"Art Is The Only Thing We Can Get Away With": london

Showing posts with label london. Show all posts

Wednesday, 5 March 2014

David Bailey's Stardust

At the weekend, I went home to London to see family and friends, but more importantly to see David Bailey's exhibition Stardust at the National Portrait Gallery. David Bailey has always been one of my favourite photographers, in fact I think it's safe to say that it was his work that first got me into photography - as Bailey himself once said, 'It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary'. So it is safe to say that my expectations were high, and I'm thrilled to report the exhibition did not disappoint. I absolutely loved the diverse range of his work and the exhibition really illustrated the extraordinary range of subjects that Bailey has captured: actors, writers, musicians, filmmakers, designers, models, artists and people encountered on his travels; many of them famous, some anonymous, all of them perfectly captured. That's the thing I love about him, he really manages to capture the individual, no matter who they are or where they're from you are shown a sense of their personality.

It is extremely rare that a leading institution allows an artist to curate his or her own retrospective, however I am so glad that they did. Featuring over 250 images, personally selected and printed by Bailey, the exhibition offers an unmissable opportunity to experience the work of one of the world’s greatest image-makers. He also designed the book (a must purchase of mine of course!) in fact Sandy Nairne, the gallery's Director, admitted that giving the artist such free rein was unusual; "We had to relax. It became very clear that he did have a vision about this show. This is Bailey through and through." But by giving Bailey free reign, we got to see all sides of his work, not just the famous shots of models and rock stars. In fact one whole room was dedicated to his wife Catherine Bailey, and featured many intensely personal shots of her and their children. As a huge fan of his work, I was wonderfully surprised at how few images in the exhibition I had actually seen before!

So, just in case you haven't got the hint, I loved the show and could not recommend it enough - I'm definitely going back whenever I'm next in London! To give you a little taste of what's on show, here's an extremely small selection of my favourites.

Monday, 7 February 2011

Primitive

I finally scanned in my primitive project images onto my computer so thought I would share them with you all. For my project I found old postcards from various cities like Paris, London, Bournemouth and Brighton. I then went to the places on the postcard and re-photographed how it looked now. Most of the original images were taken a hundred years ago and it was really fascinating to see how much had changed and how much had stayed the same. I tried to use landmarks so people would recognise them, and what had changed around it. In the darkroom I combined the two images together to create the mixture of old and new. The original postcard has come out as a negative over my image which makes the old look very ghostly, which I loved, especially if people were pictured. I then made them into my own postcards.

I really loved this project and has to be my favourite that I have done so far. Since doing the project I have begun to collect old postcards from places I visit, I especially love to find ones that people have written on and now have quite an impressive collection. I hope you like my postcard versions though. Let me know!

Click on image to enlarge

Bournemouth

London

Paris

Brighton

Monday, 7 June 2010

The Elephant Parade - London

As mentioned in my earlier post dated Saturday 22nd May, I told of my plans to photograph some of the wonderful 250 elephants placed around London. Unfortunately i did not get nearly all of them done but did photograph as many as I could by walking from Notting Hill (where I saw the actors James and Oliver Phelps who play the twins Fred and George Weasley in Harry Potter getting onto the underground!) to Soho, going through Kensington, Hyde Park, Green Park, Regent Street and Carnaby Street. I thought the elephants were really imaginative and beautifully decorated and I shall continue to photograph as many as I can before they are removed. But for now, I hope you enjoy some of the photographs I have taken.

Click on image to enlarge.