPLE® process comes science fiction’s greatest pictorial triumph’. Such a superlative ‘miracle’, in fact, required a lot of labour, involving three photographers, two special effects staff and a four further colourists. The ‘multiple’ seems to come as much from the ensemble effort - including six actors, several different planetary landscapes and a fleet of plastic spaceships and toy dinosaurs – as it does from the complex collage and overlay technique. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Who’s Slick Now?’
by: Stephen Bull
Posted: Thu, 11 Feb 2021 10:45:34 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 66 - Spring 2011

‘The Anti-Photographers’ is an influential essay by Nancy Foote, first published in a 1976 issue of 'Artforum'. Foote surveyed the use of photography by artists from the late 1960s until the mid-1970s. Most of these artists, primarily making work in a conceptual or performative mode, took or commissioned photographs to record their actions and ephemeral constructions in order to disseminate their work to a wider audience – with many of them also exploring the nature of photography itself. Foote argues that all of these artists using photography, or ‘anti-photographers’, went against the preceding Modernist art photographers’ emphasis on technical skill and precious prints. Instead, the new generation used photographs as mass-reproducible documents providing information. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Museum Piece’
by: Roger Hargreaves
Posted: Thu, 11 Feb 2021 10:10:37 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Street
First Published: Issue 66 - Spring 2011

Photography is endlessly conflated and co-joined. The book and the photograph have been fused into the ‘photobook’, standing not for all books of photographs but for a certain type of book which operates as the primary site of mediation for certain sets of photographs usually produced as a series by a single photographer. ‘Street photography’ in turn is not meant to refer to all photographs taken in the street but a specific type of photograph with an aesthetic, a set of defined subjects, principally people, and an attitude; humanist, empathetic and alert to chance. The location fashion photographs made by Richard Avedon in Paris soon after the war which re-cast the distressed backdrop of the city with a new allure are not acknowledged by street photography’s self appointed brand managers to be part of the product. Sophie Calles’ conceptual work, 'The Detective' in which a private eye followed and photographed her as she trailed around the city aren’t considered to be a chapter in the story. And yet arguably the street photographs of fashion, advertising, conceptual practice and topography are as much threads in the photographic fabric of the city as purist documentary photography. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘In Development: Yvette Monahan’
by: Susanna Galbraith
Posted: Mon, 08 Feb 2021 18:01:52 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Macro

This image was taken at our back door as the sunlight streamed in on some cobwebs. It is one of those scenes that I walk by every day, but on that particular day, the way the light caught the cobweb stopped me in my tracks. It is part of a new body of work called 'A Revolution of Stardust', which examines the cosmic every day. One morning, I looked in the sink at a pattern created by coffee grinds. On closer viewing, it resembled a moonscape. I started to see images close at hand that mirrored the universe. The water drops on the shower door took on meteoric qualities. Cobwebs assumed the form of entire galaxies. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 103 / Winter 2020 - Zoom Launch’
by: The Editors
Posted: Fri, 05 Feb 2021 04:38:18 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Event

Join us for the Online Launch of Issue 103 'Life Stories'. Live interviews with featured photographer Nik Roche and contributor Dr Annebella Pollen (who also pens our Flea Market Photobooks column). Hosted by SOURCE Editor Richard West. In association with Gallery of Photography Ireland. Nik Roche adopts a highly immersive method for image making, shaped by his interest in social change and the impact of institutions on individual behaviour. Source Issue 103 'Life Stories' features images from his project 'It's hard to report a stolen bike stolen', which follows on from the work in his first monograph, 'The Budgie Died Instantly' (Setanta Books, 2020). Dr Annebella Pollen's academic research areas include mass photography, popular image culture and histories of art, craft, design and dress, especially in relation to marginal, alternative and non-canonical visual and material forms. She is a Reader at University of Brighton and writes the Source online column Flea Market Photobooks. Issue 103 'Life Stories' features her review of 'Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography' by Kim Beil. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: The Uses of Air Photography’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:52:29 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Aerial

The popularity of photobooks based on aerial views is evident in titles such as 'Earth from Above' by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, whose full-colour coffee table production, first produced in 1999, boasts more than three million sales across its various editions. 'The Uses of Air Photography' is a different beast. Although large-scale in format to showcase its mostly full-page black-and-white examples, the book is produced under the auspices of Cambridge University’s Committee for Aerial Photography and the emphasis is less on the photographs’ visual spectacle than on their research capacity. The volume is edited by the institution’s Director of Aerial Photography, who also produced all the photographs; the essays are mostly by committee members. Sadly, the grouping and academic position no longer exist, but its legacy, the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, now numbers some 500,000 items. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Is He Acting?’
by: Colin Graham
Posted: Mon, 01 Feb 2021 10:06:07 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 66 - Spring 2011

‘The world could use a good essay about Witkiewicz’. So said Susan Sontag in an 1981 interview. Sontag was explaining that she never actually would write that essay because she could write three stories in the same time it would take her to complete the piece on Witkiewicz. Whether or not Sontag’s pragmatic equation was worth the short stories, Witkiewicz is still worth writing about, as the exhibition of his photographs at the Douglas Hyde affirms. The work on show here was chosen by Miroslaw Balka, given the title 'Between Honey and Ashes [Part 1]', and was used to provide something of a context to Balka’s video piece 'Honey and Ashes [Part 2]'. The connections which Balka sees between Witkiewicz and his own work are clear enough. Though in some ways Balka’s unsettling ‘apple T.’, shot at night and with a video camera that, Adam and Eve-like, is desperately on the point of plucking an apple, reduce Witkiewicz to an artist on the point of madness. He is that, but these photographs reveal him as much more, and as confrontational and face-on in a way that Balka is not. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘A European Collagist’
by: David Evans
Posted: Sun, 31 Jan 2021 10:10:02 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Photomontage
First Published: Issue 66 - Spring 2011

In his authoritative historical survey Collage: 'The Making of Modern Art' (2004), Brandon Taylor describes John Stezaker as the ‘most prolific European collagist’ of recent times. It is a remark that is both memorable and cryptic, and a good opportunity to reflect on Taylor’s choice of words was provided by a recent exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. 'Prolific': the exhibition included more than ninety collages, made from the late 1970s to date. A mere sample, it must be stressed, and related photo silkscreen prints were excluded. Yet it was the nearest thing to a retrospective that Stezaker has ever had, despite his productivity and international profile over several decades. He has continuously experimented with new ways of cutting and pasting, all analyzed with assurance by writer Michael Bracewell in the accompanying catalogue. There are many breaks, then, but also striking continuities. In general, the collages are small-scale, the cutting and pasting are restrained, and found photographic source materials whiff of obsolescence. The end results are usually sober, occupying an indeterminate time zone between past and present. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘A Rebellion without Clues’
by: Pavel Büchler
Posted: Fri, 29 Jan 2021 09:19:19 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Political
First Published: Issue 66 - Spring 2011

The Hungarian Club in Bradford is no more. For a half of a century it was a place out of place, a token of a home left behind by a generation. Founded by refugees from the failed 1956 anti-communist uprising in Hungary, it had outlasted the end of its era, the Cold War and ‘Eastern Europe’, serving a shrinking expatriate community to maintain a sense of belonging to something which could have been had its time not passed even before it came. It had kept alive a collective memory of an ideal, a past inscribed into the present not as a history but as an ever-elusive promise. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Makeshift Monuments’
by: Diane Bielik
Posted: Fri, 29 Jan 2021 09:06:17 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 66 - Spring 2011

A Portfolio of photographic work by Diane Bielik. Published in Issue 66 of Source, Spring 2011. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Readers’ Lives’
by: Daniel Jewesbury
Posted: Thu, 28 Jan 2021 06:14:49 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 66 - Spring 2011

Daniel Stier says of the forlorn items that he photographs, “these are the things that don’t get glorious campaigns; the things that are just there”. And it’s true, these things are so immediately recognisable that they can sometimes seem invisible. They need no promotion, no marketing to their potential consumers. They are the basic elements of capitalism, the stuff that we have to buy, and then buy again. Stier’s re-presentation of them, as lurid plastic still lives, frozen in hard direct light like suspected criminals, is patently ludicrous – the heroic grouping of slices of white bread, gazing into the middle distance; the factory-farmed chicken on its princess-and-the-pea tower of polystyrene takeaway boxes – but it is also self-consciously tragic, precisely because of the fundamental importance of these products: not for what they actually are, but for what they signify economically. It is these goods, these crappy disposable consumables, which keep markets functioning from one day to the next, not high-value luxury items. Ours really is an empire built on budget baked beans. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Any Two For Five’
by: Daniel Stier
Posted: Thu, 28 Jan 2021 05:55:04 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 66 - Spring 2011

A Portfolio of photographic work by Daniel Stier. Published in Issue 66 of Source, Spring 2011. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Domestic Drift’
by: Leontia Flynn
Posted: Wed, 27 Jan 2021 18:00:03 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 66 - Spring 2011

A grassy dome littered with tiny flowers sits in the middle of an earthy path. The scale, at first, is confusing: is this a small mountain, or raked leaves in a garden? A plastic shark and an orange ball balance, equally improbably, on irregular, glassy waves in what must be a paddling pool, or part of a child’s toy. Yet real and imitation wave patterns contradict each other and this – along with what seems to be heavy weather engulfing the foreground – confuses the eye and gives us pause for thought. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Advertising: Starbucks’
by: Judith Williamson
Posted: Wed, 27 Jan 2021 16:46:59 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 66 - Spring 2011

At the end of the 1980s, sociologist Ray Oldenberg developed the concept of the ‘Third Place’ in a book called 'The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlours, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day'. If the first and second places are home and work, the third place is somewhere in between, at once public and intimate, where communities meet and social bonds are formed. In British culture, the pub has traditionally been a staple third place; one could argue that libraries – currently under threat from budget cuts – are another. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Movement and Stillness’
by: Daniel Jewesbury
Posted: Wed, 27 Jan 2021 07:22:57 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Historical
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

I expected to enjoy David Campany’s guide to the varied theoretical staging posts of the 100 year relationship between still photography and the moving image. It’s a clearly written, plentifully illustrated book by one of the most intelligent and engaging writers on these media. It offers some excellent descriptions of important works, with a little theoretical analysis. It’s also reasonably succinct. All these benefits notwithstanding, something is lacking. Campany’s choice to focus on the description of a range of rather familiar key works and on the brief summarisation of existing theoretical understandings means that the book ends up being something between an academic textbook, and a ‘World of Art’ style compendium of theory and practice (and at times, it has to be said, a very dry one), rather than an exciting or substantially new insight into the subject. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Once the Image is Finished’
by: Malcolm Dickson
Posted: Tue, 26 Jan 2021 07:52:54 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Gallery-Based
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

'Exhibiting Photography' comes at a time when there is a groundswell of college courses in photography, evidence of many regional support networks for the medium, a number of prizes and exhibition opportunities, several dedicated magazines, websites, galleries and projects that are all championing photography’s status as a creative medium. Photography is, as Tom Normand proposes, the visual form of our age. In the book’s bibliography, Rhonda Wilson’s publication 'Seeing the Light, A Photographer’s Guide to Enterprise' is cited, a book which demonstrated (in 1993) that critical practice and career development are not mutually exclusive. Wilson is now the Director of Birmingham based 'Rhubarb Rhubarb', the annual international portfolio review event, an occasion which typifies the range and quality of photographic image-making today, whose participants, both reviewers and makers, should be alerted to this book. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writers Prize: Making Space to Speak From’
by: Mads Holm
Posted: Mon, 25 Jan 2021 05:38:51 EST
Content: New Writing / Genre: Documentary

Riot police surround the entire group of protestors. Anonymous black shapes appear like shadows on the walls of the red brick houses on both sides of the street. Their gloved hands clutch the truncheons. I look to both sides. Like plucking flowers from a bouquet of black roses the riot police begin pulling out protestors from the crowd. One after another grabbed, forced to the ground, handcuffed and dragged down the side streets. Fleeting moments of crisscross eye contact spread an anxious energy. Heartbeats felt in finger tips. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘With a Prison at its Heart’
by: Pavel Büchler
Posted: Wed, 20 Jan 2021 10:56:29 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

Mikhael Subotzky’s 'Beaufort West' details the unknowing eccentricities and degradations of a town that sits astride the main highway from Johannesburg to the northern provinces of South Africa. Subotzky’s work previous to 'Beaufort West' has concentrated on documenting, close up and with a sense of disruptive ESTrangement, the prison system in South Africa. His photographs (particularly in the two 'Die Vier Hoeke' series) combine muted colours, into which the lurid erupts, with a tableaux-like facility for framing people in the everyday. And yet his images, partly because of the frequent proximity of the lens to his subjects, still feel intimate and shocking, able to catch the claustrophobia of the inhumanely overcrowded prison system in South Africa. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Correct Behaviour’
by: Mary Warner Marien
Posted: Tue, 19 Jan 2021 07:32:14 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

One of the minor paradoxes in American/Iranian relations is that Iranian films have found a niche market here. The cultural and religious values that constrain the scope of Iranian expression often make that country’s films refined and visually captivating family fare. We have treacly stories about puppies lost and found, food fights, and fart jokes. The Iranians offer movies like 'The Color Paradise' (Magid Magidi, 1999) and 'The White Balloon' (Jafar Panahi, 1995). With some important exceptions, such as Magnum photographer Abbas and Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat, Iran’s photographers are less well known than its cinematographers. Filmmakers who also create photographs, such as Abbas Kiarostami, who also wrote the script for 'The White Balloon', and Mitra Tabrizian, are recognized more for their moving than still pictures. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Anxiety-Ridden Scrutiny’
by: Clive Scott
Posted: Mon, 18 Jan 2021 11:41:39 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

For many writers – Walter Benjamin, Philip Roth, W.G. Sebald – photographs of Kafka have been the source of troubled and fertile preoccupation. Kafka’s own attitude to the photograph is at the very least ambivalent: while he delights in photography’s ability to bring those close to him closer – as confirmations of intimacy – he has a suspicion of the camera’s easy access to the uncanny, the ‘optical unconscious’, the alienating. Photographs are ellipses, riddles, that the writer tries to tease into sense without really succeeding. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Heroic Image’
by: Jane Fletcher
Posted: Mon, 18 Jan 2021 06:19:58 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: War
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

As I write, it is the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice: 11.11.2008. Lest we forget, a recent edition of 'Metro' featured one of Robert Wilson’s photographs from Helmand Province as its ‘Big Picture’, taken from his ‘record of the 52nd Infantry Brigade as it neared the end of its tour of duty’ in Afghanistan. The image is entitled 'FOB Edinburgh' [Forward Operating Base], a perversely anonymous title for such an apparently deep and penetrating portrait of a man whose desert-dusted face looks powdered with pigment, whose cracked lips are stained with colour, whose eyelids and irises are so delineated as to appear lined with kohl. Indeed, if the eyes are the windows of the soul, Wilson’s photographed soldiers are fascinating individuals. They are strangely, shockingly beautiful, too. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Archival Fragments’
by: Doireann Wallace
Posted: Sun, 17 Jan 2021 07:52:41 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

Faced with the mass circulation of photography in 1920s print culture, Siegfried Kracauer warned that this flood of images did not in any way aid memory, but threatened to wash it away. Such laments are endemic to modernity, where the speed of change is seen to sever the continuity of historical memory, and it is against the ensuing ‘cultural amnesia’ that Sean Lynch claims to pitch his work, concerned with forgotten historical subjects. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘An Opportunity to Develop’
by: Mick Gidley
Posted: Sat, 16 Jan 2021 18:17:27 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

This is a show resulting from commissions by Pavilion, the Leeds-based art commissioning agency, itself both publicly and privately funded. The awards were to enable younger artists to develop new projects (often out of previous successful ones) to at least preliminary exhibition standard. If this means they should be assessed on the basis of their conception, execution and exhibition, then the five photographers have achieved variable levels of success at each of these stages. Jo Longhurst’s 'A-Z of Gymnastics' is fascinating in all three. As in her earlier dog project 'The Refusal', she is preoccupied by typology and taxonomy. Here, across a curved wall, we see a pattern of some 200 images – not all by Longhurst herself, some black and white but most in colour, some historic but the majority recent – arranged in sequences corresponding to particular types of gymnastic action: leaps, somersaults, box vaults, ring-work, etc. The photographs, mounted on blocks sufficiently thick to throw them into relief, are small, 5"x3" or less, so we have to look closely, and we cannot help but mark sharp similarities between the images devoted to each type of exercise. And always the photographer has gone for the body at its point of maximum extension – legs almost impossibly far apart and straight in the splits, for example – and caught, stilled it, at the extreme of dynamic exertion. Longhurst is deploying the intrinsic capacity of photography truly to observe, categorise and, even, understand something. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Acculturated Nature’
by: Siobhan Davis
Posted: Sat, 16 Jan 2021 14:18:31 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

Stratified dark cliffs rise majestically from a pebble beach. To an untrained eye, the exposed layers of strata appear to span an almost unimaginable length of time, stretching back into the primordial past. But, in truth, the cliff face of Jem Southam’s photograph has existed for only a minute portion of this imagined history. Created from the discarded waste of the iron smelting process, these manmade structures stand as monuments to the Cumbrian coast’s industrial heyday. In 2006, the Lowry commissioned Southam to photograph a section of the north western coastline – an area much loved and visited by L. S. Lowry. 'Clouds Descending' marks the culmination of this project. Divided into five sections, the exhibition traces the photographer’s journey south from Maryport, a coastal town on the Solway ESTuary, to Morecambe Bay. During the course of the project Southam invited a number of collaborators (poet, writer, historian, art historian, ornithologist, and curator) with a shared interest in the landscape to join him and produce their own responses to the sites he visited. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Camera Goes to War’
by: David Evans
Posted: Thu, 14 Jan 2021 06:09:50 EST
Content: Review / Genre: War
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

Upstairs, work dealing with wars in the 1930s and 1940s; downstairs, recent work about current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Through juxtaposition, the viewer is encouraged to reflect on the various ways in which the camera has gone to war. The two historic shows deal with Robert Capa and Gerda Taro, respectively. Capa (real name Endre Friedmann) was born in Budapest in 1913 and pursued university studies in Berlin. When Hitler took power he moved to Paris, a city that became the capital city of anti-Fascism by the mid-thirties. Capa’s American-sounding pseudonym (Capa / Capra) was adopted in Paris to help him advance in the cutthroat business of photojournalism. His assignments were diverse, ranging from Trotsky in exile to the Tour de France, but his reputation is based on war work, dealing with conflicts like the Spanish Civil War, the Japanese invasion of China and World War Two. He was killed by a landmine in 1954 whilst covering the war in Indochina. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Unstable City’
by: Edward Welch
Posted: Wed, 13 Jan 2021 07:39:08 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Urban
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

If a top ten all time list of exhibition themes is one day drawn up, then the urban world will surely be in there vying for the top slot. Yet despite the attention it has been paid over the years, it remains as fascinating and enigmatic as ever. Stills Gallery’s show captures something of its elusiveness by focusing on the theme of reflection, both figurative and literal. Work by Sabine Hornig and Dan Graham, for example, explores the nature of urban space precisely by foregrounding the role of reflection within it, and the way in which the reflective surfaces of the city (such as plate glass shop windows, or the mirrored glass which became the symbol of corporate power in the late twentieth century) can distort and disrupt our perception. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Dark and Threatening Visions’
by: Simon Denison
Posted: Wed, 13 Jan 2021 05:32:04 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

'Unreliable Truths: Transformation and Illusion in Contemporary Photographic Practice' presents the work of twelve photographic artists based in Wales. It is in effect an art school staff show, as all but two teach at Swansea Metropolitan University – an impressive flowering of creative energy from one institution. The curators have unified the work under the rubric of ‘unreliable truths’ because none of the participants works in the documentary, descriptive mode. It is a slightly awkward framing device as truth is a slippery concept in all photography, not just this type. At the same time most of the artists here are offering oblique but unequivocal statements about human experience, and presumably none would regard themselves as illusionists. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Spirit of the Experiment’
by: Nancy Roth
Posted: Tue, 12 Jan 2021 18:03:16 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

The exhibition steers visitors along a kind of border between conscious and unconscious communication. It focuses on Hiller’s very recent work in video and photography. But a careful selection of earlier work related to the theme extends the context, not only framing such borderlands of consciousness as one of Hiller’s longest, strongest interests, but also to let us see how a particular artist has used various media, over time, in connection with a specific concept. The earliest work here relies primarily on drawing and writing, the most recent on video. But photography, because it appears in both, offers as a point of reference, a way of thinking through what has and has not changed in Hiller’s thinking and consequently in her way of engaging us. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Drawing on Street Photography’
by: Lucy Soutter
Posted: Tue, 12 Jan 2021 10:47:26 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Street
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

Dryden Goodwin’s exhibition 'Cast' brings photography together with drawing in a series of uneasy hybrids. Made at night on London buses, trains and West End shopping streets, the images concentrate on the faces of passers-by. While some of the 5 bodies of work pit drawing and photography against each other as competing forms of visual documentation, the more striking images use drawing as a tool to underline the creepy, gnawing voyeurism at the heart of street photography. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Looking Closely’
by: Jonathan Long
Posted: Tue, 12 Jan 2021 05:17:08 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Macro
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

The key term of this exhibition is defamiliarisation, a notion that plays a major role in the aesthetic theory of the inter-war period. The term that owes its origins to the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky, for whom 'ostranenie' – ESTrangement or defamiliarisation – was the marker of literary discourse per se. For Shklovsky, defamiliarisation was not merely a matter of technique, but of the greatest ethical significance in that it allowed art and literature to rejuvenate and renew human experience, thereby counteracting the routine perception of an excessively familiar world that Shklovsky saw as an undesirable side-effect of everyday life. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Looking Obliquely at the Landscape’
by: Eugenie Shinkle
Posted: Mon, 11 Jan 2021 16:25:07 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

The discourse of landscape has undergone a Renaissance of sorts in recent years, with fields like cultural geography and landscape architecture turning their back on ESTablished definitions of landscape as a place or a representation of external nature, and embracing it as a cultural agent that is complexly linked to particular ways of seeing, being and doing. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 103 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 11 Jan 2021 09:38:12 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 103 - Winter 2020

Photographs are associated with the momentary and the fleeting but they are often most meaningful to us when they are placed in the context of a life. Achieving a ‘narrative’, a word often used loosely in relation to photographs, is seen as a mark of sophistication, but it is the most basic role of a family album, a book that is typically experienced with a skilled narrator. Family photographs now frequently appear in exhibitions and books removed from their original function. Josh Allen has spoken to the organisers of three projects about the reason they have been collecting family photographs and how they have tried to honour the original life stories that they tell. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Law: Albums and Books’
by: Ronan Deazley
Posted: Mon, 14 Dec 2020 12:16:53 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Law
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

The fourth ESTate is under siege: the number of public figures initiating claims before the British courts for libel and defamation has doubled in the last three years; Sienna Miller recently launched a landmark legal action against the paparazzi for harassment under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997; and Max Mosley, in the wake of his success before the High Court, has vowed to take his cause further, to the European Court of Human Rights, in an attempt to further advance an individual’s right of privacy within the British legal system. Paul Dacre, Editor-in-Chief of the 'Daily Mail', in a recent tirade against the erosion of the freedom of the press, has responded by pointing an accusatory finger at Conditional Fee Arrangements (no-win, nofee), the role that one judge (Mr Justice Eady) has played in shaping the current jurisprudence on privacy in Britain (see 'Source' 51), and ‘the wretched Human Rights Act’. Time, I thought, to tackle an issue of real substance: should wedding books be standard or zero-rated for VAT purposes? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Advertising: Louis Vuitton’
by: Judith Williamson
Posted: Mon, 14 Dec 2020 11:51:50 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

There is something at once familiar and jarring about the celebrity photos of the Louis Vuitton luggage campaign. Made by Annie Leibovitz, these images are different from one another in tone and composition, and yet remarkably similar in their use of the well-worn tropes of celebrity portraiture. Each photo makes use of an already existing photographic genre to suggest something supposedly particular about the character it presents. It is culturally understood that celebrity photos of the classier kind are meant to do more than just show a famous figure – they are expected to express something special or quirky about them, as if the entire photo offered an insight not merely into what they look like, but what they are like. The repertoire of image types available for this process is itself drawn from popular genres, in particular film and advertising; which means that ads using celebrity photos represent a full turn of the circle – since celebrity photos are themselves so dependent on the image-bank provided by ads. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Melancholy Objects; Signs of Life’
by: Annabelle Dalby
Posted: Mon, 14 Dec 2020 08:04:52 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Nature
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

Fallen trees, hanging branches, broken twigs and gnawed leaves are documented in the predominantly black set of Tim Edgar’s images. Alike, in the white images are what seem to be spiders’ legs; flies’ torsos, wings and other disembodied insect parts, not all decipherable. What lies amongst both sets of photographs are not just signs of life, of some sort of activity, but remnants, leftovers. Tim Edgar’s 'Rookery' (2003) and 'Cobweb' (2008) series are made up of 14 and 20 photographs respectively, each documenting, as their titles describe, nesting sites in unsettling environments. The images are like those of a crime scene, they show us the more dangerous and uneasy side of nature’s activity. Focusing on conflict and ritual, neither the rooks nor the prey, the spider or the fly, are totally present in the photographs. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History by Geoffrey Batchen’
by: Justin Carville
Posted: Fri, 11 Dec 2020 05:44:49 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Historical
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

In the introduction to his 'Trauerspiel' study, Walter Benjamin defined the term 'origin' as 'not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance'. Origin is thus used to describe that which is in and out of time, something that has become, yet is incomplete. This definition of origin is useful as conceptual framework to discuss Geoffrey Batchen's dual concerns in Each Wild Idea; the birth and death of photography and their respective fractured histories. Following his previous publication 'Burning with Desire', Batchen examines the birth of photography to understand its death, and its ultimate successor digital imaging. In this scenario the death of one watches over the birth pangs of the other. Batchen's approach to this subject however, does not incorporate the dialectical materialism of Benjamin but the philosophical deconstruction of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Prospecting’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Fri, 11 Dec 2020 05:14:34 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

The Portfolio days have been taking place regularly since January 1998. Over this period they have taken place consistently in Dublin and Belfast and intermittently in Cork, Limerick and Galway. The format of these days affords photographers a half hour opportunity to show and discuss their work with one of the editors of the magazine. A record of the material brought along is kept with the photographer's details to allow for further consideration and reflection. This material along with that sent directly to 'Source' forms the pool of work from which a selection is made for publication. After three years certain patterns have emerged. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Towards A Philosophy Of Photography by Vilém Flusser’
by: Paul Tebbs
Posted: Thu, 10 Dec 2020 06:32:55 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Historical
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

Vilém Flusser's 'Towards a Philosophy of Photography' is an important, ethically orientated, fully encompassing theory of photography. And, more besides. Photography serves awkwardly as an allegory for technology as a whole, and more subtly for translation and emigration. Published in German in 1983, it appears here in this English translation for the first time. Abandoning academic formalities such as a bibliography, footnotes, references to other writers (and without visual reproductions), the violence perceived to be done to the ESTablished critical topography is so great, that a glossary of terms is provided that has no 'general validity' to other writing. This is to overstate the case. Many familiar ideas float through this text (with an emégré's freedom from restrictive and sentimentalised allegiances) without detracting from its value. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Bismarck in America by Dirk Reinartz’
by: Gavin Murphy
Posted: Wed, 09 Dec 2020 05:57:25 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Urban
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

It has been said that America was created in the hope of escaping history. Dirk Reinartz's book, 'Bismarck in America', explores this by setting photographs of Bismarck, a smalt town in North Dakota, against the legacy of Otto von Bismarck, the nineteenth century architect of the German Empire. In so doing, Reinartz produces a body of photographs that is the stuff of modern horror. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Fotografien 1991-1995 by Laurenz Berges’
by: Paul Tebbs
Posted: Wed, 09 Dec 2020 04:52:52 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

Just beyond the pristinely white sentry box that is Checkpoint Charlie, two black and white images face each other. Elevated some thirty feet above the ground, one is a soldier representing the West and the other a soldier representing the East. As a memorial to Germany's tragic division it is a strangely anaesthetic commemoration. The soldiers' faces are simultaneously too individual and too generic. They are too clean. Too modern. The dirty weight of history fails to adhere to their impassive military expressions. The past is politely registered, but neutralised, by the tensionless staging of their aloft encounter. Commerce and tourism scurry about unhindered. At night, the soldiers disappear in the upper gloom. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Other Pictures by Thomas Walther - Floh by Tacita Dean’
by: Paul Tebbs
Posted: Tue, 08 Dec 2020 11:02:29 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Found
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

In the 'Restitutions' section of 'The Truth in Painting', Derrida considers to whom the two boots in Van Gogh's famous picture 'Old Shoes with Laces belong'. Heidegger interpreted them as peasant's shoes; the philosopher Meyer Schapiro disagreed and proclaimed them the footwear of Van Gogh; while the multiple voices that contribute to Derrida's text ('for n + L-female-voices') proffer other nuanced possibilities. In a familiar deconstructivist move, Derrida's polylogue stages a problematisation of the distinction between what is internal to the work of art and what is external to it. For Derrida, both Heidegger and Schapiro are guilty of appropriating Van Gogh's painting in accordance with their own presumptions. In their haste to restore to the painted boots their true subject, Heidegger and Schapiro succeed only in instating themselves. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Positioning/Repositioning’
by: Nora Donnelly
Posted: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 18:08:10 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Macro
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

"Here we enjoy an immediate apprehension of form, all shapes speak directly to us, nothing seems indifferent or redundant" (Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900). It is the unique fusion of the form and content in the work of Liam O'Callaghan that brought the above quotation (Long since consigned to the Academic out box) to mind. Initially taken by the points of tension created between what was depicted/represented and the manner of its depiction of representation, I was reminded of Nietzsche's exhortation to "look and go beyond the look". . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Upside-down and Playing Backwards’
by: Siún Hanrahan
Posted: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 17:21:08 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

I found Steve Dutton and Percy Peacock's exhibition KAYAKÖY at Catayst Arts in Belfast compelling and disconcerting. It was compelling in that its combination of photographs, video works and text (a collaborative production by Steve Dutton and artist/writer Steve Swindells) was intriguing and coherent. Disconcerting because of the stark contrast between two sets of photographs within the exhibition (in terms of subject matter, colour and format), and because the two video works were wilfully bewildering. (In one the picture is upside-down, pLays backwards and the video-recorder swings gently from side-to-side, whiLe in the other junk accumuLates and is disposed of for no apparent reason). . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Ireland of the Welcomes...’
by: Suzanne O'Shea
Posted: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 05:25:44 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Social
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

"O'Callaghan is keen to ensure that she is not seen as someone who has exploited her subject; not some fashion photographer dirtying her fingers with a little urban reality" ('Irish Times', March 1st). Perhaps it's me. Perhaps I'm cynical and lacking in empathy, but I'm sceptical of fashion photographers trying to raise awareness of social issues. I am particularly sceptical of fashion photographers who have not pre-planned an exhibition, yet end up showcasing at Temple Bar with impending catalogue (forthcoming 'Westzone' Autumn '01) and appropriate media coverage. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Utopia and the Train-set’
by: Colin Graham
Posted: Sun, 06 Dec 2020 16:50:20 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Architectural
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

In Tom Merilion's photographs Birmingham is utopian, chromatic and vertiginous. Halfway into the exhibition is an image which, at first glance, seems out of place. Why the insides of a computer in the middle of an exhibition of urban spaces? A closer look at those regularly patterned, glossy Little nodes of colour and they transform into cars in a car park, shot from an aeroplane, and then the vertigo sets in. Because you're falling into this photograph. It's an extraordinary feeling, produced again and again in different ways by these images, which vary their angle from bird's-eye to roofleveI to ground-level, yet still within each the space between the camera's point of view and the places photographed shimmers and moves. The effect is achieved with apparent simplicity; the edges of these images (particularly top and bottom quarter) are out of focus, manipulated so that in some sense they imitate the blurred edges of every day vision. And then if you can tear yourself out of the falling feeling these images induce, it's re-invented by the hint of Vaseline-on-the-lens nostalgia which threatens to tip you back into the past. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Community Photographic Project’
by: Eoin McCarthy
Posted: Sun, 06 Dec 2020 15:57:35 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Social
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

I am interested in developing my practice by combining my understanding of fine art with the fundamental principles behind Community Development. Between 1998 and 2000 I attended a part-time course in Community Development at the University of Limerick. I found that Photography proved more accessible and less intimidating to people because nearly every household was used to having their own photographs on their walls. Contributors to this published project were sought with posters in Local shops and youth clubs. Each image was jointly directed by myself and the person whose 'portrait' it was. After discussion some people chose to be in the photograph themselves, others preferred to select Locations or objects that were significant to them. The traditional studio backdrop became a key prop for setting the scene. Brian was a community development worker with a particular concern for road safety. Terence had Left school early and had placed great emphasis on his friends and his concern for horses being kept in the city. Joe wanted to show the attic of the Print Studios in Limerick that he hopes to transform into a gallery space. Sister Mary Carmel works in the St. Martin's youth centre in The New Road. The street and the kids from the area are her life. Maria's garden is her space to chill out and to proudly set out her growing collection of shoes. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Still Grim in Kharkiv’
by: Alexandra Harrington
Posted: Fri, 04 Dec 2020 06:07:57 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

Ukrainian Boris Mikhailov began to work as a photographer in the 1960s when he was sacked from his engineering job for taking nude pictures of his wife. During his long career, he has created a significant and compelling body of work, most of which has only been accessible since the break-up of the Soviet Union. His international reputation was secured with the publication (by Phaidon in 1990) of 'Yesterday’s Sandwich', a series dating from the late 1960s and early 1970s in which unconnected images are superimposed upon one another to create a fascinating, surreal landscape. His Red Series of 1968- 75, which has recently been acquired by the Tate, plays with the conventions of Socialist Realism, making it a photographic counterpart to the Sots Art of Mikhailov’s Russian contemporaries Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Wonders and Horrors’
by: Martha Langford
Posted: Thu, 03 Dec 2020 07:12:28 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Historical
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

Two rather significant institutional names in photographic knowledge and production have cooperated to bring out this volume: the Aperture Foundation and the Library of Congress. The twenty-seven albums sumptuously illustrated and discussed in the book have been selected from the more than seven hundred albums in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, as well as from other archival divisions with albums in their holdings, including the Manuscript; Music; Rare Book and Special Collections; Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound; Geography and Map; Area Studies; and Science and Technology Divisions. Curator of Photography Verna Posever Curtis has not only assembled a remarkable collection, she has blazed a trail through her institution, reminding her readers of the insinuation of photography into almost every type of documentation and research, and allowing them to see the reciprocal influences of different disciplines in words and images. A huge brief, and thankfully Curtis had help from within and without. Her acknowledgements will turn many lonely archivists green with envy. Still, this is at root her project, one whose decisions and rationales are neither personal nor institutional, but a combination of both. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Invitation to the ‘Golden Age’’
by: Dewi Lewis
Posted: Thu, 03 Dec 2020 04:44:21 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

It is frequently said that we live in the ‘golden age of the photobook’. More photography books are published than ever before and what once seemed the impossible dream of every photographer – to ‘have their own book’ – now appears to be an increasingly realisable ambition. And so the publication of Publish Your Photography Book would seem entirely appropriate and timely. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘War and Amnesia’
by: Matt Packer
Posted: Wed, 02 Dec 2020 12:07:25 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

Simon Norfolk’s return to Afghanistan since his previous 'Afghanistan: chronotopia' (2002) is a parallel enquiry of lost hope and a resuscitive dialogue. The book takes the form of an ‘artistic partnership’ with the discovered albums of John Burke (c.1843 – 1900), described as the first ever photographer to make pictures in Afghanistan. Interposing Norfolk’s scenes of contemporary military scarrings and fragile new commercialisms amid the landscape and civic life of the country, together with Burke’s equanimous and beautiful images taken during the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878- 1880), the effective congruities between the two photographers’ work ultimately sets up a critique of the amnesia of recent Western speculations in Afghanistan. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Right Between the Eyes’
by: Edward Welch
Posted: Wed, 02 Dec 2020 11:43:28 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Historical
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

'Shoot!' originates in an installation curated by Clément Chéroux at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2010, and explores the photographic shooting galleries which were once commonplace in fairgrounds in the first part of the twentieth century. Nicely concatenating literal shooting with its figurative, photographic counterpart, they were based on a grippingly simple premise: shooters who hit the target triggered a camera, and were rewarded not with a cuddly toy, but with a shot of themselves taking aim. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Electronic Waste’
by: Mick Gidley
Posted: Wed, 02 Dec 2020 11:26:12 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

The opening page of writing by Federica Angelucci – more reverie than analysis – evokes both the pictures to come and the place depicted: Agbogloshie, an area of Ghana that receives electronic detritus from the western world. The photographs themselves document the processes of such modern subsistence hunter gathering: fire, breaking, sifting, bagging. The place – for which its denizens say ‘there is no name’ – is toxic, polluting the air and water for miles around. Despite this poisoning, animals graze and, of course, human beings labour here. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Wretched of the Earth’
by: Edward Welch
Posted: Wed, 02 Dec 2020 11:10:45 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

Winner of the European Publishers Award for Photography in 2010, Cristophe Agou’s elegantly produced book explores peasant life in the wild, remote and often harsh uplands of South Eastern France. France is a country which still talks happily of peasants, and peasant life continues to loom large in the French cultural imaginary, as reflected in the commercial and critical success of Raymond Depardon’s film trilogy, 'Profils Paysans' ('Peasant Profiles'), over the course of the last decade. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘An Art Photograph’
by: Andrea Noble
Posted: Wed, 02 Dec 2020 05:37:49 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

Part of the ‘One Work’ book series published by Afterall, as the series title suggests, David Campany’s text focuses on a single image by the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, the 1979 'Picture for Women'. The reader might be forgiven for thinking that the narrow focus of the book would make it of interest only to specialists seeking to expand their knowledge of Wall’s work. However, Campany’s deft handling of his subject matter means that this book will certainly be of appeal to specialists, but equally has much to say to those with a more general interest in photographic practice and image theory of the late 1970s and early 1980s. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Pencil Revisited’
by: Geoffrey Batchen
Posted: Wed, 02 Dec 2020 04:38:06 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

Often referred to as the first photographically illustrated book, William Henry Fox Talbot’s 'The Pencil of Nature' has nevertheless long been absent from the bookshelves of most scholars. The initial publication was issued in six parts between June 1844 and April 1846, comprising fascicles containing between three and five tipped-in photographs, each with an accompanying commentary by the author. The first fascicle also came with a ‘Brief Historical Sketch of the Invention of the Art,’ in which Talbot provides his own version of the origins of photography, centered on his invention of a photogenic drawing process. 'The Pencil' attracted initial praise from critics but soon also garnered complaints from customers unhappy with the fading of its photographs. Originally intending to offer those customers ten or twelve installments amounting to fifty photographs in total, Talbot eventually issued only twenty-four images and the project was a discouraging financial failure. As a result there are only about 39 substantially complete copies of 'The Pencil of Nature' now known, making it a rare collector’s item. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The End of Optimism’
by: Mary Warner Marien
Posted: Tue, 01 Dec 2020 10:34:15 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

'From Here to There' is a compendium covering 15 years of Alex Soth’s work in the form he likes the most: the book. His photographic projects are chronologically sequenced, from the 1990s black-and-white series, 'Perfect Strangers', which he has called his practice work, to 'Broken Manual', a group of images showing people who are trying to live outside (sometimes literally) of civilization. The book ends with another, smaller book, 'The Loneliest Man in Missouri', affixed to its inside back cover. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Back in the Community’
by: Jesse Alexander
Posted: Tue, 01 Dec 2020 09:54:52 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

In 1974, a project began to document poverty in Britain’s inner cities. Under the collective title, Exit Photography Group, Nicholas Battye, Chris Steele-Perkins and Paul Trevor photographed life in some of the most deprived residential areas of London, Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow, Belfast and Liverpool. The outcome of the project was a book called 'Survival Programmes', published in 1982, the bleak title of which was taken from an interview with a resident who was referring to television wildlife programmes. The book is a substantial resource containing un-credited individual black and white photographs, interview transcripts from anonymous contributors describing aspects of their lives, and a compilation of statistics relating to aspects of Britain’s economic situation at the time. Contrasting this relative objectivity are a few, yet poignant, images of wealth and the British ESTablishment: a rather generic, commercial-style shot of investment bankers at work in the City, a shot of a Trades Union Congress meeting, Margaret Thatcher at a rally. The television set, a relatively new household necessity, is a recurring motif throughout the book, and without these, the viewer might easily mistake the photographs as being made decades earlier. In one of the most interesting images taken in a community hostel on Christmas day, Her Majesty addresses a rather unimpressed man and a pitifully modest Christmas tree. It is an uncompromising book, and hopefully the tatty condition of the library copy I looked at is testimony to the project being held up as an impressive example of social documentary practice of the period. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Tourism and Time’
by: Stephen Bull
Posted: Tue, 01 Dec 2020 08:42:03 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Architectural
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

Pyramids and proof triangulate with photography throughout the past 150 years. From 1858-1860, Francis Frith published 'Egypt and Palestine Photographed and Described by Francis Frith', where the extraordinary architecture of Egypt was revealed to a Western audience, most of which were unable to take the luxurious Grand Tour that was soon to lead to the widespread culture of tourism. Those same viewers may have heard of the pyramids or seen drawings of them, but Frith’s photographs of the structures – foregrounds liberally sprinkled with posed Egyptians – apparently provided indisputable evidence of the pyramids’ existence. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Exotic and the Universal’
by: Colin Darke
Posted: Tue, 01 Dec 2020 08:16:03 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

Jackie Nickerson quit her career as a magazine photographer to travel the world, applying the aesthetic of the fashion industry in her exploration of the uncomfortable dialogue between individual and national identity and global homogeneity. Based in her native USA, she has worked in the Gulf and sub-Saharan Africa, the Far East and even the exotic world of Ireland. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Noir in Miniature’
by: Isabel Stevens
Posted: Mon, 30 Nov 2020 14:20:22 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

‘Nobody should touch a Polaroid until he’s over sixty’ was Walker Evans’s maxim. It was only at that age, when Evans’s fingers started to fail him that he turned to the small and instantaneous image to revisit the street signs and scenes he had shot early in his career. And it was only at that age in his view, when a photographer had mastered working with larger prints and more finely-tuned instruments, that they could relinquish control and work with the Polaroid. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Conceptual Photojournalism’
by: Alison Green
Posted: Mon, 30 Nov 2020 08:58:57 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

I went to a lecture a few months ago in London by the historian Ian Boal. A member of the Bay-Area activist-writer group, Retort, Boal spoke of the unprecedented intensification of capital in the 2000s, such that (he was quoting someone else) ‘we can more easily imagine the end of the world than we can the end of capitalism’. Using images from 9/11 to the Fukushima power plant explosions to demonstrate the way images participate in promoting an overwhelming ‘catastophism’, by the end of his talk Boal spoke of reinvigorating the ‘commons’ – in other words, commonly held spaces and the kind of face-to-face interactions that take place there. He emphasised this as not the same as a democratic process – where discussion leads to new laws – rather, as ongoing dialogue for its own sake, as an empowering activity against capitalism’s spectacle. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘About Looking’
by: Mark Durden
Posted: Mon, 30 Nov 2020 05:45:16 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

Paul Graham as a photographer is very interested in the picture and the problems of picture making. While his photography is taken from the world, it is nevertheless concerned with aesthetic and formal issues integral to the way a view of the world is transformed through the photograph – one could go through the ten projects on show, spanning a quarter-century of his photography, identifying the different formal techniques that have been experimented with. It would start with 'A1 – The Great North Road', 1981-1982 and 'Beyond Caring', 1984-1985, his early politically inflected responses to American New Colour photography, in which the aesthetic effects of colour were combined with a subject matter more readily associated with a black and white documentary tradition. And it would end with the reflections on time and the moment through sequenced pictures, fascinated with the lyricism and beauty of observed everyday micro-events from streets in the US, 'A Shimmer of Possibility', 2004-2006, an evanescent unravelling of street photography’s preoccupation with the decisive moment. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘After Social Documentary’
by: David Evans
Posted: Sun, 29 Nov 2020 15:58:37 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

'Figures & Fictions' presents seventeen contemporary photographers from South Africa. The oldest is David Goldblatt, born in 1930, and the twin brothers Hasan and Husain Essop, born in 1985, are the youngest. Overall, the emphasis is on photographers who have reached adulthood in a post-apartheid country (that is, after 1993) and on work produced in the last decade or so. All contributors to the exhibition are based in South Africa, though it is worth noting that the catalogue also discusses work by famous ex-pats like Candice Breitz (Berlin) and Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin (London). And the guest curator is another famous ex-pat: Tamar Garb, Professor of Art History at University College, London. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Et Nunc Sacerdos’
by: David Brett
Posted: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 13:55:52 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Religious
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

This is a very strange task for me; to write about priest’s vestments. It seems to me important to say that I don't believe a word of religion. I have no beliefs except a belief that one should not believe. Radical doubt is the thing, pushed to the edge of possibility. This is not the doubt espoused by Joyce which always takes as its counterweight an intense piety which is the product of being deeply indoctrinated in youth by attitudes that in adulthood you have rejected. Radical doubt seems to me the precondition for any kind of thought, and perhaps any kind of feeling too. This is, of course, a form of religious feeling; it’s negative, so to speak, from which many and varied positions can be developed. I am of the view that one cannot escape religious emotion, transcendental yearnings, because they go with trying to think beyond one’s self. I am not sure what I mean by this, because these yearnings are not matters of which it is useful or even possible, to speak. They can only be made manifest in some form. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Et Nunc Sacerdos’
by: Alberto Maserin
Posted: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 10:17:50 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Religious
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

A Portfolio of photographic work by Alberto Maserin. Published in Issue 67 of Source, Summer 2011. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘What Defines a Portrait?’
by: Jonathan Long
Posted: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 07:32:58 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

August Sander is a ubiquitous presence in histories of photography, studies of the photographic portrait, and cultural histories of the Weimar Republic, and his work is widely reproduced in popular publications. This omnipresence can lead to a sense that we basically know what Sander is about. This exhibition, presenting almost 200 images that have been acquired on long-term loan, largely confirms and extends our knowledge of Sander the social typologist, but also manages to spring a few surprises. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Form Follows Function’
by: Eugenie Shinkle
Posted: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 07:06:18 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

Photographic formalism has had a rough ride for the last few decades. Championed by MOMA curator of photography John Szarkowski, formalism dominated photographic criticism throughout the 1960s and 70s. Though the formalist edifice began to crumble towards the end of the 1970s, Szarkowski remained devoted to the cause until the end of his career. In his 1989 'Photography Until Now' – his final book as curator at MOMA – Szarkowski maintained, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that ‘most photographers of ambition and high talent would prefer today to serve no instrumental functions.’ In contemporary academic circles, formalism has come to stand for a self-contained and deeply conservative approach to picture-making; as an analytical approach, it is widely regarded as a dead end. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Law: Destroying Works of Art’
by: Ronan Deazley
Posted: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 17:21:28 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Law
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

Readers of Source may well have followed the recent litigation between French photographer Patrick Cariou and the artist Richard Prince with interest. Cariou’s book 'Yes, Rasta', published in 2000, contains portraits of Rastafarians as well as landscape photographs taken in Jamaica. In 2008 Prince produced a collection of 29 paintings (entitled 'Canal Zone') for the Gagosian Gallery, 28 of which made use of 41 photographs from 'Yes, Rasta'. Some of Prince’s works consisted almost entirely of images taken from Yes, Rasta, albeit collaged, cropped, tinted, and/or over-painted, while others used portions of 'Yes, Rasta' photographs as collage elements in works that included (often pornographic) images taken from other sources. The Gallery sold 8 of the 'Canal Zone' paintings for approximately $10.5m, exchanged 7 others for art with an ESTimated value of $6-8m, and sold nearly £7,000 worth of exhibition catalogues. Cariou alleged copyright infringement. Prince and the Gagosian argued that his use of Cariou’s work constituted ‘fair use’ under the US Copyright Act 1976. In March 2011 a New York District Court ruled that both Prince and the Gallery were guilty of copyright infringement. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Troubled Thoughts’
by: Caroline Molloy
Posted: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 07:17:34 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Gender
First Published: Issue 14 - Spring 1998

'Troubled Thoughts' is a multi-media piece made whilst on residency at Flaxart studios, Belfast. The work deals with the issue of female identity within Northern Ireland, by exploring different women's individual experiences of the troubles. Whilst the work is not anthropological it does offer a very human insight into the complexity of living within a pluralist Northern Ireland; challenging stereotypical images of existing within a society at conflict. The sound and photographic installation will open at the Old Museum Art Centre, Belfast on March 4th, to coincide with International Women's Day. It will continue March 28th. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Grand Canal Swimmers’
by: Paddy McCabe
Posted: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 06:22:08 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 14 - Spring 1998

Having taken over twenty five years to complete, the Grand Canal was officially opened in 1805. It extends from Ringsend at the port of Dublin to Shannon Harbour and covers a total of 82 miles with 43 locks. The canal has a long tradition of use by swimmers in the summer months. Very little documentation exists of this and the project was started in 1988 to correct that deficit. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Beyond Division’
by: David Robinson
Posted: Thu, 26 Nov 2020 05:42:26 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 14 - Spring 1998

These images are extracts from an ongoing piece of work entitled 'Beyond Division' which is largely based within Northern Ireland, Germany and some other bordering European locations. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Cheapside EC2’
by: Martin Yelverton
Posted: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 11:49:41 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Street
First Published: Issue 14 - Spring 1998

Cheapside EC2 is situated in one of the oldest parts of the City of London, it runs from the Bank of England to St. Paul's Cathedral. The photographs were taken on Cheapside and Moorgate between April and August 1996. The photographs are in one sense a documentation of this area - Through the images, representations of a culture at a point in history. There is an attempt in this work to explore the cultural implications of representation, particularly in relation to colonialism - how control is created through representation or how representation can control or fix a culture. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Hen Brydain’
by: Phil Martin
Posted: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 11:21:36 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 14 - Spring 1998

