Review
Please submit any reviews you would like to share will others to Jamie - web@scottish-photographers.com
A number of Scottish Photographers publish books on Blurb (www.blurb.com) which provides free software for bookmaking. It is easy to use and prices start from £6.99 – and where on earth can you find a publisher to make a run of one book? Go to www.blurb.com and enter the photographer’s name in ‘search’.
Douglas Mc Bride Archaeology.
Archaeology is a monochrome record of photographs made on daily walks. The word archaeology hints both at discovery and a painstaking exploration of layers in searching for clues of things long gone, a highly appropriate metaphor. There are overt images such as skulls and footprints, but also traces of more fragile remains, fragments of stone and wood. Contained in many of the pictures are many repeating motifs for example an eye which keeps materializing. The heavy printing inevitably hints at a backward thinking (archaeology again) and perhaps to regrets or misgivings. Comparing anyone’s photographs to those of other workers is always a back handed compliment. In this case it’s hardly possible for these are all very much Douglas McBride. Some do have a strong feeling of early Steichen but the approach (not the images) are reminiscent of Minor White. These are truly joyous pictures. douglasmcbride.blogspot.com and www.douglasmcbride.com
Andy Biggs No One Was Poor
Andy Biggs is another compulsive photographer who quietly ploughs his own furrow – a fine motto for Scottish Photographers. He visited East Germany in 1990 and photographed the returning “line of Trabants . . . loaded with western goods . . . laden with washing machines’. He went back in 2008 once more to record his impressions and even met up with people he had photographed twenty years earlier. There were changes though not everyone is content with the new order. The ubiquitous Trabant survives and features as a leitmotif which links the visits. Text includes reported conversations; “the change came too quick . . . the only thing you couldn’t do was travel to the west . . . when you were nine years old you had to join the Young Pioneers”. Karl Marx, looking like a grumpy Buddha, looks on as a couple scuttle across the foreground while on another page there is a block of industrial looking dwelling houses with, below – what else but a branch of McDonalds. Andy Biggs is a consummate photographer whose perceptive pictures always repay second thoughts. He has also published An English River which will feature in the Spring NOTES. www.ajbiggs.co.uk
Keith Price is a member of the Northern group of Scottish Photographers, a graduate of the RCA and a contributor of quite splendid soup, we are told, to their marathon all day meetings. He has just uploaded a book, 25 Photographic Images by Keith Price, to Blurb which is well worth perusing. His landscape/portrait/details are a perfect example to any Scottish Photographers who wish to make an entry into Blurb publishing.
Multi Story; an exhibition in Glasgow Museum of Modern Art
Multi Story, www.multi-story.org featured in the Autumn 2009 issue of NOTES for Scottish Photographers is a collaborative arts programme based in the Red Road Flats in North Glasgow. Set up in 2004, Multi-Story collaborators include artists, local residents and community organizations. An exhibition, featuring the work of the local people, Lindsay Perth and Iseult Timmermanns, is currently showing at GOMA in Glasgow. Much as we tried to show their work including the ‘camera obscura’, in NOTES you really must go to GOMA to see the real thing. It’s all there – pinhole camera pictures by local children and video recordings of North Glasgow Saturday afternoons, with seagulls flying by, upside down of course . . .