Tuesday 25 January 2011

Restarting the journey, again

Today I contacted the admin team at the OCA and am restaring my journey towards the degree which I interrupted last year.  The paperwork will come through in a few days, I'm told, so I guess its time to get back to work.

Monday 24 January 2011

The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2010

Just a reminder that I must go to the National Portrait Gallery to see the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize 2010.  I have been to this exhibitin for a few years now and each time have found it really exciting.

A summary of the exhibition, quoted from the NPG web site, is below:

"The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2010 presents the very best in contemporary portrait photography, showcasing the work of talented young photographers and gifted amateurs alongside that of established professionals and photography students.

Through editorial, advertising and fine art images, the entrants have explored a range of themes, styles and approaches to the contemporary photographic portrait, from formal commissioned portraits to more spontaneous and intimate moments capturing friends and family.

This year the competition attracted nearly 6,000 submissions from over 2,400 photographers from around the world. The selected sixty works for the exhibition include the four prize-winners and the winner of the ELLE commission.

Exhibiting many photographs for the first time, the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2010 is a unique opportunity to see images by some of the most exciting contemporary portrait photographers working today."

http://www.npg.org.uk:8080/photoprize/site10/index.php

The John Stezaker exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery

This looks like a really fascinating exhibition, looking at the images on the Whitechapel Gallery website. I will certainly be going there in February!  The following is a description from the Whitecchapel Gallery website:

"British artist John Stezaker is fascinated by the lure of images. Taking classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, Stezaker makes collages to give old images a new meaning. By adjusting, inverting and slicing separate pictures together to create unique new works of art, Stezaker explores the subversive force of found images. Stezaker’s famous Mask series fuses the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets, or waterfalls, making for images of eerie beauty.

His ‘Dark Star’ series turns publicity portraits into cut-out silhouettes, creating an ambiguous presence in the place of the absent celebrity. Stezaker’s way of giving old images a new context reaches its height in the found images of his Third Person Archive: the artist has removed delicate, haunting figures from the margins of obsolete travel illustrations. Presented as images on their own, they now take the centre stage of our attention

This first major exhibition of John Stezaker offers a chance to see work by an artist whose subject is the power in the act of looking itself. With over 90 works from the 1970s to today, the artist reveals the subversive force of images, reflecting on how visual language can create new meaning.

John Stezaker is organised by the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Mudam, Luxembourg."