The Standing Stones and Ceremonial Sites of the Modern Era. Several years ago, as I drove around South Wales, I became aware of large stones standing on the edges of several new motorway junctions and noticed their similarity to the prehistoric stone circles and menhirs that are part of the stock in trade of the romantic landscape artist. These ancient stones have also attracted the attention of a large number of photographers, including Bill Brandt, Paul Caponigro and Fay Godwin and it occurred to me that these modern monuments could be photographed in a manner that would offer a critical response to their pastoralist vision. I also noted other monuments within Wales, that bear an even closer resemblance to ancient stone circles, the Gorsedd Stones erected for the ceremonies of the Welsh National Eisteddfod. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Unterwegs’
by: Florian Merkel
Posted: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 06:26:35 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 14 - Spring 1998

These are from 40 photographs, I shot from driving cars in the area of German Democratic Republic between August 1988 and March 1989. The title is 'Unterwegs' (On the road). . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Myths and Fables’
by: Roger Hargreaves
Posted: Mon, 23 Nov 2020 16:44:48 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

One thing I was curious about was do you have any pets? / No. But I do have a son. He’s twenty now. But I grew up with pets, I grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in Punta las Marias, a residential area not far from the airport. We always had lots of dogs and there were land crabs in the garden and birds. I was born in Germany to American parents. My father moved our family there in 1958 when I was four. He was in business to import and export beef throughout Latin America and had set up a big freezing depot. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Myths and Fables’
by: Karen Knorr
Posted: Mon, 23 Nov 2020 11:30:59 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

A Portfolio of photographic work by Karen Knorr. Published in Issue 67 of Source, Summer 2011. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Great Masturbator on Holiday’
by: Daniel Jewsbury
Posted: Mon, 23 Nov 2020 08:14:01 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

‘Arguably’ is a weasel word. I can use it in a sentence and it will appear that I’m putting forward some sort of point of view or making some statement when in fact I’m only deferring the point at which I have to do either of those things, or anything else. For instance: ‘Neil Drabble is, arguably, a sculptor whose work only exists in photographic documentation.’ I might believe that, I might not. I’m not willing to say yet whether I actually do or don’t. Even if the statement can indeed be argued, and even if it were found to be true, so what? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Great Masturbator on Holiday’
by: Neil Drabble
Posted: Mon, 23 Nov 2020 07:30:27 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

A Portfolio of photographic work by Neil Drabble. Published in Issue 67 of Source, Summer 2011. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘...As Seen by Magnum’
by: Jim Maginn
Posted: Thu, 19 Nov 2020 04:37:39 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 14 - Spring 1998

I waited eagerly to see Magnum's 'Israel 50 Years' book and exhibition. My interest came as an admirer of the Magnum school of Photography and in terms of what it would contribute to my understanding of the conflict in the Middle East. With one or two exceptions I was not disappointed. I won't get into the dubious territory of making direct comparisons between the conflict here and there. There are a lot of similarities in our post-colonial history but thankfully we have escaped the extreme bloodshed of modern Israel and it's neighbours. Which ever tribe you happened to be born into here none of us really know the sheer scale of the conflict in Israel. The book is a timely reminder of the ever present potential for strife of that scale on our doorsteps. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Still Life’
by: James Armstrong
Posted: Wed, 18 Nov 2020 07:45:55 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Death
First Published: Issue 14 - Spring 1998

In this particular moment of contemporary visual history there exists a calculated preoccupation with authentic biology. The presentation of specimens or the invention of genetic metaphors invites us to contemplate nature and its denominator; mortality, in a somehow new or heightened manner. Shock, sensation, horror or any number of cinematic headings classify these rarefied ventures into the super-real theatre of the millennium mind. Karl Grimes' 'Still Life' at the Gallery of Photography, Dublin is a documentation of malformations (natal abnormalities) from the turn of the century. Collections of this sort have existed primarily for scientific resource in the medical community. The only place where they could be bottled, displayed, and contemplated without the hysteria or side show exploitation that precipitates glimpses of nature's most unnatural matrix. The child:bastion of innocence, heterosexuality's immaculate claim to god-like normality, the hope of all that is perfect and coming. Here, a graphic variation on a genetic theme. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Community Photography Project’
by: Jim Maginn
Posted: Wed, 18 Nov 2020 06:51:50 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Social
First Published: Issue 14 - Spring 1998

I anticipate that the Ormeau Baths Gallery is about to have some of it's highest attendance figures to date with its current Magnum show. The Eve Arnold/Magnum exhibition at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin has broken all attendance records for that space. I would however recommend that first you take a look upstairs at the set of pictures from the Gallery's 'Community Photography Project' If you've taken in the sumptuous prints of Magnum first it will be harder to enjoy the raw energy and innocence that characterises this work. No Leica pin sharp images here. This work brings us back to basics with the help of Boots disposable black and white cameras. The project was sponsored by the High Street Giant in the form of free cameras and processing. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Patricia Lofgren
Posted: Wed, 18 Nov 2020 05:22:24 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Photo Essay
First Published: Issue 14 - Spring 1998

These photographs are of some of the landmarks that gave me an idea of how far I was from home before I understood the concepts of minutes or miles. When I was very young I remember staring out the back window of our family car. I knew that when we passed the grey house on our leftwe would soon see the Christmas tree farm and make a right onto West Kerley Corners Road. We would pass Mr. Rockefeller's house and I knew when I saw the William's pond on the right my house would be staring back at me from the top of the hill. These images are extremely personal but, at the same time universal. Everyone that has had a home can probably draw a map of familiar places on their way home. These places, that I grew up with, were so burned into my mind that when I was photographing them I had trouble remembering how old I was. I did not have to make too much of a choice of what to photograph. It was more a case of just lining up the image already in my mind with the back of the camera. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Broadening Horizons’
by: Wendy Wilson
Posted: Mon, 16 Nov 2020 08:58:29 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 14 - Spring 1998

Kate Mellor quotes Paul Theroux as an introduction to her collection of coastal landscapes. "Most people on the promenade walked with their faces averted from the land... Most people looked seaward with anxious hopeful faces..." She takes us around the coast of Britain with scientific precision, using measured points in what she describes as "an essentially British posture". The landscapes are not simply seascapes, they all include a point of reference, a piece of land or some people which we recognise as British. Mellor is trying to capture the sense of enclosure provided by an island, but also the protection. She places stark windswept beaches alongside familiar seaside scenes. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The New Photography Galleries’
by: Simon Denison
Posted: Mon, 16 Nov 2020 06:30:18 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Gallery-Based
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

News earlier this year of the loss of Arts Council funding at a few photography organisations, such as Side Gallery and Hereford Photography Festival, may have given the impression that the photo-gallery world is entering lean times, in keeping with a less buoyant economy. Some galleries are certainly feeling the pinch. But overall, the reality may not be quite so disheartening. With several publicly-funded photography and art galleries engaged in major new building or refurbishment projects, and general art galleries showing photographs as never before, it seems rather that photography is at last receiving the infrastructural recognition that its status in the art world has long deserved. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Listening to the Landscape’
by: Errol Forbes
Posted: Mon, 16 Nov 2020 05:02:22 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 14 - Spring 1998

These photographs comprise a journey through the mountain landscape of lreland. A discipline which demands close observation and a sympathy with the subject. All of the lrish mountains are easy to reach and explore yet remain largely unfrequented. Time spent exploring, absorbing and listening to the landscape will influence the photographer and result in a truer picture. We can record the beauty of the landscape, most importantly with our eyes and then with the camera. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 102 / Autumn 2020 - Zoom Launch’
by: The Editors
Posted: Fri, 09 Oct 2020 06:22:23 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Event

Join us for the Online Launch of Issue 102 'The Unsayable'. Live interviews with featured photographer Lorraine Tuck and contributor Professor Edward Welch. Lorraine Tuck's 'Unusual Gestures' depicts family life for a mother of two boys who have autism and two daughters, living on a farm in the west of Ireland. The 'gestures' in the title refers to her younger son Manus's inscrutable signalling with his hands but might also describe the efforts of everyone in the family to cope with the differing needs of the children and the working life of a farm, something that would be hard to put into language but is clearly visible in the pictures. Professor Edward Welch is a regular contributor to Source and co-editor of 'Photography and Its Publics' (2020). This issue features his comparative review of Jean-Christophe Bailly's The Instant and its Shadow and Hagi Kenaan's Photography and its Shadow, each of which, as he puts it, 'find different ways to apprehend the fundamental strangeness of photography'. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2020 MA/MFA Selections’
by: Elizabeth Renstrom
Posted: Thu, 24 Sep 2020 18:12:17 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Thu, 24 Sep 2020 18:12:17 EST

I am always on the lookout for new perspectives in a field that can feel more and more ubiquitous each year. As greater numbers of people have access to cameras on their phones and ways of creating lens-based work—I think subject matter and nuance is so important to stand out. I always encourage artists to identify stories only they can uniquely tell before documenting something they think they should. Zeitgeists in photo styles happen often, but wholly original series are a rarity. The submissions for this year’s MA photography graduates reflect the importance of individuality across so many genres of the medium. I was impressed and surprised by the narratives I came across in my six choices as they deal with issues of the artist’s gaze in portraiture, how we construct memory, and how we choose to tell the history of a place. All approached in a way that really made me look deeper into the projects and how the photos were constructed. I know this year is a wild one to matriculate in—but we need new ways of seeing now more than ever. These students offer just that. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2020 MA/MFA Selections’
by: Kirstin Kidd
Posted: Thu, 24 Sep 2020 18:09:24 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Thu, 24 Sep 2020 18:09:24 EST

I was honored to be asked to be on the selectors panel for this year’s MA/MFA graduates. As the year progressed and Covid-19 became pervasive in all areas of life it has been a welcome pause from the relentless news coverage for me. The process of reviewing the projects was stimulating and revitalising and gave me a chance to reconnect with photography beyond the newsfeed. Many of the projects were direct responses to the pandemic, but I was left pondering the indirect influence lockdown would have had on all these artists working at this time. The pressure to complete your final year without the usual face to face discussions and the energy and support from your peers and tutors must have been incredibly tough. Each project is revealing of our shared yet unique experiences through this time. I eventually came to my final selects but it was not without its difficulties as there are many very successful projects here which were on my extremely long short list. I urge you to look beyond those I selected, and to all the graduates I would like to wish you all the very best in the future. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2020 MA/MFA Selections’
by: Sarah Allen
Posted: Thu, 24 Sep 2020 17:59:14 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Thu, 24 Sep 2020 17:59:14 EST

This year's graduates are tackling a wide variety of subject-matter in diverse ways. However there were certain themes which ran throughout several of the projects – grief and loss, environmental concerns and sexuality, to name a few. Unsurprisingly the pandemic was a subject matter explored by many of the graduates. It’s always fascinating to see early creative responses to this critical moment– in one sense I can understand how the pandemic must feel the most obvious and urgent subject but, in another sense, one has to do extra legwork to ensure a compelling angle or mode of expression. Among my choices are projects I felt were well conceptualised, executed and edited. I wish all the graduates the very best. I look forward to seeing what comes next for them all. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 102 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 14 Sep 2020 07:55:27 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 102 - Autumn 2020

Anyone who has studied photography at a university in the last 30 years will be familiar with the idea of considering images as texts. But sometimes words are insufficient. This could be for pragmatic reasons - you don’t have a language in common - or it could be that some things are not easily put into words but can be put into pictures. It is easy to assume that words can be reduced to their meanings while pictures, whose meaning is elusive, cannot. Translators are a conduit for other people’s communication. But while a speaker’s whole meaning may be conveyed to their listener, the translator they pass through is also affected by the words, even though they are not their own. Theatre director Sophie Besse and photographer Jose Farinha worked with a group of translators employed in the public system (with the police, in prisons and hospitals) to create images to show this effect. In a collaborative process they ‘sculpted’ tableaux that dramatised their often difficult experiences. The resulting photographs show feelings that cannot be put into words. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Religion Private and Public’
by: Mick Gidley
Posted: Thu, 23 Jul 2020 07:51:15 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

These 40 colour photographs open with a view down the Soho Road as it leaves Birmingham city centre. The vantage exaggerates the road’s surface and its featurelessness. This is the locality as seen by someone driving through, who may not know the Soho Road as the multi-ethnic area captured in succeeding photographs. The next image, of guests at the annual Birmingham Faiths Forum dinner, also readies itself to be undercut: the leaders of religious groups – recognisable by such insignia as crosses and yamulkas – constitute, with the mayor in his civic regalia, a comfortable-looking ‘establishment’, whereas the people to be met later inhabit less privileged spaces. The theme is not just ethnicity (itself too often reduced to ‘colour’ and ‘diversity’) but, as Liz Hingley states, what faith, in its many guises, "can bring to everyday inner-city life". . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Relaxation and Globalisation’
by: Edward Welch
Posted: Thu, 23 Jul 2020 07:29:01 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

'Riffs' is the handsome catalogue accompanying a solo show by Yto Barrada at the Berlin Guggenheim earlier this year, organised to mark her nomination as the Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year for 2011. In many ways, it offers a rewarding encounter with her work over the past decade or so, and includes stimulating essays and interviews exploring her engagement with the city of Tangiers, and her study of the frontiers and frustrations at the margins of Europe which makes her one of the most perceptive observers of the contemporary world in all its globalised and segregated complexity. Yet at the same time, it is a publication shot through with a few too many ironies, not the least of which is that, as sponsor’s representative Pierre de Weck tells us rather proudly in his preface, the prize comes with no financial reward. Rather, alongside the solo show, Artists of the Year have a whole floor of the bank’s head office devoted to showing their work, while the bank acquires some ‘works on paper’ for its collection. One is gladdened that so many foot soldiers of big finance can be soothed, and maybe even challenged, as they meditate on Barrada’s sustained interrogation of the landscapes which global capital has done so much to shape and define over the past two or three decades. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Ephemeral Exchanges’
by: Nancy Roth
Posted: Thu, 23 Jul 2020 06:55:27 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

Although Walead Beshty is a young man (b. London, 1976) and this catalogue covers only ten years of his career, 'Natural Histories' is a retrospective. The formal diversity of the work is striking: stereoscopic views of housing projects, casual portraits, large abstract colour photograms, prints made from film exposed in an airport security scanner. But the conceptual coherence is striking as well: it’s like a threedimensional philosophy that uses objects and spaces, rather than words. Through concrete materials, observable processes, specific instances, it refutes the kind of abstraction that words so easily make familiar (or ‘natural’) and that photography usually reinforces. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘What is Conceptual Photography?’
by: Lucy Soutter
Posted: Thu, 23 Jul 2020 05:55:28 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

This book showcases the eclectic international collection of Zellweger Luwa AG, a Swiss corporation specialising in air engineering and gas detection. For those interested in the relationship between conceptual art and photography, the lavish illustrations and detailed catalogue information offer a chance to study an assortment of important works that are rarely exhibited, and often reproduced in partial form. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Reflecting Truth’
by: Mary Warner Marien
Posted: Thu, 23 Jul 2020 05:28:22 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Historical
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

In her new book, Karen M. Fraser maintains that Japanese photography is best seen in the milieu of Japan’s dynamic social history, particularly its rapid transformation from feudalism to capitalism. From the start, Japanese photographic practice responded to the needs of modernisation. Early photographic portraits made of the Mejii emperor were staged to show him as a modern leader in an ancient land. At the same time, photography responded to Japanese cultural notions. Fraser contrasts the Western roots of the word, photography (light writing), with the Japanese term, 'shashin', which means ‘truth copy’ or ‘reflecting truth.’ The Japanese configuration emphasised faithful recording of the visual and discouraged manipulation of the image. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘People Now Absent’
by: Jackie Higgins
Posted: Thu, 23 Jul 2020 05:08:32 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Death
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

Paul Hill is perhaps best known for landscape photography, in particular his monochrome images of the remote corner of the Peak District where he lives. This work was presented in his memorable book 'White Peak, Dark Peak' (1990). The imagery in his latest publication 'Corridor of Uncertainty' marks a radical departure. Made after he lost his wife to cancer, Hill turned to colour and chose to express himself through still life, close-up and abstract photography. He says, "I did not – could not – document her decline directly. I have considered these images individually and collectively and how they interrelate and correlate to reflect the experience." . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Honoured Dead’
by: Simon Denison
Posted: Wed, 22 Jul 2020 11:49:08 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Death
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

Taking photographs of our dead relatives may seem macabre today but for the Victorians (mainly, in the West) it was a sign that the dead were loved and honoured, and served as therapy for the bereaved. Photographs typically showed the dead as if at peace, and the bereaved dignified and resigned. In exceptional cases we see past the illusion: German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck caught slumped on his dishevelled deathbed by two turn-of-the-century paparazzi; or a woman captured by accident, edge-of-frame, weeping helplessly over a dead infant in a London studio. Some pictures were staged to show off the family’s wealth. Others, following the ESTablished practice of posthumous portraiture, depicted the dead dressed and sitting up as if living. The eyes were opened and eyeballs turned round – a task easily achieved, according to one account, with the handle of a teaspoon. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Depleted Associations’
by: Mary Warner Marien
Posted: Wed, 22 Jul 2020 11:29:15 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Photomontage
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

Israel-born American filmmaker and photographer, Elad Lassry, makes photographs based in the visual palaver of mass media and vernacular portraiture. His demonising tweaks of cloying pet pictures will make you think twice about letting Fluffy sleep on your bed at night. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Photography and Poetry’
by: Jesse Alexander
Posted: Tue, 21 Jul 2020 09:01:57 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Street
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

'Core Curriculum' is a volume of collected writing on photography. Papageorge, whose photographic practice matured on the streets of New York alongside Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander in the 1960s and 70s, has been teaching at Yale University School of Art since 1979, where he still leads the graduate programme, whose alumni include Philip-Lorca diCorsia, Abe Morrell and Gregory Crewdson. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Old Couple’
by: Martha Langford
Posted: Thu, 16 Jul 2020 05:26:03 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Historical
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

Photography and anthropology are like an old couple; outsiders are scarcely conscious of the sparks and divisions between them. Christopher Pinney sees into this relationship; he pries its functions and effects apart, revealing the substrata of imbrication without destroying the pattern or his reader’s trust through hyperactive hindsight. He achieves this, in part, through selective attention: "There are many anthropologies," he writes. The version that has stared critically at its own reflection in the mirror and thought hard about the power structures both imbedded in and constructed by visual representation is the anthropology that interests Pinney. He turns it on itself – in the spirit of Foucault’s ‘counterscience’ – to ask "what an anthropological destabilization of the relationship between anthropology and photography might look like." History, historiography, and theory intermingle in this text. In schoolyard parlance, one might say that Pinney picks on people his own size. Such rules of engagement don’t always make for transparent style, but the structure is compensatory. Pinney conducts his investigation of photography and anthropology from three complementary points of view. He ESTablishes a history of shared mentalities, then teases out the pluses and minuses of photographic representation from the anthropological perspective, finally reversing that attack, in part through recourse to postcolonial critical practice. A prologue and an epilogue bracket these studies, and the book is generously illustrated at a level that we have grown to expect from Pinney who has what used to be called ‘a very good eye’. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Burden of Affect’
by: Mark Durden
Posted: Wed, 15 Jul 2020 07:44:33 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

This is a strange book on photography. It is written ‘against’ Roland Barthes’s thirty-year-old 'Camera Lucida', (the English translation was published in 1981) in order to find what Elkins refers to as ‘another sense of Photography’. It mimics the book’s format in consisting of brief numbered sections, beginning with a close ventriloquism of the opening of 'Camera Lucida': rephrasing Barthes’s ‘“ontological” desire’ of wanting to ‘learn at all costs what Photography was “in itself”’ in response not to a photo portrait of Napoleon’s younger brother, but ‘a photograph of a selenite window,’ from a New Mexican pueblo house. This picture, together with a photograph showing the cracked layered surface of black lake ice and a photograph of a piece of rock salt, in which had been preserved two hundred and fifty million-year-old bacteria, all provide emblems for his book as ‘failed photographic windows’ and ‘failed looks into or through something’. They offer less optimistic metaphors for photography than the more dominant brilliant metaphors to do with ‘perfect windows, lucency, transparency’. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘As at the Filipovs’
by: Steve Edwards
Posted: Tue, 14 Jul 2020 11:37:30 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Historical
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

In 2010 the seminar ‘The Worker Photography Movement: Towards a Political History of the Origins of Photographic Modernity’ was held at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. The extraordinary follow-up exhibition 'A Hard and Merciless Light: The Worker Photography Movement, 1926-1939' ran at the same location between April and August 2011. Bringing together hundreds of images, publications and films from across Europe as well as the USA, the curator Jorge Ribalta and his team cast a new light on politics and modernity between the mid 1920s and the fall of the Spanish Republic. As the most severe economic crisis since the 1930s continues to engulf Europe it is an apposite moment to revisit reactions to that earlier watershed in the history of capitalism. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘What Am I Looking At?’
by: Andrea Noble
Posted: Tue, 07 Jul 2020 11:15:34 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Scientific
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

Beyond working in the same medium, albeit at different times and places, what is the connective thread that binds the Japanese photographic artist Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) and the British pioneer of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877)? The answer lies in the two collections of images, 'Lightning Fields' and 'Photogenic Drawings', on display for the first time in Europe at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art. Any dialogue with the inventor of the positive-negative system, that early nineteenth-century precursor of photographic processes and images as we knew them until the advent of digital photography, is inevitably an engagement with the status of photographic representation itself. In this way, the images presented in Edinburgh form part of Sugimoto’s longer trajectory which, in part, has been characterised by a meditation on the medium. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Jane and Louise Wilson
Posted: Tue, 07 Jul 2020 06:46:33 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

A Portfolio of photographic work by Jane and Louise Wilson. Published in Issue 68 of Source, Autumn 2011. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Jane and Louise Wilson’
by: Isabel Stevens
Posted: Tue, 07 Jul 2020 06:14:42 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

Isabel Stevens: When did you first begin working seriously with photography? / Louise: We were about nineteen when we got a Mamiya C330 twin lens reflex during our undergrad. But we studied in the days when people got upset when you described your photographs as fine art. Jane: Louise was at art school in Dundee and I was in Newcastle and we used to meet up and photograph ourselves in these 'mis-en-scene', tableaux sort of situations. / Louise: Our degree show installation was called 'Garage'. One of the photographic panels shows Jane and I enacting a joint suicide ritual and the other panel shows the detritus after we left. It shows during and after the event. / Jane: ...or it could be before, you don’t know really – we often work with a looped narrative. We used to process our black and white photographs in garden troughs and on resin-coated paper. It was also a time when we developed our working relationship. The photographs we made were about 5x6 feet. Scale has always been a big issue in our work. And we’ve always been in interested in a kind of portraiture too. The site as well was very important even back then – the fact that it was a garage and that we’d transformed it. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘How To Design A Photography Gallery’
by: Daniel Jewsbury
Posted: Fri, 03 Jul 2020 07:57:26 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Gallery-Based
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

Once upon a time the design of photography galleries was (one imagines) a fairly straightforward affair. The photographs exhibited would be smallish, framed with a mount, and black and white. The requirements to show them properly were some white wall space and some lighting. Depending on the size and nature of the institution, there might also be provision for some darkroom or studio space in the same building. Then, perhaps at around the same time photography began seriously to be considered as ‘fine art’, the use of colour became more widespread, and the prints became larger, and the frames or mounts changed. Galleries needed bigger rooms, and walls needed to be washed with even light rather than selectively illuminated with individual spots. At a certain point, presumably because photography became so accepted as a part of the mainstream of fine art, some galleries of photography felt the need to show photography in the context of other artforms; video and other lens-based media needed darkened spaces, and perhaps seating; eventually photography was just one medium in a whole range of image-based or even sculptural forms that required new provision in terms of storage and loading, and installation. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2020 BA Selections’
by: Nicola Shipley
Posted: Wed, 01 Jul 2020 05:24:35 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Wed, 01 Jul 2020 05:24:35 EST

Looking at projects by emerging photographers, particularly this year during the Covid 19 crisis and lockdown, has been invigorating and rewarding. Discovering bodies of work that challenge thinking, explore complex subjects, provide new narratives and a fresh approach to a subject matter is the most enjoyable part of selecting work. Many of the submissions this year were bold, providing fresh perspectives on our world and personal stories of identity, belonging and heritage. The six projects I selected were consistent and outstanding bodies of work that were conceptually strong, focused, well executed and that conveyed themes that were universal concerns and personal stories that could be connected with on an emotional level. I was very impressed by the ambition and standard of the work. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2020 BA Selections’
by: Rebecca McClelland
Posted: Wed, 01 Jul 2020 05:20:11 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Wed, 01 Jul 2020 05:20:11 EST

I came to this judging process with a refreshed and open mind not having juried a student competition as comprehensive as this one for some time. I was intrigued to discover what new printing practices students were pursuing. I was looking for work that was brave, experimental or that shared strong well-defined narratives. This jury has been a privilege. To be able to spend my time working through the many diverse portfolios and narratives entered this year. The work is consistently well executed with high production values. I was compelled to investigate further photographers’ websites, previous bodies of work and backstories. The series that I have chosen demonstrate this kind of important contextual photography that has the prowess to exist beyond campus. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2020 BA Selections’
by: Brenda Fitzsimons
Posted: Wed, 01 Jul 2020 05:16:05 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Wed, 01 Jul 2020 05:16:05 EST

Looking at these submissions mid Covid 19 lockdown there was a welcome sense of different worlds appearing before me – an energising feeling. The work that I found myself most drawn to had a strong, usually instant, emotional appeal, which on closer inspection revealed a solid skill base and technical know how. The six I chose were images I would be happy to spend time with – creative pictures that I know would continue to engage and stimulate. Submissions of this nature require the photographer to be their own curator – a challenge for all photographers no matter how experienced – and I was pleased to see that most submissions reflected a coherent vision from this year’s BA photography graduates, a narrative fully engaged in its creative response to the category brief. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Object Questions’
by: David Brett
Posted: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 13:23:05 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

This is not a photographic dossier, though all the objects include photographic images in some form, as well as being photographs. It is not an exhibition of photographs of sculpture, though these objects all demonstrate a sculptural approach to space and materials. Nor is it an exhibition of craft, though it craftily displays a keen interest in materials and a very skilful lack of skill in their handling. What the collection most looks like is a group of sketches made by a set designer for theatre or film. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Fragments’
by: Vanya Lambrecht Ward
Posted: Mon, 29 Jun 2020 10:22:37 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

A Portfolio of photographic work by Vanya Lambrecht Ward. Published in Issue 68 of Source, Autumn 2011. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Thomas Joshua Cooper’
by: David Bellingham
Posted: Fri, 26 Jun 2020 06:25:11 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 14 - Spring 1998

In a recent review (of your Exhibition 'Where The Rivers Flow' at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh) in the Independent Tom Lubbock suggests that the actual sense of place, in your images of oceans and rivers, is weak. 'You rarely feel that here is offered an impressive sight you might see yourself'. He goes on to say - 'His sea is treated abstractly, visionarily, but in a way very objectively, It's the same thing, with the sea, abstract and concrete, subjective and objective are one.' In earlier work, the various pieces that constituted the 'Dreaming The Godstadt' project for example there is a different relationship to site, many of the pictures are of places which are dramatic in themselves, could you say something about this change of approach? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The World's Edge’
by: Thomas Joshua Cooper
Posted: Wed, 24 Jun 2020 06:07:08 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 14 - Spring 1998

A Portfolio of photographic work by Thomas Joshua Cooper. Published in Issue 14 of Source, Spring 1998. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 101 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 11:05:56 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 101 - Summer 2020

Culture is a mixture of inheritances. These can be starkly contrasting, defined by historical events or geographical separation but can nevertheless all be contained in one person’s experience. The work in this issue is characterised by the spans of time and space that it encompasses. The historian Tina Campt, in an interview about her work, talks about how she came to photography as part of her research into the lives of black Germans under the Nazi regime. She discovered that photographs gave her a way of understanding a history that hadn't been written about, and that they spoke eloquently about lives that didn’t fit in the grand narrative of the period. She has continued to write about photography and says we need to 'listen' to images. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Advertising: Brooks’
by: Judith Williamson
Posted: Sun, 21 Jun 2020 18:17:35 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

The image in this ad appears to be a photograph. It shows a crisp and dynamic scene on an autumn day: hounds are running through a wood, towards the camera, while a young couple hide behind a tree, to the left of frame, sheltering a fox. The couple’s bicycles are foregrounded, seeming to lean against the tree trunk, with the fox’s tail curling over the crossbars: the fox itself looks outwards to the front of the picture. Copper beech leaves carpet the ground and are captured in minute detail, with all the sharpness that photography can produce; while each hound appears caught in action, either running forwards, or sniffing the air or the ground. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Law: Orphans Back in the Frame’
by: Ronan Deazley
Posted: Fri, 19 Jun 2020 09:25:42 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Law
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

The government’s recent response to the 'Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property' has attracted praise and criticism in equal measure. One contentious if familiar issue is that of orphan works (for previous commentary, see Source 50). A copyright-protected work is a so-called orphan work if the copyright owner cannot be identified or located by someone seeking permission to perform one of the exclusive rights set out under the copyright regime (copying, distributing, communicating the work to the public, and so on). From the government’s perspective "it benefits no one to have a wealth of copyright works entirely unusable under any circumstances because the owner of one or more rights in the work cannot be contacted". The government continue: "This is not simply a cultural issue; it is a very real economic issue that potentially valuable intangible assets are simply going to waste". It is the fact that the government proposes to enable the commercial re-use of orphan works that has drawn criticism from the photographic community, and in particular from the Association of Photographers, and the Stop43 campaign group (stop43.org.uk). . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Police Force’
by: Paul Seawright
Posted: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 10:12:23 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 13 - Autumn Winter 1997

A Portfolio of photographic work by Paul Seawright. Published in Issue 13 of Source, Autumn Winter 1997. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Laces and Eyelets’
by: Ciaran Carson
Posted: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 07:04:15 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 13 - Autumn Winter 1997

Thirty-nine bullet-holes have not quite obliterated the face of the cut-out, target-practice terrorist. It's the only face you'll see. To the right, an iron door with a wire-grilled window rivetted into it. To the left, a pair of circular brass-framed analogue pressure-guages, bathometers or altimeters, turn out to be thermometers. The scale reads from -20' or -30' to 120' or 50', depending on F or C. Wires lead in and out of them. At the moment of the photograph, the needles show 66' F. These instruments of measurement are Made in England. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Mary McIntyre’
by: Richard West
Posted: Thu, 18 Jun 2020 06:17:32 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 13 - Autumn Winter 1997

Supposition: 'Once the smallest detail has been understood then everything is understood'. The title of a pair of photographs in an exhibition of the work of Mary McIntyre. So we look carefully at the pictures in search of a small detail in the hope that everything will fall into place only to discover that the details make the images more intriguing. Looking at a picture of back gardens we notice how neatly everything is divided up by box hedges and the peculiarities of each rectangle of garden. Why is there, for example, a lone football in one garden and a goal in the other as if they have been forcibly separated and isolated from one another? Then we notice in the corner of the picture a football stadium where perhaps they are awaiting the return of their equipment. Meanwhile directly beneath us a man tends his plants with his back to us, keeping his vegetation in mysteriously strict order and the right hand side of the picture contains a greenhouse that we will see later in the exhibition from the inside. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2020 Selectors: Elizabeth Renstrom’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Fri, 08 May 2020 07:34:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Sun, 12 Apr 2020 10:33:00 EST

We chat to Elizabeth Renstrom, Senior Photo Editor at The New Yorker and Selector for the MA/MFA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2020. / Tell us about your job? What did your core role at Vice - and now at The New Yorker involve? / Previously as sole Senior Photo Editor at Vice I oversaw all photo commissions and research behind the quarterly magazine as well as vice.com sections. This includes coming up with ideas for photo essays in relation to the themes of the magazine, but also commissioning portraits for profiles, conceptual still life, feature photography and cover art. In terms of vice.com I was responsible for web photo essays, interviews, and assigning photography for larger features on the site across all beats. I also contributed my own editorial photography while at Vice when I felt like my style was appropriate and in line with the story. At The New Yorker I’m in a similar role as before, but I’m now working within a department of photo editors vs. being the sole editor. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2020 Selectors: Kirstin Kidd’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Fri, 08 May 2020 07:31:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Fri, 29 Nov 2019 11:53:00 EST

We chat to Kirstin Kidd, Picture Editor at The Economist and Selector for the MA/MFA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2020. / Tell us about your job? What does your core role at The Economist involve? / I’m a picture editor, I’m responsible for selecting photographs for stories in print, and various online platforms. I source pictures from a variety of places, including but not limited to, photo libraries and archives. The aim is to have a selection of photographs, that are factually relevant, can work in various spaces and cover various aspects of a story. I work in the art team, alongside the designers. We work with the section editors to get a good mix of words, photos, illustrations, and charts on page. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2020 Selectors: Sarah Allen’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Fri, 08 May 2020 07:26:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Tue, 03 Dec 2019 07:37:00 EST

We chat to Sarah Allen, Assistant Curator for International Art at Tate and Selector for the MA/MFA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2020. / Tell us about your job? Tell us about your job? What does your core role at Tate involve? / At Tate Modern I work on exhibitions, displays and acquisitions. At the moment I am co-curating the upcoming Zanele Muholi exhibition which installs in April. Last week we installed a mixed display of work by artists including Susan Meiselas and Paz Errázuriz. I curated a room of David Goldblatt's work in the summer and in a few weeks I will install Irving Penn's Underfoot series. One of the real joys is looking after the Martin Parr Photobook collection. For this I collaborate and co-curate exhibitions with the Luma foundation which are staged in Arles. As part of the photobook focus of my job I also oversee the Offprint photobook fair. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2020 Selectors: Nicola Shipley’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Fri, 08 May 2020 07:01:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Mon, 02 Dec 2019 09:55:00 EST

We chat to Nicola Shipley, Director at GRAIN Projects, Birmingham and Selector for the BA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2020. / Tell us about your job? What does your core role at GRAIN Projects involve? / My role encompasses a whole range of disciplines which include commissioning new work, curating exhibitions, devising and leading professional development opportunities from masterclasses to mentoring, producing symposia and other events and in support of the above the increasingly important fundraising, stakeholder management, budget management and report writing and evaluation. Obviously, the ability to commission and work with photographers and to support and spot new talent is by far the most enjoyable aspect of the role but it has to be seen as part of the bigger picture. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2020 Selectors: Rebecca McClelland’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Fri, 08 May 2020 06:52:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Thu, 06 May 2020 07:29:00 EST

We chat to Rebecca McClelland, Creative Director & Curator at The Ian Parry Scholarship and Selector for the BA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2020. / Tell us about your job? What does your core role at the Ian Parry Scholarship involve? / For the last twenty years I have been part of the small team that originated at The Sunday Times Magazine behind the creation and development of the Ian Parry Scholarship, an international award for Visual Journalism. This year we are immensely proud to celebrate our 30th year anniversary. The award was set up in memory of Ian Parry, an extremely talented young photographer who died on an assignment for the paper at the age of 24 years old. The scholarship is a free competition for any full time photography student from the UK and around the world to enter a series of 12 images and a proposal of a feature they would shoot for the The Sunday Times Magazine should they win. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2020 Selectors: Brenda Fitzsimons’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Fri, 08 May 2020 06:41:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate
First Posted: Thu, 02 Jan 2020 06:38:00 EST

We chat to Brenda Fitzsimons, Picture Editor at The Irish Times and Selector for the BA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2020. / Tell us about your job? What does your core role at The Irish Times involve? / As Picture Editor at The Irish Times, my job – and no two days are the same – involves determining the picture needs of the newspaper, across print and all digital platforms, and making sure it happens. I allocate assignments to staff and freelance photographers, in Ireland and abroad, giving clear briefs and usually very tight deadlines. I select and edit the photos that appear online and in print – that's a big part of my day – as well as liaising throughout the day with editors and the video team. I negotiate fees, rights agreements and any other legal permissions needed. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Law: Privately Alone on a Bicycle’
by: Ronan Deazley
Posted: Thu, 07 May 2020 10:44:31 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Law
First Published: Issue 51 - Summer 2007

Landmark moments in legal jurisprudence often come from the most unlikely sources. Recently, in Ash v. McKennitt (Dec. 2006) the Court of Appeal upheld the High Court decision of Mr Justice Eady to prevent the publication of a book on the Canadian folk singer, Loreena McKennitt, by her former friend and confidant, Neima Ash. The Court of Appeal’s decision to do so has been described as ‘a turning point in the development of English privacy law’ (The Guardian, 16 December 2006), the death-knell for the kiss-and-tell stories that fuel the sale of the tabloid press. That in itself may prove to be of little interest to the casual Source reader, however the substance of the decision, and in particular the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (the ECtHR) which it explicitly endorses, has considerable implications for all forms of photography in the public sphere. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Oral History Archive: Trish Morrissey’
by: Richard West
Posted: Thu, 07 May 2020 09:51:33 EST
Content: Audio Interview / Genre: Conceptual
Recorded: Jun 2012

Prior to developing her own artistic practice Trish Morrissey worked in the fields of journalism and commercial photography. Her work often takes the form of conceptually charged portraiture. Recurrent themes include questions of gender and identity and in particular the nexus of value and taboo mediated via familial relationships. Her work has been shown across the UK and Ireland and as far afield as New York and Melbourne. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Interview’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Sun, 03 May 2020 12:26:39 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Forensic
First Posted: Thu, 14 Oct 2010

Above is an interview with the lead forensic archaeologist carried on a recent edition of the BBC Radio 4 science programme 'Material World'. It gives some insight particularly into the technologies and difficulties involved in this long process. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Hope and Closure’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Fri, 01 May 2020 09:51:17 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Death
First Posted: Mon, 11 Oct 2010

It has been a while. All I can offer up is that I have been away on two trips and that I am back from one. There have been a number of developments in relation to the ongoing searches, which I will expand on soon. One small note of hope and closure, Charlie Armstrong was formally identified in the middle of September and was finally laid to rest on the 18th September. His daughter Anna told the congregation gathered at the Church of St Patrick in Crossmaglen of the great sense of liberation for his widow and the family that her father could now have a Christian burial. She also thanked the anonymous person who supplied the map that finally helped uncover her father’s body at Aughrim More at the end of July. With emotion she read the lines: “Death is a heartache no one can heal, but love is a memory no one can steal.” . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Two Contrasting Events’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Fri, 01 May 2020 09:39:01 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Landscape
First Posted: Tue, 07 Sep 2010

A few weeks ago I returned to the landscape of the recent discovery at Aughrim More. At the entrance to the site it seemed that a large rock had been placed as a dormant but potential memorial stone that quite publicly faced the slim road that separated Aughrim More from Colgagh (location of the discovery of Brian McKinney and John McClory in 1999). A short time had elapsed since its secret had been revealed and as I walked down the rough stony track the bog already appeared to have been leveled and so now this location as opposed to site had been returned to the forthcoming passage of time and nature. The earth removers were gone and as I rounded the small hill at the bottom of the track it was quite moving to see that an active memorial stone already occupied the far end of the returned bog. As confirmation is awaited – real science unfortunately does not have the pace of CSI – it appeared that relatives had allowed themselves at least a private acknowledgement of their grief. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Edit Update II’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Fri, 01 May 2020 06:12:01 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Publishing
First Posted: Mon, 06 Sep 2010

‘Nature is never finished’ (Robert Smithson). The first draft arrived promptly early last week and I have been musing without much amusement since. Its always interesting that even though one might work with paper proofs at the correct final size a strange translation occurs when paper gets bound and ideas become a physical reality in book form. Inevitably one questions what language was being spoken before the binding but lets start with a positive. The colour and reproduction is reasonably good and I would advise anyone hoping to use the Blurb method to read the colour management section on their site before embarking. One small gripe is that above 60 leaves one cannot use the premium paper so the stock is light and easily creased but I was aware of this. Presumably this is due to binding issues. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: An Attempt at Reading a Landscape’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Thu, 30 Apr 2020 16:14:38 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Landscape
First Posted: Fri, 11 Dec 2009

Back in mid October ('A Slight Change of Plan' – 17/10/09 posting) I discovered through a press statement that fresh digs for Charlie Armstrong and Gerard Evans were being carried out at two new locations and began to look at these landscapes while also tracking the search at Wilkinstown. These men, who had been considered disappeared were not on the original list released in 1999. It is thought that the South Armagh IRA was responsible but they have refused to come forward with either information or formal admission of involvement. There had been a search for Charlie Armstrong in 2003 about a mile from Colgagh, (an official site during the searches in 1999/2000), which lasted about two weeks but proved fruitless. The only information I had to go on was that these two new locations were at Colgagh and Carrickrobin and while both are within miles of each other they are in separate counties. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Advertising: Pantene’
by: Judith Williamson
Posted: Wed, 29 Apr 2020 08:19:06 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 73 - Winter 2012

The London Olympics had a quality that was widely felt as a breath of fresh air, even by those who had been initially sceptical: uniquely in contemporary culture, this was a hugely mediacovered event that centred on people who were not celebrities, but athletes, both known and unknown, followed for their prowess in actual physical actions. Some were better known than others, but all gave off the refreshing sense of being ‘real’, unglossed by PR. Not only did these real people dominate our screens for many weeks, and become the focus of widely felt admiration, we also experienced their journey to significance in real time. The athletes we followed during the Olympics occupied a unique position in a culture where being a celebrity means entering the image currency: they were seen in the very process of becoming known, we witnessed the very acts that gave them their meaning, before that meaning had yet congealed. Watching Mo Farah desperately surging forward to win the 10,000 metres made the spontaneous passion of his gestures afterwards not empty posturing, but a full human response. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 46 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Fri, 24 Apr 2020 04:34:14 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 46 - Spring 2006

Photography is not always thought of as an amusing business. For those wishing to have fun with photography Richard West and David Evans discuss photography board games and toy cameras: both ways in which you can play at being a photographer without actually having to take any pictures. Once you are enjoying yourself you may wish to question if photography is the best way to represent pleasure. Wiebke Leister looks at photographs of people laughing and notes that it is not always easy to tell if their expression represents pleasure or pain. This has a lesson for portraiture and photography in general that does not wish to be understood indexically. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 45 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Fri, 24 Apr 2020 04:26:45 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 45 - Winter 2005

Public funding has played an important role in photography over the last 30 years. Alexandra Moschovi here examines the history of funding for photography in Britain through the Arts Council. The aspirations of government funding do not always match the aspirations of photography organisations, one illuminating hard case of this mismatch was that of the funding of Ten.8 magazine, Moschovi looks back at the demise of the magazine to find out about the ambitions and expectations of the funders and publishers. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 44 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 23 Apr 2020 17:39:04 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 44 - Autumn 2005

When the bombs in the London underground were first reported they were soon accompanied by photographs taken on the scene by cameraphones. This seemed to suggest a new form of photojournalism, created for the first time, by people caught up in events. John Taylor looks at the role of technology in making pictures and asks what it is that makes us understand a news picture as showing reality. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 43 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 23 Apr 2020 17:06:55 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 43 - Summer 2005

Historically the least well known form of photography has been that produced by amateurs. While this must form the greatest quantity of pictures, of the most diverse subject matter, it is all but invisible. Timothy Prus at the Archive of Modern Conflict has set about collecting this material and here explains how decisions are made about what is saved from the photographic slag heap. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 75 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 22 Apr 2020 06:09:12 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 75 - Summer 2013

Photographs show the world as it is, and literature is ‘made up’. This common sense analysis suggests that the art forms are quite different in kind and function. This issue demonstrates that, on the contrary, there is a long history of interaction between literature and photography. Colin Graham finds that their simplistic opposition conceals the truth that the ‘literary’ and the ‘photographic’ are in fact aspects of both media. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 73 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Tue, 21 Apr 2020 05:01:24 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 73 - Winter 2012

For some time we have been reporting the effects of the recession and funding cuts on photography organisations. Added to the merging of photography remits with those of art galleries and the movement of various photography functions to the web, it wouldn’t be surprising if photography-specific organisations ceased to exist altogether. And yet... precisely the opposite has taken place. In the last five years new publications, galleries and festivals, all dedicated to photography, have sprung up. And that’s not all, there are new bookshops for photobooks, new photo collectives, new community photography initiatives. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Debatable Spaces’
by: Declan Long
Posted: Thu, 16 Apr 2020 11:17:52 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

‘Have you seen milk morning sun brushing the tops of willow herb, nettle, thistle, in the unkempt field behind the car-crushers?’ So, somewhat curiously, ask Paul Farley and Michael Symons Roberts in their book Edgelands, a loving, inquisitive guide and extended ode to the marginal, minor landscapes of modern England. Together, these writers wander across what we might perceive to be neglected and dejected terrains, seeking out moments of odd grace and glanced beauty in settings that might customarily be considered ugly, uninspiring or of little value. Usually, these are the indeterminate territories where rural and urban converge in peculiar and sometimes fraught forms. Spaces such as those at the barely visible borders of towns or cities, where fraying suburb begins to become entangled with the complicated patterning of the contemporary countryside. But, just as likely, the unloved places traversed by Farley and Symons Roberts – places where, as Derek Mahon once said, ‘even now… a thought might grow’ – can bring to mind for us the undefined and undistinguished inner zones of the urban landscape: incidental, unremarkable and entirely familiar ‘interface’ areas between nature and culture in the city, spaces of edgy stillness within the frantic centres of modern life. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Silent, Empty, Waiting for the Day’
by: Mary McIntyre
Posted: Thu, 16 Apr 2020 10:40:46 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

A Portfolio of photographic work by Mary McIntyre. Published in Issue 68 of Source, Autumn 2011. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Oral History Archive: Mary McIntyre’
by: Richard West
Posted: Thu, 16 Apr 2020 09:41:05 EST
Content: Audio Interview / Genre: Landscape
Recorded: Feb 2014

Mary McIntyre was born in Northern Ireland where she currently lives. She is a Reader in Fine Art at the University of Ulster in Belfast. McIntyre initially came to photography via the necessity of having to document her own installation work. Inevitably though she came to realise photography not as an adjunct process but as the primary basis of her practice. Her photographic work comprises interiors and landscapes depicting corners of existence that are commonly overlooked or simply out of sight. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Oral History Archive: Bill Kirk’
by: Richard West
Posted: Thu, 16 Apr 2020 09:37:15 EST
Content: Audio Interview / Genre: Documentary
Recorded: Mar 2006

Bill Kirk began work as an illustrator and draughtsman in the aircraft industry in Belfast, but his fascination with photography led him to study it full-time at the College of Art in Belfast. His work, primarily in the field of documentary photography, is characterised by frank social comment and has featured in numerous exhibitions and one-man shows. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Oral History Archive: David Goldblatt’
by: Mark Durden
Posted: Thu, 16 Apr 2020 09:21:04 EST
Content: Audio Interview / Genre: Documentary
Recorded: Jan 2003

David Goldblatt documented the changing political landscape of South Africa for more than five decades. His work is renowned for documenting both the public and the more intimate lived experience of apartheid. His retrospective exhibition, David Goldblatt 51 Years, was seen in New York, Barcelona, Rotterdam, Lisbon, Oxford, Brussels, Munich and Johannesburg. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: Bluff your Way in Photography’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Wed, 15 Apr 2020 05:55:39 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Education

Aside from the generic tableaux of camera, case, guide and print on the cover, Bluff your Way in Photography does not contain any photographs. This fits perfectly with its subject matter. The true bluffer, in John Courtis’s ESTimation, ideally never takes a picture. He notes: ‘You don’t have to be a photographer at all to achieve moral ascendancy’. The object is to ‘sneer knowledgeably from the side lines’. The ideal situation for the complete bluffer would be to not even have a camera, although s/he must be seen to have one as a baseline. Those with complete brass nerve are advised to buy an old camera case and stuff it with newspaper. As bluffers will not be able, or indeed want, the finest of photographic technology, the next best recommendation is to have a camera so bad that you stand out from the crowd. A non-operational one, out of use due to the dedicated pursuit of an obscure specialist part, carries particular kudos. If caught without a camera, the faux-photographer must claim to be ‘between systems’. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Colgagh - 29/07/2011’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Mon, 13 Apr 2020 10:50:47 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Landscape
First Posted: Fri, 30 Jul 2010

Charlie Armstrong disappeared on his way to mass on the 16th August 1981 - he was 55 years old. Along with Gerard Evans he was not on the official list of the acknowledged ‘disappeared’ released by the IRA in 1999 as part of the ongoing Peace Process. As mentioned in the Attempt at Reading a Landscape posting last December a short search was carried out for him in 2002 at a location approximately one mile from the current site, which was, up until today, being physically searched for the last six weeks. Up until today. As it appears that finally and hopefully he is being returned to his family. A long and painful wait, over. Full and formal confirmation will take a number of weeks and it would be a cruelty beyond belief if the recovered remains were not his.In relative terms it has been a short physical search over difficult ground and I had decided to keep this one quiet. I’m not sure why, a feeling that maybe this one should be a mirror of these silent searches. Photographed but not written about until later which I sensed would not be too long. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Activation Energy’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Sun, 12 Apr 2020 09:06:37 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Publishing
First Posted: Sat, 24 Jul 2010

Only recently it dawned on me that in mirroring the activity of the search team at Wilkinstown I have been photographing this location almost every weekend since last September and I realized, as I stacked the work print boxes on top of each other in preparation for an edit, that quite possibly I was pontentially suffering from 'Pittsburgh Syndrome'. While on one level it would be an honour in a certain way to make photographs that shared the psychology that Cartier Bresson beautifully ascribed to Eugene Smith’s photographs as being ‘captured between the shirt and the skin’, it was the volume and the inherent difficulty of distillation that perturbed me. How can one make sense of a mound of, perhaps too many, can there be too many photographs? And so over the last few weeks of decompression from teaching and spending much time walking "Past the...." and floating around in the goodwill and overall success of Ireland’s first ever Photo Festival, and visiting some of the other locations being searched while also finally revisiting some others that have resolved their story and unfortunately attending another set of too close funerals, the back of the head thinking was in progress as I felt it was time to examine the work and see what was there. The basic initial problem was, as with most things, that of structure and structure in relation to ‘the book’, which is always my starting point. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Versions & Diversions’
by: Matt Packer
Posted: Fri, 10 Apr 2020 08:13:43 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Found
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

Found photography is now a familiar term that regularly occupies the pages of this magazine and others, while also making frequent appearances in artist statements, gallery texts, and serving as the central subject to many academic essays and publications. In recent years, the turn to found photography has typically emphasised the vernacular and sociographic use-values of photography. Through found photography, the junk store album or the disregarded print, a portal opens into a world of social and cultural transactions once ESTablished, but that are now sometimes-bizarrely astray. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Wilkinstown - a Confused Season’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Fri, 10 Apr 2020 07:18:26 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Landscape
First Posted: Fri, 16 Jul 2010

At Wilkinstown they have spent the last few weeks flattening the mounds of inverted time, dispersing the memory and all that remains is two small islands of untouched trees sitting slightly off-centre in what now is almost a returned, flattened and scoured square. These are now being used as a source for a renewed Wood in this empty space and presumably the earth beneath these will be sifted for completion. The untouched woodland lying further north that the cadaver dogs recently visited awaits it's fate of "I can’t go on, I’ll go on". In the meantime, a slightly strange event occurs in the lower field for the trees replanted in May. Somewhat like the resumed searches, nature has gone backwards to move forwards. It is autumn in the middle of summer. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Carrickrobin – Polyedged Narratives’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Thu, 09 Apr 2020 19:03:22 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Landscape
First Posted: Tue, 06 Jul 2010

“There are three sides to every story” began the local man on one of my recent visits to Carrickrobin. Perhaps you could add another two to act as a channel to allow the truth to come out as well, which is where this search is at now. An initial small area, approximately 40m x 25m, has been painstakenly searched since last October and so far a resolution is still hiding and eluding the time team. Nature has already begun to reclaim some of the re-settled bog and green shoots breakthrough here and there. The search has now started to extend further down the lane already consuming a section of the hopeful moat excavated to drain this wetland bog the previous February, what was margin has become mud. And on it will go. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Some Notes On Street Photography Continued: A Good Walk Spoiled’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Wed, 08 Apr 2020 15:05:01 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Street
First Posted: Fri, 02 Jul 2010

I have a firm dislike of labels or more accurately boxes into which people can pour all sorts of prejudices and assumptions. However I do believe that the world, like ancient Gaul, is divided into three parts. You are either a Beckett (wo)man, a Joyce (wo)man and, if you are really lucky, your own (wo)man. My literary loyalties rest firmly with Sam and on good days I also manage to be my own (wo)man. And so deliberately eschewing the ever more popular and ever more ‘scrotumtightening’ 16-06-10, I decided to make a walk on the 21-06-10 (whose numbers, for your information, individually add up to ten) and a day of what appears to be infinite daylight. Now, in the current climate, an exclamation mark rather than a question mark might be a more appropriate journey but I decided to walk in a semi-circle or hemisphere (to allow for variations) as it seemed a good idea at the time. There are of course a host of highly conceptual reasons for this decision but I won't trouble you with them now. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Ballynultagh Revisited 2010 - Six Inches, Six Feet, Sixty Feet’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Wed, 08 Apr 2020 08:46:32 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Landscape
First Posted: Wed, 23 Jun 2010

"Grand view" the young boy breathlessly speaks as he cycles by me trying to make his way up the steep road on the edge of which I have perched my tripod and camera. It’s a fitness cycle as he is dressed in a t-shirt and football shorts – a local boy I assume – he was probably four or five years old when I first stood at this roadside overlooking Ballynultagh in 1999 which had been revealed as the location of the remains of Danny McIlhone who having left Belfast, was abducted from Dublin where he had gone to live, on the 14th May 1981.While agreeing with him with a "t’is indeed" I encourage him onwards and upwards with a "keep it going". Returning to my view I wonder does he know about this view and the story it contains. As is often here, the clouds here are performing a strange ballet, occasionally and tantalizingly allowing the sun to move torch-like across the valley but never quite where I want it – I have observed this many times here and had at times naively hoped that one day it might provide a divine-like answer. Speaking in 2008 to the forensic archaeologists who were then carrying out the resumed search here it was touching that they too shared a similar experience and desire. This location is perhaps the most ‘scenic’ of all the locations. It is set in a valley through which the river Liffey flows in the early stages of it’s journey towards Dublin and it is a place of constant light changing elusive moments. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Advertising: Porsche Panamera’
by: Judith Williamson
Posted: Wed, 08 Apr 2020 06:09:17 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 87 - Autumn 2016

In a weekend colour supplement, a double-page spread opens onto yet another familiar-looking car ad. The gleaming Porsche, light reflecting off its curves, is seen against an urban backdrop that says both ‘smart’ and ‘bohemian’. The car is sleek, photographed from an angle that makes it look long and low, and has the exotic touch of a foreign number plate. It is shown parked on a single space in a narrow street which looks like somewhere in Bloomsbury – the row includes an old commercial building with modern plate glass doors, small-scale industrial premises and a period shop/café frontage. The effect is at once specific, and generic: this is a cool, fast car in a city setting that suggests fashionable intellectual life. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘A Disguised Background’
by: David Evans
Posted: Fri, 03 Apr 2020 11:04:25 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Historical
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

Eyewitness ties in with Hungary’s Presidency of the European Union. It is an exhibition of work by fifty Hungarian photographers, mainly produced between 1914 and 1989, though the emphasis is on five who emigrated in the 1920s and ESTablished international reputations elsewhere. Some might see this foregrounding of a famous five as a cynical marketing ploy by the Royal Academy. Others might want to stress the political cynicism of a newly elected Hungarian government, accused of xenophobic excess, but here seeming to embrace celebrated émigrés of Jewish origin. Both perspectives are worth bearing in mind. Yet they should not obscure the fact that Eyewitness is also a rich exhibition, cocurated with sensitivity by Péter Baki, director of the Hungarian Museum of Photography, and Colin Ford, whose keen interest in Hungarian photography led to important exhibitions at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford, in the 1980s. Both contribute to the catalogue that also includes an essay by George Szirtes, the Hungarian-born poet and translator who has lived in England since arriving as a young refugee in 1956. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Fabulous Identities’
by: Catherine Grant
Posted: Fri, 03 Apr 2020 06:07:29 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Gender
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

Approaching the exhibition space from the outside, three larger-than-life prints are overlaid with a quotation: ‘On three counts I am an outsider: in matters of sexuality; in terms of geographical and cultural dislocation and in the sense of not having become the sort of respectably married professional my parents might have hoped for.’ The voice of the Nigerian-born, London-based photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode is explicitly foregrounded in this retrospective of his brief six-year career, with this particular statement having taken on a talismanic status, being almost always mentioned in writings on his photography. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: A Day of Reverberations, a Day of Aftershock’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Thu, 02 Apr 2020 11:52:28 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Political
First Posted: Tue, 15 Jun 2010

It's difficult to do a minute's silence on a blog, but on a day when the ESTablishment rolls back on itself after a protracted period maybe a few words will do. There are eerie echoes in the two inventories of names below. The first list of fourteen people is of those killed on the 30th January 1972 now known as Bloody Sunday: John Duddy, Patrick Doherty, Bernard McGuigan, Hugh Gilmour, Kevin McElhinney, Michael Kelly, John Young, William Nash, Michael McDaid, James Wray, Gerald Donaghy, Gerald McKinney, William McKinney, John Johnston. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Reverence and Anxiety’
by: Eugenie Shinkle
Posted: Thu, 02 Apr 2020 06:55:20 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

The category of the sublime is organised around a central paradox. Sublime emotion arises only when the imagination is unable to fully grasp the size or extent of an object or concept. Classical formations of the sublime, such as Immanuel Kant’s, sought to resolve this paradox by playing the trump card of human reason: the very ability to conceptualise the ‘absolutely large’ in nature was, it was claimed, proof of the superiority of reason. Postmodern formations of the sublime are organized around a new set of limits. Now, as technology takes nature’s place as the foundation of sublime experience, humanity’s own handiwork has the capacity to exceed the power of the imagination. Born of human ingenuity but no longer fully under our control, technology is both an affirmation of reason and a dehumanizing force. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: Ffotogallery Book Arts Fayre’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Thu, 02 Apr 2020 06:08:36 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Event
First Posted: Sun, 04 March 2012

Last weekend I was at Turner House as part of Ffotogallery's Book Arts Fayre. On this occasion Source was one of the more mainstream publishers, with the majority of the other stall holders being made up of individual photographers or collectives selling their own publications. Next to the Source stand were a group of final year students from the Documentary Photography course in Newport. On sale at this stand were a boxed set of prints and a variety of Artists' books produced by the students themselves. Amongst these works was a book by Jack Latham, one of a growing number of students making work in response to archives. In this case Jack has used imagery from online resources such as Craigs List as a starting point for restaging new images. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: The Art of Home Cooking’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Wed, 01 Apr 2020 11:38:48 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Food

Produced ‘as a mark of celebration of the happy return of Stork Margarine to the kitchen’, this slim volume was offered free, by mail order, for anyone who wished for a copy, as fourteen years of food rationing in Britain came to a close. With a cover faded and foxed by more than fifty years in a kitchen, the peas in their tureen have taken on a fugitive bluish tinge; the traffic light colours of the three jam tarts, floating disembodied alongside, have in one case tarnished to teal rather than lime. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: Charlotte Cotton Resigns Media Museum’
by: Richard West
Posted: Tue, 31 Mar 2020 10:51:39 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Gallery-Based
First Posted: Thu, 01 Mar 2012

Charlotte Cotton is resigning from her position as Creative Director for London Galleries at the National Media Museum, a position she took up in October 2009. The Galleries called ‘Media Space’ have been beset with delays and difficulties with raising funds but are currently due to open at London’s Science Museum in March 2013. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: Photographs of Animals’
by: Richard West
Posted: Tue, 31 Mar 2020 10:07:50 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Archive
First Posted: Thu, 01 Mar 2012

We went to visit London Zoo Library. The library itself is a galleried room decorated with small animal sculptures and lined with books and journals relating to zoology. Ann Sylph, the helpful librarian, explained that the photographic collection relates mostly to animals that have been part of the collection of the Zoological Society of London (who also run Whipsnade Zoo) rather than animals ‘in the wild’. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Looking Back at Poland’
by: Colin Darke
Posted: Tue, 31 Mar 2020 08:56:07 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Historical
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

Allan Sekula’s show at Belfast Exposed is in two parts – Polonia and Other Fables is a selection of 18 photographs from a larger series and Walking on Water is a projection of seventy-eight 35mm slides. Both construct personal perceptions of the realities and myths of Poland, from his perspective as a third generation Polish American. The photographs are literarised through a booklet for each of the two parts, containing notes and quotes, along with quotations from various and often conflicting sources, scattered between images. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Advertising: Panasonic HD TV’
by: Judith Williamson
Posted: Sun, 29 Mar 2020 18:55:53 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 86 - Summer 2016

At first sight I thought this was an advertisement for a video camera: its image and caption seem to be entirely about cinematography. The photo positions us looking at a landscape from behind the shoulder of a man making a ‘viewfinder’ with his hands, while the part of the scene he frames is presented inset, slightly larger than in the main image and overlaid on it, towards the bottom right of the page. The main caption, ‘True to the Director’s Vision’, pins down the meaning of the situation unambiguously: this is the director and that is his vision. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: Archive Photograph Competition’
by: Emma Campbell
Posted: Wed, 25 Mar 2020 13:37:32 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Archive
First Posted: Wed, 22 Feb 2012

Today Source announces the start of a three-month season dedicated to photo archives. It will include seven new films, extended audio interviews, a dedicated issue of Source, blog posts and the online publication of material from our own archives. The season has been a year in preparation, has taken us to visit all manner of collections across the country. Artists, archivists, curators, conservators and academics have told us about the different projects they are working on, often out of public view. To capture some of this thrill of discovery we have designed a competition that can connect readers of this blog post and our Facebook page with the archives we will be featuring in the coming months. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: Masterpieces of Bird Photography’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Thu, 19 Mar 2020 08:36:39 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Nature

What constitutes a masterpiece of bird photography? Is it the rarity of the specimen, the style of its depiction, or the difficulty of achieving the image? The editors pose these questions but do not answer them explicitly in their text. The contents of their volume, however, suggest that what matters most is how hard it was to make the picture. Masterpieces of Bird Photography is about triumph. In the first instance, British superiority in their field is asserted from the first line, perhaps due to the era in which the book was produced. The opening pages detail the 1890s origins of the genre, attributing the status of pioneers to the Kearton brothers. An extraordinary image - the only one in the book that is not of a bird - shows one brother stood on the shoulders of the other behind a large plate camera on the spindly legs of an extended tripod. They were as much acrobats as ornithologists (a story told recently at greater length in The Keartons: Inventing Nature Photography by John Bevis). . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flock - Rachel Ballagh’
by: Nicholas Allen
Posted: Mon, 16 Mar 2020 06:01:53 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Photomontage
First Published: Issue 13 - Autumn Winter 1997

Flock is the name of Rachel Ballagh's first solo exhibition at Dublin's Temple Bar Gallery and Studio. It consists of an untitled series of seven triptychs with each individual set of three images containing a total of seven magpies within it. These birds in turn frame a series of background scenes, each of which is linked thematically within the triptych. There are for example three images of flowers, of the sky and of a city. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Well That Passed the Time’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Sun, 15 Mar 2020 19:38:54 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Street
First Posted: Fri, 18 Jun 2010

A walk into town, the first one in a long time. I am without camera so as a small comfort I start to list in my head a small litany of past the... noting verbally though internally, so as not to appear like the village madman, all the things I observe that I might put a frame around if I was armed. It’s an interesting game and I am doing fine without my shield, most of the things are possibly to be returned to or probably not worth embalming in time - no real masterpieces then. It’s a grey softish day, the first mild day of our summer, almost warm I’d say but a moist air is the payback for this small relief from the recent sharp air. I start to reflect on this list that is now getting longer and longer and the sound in my head appeals to me - it’s worth pursuing, maybe I can begin something new and sure what else am I doing. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Wilkinstown - Summer Echo’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Sun, 15 Mar 2020 18:43:33 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Landscape
First Posted: Wed, 05 May 2010

My concern for the trembling trees must have wafted along the winds towards County Meath as at the official beginning of another season Wilkinstown provided another shift in its ongoing narrative. It was one of those things that will make me return (this time three days in a row) seeking some decent light to work with before the landscape changes again. While it’s the sort of detail that possibly only matters to me, there is something very significant, not just in the replanting of the reclaimed young saplings from the encroaching trench in the adjacent field, but rather this alternative shallower trench and the exposed and uprooted trees laid out now for replanting. The evidence of the ongoing search has now begun to be truly erased and a yin and yang cycle commences. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: A Birthday Portrait’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Sun, 15 Mar 2020 17:04:01 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Medical
First Posted: Sat, 01 May 2010

It was my Birthday recently, the date, let alone the year, are naturally state secrets. As it happened, just around this anniversary of me being dragged a little reluctantly into the world (I was a forceps delivery), I had this portrait made of me. It’s a little flattering, what with the Kirk Douglas chin and that faint but invisible smile, but methinks me has the bones of an eighteen year old, for look at those lovely clavicles. Although that said, if I am being truly honest the outer shell unfortunately resembles the painting in the attic. Who said the camera never lies...? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: A Daaarlin Woman’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Sun, 15 Mar 2020 15:11:39 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Death
First Posted: Fri, 30 Apr 2010

An’, as it blowed an’ blowed, I ofen looked up at the sky an' assed meself the question - what is the stars, what is the stars? ... An’ then I’d have another look, an’ I’d ass meself - what is the moon? Captain Boyle, Act I, Juno and the Paycock - Sean O'Casey. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Carrickrobin III’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Fri, 13 Mar 2020 12:39:18 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Landscape
First Posted: Sat, 27 Mar 2010

Apologies for the hiatus but my mother’s fencing with Mr C became a little more complex recently so long hours in hospital visits Dysoned up my few words so a brief update for now.When visited at the end of February there had been no renewal of the search at Carrickrobin since before Christmas and I was uncertain as to what lay ahead. It is now heading towards the end of March so last Sunday, having spent some time at Wilkinstown, I ventured further north hoping to benefit from significantly longer days. Driving down the small lane I noticed the return of the drainage pump, so they had returned. Unlike Wilkinstown with its deep trenches and increasing number of time-mounds, Carrickrobin is difficult to photograph in terms of a shifting landscape. It is very flat and the area being searched is tight and precise. However the earth like an exotic dancer can reveal itself slowly and show us hidden things. The initial area searched has been leveled and returned and they have simply continued on from where they left off trying to follow those instructions: Walk up that lane, past the green field on the right and the stone mounds, and you’ll see the bogland. After 150 yards of bogland, stop. Walk 30 yards into the bog - that’s where the body is buried. But they are getting close to the initial drainage moat in this part of the bog so if it yields nothing they will possibly move deeper into this wetland ignoring the specifics and exhuming areas that the archaeologists have assessed as possibilities. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Camphill Community’
by: Gypsy Ray
Posted: Thu, 12 Mar 2020 15:14:20 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 13 - Autumn Winter 1997

A Portfolio of photographic work by Gypsy Ray. Published in Issue 13 of Source, Autumn Winter 1997. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Short Strand’
by: Frankie Quinn
Posted: Thu, 12 Mar 2020 14:21:07 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 13 - Autumn Winter 1997

A Portfolio of photographic work by Frankie Quinn. Published in Issue 13 of Source, Autumn Winter 1997. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Last Accordian Band’
by: David Barker
Posted: Thu, 12 Mar 2020 13:08:10 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 13 - Autumn Winter 1997

A Portfolio of photographic work by David Barker. Published in Issue 13 of Source, Autumn Winter 1997. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Chairs of Marly Le Roi’
by: Michael Durand
Posted: Thu, 12 Mar 2020 12:36:08 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Still Life
First Published: Issue 13 - Autumn Winter 1997

A Portfolio of photographic work by Michael Durand. Published in Issue 13 of Source, Autumn Winter 1997. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Advertising: Microsoft Cloud’
by: Judith Williamson
Posted: Thu, 12 Mar 2020 04:57:16 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 85 - Spring 2016

This is the middle ad in a sequence of three that ran on consecutive recto pages in a recent Wired. Each follows a similar structure: a colour photo is superimposed on a montage of what seem to be tinted black and white photos of generically similar scenes, the tints matching the positions of the red, green, yellow and blue squares of the Microsoft logo shown in the bottom right hand corner. The first and last ads in the sequence are captioned This cloud redefines winning and This cloud opens one stadium to 450 million fans - referring to uses of Microsoft's cloud by the Special Olympics and Real Madrid. Further stories about specific uses of their cloud platforms can be found on Microsoft's website, which presents short videos, under the same captions, about all the companies shown in these and similar ads. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: Archive Season - Warm Up’
by: Richard West
Posted: Tue, 10 Mar 2020 06:32:13 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Archive
First Posted: Sat, 18 Feb 2012

Next week, Source will be launching an archive season that will continue until May. Putting this season together I have come across a number of online archives, some well known, some obscure, that contain a wealth of material I had never seen before. Although the emphasis of the season is on the physical collections that we have visited, in some ways the most significant recent development in photography archives is their increased availability via the web. In an ideal world we would be able both to visit archives and see them digitally (and we will be running a competition that connects finding archives online with visiting them in person, watch this space for details) but, to start us off, here are a few of the pictures I have seen and some reflections on how they are changed by appearing on the web. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Small Acts of Memory and Large Omissions of Time’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Mon, 09 Mar 2020 22:10:32 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Documentary
First Posted: Sat, 13 Feb 2010

estragon: I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget. (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts ). One thing I have to admit I do miss in my recent dabbling with the devil is that old inner glow I felt, in the good old days, when I opened the fridge and saw my exposed but unprocessed beauties lying inert like a cryogenic experiment awaiting a better time (usually financial). Recently, I had a conversation with a teaching colleague who spoke about liking film because even by looking at recently processed negatives, irrespective of the date of their exposure, he could begin to remember being here or there, or having seen this or that and somehow that re-remembering was missing when one worked with the ‘darkside’ (digital photography). Perhaps it’s simply a different process of both laying down memory and engaging with memory within the process of digital photography rather than the specifics of film itself. Its possible that the relatively proximate viewing of the ‘positive’ image in relation to it’s capture, combined with the interruption of memory through the process of deletion that can occur with darkside photography (which usually doesn't happen with the film strip ) radically alters this re-remembering and so connections are lost and the memory is not so labile or latent. There is perhaps an interruption in the flow of memory as those failures which one either forgets (or tries to forget) are not still present and so there is a fracture in our retrieval system. Perhaps this might explain why at times I find it quite painful to look back on contact sheets and it is somehow easier for me emotionally to retrieve images from a hard-disk rather than a hard-box. Being a little older than my colleague perhaps I have more doors to rooms full of film-strips that I prefer not to re-project on the inside of my head. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘I Could Read the Sky’
by: Carlo Gébler
Posted: Mon, 09 Mar 2020 12:20:47 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Narrative
First Published: Issue 13 - Autumn Winter 1997

I Could Read the Sky is an unusual novel with text by Timothy O'Grady and photographs by Steve Pyke. At some point during the last twenty years, an unnamed narrator lies in a room in Quex Road, Kilburn, and remembers fragments of his idyllic Irish childhood, his savage, back breaking years of toil in England, first as a farm labourer in Lincolnshire and later as a builder in various towns in the southeast, his short-lived happiness, sexual and emotional, with his wife, Maggie, her death from a heart attack in the street, and his decline into feeble old age. At the end of the book he waits for death in his squalid Kilburn room, the money to pay for the cost of shipping his corpse back to Ireland in a box under his bed; after a life of gruelling labour that's all he has to show - the money to pay for his funeral - and this is a bitter comment, I presume, on how little the emigrant gets back in return for the stupendous amount that the emigrant gives to the host country. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Lost Children of Rwanda’
by: Martin McCabe
Posted: Mon, 09 Mar 2020 10:02:36 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 13 - Autumn Winter 1997

Seamus Conlon's Lost Children of Rwanda pursues the paradigm of documentary reportage which historically has been linked to social reform agendas and meliorism. In this instance, the photographer seeks 'to open the eyes' of the viewer to distant tragedies and their aftermath in Central Africa. The first image to greet the viewer at the entrance to the gallery can only be identified as 11262/I023, a large colour photograph of an African child. For all intents and purposes 5000 + 'mugshots' of African children line the inside of the Gallery. Impressive purely at the level of their visual impact. Each face uniformly photographed and laid out regularly all around the inside of the gallery. Framing, exposure, colours and scale all maintained throughout. There are no names, no other details, just faces and identification numbers. This may be a strategy to impress upon the viewer the numbers involved and the scale of the problem. However the overall effect negates the individual images and goes some way to deindividuate the subjects. They are just a sea of faces. Conlon may have intended to put faces on the numbers but ends up putting numbers on faces. At the same time there is a long tradition of images of 'black babies' on collection boxes outside churches, in schools throughout Ireland. This seems to go unacknowledged. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Eve Arnold: In Retrospect’
by: Lynsey Muir
Posted: Mon, 09 Mar 2020 07:28:34 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 13 - Autumn Winter 1997

Eve Arnold was born in Philadelphia and took up photography in 1950. One of the most famous practitioners of her generation, her latest exhibition is called Eve Arnold: In Retrospect and is based on work published in the book of the same name. The exhibition consists of nearly two hundred photographs, a small fraction of the thousands taken over the last forty seven years. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Tripping Among the Stars’
by: John Hoey
Posted: Mon, 09 Mar 2020 06:58:25 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Astrophotography
First Published: Issue 13 - Autumn Winter 1997

David Malin is an astronomer; he is also an artist. Working from the same template as the amateur photographer with the tripod, camera, and time exposure, who explores the circadian revolution of the heavens, Malin convenes a body of work which invokes wonder and conveys beauty. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Causality and Contingency - Irish Landscape Images’
by: Nicholas Allen
Posted: Fri, 06 Mar 2020 11:22:58 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 13 - Autumn Winter 1997

Daniel de Chenu's ' Causality and Contingency - Irish Landscape Images is currently on show at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin. It consists of a large number of colour images by Le Chenu on both floors of the gallery, placed around a landscape painting from the eighteenth-century and a selection of four images from the turn of the century by Robert French. De Chenu himself tells using the Gallery's notes for the show that he wanted to follow a practice which would utilise the medium of photography as an objective recorder of reality as opposed to a tool of creative expression. Thus Thomas Roberts' 'Ideal Landscape' is from the start marginalised. The painting is there to show what photography is not. It is indeed easy to see how Roberts's landscape conforms to certain traditions of pictorial representation. There are elements of romanticism in the deserted church in the background with its literary analogue of Goldsmith's Deserted Village. There are the figures in the foreground, a country gent talking to his inferior from the height of a horse and a woman carrying a water jug on her head. Finally there are the cows, ruminating idyllically on their station in life. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Christian Boltanski’
by: Paul McNally
Posted: Fri, 06 Mar 2020 05:41:01 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 13 - Autumn Winter 1997

In one of the five essays contained in Christian Boltanski the artist tells Tamar Garb of a time when the Tate Gallery bought one work Dead Swiss on shelves with white cotton. The curator noted that the cotton would fade in a few years and asked could they replace it when this happened. Boltanski readily agreed. The curator also mentioned that if the shelves in the piece could be made shorter they would fit in the room at the Tate; again Boltanski agreed. Finally the curator asked if the photographs could be replaced if they faded, which was no problem for Boltanski. The curator then asked what exactly had the Tate bought? Boltanski replied an idea not an object . . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Wilkinstown - Fourth Act’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Thu, 05 Mar 2020 14:38:40 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Landscape
First Posted: Wed, 10 Feb 2010

Expecting stasis I reluctantly headed off to Wilkinstown last weekend under the grey light that enveloped us on Sunday. The protagonists have returned, the fourth act is under way, and with a renewed energy they have worked their way through a corner of this new section. The soil here at times is different with large sections having a thin covering of bog and possibly because this doesn’t match with information they may have, they seem to have moved quickly through it. In another part the small clumps of trees that dotted this field have been levelled in preparation like two pages from a diary.The potential pyre is still present and in the soft light it now truly haunts the center of the recently returned field an justifies my rejection of the blue sky last week. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Some Observations While Driving Through a Post Tiger Landscape’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Thu, 05 Mar 2020 14:25:20 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Landscape
First Posted: Sun, 07 Feb 2010

Utopias exist only in carpets (John Berger). Trampolines in gardens, and trophy homes with garages bigger than most suburban houses, and other houses reduced to sell or available at two for the previous price of one, and some that are now advertised on trucks in fields, and ghost ESTates where empty houses haunt their inhabitants, and the work of an artist/joker/philosopher/republican posting tri-colours on bridges and road signs, and orange filtered blinds still protecting mannequins in the windows of fabric shops of small and medium sized towns, and the once brightly coloured and image-laden but now minimalist black and grey hoardings around stalled development sites, and the seldom crane, now an endangered species, and the return of pot-holes down which a small elephant could disappear, and a skeletal old man with a thin stick walking straight out of a Beckett novel with his open-fire dirt-stained face, who shuffles along the side of the road like the ghost of Christmas past, and the small irony of a dead petrol station being reborn as a petrol station perhaps selling Lazarus fuel, and this building below which, in the nineties, was a two-storey house on the corner of a Dublin street. These are a few of the things. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: English Inns Illustrated’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Thu, 05 Mar 2020 13:37:10 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Documentary

Effectively a national survey of pubs for those who like their boozing to be historically legitimated, English Inns Illustrated was one of the Britain Illustrated series of books produced by Odhams Press in the early 1950s. The illustrated aspect of the publication was centrally important, and is demonstrated from the dust jacket onwards, which features two large-scale camera studies, front and back, on its almost festive wrappers of red ground and white script. The flyleaf boasts that the book’s 128 pages contain 160 such camera studies - calling them photographs, it seems, would not do them justice - provided by leading modern photographers . . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 100 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 02 Mar 2020 07:19:25 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 100 - Winter 2019

One of photography's most prized attributes is the access it gives us to reality. It captures the unguarded moment or the telling detail and we believe in its ability to record events; 'Pics, or it didn't happen' people still say on social media when they want proof that something took place. Nevertheless, the suspicion remains that the story we are being told has been set up, that photographs of political events, for example, are staged. In this issue we have spoken to a photographer, Stefan Rousseau, who photographs the British Prime Minister. The orchestration of the events he photographs is part of his everyday working life. We have also spoken to a former government Press Officer about how they manage these events and plan, down to the smallest detail, what will appear in photographs. Neither sounds confident that they are in control of what we see. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘August Sander's Mission: Impossible’
by: Stephen Bull
Posted: Fri, 28 Feb 2020 06:10:00 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 12 - Summer Autumn 1997

The desire to classify is strange and strong. During the 1920's August Sander began his personal mission to create a 'portrait atlas' surveying the whole of German society. In 1929, sixty of these photographs were published as The Face of Our Time ; a microcosm of his much larger forthcoming work People of the 20th Century, but the war put paid to Sander's grand plans. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Photography Course Prospectus’
by: Paul Seawright et al
Posted: Thu, 27 Feb 2020 18:10:16 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Education
First Published: Issue 12 - Summer Autumn 1997

Documentary Photography has flourished at Newport School of Art and Design since the mid 1970s, producing many individuals who have helped shape the profile of documentary practice in Britain today. Traditionally, the course had emphasised the role of the photographer in relation to the editorial world that encompasses photojournalism. Within the last few years however, there has been a considerable move towards a broader definition of documentary practice, recognising the need to respond to photography's changing cultural contexts. This course has been designed to reflect this development. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Pony Kids’
by: Peter Smyth
Posted: Thu, 27 Feb 2020 11:10:46 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 12 - Summer Autumn 1997

My first reaction to this exhibition relates to its location, Smithfield is an old market area of Dublin and is used on the first Sunday of each month as a horse fair. The images in the exhibition are portraits of children who attend the fair. The works are displayed along each side of the street and around a small brick structure, in the centre of the market. The images are large photocopies of original prints and measure about 30"x40". They are mounted directly onto the walls and covered with a protective sheet of plastic. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Straight Lines and a Crooked Border’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Thu, 27 Feb 2020 08:55:46 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Political
First Posted: Sun, 25 Oct 2009

The South Armagh/Louth region is a fascinating area in terms of roads and 'latent' border crossings. On my first journey to Colgagh in 1999 I was very struck by the way a more or less straight road crossed in and out of the North and the South at various points perhaps aiding and abetting its historical currency as Bandit Country, a notion that goes back centuries. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: Is There a Crisis in Art Book Publishing?’
by: Richard West
Posted: Thu, 27 Feb 2020 08:21:35 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Publishing
First Posted: Thu, 9 Feb 2012

Art Data is a specialist art book distributor. It takes up a small warehouse in West London (with another warehouse in Norfolk). When you go inside, the ground floor is full of bookshelves with a mezzanine floor of office space. There were five people there when I visited, sitting at desks or packing boxes. Tim Borton, whom I had come to talk to, started the company in 1978 and is still running it, so I was interested to know what he thought of the current state of the art book market. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: The Revisits - An Introduction’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Thu, 27 Feb 2020 06:32:45 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Religious
First Posted: Fri, 23 Oct 2009

Truth is made of infinite small pieces (Gogo della Luna). When the searches finished in 2000 it was stated that they were at at end. For reasons outlined below in an extract from an almost singular set of diary entries from 2003 I outline why I started to revisit these places and some sense of the ongoing narrative within this work. Looking back now ten years on in some ways these Revisits do in some way appear to be the act of a madman. (In a later posting I hope to talk about the relationship between analogue, and 'what has occurred', and digital, and 'events to come' and explore the issue of photographic time which should probably also be measured in 'light' years). I mean I had had the photographers lotto win in a certain way with a book published in five European editions (though the photographs were still in English). I could move on to another work and I did (on to many), but there was a force that kept drawing me back year after year. Consequently every year I would revisit and while on one level I was simply documenting the process of renewal I was also searching for metaphors within these recovering landscapes that would resonate beyond the yearly matter of fact documentation. Indeed there is one image that I made again at Wilkinstown that I will talk about in a future blog that encapsulates in Beckettian sparseness everything that I have been producing since the first revisits in 2001 therein giving the painful dilemma of possibly letting/having one image speak for eight years work. So while every time I walked those landscapes in subsequent years scanning the settling earth in the vague hope of a chance discovery it wasn't that I felt Innocent Landscapes as a work needed a full resolution of the issue - the only resolution that mattered was for the families - but perhaps I was carrying within me the comment by the Czech poet Miroslav Holub that art doesn't solve problems, it only wears them out. I remember my father once saying to me, when he was possibly slightly exasperated at my new chosen vague, mapless and uncertain path can there never be enough pictures taken - it's a bloody good question particularly now that I have amassed a level of material on this work alone that at times can be overwhelming. In the first year or two these revisits were made quickly but as events unfolded and the landscape changed it became an imperative. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Advertising: Facebook’
by: Judith Williamson
Posted: Wed, 26 Feb 2020 06:04:57 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 84 - Winter 2015

Earlier this year Facebook launched its first UK advertising campaign, titled 'Friends' and spanning a range of media from TV to posters, magazines and newspapers. The ad shown here is a typical example of the current print version. Most of the page is left blank, apart from the 'f' logo at the bottom, and the substance of the ad is a letterbox shape modelled on the box with a tick and the word 'Friends' which appears on the Facebook interface when you click on a 'friend'. It is essentially the click-box blown up large, with a group of 'friends' illustrated inside it. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Vienna Today’
by: Jim Maginn
Posted: Tue, 25 Feb 2020 11:56:18 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 11 - Spring Summer 1997

Vienna today is an extended picture story on a year in the life of the Jewish community in Austria's capital. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Views from Flat 15-5, Block 9’
by: Michèle Lazenby
Posted: Tue, 25 Feb 2020 10:05:53 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Pinhole
First Published: Issue 11 - Spring Summer 1997

I really enjoy being physically present within the body of the camera. Slowly your eyes get accustomed to the darkness and then you begin to be able to make out the shapes that are projected onto the walls and ceiling. You are able to see the way light travels, the way it reflects off objects outside and projects to form an (upside down) image, distorting at the peripheries. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘On the sixth day, Mr Burden?’
by: Peter Richards
Posted: Tue, 25 Feb 2020 09:49:58 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Performance
First Published: Issue 11 - Spring Summer 1997

My performance works at present are centred around the principle of the Camera Obscura, which creates a method of documentation of performance and performance as a single entity . . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘One Foot Has Not Yet Reached the Next Street’
by: Martin McCabe
Posted: Tue, 25 Feb 2020 06:57:59 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 11 - Spring Summer 1997

In terms of introduction, the work of the British artist, Keith Arnatt is known to most art students at any rate for his Self-Burial TV Interference Project of 1969. This was an 'intervention' which used a series photographic images of the artist burying himself in a hole which were broadcast on television over a period of a week or so; one at a time they were literally dropped, unannounced and unexplained, into the televisual flow. It endures as a work because amongst other things it traversed video art as anti-television, conceptualist practices, performance, and photography at a specific historical moment when new agendas and paradigms were emerging. But that was then. TV has done a couple of revolutions since. While just about coralled into the so-called 'breaks', TV advertisements today use similar tactics to Arnatt's in infiltrating the fabric of everyday life at any and every possible juncture and space. Arnatt's exhibition at the Gallery of Photography entitled One Foot Has Not Yet Reached the Next Street is a series of large scale photographs of found objects taken from a dump. This includes toys, household items, clothes, paint tins, garden ornaments, etc. They are photographed in situ using available light and are consequently imaged with a minute depth of field which acts to focus the attention of the viewer onto certain parts and qualities of the objects isolating them from their context and environment. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Vanishing Points’
by: Andrew Grannell
Posted: Tue, 25 Feb 2020 05:35:40 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Institutional
First Published: Issue 11 - Spring Summer 1997

I took this series of photographs in 1993 while visiting a psychiatric institution at Horton, Surrey which was undergoing closure to make way for the government's new Care in the Community policy. This visit re-evoked the experience of my own hospitalisation when, at the age of eighteen, I suffered a breakdown. I was committed to Our Lady's Hospital, Cork, which like Horton, is a Victorian psychiatric institution with a labyrinth of corridors which disappear into various vanishing points. In the heyday of this hospital, countless psychiatric patients would walk these cloisters, each dreary step seeming to further confer an immutable seal of institutionalisation upon their utter rejection from respectable Irish society. Up and down they would shuffle all day, year in year out, dressed in potato-stained, ill fitting hospital rags, occasionally stopping to pick up cigarette butts from the floor in order to make roll-ups. Some derived comfort from masturbating openly in this public space. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: Photography at London Art Fair’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Sun, 23 Feb 2020 13:09:31 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Event
First Posted: Mon, 30 Jan 2012

I was at London Art Fair recently at the Source stand to sell and promote the magazine. It was also an opportunity for me to catch up with a number of photographers, curators and Source readers. In my coffee breaks I was able to take a look round at what the galleries had on show in their spaces. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: Irish Student Award’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Sun, 23 Feb 2020 06:51:41 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Event
First Posted: Tue, 17 Jan 2012

On Wednesday night I attended the opening of Propeller, the Irish graduate photography award. This was at The Copper House Gallery which is a new space located at the premises of the printers Fire in Dublin. The award is a collaboration between Fire and Source which includes an in-kind award of print-production costs, studio space at the lab and mentoring by staff at Fire and Source. The initial idea for the award came from Les Wolnik one of the directors at Fire who saw how difficult his own daughter, a recent photography graduate, was finding it post University. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: List Mania: 2011 Photobook Roundup’
by: Richard West
Posted: Sat, 22 Feb 2020 13:17:07 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Publishing
First Posted: Sat, 24 Dec 2011

I was planning to do a roundup of the photobooks published in 2011. We have started to review self published books this year and the job of finding out what has been published, and deciding what to review, has become even more challenging. Larissa Leclair's list of her favourite self published books of the year (most of which I hadn't seen before) is a particularly fine selection - drawing together a wide variety of high-quality books. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Innocent Landscapes - Background’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Sat, 22 Feb 2020 11:08:57 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Political
First Posted: Tue, 20 Oct 2009

In thirty years of conflict and atrocity in Northern Ireland a small group of people stood apart: they were the missing, the Disappeared - absent and yet somehow still present. Even their exact number was uncertain though it was thought that there were at least 15 people whose whereabouts had remained shrouded in misinformation and doubt since the 1970’s and early 1980’s. Despite considerable obfuscation it was considered that their fate and whereabouts was directly linked to what was colloquially known as the Troubles. Apart from Capt. Robert Nairac, an undercover British Soldier they were all Catholic and widely assumed to have been 'disappeared' by the IRA through a process of internal policing of the movement and the wider catholic community. What separated this group from other 'policings' was the silence, the denial and the absence of a returned body for uncertain relatives. This renunciation continued for over twenty-five years.On 27th May 1999 as a result of the ongoing peace process, the IRA issued a statement in which they apologised and accepted the injustice of prolonging the suffering of victim’s families and admitted what they termed the killing and secret burial of ten people. Despite internal enquiries they had only managed to locate the burial places of nine people;Brian McKinney, John McClory, Danny McIlhone, Brendan Megraw,Jean Mc Conville, Kevin McKee, Seamus Wright, Columba McVeigh andEamonn Molloy.The locations - Colgagh, Ballynultagh, Oristown, Templetown, Wilkinstown, Bragan, and Faughart contained a simple but final bitter twist - they were all located in the South of Ireland. This small group of people had been exiled in death creating a poignant and, as time progressed, what could be termed a haunting internal diaspora. This became evident when on May 20th 2000 the digs, now in their second phase, were suspended: three remains had been located, three closures permitted leaving the remaining families with a site rather than a spot, a closing rather than a closure.I had followed the searches that were carried out in 1999 and 2000 and the resulting photographs were published in a volume entitled Innocent Landscapes in 2001 as a result of winning the European Publishers Award for Photography. However I couldn’t walk away from this work - for one thing there was the unresolved nature of the searches, as only three remains had been recovered. So, every year, usually towards the end of the Summer I would revisit these locations making photographs of a ‘healing’ landscape and witness the evidence that they had been searched slowly subsume under nature. In the back of my mind I had said to myself that I would try to do this for ten years. However, as it happened, this turning back of time within these landscapes was not as straightforward as I thought it would be and fresh wounds and the re-opening of scars would occur over succeeding years. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: A Short Geography Lesson’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Fri, 21 Feb 2020 06:48:19 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Political
First Posted: Sun, 18 Oct 2009

Many times during the making of Innocent Landscapes in 1999 and in 2000 people would often say to me: how is your work in the North going?. In spite of the fact that this story was on radio and television and in newspapers and that the locations were named, quite clearly there was an automatic assumption that these places were North of the border perhaps emanating from an imbedded psychological distancing of those in the South from the Troubles of the North. So for those of you who are still in denial, or perhaps for those two international readers, these maps will hopefully give some sense of the locations and locate me as based in Dublin. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: A Slight Change of Plan’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Thu, 20 Feb 2020 17:48:13 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Police
First Posted: Sat, 17 Oct 2009

When the nice people at Source approached me in early September to do this my initial thoughts were to do some general blogs before getting to the subject I was going to cover i.e: my continued and intended final involvement with Innocent Landscapes. While sorting out technical issues and getting my head around writing, a patch of particularly nice weather enveloped Ireland and so I had to move in terms of revisiting and picture making. In any event I didn’t want this thing to be exactly contemporaneous, in order to buy time to construct some sort of narrative around how I would lay out this project to those unfamiliar with it. I also didn’t want to return to my days at the Sunday Business Post where I had to rush home to process my 8x10 prints for the next day in one of those much-favoured shower-darkrooms that freelancers used to inhabit. The nature of my way of working these days is to make photographs and to create a space for reflection. Anyway as Lennon from Liverpool said: life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. For the last three weekends I have been photographing the landscape of a resumed search in Co. Meath. It is part of new searches that were initiated three years ago and are being co-ordinated by the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains (ICLVR). These are discreet searches by forensic archaeologists as opposed to the initial Gardai* lead investigations. I had intended holding off for as long as possible from discussing this particular search but on Thursday, at an inquest into the successful recovery by this search team of Danny MCIlhone’s remains at Ballynultagh, Co Wicklow in November 2008, it was announced that that regular contact between the IRA and forensic investigators is guiding searches for people abducted, murdered and secretly buried during the North's Troubles, and that top scientific detective Geoff Knupfer, who is leading a painstaking quest to locate the remains of the so-called Disappeared, said that: recent and ongoing talks with the Provisionals has led to fresh digs. In this becoming public I am making a judgment here to make public in this forum what I have witnessed recently, I hope this is a right decision. However it is important to give a context and background to this complex and layered story and in the next blog or two I will hopefully introduce this work succinctly particularly to those not familiar with it, for there are details in this narrative that are frequently overlooked or somehow not grasped. I was somewhat taken aback by some of the information in the press announcement but I will address this later. *Gardai - Police Force in the South Of Ireland . . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Another Year’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Thu, 20 Feb 2020 17:09:14 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Nature
First Posted: Fri, 16 Oct 2009

It’s somewhat perverse but I actually feel rejuvenated in the autumn. There is something almost perfect about the light, the colour and the length of day. Today I returned to a small park near where I live that became my decompression chamber from teaching this time last year as we slid slowly to naked trees. It has a river and a pond and is slightly wild in parts. I tried where possible to make a number of visits during the months of October through to December to this place - it has a particularly sad beauty that embraced yet another bout of ennui and I became particularly taken with a small corner of the pond where it dropped in height from an upper to a lower level giving rise to a cascade of leaves which accumulated over time - there was an ebb and flow in relation to the trapped material and the continual flow of new leaves from above that (at the time at least) seemed an appropriate metaphor. Although I made a reasonable amount of work there last year I still struggle with its validity - it’s the beautiful landscape issue that maybe we will venture into in the future. Elusive though they may be, there are decisive moments even within landscapes - moments when all is aligned. Today is one, it is so still that one can almost hear the leaves fall. I make a photograph of the ebb. There is an interesting transition from the inner turbulent heart-shaped pool through the hinterland of decaying leaves into outer stillness. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: How it Works: The Camera’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Thu, 20 Feb 2020 05:51:11 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Education

There’s something delightfully ironic about a fully-illustrated book on photography where every single image is meticulously hand-painted. In 1970, some 130-plus years after Paul Delaroche is said to have pronounced that photography had killed off painting, this technical guide features fine brush work representations of each of its photographic images, including film negatives depicted in careful chiaroscuro. This might seem like a perverse enterprise if one didn’t see The Camera in wider context. As one of a set of Ladybird Books (series 654, to be precise), the illustrated guide’s painted illustrations are just one of a number of characteristic qualities of the Wills & Hepworth’s imprint. The palm-sized hardback cover, the ten-spot red Ladybird logo, and the formatting of simple text on the left hand page with full-page colour images on the right are tell-tale signs for any reader familiar with the heyday of the press in the 1960s and early 1970s, when it produced hundreds of enormously popular titles from fairy tale retellings to learning-to-read schemes, all priced at 2 shillings and 6. Another key characteristic of Ladybird books, however, is that they are most strongly associated with titles for children. Peter and Jane pick up a Camera this is not. Its images belong to the pastel-coloured Ladybird universe, but its content is elsewhere. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: To Blog Or Not To Blog’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Tue, 18 Feb 2020 06:46:33 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Portraiture
First Posted: Tue, 13 Oct 2009

To blog or to blabber that is the question. Am I blogging now or have I already started to blabber, hmmm... When the nice people at Source asked me would I be interested in doing this, I turned to a wise woman who archly informed me ‘that blogs are usually written by sad old men who live alone and have a cat’ (SOMWHLAAHAC Syndrome) and while I may tick a box or two there (though I would substitute one descriptor with ‘occasionally melancholy or sporadically imbued with ennui’), I was intrigued, I reckoned I would only ever do such a thing if asked so here goes for a while at least.I admitted to the nice people at Source that I had never read a blog - (apologies to Darren Campion a former student of ours at www.theincoherentlight.com) - I am of a generation that will never be digital native no matter how hard we try and possibly think we are. Facebook, twitter etc are for the birds as far as I am concerned although I have heard some positive things about LinkedIn ... So I see it as a challenge and when opportunity knocks my philosophy is have a lash. As it happens I recently came across a diary that I kept for a brief period as a fresh teenager and so I will try to avoid things like ‘JD really fancies TS but she fancies LO’S who is going out with LMcM etc’ and while a gossip blog might be more interesting I do, as mentioned, suffer somewhat from SOMWHLAAHAC Syndrome, so not a runner.The proposed nature of this escapade is to be a blog within the making of a project - now, my way of working arises from many peripatetic journeys both internally and externally and while not necessarily always a good idea, sometimes projects arise through following an intuitive curiosity rather than a linear continuity - for example, this summer largely driven by a deep ennui I began making work which slowly evolved into acquiring the working title Almost Blue - Between Two Full Moons - a title is useful as it can help to start the bracketing process of the edit. This work was born by the impromptu action of standing in front of the camera during a long exposure. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes Revisited: Background to Innocent Landscapes’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Tue, 18 Feb 2020 05:00:54 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Political
First Posted: Tue, 06 Oct 2009

In 1999, as part of the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, the IRA finally admitted the ‘killing and secret burial’ of ten people from a possible list of fifteen missing people. They released a roll call of locations that were said to be the burial places of nine people from this list. The twist in this inventory of place-names and one of the main factors that drove me on in the project was that all the locations were in the South of Ireland. These people had been exiled in death, somehow uniting North and South in relation to the conflict – a dark stain lurking under the ‘peaceful’ landscapes of the South.That Summer I set out on a short journey from the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in County Monaghan to visit and photograph my first ‘site’ where, three weeks earlier, the remains of Brian McKinney (22) and John McClory (18) had been found. They had disappeared on 25th May 1978 from West Belfast and were thought to have been abducted, murdered, and secretly buried by the IRA. Throughout the history of the recent conflict in Northern Ireland where grief and trauma were visited upon so many people across all communities, these young men were part of a disparate group of people who became known as ‘the disappeared’. Nothing was certain in relation to these people, even their exact number was difficult to ascertain. Virtually all were Northern Irish Catholics and were thought to have been victims of internal IRA ‘policing’ of the movement and the wider catholic community.I followed the searches that were carried out in 1999 and 2000 and the resulting photographs were published in a volume entitled Innocent Landscapes in 2001 as a result of winning the European Publishers Award for Photography. However I couldn’t walk away from this work - for one thing there was the unresolved nature of the searches, as only three remains had been recovered. So, every year, usually towards the end of the Summer I would revisit these locations making photographs of a ‘healing’ landscape. In the back of my mind I had said to myself that I would try to do this for ten years. This blog will outline my intended final visits to these haunted places. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: Cork Analogue Photographers’
by: Emma Campbell
Posted: Mon, 17 Feb 2020 10:46:06 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Social
First Posted: Tue, 13 Dec 2011

Forming an artist's collective has been a traditional way to nurture support and critique from fellow artists. For some it can mean the sharing of resources such as equipment and studio space, for others it can be an umbrella name to give more clout for showing and publishing work. As a curator or editor, it can be more rewarding to keep tabs on a collective, as their output is likely to exceed that of an individual artist, given that at least one is bound to be producing work at any given time. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: The Invisible Gallery’
by: Richard West
Posted: Sun, 16 Feb 2020 18:24:25 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Gallery-Based
First Posted: Sun, 30 Oct 2011

Two weeks ago I spoke to photography students in Falmouth and one of the questions I asked them was if they felt part of a photography community. Some did, some saw the university as their community, but most explored the photography world online. There's lots of stuff online but there is also a lot missing. If the experience doesn't translate online, if there is no easy way to link to it and if there are no advocates, then bits of the world remain invisible to the web. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: Search for New Photography Continues’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Sun, 16 Feb 2020 17:42:46 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Event
First Posted: Thu, 27 Oct 2011

I was at Impressions Gallery in Bradford on Saturday, as part of the Ways of Looking Festival, to meet photographers and try to find new work for Source to publish in our portfolio pages. We had received over 120 initial submissions by email, which I had whittled down to a shortlist of seven photographers to meet on the day. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: Photography Degree Top Ten Tips’
by: Emma Campbell
Posted: Sun, 16 Feb 2020 13:11:15 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Education
First Posted: Tue, 18 Oct 2011

Starting a photography degree is exciting and daunting, there will be new people to get to know, equipment to get your head around, ideas to mull over, lengthy reading lists, and all this whilst working out how to pay rent and buy two weeks food for under a tenner! Source has some collective experience of what a photography course entails and some lessons learned the hard way, so we thought we'd pass on some handy tidbits for those fledgling photographers just beginning their academic journey. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: Self Published Books’
by: Richard West
Posted: Sun, 16 Feb 2020 07:12:04 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Event
First Posted: Sun, 02 Oct 2011

The latest issue of Source contains a new section dedicated to reviewing self published books. Part of the challenge for this section will be finding out what has been published. Blurb, to name only the best known print on demand company, say they now have 11,907 books in the category ‘Fine Art Photography’ and many books will only appear on photographers websites or at photography festivals. We will welcome notice of new books (through an email: photobooks [at] source.ie) and any recommendations. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: The New Photo Galleries’
by: Richard West
Posted: Sat, 15 Feb 2020 13:17:30 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Gallery-Based
First Posted: Tue, 27 September 2011

A number of photography galleries are reopening in the UK over the coming months. In the latest issue of Source Simon Denison has been to visit the redeveloped galleries: Open Eye in Liverpool, The Photographers' Gallery in London, The Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh and Focal Point Gallery in Southend. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Noblesse Obligé’
by: Chris Harrison
Posted: Thu, 13 Feb 2020 07:52:32 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Institutional
First Published: Issue 11 - Spring Summer 1997

Text taken from an essay entitled His Grace - and Lord Derby written by Peter Jerrome, the chairman of the Petworth Society. An unabridged version appears in the book Noblesse Obligé and was originally published in the Petworth Society Magazine . . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Third Battle of Newbury’
by: Jonathan Olley
Posted: Wed, 12 Feb 2020 07:43:14 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 11 - Spring Summer 1997

Newbury is a small English market town on the sleepy rolling hills of the Berkshire - Hampshire borders, made famous after two decisive civil war battles; the first and second battles of Newbury (1643 and 1644). The local council in conjunction with the Governments road building programme have decided to build a relief road around the town but there is popular objection to the new road; The Newbury Bypass . . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: Photography Shows Up in Ireland’
by: Emma Campbell
Posted: Tue, 11 Feb 2020 18:05:36 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Event
First Posted: Fri, 23 Sep 2011

Ireland appears to be awash with photography in 2011. From PhotoIreland to Belfast Photo Festival, (both of which Source particpated in as hosts as well as attendees), and still to come in Dublin Contemporary and in the Douglas Hyde (Mike Disfarmer coming soon) it seems to be celebrated more than ever before. Even IMMA in Dublin has a show until the 9th October, exclusively on photography, Out of The Darkroom showing the collection of David Kronn. Though they admit in their press release that they don't yet have a permanent collection of photography, it seems clear they are finally willing to admit photographic works into their fold: Although lacking a representative photographic collection, IMMA has to date sought to compensate for this by presenting a number of significant photographic exhibitions drawn from external sources. Commenting on the Kronn donation, IMMA’s Director, Enrique Juncosa, said: David Kronn’s commitment to making IMMA the future home of his photography collection positions us as a major force in the field and comes at an opportune moment, when the museum would not have the resources to buy such prime works. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: Do we need Photography Galleries?’
by: Richard West
Posted: Tue, 11 Feb 2020 13:53:52 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Gallery-Based
First Posted: Mon, 19 Sep 2011

The new issue of Source is all about photo galleries. Rebecca Hopkinson has been looking at the programmes of contemporary art spaces to ask if we still need specialist photography galleries. If contemporary art spaces (like the Whitechapel and Irish Museum of Modern Art) are showing photography why do we need galleries like the the Photographers' Gallery (due to reopen in early 2012) and the Gallery of Photography? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Source Photo: Photobook London’
by: Richard West
Posted: Tue, 11 Feb 2020 09:48:29 EST
Content: Blog Post / Genre: Event
First Posted: Mon, 12 Sep 2011

Along to the opening night of Photobook London. A number of people there and a convivial atmosphere. Spoke to Julie Cook and Jonathan Lewis on the stand for the ABC collective. The group was started by Joachim Schmid, who according to Jonathan, spent two weeks looking through the books tagged 'art photography' on Blurb ('the worst two weeks of his life') to find other self publishers whose work he liked. Joachim has written for Source a number of times and produced some art market photography playing cards, as our subscription inserts, some years ago. As with his own work, a lot of group's books recycle found photographs, often from the web, like Mishka Henner's book No Man's Land (which we are reviewing in the next issue of Source ). . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Flea Market Photobooks: Marvellous World of Shells’
by: Annebella Pollen
Posted: Tue, 04 Feb 2020 04:58:01 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Nature

The emergence of shell-bearing molluscs, the opening line of the book declares, was one of the first stages in the evolution of the animal world. Shells, then, go back to the very origins of life. Marvellous World of Shells, however, is a 1977 product through and through. The text introduces conchology as a serious site for scholarship as a sub-branch of zoology, but the book’s scientific credentials are scanty. Technical information is given in abundance, but in print so small that it seems designed to be unread. Perhaps as a result of the text’s translation into English, there are clunky turns of phrase from the title onwards, with its absent definite article (the book also exists as Le Monde Merveilleux des Coquillages and Die Wunderbare Welt der Schnecken und Muscheln ). There are also some rather clumsy observations. Shells are often colored, one short sentence bluntly notes. The real purpose of the book, as is evident from the illustrated pages, is visual pleasure. The introduction, for all its vocabulary of operculum and dextrogyrus, betrays its aesthetic interests. In choosing examples, the author confesses, we have been guided primarily by the beauty or originality of shapes, patterns and colors . . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Magnum Landscape’
by: Bill Kirk
Posted: Fri, 31 Jan 2020 06:55:21 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 11 - Spring Summer 1997

Magnum Photos, the co-operative agency founded in 1947 by a group of left-thinking photo-journalists, among whom were Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and George Rodger, soon grew to epitomise the term 'concerned photography' and drew into its ranks the cream of the world's reportage photographers. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Developing Expression’
by: Helen Gulliver
Posted: Fri, 31 Jan 2020 05:24:09 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Medical
First Published: Issue 11 - Spring Summer 1997

It is now beginning to be recognised that exposure to the arts has a beneficial effect on people in hospitals. The success of organisations devoted to the use of the arts is documented by testimonials from physicians and patients, and by statistics of accelerated recovery and lower use of pain relieving drugs among those who have access to the arts. (Moss, Linda, Art for Health's Sake, London: Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1987). . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘What's Your Story?’
by: Ray McKenzie
Posted: Fri, 08 Nov 2019 07:57:39 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 11 - Spring Summer 1997

What's Your Story? was a pair of linked exhibitions that ran concurrently in Street Level and Central Station Glasgow, in February this year, the outcome of a series of workshops involving residents from a group of hostels for the homeless. At Street Level, there were portraits of the workshops participants made by Kathleen Little, the project leader, and Andrew Whitaker ; Central Station was devoted to a display of images made by the residents themselves - mostly of themselves - using the skills they had acquired on the project. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Young Unionists’
by: Raymond B. Newman
Posted: Thu, 07 Nov 2019 07:31:11 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 11 - Spring Summer 1997

A Portfolio of photographic work by Raymond B. Newman. Published in Issue 11 of Source, Spring Summer 1997. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Memory Memorial’
by: Paul McNally
Posted: Thu, 07 Nov 2019 07:09:04 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 11 - Spring Summer 1997

The parallels between a gallery and a mausoleum and their private and personal uses here turn into an unusual metaphor. The need for private contemplation and recollection in a public space, the time to imagine histories that are only yours in the abstract, the impossibility of truly comprehending another's personal experience: the reverence that the gallery imposes on all work regardless of quality. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Track’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Thu, 07 Nov 2019 06:53:15 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Manipulated
First Published: Issue 11 - Spring Summer 1997

Clare Langan constructs her own reality through these images. It is a world she has formed through directing, light control, and filming. What becomes important is the whole and the flow of the project rather than an emphasis on any single image. Within this 'whole', sequencing and editing are used effectively to create a pace and structure. It is a relentless rhythm in which we are always moving towards the shifting fuzzy horizons. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Third World on Our Doorstep?’
by: Derek Speirs
Posted: Wed, 06 Nov 2019 06:10:39 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 10 - Winter 1997

The Northern Ireland Council for Travelling People was founded in 1981. Today NICPT is an umbrella group comprising of Travellers, Traveller support Groups and statutory and voluntary organisations, supporting and co-ordinating work with Travellers in their identification of needs, goals, strategies and resources for action. In l996 the government released the Draft Race Relations Legislation for N. Ireland. Anticipating the order's implementation in 1997. NICPT welcomes the recognition of Travellers as an indigenous ethnic minority group, recognised and named in the legislation. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Street Life: Street Children’
by: Paul Smith
Posted: Tue, 05 Nov 2019 18:19:17 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Street
First Published: Issue 10 - Winter 1997

Over five thousand children live on the streets of Guatemala City. Orphaned, abandoned, or runaways everyday they must hustle to survive; relying on begging or petty theft to 'earn' their existence. In a pathetic attempt to fend off the cold and hunger, and escape their own desperate reality, the children sniff glue and solvents. The little plastic bag containing yellow blobs of Reistol (shoemaker's glue) is a street kids emblem - it is an exception rather than a rule to come across a street kid who doesn't clutch a wrinkled bag in a tight fist - a constant companion and arguably the best friend they have on the street. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Questioning the Signals’
by: Aphra Kerr
Posted: Tue, 05 Nov 2019 11:05:58 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Gender
First Published: Issue 10 - Winter 1997

On October 26th a day of seminars was held in the Gallery of Photography, Dublin as part of the festival. We heard some very informative presentations; Victoria Lukens of the Independent Review offered practical tips on how to approach picture editors and Rhonda Wilson, also from the UK, offered advice on how to harness digital technologies. The latter discussion was free of hype, focusing instead on how photographers might usefully access technology, i.e. using the downtime of computer firms. The informal atmosphere of the gathering was conducive to meeting other participants and breaking down barriers, as the publicity material intended. The physical exhibition in the Gallery of Photography in comparison to the seminars was rather uninspiring and disjointed, hampered by the restrictive and unsympathetic design of the gallery itself. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Effort After Meaning’
by: Anselm Gallagher
Posted: Tue, 05 Nov 2019 10:31:36 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 10 - Winter 1997

There is a certain contradiction in offering contemporary colour photographs as personal memories, as Anselm Gallagher does in his eight square prints at Watershed in Bristol, as photographs are obviously contemporary, taken in the 'now'. One cannot photograph a memory. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Bathing Caps’
by: Anne Bjerge Hansen
Posted: Tue, 05 Nov 2019 10:05:02 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 9 - Autumn 1996

A Portfolio of photographic work by Anne Bjerge Hansen. Published in Issue 9 of Source, Autumn 1996. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 88 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Tue, 05 Nov 2019 09:47:21 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 88 - Winter 2016

It is possible that for years, publishers around the world were producing photobooks and never realised. After all, they didn't even have the word 'photobook' to describe what they were doing. Jose Luis Neves here explains why the word didn't exist in the past and why it may not be adequate to describe the wild variety of books-with-photographsin that we have today. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 99 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 04 Nov 2019 06:48:33 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 99 - Autumn 2019

There are many different ideas wrapped up in our concept of Nature. It is different from us and our culture: irrational, unpredictable and dangerous. Or maybe not as different as all that? As Dorothea Born writes, these concepts are embedded in the images we have used to depict climate change but their power to elicit an emotional response from us is not sufficient to help us understand a global problem. She says that to tackle climate change we will need new conceptions of Nature. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 98 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Tue, 30 Jul 2019 06:27:48 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 98 - Summer 2019

Photographs come into existence for different reasons, many of them nothing to do with the intentions of photographers. Public Relations is a profession that seeks to control the way organisations are understood, although the way this is achieved can be murky. This issue of Source aims to illuminate the influence PR has on the photographs that shape public life. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘No Smoke Without Fire’
by: Sarah Edge
Posted: Thu, 04 Jul 2019 11:55:11 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Political
First Published: Issue 10 - Winter 1997

This publication immediately causes the reader some confusion, as it does not fit readily into any recognisable type of art publication. Whilst it is clearly a book of 'art' photography, it is not a catalogue. It does not document or accompany a specific exhibition of work. Nor is it a publication about the artist or his work, it offers us no information about Willie Doherty, his history or his ideas. The simplest way to describe this publication is an artwork in its own right. In some respects it operates as a kind of visual retrospective of Doherty's more recent works and includes two of his most well known installations; The Only Good One Is A Dead One (1993), nominated for the Turner Prize, and At The End Of The Day (1994) which was purchased by the Arts Council of Great Britain. It also includes a number of reproductions of Doherty's recent colour photographs from 1995. However, it would be incorrect to see this publication as merely illustrating or documenting these earlier works. Instead, because Doherty's work is conceptually led, there has been a translation or transformation of the original work to take into account the different demands of a book format. Moreover, my personal view is that this has added a new and more powerful dimension to some of the original work. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Edge of Europe’
by: E. Michael Desilets
Posted: Thu, 04 Jul 2019 05:35:48 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 10 - Winter 1997

Photographs seldom speak for themselves. This seems particularly true of the work of Anthony Haughey in The Edge of Europe, published to coincide with an exhibition at The Gallery of Photography, Dublin. Though fairly evenly divided between the U.S. and Ireland, from the Bronx to Newtownmountkennedy, this collection of 30 photographs is informed primarily by the depopulation of the Blasket Islands and the emigration of most of the inhabitants to Massachusetts. In the preface by Pat Cooke, a brief memoir by ex-islander Paddy Kearney, the main text by Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole and an afterword by Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht Michael D. Higgins, we are provided with much guidance (in both Irish and English) as to how to 'read' Haughey's photographs. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’
by: David Gepp
Posted: Thu, 04 Jul 2019 04:28:24 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 10 - Winter 1997

A Portfolio of photographic work by David Gepp. Published in Issue 10 of Source, Winter 1997. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 97 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Tue, 16 Apr 2019 07:15:56 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 97 - Spring 2019

The relationship between us, the viewers of photographs, and them, the people in photographs, is a source of constant anguish, in particular about the one-way relationship between the person looking and the person being looked at. But there are genres in which that role is reversed, in which the pictures are dictating the terms, like the 'how to' photograph. The subjects of the pictures may not be looking towards the camera but their actions are discretely presented to the viewer to instruct them. They show the decisive moment or moments at which the technique they illustrate is being enacted. Typically, 'how to' photographs are in step by step sequences so all of the stages of the action can be understood as it progresses. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Ray's a Laugh’
by: Anthony Haughey
Posted: Thu, 14 Mar 2019 20:25:11 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Family
First Published: Issue 10 - Winter 1997

I first encountered Richard Billingham's work, Triptych of Ray, in the exhibition, Who's Looking at the Family? at the Barbican Gallery, London, 1994. Triptych of Ray was a series of grainy black and white melancholic portraits of his alcoholic father Ray, clutching a bottle in the half light of gloom and despair. Reminiscent of an earlier epoch, the photographs were taken as 'preliminary sketches' for painting studies, (Billingham was an art student at Sunderland University). . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Mapplethorpe’
by: Kieran Owens
Posted: Thu, 14 Mar 2019 19:41:10 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 10 - Winter 1997

After many visits to both parts of this retrospective exhibition of photographic works by Robert Mapplethorpe, taken between 1970 and 1989, the words context and intention stand out as requiring some careful consideration. From the present vantage point of 1997, it is impossible for any viewing public to fully grasp the context within which these works were made. This is a problem that exists not only for this show but in fact for every show of any kind. It is hard for us now to believe that an exhibition of impressionist, surrealist, dadist, cubist or any other kind of art could have generated such storms of controversy in their day, but so they did. However, over the passage of time and through repeated exposure to these works they have become utterly familiar to us and we have become utterly comfortable with them, and any outrage expressed then seems now like the reaction of less cultured or less intelligent or less enlightened peoples. As with works from these great movements, the context within which Mapplethorpe's photographs were made is obscure and indefinable, for never will anyone be able to reconstruct the complex web of relationships and events, or of the social, political, religious and cultural mores, that interacted during his creative life and that lead to the production of these works. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Bruce Gilden in conversation with Christine Redmond’
by: Christine Redmond
Posted: Thu, 14 Mar 2019 18:32:13 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Street
First Published: Issue 10 - Winter 1997

CR: Bruce why did you start taking photographs? / BG: I was in college and I decided that I wanted to do something other than go to University, so I took up acting and photography. You have to understand that at that time the film Blowup was out so photography was in vogue. However I had no technical expertise so during the acting course my teacher was absent and his assistant got up and performed a text from Shakespeare. Having a heavy Brooklyn accent I realised acting was not for me. At the same time I was taking a night course in basic photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and when I saw my first print come up in the developer I was hooked. / CR: So what next? / BG: I drove a taxi cab for four years to support my photography and then I found that I was working so hard I had no time for my photographic work, so I quit and I drove a truck for my father working only a few days a week which gave me time. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 96 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Fri, 30 Nov 2018 06:30:25 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 96 - Winter 2018

A magazine about photography can encompass many of the most interesting aspects of contemporary life and that is what we have sought to connect with in renewing its design. You will find new columns about fashion, the afterlife of photographic objects and conversations with photographers, of all varieties, about their experience of the world. We maintain our commitment to reviewing exhibitions, books and anything else that defines the evolving photographic culture. We will continue to explore themes - like privacy in this issue - that seem particularly relevant to our current moment. Our attitude to photographs seems to encompass our contradictory feelings about privacy today. We are increasingly intolerant of being photographed in public but ever more willing to expose ourselves in photographs online. This has political, societal and legal consequences that are explored by our interview with Camille Simon and Laura Cunningham's article on the evolving law of privacy. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 95 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 20 Sep 2018 07:45:33 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 95 - Autumn 2018

Of all the outrages of contemporary political life perhaps the greatest is the apparent disregard for truth, for which we have the new coinage, 'posttruth'. What can we use to oppose this tendency? Facts? That's something photographs should be able to help us with. But are facts the same as the truth? And are photographs a way to provide them? David Bate disentangles this confusing subject with the help of an anteater and a shelf of china. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Road Bowls in Armagh’
by: Brian Lynn
Posted: Mon, 03 Sep 2018 19:08:38 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 9 - Autumn 1996

The documentary series, once the standard format of photojournalism in the 1950's and 1960's before its virtual demise due to television, is given new life in the show by Andrew Breakey at St. Patrick's Trian in Armagh. In a tightly edited selection of fifteen monochrome images he tells a story of the traditional country game of Bullets (or Road Bowls) which still survives in counties Cork and Armagh. By his discreet approach he has captured a selection of intimate studies which are never intrusive as his subjects always seem totally oblivious of his presence. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Sex Shops’
by: Paul McNally
Posted: Mon, 03 Sep 2018 18:48:49 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Institutional
First Published: Issue 9 - Autumn 1996

Paul Seawright's present work is shown as part of an untitled group exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin. He is the only artist represented working with photography as a medium for the exploration of environments and the politics of inhabiting them. This is what Paul Seawright does, his fascination is the human space and the history of people who have occupied it. An especial fascination are those involved in areas or actions of society that will divide and partition people (the viewer?) by the nature of their own morality. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Irelantis’
by: Catherine Duncan
Posted: Mon, 03 Sep 2018 14:12:48 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Photomontage
First Published: Issue 9 - Autumn 1996

Ever seen the Great Pyramids of Carlingford? Their corn-coloured geometric forms compliment the seemingly half reared nature in which they are planted: their staid elegance points to a new horizon. A jolly red jumpered Irishman contemplates the scene with satisfaction. His vantage point is ours, the planetary horizon stretches out before him, and he is master of all he surveys. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Weddings, Parties, Anything’
by: David Lee
Posted: Mon, 03 Sep 2018 11:40:31 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Family
First Published: Issue 9 - Autumn 1996

Remember slatternly Janet in 'Living Rooms', Waplington's first book? Well she's back. She still parades her 'Kev' and 'Ian' tattoos on her popeye-like arms and smokes nonstop, and if I'm not mistaken she's done us a favour and shed some weight, which means that she's now within spitting distance of seventeen stone. She's also married a black man called Clive, who looks generally seedy and peers out suspiciously from what might be the squashed face of a former boxer. Overflowing ash trays and several night's empties are still strewn around the living room floor and that piece of orange peel, which seems oddly familiar from the previous book, has now taken root under the gas fire. The wallpaper has changed from plain naff to a jazzy chevron (Clive's personal touch I'll warrant). Apart from the wedding, for which Janet ill-advisedly squeezed her tyres into a white satin dress, and following which there was a Bacchanalian session down the club, everything is much as it always was on this Nottingham council ESTate. Meaning that short of a lottery win its inmates will die here. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘In the Hunter's Space’
by: Nicholas Allen
Posted: Mon, 03 Sep 2018 10:26:01 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Historical
First Published: Issue 9 - Autumn 1996

Hannah Collins impressive collection of work is ideally situated in the Irish Museum of Modern Art. It hangs along a corridor and is spaced through a series of anterooms. All are white. The main images are approximately three by eight metres, black and white and striking. The first is coincidentally the one that entices the most. Entitled 'The Hunters Space - In the Course of Time - The Road to Auschwitz' it details (and for once this word is entirely correct, so large is the image that even the smallest of branches seem to be dangling in your face) a deserted scene of bending road and naked tree, half covered in snow. At first you feel like you're standing there, in the picture. Then the planes of reference make you disorientated. The right quarter of the image is cordoned off by the twist of a road which forms a semicircle whose other half can only be guessed at. Does it indeed go anywhere? Buildings rest on the left hand side. They are hyper-real as the image has been treated to allow little contrast, thus making the sky the same colour as the snow covered ground. There is a curious 3-D effect about the whole scene. The more you stare at it, the more the darker parts seem to bulge out at you. And all this without the aid of hallucinogens. This form of contact with the image before you is not sustained through the entire exhibition and with good reason. There is a subtext to the show which chronicles the traces of the lost and dispossessed. When this touches upon the still sore ground of the Holocaust such a drawing into the scene may be at best only a pastiche and at worst voyeuristic. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Clive Landen’
by: Martin McCabe
Posted: Sun, 02 Sep 2018 17:40:58 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Death
First Published: Issue 9 - Autumn 1996

The relationship between death and representation have always been profoundly and intimately intertwined. Never more so than with the emergence of the photomechanical apparatus in the middle of the last century. So much so that some early photographic processes were called Thanatography derived from the Greek word Thanatos meaning 'death'. And some of the most startling images from that same period were images of the dead. They exemplified what Barthes would later go on to say about photography it must be described in relation to death. This particular preoccupation has undergone a re-emergence in the last decade or so led by photographers like Witkin and more recently in Luc Sante's collection of forensic photography from the turn of the century amongst others. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Maguire's Barbers, Belfast’
by: Paul Quinn
Posted: Mon, 27 Aug 2018 12:54:46 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 9 - Autumn 1996

A Portfolio of photographic work by Paul Quinn. Published in Issue 9 of Source, Autumn 1996. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘World Press Photo’
by: Mary Fitzpatrick
Posted: Thu, 09 Aug 2018 08:33:06 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Photojournalism
First Published: Issue 9 - Autumn 1996

Lucian Perkins, the winner of the 1996 World Press Photo of the year award sums up his attitude towards photography as an artform, he goes on to say that he does not distinguish between documentary and fine art photography, in his view they have been merging in recent years. His 'Photo of the Year' is unusual but very beautiful. It is not the dramatic 'big picture' which we may have expected but is, rather, a quiet and reflective image. It shows a small Chechen boy, his palms pressed hard against the back window of a bus through which he is gazes, his face contorted with intense and almost tangible anxiety. A fleeting moment of contact between the boy and the photographer. It was a face that symbolised the all that he had seen. Symbolised all that Perkins had seen? Perhaps the boys face encapsulated all that the child himself had seen in the Chechen war. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Grapevine’
by: Leon McAuley
Posted: Thu, 09 Aug 2018 06:49:40 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 9 - Autumn 1996

What prompted Susan Lipper to document the lives of the denizens of grapevine Hollow, West Virginia, between 1988 and 1993? Well, according to her introduction, she didn't. The book is, she says, not so much an effort to document, as the collusion of my experiences... - a revealing construction in itself - ...the tangible world and the nature of photography. Really? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Unwords’
by: Stephen Bull
Posted: Wed, 08 Aug 2018 18:38:26 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Photomontage
First Published: Issue 9 - Autumn 1996

In some ways the work of photomonteur Peter Kennard has turned full circle. When he began making politically charged paintings in the sixties he seemed to be aiming for the small elite of a gallery audience. The escalation of the Vietnam war and the revival of a radical European Left in 1968 led him to reconsider his medium. Paint retained a seductive quality, perhaps inappropriate for the revolutionary revelations of unsavoury events that he now felt should be shown. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Portraits’
by: Christopher Taylor
Posted: Mon, 06 Aug 2018 18:39:26 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 9 - Autumn 1996

The spectator is charged with acknowledging the representational value of the portrait. This does not mean simply deciding whether the portrait looks like the subject or not. This possibility (of a resemblance) is more appropriate in other artistic disciplines. In photographs, all the subjects look like themselves, even if only the spectators are able to recognise them, or to admit to their existence due to the characteristics of the medium itself. But it is more than that. The real problem is not the resemblance, but the recognition of authenticity. When the spectator accepts, by a particular gesture, a look,, or whatever, that the person in the photograph is 'really him or her', then the portrait can truly be considered a success. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Confrontation - Portraiture’
by: Pere Formiguera
Posted: Mon, 06 Aug 2018 17:36:14 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 9 - Autumn 1996

The portrait is, above all, the artistic manifestation of an instant of ritual confrontation, the discovery of another person and a three sided dialogue. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Rencontres d'Arles’
by: Christophe Chabot
Posted: Mon, 06 Aug 2018 17:15:51 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 9 - Autumn 1996

Since 1970 the town of Arles in the South of France has during the first week of July been a place where people involved with photography meet. It is the home of Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie . . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Advertising: Dove’
by: Judith Williamson
Posted: Fri, 03 Aug 2018 11:59:13 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 83 - Summer 2015

It is over ten years since Unilever launched the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. In response to global research showing that only 2 percent of women considered themselves beautiful, the campaign kicked off in 2004 with a series of billboard photographs by Rankin that showed 'real women' (i.e. not models), whose age, ethnicity or body shape transgressed western stereotypes of beauty, all looking gorgeous in their unique ways. The captions aimed to challenge assumptions by offering a choice of descriptions for an online vote: 'Wrinkled or Wonderful?', 'Fat or Fit?', and so on. The campaign received a great deal of media attention, and has continued to reinvent itself over the last decade in ways that provoke debate and comment. It has incorporated a range of videos (including the prize-winning Evolution, which shows how media images of beauty are created), publicity stunts (a recent one involved inviting women to enter workplaces and shops through doors marked either 'average' or 'beautiful' - unsurprisingly most chose 'average') and institutional alliances: as The Dove Movement for Self-esteem it has worked, for example, with organisations such as the Girl Scouts and Girl Guides. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Advertising: Emirates’
by: Judith Williamson
Posted: Fri, 03 Aug 2018 10:38:45 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 82 - Spring 2015

This extraordinary advertisement for Emirates airline has been running in recent colour supplements. It is unsettling in a great many ways, some of which are built into the ad itself, while others are about the knowledge we bring to it. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Advertising: Tiffany’
by: Judith Williamson
Posted: Wed, 01 Aug 2018 16:02:11 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 81 - Winter 2014

This ad for Tiffany engagement rings - running in glossy magazines around Valentine's Day - is a perfect example of a continuing line of advertisements, almost all for jewellery or perfume, that use black and white photography to signify romance in particular ways. These significations draw on a photographic history which, whether or not it is actually known to contemporary audiences, has been made familiar as a kind of all-purpose visual reference by advertisements themselves. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Advertising: Panasonic’
by: Judith Williamson
Posted: Wed, 01 Aug 2018 09:47:02 EST
Content: Column / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 80 - Autumn 2014

A few years ago in this magazine I wrote about a Panasonic camcorder ad that showed the image of a girl flying a kite, with the slogan 'Treasure the memory as much as the moment'. The child was smiling over her shoulder towards the camera - in other words, at the person behind it. The main issue I raised at the time concerned the implication of responding to a child's activity with a camera, rather than with actual attention: it was troubling that the potential 'memory' represented by the recording was presented as more important than the lived 'moment'. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 94 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Sun, 08 Jul 2018 12:18:24 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 94 - Summer 2018

A hot spot of recent politics has been how digital platforms have become the conduit and corrupter of debate. In the recent referendum on abortion law in Ireland however, the old fashioned poster became a key battleground for each opposing side to put across their messages. Orla Fitzpatrick, Ann Curran and Fiona Loughnane followed the campaign and here examine the strategies of both sides and in particular the way they employed photographs to persuade the public. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Landscape of Remembrance’
by: Brian Lynn
Posted: Mon, 23 Apr 2018 16:21:32 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 7 - Spring 1996

In 1986 Jan Voster visited the North-West of Ireland, started taking photographs and so began a journey- a journey back to a past of which he knew nothing but was determined to sift out, discover and somehow capture. In that capturing he has shown us what we haven't seen for ourselves. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Pavel Büchler’
by: Nicholas Allen
Posted: Sun, 22 Apr 2018 16:59:38 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 7 - Spring 1996

Answers to questions of identity don't come easily with Pavel Büchler. He remarks that what led me getting involved in Art was precisely the possibility of working around... uncertain boundaries. The images which are News Flash suggest an outline of a head with the face blurred out by yellow and purple circular flashes. You are left wondering who this is (or was), where is she from (or is) and what she was doing. Immediately then the viewer is thrown into a complex of questions which are as much about the process of observation itself as they are to do with the decoding of this specific work. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Entre-Temps’
by: Padraig Murphy
Posted: Sun, 22 Apr 2018 15:48:56 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Photojournalism
First Published: Issue 7 - Spring 1996

Having suffered a personal breakdown, Roland Schneider, a professional photographer, entered a psychiatric hospital in the summer of 1987. He subsequently used the camera in an attempt to come to terms with his illness. What emerged was a set of intriguing images, first exhibited in the hospital in 1988 and later printed in the book Entre-Temps . . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Our Special Day’
by: Michael Crone
Posted: Sun, 22 Apr 2018 09:14:34 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Family
First Published: Issue 7 - Spring 1996

The exhibition, entitled Our Special day, by Lawrence Cassidy showed at the Belfast Exposed gallery in Belfast. Cassidy cites the Ken Loache film Raining Stones, together with an interest in his own family history, as being the main motivational sources for originating the project. The inclusion of an extract from the play A Hero's Life by Terence Cassidy reflects this: . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Triúr Ban’
by: Lynne Connolly
Posted: Thu, 19 Apr 2018 10:43:23 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Performance
First Published: Issue 7 - Spring 1996

Triúr Ban brings together the work of three artists; Cindy Cummings, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Amelia Stein - respectively a performer, a poet and a photographer. It would however be more accurate to say that these three artists have collaboratively produced what is Triúr Ban. In this instance Triúr Ban is a book of poetry and black and white images of performance. But that's only the beginning. As Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith states in the foreword, their work is to some degree about the process of collaboration itself, about the perils and rewards of labouring together . . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Cultural Sniping’
by: Amanda McKittrick
Posted: Wed, 18 Apr 2018 18:46:07 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Political
First Published: Issue 6 - Winter 1995

The concerns of Jo Spence's work were wide - covering aspects of class and gender, identity and family, health and bodies. She came from a working-class background and began work as a commercial photographer. In the early seventies she became involved in education and political work using photography as a tool for change. She worked with a number of groups such as the Hackney Flashers and Half Moon Photography Workshop in London. Her life and work changed when she began studying for a degree in the theory and practice of photography, and with the discovery of her breast cancer. Together with Rosy Martin she developed a way of using photography as a personal therapy tool, producing photographs that allowed the subject to control the image and represent their own painful and often previously unexpressed feelings and ideas. From the early Eighties she used her work to deal with issues that touched her personally - identity, subjectivity, mental and physical health. She published and exhibited widely. Her work was both radical and innovative. It had an important effect on a generation of photographic students and photographers. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Taken Down in Evidence’
by: Eamonn Hughes
Posted: Wed, 18 Apr 2018 18:02:29 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Police
First Published: Issue 6 - Winter 1995

Leo Regan, a newspaper photographer, spent some eighteen months with the Garda to produce this text, divided between interviews with individual gardai and photographs from three locations: the Store Street station in Dublin (whose area includes the notorious and ironically-named Sheriff Street housing ESTate); a border station; and a station in rural Galway. It has to be said that, initially, one is unsure of what one is looking at. Is this photojournalism or documentary? If the former then many of the pictures lack the drama and urgency one would expect. If the latter, then there are the usual worries about participant/observer status. Nor are these merely generalised problems for they are raised directly by Regan's introductory comments. Having missed a photograph because of garda interference he is saved from a possible beating by the shout He's with us. Nevertheless, the hostility and suspicion with which gardai regard the media is still an issue and although Regan was granted access he has had to change the name of the interviewees and even then some of them seem to have placed their jobs on the line by talking to him without express permission. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Shankill Meets Falls’
by: Nicholas Allen
Posted: Wed, 18 Apr 2018 17:23:26 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Political
First Published: Issue 6 - Winter 1995

The exhibition Shankill Meets Falls is described as a community initiative with the primary aim of trying, in the words of the organisers, to dispel the notion that the two cultures within Northern Ireland are widely different. The medium by which to make this connection is photographic and so it is interesting to interpret common signs between the various practices displayed. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Belfast’
by: Jennifer Dempsey
Posted: Wed, 18 Apr 2018 12:59:27 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Commercial
First Published: Issue 4 - Spring 1995

A photographer captures the sights he or she wants to show the rest of the world. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Parallel Realities’
by: Paul Robinson
Posted: Wed, 18 Apr 2018 12:29:46 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Commercial
First Published: Issue 4 - Spring 1995

Parallel Realities, published last November by Blackstaff Press with sponsorship from the IDB, ABSA, and Black Bush, has all the ingredients of a nice coffee-table book. It also has all the ingredients of a nice advertising campaign. But if we take the photographs within and mount them on a gallery wall the ingredients lack something; the resulting taste is bland and insipid, the viewer craves something more. It's a matter of context. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 93 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Sun, 15 Apr 2018 19:20:05 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 93 - Spring 2018

We conduct experiments to ESTablish knowledge about the world. The method is compelling because it is repeatable and can be tested. It puts our knowledge on a firm footing. But it can also produce unexpected and counter-intuitive results and contradict our experience or beliefs. In this issue we publish the work of photographers and artists that, in different ways, use experimental methods to make us see the world differently. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 92 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 06 Dec 2017 07:01:02 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 92 - Winter 2017

What is art photography? There's certainly a lot more of it about but it's hard to nail down the difference between this special variety and the common or garden kind of photography. Even photographs that you might suppose were definitely not art, like family snapshots or old photojournalism are liable to appear in art galleries. We have asked three writers to answer this question and they have given us different answers. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 41 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 27 Nov 2017 06:05:46 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 41 - Winter 2004

In the last issue of Source, David Bate asked what had happened to Postmodernism and discovered that it had been replaced with a new form of Realism. In this issue he describes this neorealism and shows how its strategies are present on television, in newspapers and in art galleries. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 42 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 27 Nov 2017 06:00:45 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 42 - Spring 2005

The body has been a key area of debate in photography over the last twenty years. Jane Fletcher looks again at the photographic nude, still a favourite of photographic publishers but no longer a respected genre in the art gallery. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Island Camera’
by: John Shade
Posted: Thu, 23 Nov 2017 07:29:57 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Travel
First Published: Issue 2 - Autumn Winter 1992

Jim Bennett has been a major figure in Photography circles in Ireland for many years. Those who have taken the traditional route through Art Education in the Northern Ireland i.e. Foundation Art & Design at the University of Ulster, or the Ulster Polytechnic, will doubtless have been guided by Jim in their embryonic stages of photographic development. Jim has photographed and subsequently exhibited many dramatic images of his native land. In more recent years he has spent prolonged periods turning his camera on the Islands of Greece and Spain. Avid travellers will have seen much of this work in various tourist brochures and travel publications. Until now Jim has waited patiently for the right time to publish a retrospective of his work. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Paul Seawright’
by: Catherine Duncan
Posted: Wed, 22 Nov 2017 10:06:55 EST
Content: Book Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 5 - Summer 1995

Paul Seawright takes photographs of Northern Ireland. He says It is only my interpretation It is the only that gives it away. Here is an accomplished artist, from Belfast, taking photographs of his own country. But who, in common with many others who have tried to make sense of the quagmire of their culture, is reduced to the pathetic qualification only to absolve themselves in case of questions, agreement or offence. Is he not entitled to have an opinion, to make an interpretation? I would urge him to have confidence. Newspaper headlines, editorials, politicians, spokespersons, graffiti, emotive photography and TV footage all shout opinions, thunder interpretations with far less consideration. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 85 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 20 Nov 2017 08:14:48 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 85 - Spring 2016

Anyone who has tried to match the image of a haddock to the noise it makes will tell you that sound and appearance can seem completely unrelated. yet photographs and sound recordings can both testify to an event, or a place, or a personal experience in a similarly compelling way. Photographs are often accompanied by sounds, from the 'click' of a shutter to the spoken recollection of a picture's story. Photography and sound recording are often used in the same situations, be it recording wildlife or surveillance. In both the essays and portfolios, this issue of Source shows some of the way sound and photography relate to one another and suggest the great potenrial for further exploration of this relationship. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 79 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 20 Nov 2017 07:58:05 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 79 - Summer 2014

The question 'Who is the photographer?' suggests two related kinds of answers. The first answer is that the photographer is probably a straight white man. Emma Campbell here writes about women in photography and, setting out the results of her research in plain numbers, shows that women are under represented as photographers in magazines and exhibitions. This disparity was terrible in the 1970s but it's still not good today. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 78 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 20 Nov 2017 07:54:09 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 78 - Spring 2014

For the past decade there has been much debate about the apparently changed nature of photography as a result of digitisation. This initially concentrated on the malleability of digital pictures but now the most significant effect appears to be the way photographs are being made and exchanged. It is the way digital images can be used rather than the type of images they are, that seems to have changed. Cathal Gurrin is a Lecturer at the School of Computing in Dublin City University. Since 2006 he has worn a digital camera that continuously photographs. He has amassed a huge store of images - a detailed 'digital memory'- that is intended to function as data for further study on how computers can retrieve information from pictures. Colin Graham went to meet Gurrin to find out how the human subject fits into this automated image capturing system. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 39 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Fri, 17 Nov 2017 07:30:25 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 39 - Summer 2004

Photographs are often said to be 'transparent' and equated to the experience of seeing. This is an inviting comparison because of the similarity between cameras and eyes but it also conceals the process of framing a picture and the various inversions and reflections that occur through optical devices. Jane Fletcher, writing about Roger Fenton and Stephen Shore, draws our attention to the transformative component of photographic picture making with a large format camera by looking at pictures upside down as they would have been seen on a camera's ground glass. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 38 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Fri, 17 Nov 2017 07:26:36 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 38 - Spring 2004

A theme in the recent history of photography has been its definition as a distinctive discipline with university departments and specialist publishers. Over the same period an interest in the medium has also spread to writers working in other areas. In this issue Elizabeth Edwards, Clive Scott and John Taylor writing from the persectives of respectively, Anthropology, Literary Studies and Art History, demonstrate what distinct approaches these disciplines can bring to thinking photography. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 37 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Fri, 17 Nov 2017 07:24:24 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 37 - Winter 2003

One role necessary for the production of this magazine is getting copies of pictures to illustrate reviews. While some galleries and publishers are very helpful it is also common for organisations to refuse to supply pictures claiming they do not have permission or a fee will have to be charged. This is indicative of a broader trend that emphasises the publicity value of images rather than the value of public criticism. Ronan Deazley looks at the law regarding the availability of images for review and in particular how this can be constrained by contracts produced to restrict the 'fair usage' of pictures. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 35 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 15 Nov 2017 19:15:27 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 35 - Summer 2003

On the 6th June Tate Modern will open its bumper exhibition, Cruel and Tender, that sets out to clear away the problematic aspects of the Tate's relationship to the medium and start afresh with fewer inhibitions as to what is suitable for the gallery to exhibit. In 1994 Frances Morris, then responsible for acquisitions at the Tate, was interviewed by Creative Camera about their policy. She said that the Tate would hope to fulfil photographer's expectations when the new Bankside gallery opened. Emma Dexter has co-curated Cruel and Tender. Helen James interviews both Dexter and Morris to discover how they understand the institution's relationship to the medium, why they are showing documentary photography and what their plans are for the future. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 16 Editorial’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Wed, 15 Nov 2017 19:11:24 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 16 - Autumn 1998

To coincide with their forthcoming exhibition at The Gallery of Photography in Dublin we feature work by Patrick McCoy and Garreth McConnell. McCoy's images were made whilst enduring the cramped conditions of working with camera and tripod in the back of West Belfast's Black Taxis. The project conceived as 'an antidote to the spectacular images produced by visiting foreign photojournalists' examines a different aspect of life on the Falls Road. In McConnell's work the faces that emerge from the dark form a group of portraits that explores the artist's ongoing fascination with those on the edge of society. This follows on from his project exploring anti-social behaviour that looked at 'punishment beatings' and drug abuse, which will be on show at the gallery. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 15 Editorial’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Wed, 15 Nov 2017 19:09:12 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 15 - Summer 1998

Meeting with photographers during the portfolio days provides us with useful feed back about the contents of the magazine. These conversations seem to suggest perceptions are polarised into two camps: that we are an 'art photography magazine' or 'a documentary magazine'. These categories are frustratingly vague and at odds with the increasing cross-fertilisation of approaches that informs gallery based work and that appearing in newspapers and magazines. The phrase 'Art photography' is also frequently used to describe any set of images that can not be understood and consumed instantly. We hope to continue to publish work that is challenging and innovative regardless of categories. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 14 Editorial’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Wed, 15 Nov 2017 19:05:07 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 14 - Spring 1998

For the first time we explore the attitudes of six photographers towards the land; examining issues of mapping, geography, personal experience, and sense of place. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 13 Editorial’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Wed, 15 Nov 2017 19:02:26 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 13 - Autumn Winter 1997

In this issue we celebrate Paul Seawright's achievement in winning this year's Glen Dimplex Artists Award for his exhibition Inside Information at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin. Based on unprecedented access to the RUC's operations over a prolonged period these works take a 'behind the scenes' look at the organisations inner workings. We are proud to accompany the photographs with a specially commissioned work from the poet Ciaran Carson, a feature unique to Source. We hope you enjoy this first opportunity to appreciate both these particular pieces together. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 12 Editorial’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Wed, 15 Nov 2017 18:59:50 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 12 - Summer Autumn 1997

I always convince myself that each issue is better than the last, building on experience, better planning and increasing contacts with photographers. This progress has finally been complemented through financial backing by Proteus under the EU special support programme for peace and reconciliation. This provides us with two part-time salaries and allows me to finally relinquish my status as sometimes willing volunteer. The funding has also allowed us to invest in our own computer for the design of the magazine and to pay our designer. Staffing the magazine on a volunteer basis for the last three years has been a very unsatisfactory and challenging arrangement. This funding in combination with that continued by the Northern Ireland Arts Council and awarded for the first time by the Southern Ireland Arts council will provide us with increased opportunity and hope. The student work that forms the basis of this issue has been selected from seven different third level courses, located in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The contact ESTablished with the various colleges and their students is another key to our growth. The strength of the work speaks for itself. My hope is to follow the progress of these students as image makers well into the future. To what extent the various courses have equipped them to succeed in this will be the ultimate test of these varying educational environments. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 11 Editorial’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Wed, 15 Nov 2017 18:58:12 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 11 - Spring Summer 1997

Taking the photograph out of the gallery and into the community hall might suggest dodgy dog eared prints on manila card but it doesn't have to be. Chris Harrison's quiet and dignified portraits made at the Older Persons Residence in Petworth are a lesson in excellence of presentation and vision. The images are now on permanent display at the community Hall in Lincolnfield were they form a backdrop to local meetings and events. The photographs were the first commission in the Country Life series by Photoworks (Kent) and we publish extracts from the accompanying book publication. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 10 Editorial’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Wed, 15 Nov 2017 18:46:12 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 10 - Winter 1997

'Curiosity is probably what drives me more than anything. Pictures, after curiosity, were something I thought I could try to change things with. I do have an axe to grind that's why I bother to take pictures and to write.' The sentiments of Paul Smith are clearly from the 'socially concerned' school of photography. His images from Guatemala depict a harsh living environment and raise questions with the viewer about what possible appropriate response we can have to them. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 9 Editorial’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Wed, 15 Nov 2017 18:42:10 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 9 - Autumn 1996

Andre Felibien in the 17th Century first suggested the use of the term 'portrait' exclusively for likenesses of (certain) human beings. Up until then 'portrait' and 'likeness' could be used to mean pictorial imitation of any kind; animal, vegetable or mineral included. In the pioneering days of photography in the 19th Century the lead in technical development was given by the need to reduce exposure times for making portraits. The 15 or more minutes required in bright sunlight was reduced to less than 60 seconds. In 1842 Francis S. Beatty opened Ireland's first daguerreotype portrait gallery in Belfast. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 91 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 11 Oct 2017 05:17:51 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 91 - Autumn 2017

In 2007 Source started a website called Graduate Photography Online. The site brought together work from different degree courses and, as it was added to each year, created an archive of students' work. As the number of students increased we asked curators, editors and other industry figures to make selections from the work with these recommendations acting as an introduction to each year's graduates. For example, looking through the MA work this year are Thomas Dukes the curator at Open Eye Gallery, Anna Sparham, curator at the Museum of London and Magnum photographer Olivia Arthur. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 90 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Fri, 14 Jul 2017 10:23:46 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 90 - Summer 2017

In this issue we are publishing projects by three photographers who examine their own position in relation to the people and situations that they are photographing. To draw this out we have commissioned interviews with them by people who have a professional or personal connection with their work. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 89 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 12 Apr 2017 06:27:55 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 89 - Spring 2017

The political upheaval of the last year has been played out and articulated in images, whether it's photographs of the Brexit bus (and its dubious slogans) or the size of the crowd at the Trump inauguration (and its questionable surface area). But this has not just been a matter of a small number of iconic pictures, increasingly, political debate has been mediated through the Internet and one of its chief currencies is images. In the partisan political climate we inhabit a picture and phrase combined (to make a meme) is the ideal way to pithily sum up an argument or skewer an opposing point of view. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 87 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 22 Sep 2016 07:25:47 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 87 - Autumn 2016

Museums and archives holding photography collections that aim to encompass the history of photography, like the National Media Museum, have been in particular difficulties recently. Meanwhile, those that focus on photography as an art form, like the Tate, have been doing comparatively well. In particular, they have had more success in attracting private backers: patrons willing to give them either money or photographs to enhance their collections. So what are they doing right? Can any museum attract wealthy donors or only those that show art? Will these backers only deal with institutions in London or elsewhere in the UK and Ireland? What do the super-rich expect in return for their gifts? To find out we spoke to an art advisor, a curator and a collector and they explain how contemporary museum patronage works. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 86 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Tue, 07 Jun 2016 11:01:43 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 86 - Summer 2016

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has long been a leader in the world of photography having been an early collector of the medium and having organised many formative exhibitions. There was therefore a flurry of interest when MoMA launched a massive open online course for a general audience entitled Seeing Through Photographs. This is free, can be accessed from anywhere in the world and is led by museum photography curator Sarah Meister. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 84 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Tue, 01 Dec 2015 15:04:58 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 84 - Winter 2015

This special issue includes the work of the winners of the Solas Photography Prize: Michel Le Belhomme, Dara McGrath and Mervyn Arthur. We are publishing their work along with three specially commissioned essays. We are also announcing the winners of the Solas Ireland award: Ciarán Óg Arnold, Enda Bowe, Eamonn Doyle, Emer Gillespie, Shane Lynam, Dara McGrath and Yvette Monahan. The Prize is a partnership between Source and the Gallery of Photography and work from all the winners will be exhibited there from 2 December to 10 January. The Solas Prize is also partnering with Fotohof and the Irish winners' work will be exhibited in Salzburg in April 2016. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Metropolitan Tabernacle Belfast’
by: Raymond B Newman
Posted: Mon, 30 Nov 2015 10:45:56 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 5 - Summer 1995

A Portfolio of photographic work by Raymond B Newman. Published in Issue 5 of Source, Summer 1995. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Port Meadow’
by: Adrian Arbib
Posted: Thu, 01 Oct 2015 06:20:15 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 33 - Winter 2002

All the pictures are taken on Port Meadow Oxford, a 400-acre area of common land in the centre of Oxford. It's arguably one of the largest common spaces inside the ring road of any city in the UK. It has been continually grazed for over 2000 years. Originally given to the Freemen of oxford by King Alfred in 900 AD as a gift for fighting the Danes, it remains steeped with history. During the civil war King Charles camped on the meadow as he fled the Parliamentarian forces and the foundations of the battlements can still be seen. In the first world war a flying school practised bombing runs by throwing jars of paint out the planes' cockpits onto a concrete block, which is still there. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Psi Gardener’
by: Peter Finnemore
Posted: Tue, 01 Sep 2015 11:25:35 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 32 - Autumn 2002

This body of work contains some of my most recent images in an ongoing project that explores my family home and garden in Wales. They become sites and backdrops to visually investigate a range of ideas from culture, history, myth, cosmology, memory, autobiography, psychology and spirit. These ideas are amplified and magnified through the transformational and alchemal qualities of photography, light and the mytho-poetic imagination, where the camera can become a bridge to connecting internal and external worlds. The work was shown in Capsule Gallery in Cardiff from 3rd October - 3rd November 2002. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Squidz and the Beautiful Octopus’
by: Mauro Cocilio
Posted: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 16:28:50 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 36 - Autumn 2003

Based at The Albany Theatre Deptford, London The Beautiful Octopus Club is run by and for people with learning disabilities. The club was initiated by the arts organisation Heart 'n Soul who also run the Squidz Club which is aimed at 14-25 year olds. This is a space where disabled people meet every few months to take part in educational activities, dance the 'big hits' and perform live during an open microphone session. Going into the club nights I was interested in producing a series of portraits of people being out and having a good time in an environment where difference isn't different. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘I Wonder Whether Cows Wonder’
by: Keith Arnatt
Posted: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 13:46:39 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Nature
First Published: Issue 36 - Autumn 2003

The first indication they had returned was the sight of a black and white cow's back appearing just above a roadside hedge. The strong markings of the back punctuating the bright green landscape were visually quite shocking. I took a photograph to record this dramatic effect and to remind me of the pleasure it gave to realise the cows had returned to where they 'belonged'. Their prolonged absence from the landscape had been due to the recent foot and mouth epidemic. Later reflections led me to consider the idea of taking further photographs of cows. Though I had no clear idea why, I began to look for cows and photograph them. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 83 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Sun, 23 Aug 2015 10:49:37 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 83 - Summer 2015

It is a common occurrence to encounter a familiar photograph in an unexpected setting. If we had time to think about it we might ask how different it was from the way we had seen the picture before. How much do we know about the circumstances in which a picture was made and first published anyway? What difference does this context make to the way we understand a photograph? Does a photojournalistic image retain much of the encounter that created it once 50 years have passed and it has become an album cover or a fridge magnet? Ian Walker had just such an encounter with a Don McCullin photograph and has retraced the the steps of the photograph and its photographer to answer these questions. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Interfering with the Negative’
by: Richard West
Posted: Thu, 20 Aug 2015 16:30:33 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Manipulated
First Published: Issue 26 - Spring 2001

VS: We've got to the early 80s. I think the start of the change was a series I took of Belfast zoo. I went along with the family - with the camera - as I always do, to take some family snaps. I was really appalled to see the conditions the monkeys were living in; behind glass, dirty and bored out of their skulls; really depressing stuff. So I took a lot of photographs of the monkeys. Some weeks later I developed the film and I just couldn't believe what was on it. For the first time ever what I had seen was there, I just couldn't believe it. I printed them up, I was quite happy with them in black and white and decided that they were good enough to be shown in an art gallery. I toned some of them and made a blue mark on one of them, because I happened to have a piece of blue crayon in my hand. Then I put a mark on another one. At that time the Octagon gallery asked me to put in some work and I submitted these. A show called the Best of Belfast. I think there might have been six hung in that show. Everybody liked them, they looked really bad! I say really bad, Best of Belfast was a sort of contradiction; I don't think anyone really called them that - that looked at them. People liked them as images. So that was the start. / RW: So we're in about 1980, had you taken any photographs before you took the series in the zoo? / VS: My mother was a great photographer, she was an amateur photographer but she loved cameras, she always bought the automatic, instant cameras; good amateur cameras with a built in flash and so on. Anyone who walked through the door she'd photogaph them. Having quite a lot of brothers and sisters and brothers and sisters on my father's side, an awful lot of cousins and aunts and uncles; people were always calling at the house and she photographed all of them. They are all in my attic now, I must wade through them some time. She really had a lot of photographs. So my mother would have been an influence and I would have taken family snaps as well. I took some photographs at the art college but they weren,t considered anything, the lecturers never looked at them or cared about them. I was there to paint and that was that. 1 / RW: So when did you start caring about photographs? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Day of Action, Bangor’
by: Victor Sloan
Posted: Thu, 20 Aug 2015 12:24:41 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Manipulated
First Published: Issue 26 - Spring 2001

A Portfolio of photographic work by Victor Sloan. Published in Issue 26 of Source, Spring 2001. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 32 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 20 Aug 2015 08:53:25 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 32 - Autumn 2002

What are you looking at when you look at a portrait? Stefanie Grebe traces the modern definition of portraiture back to the Renaissance. In this definition a photograph is decisively a portrait if an idea of the sitter's character is conveyed by the picture. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘From ESToril to Firmount’
by: Martina Clawson
Posted: Thu, 20 Aug 2015 07:25:48 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Family
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

From ESToril to Firmount is an autobiographical assemblage of images centred around the family home. Both my Mother and Father are remarried with young children from these new relationships. I am interested in exploring their family lives. The raw material has come from foraging through their family albums and from my photographs and video footage. The edited work cuts between images of domestic interiors and the family. The camera tentatively negotiates and reveals the family. The work was on show at The Conway Mill, Conway Street, Belfast from 13th June - 22nd June 2001. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘I Am My Mother's Daughter’
by: Ursula Burke
Posted: Wed, 19 Aug 2015 16:59:24 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Family
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

This work attempts to explore the worlds of my mother and my daughter, and my relationship to the both of them. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Deirdre Power
Posted: Wed, 19 Aug 2015 08:24:42 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

These images were made after a number of years working in O'Hanlon's Bar in Astoria, New York. I gained the trust and friendship of these men through my job as a bartender. The men were either happily divorced or desperate to get married. They granted me access to the private worlds of their apartments and allowed me to produce the following set of portraits. The work was on show at Tiskel Arts Centre in Cork in June 2001. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Like Father, Like Son’
by: Joseph Duggan
Posted: Mon, 17 Aug 2015 10:27:49 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

Our current consumer society confronts images of constructed worlds on a daily basis. I am fascinated by photographs in advertising, saturated with fantastical, idealised, apparently 'normal' views of life. The series of work Like Father Like Son, explores masculine ideals. These photographs depict various 'real-life' scenarios presumed to occur between a man and his young child in 'normal', daily life. The youth and man are played by a child-mannequin and myself respectively. Their tone is deliberately romantic, and the situations portrayed are easy to recognise. My hope is that these works challenge what people believe they see in photographs. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Relentless Landscapes’
by: Niamh Ann Kelly
Posted: Thu, 13 Aug 2015 08:17:45 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 26 - Spring 2001

In her exhibition Too Dark for Night, at the Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, Clare Langan has mounted an exhibition that seeks to explore the nature of the desert, in a way that seems to mirror Coehlo's description' The exhibition features a short film and a series of photographic prints, stills from the film. It is the display of these prints, though they are individually of merit, which provides the only weak link in this presentation as they are viewed en route to the film and serve in that context to reduce the potential impact of the main work. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Equivocation and Renewal’
by: Siún Hanrahan
Posted: Thu, 13 Aug 2015 06:43:26 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 26 - Spring 2001

Martina Corry's Photogenic Drawings exhibition offers the viewer surfaces in which areas of deep shadow dissolve into a pale undulating expanse, and soft shifting tones are punctuated by a busy crinkling. But, and this may be disconcerting in a photographic exhibition, there is no 'thing' for the viewer to see. No thing has had its likeness taken, there is no scene to be discerned through the photographs. There is only the photographic surface to attend to. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Re-enter Ophelia’
by: Stefanie Grebe
Posted: Thu, 13 Aug 2015 05:44:47 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Religious
First Published: Issue 26 - Spring 2001

Extreme Unction - From the Ophelia Room by Abigail O'Brien is the fifth installation in her series Sacraments. The series relates to the Catholic convention of the Seven Sacraments, with the Fifth Sacrament being the Extreme Unction. The exhibition combines a small photograph and ten large-format photo works with five glass cases containing small flower embroideries stitched by the artist, a sound-piece and a thawing urn moulded from ice. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Performance and Photography’
by: Dougal McKenzie
Posted: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 08:40:19 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Performance
First Published: Issue 26 - Spring 2001

Perhaps the first 'set up' occurred when Yves Klein performed The Painter of Space Hurls Himsetf into the Void in Paris in 1960. Throwing himself from a high wall, he then had the tarpaulin bearers removed from the recorded image and presented the altered photograph as a truthful statement. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Seeing Through the Comfort Blanket’
by: Colin Darke
Posted: Tue, 11 Aug 2015 10:49:17 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Gender
First Published: Issue 26 - Spring 2001

Phil Collins' Face Value is made up of five parts - four series of photographs and a four-monitor video installation. Collins says that the theme running through the show is its critique of masculinity. This is true, but I feel it reaches beyond this to encompass a broader observation of human consciousness. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Aesthetics in the Cyborg Gallery’
by: Tracey Heatherington
Posted: Tue, 11 Aug 2015 05:41:27 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Scientific
First Published: Issue 26 - Spring 2001

What does 'science' look like? Pictures of the laboratory, its human protagonists, its instrumentation and its objects of knowledge come to us from fictional genres, textbooks, newscasts and popular magazines. When we look for classic models of scientific practice we may think of the gentlemen of the Royal Society in Victorian England, describing their experiments in the refined society of the drawing room, or the mad scientists of old horror movies, whose intellectual pursuits are profoundly antisocial. What we take for granted about the relationship between science and society, with all its possible utopic and dystopic transformations, is ultimately fixed in these images at large in the cultural imagination. Inasmuch as we expect science to shape the ways we live and work in the future, our visions of that future have changed along with our changing visions of science. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Metropoli’
by: Colin Graham
Posted: Mon, 10 Aug 2015 05:25:04 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 26 - Spring 2001

When cities change they create and multiply nostalgias. What was once the shock of the materially new accretes layers of its own over the years. Buildings, corners, junctions and doorways become smeared with the ends and beginnings of moods and extraordinary stories, or just the comforting repetition of everyday life. By erasing these smuts of time, the new building or the fresh, open-planned space can look like the embarrassed expression on a sheepish unknown face, with a strangeness which is an abomination to the city's ease with its own complexity. By our stage in city life the sight of the new has a superficial confidence, but it is always in danger of being overwhelmed by the spectres of those nostalgic pasts, which call it to account, challenging it to belong to the city, to either create its own history quickly, or refute the city's pasts for the sake of the future. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Metropoli’
by: John Davies
Posted: Mon, 10 Aug 2015 04:18:06 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 26 - Spring 2001

John Davies's photographs of Belfast, part of his Metropoli project, include what appears to be the ultimate in Belfast nostalgia; one of Harland & Wolff's cranes seen from the top of other, and the city in the background. Davies's images have the initial appearance of superficiality, yet their uncanniness and perception grows with a lingering gaze, and the photographs take on a hazy, shimmering appearance that questions our own ways of looking at the industrial landscape. Davies takes us to the edge, his elevated position as seeing eye brings on a kind of urban vertigo. ln the Harland & Wolff shot Belfast fades away into a silvery palette and becomes a cloud city. The yard's own once vastly peopled spaces are now the site of an impending grand dereliction, and the crane is a lonely skeletal structure, splay-legged and graceful. Above it the city is apparently supported on its beam, but the clouds move against the viewing eye and the city is actually being squeezed into the sky. Whatever kind of new day this suggests, it leaves behind the sense of a yesterday which has been hollowed out; this is, foremost, a photograph of the unused space beneath the crane, pointed to by the striking lines of the shed which in turn supports the beam. The yard's past is irretrievable, this shot implies, and its hold over the city is now only, and at best, an architectural anomaly. Even this dominance is undermined in another of Davies's images, looking across the river towards the new odyssey complex, in which the two H & w cranes stand at the edge of the image with the appearance of dutifully invited but unfashionable guests at an opening night. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Bird Men’
by: Audrey Flynn
Posted: Fri, 07 Aug 2015 08:01:38 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 26 - Spring 2001

A Portfolio of photographic work by Audrey Flynn. Published in Issue 26 of Source, Spring 2001. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘An Awkward Proximity with Nature’
by: Fiona Kearney
Posted: Thu, 06 Aug 2015 06:31:33 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 26 - Spring 2001

Paul Seawright's recent exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery continues the artist's enquiry into the borderlands of contemporary society. The overtly political photographic series that defined Seawright's early career have been replaced by a more generic representation of space, the study of an intermediate ground caught between city, suburb and countryside. The photographs in The Map could have been taken anywhere in the Western World. The same concrete, earth and skeletal trees are to be found in every encounter between the rural and the built environment. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 26 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 06 Aug 2015 06:03:07 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 26 - Spring 2001

Photography has often been seen as having a dual nature; part art, part science. In this issue we have two essays that look at photography in the scientific domain. Tracey Heatherington discusses the way science is pictured in a popular science magazine and the implications this has for the way science is understood in the broader culture. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘A Moving Display Cabinet’
by: Richard West
Posted: Wed, 05 Aug 2015 06:42:30 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Street
First Published: Issue 19 - Summer 1999

Tom Wood has been photographing around Liverpool for over fifteen years from buses and bus stops. His subject might be the changing face of urban Britain (from black and white to colour), people on pavements or the fortunes of Liverpool but his manner appears somewhat oblique. His working method involved exposing a large amount of film over a long period from which the final work was then edited. If the ratio of film exposed to printed pictures is anything to go by these must be carefully considered images. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Between Image and Text’
by: Siún Hanrahan
Posted: Wed, 05 Aug 2015 05:46:09 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Architectural
First Published: Issue 19 - Summer 1999

Gerard Byrne's show at Catalyst Arts in Belfast consists of four large, untitled colour prints on aluminium accompanied by a four-scene audio drama, 'Treatment', made in collaboration with Sarah Pierce. The photographs are of unoccupied office spaces at night, taken from outside. The audio drama presents what seem to be snippets of a pulp fiction plot. The spaces Byrne presents and his visual decisions in presenting them are unremarkable. Other than discerning that each of the photographs was taken through a window, our perception is not challenged. As Sontag observed, 'What it once took a very intelligent eye to see, anyone can see now'. So what are we being asked to look at? One possibility suggested by this particular juxtaposition of images and audio drama is that the relationship of image to reference be superseded. As a kind of caption, this fragmented, slapstick drama indicates that the photographs are no longer expected to 'speak for truth'. The relationship between image and 'text' invites imaginative projection into the image rather than beyond it to the world. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Remnants of The Conflict’
by: Andrea Lange
Posted: Tue, 04 Aug 2015 05:33:10 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 19 - Summer 1999

In the small space of the gallery I am surrounded by Anthony Haughey's large, square-format colour photographs. They were taken during the recent armistice, and show the no man's land between the borders of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Everywhere And Nowhere’
by: Fintan O'Toole
Posted: Mon, 03 Aug 2015 07:22:23 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 19 - Summer 1999

For most of his career, one of the strongest strains in Martin Parr's work has been a sense of place. His images have always been witty, often comic and sometimes surreal. But they have unfolded within a very clear documentary framework. His large-scale projects were shaped by the need to document a place and a community. His images of the West of Ireland (in A Fair Day) or of a dilapidated English seaside resort (The Last Resort) were certainly not naive or sentimental, but they were imbued with a deep particularity. They capture a place and a time, a society caught in a moment of transition. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘What Is Contemporary?’
by: Fiona Kearney
Posted: Mon, 03 Aug 2015 05:31:30 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 19 - Summer 1999

The Contemporary Photography exhibition at the Kerlin Gallery introduces the work of five international photographers; Uta Barth, Oliver Boberg, Jeff Burton, Esko Männikkö and Walter Niedermayr. These artists have been selected 'to represent a mini-survey of current trends within international contemporary photography'. The work is indeed varied; Barth's ambient compositions, Boberg's urban sites, Burton's voyeuristic glance, Männikkö's social documentary and Niedermayr's tourist-trafficked landscapes all illustrate different strands of contemporary photographic practice. The absence of a curatorial schema, however, and the modest selection of photographs on show limits the achievement of the exhibition. The pictures offer only a glimpse of the individual oeuvres to which they belong and even their collective presentation is no more than a sliver of the international photographic scene. Nonetheless, the viewer is posed with an interesting question; what is contemporary about these photographs? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Influence of Context’
by: Justin Carville
Posted: Mon, 03 Aug 2015 04:06:25 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 19 - Summer 1999

Group shows can at times be difficult terrain to negotiate. The concerns of individual artists can be usurped by the overall agenda of the institution or curator, and the impact of individual works can be lost amidst the varying scale of the pieces which surround it. The works can thus compliment or clash with one another, and the show is accordingly a critical success or curatorial failure. First Look, at the RHA in Dublin falls into the former category in both instances not least for the interesting combination of mediums, from photography and etching to video and sculpture. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Ulster Youth’
by: Sarah McWilliams
Posted: Sun, 02 Aug 2015 10:50:19 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Family
First Published: Issue 19 - Summer 1999

A Portfolio of photographic work by Sarah McWilliams. Published in Issue 19 of Source, Summer 1999. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Drumgor Spar, Craigavon’
by: Ruairí Watson
Posted: Sat, 01 Aug 2015 13:23:41 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 19 - Summer 1999

A Portfolio of photographic work by Ruairí Watson. Published in Issue 19 of Source, Summer 1999. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Growing Up in Belfast / Arranged Marriage, Pakistan’
by: Cathy Loughran
Posted: Fri, 31 Jul 2015 09:48:01 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 8 - Summer 1996

A Portfolio of photographic work by Cathy Loughran. Published in Issue 8 of Source, Summer 1996. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Irish Photography in Paris’
by: Christian Caujolle
Posted: Thu, 30 Jul 2015 07:59:47 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 8 - Summer 1996

In France, 1996 is the year of the Irish. From 'Irish Imagination' (Imaginaire Irlandais) to 'Celtic Spring' (Printemps Celte), from anthologies of Irish poetry to celebrations of Joyce and Beckett, from music to storytelling, and from dance to lectures on whiskey, it's impossible for even a moderately well-informed French person to avoid Ireland. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘First Event’
by: Patricia Lambe
Posted: Thu, 30 Jul 2015 07:07:17 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 8 - Summer 1996

The Shoreditch 'First Event' was held during April in East London. It 'launched the concept of the first Shoreditch Foto Biennale', an international photography festival to be held in 1998. Organised in conjunction with Creative Camera magazine, 'First Event' was in fact an ambitious and well organised series of events which included six exhibitions, a day of studio visits, artists presentations and a curators' meeting. Delegates attended from the UK, Belgium, India, Ireland, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands. Exhibitions were held over a diverse range of sites, from vacant shop units and builders' hoardings to local galleries. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Everyday Occurrences’
by: Michael Crone
Posted: Wed, 29 Jul 2015 11:15:45 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 8 - Summer 1996

Initial preconceptions, derived from the title suggested an insight into the singles culture, the lads' night out, casual army, lager and cumbersome seduction attempts with inebriated females wearing white high heels. This, however, could not be further from the truth. Peter Houston comments on the relationship between people and place, drawing direct comparison between Western and Indian cultures. The directive statement 'There is no real difference in their place or ours', reveals Houston's agenda immediately, making connections rather than distinctions between the world's societies. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Baptism’
by: Nicholas Allen
Posted: Wed, 29 Jul 2015 09:02:28 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Gender
First Published: Issue 8 - Summer 1996

I'm sitting in the middle of Belfast with a helicopter blaring over my head and more than enough police to act as extras in an Irish Braveheart standing in the streets below me. I can't find a good channel on the radio so I've settled for a violin from the far end of the tuner to lament my late night in the office. In this context photographs of Baby shoes and elaborate Salt cellars in the shape of a pram do not seem like the keys to a discussion of the world's problems, a few of which are so dully paraded in front of me. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Angels in the Architecture’
by: Paul M. O'Reilly
Posted: Wed, 29 Jul 2015 07:52:20 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 8 - Summer 1996

We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men (and women), but are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings. R.D. Laing's The Politics of Experience (1967) documents some forms of our contemporary violation of ourselves. The images of Sarajevo's children by the photographer Louis Jammes, fifteen of which rose like apparitions to hover in and around Dublin's Temple Bar, can be understood as further evidence of our predicament . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Wider Angles’
by: Linda McClelland
Posted: Tue, 28 Jul 2015 05:22:20 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Gender
First Published: Issue 8 - Summer 1996

There is always the question of ownership in a collaborative body of work. For example, how much say did the photographer have in the initial stages and on completion of the project? When work is commissioned other questions arise such as who has commissioned it, for what reasons and how was the photographer selected? Equally, where will the resulting work be displayed and why this particular venue? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Satellite’
by: Aidan Dunne
Posted: Mon, 27 Jul 2015 11:14:15 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 8 - Summer 1996

The film historian Eric Rhode, writing some years ago about Andrez Wajda's film 'Ashes and Diamonds', suggested that at key moments in the narrative, the director contrived to undermine the viewer's habitual sense of superiority. He did so, as Rhode saw it, by plunging us into the middle of the action, leaving us unsure and disorientated, even literally unbalanced. Michael J. Arlen, writing about television news coverage of the Vietnam war in the 1960's, said that a crucial turning point in reporting the war came when a renowned reporter found himself caught up in an action and appeared on air visibly alarmed, breathless and unsure of what was going on. What was significant, Arlen noted, was not the chaos of battle, because everyone knew that people were being killed all the time, but the fact that such an imperturbable authority figure was out of breath. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Images Should Speak for Themselves... but’
by: Catherine Duncan
Posted: Mon, 27 Jul 2015 04:34:24 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 8 - Summer 1996

When is wearing high heels and your best frock an act of defiance? Well, one occasion is a war zone in Bosnia. It is this sort of detail that inspires Tom Stoddart to take the pictures he does, whether the subject be Bosnia, Beirut or Romania. Detail encourages a more intimate connection with images, with their subjects, touches us where long shots of massed hardware and troops cannot. Detail etches a truth that cannot be denied by any future revisionist histories. Detail or close ups (not telephoto ones) are proof. If Stoddart photographs a woman sheltering from attack trying to protect her children, it is because he is there with them. He is especially in awe of the women of Sarajevo, their creativity and resilience in the face of adversity, the subtle symbols of resistance that they represent, their basic heroism in feeding and clothing a family of ten in spite of the shattering of their lives. To achieve his type of detail, Stoddart gets close to his subjects mentally and physically. This closeness is bound up in the ethics of his photography: he wishes to work with his subjects in every sense, to know them, to photograph the intimate emotion on a face that could tell a thousand horror stories, to enable people to speak 'through' him. He, the medium, has the possibility to let the subjects tell their story worldwide and he thinks that the people he photographs recognise his sincerity, sense of purpose and the possible results of the exposure of the images. The intended result justifies and spurs a vocation built around war and suffering. It would be miserly to fault a commitment and idealism that might seem naive in a less seasoned veteran. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 8 Editorial’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Mon, 27 Jul 2015 04:03:51 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 8 - Summer 1996

In this issue we look at work from several projects that challenge the relationship between photographer and photographed. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Magnum Cinema... Neat Slice’
by: Daniel Meadows
Posted: Sat, 25 Jul 2015 05:25:38 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 7 - Spring 1996

Photographs, wrote Susan Sontag, may be more memorable than moving images because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow... Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again . . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Truths and Fictions’
by: Frank Miller
Posted: Fri, 24 Jul 2015 05:36:43 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Manipulated
First Published: Issue 7 - Spring 1996

The Pedro Meyer show, Truths and Fictions, stopped in the Gallery of Photography, Dublin, in February during it's world tour. The work is remarkable if only because it heralds a new era in photography, warmly embracing the potential of digital manipulation of photographs. Manipulation of photographs has been with us since it's invention but Meyer brings things very much further by applying software packages such as Adobe Photoshop to the traditionally purist documentary medium. In effect Meyer combines elements from different images, often taken many years apart, to create what could be called fictional truths, if you can stomach the contradiction implied in the title. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Once in a Life’
by: Fintan O'Toole
Posted: Thu, 23 Jul 2015 08:33:29 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Family
First Published: Issue 7 - Spring 1996

Susan Sontag, in her book On Photography, noted a study in France that found families with children twice as likely to have a camera as families with none. 'Not to take pictures of one's children, particularly when they are small', she writes, 'is a sign of parental indifference...' And she sees this not as a tribute to children and the family, but as evidence of a crisis. For her, the family photograph album stands as a sign of the breakdown of family connections, photography coming along 'to restate symbolically the imperilled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life'. And this is part of her general critique of the medium of photography itself, her belief that photographs do not so much reproduce experience as reduce it, not so much signify life as replace it. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Writing the Light’
by: Aidan Mathews
Posted: Thu, 23 Jul 2015 06:35:25 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Miscellaneous
First Published: Issue 22 - Spring 2000

My father censored text, my mother images. Had they divided the work of curfew between them or was it simply that each had a special vigilance - and so a special weakness - for the form they monitored? It was my dad who threw out The Misery of Christianity, a Pelican paperback from the mid-seventies - indeed, he tore it in two and chucked it into the coal fire, though I'd learned my own ironic anti-clericalism from him; and it was my mother, on the other hand, who habitually interfered with my bottom desk-drawer to search out pristine selections of Mayfair or Men Only from underneath decoy student copybooks, old aerograms and bottled snowstorms. Text and the instabilities of print didn't bother her, but the women - naked except for their stilettos and lipstick, up-ended beside a two-bar electric heater - trembled between her hands. What shook my father was pollination, seeds on the invisible wind, tares among the wheat, the radiation sickness of a new idea for which nothing has prepared you. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Communication and Development’
by: Michael Brown
Posted: Wed, 22 Jul 2015 06:55:09 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Social
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

Since the 1950's the role of information and communication in social development has been increasingly recognised, and increasingly questioned. In the 1960s debate centred upon the Global Information Flow; the unilateral flow of information from the 'developed' countries to the 'developing' countries. This primarily comprised of the western concept of journalism, western mass media, western communication technology, popular western culture and language, values and news. The dominant role of western media in news definition was seen as distorting and excluding authentic cultural values and expression from developing countries. This negative treatment of developing countries being ultimately transferred back to them through their dependence on western news agencies and technology. While the debate around the Global Information Flow continued, simultaneously there began to emerge the practice of development. In the aftermath of the Second World War, countries devastated by conflict began to rebuild. Stronger, richer governments sought not only to rebuild themselves internally, but to influence and control the development of poorer countries through aid programmes. Western non-governmental organisations (NGOs) also began to emerge to deliver poverty relief programmes; shifting their attention, a few decades later, from Europe to the so called 'Third World'. Within these social development programmes organisations like UNICEF advanced the role of communication and today 'Development Communication' is a recognised discipline both in academic circles with specialist journals and texts, and in practice. Attitudes towards Development Communication have changed over the decades, mirroring the way that attitudes to development theory and practice have changed. To understand the role of Development Communication it is necessary to understand the paradigms of development theory. Development theory can be broadly generalised under three paradigms; Mainstream Development, Alternative Development and Post-Development. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 7 Editorial’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Tue, 21 Jul 2015 18:05:10 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 7 - Spring 1996

Involving people more directly in making their own images and encouraging them to engage directly with photography form a link for this issue. Belfast Exposed workshops with St. Malachy's and St. John Vianney Youth Clubs provided access for their members to cameras and darkrooms. This enabled them to build up a contemporary archive of their own images of the Markets and Lower Ormeau. This was carried out in conjunction with the compilation and research of 'historical images' gathered in the area. We are pleased to publish some of their explorations in the 'Portfolio Pages'. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Romantic Ireland is Dead and Gone’
by: Fintan O'Toole
Posted: Mon, 20 Jul 2015 06:38:09 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

At the level of common sense, nothing is as real as a place. Roads, buildings, rivers, mountains, fields and bogs can be seen and touched, traversed and inhabited. Unless we are followers of Bishop Berkeley, we know that they are there even when we are not looking at them. Indeed, for many people, they are most real when we are not looking at them but rather recollecting them from the distance in time and space that is exile. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Creating an Atmosphere of Sophistication’
by: Katy Radford
Posted: Sun, 19 Jul 2015 06:02:40 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

KR: Talk to me about your involvement in the campaign, what was your brief? / PR: ACS came to us to handle the North of lreland, they had an agency in the South. lt was a pretty straightforward brief - the task was just to re- ESTablish and reposition ACS in the Northern Market and break down some of the taboos about cosmetic surgery. This whole campaign was preceded by one that had a very different tone and style, it was very simple mono shots with the line 'For a more confident life just follow the dotted line'. A 'Cut on the dotted line' approach. The client specifically wanted to stir up the pot a little bit with this campaign, they felt that NI was ready for a more aggressive approach. They had a situation where down south they had generated tons of free copy, an enormous amount of publicity with the images they had used there with the grandmother, Halina, that you can now see in Belfast. And they had wanted to do that up here. But we were against using that strategy up here because we didn't think it was right to feature the MD for the company. We wanted to develop a brand and image for the company that wasn't based around any individual who happened to be in the company at that particular time. We felt it was more short sighted and that it wouldn't do anything for the brand in the long term. / KR: Talk to me first about the various images that you did choose. / PR: I'll take you through each of them. Humour was important. This one, she's got a beautiful clear face, brilliant complexion and She's just a very attractive, soft face. lt is actually about hyperhydrosis so the headline 'When I get damp I want to enjoy it' is just playing up on the fact that she doesn't want to get into stressful situations, She doesn't want to sweat excessively. The copy is nice and simple on that procedure. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Creating an Atmosphere of Sophistication’
by: Orla Fitzpatrick
Posted: Sun, 19 Jul 2015 05:36:25 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Advertising
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

OF: Was this the first time that billboards were used to advertise cosmetic surgery in the ROI? / EW: Yes. The company took 50 billboard sites in Dublin, 20 in Cork, and recently expanded the campaign to Belfast. I don't know of any agencies or any clinics that have used outdoor 48 sheets 19.5m squared as we have. / OF: The company's earlier campaigns used professional models, why did this change? / EW: It was purely the decision of the Company's Chairman, to use Halina. He thought because of the amount of surgery she has had over the years that she would be living proof of the merits of the company. (She has had liposculpture, a facelift, cheekbone implants, under-eye lifts, breast implants and lip enhancement). She is more realistic than a young model. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Cosmetic Cuts and Body Politics’
by: Katy Radford
Posted: Sat, 18 Jul 2015 16:26:02 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Commercial
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

The body politics brought to the fore with issues of self-fashioning and 'corrective' cosmetic Surgery have received much attention within a feminist critique, but until recently have not been to the fore of popular attention in the North of lreland. Cosmetic surgery was, in the main, both out of sight and out of mind. Balsamo's article On the Cutting Edge in Camera Obscura, Chapkiss (1986) and Friedan (1993) offer but three examples of the many scholars who consider at length the political and philosophical issues which arise when the business of the medical ESTablishments and the cosmetics industries profit from the vulnerabilities of women. However until this year, their concerns have remained a matter of personal or academic concern rather than the meat of public debate. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘At The Top Table’
by: Fiona Kearney
Posted: Sat, 18 Jul 2015 11:46:43 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

In her recent exhibition at the Gallery of Photography, Dutch artist Jacqueline Hassink presents a series of photographs that depict the boadroom tables of those multinational corporations that make the top forty list of the largest industrial companies of Europe. Each image is accompanied by a small panel that informs the viewer of basic facts about the company such as its location, industry, turnover, and of course, its chart spot in this corporate top of the pops. The artist also provides us with a section of salient facts about the table and ends with her own special comments that document a personal impression of the space. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Emerging Perspectives’
by: Slavka Sverakova
Posted: Fri, 17 Jul 2015 05:31:59 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

Nine out of the twenty nine artists selected by Lynne Cooke for this year's Perspective exhibition, from over 330 submissions, are photographers. The history of photography had been characterized by comparison with painting and by an entrenchment in debates about the 'real','truth' and 'representation'. The way in which photography contests its representational role, is a measure of it being like contemporary art practices that allow a meaning to slide. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Dead House UR’
by: Justin Carville
Posted: Thu, 16 Jul 2015 07:36:45 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

Gregor Schneider's Dead House UR is made up of an installation of some three hundred largely black and white photographs with a number of sculptural pieces such as Gravestone, Treasure Box (head, stomach and gut) and Negative Stone. These are accompanied by a twenty minute video screening of the artist struggling to crawl through the various orifices that lead to his installations in the Dead House's constructed spaces. As the artist grunts and groans working his way through the house with video camera in hand he is excreted from one space to another. The bulk of the exhibition however is made up of the large clusters of photographs reproducing various sections and installations of the house. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 82 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 01 Jun 2015 09:52:11 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 82 - Spring 2015

The basic elements of photography, like focus and composition, that go towards the making of an individual picture are not often discussed today because, it is implied, there is no shortage of pictures of all kinds. A more pressing question is how to select them. Whether in the use of appropriated imagery or in the sequencing of a book the key decisions are seen as less about framing than editing. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2015 Selectors: Emma Bowkett’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Wed, 01 Apr 2015 07:40:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

We chat to Emma Bowkett, Picture Editor at Picture Editor at the Financial Times / FT Weekend Magazine and Selector for the BA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2015. / What is your core role in the job that you do? / We are a small team who work closely together. Most features in the magazine start life as a pitch to my editor. As soon as a story has been commissioned I will be thinking about the photographic approach. It is my job to pair a photographer to an assignment. The photographer I choose determines the feel of that project beyond the words, so a typical day can involve meetings with commissioning editors, art directors and writers, as well as liaising with photographers. A large part of my time is spent sourcing photo stories and new photographers for the magazine. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2015 Selectors: Fiona Shields’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Thu, 19 Mar 2015 06:32:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

We chat to Lu Bowan, Editor & Head of Talent at Making Pictures and Selector for the BA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2015. / What is your core role in the job that you do? / Artist development and management is the core of what I do at Making Pictures in tandem with marketing the agency as a whole in new and interesting ways. As a consultant and editor I collaborate to produce visually engaging projects. / How do you decide on what makes an interesting photograph or photographic project? / This is of course subjective, for me it's how I engage with the imagery or narratives. Does it stir something? How has the photographer explored their subject? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Careers In Photography: Medical Photographer’
by: Melanie Yeneralski
Posted: Tue, 24 Mar 2015 05:39:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Medical

hat does your job entail day to day in a normal week? / My Job is guided by a staff rota that covers areas of Clinical photography (studio, wards, emergency and operating theatres), Ophthalmic imaging, pathology, video and PR photography. We have a great team spirit at the Media Studio, we are lucky to be able to cover so many types of photography and video within our roles. / Did you study photography or something else and how was it useful? / I studied Professional Photography, the course covered a wide range of photography, from studio product stills to documentary photography. I found the course very useful and it helped me with the technical aspect to photography. We would also process and print our own films (colour and BW). . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Careers In Photography: Unit Photographer’
by: Helen Sloan
Posted: Tue, 24 Mar 2015 05:38:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Commercial

What does your job entail day to day in a normal week?/ The job of Unit photographer (on Thrones specifically) spans several different areas. The first, and most important is scene coverage. Then there are the 'specials' - portraits of individual cast members in my photo studio, used for posters or merchandising. Although the job isn’t just "shoot-the-takes-technical" - I do get to be creative and interpret the show in my own way. And then there's behind the scenes documentary. So basically, it's my job to shoot everything. Ha! The quantity of material is huge. Then there's the editing, retouching and colouring (grading), meta tagging the cast and crew before the pictures go off to NYC. This gig is all encompassing for me – and right from the first day of shooting on the pilot, I was completely hooked. I was given the opportunity to shape a style for the show photography. That's an amazing gift for any photographer. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Careers In Photography: Freelance Photographer’
by: Paul Murphy
Posted: Tue, 24 Mar 2015 05:37:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Advertising

What does your job entail day to day in a normal week?/ A working week for a freelance photographer does not always mean actually working to earn money. During an average week in an average year maybe only one day will be spent actually earning a living. The rest of that week is generally given over to the challenge of finding that work. There are many different ways that this achieved. Here are some of the tasks that are important in order to have a career as an advertising photographer. The first and most important is my product, which are my photographs. Without these I would not be able to describe my ability to potential employers. My photographs show my experience and skill within a certain area of advertising photography. So part of my week has to be given over to making new images so that I keep my 'shop front' looking fresh and appealing to prospective clients. So it is very important to get out there with your camera and make images because it is these images and the experience gained from making them that will take you to the next step of your career. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Careers In Photography: Picture Editor’
by: Frank Miller
Posted: Tue, 24 Mar 2015 05:36:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Photojournalism

What does your job entail day to day in a normal week?/ As somebody said to me a very long time ago there is no such thing as normal in this business. I think that's what makes it interesting and in an ideal world keeps newspapers, and their online versions fresh. The clue I guess is in the New part of Newspaper. My role as picture editor is to make The Irish Times as visually interesting and relevant to our readers as possible. This involves commissioning photographers and sourcing pictures from around Ireland and the world via our staff photographers, local freelances and major agencies. We have contracts with the major news agencies such as Reuters, Getty etc to provide us with picture feeds daily. Typically we get about 5,000 plus new images a day and on our live system have about 120,000 pictures accessible to us for use at any one time. We have several million archived images also. It takes a fair bit of work to sift through all these images to find the good ones and in particular the ones relevant to each days mix of news. The trick is to find fresh images and avoid as far as possible repeating visual clichés. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Careers In Photography: Curator’
by: Elizabeth Kirwin
Posted: Tue, 24 Mar 2015 05:35:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Archive

What does your job entail day to day in a normal week?/ Most of my day to day work is about managing a National cultural resource. This includes: Preservation of and enabling access to the NPA's collection of 5.2m photos. Housing, listing, cataloguing and digitisation of the NPA collections. Staff, volunteer and intern management. The NPA building and security. Overseeing NPA Reader Services including reprographics. Devising and implementing the NPA exhibition programme. Managing NPA external relationships: exhibitors, interns, volunteers, local authorities and most importantly, NPA collection Donors, and sponsors. I also promote the NPA through outreach activities including lectures, interviews, opening exhibitions, keynote international conference addresses, etc. What are the roles of the key people around you? Preserving and securing the NPA collections. Rehousing, listing and cataloguing the NPA Collections. Running the NPA's Reader Services programme. Digitisation of NPA collections. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Careers In Photography: Assistant Photographer’
by: Al Higgins
Posted: Tue, 24 Mar 2015 05:34:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Commercial

What does your job entail day to day in a normal week? / Everything changes from week to week - I tend to spend one week of every month on a travel assignment which could be anywhere from the west of Ireland to the west coast of America. The rest of the month is mostly based in Dublin, where it's a good mix of actually taking photographs, meeting agencies to show work, talking to other creatives about current projects or at my desk post processing images. / What do you have to know about? / Starting out as an assistant, knowing the basics of what lighting gear is or does is a great help, but you can always ask questions. If you don't know how to do something you've been asked, being honest about it is the best way to learn. As a photographer, you'll have learned skills from working with other photographers as an assistant, such as learning how to coordinate your schedule, talk to clients, as well as know your style and how you would like to go about photographing a commission. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Careers In Photography: Senior Curator’
by: Karen Downey
Posted: Tue, 24 Mar 2015 05:33:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Gallery-Based

What does your job entail day to day in a normal week? / My job is to devise and develop an exhibitions policy and annual programme of exhibitions for Belfast Exposed Gallery. On a day-to-day basis, I might be researching artists’ work, liaising with a photographer on anything from concept development to installation design. I am also responsible for writing the exhibition-related texts, including exhibition texts, marketing material and press releases. / What are the roles of the key people you work with? / The other key role at Belfast Exposed is that of ‘Curator and Gallery Manager’. This person is mainly responsible for the technical, logistical and administrative aspects of the exhibition programme. Belfast Exposed also runs a paid internship for University of Ulster graduates, so we have a Gallery Intern who supports the other gallery staff. Their main role is make sure the gallery is open and welcoming and that the exhibitions are invigilated. They also manage the day-to-day running of the volunteer programme. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Careers In Photography: Heritage Photographer’
by: Tony Corey
Posted: Tue, 24 Mar 2015 05:32:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Aerial

What does your job entail day to day in a normal week? / The one thing I would say is that, there is not an average day or week, so I’ll lay out a week. Monday: (AM) Team meetings/briefs.(PM) Fix in place the schedule for the weeks work, contact all those who need to be contacted and lay out all equipment needed, charge any batteries or power sources, print out maps and any other paperwork required. Tuesday: Leave home 6.30am for 2 hour drive to Airport, meet pilot and go over flight plan for the day, (with some archaeological sites, aerial photographs can provide much more information than those images taken from the ground). Change into warm clothing and extra layers, take flight and shoot for two hours. Return to office and download all imagery and check. Recharge batteries, clean lenses used and sensor if required. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2015 Selectors: Lu Bowan’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Thu, 19 Mar 2015 06:32:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

We chat to Lu Bowan, Editor & Head of Talent at Making Pictures and Selector for the BA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2015. / What is your core role in the job that you do? / Artist development and management is the core of what I do at Making Pictures in tandem with marketing the agency as a whole in new and interesting ways. As a consultant and editor I collaborate to produce visually engaging projects. / How do you decide on what makes an interesting photograph or photographic project? / This is of course subjective, for me it's how I engage with the imagery or narratives. Does it stir something? How has the photographer explored their subject? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 81 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 09 Mar 2015 21:08:09 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 81 - Winter 2014

For many photographers there is a difference between the work they make commercially and their 'personal work'. However, this distinction belies the fact that photographs produced to a brief can nevertheless be creative or that pictures made for the most practical reasons can be interesting to a wider audience. In this issue we speak to editors, creative directors and photographers who work with photography with specific ends in mind, be it medical photography, architectural photography or 3D photography to be viewed on tablet computers. In each case we wanted to know how the purpose to which the pictures would be put dictated the way they were made. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Graduate Photography Online 2015 Selectors: Malcolm Dickson’
by: Stephen Hull
Posted: Wed, 18 Feb 2015 08:40:00 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Graduate

We chat to Malcolm Dickson, Gallery Director at Street Level Photoworks and Selector for the BA phase of Graduate Photography Online 2015. / What is your core role in the job that you do? / As the Director I have the dual roles of programming (curating) a diverse series of exhibitions, events and professional development opportunities, whilst ensuring that these are integrated into the other various function of the organisation - production facilities, for example. I manage the organisation on a daily basis in terms of its public remit, and I also deal with developments. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Lost and Found’
by: Ciaran Carson
Posted: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 11:10:25 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Found
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

The 'of' in LOTS of LOVE seems an afterthought, its lower case squeezed in between the capitals. Below are a string of Xs and os. X stands for a kiss, O for a hug: there are nineteen kisses, and twenty, maybe twenty-and-a-half, hugs on the scrap of paper. Where it has been torn, just above the message, it has a soft, indefinite edge that suggests heavy paper, or card - photographic paper, perhaps. But what I am looking at is a photograph of a scrap of paper, and it is difficult to tell. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Found Families in Photography Found’
by: Paul Tebbs
Posted: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 12:17:42 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Found
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

For the surrealist André Breton, the involuntary perception that is occasioned by an encounter with a found object 'bears in itself the solution, symbolic or other, of a problem... The finding of an object serves here exactly the same purpose as the dream, in the sense that it frees the individual from paralysing affective scruples, comforts him and makes him understand that the obstacle he might have thought insurmountable is cleared.' . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 80 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 16:26:18 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 80 - Autumn 2014

This special issue coincides with the announcement of the winners of the Source-Cord Prize, Takashi Arai ($10,000 first prize), Andrea Grützner (second prize $1000) and Sebastian Collett (third prize $500). As part of the prize we are publishing work by the three winners along with specially commissioned essays. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Perfidious Nature’
by: Nora Donnelly
Posted: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 19:32:01 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

While each of de la Garza's ten enormous photographs speaks in its own voice - of itself and by itself - and tells its own story in its own way, there is an on-going narrative which is disclosed as the spectator moves from the first to the final piece in this show. Each individual image may exist independently, the meaning self-referential and self-contained, but as the correspondence is effected between one and the others there are added tensions, added forces, added layers. These demand the forging of conceptual/imaginative links where meaning is augmented and strengthened. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Anonymity and Angularity’
by: Alannah Hopkin
Posted: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 10:14:39 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

The cork-based French artist Franck Allais has participated in Triskel's annual multi-media event, lntermedia, and in various group shows. This is his first solo exhibition. The work is presented as three large, wall-mounted black and white photographs, and a large-format artist's book on a stand, consisting of another seventeen or so large-format prints (112cm by 72cm), mounted on card, which the viewer turns over. The photographs feature details of domestic interiors, with a man glimpsed, as it were in synecdoche - a foot, an ear, the top of a head, a hand on a sofa arm, knuckles opening a kitchen drawer, a hand holding a shower head. While the scale is grandiose, and subject matter consists of closely observed moments in everyday life. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘They Must Be Represented’
by: Aaron Kelly
Posted: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 10:51:31 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

Beaches by Trevor Appleson comprises a series of colour studio portraits shot on location at various beaches in and around the Cape Town area in South Africa. Appleson, a self-taught photographer who is originally from Johannesburg but now bases himself in London, resists using the beaches themselves as an avowedly natural and striking visual backdrop. lnstead, the portraits of his subjects, who range from the destitute to wide-boy gangsters and white professional-strata beach ravers, are produced in a portable studio using a mixture of sunlight and flash against a stark black background. The resultant photographs register a range of indifference, bemusement, embarrassment, enjoyment and cool repose amongst Appleson's subjects. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Concrete Manifestations’
by: Colin Darke
Posted: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 07:42:56 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Political
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

Victor Sloan is in the unfortunate position of having produced a large body of work with which he will always be identified - his photographs of Orange and Apprentice Boy parades, worked into through scratching negatives before printing. Unfortunate because his subsequent work is always received in reference to those earlier pieces. And of course l've just done the same, but in this case I think it's unavoidable. Without the awareness of Sloan's earlier work, this show would be a tough nut to crack. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Mingling with the Gods’
by: Rhonda Tidy
Posted: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 21:47:37 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 23 - Summer 2000

What sublime force could possibly unite Bertrand Russell and an arse struck by lightning? Lightning Strike and other stories...100 photographs from the Osman Collection, visited Enniskillen Castle recently. Introducing himself as 'an enthusiast on a limited budget', John Osman has been collecting photographs since the early 1970's. There are apparently a number of contradictory impulses at work in his collecting; buying precious old photographs and news pictures, he seems inclined to be a democrat and a connoisseur at the same time. Whereas his acquisitions include examples from Henry Fox Talbot, Francis Frith, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton and Bill Brandt, he invites the viewer to identify with the images of iconic and historic figures, Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove, Winston Churchill, Queen Elizabeth, Eamon DeValera, James Dean. He prides himself on having an eye for photographs of and by the unknown; Daguerrotype of an unknown seated man, Grannies' Yuletide, Chess Game, Oirishman on a Donkey, and so on. Making a clear distinction between himself and 'the greatest collectors', the distinction, he insists, is a matter of prestige and wealth rather than one of taste. In his own words, his collecting has enabled him to '... mingle with the gods.' . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘On the Omnibus’
by: Nicholas Allen
Posted: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 20:54:49 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 23 - Summer 2000

Daniel Meadows' exhibition at the Gallery of Photography is titled National Portraits: Now and Then. The show has two components. The first is a series of photographs Meadows made between 1973 and 1974 in the English regions. Meadows travelled to Barrow in Furness, Hartlepool and Southampton on a double-decker bus that served as his darkroom and accommodation. He named this experiment the Free Photographic Omnibus. The second is Meadows' attempt to photograph his subjects again two decades later. Where successfully located, these individuals' portraits are mounted beside those of their earlier selves. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Space in Time’
by: Niamh Ann Kelly
Posted: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 10:02:46 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Architectural
First Published: Issue 23 - Summer 2000

The current exhibition of Hiroshi Sugimoto's latest work, Architectural Series (1997-1998) at the Kerlin Gallery Dublin, comprises fifteen photographic works. He has kept constant his practice of producing black and white photographs achieved through long exposures and presented them once again in a series. However, at first glance it seems like Sugimoto has tricked us: anyone familiar with his work will expect the trademark sharp prints. In this series the focus is not accurate, the composition no longer ordered and centralized. His previous series included Seascapes and Night Seascapes ; Theatres and Drive-in Theatres ; Wax Museums and Dioramas. All were twinned in themes, all re-constructions of differing realities. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Lens and the Legal Practice’
by: Sean Doran
Posted: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 08:49:25 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Law
First Published: Issue 23 - Summer 2000

Of the many enduring images the lens has captured in the last thirty years of Ireland's troubled history, one has remained fixed in the memory as a graphic representation of a cry for peace and sanity in the midst of conflict. The image is of Father Edward Daly, waving a white handkerchief, as he walked alongside men carrying one of the victims of the Bloody Sunday shootings to a place of shelter from gunfire on the streets of Derry on the 30th of January 1972. Now that Bloody Sunday is again the subject of official scrutiny - a tribunal of inquiry chaired by Lord Saville has begun the painstaking task of reinvestigating the events of that day - photographic images of the setting in which the deaths and injuries occurred have assumed a new ex post facto importance. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘At the Natural History Museum, New York City, 5 May 2000’
by: Nicholas Adams
Posted: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 08:18:47 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Nature
First Published: Issue 23 - Summer 2000

The true rulers of the museum jungle are the packs of upper-middle class suburban young from Scarsdale, Greenwich, and White Plains. They arrive by the bus load. They are America's uberdogs in training, secure, self-confident, cossetted little treasures. They sweep through the halls, chattering, hanging on to one another for companionship, laughing uncontrollably at inaudible pieces of adolescent humor. 'No, no, no, it's really like this...' they say, trying to outdo one another. These are mating rituals. Will the girls notice? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Place of Photography in (an Irish) Commercial Art Gallery’
by: Siún Hanrahan
Posted: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 07:59:56 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Commercial
First Published: Issue 23 - Summer 2000

Photographic practices are hugely divergent, ranging from the economic and functional to the aesthetic, so that exploring the places in which photography has a role raises interesting questions about the strategies employed to contain this diversity and maintain boundaries diluted by photography's vicissitudes. This article looks at the place of photography in Dublin's Kerlin Gallery, a commercial gallery and a significant force on the contemporary Irish art scene. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Show Me a Sign’
by: Aaron Kelly
Posted: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 17:00:11 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 23 - Summer 2000

In reviewing this photograph, I felt rather like the heroine in Brian Moore's The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, scouring Belfast in search of a sign. For Eoghan McTigue's piece, displayed in the Something Forever exhibition at the Golden Thread Gallery, takes as its subject the electronic advertising screen which stood above Shaftesbury Square and now adorns Windsor Park football ground. The photograph, which is almost to scale, shows the sign displaying its test card. This image comprises a monochrome grid of black squares and shifts in tone that appear as a kind of diffused or formless chessboard, which challenges the viewer to a game of critical positioning. Additionally, the surface is occasionally punctuated by a random matrix of coloured lights. Perhaps one of the points of this work, in opening an interpretative space between its surface and the place of the viewer, is to foreground the more general signposting of the visual image and its critical interpretation. The huge televisual screen also raises questions about just how far an original and unmediated response is now possible to any work of art. It is worth considering, therefore, whether this photograph only serves to elaborate in a mechanistic fashion the ground rules of the conventional interpretative process; though I think otherwise. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Turf’
by: Jamie Davis
Posted: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 11:55:36 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Institutional
First Published: Issue 23 - Summer 2000

A Portfolio of photographic work by Jamie Davis. Published in Issue 23 of Source, Summer 2000. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Anthony Haughey
Posted: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 21:07:22 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 23 - Summer 2000

Surveillance and monitoring technologies have become part of our everyday lives. In this new series by Anthony Haughey, CCTV, monitoring and emergency workers are depicted in the reflected light of computer monitors and visual displays. The controller stares at a point beyond the viewer, though we cannot see the object of the gaze. The normally invisible controller is momentarily made visible. The images shown here were produced as part of Ffotogallery's Just Another Day project aimed to record the 48 hour Millennium period from December 31st 1999 to January 1st 2000. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Stuffed Histories’
by: Karl Grimes
Posted: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 08:08:14 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Nature
First Published: Issue 23 - Summer 2000

A Portfolio of photographic work by Karl Grimes. Published in Issue 23 of Source, Summer 2000. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 77 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 23 Oct 2014 13:36:58 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 77 - Winter 2013

Photography is typically considered as a documentary medium because of its connection with the world. It might equally be considered an abstract medium for the same reason. One arena in which this is particularly evident is in the long running and painstaking efforts made to get computers to interpret photographic images. The summit of achievement in this area so far is getting computers to recognise cats on Youtube. Adrian Li sets out the steps a computer has to go through to move from receiving undifferentiated pixels to even the most basic interpretation of a photograph. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 76 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 11:20:42 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 76 - Autumn 2013

This August the Getty Museum published a blog post entitled 'Open Content, An Idea Whose Time Has Come' announcing that they were going to make 4,600 high-resolution images available on their website for free with a promise to make more images available in the future. They joined other Museums like the Los Angeles County Museum and the Rijksmuseum in apparently similar moves to give away high-quality digital versions of pictures. Nick Galvin examines what is involved in public collections making images available in this way. What is the best approach for the public, for the collection and for the museum? Is 'open access' simply an unqualified public good or do other considerations have to be taken into account when distribution images owned by public institutions? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: McCoy Patrick
Posted: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 09:06:07 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Found
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

A Portfolio of photographic work by McCoy Patrick. Published in Issue 25 of Source, Winter 2000. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Mary McIntyre
Posted: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 08:04:31 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Institutional
First Published: Issue 23 - Summer 2000

A Portfolio of photographic work by Mary McIntyre. Published in Issue 23 of Source, Summer 2000. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: David O'Mara
Posted: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 19:07:42 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Found
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

A Portfolio of photographic work by David O'Mara. Published in Issue 25 of Source, Winter 2000. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘An Object Lesson In Objectivity’
by: Pádraig Murphy
Posted: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 16:26:30 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 6 - Winter 1995

A description of the precise function of the water-towers is given as text to accompany one of Bernd and Hilla Becher's books. This text is also indicative of their photographic practice; one which is based on the systematic recording of various industrial structures. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Transitions’
by: Linda and John McClelland
Posted: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 12:40:08 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 6 - Winter 1995

Santu Mofokeng and Lien Botha both contributed their photographic works to this touring exhibition of contemporary art from the Republic of South Africa. Its aim is to highlight the work of selected artists at a pivotal movement in its history when there is a very real need to rebuild international relations with the post-apartheid state. Their works are primarily intended to enhance the dialogue between the Black, Boer and English-speaking communities and to bring that dialogue to a wider audience. Bearing this in mind their setting within the gallery space at the Ormeau Baths is unfortunate as they oppose each other across a stretch of barren wooden flooring, Black South Africa on one wall and Boer South Africa on the other. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘FotoFeis’
by: Jeremy Stevenson
Posted: Tue, 03 Dec 2013 12:00:37 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Architectural
First Published: Issue 6 - Winter 1995

The second Fotofeis can justifiably claim to be the UK's leading photographic festival because of its country-wide involvement. Its Director Alasdair Foster said that it seeks to embrace both the photographic specialist and those who rarely, if ever, enter a gallery, It should become clear that a diversity of practice is Fotofeis's greatest asset as it celebrates an openness to photography or lens based media that helps to push an appreciation of photography beyond the walls of the specialist galleries, and beyond its own restrictive medium specific history. It is the inclusive nature of the festival that has to be praised as it sites work in museums and galleries, in shopping and leisure centres, on billboards and monuments and even shop windows or bus shelters. This may bewilder the fine print specialist but gives public access to the broad range of cultural activities of artists, brought out into the open and not just conducted in the dark (room); this should encourage a questioning of the meanings and manipulations that condition us all, giving a chance for alternative images to take over the sites most often used for promotional propaganda. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Shades of Orange’
by: Neil Dodds
Posted: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 09:02:59 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 5 - Summer 1995

Kelvin Boyes' exhibition at the Old Museum Arts Centre in July opted for an anthropological examination of the Orange Order. Given unparalleled access to certain lodges, to the extent of being allowed to photograph previously secret rituals, he had the opportunity to concentrate less on the potentially explosive confrontations between marchers and police that have marked recent Twelfth Demonstrations, and more on the idea of the Orange Order: What is it? What does it do? How do its members perceive themselves? What do they do for the rest of the year? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Tim Page’
by: Nicholas Allen
Posted: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 08:23:32 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Photojournalism
First Published: Issue 5 - Summer 1995

In an era which adopts everything North American into its own set of cultural icons, the photographer Tim Page has chronicled the depths to which Uncle Sam's little intrigues plunge. The complexity of his work arises from his position as wilful participant as well as disengaged artist. There is a sense of energy in the earlier photographs as the photographer gives himself to a world of sudden death, lingering addictions and slow, slow pain. The book Mid-Term Report itself contains several pictures not on show in the Ormeau Baths Gallery. The opening photograph of a street in Bangkok gives away what one suspects after viewing the exhibition. Page's reflection can be seen in the wing-mirror of a Harley whose tank has 'Rebel' painted on it. There is a sense of a Romantic emigre's self-portraiture about the scene, a sense that the connections in the images rely on reference to Western culture even as they sympathise with the East; a certain voyeurism which at times sneaks a suspicion of doubt into an otherwise striking image. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘73 Delegates’
by: Martha McCulloch
Posted: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 10:13:35 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Education
First Published: Issue 6 - Winter 1995

The Conference for European Photographers held at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen from 3rd to the 5th November marked the close of the month long Fotofeis '95 Festival. The second Fotofeis to be held in Scotland, it spanned the entire country, with over 100 exhibitions and included a diverse community programme, a range of presentations in public spaces and a host of events - live performance, lectures, workshops - Fotofeis aimed to celebrate the diversity of photographic art and to reach communities from the urban centres to rural areas. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 6 Editorial’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 08:13:15 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 6 - Winter 1995

'FotoFeis', Scotland's International Festival of Photography, has just completed its second successful staging. We report from the finishing conference and review some of the work on show. This biannual event included the work of over one hundred photographers in venues throughout Scotland, based around the themes of mortality, migration and the city. The interest generated by this event with over half a million viewers marks it out as one that Ireland could consider following in an attempt to raise the profile of photography here. Maud Sulter's work 'ALBA' (shown at the festival) will arrive at The Ormeau Baths Gallery during January at the same time as the work from those connected with 'showing off' and the 'Portfolio Pages' in this issue of Source. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Battle of the Bogside’
by: Brian Lynn
Posted: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 12:04:46 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 5 - Summer 1995

Battle of the Bogside was shown as part of the West Belfast Festival during August and combines the work of Clive Limpkin a freelance photographer from England and Barney McMonagle from the Brandywell in Derry. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Five Titles’
by: Paul Robinson
Posted: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 11:07:39 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 5 - Summer 1995

Is this what you want from photography? Then go out and buy Popular Photography, the World's Largest Imaging Magazine. But if the latest report on the new Mitsubishi S3600A4 300 dpi dye-sub (£3995.00) is more your style, you don't have to go far. On the shelves of Belfast's larger newsagents is a selection of magazines aimed at a wide variety of photographic tastes and interests. Unfortunately, however, few hit the mark. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘GCSE’
by: Jim Maginn
Posted: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 11:47:53 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Education
First Published: Issue 5 - Summer 1995

What is wrong with the things I learn at the Camera club or from books and magazines? Why the big emphasis on education? Questions which strike right at the heart of the matter. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the things learnt from books, magazines, camera clubs or anywhere else. In fact the greater involvement in photography beyond a class or course the better. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘9231’
by: Mike Rendle
Posted: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 11:22:55 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Education
First Published: Issue 5 - Summer 1995

It is just over ten years since the City and Guilds of London Institute launched the 9231 Certificate in Photography. Aimed primarily at non-professionals, it was initially received with a great deal of indifference, and occasionally, hostility. Offering a handful of modules, 9231 was quickly cast in the role of poor relation to the other photography courses already available. I do not believe that it was ever intended to be a close relation and has now shown itself to be a different breed of learning package with a flexible structure which integrates easily with most areas of photography. A decade later 9231 has ESTablished a proven track record. Students have voted with their feet making it the fastest growing photography course available in the greater Belfast area. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Cindy Sherman’
by: Mike Catto
Posted: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 09:31:40 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 4 - Spring 1995

To describe Cindy Sherman as a photographer is to invite a look of questioning or of derision from some other photographers. Yet as the exhibition of a selection of her work at IMMA between November 1994 and February 1995 showed, Cindy Sherman's concerns and her physical output place her firmly in the twin (and overlapping) traditions of artist and photographer. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Paul Graham’
by: Catherine Duncan
Posted: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 09:16:58 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 4 - Spring 1995

Skies, big beautiful skies. Big beautiful prints. Paul Graham's show last November had an immediately attractive surface. What could be more impressive and humbling than infinity, the start of the rest of the universe, via the seduction of giant photographs? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Reviewing My Insolent Ontologies - The Family Album’
by: Nicholas Allen
Posted: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 07:52:33 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Family
First Published: Issue 4 - Spring 1995

If you take this as a study in planes you get the picture. In the background a wall, of a house with a quarter-window trapped between a spoked wheel and a carriage. In front of this and parallel, a skinny-haunched horse, arranged with the other family treasures, a beat-up chair and the living themselves. Which is what works for me. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Francis Beatty’
by: Michael McCaughan
Posted: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 05:34:08 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Commercial
First Published: Issue 4 - Spring 1995

Although the essential principles of photography have been know for more than two hundred years, it was not until the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century that optics and chemistry were successfully combined to achieve permanently fixed images. In France, about 1826, Nicephore Niepce succeeded in recording a view from his work room window by means of a camera obscura and a light sensitized plate. The direct positive picture, which required an exposure of about eight hours, was improved on by Louis Daguerre in 1837 (Niepce's partner 1829-33). After exposure, which could take up to thirty minutes, the plate was held over warmed mercury to intensify the image, which was one of great detail and accuracy on a mirror like surface. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Press Photography in Northern Ireland’
by: Jim Maginn
Posted: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 13:14:36 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Photojournalism
First Published: Issue 4 - Spring 1995

I reckon that as a consumer of locally produced newsprint I deserve and expect better photographs in our papers. Surely I am not alone in this. To prevent any, "who does he think he is?" I'll declare my credentials. I've worked as a staffer and freelance for papers from London to Vancouver. I've had to cover cheque handovers, W.I. Cake sales, pictures of used cars for ads, strawberry growers coping with floods etc. Nothing particularly challenging or dangerous, but I always tried to find an alternative to the norm. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 4 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 10:39:04 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 4 - Spring 1995

The cover image is taken from The Poole Collection, some 70,000 uncatalogued glass plate negatives held by the National Library, Ireland. The Poole family were commercial photographers who operated out of Waterford between 1884-1954. Dated c1920, the photograph records The Hon. Mrs. Vaughan Thompson and her sister's children at the Zoological gardens in Dublin. An image from 1920's Dublin that is far removed from the political turmoil of that period. Yet I still enter into this photographic space and enjoy its mental and physical openness. It contains none of the awkward disruptions or self consciousness of the photographer. The pencilled text on the back of the print is A Pretty Snapshot which suggests a casualness and spontaneity that reads well across 75 years. How does this photograph with its commercial intent by the maker, relate to contemporary practice? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Austerlitz’
by: Paul Tebbs
Posted: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 19:34:23 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Narrative
First Published: Issue 29 - Winter 2001

The borderlines between history and fiction have become a rich seam of ambiguity for contemporary writers. Biographers employ fantasy dialogues and meetings with their subjects; while much historical fiction is distinguished by a sheen of scholarly exactitude. The novels of W. G. Sebald are loosely aligned to this beguiling literary trend. Sebald's fictions meander, often with only a semblance of narrative vitality, through a variety of literary genres: biography, history, travel writing and personal reminiscence. What distinguishes Sebald's approach is the significance of visual imagery. Sebald's novels are punctuated by a variety of visual information - photographs, maps, paintings, drawings, newspaper cuttings, pictures of train tickets, visas, passports: all proffering an empirical visual anchor to the prose. One senses, on occasions, that the narrative possibilities Sebald is able to indulge have been generated by the peculiarity of the images at his disposal. The deployment of images reaches a new level of significance in Sebald's latest novel, Austerlitz. In this novel, photography is not only used as a source of visual information but also as a means through which the principal characterisation and dominant theme of the book are articulated. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 29 Editorial’
by: Editors
Posted: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 18:44:48 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 29 - Winter 2001

National newspapers around the world were transformed on September 12th with blanket coverage of the attack on the World trade Centre. John Taylor reviews the coverage of this event and the subsequent action in Afghanistan. He charts the different positions newspapers have adopted in relation to the 'war on terrorism' and the complexity and diversity of the issues it has raised. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The House of Small Things’
by: Roma Tearne
Posted: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 11:11:48 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 33 - Winter 2002

Born in Sri Lanka, I arrived in Britain when I was ten. My mother and I travelled by boat on a 7,000 mile journey, which took 21 days. The enormous impact of this journey on my life is only now emerging in my work. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘A Solid Line’
by: Colin Graham
Posted: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 08:26:36 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

David Goldblatt's career as a documentary photographer stretches back to the 1950s. In TJ his work is put into retropsective form, arranged by decade, but most importantly arranged by place. The TJ of the book's title is Transvaal, Johannesburg, once the official placename for the city and now something of a nostalgia piece, captured here in the cover image of a black couple holding up the fender of a car and pretending to be the 'madam' and her 'driver'. The number on the plate begins 'TJ...'. Goldblatt's work is encircled by the city and cut across, at various points in his career, by a clear and acute sense of race relations. This, and his unabashed capacity to tell stories in his images and to face up to and encapsulate the worst of South African society, pre- and post-Apartheid, make this a rich, shifting and always forceful introduction to his work. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 74 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Tue, 07 May 2013 11:33:08 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 74 - Spring 2013

Photographs in archives are often 'rediscovered' and reanimated by artists but sometimes their latent charge is brought to the surface by the changing circumstances around them. Michal BarOr and Samuel Foster both write about photographs that have remained dormant for long periods, only to be brought back into circulation because political events have made them suddenly, urgently relevant once again. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 5 Editorial’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Tue, 13 Nov 2012 17:05:17 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 5 - Summer 1995

From the photojournalism of Magnum's David Hurn through to the meditative fine art practices of Thomas Joshua Cooper my own education at times seems to stem from very different agendas. Yet these two photographers and their surrounding colleagues provided an enthusiastic meeting point for those possessed by the need to explore with a camera. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Us-Versus-Them’
by: John Mullin
Posted: Mon, 12 Nov 2012 13:32:36 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Political
First Published: Issue 22 - Spring 2000

Irish folk love funerals; a chance to gather together, demonstrate that all-important sense of community, and afterwards remember the departed with a drink in the hand and a lump in the throat. No one, though, takes more pride in burying their fallen than republicans. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Republicans’
by: Tony O'Shea
Posted: Mon, 12 Nov 2012 13:08:39 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Photojournalism
First Published: Issue 22 - Spring 2000

A Portfolio of photographic work by Tony O'Shea. Published in Issue 22 of Source, Spring 2000. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘At the Border’
by: Colm Tóibín
Posted: Mon, 12 Nov 2012 08:10:53 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Security
First Published: Issue 22 - Spring 2000

In the middle of the night, they snaked their way down the mountain. There must have been twenty or thirty vans and they were smuggling cigarettes and whiskey from the principality of Andorra, still a duty-free zone, to the villages in the Catalan Pyreness. They had their headlights turned off and they stuck close together, their life made much easier by the mobile phone. It would be easy for look-outs to alert them to the presence of police or customs officials. This is an easy route in summer, if your suspension is good and you know the road. In the winter, it is impassable. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Europe Between the Lines’
by: Dara McGrath
Posted: Mon, 12 Nov 2012 07:30:25 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Security
First Published: Issue 22 - Spring 2000

A Portfolio of photographic work by Dara McGrath. Published in Issue 22 of Source, Spring 2000. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Modest Souls’
by: Carlo Gébler
Posted: Fri, 09 Nov 2012 07:40:07 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 22 - Spring 2000

Receiving these photographs my first reaction was to wince and then to glaze over mentally. Inflated by snobbish condescension, I looked at the seven subjects in their terrible clothes, each striking their ridiculous (I thought) Walker Evanish poses, and I found myself wondering what on earth was there to say about these? If Arbus, I thought, had done these, she would at least have found some momentarily arresting subjects, some weirdos. She would have given us golfers who were Siamese twins (one doing the long shots, the other the putting, presumably). No doubt she'd have given us naturist golfers as well. But these were boring, anodyne; there was as little going on here, I thought, as in any game of golf I have had the misfortune to catch. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Golfers’
by: David Robinson
Posted: Fri, 09 Nov 2012 07:22:59 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 22 - Spring 2000

A Portfolio of photographic work by David Robinson. Published in Issue 22 of Source, Spring 2000. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 22 Editorial’
by: Editors
Posted: Thu, 08 Nov 2012 19:33:48 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 22 - Spring 2000

Tony O'Shea has been photographing republican commemorations, funerals and political gatherings for the last fifteen years. As a photojournalist he has covered the main events of this period producing images for the front pages of the major Dublin newspapers. John Mullin, the Ireland correspondent for The Guardian introduces this more intimate view of republicanism. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Women with Facial Hair’
by: Robin Whitaker
Posted: Thu, 08 Nov 2012 19:09:28 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Gender
First Published: Issue 22 - Spring 2000

I think it might be worth starting with the significance of that parenthetical exclamation mark and the appeal of an anthropologist's perspective. They suggest there is something a bit odd or exotic about the idea. Might it have anything to do with how, on hearing about the idea, the mind jumps to the mythic bearded lady of carnival side-shows: the female grotesque? This association is worth exploring despite its distance from the substance of Trish Morrisey's photos. It points toward something of the critical appeal of "women with facial hair": a dispute with taken-for-granted ideas about gender and sex, culture and nature and what makes a woman. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Women with Moustaches’
by: Trish Morrissey
Posted: Thu, 08 Nov 2012 17:31:40 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 22 - Spring 2000

A Portfolio of photographic work by Trish Morrissey. Published in Issue 22 of Source, Spring 2000. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Acting Normal’
by: Joe Sterling
Posted: Wed, 07 Nov 2012 20:39:51 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 19 - Summer 1999

A Portfolio of photographic work by Joe Sterling. Published in Issue 19 of Source, Summer 1999. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Ash’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Wed, 07 Nov 2012 20:20:42 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 19 - Summer 1999

A Portfolio of photographic work by David Farrell. Published in Issue 19 of Source, Summer 1999. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Sean Hillen
Posted: Mon, 05 Nov 2012 19:01:23 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Photomontage
First Published: Issue 3 - Winter 1994

A Portfolio of photographic work by Sean Hillen. Published in Issue 3 of Source, Winter 1994. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Irish Geography’
by: Peter Neill
Posted: Mon, 05 Nov 2012 18:42:42 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Manipulated
First Published: Issue 3 - Winter 1994

A Portfolio of photographic work by Peter Neill. Published in Issue 3 of Source, Winter 1994. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Hung Like a Donkey Jacket’
by: Jennifer Dempsey
Posted: Mon, 05 Nov 2012 17:03:51 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 3 - Winter 1994

Hung Like a Donkey Jacket, on display at the old Museum Arts Centre, October 1994, is a collection of black and white photos depicting the life of workers in the Greater Belfast power industry. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Interface Images’
by: Nicholas Allen
Posted: Mon, 05 Nov 2012 15:42:13 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 3 - Winter 1994

The children struck me the most - even the ones with cider and moustaches, either glaring sullenly at the intrusion or beating carelessly as they hang upside down from iron railings. The black and white captures them perfectly in a clarity which so unfairly captures their moment; unfairly because the static places them in landscapes of weeds, of thick splashed slogans on walls, against the grids around them. The faces may laugh or stare but remain the same, caught as images in a study highlighting division. The grim final picture of another brick being planted seems too tacit an acceptance of our future, too lacking a dynamic much better caught in the kids blasting footballs in Cliftonville. The still life has always been a problem in Northern Ireland... . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘David Gepp’
by: Jim Maginn
Posted: Mon, 05 Nov 2012 11:47:55 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 3 - Winter 1994

Northern Ireland has provided material for many photographers. Often people with little or no knowledge of life here, and the issues that affect our daily routines, jet in, point the camera at the restless natives, and jet out again. In David Gepp's case the project this image is from was completed over a three year period from 1990 to 93. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Digital Deja-Vu’
by: Beryl Graham
Posted: Mon, 05 Nov 2012 11:10:32 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Manipulated
First Published: Issue 3 - Winter 1994

There's something about seeing students in flared trousers and platform shoes which has recently been making me feel as though I'm falling into a particularly badly designed time-warp. Visiting the new university courses in digital imaging and multimedia seems very much like visiting photography courses of twenty years ago; predominantly male lecturers paying homage to technology gods which used to be long lenses and large format, and are now big hard-drives and more RAM. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Shock of the New’
by: Paul Seawright
Posted: Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:53:24 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Manipulated
First Published: Issue 3 - Winter 1994

We have all become, at various levels, aware of the radical changes to photographic practice in the nineties. I don't refer to a new style or application in the context of what we hold dear to photography, but an extreme and revolutionary shift in the possibilities and probabilities of the future. It seems that the further I delve into electronic imaging methodology the closer the future becomes. What is apparent to anyone who has seen explanations of contemporary advertising is that the notion of reality or truth has become obscured completely by the ability to construct photographs from A to Z without ever going near film, chemical or darkroom. The related discussion in photographic circles has ranged from panic to a scramble for information, workshops and access to hardware. But as the learning curve climbs ever steeper in front of us is it time to take stock of how the 'ordinary' practitioner might apply such innovative advances? Is it all beyond us, hidden in the province of advertising agencies and media giants? How accessible is the future or should we stick to our Durst in the garden shed? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 3 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:29:53 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 3 - Winter 1994

This issue of Source brings with it news of a more defined and secure future for both Photo Works North and Source. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 72 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 29 Oct 2012 08:28:59 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 72 - Autumn 2012

The teaching of photography in universities has grown exponentially in the thirty years since the first photography degree was ESTablished at the Polytechnic of Central London in the late 1970s. The tension in those original courses between the teaching of 'theory' and practical skills has now dissipated. Today, there are many more students and they have different expectations of, and concerns about, their time at university, including what debts they will be left with and their subsequent employability. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Motorway’
by: Jesse Alexander
Posted: Tue, 02 Oct 2012 07:43:23 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 58 - Spring 2009

Colin Balls has been involved in audiovisual since the late 1960s, as a practitioner and as a manufacturer of audiovisual equipment. His sequence Motorway that he made in the early 1980s was in pursuit of his passion for transport, and developed into an exploration of ideas about the disjointed nature of the body and mind when engaged in monotonous activity such as driving. He has recently begun to ESTablish a collection of exhibits for a museum of audiovisual equipment, documenting their evolution from the Victorian Magic Lantern to the present day. The museum is located within the British Commercial Vehicle Museum in Leyland, Lancashire and will be open from April this year. / Jesse Alexander: How did you become involved with working with audiovisual? / Colin Balls: I've been involved in AV for forty years now. The beginnings were in 1968 when I saw an AV show by Richard Tucker. He did work for Nikon and took his shows all over the country. He did a show with a manual control unit that impressed me sufficiently to make me want to take the subject up. I've been doing it as a business - making AV equipment - as well as a hobby ever since. I became involved towards the end of the 1960s, and I got my fellowship with the RPS and did workshops across the country with a specialist in sound, John Edson. / Jesse Alexander: What sort of equipment did you manufacture? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Motorway’
by: Colin Balls
Posted: Tue, 02 Oct 2012 07:01:50 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 58 - Spring 2009

Colin Balls has been involved in audiovisual since the late 1960s, as a practitioner and as a manufacturer of audiovisual equipment. His sequence Motorway that he made in the early 1980s was in pursuit of his passion for transport, and developed into an exploration of ideas about the disjointed nature of the body and mind when engaged in monotonous activity such as driving. He has recently begun to ESTablish a collection of exhibits for a museum of audiovisual equipment, documenting their evolution from the Victorian Magic Lantern to the present day. The museum is located within the British Commercial Vehicle Museum in Leyland, Lancashire and will be open from April this year. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Terry Loane at Old Museum Arts Centre’
by: Lynn Connolly
Posted: Wed, 26 Sep 2012 10:24:33 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Photomontage
First Published: Issue 2 - Autumn Winter 1992

The work of Terry Loane is a fusion of media and processes incorporating traditional crafts of old photographic processes - cyanotype and gum bichromate. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘A Photography Gallery for Belfast?’
by: Paul Seawright
Posted: Wed, 26 Sep 2012 10:00:17 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Gallery-Based
First Published: Issue 2 - Autumn Winter 1992

Una McCarthy was appointed by the Old Museum Arts Centre, known as OMAC, over a year ago. What is evident since that appointment is that OMAC does not fall into the stereotypical perception of an Art Centre space. It is closer in identity to contemporary multi-media spaces like Watershed in Bristol. Originally founded to service emerging and innovative art forms, it has been known principally as an arena for the performing arts with various theatre companies based there. The arrival of a new director also saw the development of new initiatives. The most prominent has been the launch of a gallery space. Una explained that she identified a need to address the visual as well as performing arts within the same policy framework as before which is a commitment to indigenous and experimental art. She was very aware of the imbalance and looked at both the space and at what was happening in Belfast generally, and saw a glaring need for a space that would concentrate on showing photographic work . . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Through the Lens - Arts Council Touring Exhibition’
by: John Shade
Posted: Mon, 24 Sep 2012 07:02:36 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 2 - Autumn Winter 1992

This exhibition features the work of twelve Northern Irish photographers each well known in their own right through appearance in exhibitions, publications and inclusion in private collections. The photographs vary widely in their subject matter and style - from the atmospheric landscape studies of Errol Forbes and Stephen Lowry to the social documentation of Paul Seawright and the wry political commentary of Victor Sloan. Sonya Whitefield focuses on family situations in an unusual and up-beat way, while Lynn Connolly, whose work is based on the piecing together of fragments, linking memories and contextualising rites of passage, produces highly coloured images to powerful effect. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Kingdom Come’
by: Jesse Alexander
Posted: Sun, 23 Sep 2012 15:58:09 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Religious
First Published: Issue 58 - Spring 2009

Peter Coles is a prolific audio visual worker, who has produced more than two-hundred sequences, achieving over one hundred and fifty awards internationally. His backgrounds in chemistry, theology, education, local government and publishing have informed a diverse portfolio of works. A published author of many volumes, and describing himself as a 'word-monger', poetry is particularly important to Coles' AV works, and he collaborated with Collin Balls on Motorway. / Jesse Alexander: How were you introduced to the slide-tape format? / Peter Coles: In 1969, the audio-visual aid officer where I worked in Buckinghamshire was playing with two slide carousels. He put his hand in front of one carousel and then the other, creating a rudimentary dissolve. I was supposed to be delivering a twenty-minute introduction to somebody talking about the 'environment', so I made a little presentation using two projectors, and I did what my colleague had done, with my two hands in front of the projectors. When I was promoted and became chief education officer for Berkshire, people took over what I had previously been doing. I thought I had better develop these simple dissolves, and so I started experimenting with audiovisual programs. / Jesse Alexander: Which visual artists were you aware of at that time? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Kingdom Come’
by: Peter Coles
Posted: Sun, 23 Sep 2012 15:25:09 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Religious
First Published: Issue 58 - Spring 2009

Peter Coles is a prolific audio visual worker, who has produced more than two-hundred sequences, achieving over one hundred and fifty awards internationally. His backgrounds in chemistry, theology, education, local government and publishing have informed a diverse portfolio of works. A published author of many volumes, and describing himself as a 'word-monger', poetry is particularly important to Coles' AV works, and he collaborated with Collin Balls on Motorway . . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Can Seeing be an Art Really?’
by: Richard West
Posted: Sun, 23 Sep 2012 13:30:26 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 53 - Winter 2007

Richard West: When were your first encounters with photography? / Kendall Walton: I don't consider myself a photographer. I own a camera and once in a while take pictures, and I have always enjoyed looking at photographs of different kinds for aesthetic pleasure, but also for lots of other reasons as well. I'm not sure that you can separate the aesthetic pleasure from other kinds of interests. / Richard West: Do you remember when you first started to take photography seriously as a philosophical subject? / Kendall Walton: I was interested in philosophical problems to do with the visual arts for a long time but I considered photographs and paintings alongside one another. Then at some point I decided to figure out what was distinctive and special about photographs and why some people think of them as being much more realistic than other pictures. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Meanwhile’
by: Yve Lomax
Posted: Sun, 23 Sep 2012 08:10:40 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 54 - Spring 2008

There had been much talk of the event, and hearing this I had to ask: what constitutes an event and how can it be said of a still photographic image? I was listening out for theories of the event and my attention was turned toward the temporality that comes about in events: in each and every event there is a wait - a meanwhile - in which a present moment in time doesn't come to pass. Deleuze's words were beckoning me, holding me... 'the agonizing aspect of the pure event is that it is always and at the same time something that has just happened and something about to happen; never something that is happening.' . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Lost in Play’
by: Lucy Soutter
Posted: Sat, 22 Sep 2012 19:40:54 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 54 - Spring 2008

A cuddly lion, a monkey and a Paddington Bear gaze out the window in the cool morning sunshine. They cannot help but gaze into the light because they are prisoners, wedged into the arm of an upturned Marcel Breuer chair. The scene is a bedroom; there are patterned curtains, a kilim rug on the parquet floor, and a bed in the foreground. The animals are safe, held tight in their modernist confinement. They are also abandoned - the child who placed them so carefully is nowhere in sight, and has clearly forgotten about them. A still life of everyday objects arranged in a room, the image is also a narrative, with the toys as characters in an imaginary drama. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Revelation’
by: Jesse Alexander
Posted: Fri, 21 Sep 2012 08:11:01 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Religious
First Published: Issue 58 - Spring 2009

Sir George and Lady Doreen Pollock have been important figures in the Royal Photographic Society since the 1960s, and their enthusiasm for audio visual practice has promoted the practice in the UK and has been a driving force behind the development of the audio visual branch of the Society. In Lady Doreen's absence, Sir George discusses the history of the Royal Photographic Society Audio Visual group, and some of their collaborative works. / Jesse Alexander: How did you become aware of AV work? / Sir George Pollock: Slide-tape with dissolve was brought from France to England by Ray Beaumont-Crags. He was invited by Amateur Photographer to show his work at a photo-fair in 1965. He was then invited by the RPS's kinematographic group who immediately gave him one of the Society's distinctions. A few other people began to take it up, particularly a man called Michael Tickner. He was already doing a single projector show called Audioscope and bought a mechanical dissolver and converted it into a twin-projector dissolving view. My wife, Doreen and I saw Ray's work in about 1969 and were absolutely fascinated by it. The first sequence - we call each item a 'sequence' or a 'programme' - we sent to an international competition was in 1971 in Epinal in Eastern France, which had already been going annually for eleven years. / Jesse Alexander: At what point did a group of AV practitioners begin emerging? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Revelation’
by: Sir George and Lady Doreen Pollock
Posted: Thu, 20 Sep 2012 16:36:44 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Religious
First Published: Issue 58 - Spring 2009

Sir George and Lady Doreen Pollock have been important figures in the Royal Photographic Society since the 1960s, and their enthusiasm for audio visual practice has promoted the practice in the UK and has been a driving force behind the development of the audio visual branch of the Society. In Lady Doreen's absence, Sir George discusses the history of the Royal Photographic Society Audio Visual group, and some of their collaborative works. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 2 Editorial’
by: Paul Seawright - Editor
Posted: Thu, 20 Sep 2012 07:50:10 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 2 - Autumn Winter 1992

Looking around me in the last few months, the once familiar photographic landscape has begun to change. I had become accustomed to the wilderness in Northern Ireland, visitors would often ask why have we never discovered the joys of photography? Five years ago I returned from London where I had joined with other photography students to lament the profile of the medium within the Arts. Moving back to Northern Ireland soon revealed England to be the Garden of Eden. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Autoxylopyrocycloboros’
by: Richard West
Posted: Thu, 20 Sep 2012 06:59:01 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 58 - Spring 2009

Richard West: Can you explain the title? / Simon Starling: Autoxylopyrocycloboros is an amalgam of words that come from ancient Greek. The name began with the Ouroboros, a mythical creature or alchemical symbol of rejuvenation; a snake that's consuming its own tail. I contacted a classics scholar to help me piece together a collage of a word for a kind of self-consuming, wood-burning sea serpent. So auto- is self, xylo- refers to wood, pyro- is fire and cyclo- is turning. / Richard West: What was the genesis of the project? / Simon Starling: I teach in Germany and I brought a group of students to Scotland and we stayed at Cove Park on the residency programme on the edge of Loch Long. One of the things we did was to visit the Faslane nuclear submarine base and the peace camp, which was actually an amazing experience for everybody I think.We had this bizarre power-point presentation by Commander Bill who took us through the workings of a naval base and also showed us a clip of a situation comedy to endear us to the navy somehow. Of course it went completely over the heads of the students but it stuck in my mind, this slapstick thing, as a kind of existential plea to be seen as human. It had a certain kind of poetry to it that I clung onto afterwards. This happened in the summer, then I started looking for boats and four or five months later the thing was ready to go. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Photo Works North Responds to David Lee’
by: Jim Maginn
Posted: Wed, 19 Sep 2012 10:57:23 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Gallery-Based
First Published: Issue 1 - Summer 1992

I feel compelled to respond to some points raised in David Lee's "Circles of Confusion" article Surprisingly given his adopted home, the title could easily refer to his paragraph on photography in Ireland. This is in contrast to his usually well informed comment. My observations deal with some of his notions about photography on this Island. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Orange Order by Paul Seawright’
by: Lynne Connolly
Posted: Wed, 19 Sep 2012 10:26:48 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 1 - Summer 1992

This exhibition is one to be savoured, a taste not quite familiar, not readily identified yet not quite unpleasant. The photographer probes quietly, dipping into sinister shadows, unheard conversations, but the stance, the dress, the mass anonymity speak volumes. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Photographic Constructs by Karl Grimes’
by: Brian Lynn
Posted: Wed, 19 Sep 2012 09:53:50 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Manipulated
First Published: Issue 1 - Summer 1992

Using locations from Allihies on the Beara peninsula, Co. Kerry, to Algeciras in Southern Spain and on into Morocco and Tunisia - Karl Grimes has produced a wide ranging mix of images and subjects. Yet some how all of them have been linked by his technique of juxtaposing two near mirrored images, then overlaying a third dominant central image which acts as catalyst and metaphor. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 1 Editorial’
by: Paul Seawright - Editor
Posted: Wed, 19 Sep 2012 09:32:50 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 1 - Summer 1992

Over the past two years, a growing frustration at the lack of support for photography in Northern Ireland has given birth to an exciting new organisation called Photo Works North. The principle aim of the group is to see that photography is promoted here at least to the same extent as it has been in the rest of Britain. Belfast remains one of the only major cities in the U.K. that does not have a gallery and resource centre specifically for photographic use. Photo Works North is vigorously campaigning to make such facilities a reality for Northern Ireland. Until now public funding has tended to focus on local community projects. These are important areas but cannot answer the broader requirements of photography within the Arts and Media. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Nice Prospects, but is it Education?’
by: Charles Kinbote
Posted: Mon, 17 Sep 2012 08:05:34 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Education
First Published: Issue 24 - Autumn 2000

Let us suppose, just for a minute, that we are without the benefit of the past hundred or so years of hindsight; assuming that we could actually exist within such perversely hypothetical circumstances it would then, in all plausibility, be open to us to conceive of education as something like a general field of activity, whose overall impetus can be seen to derive from two main, or at least readily distinguishable imperatives, an academic concern and a practical concern. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Why Art Photography?’
by: Lucy Soutter
Posted: Thu, 13 Sep 2012 19:44:32 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 53 - Winter 2007

What is the difference between an art photograph and a designer handbag? I pose this rhetorical question to my photography students from time to time. It's a crude provocation, but invariably leads to a productive discussion. The room polarises sharply. Knee-jerk, common-sense-based responses gradually unfold into more complex positions. The students fall into roughly four different camps on the relationship of photography to commercial culture. With the fervency of mid-20th century modernists, some argue for the aesthetic, expressive and craft value of photography; they see the mass-produced handbag as a different category of object. Others occupy a cynical, even Baudrillardian position. They feel that contemporary art and fashion are both capitalist conspiracies, covering up a central bankruptcy in our culture. A third group embodies a critical realist stance. They argue that photography's function is to tell important social truths. These truths, they feel, are too easily obscured in an art context, with the art photograph reduced to the superficial commodity status of the handbag. There tends to be a small (well-dressed) group who believe that the commercial fashion industry makes an important contribution to individuals' identity formation via personal style. These students defend the handbag and may even prefer it to the photograph, unless the photograph is also concerned with design and visual self-expression. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Then and Now’
by: Simon Denison
Posted: Thu, 13 Sep 2012 08:55:42 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 58 - Spring 2009

Few photographers could get away with making a new book and show out of repositioning old work; but in David Goldblatt's case it makes sense. For over 40 years this South African photographer has documented the society and culture of his troubled country, which underwent such dramatic transformation in the 1990s. By pairing apartheid-era pictures with more recent work we are encouraged to reflect on the changes that have taken place. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Banks of The Tees’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Thu, 13 Sep 2012 01:50:40 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 58 - Spring 2009

In a collaboration that began in the late 60's Photographer Robin Dale and the folk singer Graeme Miles have produced three major bodies of work as slide sound pieces: The Banks of the Tees, Ballad of a Country Camera and Down the Sands to Whitby Oh! The pieces combine photographs and drawings projected as slides, folk songs and recordings in the field. Robin Dale discussed the background to the work with John Duncan. / Robin Dale: About 1968 I saw an advert for a second-hand Rolleicord, an old style camera where you bowed down to people and gazed at this two and a quarter inch square image. It wasn't as threatening as cameras are now. To increase my knowledge I joined a camera club in Middlesbrough and I came across things called 'slide battles' (I thought 'do they throw slides at each other?'). I learned some things but I didn't want to carry on because everyone else seemed to think that you weren't that good unless you had the latest lens. 1 / Speaker 2 Then, I bought one of the early slide projectors - you could buy them second-hand - and that opened up an even wider world for me because I'm a frustrated film maker. I would put a sequence of pictures together and add a soundtrack which was usually from the Four Seasons, and I got quite good feedback from that. / John Duncan: Were you influenced much by other photographers or film makers? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Banks of The Tees’
by: Robin Dale
Posted: Wed, 12 Sep 2012 17:30:47 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 58 - Spring 2009

In a collaboration that began in the late 60's Photographer Robin Dale and the folk singer Graeme Miles have produced three major bodies of work as slide sound pieces: The Banks of the Tees, Ballad of a Country Camera and Down the Sands to Whitby Oh! The pieces combine photographs and drawings projected as slides, folk songs and recordings in the field. Robin Dale discussed the background to the work with John Duncan. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘It is just not that Important’
by: Linda McClelland
Posted: Wed, 12 Sep 2012 10:06:02 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Education
First Published: Issue 24 - Autumn 2000

Traditional photography is not alive or well in Northern Ireland secondary schools. This is due to lack of facilities, funds, teacher training, technical support and teacher confidence. When these problems are tackled some excellent work has been produced, from 1st Year right through to 'A' Level but this is very sporadic. Many teachers feel that now the digital camera has arrived they will put the past behind them and embrace the new technology. If the government says photography must be taught then they must put their money where their mouth is. They have not done so - it is rarely taught. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Will the Real History of Photography Please Stand Up?’
by: Justin Carville
Posted: Wed, 12 Sep 2012 09:07:08 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Education
First Published: Issue 24 - Autumn 2000

Let's begin with a story on the origins of photography. It is a story that most readers will be familiar with and it goes something like this: on the 7th January 1839, Francois Jean Dominique Arago, Director of the Paris Observatory, permanent secretary and member of the French Académie des Sciences and leader of the left wing Republican opposition in the Chambre des Députés, walked into a meeting of the Académie des Sciences and read a statement to the waiting Académie members outlining the details of Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre's invention which was to later bear his name. The exact details of Arago's speech are not of much relevance to the concerns of this article but as we might expect it detailed the various advantages Daguerre's process could bring to the sciences and arts in France and the rest of the world. It is a story that is found in almost every historical account of photography from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as most pamphlets, brochures and exhibition catalogues on nineteenth century photography. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Neighbourhood’
by: John MacLean
Posted: Thu, 30 Aug 2012 06:59:05 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 61 - Winter 2009

A Portfolio of photographic work by John MacLean. Published in Issue 61 of Source, Winter 2009. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Trace of an Encounter’
by: Siún Hanrahan
Posted: Tue, 07 Aug 2012 20:38:03 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Education
First Published: Issue 24 - Autumn 2000

A key facet of photographic education in Ireland and the United Kingdom is the Bachelors Degree in Photography. This is by no means the only useful course for an aspiring photographer but it is an increasingly important qualification. (Indeed, the increasing availability of Masters and Doctoral degrees in the field indicates that it is becoming a basic qualification.) . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Printing Revolution’
by: Simon Denison
Posted: Tue, 07 Aug 2012 10:47:34 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 60 - Autumn 2009

During the last century of photography there have been two or three times when the 'look' of photographic prints rapidly changed. The reversion to silver in the 1910s/20s after three decades of Pictorialist platinum, gum and oil was one such period. Another was the widespread adoption of colour by press, documentary and art photographers in the 1970s/80s. Future historians will almost certainly regard the 2000s as a similar period of change, although the effects of the digital printing revolution are much harder to pin down - at least for now. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Fancy Pictures’
by: David Brittain
Posted: Tue, 07 Aug 2012 09:27:01 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 60 - Autumn 2009

David Brittain: What was the background to the Bute project? / Mark Neville: Mount Stuart's visual arts programme director, Sophie Crichton-Stuart, commissioned the work on the Isle of Bute following a visit to my studio. She had been interested in my work since reading about, The Port Glasgow Book Project. Mount Stuart is an eclectic, extraordinary Victorian Gothic Palace on Bute, which up until the 1990s was home to the Bute family. I was interested in participating because it represented an opportunity to work with a new, but also familiar, demographic. Familiar due to its West coast of Scotland location, where I had realised several works, but new because it meant not only working with a farming community for the first time, but also the aristocracy (including Sophie and her brother Johnny, Marquis of Bute). / Speaker 2 The Bute family has been commissioning art works since the time of Joshua Reynolds and beyond. Since 2001 the programme has invited contemporary artists, usually one a year, to make a work in response to the house, the grounds, or the island. Usually these commissions - that have involved such artists as Anya Gallaccio, Katja Strunz, and Langlands and Bell - though often ambitious, have not been concerned with the relationship between the predominantly farming community on the island, and Mount Stuart itself, which owns and rents out most of these farms. / Speaker 2 The show was called Fancy Pictures and consisted of three parts. Installed in the visitor centre, on the grounds of Mount Stuart House, were both an audio-slideshow entitled Tula Fancies and a 16mm film, 'Fancy Pictures', mostly shot on Bute farms, featuring animals. In the master bedroom of the House itself I hung a series of photographic prints of the images I had taken of farmers. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Teenage Girls at the Edges of Cities at Night...’
by: Richard West
Posted: Thu, 02 Aug 2012 09:51:44 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 52 - Autumn 2007

In the late 1990s I was looking through the latest batch of photography magazines we had received in the post, when I began to notice the recurrence of certain photographs of uncomfortable teenagers on beaches. These pictures were by Rineke Dijkstra and travelled like a rash through the photography press. Soon we were also receiving exhibition invitations with the same anxious teenagers, and I thought to myself, 'These tormented adolescents really are on the money. Why doesn't anyone show us any work like this?' . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Titled’
by: Richard West
Posted: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 09:52:38 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Miscellaneous
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

What exactly do photographs mean? Attempts to resolve this frequently recurring question have often concentrated on the relationship between photographs and the world they appear to replicate. The extent to which a photograph is a copy or imprint of the world is taken to be an indication of its inability to express anything about its subject, or alternatively, its importance as a means of recording. At the same time it is argued that photographs do not merely replicate the world but may also be an iconic representation of it, with all the sophistication and expressive power that implies. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Extracts from a File’
by: Willie Doherty
Posted: Mon, 30 Jul 2012 09:34:52 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Night
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

A Portfolio of photographic work by Willie Doherty. Published in Issue 25 of Source, Winter 2000. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 25 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 30 Jul 2012 09:13:24 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 25 - Winter 2000

Willie Doherty has recently completed a residency at the DAAD museum in Berlin. This resulted in a new set of work about the city. Returning to black and white these night time photographs are suggestive of Berlin prior to the fall of the Wall and an atmosphere of secrecy and surveillance. This is a continuation of his previous concerns familiar from his work produced in Northern Ireland. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Difficulty of Diffusion’
by: Ramón Esparza
Posted: Mon, 30 Jul 2012 08:27:02 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 21 - Winter 1999

What is the place of photography in the cultural panorama? I will not try to give a definitive answer to this question, since this would mean the implausible task of ending - with one stroke of the pen - a debate about the very nature of photography, a debate which has lasted throughout this century. To paraphrase Règis Durand, who poses this problem in discussing the possibilities of ESTablishing a history of photography, if the twentieth century began with a debate about the artistic possibilities of the genre, as we reach its end we should ask if photography has not become the art form of the century. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 71 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Sun, 08 Jul 2012 18:50:07 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 71 - Summer 2012

The term 'conceptual photography' is often used but rarely defined. Does it say merely that photography can be an intellectual activity? Or, does it refer specifically to an inheritance from an art movement of the 1960s and 70s? We decided to produce an issue to explore these questions and, in a parallel enterprise, have made a film asking various artists and critics the same question. The film will be available on our website in July. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘An Antidote to Art’
by: Richard West
Posted: Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:41:35 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 43 - Summer 2005

Richard West: Was there a point at which you consciously started collecting vernacular photography? / Timothy Prus: Pretty much at the very beginning of the 90s although I'd always been interested in finding quirky photos in flea markets and sticking them in the bottom drawer like I guess a lot of people have been. / Richard West: Were you a collector? / Timothy Prus: I'd been doing art dealing mainly in the 80s and was heartily sick of it. I found great pleasure in photography. That's how it grew. A Canadian colleague has been very supportive and constructive in bringing it all together but lots of people have helped in different ways. It's very much not a one man thing. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Medical Universe’
by: Jesse Alexander
Posted: Wed, 04 Apr 2012 08:09:45 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Medical
First Published: Issue 52 - Autumn 2007

We all know the particular odour of hospitals, the uncomfortable waiting room furniture, the diffused lighting, the corridors decorated with posters reminding us to be aware of various diseases. Rémi Faucheux, art director of RVB - a new commissioning institution based in Paris - seeks to go beyond these clichés to define the aesthetics of the medical universe (although it should be noted that this universe does not reach much further than central Europe) where design and architecture is governed by functionality and economic factors alone. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Wrapped in Countryside’
by: Colin Darke
Posted: Wed, 04 Apr 2012 07:41:41 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Security
First Published: Issue 52 - Autumn 2007

Art in the north of Ireland has tended to engage with its conflict from a few steps behind, gazing on it from a safe distance. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but it seems there has been an effort, conscious or otherwise, to ESTablish a temporal gap between our shared experience of the troubles and our engagement with them through the arts. This may have arisen through fear of association with a political environment which demands side-taking or merely a reflection of the general separation of art and politics over the past couple of decades or so. Either way, art which addresses the conflict has done so, on the whole, in retrospect. Now that the fighting has stopped, then, one can assume it will be fair game for plenty of ex post facto scrutiny. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Continuity of Landscape’
by: Sara-Jayne Parsons
Posted: Wed, 04 Apr 2012 07:23:08 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 52 - Autumn 2007

The Black Country Consortium is a community project which aims to transform the quality of life for over a million people living in the West Midlands through the creation a new urban park. It is one of six hopeful regeneration projects currently shortlisted for funding to the tune of £50 million through Living Landmarks: People's Million Award, a competitive nationwide initiative organized by the Big Lottery Fund in conjunction with ITV. The winning project will be decided by a televised public vote later this year. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Modernism and Modernisation’
by: David Evans
Posted: Wed, 04 Apr 2012 06:28:57 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 52 - Autumn 2007

Black and white landscape photographs by Roger Palmer were included in Three Perspectives on Photography (Hayward Gallery, London, 1979), a significant exhibition because it marked the acknowledgement by the Arts Council of Great Britain of the importance of photography in contemporary art. Three perspectives required three curators, namely Paul Hill, Angela Kelly and John Tagg. Tagg and Kelly presented work informed by Socialism and Feminism, respectively, and Hill's perspective emerged in the catalogue essay 'Photographic Truth, Metaphor and Individual Expression'. There, he dismissed 'propagandists' (an obvious swipe at those chosen by Kelly and Tagg) and celebrated 'individual expression', an 'introspective approach' or 'art for the artist's sake' (as represented by, amongst others, Roger Palmer). In general, Hill's distinction between art and propaganda was crude. More specifically, it was, and remains, unhelpful for assessing a figure like Palmer whose subtle art has always involved complex reflections on place and time. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Becoming Redundant’
by: Siún Hanrahan
Posted: Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:57:24 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 52 - Autumn 2007

As Mooney suggests, '...conceptual play with the processes involved in image making from behind the camera, in front of the camera, and the camera itself' is at the heart of her work. Within her recent exhibition at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin, this play begins with the camera itself. Mooney's Decommissioned Camera Series I & II depict hundreds of analogue cameras that have been traded in by their owners in part exchange for new digital cameras. The images thus mark a key moment in photographic history, the dramatic and wholesale shift from analogue to digital photography. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Inhabiting an Inhuman Situation’
by: Nancy Roth
Posted: Tue, 03 Apr 2012 16:17:45 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Performance
First Published: Issue 52 - Autumn 2007

The exhibition space is dark except for overhead spotlights that illuminate a few of the large images for a while, and then switch off and are replaced by other. Visitors quickly learn that they themselves control the lighting by standing in front of a particular photograph. Most settle into a systematic journey around the room, the lighting system registering any given viewer's attention to each image in turn. Almost all the photographs depict single figures, usually scaled so that the figure appears at about life-size. The colour is sumptuous, the printing meticulous. It adds up to a sense of improbably intimate, serial encounters with bodies in extremis : many naked, some in pain, most in precarious circumstances - covered with rubbish, covered with ash, about to fall, left unconscious - grappling with a core of human experience. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘John Hilliard’
by: Richard West
Posted: Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:11:28 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 52 - Autumn 2007

Richard West: When do you first remember taking photographs? / John Hilliard: When I was still at school I was interested in railways, so I started to photograph trains. We had a next door neighbour who was an amateur photographer and took pictures for the local community. He taught me a little bit about photography, helped me to chose a camera and developed my films for me. Then when I went to the local art school in Lancaster we could do a little bit of photography as part of the course and so I began to take pictures of other things as well. I went there for two years and after that I got into St. Martin's and did a degree equivalent course there. / Richard West: What did you do in the first year of the St. Martin's course? / John Hilliard: The teaching was very much centred on ideas, not on some prescribed way of working. I thought it was a good approach because it made you think about what you were doing and about how you were doing it. We also had to make something which was described as a 'documentation model', which meant that everything you did had to be in some way documented and incorporated, so that you always had oversight of everything you'd been doing. I had never been asked to do anything like that before and I thought that it was very useful. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘From the North’
by: Enno Kaufhold
Posted: Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:50:45 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 21 - Winter 1999

Andreas Müller-Pohle's European Photography: Art Magazine made its first appearance in December 1979 when it came out as a quarterly. It is still published out of Göttingen, Germany, and is one of the most enduring art photography journals in circulation today. Its most significant articles appear in both German and English and, with a special authoritative focus on photo art, have communicated world-wide much of what has happened in Germany, Europe and beyond over the past twenty years. Today 1 European Photography is published only biannually but is strengthened by its book format. Its individual reproductions and monographic portfolios mirror the changes in style over time and occasionally - following domestic and international developments - set new trends and directions. Over the past years Andreas Müller-Pohle's own artistic development - especially his early interest in the adaptation of the most recent electronic art reproduction techniques - has made a strong mark on the text and picture articles in his journal. This has made the journal into an important forum for digitally generated pictures and accompanying commentaries and theories. In addition to this, Andreas Müller-Pohle has also received international recognition for his own digitally generated pictures. Presently - and that probably also holds true for the near future - the magazine (or rather, book) can be subdivided into three distinct parts: it begins with theory-oriented pieces, followed by a section with reproductions (portfolios) in good print quality, and the final part contains current exhibition and book reviews. The printed journal has an internet appendage which makes available current and more time-sensitive information. In the future this service will encompass items of even shorter-lived topicality. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Dispose of this Magazine Carefully after Use’
by: Joachim Schmid
Posted: Mon, 02 Apr 2012 12:40:39 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 21 - Winter 1999

The invitation to write on European photo journals came as a surprise. Why me? On the other hand, why not. After all, I do have some years of experience as a reader, co-worker and as editor of such a journal. But that was quite a while ago. I confess that in all these years I have not subscribed to any of these periodicals and I read them only sporadically. Strictly speaking, one can hardly call it reading since I do not find much worth reading in them. The decision not to take such journals seriously has something to do with my experience as reader. At the beginning of this decade there were a number of exhibitions of Eastern European photography touring through Europe and probably also other parts of the world. They presented works many of which were quite unknown and just waiting to be discovered and discussed. A few days after one of the events took place I read quite an intelligent and informative article about the exhibition and conference in Switzerland in my daily newspaper. It was written by someone who clearly had both a sound knowledge of contemporary art as well as of life in Eastern Europe. Months later, however, I read a whimsical article by a well-regarded photo critic who was writing on the self-same event in a well-regarded photo journal. The writer added his lament to a number of well-known banalities: none of those Eastern-block hillbillies would speak with him - him, the internationally eminent authority. That was it for me. I had already felt pronounced discomfort with photo journals; I would have been able to tolerate one more trivial article but this small stupid arrogance was the final straw. Why should I fork out the money of a bottle of decent wine or three packs of cigarettes for a specialist journal when I would be better served by going to other sources and thereby not be burdened by such conceitedness? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘This Morning There Was No New Idea’
by: Pavel Büchler
Posted: Mon, 02 Apr 2012 09:43:51 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 51 - Summer 2007

In the appreciation of a work of art, the familiarity with the artist's intentions seldom proves helpful. With Maeve Rendle, it becomes an outright hindrance. No matter how I try to engage on my own critical terms with what she makes, I cannot forget that what she makes is, for Rendle, not the work. So, what is it? And how do I reconcile my understanding of the artist's argument with the experience of - why not use the word - the work? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Archive of the Planet’
by: Mary Warner Marien
Posted: Mon, 02 Apr 2012 08:49:48 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 51 - Summer 2007

In his seminal essay, 'The Body and the Archive', Allan Sekula concluded that 'roughly between 1880 and 1910, the archive became the dominant institutional basis for photographic meaning.' What Sekula deemed the archive's 'voracious optical encyclopedism' may be exemplified by the early twentieth-century efforts of French banker-financier Albert Kahn (1860-1940), to create a visual record of everyday life around the globe. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Feminine Ideal’
by: Anthony Luvera
Posted: Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:44:32 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Gender
First Published: Issue 51 - Summer 2007

Photography and beauty have always been uneasy bedfellows. When William Henry Fox Talbot christened his invention the 'calotype' after 'kalos', the Greek word for beauty, he prophetically pointed to the symbiotic entanglement that would endure between the two. Photographs aestheticise the world and, in turn, shape our very experience in it. Regardless of what they represent, photographs tell us what is beautiful. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘War Memorials’
by: David Brett
Posted: Wed, 28 Mar 2012 19:20:32 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 21 - Winter 1999

War memorials are serious objects. Considered artistically they can be of all kinds and every level of quality, but what they all have in common is that they denote and commemorate experiences of terrible import in the lives and deaths of individuals and states. The phrases engraved or carved upon them carry a half-hidden threat... 'In Memoriam', 'Lest we forget'... and what we might forget would be Time itself, and therefore community and identity which are created in and by Time. Thus what monuments represent, and how they represent it, are communal utterances; and how in turn they are represented through other means, such as photography, are a further stage - a kind of commentary upon the process of representation and the passage of time. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Resisting Mythology’
by: Tom Paulin
Posted: Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:39:45 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Security
First Published: Issue 21 - Winter 1999

In an attempt to assimilate these images, I think of the Roman god of walls and boundaries, Terminus. There was an annual ceremony on 23 February when first fruits were offered and libations of oil and honey were poured over the termini, the boundary stones between properties. These rural termini had their state counterpart in the great god Terminus, the sacred boundary stone which stood, in the temple of the Capitoline Jupiter. The annual ceremonies would have been attempts at assimilation, attempts at plamasing the brutal truth that good fences make good neighbours, that behind social interaction there is a steeliness - the steeliness of Law or the fixed necessary formality that shapes good manners and shuts off intimacy. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Barracks’
by: Jonathan Olley
Posted: Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:09:28 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Security
First Published: Issue 21 - Winter 1999

A Portfolio of photographic work by Jonathan Olley. Published in Issue 21 of Source, Winter 1999. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 70 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 28 Mar 2012 10:28:21 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 70 - Spring 2012

This issue is part of a broader Archives Season that includes the publications of archive related back issue material on our website, the release of seven new films about photography archives and a series of audio interviews (see our website for more details). Here, we tackle two of the major developments in photography archives. Firstly, Nick Galvin, who has worked in a number of major UK archives, looks back over the last fifteen years of upheaval in commercial picture libraries and asks what benefits digitisation has brought us. Secondly, we have asked a number of artists and photographers to talk about the way they have employed archives in their work. Although there are common themes of accidental discovery each has adopted a different approach to the collections they have looked at. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘At Ground Level’
by: David Green
Posted: Wed, 28 Mar 2012 10:07:32 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Industrial
First Published: Issue 51 - Summer 2007

If there is a predictability to Andreas Gursky's work these days it nonetheless continues to elicit no small measure of reverence. As they get even bigger the sheer size of the photographs alone demand our respect. Yet, perhaps more important is the awareness of the immense and complex infrastructure upon which these images depend: from the extensive logistics of pre-shoot planning to the expenditure of time and labour in studio production, Gursky's practice raises the level of ambition for photography to the sphere of art. Whilst most aspiring students of photography could manage a passable pastiche of a Tillman's installation, and a few might be able to master the technical and economic demands of large format photography à la Seawright or Southam, none would be able to emulate Gursky. With Gursky photography gets about the closest it ever has to rivalling its younger sibling: if one were to compare these images to cinema it would not be on aesthetic grounds but on the fact that they involve something of the social, technological and economic investment that is usual in the film industry. On purely commercial grounds it is the level of such investment that has demanded a reasonable return and why Gursky currently holds the record for highest price ever paid for a photograph. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Wider Comment’
by: Siobhan Davis
Posted: Wed, 28 Mar 2012 09:41:33 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Photojournalism
First Published: Issue 51 - Summer 2007

Some people stop and studiously read, while others scan and walk on quickly. Another group may return at the end of their visit and compare their personal experience and interpretation with that of the curatorial voice. However highly you rate the importance of the introductory text panel as part of the exhibition experience, it is fair to have certain expectations about the content and accuracy of the information made available to the visitor. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Witnessing the Illusion’
by: Eugenie Shinkle
Posted: Wed, 28 Mar 2012 08:22:04 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 51 - Summer 2007

Videogames have come a long way in the last 25 years. The minimalist aesthetic of early videogames - clusters of pixels or slender wireframe outlines superimposed on a black void - has given way to lavishly detailed and ever more lifelike gameworlds. Ironically, however, it is Hollywood cinema, rather than the real world, that provides the benchmark for realism in today's videogames. These virtual environments may meet the standards of the average cinemagoer, but would they hold up to the more exacting standards of a landscape photographer? Using the task of image-making to gauge the realism of a virtual environment may seem counterintuitive, but comparing the two scenarios in terms of both the picture-taking experience and the resulting images ends up revealing some interesting things. Though a gamescape may successfully mimic the appearance of a real landscape, imagine the experience of a landscape photographer in a gamescape and it describes a profoundly different kind of picture-making. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Looking out of the Darkness’
by: Colin Graham
Posted: Wed, 28 Mar 2012 05:58:55 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Night
First Published: Issue 51 - Summer 2007

A harsh play of darkness and light is at the centre of Ciaránóg Arnold's photographs. In this series of images of men living in and around Ballinasloe, men who are 'down and out', the unforgiving luminescence of street lighting is used, imitated, and then transformed into something more than itself, so that the contrasts of the photograph become the mere sign of a greater light, an almost metaphysical illumination. Arnold's subjects lie low - they sleep, collapse, or haunch down, and in doing so they apparently visually reflect their social status. Yet there is more to these photographs than the deadpan pity that a photographic chronicle of homelessness might naturally aspire to. This is not simply a record of poverty nor a set of images that works primarily as a prick to our bourgeois consciences. The 'lowliness' of the men and places in these photographs is part of a vertiginous relationship between the light from the street or from the camera flash, and the distance between these men and the light they look for, or which searches them out, intimating that their lives should be understood beyond the frame which would be created by an eye that is merely socially concerned. The darkness and light of these lives tries to lift us outside the boundaries of the photograph and outside the conventions of documentary accounts of the dispossessed. We are taken close to a tantalising vision - avoiding the obvious danger of romanticising poverty - a vision which is always moving us towards seeing a wonder, a magic and a compromised kind of purity in both these photographs and their subjects. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 51 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 28 Mar 2012 05:08:37 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 51 - Summer 2007

Clive Landen stopped being a 'socially concerned' editorial photographer when he moved out of the city and says, 'I always thought of landscape as a bit easy'. He explains how he discovered this wasn't the case in describing the challenges of photographing roadkill for his work Familiar British Wildlife and then getting access to the burning and burial sites of the foot and mouth epidemic for his work The Abyss which is featured here. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Margins’
by: Paul Seawright
Posted: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:53:09 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 21 - Winter 1999

Paul Seawright's landscape photographs from 1997/98 - of the sites of fires burnt on the edges of Belfast housing ESTates, cages around pubs and walls between communities - began an investigation into peripheral and marginal territory. In this new work he moves away from the overtly political to examine tracts of unspecified land that lie on the edges of many cities. They are uninhaited spaces, places beyond everyday encounter. The police often turn to these places, searching them for missing persons, clues or for criminal evidence. Seawright too is conducting a search on the outskirts of European cities; under roads and bridges, on the edges of sprawling housing projects and industrial buildings, in roadside lay-bys and where the forest borders the city and its light spills over into the darkness beyond. Here amongst this undefined territory we discover a malevolent landscape that begins to touch upon our unspoken fears and anxieties. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘New Work’
by: Paul Quinn
Posted: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:51:53 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Death
First Published: Issue 20 - Autumn 1999

The starting point for this work is a childhood memory of entering a house where an old man had died and been discovered lying in a dark room on a sofa. The light, just sufficient to illuminate what had occured, came in through narrowly parted curtains. This strip of light forms the dominant motif in these photographs. It picks out details that hint at the lives of the people that have now vacated these rooms. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘After the Off’
by: Bruce Gilden
Posted: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:26:50 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 21 - Winter 1999

'After the Off', is published by Dewi Lewis Publishing £30.00. This work was commissioned by the Gallery of Photography, Dublin and will be exhibited there in February 2000. All pictures courtesy of Magnum Photos. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Belfast Degree Shows’
by: Mary Cosgrove
Posted: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 07:53:20 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 20 - Autumn 1999

If cultural models are to be appropriate to our situation they must involve spatial issues. Despite or because of sectarian boundaries, Belfast is a prime example of an alienated city where people are unable to map their positions in their minds. Alienation is further evident in the Ulster University's art department building. Brutally situated between Stevenson's warehouse and the Co-operative Store as part of the academic institutionalisation of the modern movement, it has no orientation. Art students must chart their separate and largely unassisted routes through building sickness towards a reinvented history. The remapping of cognitive space is evident in the co-ordinates of the photographic content of the Degree Show and briefly helps alleviate the alienation of city and building. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Dublin Degree Shows’
by: Nicholas Allen
Posted: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 07:12:06 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 20 - Autumn 1999

The graduate show of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin featured several excellent exhibits of photography. Set in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, students had a comfortable space in which to present their final year Fine Art Degree project. Outstanding among these were Fidelma O'Neill's six prints, entitled Co-ordinates, and Louise Halpin's eerie Untitled portraits. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Untitled II’
by: Louise Halpin
Posted: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 06:28:05 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 20 - Autumn 1999

A Portfolio of photographic work by Louise Halpin. Published in Issue 20 of Source, Autumn 1999. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘A Persisting Anachronism’
by: Colin Graham
Posted: Tue, 27 Mar 2012 05:10:09 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Manipulated
First Published: Issue 50 - Spring 2007

Luxus, Latin for luxury, is also the name of a bar in Berlin. Victor Sloan's collaboration with Glenn Patterson celebrates the recalcitrant ironies of Luxus, and its owner's refusal to blow with the prevailing winds of change in Germany. Before the fall of the Berlin wall Luxus was a subcultural refuge in the GDR. After reunification Luxus has remained the same dowdy, unreconstituted remnant of a butcher's shop, while all around it 'luxury' has sprung up in the form of new apartment living. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Tired or Paranoid Looking’
by: Jesse Alexander
Posted: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 08:01:42 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Urban
First Published: Issue 50 - Spring 2007

Anyone who has had the opportunity to play with a large-format camera will have noticed, and probably have been extremely vexed by, the difficulty of correctly focusing the image that falls (upside-down) on the ground-glass plate. This is due to two factors: the necessarily long focal lengths of large-format camera lenses (which have a relatively shallow depth-of-field), and the physical flexibility of the lens and film mounts, the positioning of which determines what is in focus, depending on the perspective of the subject to the camera. Correct adjustment should lead to perfectly vertical subjects and pin sharp images every time. However, a growing list of practitioners, including Miklos Gaál, Olivo Barbieri and Jean-Luc Mylayne have exploited these movements (most commonly by tilting the film mount) to throw all but a small selection of the composition out of focus. It is quite understandable that many people see this technique as little more than a gimmick; Gaál himself has been candid enough to admit this, and goes on to divulge that his work was the result of not knowing how to operate the camera properly. This visual method leads to two very identifiable visual connotations within these practitioners' work, both of which are also explored in Richard Page's series What We Already Know . . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘North of Morocco’
by: Nancy Roth
Posted: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 07:17:03 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Performance
First Published: Issue 50 - Spring 2007

Tim Brennan's current work The North comprises a series of large, luminous photographs, a set of very small watercolour paintings, two tiny wall-mounted, glass-fronted cases lined with glistening, crystalline stones, and a performance event - called a manoeuvre - that lasts about an hour. There is a text on the gallery wall, which I took to be part of the work, for without it, The North would be incomprehensible. The photographs - spare, enigmatic images mounted on thick, luxurious acrylic - would certainly in themselves form a comprehensible critical object, as would the paintings or the performance. But one must have words to start linking these parts together, to start reading this exhibition in terms of 'the relationship between geography, personal memory and social history' (exhibition copy). . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Staged Romanticism’
by: Justin Carville
Posted: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 06:25:20 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 50 - Spring 2007

In conjunction with Edward Curtis's Sacred Legacy exhibition, the Gallery of Photography proposed to organise a workshop on alternative photographic processes. Recently described as photography's 'antiquarian avant-garde', the cyanotype, platinum printing and toning with various precious metals have all resurfaced within contemporary photographic culture. A reactionary turn, no doubt, to photography's chemical past in the face of its digital future. It is ironic that this interest in Curtis's use of alternative processes appears to be the only thing salvageable from his massive ethnographic survey of the culture of the North American Indian. Though perhaps even more ironic is what has been lost amidst this rescuing of Curtis's photographic legacy; that the displacement of North American Indians from their tribal lands was in part due to the mining industry's desire to get access to the very types of precious metals used in the production of his photographic imagery. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘A Serious Traveller’
by: Justin Partyka
Posted: Mon, 26 Mar 2012 05:51:51 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 50 - Spring 2007

The Old Order and The New: P. H. Emerson and Photography, 1885-1895 provides a rare opportunity to see up-close Emerson's thought provoking photographs made in East Anglia during the late nineteenth century. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Canine Emotion’
by: Nessa O'Mahony
Posted: Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:36:01 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 20 - Autumn 1999

Dog Dogs, the latest exhibition by US photographer Elliott Erwitt, showed in the Gallery of Photography in Dublin's Temple Bar in June. The exhibition included 108 portraits of dogs in a variety of locations and, indeed, eras - the photographs were taken by Erwitt over a six decade period, from the early 1940s to modern day. Erwitt was born in Paris in 1928 but moved to Los Angles in the 1940s, studying film at the New School for Social Research before starting work as a photographer. He joined the Magnum photo agency in 1953 (at the request of co-founder Robert Capa), and has worked for many of the world's leading photographic magazines. He has exhibited throughout the world, with solo shows in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institute in Washington and the Kunsthaus in Zurich. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Dead Flowers’
by: Richard West
Posted: Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:53:22 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Performance
First Published: Issue 20 - Autumn 1999

Nigel Rolfe was once a performance artist who incorporated projections into his work. He then exhibited photographs which, though autonomous, seemed to record his performances. He is now almost entirely absent from his photographs. In 1988 an audience for Belgrano would have seen a projection of the 'Mary Rose' and the artist smeared in red paste in an overflowing bath. In 1999 we see 162 slides projected in a dark room. Despite the change there is a consistency about the way the artist engages his viewers and asks them to understand his imagery. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘More Glossy Than Reflective’
by: Fiona Kearney
Posted: Fri, 23 Mar 2012 09:11:28 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Event
First Published: Issue 20 - Autumn 1999

Arles is the small town in Provence where Van Gogh painted sunflowers and infamously mangled his ear. For the last thirty years, it has also been host to the longest running photography festival in the world, Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie. The theme of this year's event was 'Vive les Modernités', a motif to celebrate the welter of modernisms this century has produced and an occasion for the festival's organisers to gather together under one conceptual umbrella such photo-luminaries as Walker Evans, Alexander Rodchenko, Hilla and Bernd Becher, and Lee Friedlander. Our millennium moment has intensified historical appraisals of this sort and all too often, we encounter no more than cursory surveys, shimmering summaries of the past which do little to further our understanding of the complex image culture of our time. Unfortunately, Arles was more glossy than reflective, a slight celebration of modernity despite the marathon number of presentations and events in its programme. Many of the exhibitions were whimsical curations, flimsy ideas propped up by an assortment of images that provided nothing much other than a pleasant parcours of pictures. The exception to this was Photographic Abstraction, an insightful look at the development of abstract form in photography since the turn of the century which contextualised the innovations of artists such as Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy within a wider framework of experimentation. Even the enjoyable tributes to modernist heros such as Evans and Rodchenko lacked the scale necessary to ESTablish the significance of their contribution to the history of the medium. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Dystopian Chic’
by: Gavin Murphy
Posted: Fri, 23 Mar 2012 07:18:08 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 20 - Autumn 1999

This year's selection of artists for the Glen Dimplex Award reaffirms the prominence of lens based media in contemporary fine art practice. It also clarifies two divergent strands of such practice: a preoccupation with the craft of photography and the role lens based media can perform in relation to wider structures of knowledge. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Dominant Style / Variant Practices’
by: Justin Carville
Posted: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:16:21 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Multi-Genre
First Published: Issue 20 - Autumn 1999

A survey of the contemporary art shows exhibited in this country during the last 12 months would probably, unsurprisingly, reveal that an increasing number of institutions are incorporating artists using lens based media into their programmes. Indeed over the last 3-4 years photography in particular has become a visible feature of museum and gallery schedules throughout Europe as a whole. This emergence of photography as a predominant feature of contemporary art is reflected by the increasing number of graduates using the medium. Art schools are a useful barometer of marketplace trends and recent reviews of graduate shows in papers such as The Irish Times have gone out of their way to comment on the high numbers of graduates using photography in a variety of contexts. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Icelandic Series’
by: Christopher Taylor
Posted: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:40:45 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Narrative
First Published: Issue 20 - Autumn 1999

A novel by the Icelandic Nobel laureate Haldor Laxness - 'Christianity at Glacier' sent to me by my mother-in-law (who can't read) provided the initial impetus for the series. I have been visiting my wife's family in Iceland for 15 years. I began at the base of an extinct volcano topped by a small glacier at the tip of a peninsula where my nephew was employed by a fish packer. The glacier, which is held by Icelanders to possess a spiritual potency, is the setting for the novel by Laxness, and coincidently the starting point for Jules Verne's 'journey to the Centre of the Earth'. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Double Happiness’
by: Pavel Büchler
Posted: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 09:42:50 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 50 - Spring 2007

I wonder what the most popular cigarette brand is in North Korea. In China, I am told, it is Double Happiness (and in Taiwan, smokers delight in Long Life). But factual knowledge and information may not be the point in the selection of some twenty photographs from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea by Philippe Chancel. Chancel gave up 'reportage' years ago 'to explore other ways of looking at reality' - and it is the manner of looking, the point of view, that is up for scrutiny in this exhibition. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘We're Not Alton Towers’
by: Richard West
Posted: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 08:47:44 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 50 - Spring 2007

Richard West: What was your own educational background and what did you before this job? / Colin Philpott: I did a law degree at university but caught the journalism bug. I worked for the BBC in a range of jobs for twenty-four years: as an on the road reporter, as a producer, and then an editorial manager across radio and television. / Richard West: Since you arrived you have changed the name and the structure of the Museum, can you describe those changes? / Colin Philpott: The Museum by any measure has been fantastically successful over its twenty-three year history. Having said that, one of the things which we couldn't ignore was the fact that the number of visitors had declined since 2001. Whilst the number of the visitors is only one measure of success, it is clearly quite an important one, so I suppose my starting point was to say 'let's be clear about who we are trying to appeal to'. Obviously on one level we are trying to appeal to everybody, but you have to have a sense of who you are particularly targeting, and the way we would define that is to say that our first target is the general audience. Including families, but not just families, as I think that can give a misleading impression that it is all about just having young kids in here. The sort of people who are looking for something to do on a Sunday afternoon, something that they would regard as entertaining but also informative and educational. So we are not Alton Towers. And I suppose everything that has happened here over the last two or three years has been about saying, 'let's regard that group and appeal to that group as our first target'. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘John Stezaker’
by: Richard West
Posted: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 06:45:25 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Photomontage
First Published: Issue 50 - Spring 2007

Richard West: How did you first started cutting up pictures and putting them together? / John Stezaker: In 1975 I did a publication for the Paris Biennial and in Paris I suddenly discovered this thing called the Photoroman which was a pictorial, cinematic magazine in comic strip form, which didn't exist in England. It was great because they were cinematic imagery available in quantities, and I could always find one magazine and within a month buy five more. I must have done thousands and thousands of Photoromanic collages, all but a handful of which I destroyed in a great ritual act of destruction many years later. They were very important in working through a kind of vocabulary of cutting and tearing and folding. / Speaker 2 I started collecting some stills at the same time but I didn't know what to do with them initially and I think the first film still collage was in 1977. / Richard West: How did you collect film stills? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘In the Service of the Imagination’
by: David Green
Posted: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 05:53:59 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Photomontage
First Published: Issue 50 - Spring 2007

It is nearly a century ago that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque produced the first of their papier collés - works that combined the traditional notation of painting and drawing with fragments of newspaper and other printed matter directly pasted onto a two dimensional surface - and thereby initiated, not only a decisive development in the course of Cubism, but a radically new order of depiction into the visual arts. What was to evolve from this point as the medium of collage (and its variations as photomontage, assemblage and so forth) has been characterised in terms of art's rendezvous with the full consequences of the cultural conditions of modernity. In its direct deployment of, rather than mere reference to, the phenomena of modern life and artefacts of an industrial society, collage signalled the birth of an entirely new kind of relationship between high art and the realm of popular culture. Henceforth the practices of contemporary art would find it difficult to feign indifference to the ubiquitous presence of the products of mass culture or to presuppose the separation of art from the everyday. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: John Stezaker
Posted: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 20:51:08 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Photomontage
First Published: Issue 50 - Spring 2007

A Portfolio of photographic work by John Stezaker. Published in Issue 50 of Source, Spring 2007. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Family Photographs’
by: Maeve O'Sullivan
Posted: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:12:28 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Family
First Published: Issue 18 - Spring 1999

'Shades of Time' is a photographic installation by the Swiss photographer Annalies Strba. Three projectors simultaneously show slides (240 in total) which change every 11 seconds, with accompanying electronic, percussion-based music. There are bell-like sounds and others simulating the noise of wind blowing. The music does not intrude, but neither does it add very much other than providing an ambient atmosphere. The work is also reproduced in a book. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Vulnerable Fragility’
by: Mairin Murray
Posted: Wed, 21 Mar 2012 08:10:53 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 17 - Winter 1998

Marie Jo Lafontaine is an artist from Brussels, internationally celebrated for a body of work comprising of video works and photo installations. The exhibition titled 'The Blind Angels' in the Orchard Gallery consists of two video installations and the photowork 'Kids of the Ruhr Valley', consisting of eleven large scale photographs inside the gallery and five smaller photographs above the entrance to the gallery. Lafontaine's work and indeed the title for one of the video pieces draws on sentiment expressed by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who wrote in 1912, For Beauty's nothing but beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘For She Loved Much’
by: Siún Hanrahan
Posted: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 17:16:10 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Institutional
First Published: Issue 17 - Winter 1998

Maoliosa Boyle's exhibition 'For She Loved Much,' consists of a series of photographs taken within Derry's recently derelict Magdalene Laundry. This and a host of similar institutions throughout England and Ireland housed unmarried mothers and 'unmanageable' women. As the name of these ESTablishments indicates, the women washed clothes during their confinement. Boyle suggests that this served as a kind of 'industrial therapy' or penance, reminiscent of that of Mary Magdalene herself perhaps. The seven photographs making up this exhibition seek to address the plight of these women by focusing on the spaces they once occupied. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Amongst Women’
by: Paul Tebbs
Posted: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:03:51 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 17 - Winter 1998

In previous works, Hannah Starkey created what appeared to be accidental meetings of female strangers, found together on the top of a bus or within the reflection of a mirror. The significance of these encounters was ambiguous. One was unsure as to whether the significance was accidental, an illusion created through the privileged position afforded the spectator, or real for the people within the scene. But Starkey's compositions are anything but accidental. There is within every detail a considered intent. In her latest work shown at Interim Art, the physical closeness of the women and girls suggests a familiarity. We appear to witness an encounter between friends or relations. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Chambers’
by: Eoghan McTigue
Posted: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:40:05 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Institutional
First Published: Issue 17 - Winter 1998

Mary McIntyre has made some distinct decisions installing 'Chambers' at the Old Museum Arts Centre, the installation consists of two light boxes, one large, one small, each depicting an aspect of the interior of a local council chambers. McIntyre has set a false wall 3 feet into the space and 7 feet wide blocking our view of the main image and deliberately restricting our approach to the work. As an extension of the curtains, a central motif in the photographs, the entire gallery space has been painted a deep navy blue. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Alternatives to Propaganda’
by: Fiona Kearney
Posted: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 09:35:37 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Political
First Published: Issue 17 - Winter 1998

The work of Willie Doherty, Paul Graham and more recently, Paul Seawright, has been widely acclaimed as a critical response to the way in which Northern Ireland has been represented in the mass media for the last thirty years. Their photographs are seen as an alternative to the propaganda of conflict perpetuated in newspaper coverage of the violence. These images record the spaces beyond any actual confrontation and stage the legacy of the North's hostile histories in a different context. It is a fragmented vision, deliberately at a tangent to the almost cliched pictures of bitter and dangerous encounters circulated by the world's press. Doherty, Graham and Seawright construct new and subversive perspectives of the political setting in which they work. The photographs, however, are defined by their opposition to the visual rhetoric of photojournalism and as such ESTablish a binary culture of representation between fine art photography and the print media. This article will consider how this dialogue between two photographic positions has developed in recent years and how the wider understanding of the photograph as a constructed image has influenced the production of contemporary images in Northern Ireland. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Fassaroe Sporting Club’
by: Edel Byrne
Posted: Tue, 20 Mar 2012 08:09:36 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 17 - Winter 1998

A Portfolio of photographic work by Edel Byrne. Published in Issue 17 of Source, Winter 1998. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Sites of Memory’
by: Chris Harrison
Posted: Sat, 10 Mar 2012 18:32:30 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 21 - Winter 1999

A Portfolio of photographic work by Chris Harrison. Published in Issue 21 of Source, Winter 1999. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 21 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Sat, 10 Mar 2012 17:58:26 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 21 - Winter 1999

In the course of producing this issue it has become clear that Source shares a common history with many other photographic publications from around the world. Source was originally envisaged as a member's newsletter and was initiated by practising photographers. Various attempts had been made to start a photographic journal before Source came along, notably the short-lived Belfast Exposed magazine and Exposure, produced by The Gallery of Photography. The motivation in producing these magazines - in Ireland and elsewhere - always appears to have been firstly, to create a means of disseminating and recording the work being produced and secondly, to start a critical debate around photography. More often than not magazines have been started by galleries, individual artists or groups and they have sought to attract readers like themselves. The twin challenges facing 'little' magazines are survival and finding an audience and it is taken for granted that a photographic magazine will only attract a specialist audience. We would like to defeat this expectation (and survive in the process) by transcending our history and publishing work that can claim anyone's attention. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Popular Vote’
by: John Duncan
Posted: Sat, 10 Mar 2012 09:21:27 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Event
First Published: Issue 20 - Autumn 1999

Photo Espana 99 was not organised with the specialist art press in mind. It was concerned with creating a festival for 'the people of Madrid'. The accompanying pocket-sized guidebook to this year's event identifies its broad aim as 'assisting in recovering emotion as the essential instrument of creation'. This was to provide a loose link across the work exhibited in over seventy venues. The well designed guide, complete with maps, in combination with highly visible signage throughout the city, made the physical negotiation of the exhibitions easy. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Little Angels’
by: Reinhard Kühl
Posted: Fri, 09 Mar 2012 20:25:32 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 20 - Autumn 1999

These photographs are of children's toys left on graves in a cemetry in Dublin. They represent a personal memorial for children that have died young or during pregnancy. The artist photographed the toys against a white background so they could be seen as suggestive of the children they memorialised. He did not wish to document a cultural tradition. This work was produced during a residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Plastic Cup’
by: Karen Forrester
Posted: Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:31:39 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 20 - Autumn 1999

A Portfolio of photographic work by Karen Forrester. Published in Issue 20 of Source, Autumn 1999. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 20 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:59:29 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 20 - Autumn 1999

This year's Glen Dimplex artist award saw all four short-listed artists using photography in their work. Justin Carville in the latest Source commissioned essay argues that old divisions still exist between the role of artists and photographers within the exhibition arena. He highlights the tension between political concerns and aestheticism in the gallery and Museum. This debate is also to the fore in Mary Cosgrove's review of this year's graduate work in Belfast. Another aspect of the discussion about art and contemporary photography is to be found in reviews of exhibitions by artists (Peter Richards and Nigel Rolfe), that inhabit the shared territory between performance art and photography each producing quite different results. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘A Landscape Revealed’
by: Louise Gagen
Posted: Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:13:06 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 18 - Spring 1999

This is a significant moment in Northern Ireland's history. For the first time we are witnessing the dismantling of historical boundaries. This presents an ideal opportunity for a photographer to record these events. However Frankie Quinn's journey 'All Along the Watchtowers' is concerned with reconciling the people, not so much with each other, as with the land. He has chosen to focus on the scars which have been made on our landscape, scars made of concrete, barbed wire and watchtowers. Quinn documents the removal of these scars and reveals the land which, for so long, has been obscured from our sight. As a consequence he also succeeds in removing the traces of psychological scarring from the people, thereby suggesting that the land and its people are inextricably bound together, each a mirror reflecting the other. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Sea of Images’
by: Justin Carville
Posted: Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:47:30 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Macro
First Published: Issue 18 - Spring 1999

There is always a disparity between interpretation and intentionality. Artists and photographers are, no doubt, frequently perplexed at the types of things viewers say about their work. Reciprocally, viewers are often unsure of the explanations given for the basis of much visual art. Such is the fragility of communication between artist, work and the viewer, that the search ensues to find that one fragment which may pull everything into place and contextualise the experience of engaging with a body of work. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘H.M.P. Hands’
by: Amanda Dunsmore
Posted: Tue, 06 Mar 2012 08:04:00 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 18 - Spring 1999

A Portfolio of photographic work by Amanda Dunsmore. Published in Issue 18 of Source, Spring 1999. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Half-Wild’
by: Eugenie Shinkle
Posted: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 17:58:12 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Nature
First Published: Issue 50 - Spring 2007

Few photographic subjects have wider or more lasting appeal than animals. The difference between animal photography and the more specific genre of wildlife photography seems fairly obvious: wildlife photography depicts wild animals. As I discovered when I visited the Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum, however, things aren't quite that simple. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The American Three Ring Circus’
by: Jimi Hughes
Posted: Mon, 27 Feb 2012 12:56:16 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 18 - Spring 1999

A Portfolio of photographic work by Jimi Hughes. Published in Issue 18 of Source, Spring 1999. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘There's No One at Home Peggy's in Town’
by: Pádraig Murphy
Posted: Mon, 27 Feb 2012 07:59:06 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 18 - Spring 1999

A Portfolio of photographic work by Pádraig Murphy. Published in Issue 18 of Source, Spring 1999. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Life and Times of Mick Minogue’
by: Louise Croke
Posted: Sun, 26 Feb 2012 18:02:47 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Narrative
First Published: Issue 17 - Winter 1998

A Portfolio of photographic work by Louise Croke. Published in Issue 17 of Source, Winter 1998. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘'Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously'’
by: David Campany
Posted: Sun, 26 Feb 2012 07:55:51 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 36 - Autumn 2003

For good reason perhaps, much of our photographic theory is marked by an anxiety about the proper place of images: about their use, their re-use and their misuse. So readily are photographs detached from their origins that the overriding inclination is often to 'return' images from whence they came, to locate their 'real' meanings somewhere in their material source. Certainly this is an important task. It can reveal a great deal about why, how and for whom images are produced. It shows us that photographic meaning is heavily dependent upon context and that shifts in context - historical, institutional, cultural - produce shifts in meaning. We might think of how critics such as John Tagg have insisted on the concrete origins of Farm Security Administration pictures from 1930s USA, or of Allan Sekula's writings on what he has called the 'traffic in photographs', examining the constant reinvention of meaning. Producing a 'history of photography' has so often meant ignoring history proper, which makes insisting on the sources of pictures a necessary task. Moreover, in an amnesiac, spectacular society of simulation and inane recycling any discussion of the genesis of photographs is a significant antidote. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 36 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Sun, 26 Feb 2012 05:40:43 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 36 - Autumn 2003

Could a substantial and meaningful body of work be constructed from photographs extracted from official archives? The book Evidence, published in 1977 by the artists Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, seems to pose this question. David Campany looks at this and other examples of photographs removed from (and positioned within) archives and discusses how an archive secures the meaning of photographs. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Fragments of Modern Life’
by: Colin Darke
Posted: Sat, 25 Feb 2012 15:52:35 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 30 - Spring 2002

Elina Brotherus talks more of what her work isn't than what it is. Furthermore, what she says it isn't is precisely what the rest of us would think it is. She denies the melancholy of her landscapes, the narrative of her text/image pieces and the issue of women's sexual identity which are evident throughout. She prefers instead to stress the aesthetic and the opportunity that photography provides for catching the fleeting serendipitous moment. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Goodbye Golden Wonder’
by: Stephen Bull
Posted: Sat, 25 Feb 2012 11:02:52 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 30 - Spring 2002

Soon after releasing Gold, their greatest hits album, Steps announced that they were splitting up. There is often a feeling that the appearance of a band's greatest hits collection suggests their career has run its course; that they have achieved their finest work. The same suspicion might arise on the occasion of an artist's retrospective, such as the Val Williams curated show of Martin Parr's work at the Barbican Gallery. Parr himself is quoted by Williams in the accompanying catalogue as declaring that 'My best photography is behind me'. The occasion of this huge survey, covering thirty years of Parr's work, seems like a good time to assess what Parr has achieved so far, and perhaps to consider where his photography might go in the future. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Underpants’
by: Steven Tynan
Posted: Fri, 24 Feb 2012 18:45:56 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 30 - Spring 2002

I have been working on this personal project for nearly 5 years. I felt that I could not record, document, take, feed-off and rob any more images relating to the editorial, documentary world that I had a very small part in. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 30 Editorial’
by: Editors
Posted: Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:11:47 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 30 - Spring 2002

Beyond the pages of the specialist photography magazines there is a large economy of people that use and discuss photographs. The interview with Michael Rand and Masoud Golsorkhi, respectively of The Sunday Times magazine and Tank, the fashion magazine, describes two different ways in which pictures are used. The Sunday Times magazine, which has just celebrated its 40th anniversary, has been identified with high profile photojournalism while Tank has sought to reinvent the way fashion magazines function. Both interviewees give an insight into the decision making processes that decide which pictures are used and the motivations behind the publication of each magazine. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Rest Assured’
by: Richard Adams
Posted: Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:23:36 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 17 - Winter 1998

A Portfolio of photographic work by Richard Adams. Published in Issue 17 of Source, Winter 1998. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Belfast Exposed’
by: Martin Bruhns
Posted: Fri, 24 Feb 2012 08:18:04 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Social
First Published: Issue 33 - Winter 2002

The origin of Belfast Exposed dates back to 1983 when a group of local photographers came up with the idea for an exhibition to which people from across Belfast were invited to bring their photographs, to provide an 'amateurs insight into the varying images of Belfast' (Brendan O'Reilly 1984). The response to this idea and to the eventual exhibition itself was so enthusiastic that it was taken not only to different venues within Belfast but was soon sent abroad. 'It just snowballed from there.' Following on from the exhibition, those involved found themselves facilitating workshops. Later, after more permanent premises were obtained, a darkroom and a gallery were added. The gallery space provided exhibition space both for local community groups and ESTablished photographers from within and outside of Belfast. Photographs taken by the photographers and by the participants of the workshops started to amass, adding to the corpus of images from which the initial exhibition had been formed and providing the foundation of an archive. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Laminated in Time’
by: Pete James
Posted: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:42:44 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Social
First Published: Issue 33 - Winter 2002

It's strange how quickly your past catches up with you. Over the last few years - in my job as curator of the photography collections held at Birmingham Central Library - I have helped organise the deposit of archives relating to a number of now defunct Birmingham-based photography organisations which, in one capacity or another, I previously worked for or with. One feature that seems to re-occur throughout these archives is portable, lightweight laminated exhibitions. The images and texts preserved between sheets of plastic now appear like insects preserved in amber, marking out signs of a period of prolific life in the stratigraphy of recent photographic history. In today's world of digitally output images, these laminated panels now seem incredibly outmoded. However, in their own time they provided comparatively cheap and easy ways of exhibiting photographs: a radical alternative to the traditional framed exhibition. They enabled photographs to be seen by audiences beyond the traditional museum or gallery setting and made it possible for exhibitions to be toured with ease. They therefore helped take photography out of the gallery and into the community. But it was not just exhibitions that were reaching beyond the traditional settings of the institution. The teaching of photography skills was also being taken into the community, enabling people to represent themselves and not be dependent on others to do it for them. The term most commonly associated with this area of photographic activity is 'community photography'. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The History of the Solitary Lighthouse Keeper’
by: Justin Carville
Posted: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 05:34:58 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

The imagined existence of the lighthouse keeper as a solitary figure stoically watching over the fringes of the mapped world, has been one of the most enduring images of the twentieth century. So too has the media portrayal of the final days of the lighthouse keeper on some isolated peninsula or island before modern technology has rendered his presence there obsolete. Flashed across the television screen in recent decades have been intermittent 'human interest' stories of the final moments before the lighthouse keeper has for the last time, boarded a boat for the mainland. This forlorn figure has for many, become a poignant symbol of the final area of working life to have given way to automation. Today the safety of the mariner has been handed over to computers, satellites and global positioning systems, from man to machine. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Indexing Meaning’
by: Justin Carville
Posted: Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:48:14 EST
Content: Review / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 17 - Winter 1998

With the opening of the National Library's photographic archive in Temple Bar and the coinciding publication of Sarah Rouse's illustrated guide to the collection, there is an opportunity to briefly asses the influence the archive may have on the conditions under which Irish photographs come to be reproduced, exhibited and understood. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Local News’
by: Jim Vaughan
Posted: Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:02:10 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 18 - Spring 1999

A Portfolio of photographic work by Jim Vaughan. Published in Issue 18 of Source, Spring 1999. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 33 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Tue, 21 Feb 2012 08:46:56 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 33 - Winter 2002

It's 20 years since the publication of Thinking Photography. Reflecting on this anniversary it becomes apparent that the terrain for photography today is very different to that of 1982. It takes time to discover a perspective on past debates but superficially the late 70s and early 80s appear more argumentative and radical than 2002. Photography theory, the subject of much argument in the 80s, is now the staple bibliography for photography students on courses across Britain and Ireland. The representation of 'community' through photography was a form of radical politics rather than local government policy. So what exactly happened to these arguments that they have now been assimilated? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Where Do All The Photographs Go?’
by: Mark Bolland
Posted: Tue, 21 Feb 2012 07:21:06 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 55 - Summer 2008

What happens to a photographer's work when they die and where do the photographs go? A cynic might say that in the UK the answer is probably 'nothing and nowhere', and they would be right, more often than not. However, the acquisition by the British Library of Fay Godwin's archive suggests that this bleak prognosis isn't always accurate and some other recent examples suggest that there is hope for those who expect archives of work by prominent photographers to find their way to national collections. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Murder H38 / 93’
by: Royal Ulster Constabulary Scene of the Crime Photographic Archive
Posted: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:25:51 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Police
First Published: Issue 18 - Spring 1999

A Portfolio of photographic work by Royal Ulster Constabulary Scene of the Crime Photographic Archive. Published in Issue 18 of Source, Spring 1999. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘In Perpetuity’
by: Mary Warner
Posted: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:53:58 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 55 - Summer 2008

The Center for Creative Photography, located on the campus of the University of Arizona at Tucson, celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2005. Ansel Adams was among its founders, and his emphasis on public access guides the institution. CCP take pride in holding 'more archives and individual works by 20th-century North American photographers than any other museum in the nation.' Their research collection features the archives of Ansel Adams, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Richard Avedon, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, W. Eugene Smith, and Edward Weston among others. These archives include not only photographs, but also 'negatives, albums, work prints, manuscripts, audio-visual material, contact sheets, correspondence and memorabilia.' Amy Rule, who began working as a librarian and archivist at CCP in 1981, became Head of Research in 2005. / Mary Warner Marien: CCP is best known as the museum and archive founded by Ansel Adams. Did Adams originally envision an archive for American photographers or photographers of the American West? Did he delimit his vision at all? / Amy Rule: Essentially, Adams had been looking for an institution to provide access to and preserve his life's work. He approached several, but was told that museums must relegate most of their collections to storage. Access for research was way down at the bottom of the list of priorities, way after exhibitions, for example. Adams did not stress the geographical/US bias you suggest. He was looking for a new way of institutionalizing creative photography so that the field could grow and support new study and appreciation. / Mary Warner Marien: Your list of major collections includes that of Robert Heinecken, who died in 2006. Did you acquire the materials after his death, or were you able to work with him (and Joyce)? When is the ideal time for a photographer to start thinking about archiving materials? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Bearing Witness’
by: Siún Hanrahan
Posted: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 09:36:45 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 18 - Spring 1999

Despite its absence from view, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) scene-of-the-crime photographic archive is hugely significant. This significance is threefold. The archive is massive; although the photographs from the scene of a crime are destroyed after five years, the negatives are kept. The archive is a profound historical record; it depicts three decades of violent conflict - our 'troubles' - in horrific detail. The archive is a container for this trouble; it holds in store for us that which cannot yet be admitted as central to our community. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Collecting The Indefinable’
by: Jennifer Grigg
Posted: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 05:51:42 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 23 - Summer 2000

The definition of photography, for some curators, is an elusive one. Art or technology? There are photographers who do not consider what they make to be art and there are artists who use photography as a medium and expect what they make to be called art. Photography has undoubtedly grown throughout the 20th century in popularity as an artistic medium. It may be the case that not all photography is art, but where does that leave photography as something to be archived and collected by a nation's institutions? Some of the difficulty in 'placing' photography within collections stems from the various ways of critiquing photography since its inception. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Armed Robbery - H2208 / 93’
by: Royal Ulster Constabulary Scene of the Crime Photographic Archive
Posted: Sun, 19 Feb 2012 15:04:33 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Police
First Published: Issue 18 - Spring 1999

A Portfolio of photographic work by Royal Ulster Constabulary Scene of the Crime Photographic Archive. Published in Issue 18 of Source, Spring 1999. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Assault - H3963 / 96’
by: Royal Ulster Constabulary Scene of the Crime Photographic Archive
Posted: Sun, 19 Feb 2012 14:58:29 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Police
First Published: Issue 18 - Spring 1999

A Portfolio of photographic work by Royal Ulster Constabulary Scene of the Crime Photographic Archive. Published in Issue 18 of Source, Spring 1999. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 18 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Sun, 19 Feb 2012 12:26:18 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 18 - Spring 1999

The commissioned essay in this issue, by Siún Hanrahan, examines the Royal Ulster Constabulary photographic archive. To accompany the article we are publishing a selection of photographs from this archive showing the scenes of crimes; a murder, an assault and an armed robbery. We are publishing the pictures in the belief that drawing attention to their existence, and to that of the archive, could contribute to process of being reconciled to the deeds they describe. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Remote Control’
by: Justin Carville
Posted: Sun, 19 Feb 2012 09:23:04 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 23 - Summer 2000

As part of their millennium year programming RTE television have been screening a short three minute filler called 100 Years: Ireland in the Twentieth Century. The format of the programme consists of archival news footage, reproductions of newspaper headlines and still photographs of historic events appearing on screen with an accompanying narration by Professor Brian Farrell. Produced in conjunction with the National Millennium Committee, 100 Years, which is screened twice every twenty-four hours, recounts significant events that have taken place over the last century which correspond to the date each particular episode is aired. So for example, on the 3rd of May 1916, Padraig Pearse, Thomas McDonagh and Thomas J. Clarke are executed at Kilmainham Gaol. 1949 Westminster's Ireland Bill is passed. 1973 the Northern Ireland Assembly Act is rushed through Parliament and in 1997 British PM Tony Blair appoints Mo Mowlam as Northern Ireland Secretary. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 23 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Sat, 18 Feb 2012 18:49:09 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 23 - Summer 2000

Although we might prefer to believe otherwise there is no getting away from the fact that a lot of photographs end up in institutions. There they are catalogued, put to work and occasionally sold off to whoever can afford them. This issue takes a systematic overview of the different ways a photograph can inhabit an institution. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Revisionists Take Note’
by: Richard West
Posted: Sat, 18 Feb 2012 13:12:28 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 34 - Spring 2003

Richard West: So tell us then where you were born? / Sean Sexton: I was born in Co. Clare in 1946 on a small farm, 55 acres, rural, Co. Clare. No running water. My mother never had a pram for any of the seven of us. The farm was worked by hand by my father, it was a dairy farm basically, I think there were eight cows, one horse that was for the ploughing. Turf was cut in the bog by hand, brought home, that was the fuel. / Richard West: So how much an idea of the family history do you have from when you were growing up? / Sean Sexton: Very little. When they slated the house, I think in probably 1960, a musket was found underneath the thatch, apparently they were sympathetic to the republican movement. I didn't know that much about the history, our family, especially on the male side. If you think about a stiff upper lip here, you want to see into our house. There was no displays of affection shown to the the children at all from the men, that wasn't a done thing. Then entertainment, we used to go to the local village and it was bloody dreary. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘A Temporary Custodian’
by: Richard West
Posted: Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:41:04 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 34 - Spring 2003

Richard West: Where were you born? / Michael Wilson: I was born in New York city, raised in California, went to university as an engineer and then went to Stanford Law School. Worked as a lawyer first for the government and then for a private law firm. During the Vietnam war I was working on military contracts, then I got into tax and international business law, about 1974 I came to London. The two year leave of absense became permanent, I've been over here ever since. / Richard West: What did your parents do? / Michael Wilson: My stepdad was a movie producer, came over in '52 and produced pictures all his life here. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Picturing The Queen’
by: Douglas Hurd
Posted: Fri, 17 Feb 2012 06:27:26 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 31 - Summer 2002

When the Queen travels to foreign countries on an official visit she takes with her one of her Ministers, usually the Foreign Secretary. Between 1989 and 1995 I enjoyed this pleasure six times, in France, Germany, the United States, Hungary, Russia and South Africa. There is a reason for this arrangement beyond giving the Foreign Secretary a pleasant outing. Many of the Presidents and Prime Ministers whom the Queen meets are political personalities for whom it is normal to discuss politics. But the Queen cannot get drawn into political controversy. When one of her hosts, for example President Yeltsin in Russia, launched into some political discourse she would intervene with a smile at a convenient moment and say 'that is very interesting, Mr President; I am sure the Foreign Secretary would like to discuss this with you further'. Then it was up to me. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Representing Loyalty’
by: Neil Jarman
Posted: Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:21:01 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Political
First Published: Issue 31 - Summer 2002

Each summer the Protestant areas of towns and villages across Northern Ireland are bedecked with Union flags, red, white and blue bunting, elaborately painted gable end murals and street furniture in the union colours. To the uninformed such representations of loyalty to 'Queen and Country' might suggest that many of these communities are celebrating a royal jubilee each and every year. In fact the decorations are no more than a 'traditional' facet of the marching season, when the Orange Order and other similar bodies parade to commemorate the victories of the seventeenth century that ensured the place of a Protestant king on the throne of Britain and Ireland. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘What is to be done?’
by: Christopher Pinney
Posted: Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:50:27 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 48 - Autumn 2006

Our current century opened with events that destroyed the implausible proposition that history had ended. These events also further eroded an art practice increasingly aware of its own isolation from world history and its inability to produce knowledge about that world. These parallel historical implosions were brought into sharp relief by the curator Okwui Enwezor's brilliantly provocative transformation of Documenta 11, in Kassell in 2002, into politico-philosophical praxis. In Enwezor's vision, the white cube became a gallery without walls, opened to a world of conflict. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Just Before He Left, He Said’
by: Anne Enright
Posted: Thu, 16 Feb 2012 09:49:34 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Miscellaneous
First Published: Issue 24 - Autumn 2000

Declan said he had driven half way across America, ended up in a place called Dewey, Wisconsin. He got out of the car, looked at people on the sidewalk and wondered what the hell they were doing here: working in the launderette, working in the uranium plant at the edge of town. Maybe it was just love. They fell in love, they had kids. And they were amazed by it - by the fact that all this could happen in Dewey, Wisconsin. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Ann McNamee
Posted: Thu, 16 Feb 2012 08:57:38 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 24 - Autumn 2000

A Portfolio of photographic work by Ann McNamee. Published in Issue 24 of Source, Autumn 2000. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘This Is British Photography’
by: David Brittain
Posted: Thu, 16 Feb 2012 07:37:49 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Historical
First Published: Issue 31 - Summer 2002

Despite the internationalization of art and the uncertainties over the identity of photography, the British photography survey is an enduring institution. Since the 70s, survey exhibitions have cropped up with amazing regularity, ostensibly to satisfy an ever-increasing interest, at home and abroad, in photography as art and in art. In 1980 Artist and Camera, an Arts Council survey of conceptual practices, announced that it owed its existence to, 'an expanding appreciation of photography proper.' The following year the British Council presented Photography as Medium in recognition of, 'the increasing use of photography by artists... in the 1970s.' . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 31 Editorial’
by: Editors
Posted: Thu, 16 Feb 2012 06:15:14 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 31 - Summer 2002

It is now ten years since the first issue of Source was published in Summer 1992. We celebrate our anniversary with a bumper issue. With the football world cup and the Queen's Golden jubilee underway this summer, national identity will be at the forefront of people's minds over the next few months. This issue looks at some aspects of the way these identities are formed. Douglas Hurd, who was both a Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary in the previous government describes the role of the Queen as an apolitical figurehead for British identity. Neil Jarman looks at the role of the Queen for one component of Britain, the unionist community of Northern Ireland, and discovers their loyalty to the monarch is not unconditional. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Parts of it Didn't Happen’
by: Richard West
Posted: Wed, 15 Feb 2012 07:04:52 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Manipulated
First Published: Issue 17 - Winter 1998

To coincide with the opening of the David Byrne show at the Ormeau Baths Gallery the editors of Source visited the gallery and interviewed the artist. His personal assistant provided various reviews among which was a sheet entitled 'David Byrne Photo Bio'. The reason for this title is evident in the first line of the text, it reads: 'David Byrne is primarily known as a musician who co-founded the group Talking Heads'; presumably there are other similar sheets entitled 'David Byrne Composer Bio' and 'David Byrne Film-maker Bio' which perhaps also begin with the same disclaimer. The artist was tall, spare and dressed elegantly in black. His manner was open and alert, and he spoke freely, despite the fact he had been answering questions all day. The interview was conducted to the hum of a polishing machine that has been edited out of the transcript for ease of reading. / Source: Do you cherish the things you're taking pictures of, are you collecting them? / David Byrne: I usually think there's something beautiful about it when I'm taking a picture of it... beautiful in a kind of strange way sometimes, whether it's the light or just the strange quality of the place or the peculiar way that something relatively ordinary is being done that I hadn't looked twice at before but because it's being done in a slightly different maybe slightly peculiar way I'll take a picture of it. / Source: So would your photographs describe your concept of beauty? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Classified Subjects’
by: Pete James
Posted: Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:49:49 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 34 - Spring 2003

In recent times a growing body of work has begun to chart and re-assess the historical relationship between the photograph and institutions of knowledge: i.e. museums, libraries and archives. In some situations this work has resulted in the restructuring of the systems of classification, the physical relocation of collections and the development of new roles for the photograph within these domains. Writers and curators have also sought to develop new understandings of the history of books illustrated with original photographic prints and that of the history of the literature of photography. Together this work has helped to ESTablish new understandings of the institutional, material and cultural history of photography: a history that goes beyond the simple canonical model of great pioneers and artists. This essay seeks to open up debates about a related, yet relatively unexplored field: that of public reference libraries and the resources they dedicate to representing photography, this being primarily expressed through issues such as the books that are purchased and the way they are catalogued and physically ordered within the institution. This is in itself a substantial subject area and one that cannot be fully understood in isolation from the related history of libraries and of photography. However, within the constraints of this essay it is not possible to do more than present some of the key questions relating to this subject. These questions will be addressed largely in reference to my own institution, Birmingham Central Library: one of the largest public reference libraries in Europe and home to one of the national collections of photography. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘In Perpetuity’
by: Elizabeth Martin
Posted: Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:33:07 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Archive
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

Since the birth of photography in 1839, both photographers and manufactures of photographic materials have been attempting to increase the longevity of photographic images and films, which are inherently chemically unstable objects. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 27 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:47:43 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 27 - Summer 2001

The Source leopard has adapted its spots to bring you a news section to keep you up to date with the burgeoning prize market and the movements of artists and phtographers. Also in this issue we introduce for the first time a book review section to bring you discussion of the best of recent critical and photographic publications from around the world. John Duncan, after three years out on the road, takes stock of his experiences of the Portfolio Days. He gives an editor's view of the relationship between Source and Irish photographers. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘How Do You Want Me?’
by: Richard West
Posted: Mon, 13 Feb 2012 09:31:12 EST
Content: Interview / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 55 - Summer 2008

Richard West: When you said you became interested in objects, what was that? / Hew Locke: 'Objects' is the wrong word. I made a flying goat out of cardboard and bamboo and cloth. It was all very carnivalesque, very folk-arty. It was all about trying to get back to a place I'd left long ago in Guyana. I grew up with a collection of outsider art that my dad had. There was one painting that I always remember as a kid: a volcanic landscape with the Queen's head being blown out of a volcano and Prince Phillip standing, looking on at this bizarre scene. Things like that stick in your brain. I was surrounded by this strange imagery and it made sense that I would gravitate towards this kind of thing. / Richard West: Is it a type of Guyanese folk tradition? / Hew Locke: No, it's absolutely not. There is no Guyanese folk tradition that I can think of. There is an Amerindian tradition but there is no folk tradition. And here's where I ran into trouble years later. I would make a sculpture and people would think it was made for some festival. When I was at the Royal College my degree show was this huge papier mâché boat ( Ark ) and these brightly painted figures. And all the time it was being viewed as something from somewhere else. It was seen as being from a folk tradition, not as being of its own tradition, true to itself - as art basically. This problem has dogged me for a number of years. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Photographic Still Life’
by: Gavin Murphy
Posted: Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:13:33 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Commercial
First Published: Issue 19 - Summer 1999

We all strive for the easy life. Often this entails finding a niche. This suggests contentment with our own limits. Questions of value are at the heart of this - how to live the good life, how to balance relations between self and the world beyond, or how to attain a satisfactory understanding of things. We seek to resolve these in the hope for comfort in our lives. Ideas of home plays a prominent role in relation to this. Home speaks of things material - a house, a garden, a retreat. It also speaks of oneness in the sense of a return to self on ending a spiritual journey. How does photography relate to all of this? I think of two areas of practice, commercial images and fine art photography appearing in the modern gallery. I wonder what it is that allows us to separate one from the other in terms of value. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 19 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Sun, 12 Feb 2012 19:38:26 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 19 - Summer 1999

On the shelves of newsagents Source jostles for space with many other magazines that use photographic images for as many different purposes. Gavin Murphy in his commissioned essay explores the relationship between fine art photography (for want of a better expression) and commercial still life photography, as found in the 'lifestyle glossies'. Martin Parr's latest show Common Sense opened in 42 venues simultaneously across the world, perhaps an example of a photographer making a bid to be as ubiquitious as commercial imagery. The exhibition is reviewed here by Fintan O'Toole who wrote the introduction to Parr's book about the West of Ireland A Fair Day in 1984. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Single Supper Only’
by: Aidan Matthews
Posted: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:30:11 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 17 - Winter 1998

Institutional cutlery, half-eaten fast-food on functional plates, the haunted scantiness of countless galley kitchens where the single and the separated and the solitary preside as the absent hosts of their almost meal, their ghosted feast, their posthumous banquet: this is the landscape of the lone individual, the student's fish and chips, the spinster's yoghurt, the spoon-fed psychogeriatric's plastic beaker, the bachelor's rewarmed steak and kidney pie. It is the territory of the one who eats by themself, an involuntary anchorite, as only the outcast and the scapegoat ever did before; and who eats by themself in the recent aftermath of the historical ritual that humans once called a meal, imagining it immemorially as the principal event by which any community comes into being. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Dinner For One’
by: Martina Mullaney
Posted: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:15:58 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 17 - Winter 1998

A Portfolio of photographic work by Martina Mullaney. Published in Issue 17 of Source, Winter 1998. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 17 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:18:10 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 17 - Winter 1998

With the redesign and relaunch of the magazine it is an appropriate time to define what Source magazine is aiming to achieve. We aim to act as a stimulus for Ireland's photographers, providing an outlet and catalyst for their work combined with an enlivening critical debate. With the publication of the first two photographic projects and the first of the essays specially commissioned by the magazine we hope that we are approaching this goal. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Collecting Photographs, Copyrights and Cash’
by: Ronan Deazley
Posted: Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:42:14 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Law
First Published: Issue 28 - Autumn 2001

On Wednesday 6 June 2001 all of the mainstream British press (with the exception of The Daily Telegraph ) carried a story about 'a six-year-old girl with pink ribbons in her hair' who disappeared on a 200-yard walk home from her local primary school. The girl's name was Sheila Fox. She had disappeared 57 years earlier in August 1944 and was now re-entering the public consciousness in 2001 as a result of the Manchester Police re-opening the case following fresh eyewitness evidence. On 5 June they began digging for her body in the back garden of a semi-detached house that she had passed every day on her journey to and from school. This article is about Sheila's photograph, and the images of the other children who, every year, make national headlines for the wrong reasons. While each of these children's stories is particular, they share the common tragedy that comes with the unnecessary and unexpected loss of a young life. Their stories become rooted deep in the public consciousness. So too do their faces. Sarah Payne. Damilola Taylor. Jamie Bulger. Each name brings to mind a corresponding image. The same can be said, not just for the victims of such crimes, but also for the perpetrators. We all know what Myra Hindley looks like, or at least what she looked like over thirty-five years ago at the time of the Moors Murders. Similarly for Ian Brady, Harold Shipman, Lenny Murphy or Fred West. Victim and offender alike are frozen in our visual memory. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Suspended Adolescence’
by: Branislav Dimitrijevic
Posted: Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:40:38 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 28 - Autumn 2001

Well, yes, I can hardly bear them. They appear too intense, too close, too physical. But what I think I cannot really bear is the gaze from their eyes. The eyes of people lying down, resting their heads; a gaze you encounter only in the most intimate situations. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Art as Irritant’
by: Suzanne O'Shea
Posted: Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:07:55 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 28 - Autumn 2001

I'm glad I'm not in Carrickfergus. Well, the Carrickfergus of these pictures at any rate. Frankly, they depress me. There are a number of reasons for this, some of them nostalgic, others more ambiguous. One of my favourite poems, Louis McNeice's 'Carrickfergus', with its 'mill-girls, smell of porter and salt-mines,' bears little or no resemblance to these pictures of Ulster Loyalists, to these dark and oppressive documentary photographs of a ideology, perhaps as impoverished as its Catholic counterpart. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Carrickfergus’
by: Susan McKay
Posted: Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:18:52 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 28 - Autumn 2001

They're selling plastic swords outside Carrickfergus Castle. Up on the parapets, a redcoat soldier in a black tricorne hat aims his musket into the crowd below. On the grass, young soldiers in khaki from the Royal Irish Regiment are lifting little boys up into an armoured assault brigade vehicle. The children reach up on tip toe to try out the big guns on their swivels. 'That's a real soldier, son. See his gun?' says a young man to his boy. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Discovering a Body’
by: Steven Canny
Posted: Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:18:14 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 28 - Autumn 2001

Back in April 1999 Theatre de Complicite began a collective investigation into the discovery of a body. Eight years before, after unusual weather conditions had started to melt the glacier, the head and shoulders of a man had been discovered sticking out of the ice high up in the Oetztal Alps on the Italian-Austrian border. Initially climbers thought that it was a mountaineer who went missing during the Second World War. Over the following weeks they began to realize that they'd found something altogether more resonant. This frozen corpse arrived directly to us from the late Stone Age, some 5,200 years ago. The exceptional feature of the find was that many objects of this man's life had survived with him. The body was wonderfully preserved by the constant temperature in the glacier and is of rare archaeological significance. It helped to changed the way we think about our ancestors. This man carried with him a story of his life, a story spelt out in clothes, tools, weapons and a number of natural remedies. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘The Ups and Downs of the Bizarre World of Public Sector Publishing’
by: David Brittain
Posted: Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:05:44 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Institutional
First Published: Issue 28 - Autumn 2001

When I worked in commercial 'zines I couldn't see how anyone got Arts Council cash for producing a weird little mag that came out irregularly and which no one seemed to read. Now that I am emerging, blinking, from 10 years as editor of one of these magazines I would liken the experience to being involved in a collective delusion. Flashback to the mid-90s and I'm sitting in our Hoxton offices facing a panel of Arts Council appointed 'experts' on a fact-finding mission. It includes one man I managed to vote on there myself - the only person present with any knowledge of magazine publishing. Repeatedly, I am asked what I would like to do if I had free reign and repeatedly I hedge (Is it a coded way of telling me the funders hate what we're doing? Can it be that they don't realise that an editor just doesn't think like this?). My man, who has been hearing this with mounting frustration, suddenly exclaims: 'If you want him to edit it differently then you need to tell him what you want!' . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Using Children's Photographs’
by: Anthony Luvera
Posted: Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:20:31 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Social
First Published: Issue 54 - Spring 2008

When considering practices that use photographs made by other people, it is not enough to only consider what is in the image. It must be also asked, what does the artist do with the photograph? As an artist who works with other people's images myself, I am aware that the practice of generating and handling other people's photographs is always a multifaceted process of dialogue, exchange, compromise and trust, and the many other nuanced complexities that cast personal relationships. Any outline of a collaborative, participatory or co-produced practice, particularly by an outside observer, will always unavoidably be reductive to some degree. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Strangely Simple or Simply Strange’
by: David Campany
Posted: Sun, 05 Feb 2012 12:46:40 EST
Content: Feature / Genre: Commercial
First Published: Issue 54 - Spring 2008

Fairly little attention has been paid to photographically illustrated books for children. They hardly appear in the histories or photography or children's literature. This seems like an oversight. There have been thousands published, the earliest appearing in the first decades of photobook production in the nineteenth century. Many well-known photographers and designers have made or worked on photobooks for children, including Edward Steichen, Claude Cahun, Alexander Rodchenko, Bruno Munari and Cindy Sherman. Even if such books don't merit serious consideration on their own terms, perhaps knowing something about the child's engagement with the photographic image might tell us about something the ways adults engage with it. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 69 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 06:25:34 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 69 - Winter 2011

Like any relationship that went through a period of ESTrangement there is still something embarrassing about how art and photography get on with one another; something both parties wish could be forgotten. Nevertheless, there are still a number of blindnesses in the traditions (and institutions) of art and photography. Duncan Wooldridge believes that we have a limited view of art photography in the UK and Ireland. This is manifest both in the internationally produced work we see and the neglect of a number of historically significant artists from our own shores. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Domestic Drift’
by: Clare Gallagher
Posted: Fri, 30 Sep 2011 06:19:55 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 66 - Spring 2011

A Portfolio of photographic work by Clare Gallagher. Published in Issue 66 of Source, Spring 2011. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 68 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 15 Sep 2011 06:33:57 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 68 - Autumn 2011

Photography galleries, museums and magazines create a community of interest. Some argue that this emphasis on the medium of photography is anachronistic, or, as one curator puts it Dedicated photography galleries were at the forefront of fighting for artistic emancipation but now the fight's won. But, although the infrastructure of photography may be a historical accident, the ongoing conversation around photography, and the energy and commitment of the people who conduct it, is as strong as ever. And there is no better illustration of this enthusiasm than the startling reinvigoration of our photography galleries. Over the coming months three new galleries will open with more in development. This issue, from the news section through to the main features, looks at this renewal. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 67 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 18 Jul 2011 09:10:18 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 67 - Summer 2011

Books have the power to reach people everywhere and then stay with them, to be referred to repeatedly and have a lasting influence on the way they see the world. Many people will have had their formative experiences of photography by looking at photographs in books, or have formed their ideas of the medium by reading about its history. To sample this bedrock of inspiration we have asked writers, photographers and curators to name three books that have influenced their view of photography. Some have named titles that appear to have nothing to do with photographs. Others have named classics - On Photography and Camera Lucida being popular choices - while some of the selections are obscure and personal. Altogether the choices are testament to the enduring influence of books. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 66 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Mon, 23 May 2011 07:10:57 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 66 - Spring 2011

Many people want to be art photographers, judging by the numbers of students on photography courses, the amount of work exhibited and the number of submissions to this magazine. However, the number of photographers who survive by selling prints is not large. Rebecca Hopkinson has been speaking to photographers who sell their work through galleries, to find out how the system works and what their experience of the market has been. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 34 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Fri, 04 Mar 2011 07:04:42 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 34 - Spring 2003

The production of the computer game The Getaway involved the recreation of central London using photography as its principal tool. Sam Coates the lead artist on the project explains how this was achieved. The way the images were cleaned and manipulated to be perceived in the game environment shows how the 'reality' of photographs can be used to contribute to the construction of a virtual world. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘England Made Me’
by: Clayton Irwin
Posted: Fri, 04 Mar 2011 06:55:36 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 34 - Spring 2003

A Portfolio of photographic work by Clayton Irwin. Published in Issue 34 of Source, Spring 2003. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Holding On’
by: Andrew Robinson
Posted: Thu, 03 Mar 2011 09:45:13 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 34 - Spring 2003

These photographs are from the home of a person with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (O.C.D.). The contents of the house had been accumulated over the period of a year or more and little if anything had been thrown away during this time. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘A New Blue Carpet’
by: Stephen McCoy
Posted: Thu, 03 Mar 2011 07:56:30 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Forensic
First Published: Issue 34 - Spring 2003

A new blue carpet and a new Dyson vacuum cleaner. The clear cylinder filling with a cyclone of carpet fibres. Settling down. Shelves - drilling into brick and vacuuming afterwards, red dust over the top of blue turning to grey. Car cleaning - small stones and gravel. Christmas aftermath - pine needles, tinsel. Fingernail parings, hair and more food crumbs. All layering down and providing an archaeological document of houshold activities. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Curfew’
by: Tobias Zielony
Posted: Wed, 02 Mar 2011 08:05:12 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 34 - Spring 2003

There was a time in my childhood when I had to return home when the streetlights were turned on. The young people I photographed in Bristol, Newport, and Cwmbran prefer to stay out later. Hanging around bus stops, street corners, shop fronts, car parks and wastelands at the edge of town, they wait for something to happen. Some of them however have got into trouble. It is only since the beginning of the year 2001 that the police have imposed curfews on individuals. James, Nathan, John, Craig, Lee, they all to have to be back home at nine o'clock p.m. and stay in all night with the police calling every so often to check if they accord to the curfew. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Hannah Starkey
Posted: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 11:29:44 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 24 - Autumn 2000

A Portfolio of photographic work by Hannah Starkey. Published in Issue 24 of Source, Autumn 2000. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Esther Teichmann
Posted: Mon, 31 Jan 2011 12:11:29 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 55 - Summer 2008

Water appears in a lot of my pictures. It stands for a desire to return to something, a uterine, primordial fantasy of return, but also a desire to be outside of yourself. One of my early bodies of work was of figures isolated in the water, which was an early memory, of swimming in a lake next to our house at night, the water becoming this thick viscous liquid, heavy with the heat from the previous summer day. It has a sensuality that is both frightening and exhilarating; the sense of being outside on your own and diving into complete darkness. Water as a containing and holding thing, like a boat floating, but also covering and cloaking. Water as a place of escape, almost of your own physicality. That's something I've returned to a lot, that it's a way to escape your body and its separateness from everything else. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Fancy Pictures’
by: Mark Neville
Posted: Wed, 26 Jan 2011 08:19:25 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 60 - Autumn 2009

A Portfolio of photographic work by Mark Neville. Published in Issue 60 of Source, Autumn 2009. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 65 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 26 Jan 2011 06:54:52 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 65 - Winter 2010

In keeping with the tenor of this issue the four artists featured have almost nothing in common. As Mari Mahr explains in her extended interview with Duncan Forbes, her work involves the layering of different photographed objects that relate to her memories of people and places. Anthony Haughey has been photographing abandoned building sites left behind by the collapsed Irish property market, a symptom of the wider crisis in the Irish economy. Meanwhile, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin have been commissioned by Belfast Exposed to make work in response to their community photographic archive. They examine evidence of how it has been handled: recovering from contact sheets the marks and scribbles of previous users, and behind stickers a collection of latent, round 'dot' images. Together this work shows the vitality and diversity of contemporary photographic practice and its capacity to approach any subject, be it the political, the personal or the way photographic meaning itself is constructed. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘About Turning’
by: Roger Palmer
Posted: Mon, 24 Jan 2011 12:14:32 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Travel
First Published: Issue 59 - Summer 2009

A Portfolio of photographic work by Roger Palmer. Published in Issue 59 of Source, Summer 2009. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Emergency Weather’
by: Ulrika Ferm
Posted: Mon, 24 Jan 2011 11:19:38 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 59 - Summer 2009

I set out to learn about Ireland through researching the photographic archive of the National Library in Ireland. I noticed that the wartime photographs were the only ones that were not properly dated. I approached the Library with a question about how the filing was done during the war. I never heard back from them, but it got me interested in censorship during the war. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘No Surrender’
by: Gareth McConnell
Posted: Mon, 24 Jan 2011 08:26:40 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 28 - Autumn 2001

These portraits, taken over the Easter Period of 1999, were situated in a Loyalist Bar in my home town of Carrickfergus. It was a place I had only ever glimpsed into as a teenager - through a cracked door or through the security bars of the adjoining off sales. I wanted to create a set of images of the loyalist community which did not adhere to the strict media guidelines of bowler hatted men, apprentice boys, Drumcree rioters and super star terrorists posed against backdrops of Shankill Road murals. I wanted to make photographs with all the dignity and poise of old masters and not to revel in the slogans and iconography so closely associated with the protestant people. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Innocent Landscapes’
by: David Farrell
Posted: Mon, 24 Jan 2011 07:44:35 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 28 - Autumn 2001

It was a beautiful late July evening in 1999 when I visited what would be my first 'site', where some three weeks earlier the remains of Brian McKinney (21) and John McClory (17) had been found. After a number of wrong turns and drive bys we located the small laneway that took us past a typical summer evening rural scene with birds singing and cows wandering in fields; a typically (beautiful) 'innocent landscape', tranquil and calm. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘History of Summers’
by: Ciarán Spencer
Posted: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 10:20:33 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Narrative
First Published: Issue 24 - Autumn 2000

A Portfolio of photographic work by Ciarán Spencer. Published in Issue 24 of Source, Autumn 2000. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 40 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:15:54 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 40 - Autumn 2004

Not very long ago it seemed that everybody was exercised by Postmodernism. Now we find it has left the room without anyone noticing. David Bate examines the silent departure of our old friend and introduces a new character who he says has slipped into Postmodernism's armchair when we weren't looking. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘8 Hours’
by: Martin Newth
Posted: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:04:13 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Long Exposure
First Published: Issue 40 - Autumn 2004

The series of images was made during my honeymoon - a road trip in the western United States in 2001. The photographs show entire night's sleep in budget motels in California, Arizona, Utah, Oregon, Nevada and Washington State. The exposure times are 8 Hours. The night-long shots record the movement of the sleeping figures (my wife and I) as vapour trails over the bed. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘What Do You Know?’
by: Diana Matar
Posted: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 08:15:10 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Narrative
First Published: Issue 56 - Autumn 2008

I have never known Cairo without the knowledge that you were taken from it. That someone came to the door of your house and took you away. I have often wondered why it has become my muse, why I keep returning to the city and its chaos for some hint of you. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 47 Editorial’
by: Editors
Posted: Wed, 19 Jan 2011 12:18:32 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 47 - Summer 2006

The idea of 'community photography' is attached to particular types of politicised practise from the 1980s associated with the politics of representation and the politics of the Thatcher years. Now that photography is to be found in art galleries and has a status not dreamt of in 1985 is there still space for these kinds of 'committed photography'? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Magic Party Place’
by: CJ Clarke
Posted: Wed, 19 Jan 2011 12:08:21 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 47 - Summer 2006

These photographs were all taken in and around the new town of Basildon in Essex between July and December 2005. The photographs represent the perspective of the photographer and consequently, do not (and cannot) represent a definitive portrait of the town and its inhabitants. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Invisible Structures’
by: Xavier Ribas
Posted: Wed, 19 Jan 2011 10:14:58 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Landscape
First Published: Issue 49 - Winter 2006

The tumulus or mound provides a focal point to speculate on the perception and representation of the invisibility of a historical site. That which remains beyond representation, or which hides behind its visible surfaces; that which is only suggested or unspoken, which cannot be known completely, or that remains at the edges of the narration, or of thought; that which is neither one thing nor the other... these in-definitions are fundamental in contemporary visual arts, as in literature, science and philosophy. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 24 Editorial’
by: Editors
Posted: Mon, 17 Jan 2011 08:37:35 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 24 - Autumn 2000

In this issue we examine the debate surrounding photographic education. This is a period of major changes within the education 'business' and the new 'knowledge based economy'. David Blunkett the Secetary of State for Education has outlined a 'coherent ladder of vocational learning, rooted in school and moving through foundation and advanced modern apprenticeship into foundation degrees and work based qualifications'. The new degree which 'could apply to the arts and humanities' and which is designed for 'business and industry', has been welcomed by Dr Sean Farren the Minister of Higher and Further Education in Northern Ireland. NTL, Marks and Spencer and British Telecom are just some of businesses already involved in the education process. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 28 Editorial’
by: Editors
Posted: Mon, 17 Jan 2011 08:27:14 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 28 - Autumn 2001

In 1999, searches began at locations in Louth, Monaghan, Meath and Wicklow, specified by the IRA as burial places for nine people they murdered in the 70s. In his new work David Farrell has produced a series of images exploring these sites. The work is introduced by Steven Canny. In 1999 he worked with Theatre de Complicite on Mnemonic a piece which had as its starting point the discovery of the body of a stone-aged man in the Alps. Canny makes a connection between the isolated tragedies of the deaths and how they live on in our imaginations. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Young Serbs’
by: Phil Collins
Posted: Fri, 14 Jan 2011 09:21:12 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 28 - Autumn 2001

Well, yes, I can hardly bear them. They appear too intense, too close, too physical. But what I think I cannot really bear is the gaze from their eyes. The eyes of people lying down, resting their heads; a gaze you encounter only in the most intimate situations. On the other hand, for a trained art historian, the myth of Narcissus immediately comes to mind. One can almost smell the pool just a few metres away. Unfortunately, since I know where these photographs were taken, the magic might go for me. But does not. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Celibacy’
by: Anne Marie Curran
Posted: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 12:58:49 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 24 - Autumn 2000

A Portfolio of photographic work by Anne Marie Curran. Published in Issue 24 of Source, Autumn 2000. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: John Hilliard
Posted: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 12:00:10 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 52 - Autumn 2007

A Portfolio of photographic work by John Hilliard. Published in Issue 52 of Source, Autumn 2007. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Sarah Lynch
Posted: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 10:52:58 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

I never realised talking about beauty was a problem until college. As soon as you said 'I want to make a beautiful photograph' tutors would cringe. I didn't realise it was an issue until I saw people's reaction. It's quite depressing. But if I look around and see things that are beautiful that's the word I'm going to use. 'Fragile' as well, life is hanging on the edge the entire time. We're so transient we don't exist, we're not there. That would scare the pants off some people but it's a beautiful thing for me. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Unit 2’
by: Tom Lovelace
Posted: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:36:19 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

I've always been fascinated by the industrial landscape; the object world of machines and devices. When I was growing up I spent a lot of time in that kind of environment. My father used to own a big factory and I spent time with him in evenings and weekends at the factory. Spending time in a factory that's not functioning you see a very different side to it. Manufactured objects have a specific function with a specific intention behind them, on paper they should be mundane things but I find them to be incredibly ambiguous. They have a clear purpose if they are used by the people who designed them but their visual appearance is secondary to their function. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Island’
by: Thomas Haywood
Posted: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 08:54:23 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Narrative
First Published: Issue 55 - Summer 2008

This place, / it only existed in a funny way when you were actually here, / when you left it, it didn't sort of exist, / it was a sort of mythical place. / But here at that time we didn't think of outside at all. / 'I always thought that the road was like a garden, / I mean, really like a garden. You see, / there was nothing for people to do here. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Super Border’
by: Christopher Stewart
Posted: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 22:02:56 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Security
First Published: Issue 56 - Autumn 2008

This journey starts with a failure to gain access to the interiors of the newly constructed surveillance stations that are a part of the Integrated External Vigilance System (SIVE), a new 'vision machine' that is now operational along the southern coast of Spain's Andalucía. I am used to such denials. For over ten years I have photographed the shadowy activities of a commercial security infrastructure that is perhaps one of the most representative of the new economies of globalisation. I have often experienced difficulties in attempting to interrupt the hierarchical flow of looking and there are times when I have stood idly at airports for contacts that failed to show and others where I have been abandoned at the side of the road when my subjects have decided that I am photographing the wrong thing. But I have also been sped through foreign cities in cars with tinted windows to unknown destinations (yes, such clichés are common in this world). I have photographed in shopping malls and in motels. I have been witness to extraordinary scenarios conducted by indeterminate security personnel in the landscape of the everyday: in parks, bars, beaches and parking lots; train stations, forests, villages, towns and cities. At the very least, I have usually persuaded someone to unlock their doors for me. For now though, all I can do is to resort back to that essential currency of documentary, to just walk along the route in observational mode, with camera in hand, and attempt to experience a landscape that may or may not feel changed by the advent of this super border technology. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Little Tommy Nobody’
by: Jamie McGillivray
Posted: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 10:24:49 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Narrative
First Published: Issue 51 - Summer 2007

A Portfolio of photographic work by Jamie McGillivray. Published in Issue 51 of Source, Summer 2007. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 59 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 06 Jan 2011 07:50:43 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 59 - Summer 2009

One of the contradictory aspects of photography is that while it offers us a faithful record of things, it can also be inscrutable and suggest many, even opposing, interpretations. We are constantly encouraged or discouraged about photography's power to help us know the world. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Frieze’
by: Ian Walker
Posted: Thu, 06 Jan 2011 07:44:09 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Institutional
First Published: Issue 59 - Summer 2009

One day in the early nineties, I was passing through the life room at Newport School of Art when I noticed some plaster casts leaning against a wall. I recognised them as copies (many times removed) of the frieze that once ran round the Parthenon temple on the Acropolis in Athens. Installed for students to work from, the casts were now largely ignored, though at some point they had been painted in garish colours. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 64 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 06 Jan 2011 06:44:17 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 64 - Autumn 2010

Unlike films, photographs are usually taken to be real, rather than fictional. As Mick Gidley shows however, it is a short step from speculation about what is going on in a documentary photograph, to full-blown make-believe. Reality is not an impediment to fiction but a stimulus to it, and this can be found in novels as well as in staged and directed photographs. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 63 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 06 Jan 2011 06:36:20 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 63 - Summer 2010

Photographs are used to report events and for many there is a moral imperative to defend their ability to accurately record what has actually taken place. There is, however, another tradition of using pictures to represent something quite different from their original intention, that of parody and satire. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 62 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 06 Jan 2011 06:24:56 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 62 - Spring 2010

In modern times photography has often been involved in human encounters with nature, as a recording and classifying device. What these photographs do not show are the choices made about which parts of nature to select and how they were encountered. Robin Friend, interviewed here by Jesse Alexander, explains that his work Belly of the Whale is dependent on chance encounters and accidental discoveries. Friend describes how he sees his image-making in relation to mythic stories (like Jonah and the Whale). These stories provide archetypes but also a metaphor for how an artist can comprehend an unrecognisable place and a new experience. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 57 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 06 Jan 2011 05:54:23 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

Sometimes the scope of a photographic practice becomes suddenly evident by comparison between contrasting projects. Tom Lovelace has been building elaborate looking machines in factory settings to conjure the strange sensation of ambiguity of purpose he found in them when visiting his father's factory as a boy. Sarah Lynch, by contrast, rather than encouraging our supposition about her photographic subjects has pared them down to the simplest forms and a limited range of immediately familiar materials. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 60 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 06 Jan 2011 05:45:37 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 60 - Autumn 2009

In photographic art, as in other types of art, the artist is seen as the person who decides the appearance and meaning of the work they produce. Nevertheless, in practical terms, other people often make an important contribution to these decisions. The editing of pictures, the printing of pictures and the curating of exhibitions are three roles that are often undertaken by people other than the photographer. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 61 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Thu, 06 Jan 2011 05:23:53 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 61 - Winter 2009

Photography in Ireland and the UK has in many cases been a grass roots activity, with the stimulus for the development of photography organisations coming from photographers and curators concerned with local issues. Siobhan Davis traces this story in the history of Open Eye gallery, in particular in the gallery's archive which contains photographs collected from the various exhibitions and commissions that have been undertaken in the last 30 years. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 54 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 05 Jan 2011 12:31:08 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 54 - Spring 2008

Children have often been the focus of photographs and enjoy making pictures themselves, but pictures made for them or by them are generally disregarded. David Campany has been looking at photography books made for children and has discovered a rich and diverse literature including work by many famous photographers. Discussing a few different examples he shows that these books address fundamental questions about photography, learning and representation that make them worthier of closer attention. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 55 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 05 Jan 2011 12:18:10 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 55 - Summer 2008

In the last ten years photography has taken a number of strides forward, including admission to contemporary art galleries (see review of the latest Tate show on page 48), new UK festivals (see news on page 4) and the growth in photographic publishing. But in other ways the infrastructure doesn't seem to have advanced at all. Following the announcement of Autograph's new 'diverse' archive (see opposite) and the touring show of the photographic collections of Arts Council England and the British Council (reviewed on page 72) - both of which seem to auger well for photographic collections - Mark Bolland looks at the recent record of UK institutions in securing and making sense of photographers' legacies. He finds some positive stories, such as the Paul Hill archive's deposit at Birmingham Library, but more generally a lack of coordination and resources. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 56 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 05 Jan 2011 12:10:20 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 56 - Autumn 2008

Photography has frequently been harnessed in the interests of 'security', its apparent impartiality making it an ideal means of bearing witness against individuals or states that are thought to be a threat. On a global level this is most dramatically demonstrated by satellite photographs that are now frequently presented as evidence of government wrongdoing. David Campbell says that although satellite photographs have a powerful aura of objectivity, understood in the light of history and their social and political context they may not appear so self-evident. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 58 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 05 Jan 2011 11:17:15 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 58 - Spring 2009

Contemporary photography is frequently said to be indebted to cinema. Art photography in particular is said to ape the appearance of films as well as the size of their pictures. However, it is not often we hear about a closer kinship between the forms: a shared usage of the projected image. The technology of projection (rather than the style of filmic pictures) means that photographs made as slides do some of the things films do: they appear in non-art spaces, like theatres or clubs (social and music); they occur in sequences that are closer to the time-based nature of films than printed photographs; and they can be accompanied by music, other recorded sound or performance. In other words, they happen live .This issue of Source is a sampling of some of the wealth of work made for projection. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Autoxylopyrocycloboros’
by: Simon Starling
Posted: Wed, 05 Jan 2011 11:06:01 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 58 - Spring 2009

A Portfolio of photographic work by Simon Starling. Published in Issue 58 of Source, Spring 2009. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 53 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 05 Jan 2011 09:06:02 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 53 - Winter 2007

Art photography has often been an object of suspicion. It attracts the hostility of those who believe that functioning as art betrays photography's allotted role of capturing reality, and the condescension of others who say that photography is not a suitable medium for human expression. But is there any basis for these attitudes? And given the present diversity of photography presented in galleries can we make a positive statement about what art photographs can achieve? . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 52 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:53:51 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 52 - Autumn 2007

Where is photography now? Tate Britain has just hosted How We Are (review p.50) - an exhibition including not only art and documentary pictures, but even lowly forms of vernacular photography - which has been visited by 97,000 people. The BBC is about to broadcast a six part series, The Genius of Photography (review p.46), the most significant coverage of the medium on television since the 80s. There are more books and exhibitions of photography than ever. So many, in fact, that Richard West is able to survey some of the clichés that have arisen from this abundance (p. 32). . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 50 Editorial’
by: The Editors
Posted: Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:38:12 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 50 - Spring 2007

This is the 50th issue of Source and we have taken this anniversary as an opportunity to renew the magazine with a redesign and a fresh approach to the way it is put together. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 49 Editorial’
by: Editors
Posted: Wed, 05 Jan 2011 07:55:25 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 49 - Winter 2006

Xavier Ribas is interested in the invisibility or indifference of a historical site. His new work was made in Guatemala on the edges of archaeological excavations of pre-Columbian Maya civilisation. Here the peripheral sprawl of the city is of secondary archaeological interest compared to its ceremonial centres and elite residential areas, and it tends to remain unexcavated, deep in the rainforest. Through the perception and intuition of something that is hidden he offers an alternative framework to appreciate this historical presence. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Issue 48 Editorial’
by: Editors
Posted: Tue, 04 Jan 2011 21:13:56 EST
Content: Editorial / Genre: Publishing
First Published: Issue 48 - Autumn 2006

Three photographers based in the UK have been photographing in Africa. Paul Seawright's new work documents the invisible peripheries of African cities, vast metropolises 'hidden in the blind spot of the West'. In Admas Habteslasie's photographs we see the consequences of a long period of war on Eritrea that has left the ports silent and food rationing. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Rookery, Cobweb’
by: Tim Edgar
Posted: Mon, 03 Jan 2011 10:26:30 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Nature
First Published: Issue 57 - Winter 2008

A Portfolio of photographic work by Tim Edgar. Published in Issue 57 of Source, Winter 2008. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘How Do You Want Me?’
by: Hew Locke
Posted: Mon, 03 Jan 2011 09:06:20 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 55 - Summer 2008

A Portfolio of photographic work by Hew Locke. Published in Issue 55 of Source, Summer 2008. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Play’
by: Alexandra McGlynn
Posted: Mon, 03 Jan 2011 08:02:13 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 54 - Spring 2008

A Portfolio of photographic work by Alexandra McGlynn. Published in Issue 54 of Source, Spring 2008. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Histoires/(Hi)stories...’
by: Gérard Mermoz
Posted: Thu, 30 Dec 2010 12:35:33 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 46 - Spring 2006

Histoires /(Hi) stories... * stages a series of impossible situations, staged with found objects from different cultures: an Etruscan bronze + a Baroque Jesus; [a bronze ('cire perdue') crucible from Africa, in the shape of a bird + a wooden pin-holder from Eastern Europe]; a wood carving from China + a XVIIIth century porcelain figure; a terracotta votive figurine from India + a Roman bronze; a toy figure of a gentleman farmer + a bronze African 'mask'; a plastic figurine of a German soldier from WWII + a Etruscan bronze; a plastic model (hand painted by a child) of Napoleon + a ceramic penguin; a porcelain figure of an XVIIIth century nobleman (the Marquis de Sade?) + a wood carving of a fertility figure from the Dogon nation... . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Work from the series 'Eigenzeit' (Time of Its Own), 1999 and 'Hals Über Kopf' (Neck over Head), 2006’
by: Wiebke Leister
Posted: Wed, 29 Dec 2010 12:06:50 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 54 - Spring 2008

A Portfolio of photographic work by Wiebke Leister. Published in Issue 54 of Source, Spring 2008. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Dens’
by: Barry Fletcher
Posted: Wed, 29 Dec 2010 11:39:12 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 54 - Spring 2008

A Portfolio of photographic work by Barry Fletcher. Published in Issue 54 of Source, Spring 2008. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘A Portrait of a Village’
by: Kim Cunningham
Posted: Wed, 29 Dec 2010 09:10:30 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 61 - Winter 2009

The pictures are taken in Laytown, County Meath, which is where I'm from. I started photographing in 1997 because I knew I was going to leave and move to London after I'd finished studying photography in Dublin. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Under a Grey Sky’
by: Simon Burch
Posted: Wed, 29 Dec 2010 08:16:44 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 60 - Autumn 2009

As early as 1807 it was considered that peat could be used as a commercial fuel, before that any discussion about the boglands were concerned with reclaimation for agricultural use. All through the 1800's unsuccessful attempts were made to win turf commercially, and in 1872, when a miners' strike in England increased the price of coal in Dublin by 100%, renewed efforts were made to exploit this natural resource. It was finally achieved by Sir John Purser Griffith at Turraun, Co. Offaly when in 1924 he built a power house, and with fully automatic machines he produced turf of a first class quality. His principles of bog drainage and operating of machines formed the basis on which the Turf Development Board and subsquently Bord no Mona worked, although both made many mechanical improvements. (C. S. Andrews - founding Managing Director of Bord na Mona ) . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Only A Stranger Can Bring Good Luck, Only A Known Man Can Hang’
by: Faye Claridge
Posted: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 11:41:45 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 53 - Winter 2007

This series depicts Morris dancers from Bedfordshire in a 'paradise', painted and assembled by myself. While artist-in-residence at BCA Gallery I worked with the group over a number of months, learning about their relationships to the past and their motivations for dancing. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Camera Interiors’
by: Mervyn Arthur
Posted: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 07:45:53 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 52 - Autumn 2007

A Portfolio of photographic work by Mervyn Arthur. Published in Issue 52 of Source, Autumn 2007. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Petros Chrisostomou
Posted: Tue, 21 Dec 2010 09:01:00 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 50 - Spring 2007

A Portfolio of photographic work by Petros Chrisostomou. Published in Issue 50 of Source, Spring 2007. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Christian Hagemann
Posted: Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:35:00 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Still Life
First Published: Issue 50 - Spring 2007

A Portfolio of photographic work by Christian Hagemann. Published in Issue 50 of Source, Spring 2007. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Love’
by: Zarina Bhimji
Posted: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 22:11:47 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 48 - Autumn 2006

A Portfolio of photographic work by Zarina Bhimji. Published in Issue 48 of Source, Autumn 2006. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Limbo’
by: Admas Habteslasie
Posted: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 21:43:24 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 48 - Autumn 2006

A Portfolio of photographic work by Admas Habteslasie. Published in Issue 48 of Source, Autumn 2006. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Stories’
by: Denis Masi
Posted: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 09:59:25 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 47 - Summer 2006

A Portfolio of photographic work by Denis Masi. Published in Issue 47 of Source, Summer 2006. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Susanne Nielsen
Posted: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 07:28:01 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 46 - Spring 2006

A Portfolio of photographic work by Susanne Nielsen. Published in Issue 46 of Source, Spring 2006. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘In and Out of the Old Bailey’
by: Ben Graville
Posted: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 06:59:07 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 45 - Winter 2005

A Portfolio of photographic work by Ben Graville. Published in Issue 45 of Source, Winter 2005. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘A Language of Equal Importance’
by: Maxine Hall
Posted: Tue, 14 Dec 2010 06:05:08 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 45 - Winter 2005

A Portfolio of photographic work by Maxine Hall. Published in Issue 45 of Source, Winter 2005. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Mustafa Hulusi
Posted: Mon, 13 Dec 2010 11:06:55 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 44 - Autumn 2005

A Portfolio of photographic work by Mustafa Hulusi. Published in Issue 44 of Source, Autumn 2005. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Impaired’
by: Carrie Levy
Posted: Mon, 13 Dec 2010 10:12:28 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Body
First Published: Issue 44 - Autumn 2005

A Portfolio of photographic work by Carrie Levy. Published in Issue 44 of Source, Autumn 2005. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Ciaránóg Arnold
Posted: Mon, 22 Nov 2010 10:52:32 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Night
First Published: Issue 51 - Summer 2007

A Portfolio of photographic work by Ciaránóg Arnold. Published in Issue 51 of Source, Summer 2007. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Irish Parables’
by: Peter Neill
Posted: Mon, 22 Nov 2010 08:41:50 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Religious
First Published: Issue 49 - Winter 2006

A Portfolio of photographic work by Peter Neill. Published in Issue 49 of Source, Winter 2006. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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Portfolio
by: Lorraine Burrell
Posted: Mon, 22 Nov 2010 07:36:45 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Staged
First Published: Issue 46 - Spring 2006

A Portfolio of photographic work by Lorraine Burrell. Published in Issue 46 of Source, Spring 2006. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Points In Between’
by: David O'Mara
Posted: Thu, 18 Nov 2010 09:11:58 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Found
First Published: Issue 52 - Autumn 2007

Walking has always been central to my artistic practice, as has collecting the detritus of the street. As well as accumulating an array of found items - children's drawings, shopping lists, etc - I started using a camera more on my journeys around London, usually a small 35mm compact that could fit easily in my pocket. I was taking photographs to make up for the negatives I couldn't find and it was a way of giving a purpose to my wandering. At the end of 2005 I found myself confronted with two collections, one of black and white photographs I had taken during that year, and one of found paper. To put the two together was a logical progression that articulated something of the past year. The combinations in the most part suggested themselves and similarities or coincidences informed the final configuration. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Deadpan Aesthetics, Lossy Compression, Post-it-Notes’
by: Conrado Velasco
Posted: Thu, 18 Nov 2010 08:21:17 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Conceptual
First Published: Issue 53 - Winter 2007

This series of photographs, constructed with humble Post-it-notes, is a translation of five images by photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. Scans of images by the Bechers were laid out on a grid and rendered on a studio wall with Post-it-notes with each piece of paper standing in for a pixel. In creating and using files such as jpeg files, a process called lossy compression takes place where compressing data and then decompressing it retrieves data that may well be different from the original, but is close enough to be useful in some way. Repeatedly compressing and decompressing the file will cause it to progressively suffer generation loss. This process has a levelling-off effect on images destined for the computer screen. Taken to its logical conclusion a Post-it-note could be used to create the same approximation at the original image. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Fathers’
by: Louise Maher
Posted: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 08:52:34 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 49 - Winter 2006

A Portfolio of photographic work by Louise Maher. Published in Issue 49 of Source, Winter 2006. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Invisible Cities’
by: Paul Seawright
Posted: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 06:58:56 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Documentary
First Published: Issue 48 - Autumn 2006

A Portfolio of photographic work by Paul Seawright. Published in Issue 48 of Source, Autumn 2006. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Teenagers, Belfast’
by: Michelle Sank
Posted: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 12:20:37 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Portraiture
First Published: Issue 45 - Winter 2005

A Portfolio of photographic work by Michelle Sank. Published in Issue 45 of Source, Winter 2005. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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‘Airside’
by: Richard Mosse
Posted: Fri, 12 Nov 2010 05:41:51 EST
Content: Portfolio / Genre: Fire
First Published: Issue 56 - Autumn 2008

A Portfolio of photographic work by Richard Mosse. Published in Issue 56 of Source, Autumn 2008. . . [ Full Article ▸]

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