Zemni Photography Blog

Photography projects, inspiration and research by Linda Mayoux

Peter Kennard

Author: lindamayoux

  • Peter Kennard

    Peter Kennard (born 17 February 1949) is a London born and based photomontage artist and Senior Research Reader in Photography, Art and the Public Domain at the Royal College of Art. Seeking to reflect his involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement, he turned from painting to photomontage to better address his political views.He has often worked in collaboration with writers, photographers, filmmakers and artists such as Peter Reading, John Pilger and Jenny Matthews.

    He is best known for the images he created for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the 1970s–80s. This includes “Haywain with Cruise Missiles“, a cut-and-paste photomontage of Constanble’s Haywain – a symbol of Britain’s rural idyll with American missiles used by CND to highlight the threat of installation of cruise missiles at air bases across the UK, such as Greenham Common.
    “ Photomontage may not be subtle but it is effective as a tactic when the aim is to make a point quickly and directly. We grasp immediately that Britain is under threat.” Liz Wells (2011, p.21 quoted Alexander 2013 p98)

    Because many of the left-wing organisations and publications he used to work with have disappeared, Kennard has turned to using exhibitions, books and the internet for his work.

    In “Dispatches from An Unofficial War Artist”, his 2000 autobiography, he writes about the possibilities of undertaking an aesthetic practice in relation to social change, and considers how his art has interacted with the politics of actual events.

     One of Kennard’s latest projects is 2011’s @earth, a story without words told in the language of photomontage. It takes the form of a small book priced at £9.99, published by the Tate Gallery, which Kennard believed was a reasonably cheap and accessible way of getting his message to young people outside the artworld. The book contains a variety of images from Kennard’s 40-year career and, as a result, attracts the criticism that its targets are too general. Kennard’s reply was that he wanted “to encourage people to think about their own situation and activate, but I’m not trying to tell them to do this or that. I’m just trying to show how I see the world at the moment.”

    The idea has expanded to a re-appropriation and re-distribution of his images through online platforms such as Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter. G8 Protest Posters is the latest of these projects that shares images “designed for protest”. Created in 2013 in reaction to the 39th G8 Summit in Enniskillen, Kennard has encouraged the public to “print, Tweet, Facebook, email and share these images as a sign of protest”. He sees online distribution sites as “a valuable addition to the dissident artists toolbox. G8 is a charade masquerading as a serious conference, my posters attempt to rip through the lies and point to the world as in fact it is.”

    He has also executed a number of guerrilla street installations and has said “if world leaders insist on assaulting our lives and livelihoods, let’s hit back by assaulting their eyes.”

    The first major retrospective of Kennard’s work will be held at the Imperial War Museum for one year from May 2015.

    Source: edited from Wikipedia

     

     

  • Tim Simmons

    From Out West

    website: http://www.timsimmons.co.uk

    Simmons creates his nocturnal landscapes using fluorescent lamps and a range of post-production techniques. His images might be described as ‘hyper real’; they have an aesthetic that somehow seems to transcend photo-realism. They look almost artificial, like video game graphics.

    Tim Simmons established a successful career within the field of motor photography. Simmons’s innovative lighting methods that brought him to the attention of advertising agencies, who wanted to place cars within his out-of-this-world landscapes.

    His recent projects are more tightly cropped ‘vignettes’ or almost meditative viewpoints. Simmons locates his practice within a fine art context and has installed his images in temporary open-air exhibitions across the world, some of which, ironically, have been presented on billboards.

    See: http://www.timsimmons.co.uk/showkase/ulp-billboards-2011/

  • James Morris

    In Wales, particularly South Wales, the idea of ‘post-industry’ is poignant in the light of the well-documented, widespread decline in industrial activity in recent decades.

    In A Landscape of Wales (2010), James Morris explores the diverse landscape of the country, including the Gothic-looking remains of slate quarries and other sublime-inspiring features. Most interestingly, Morris looks at how the tourism and heritage industries, which continue to play a major part in the Welsh economy, relate to the landscape. Morris provides an excellent example of the inextricable link between topography and industry, which have in turn shaped the identity of a place and its people.  (Alexander course text p105)

    See Google Images

    See more from this series at:
    http://www.jamesmorris.info   (Flash-based site)

  • John Davies

    [wpdevart_youtube]BW44iNga8Fk[/wpdevart_youtube]John Davies website

    See more of Davies’s work

    John Davies (born 1949 in Sedgefield, County Durham, England) is a British landscape photographer. He is known for completing long-term projects documenting Britain and its industrial and urban landscape. He juxtaposes elements of history, industry and social activity within a single composition to critically examine our social geography.

    The British Landscape is his best-known body of work

    Fuji City Mount Fuji, Japan is a meditation on the balance between nature and industry.

    The shift in subject matter also developed into a fascination with urban regeneration and work on this includes his Metropoli Project, City State, and Cities on the Edge, the latter of which he curated, in addition to contributing images of his own.

    Not judgemental – ask questions. People have different reactions to different images. Doesn’t include many people, but images are about what people have done in the environment.

    The caption to Davies’s Ffestiniog Railway image reads:
    “The Ffestiniog Railway was originally built to transport local slate, but in
    1964, following new connections to the national railway network, trains
    began serving the Trawsfynydd nuclear power station. Although the
    decommissioning of Trawsfynydd began in 1991, the railway continued
    to be used daily to transport 50-ton flasks of nuclear fuel and waste to
    the Sellafield reprocessing plant in Cumbria. Sellafield stopped taking
    waste from Trawsfynydd in 1997.”

    Technique

    He is known for producing large photographic prints of images produced from high vantage points, using traditional darkroom techniques. His work in the 1980s primarily used medium format cameras, and work from the 1990s alarge format camera, although in recent years he has begun using dSLR and digital medium format cameras in his work as well.

    The stylistic components reference – with irony – the picturesque:

    • Davies’s photographs are nearly always taken from high vantage points that hint towards a welltrodden, formalised ‘viewpoint’, looking out across views with foregrounds, middle distance and backgrounds (usually a rolling hill).
    • He continues to work with black-and-white film, linking his work to the classical aesthetics of Adams and Weston.

    Liz Wells (2011, pp.170–71) identifies a potential problem with Davies’s relation to the picturesque:
    “… his work operates as a visual archive of post-industrial Britain. But his personal style is so marked that content risks becoming subservient within a generalised vision of industrial legacy in ways that work against any sense of the specificity of each site. There is a risk that political commentary is diluted rather than distilled, as the industrial becomes a strand within a new picturesque.”

    Biography

    Davies was born in Sedgefield, County Durham, in 1949. He grew up in coal mining and farming communities, and this combination of open space and industry was to become a persistent motif in his creative work. His early life was spent living in industrial landscapes in County Durham and Nottinghamshire.

    He studied Photography, first attending Mansfield School of Art to complete a Foundation Course, then studying at Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent University), graduating in 1974. Following this, he began working on long-term projects, seeking commissions and arts funding to support his work. He has worked closely with Amber/Side Collective on a number of commissions. In 1981, Davies won a one-year Photography Fellowship at Sheffield Polytechnic, and he became Senior Research Fellow at the Art School of University of Wales Cardiff (UWIC) in 1995.

    He has also become involved in local politics, as his interest in the use of public space has been both personal and professional. He lives with his partner and their daughter Alix in Liverpool, England.

    Books by Davies

    • Aggie Weston’s no.13. Belper, Derbyshire: Stuart Mills, 1977 ASIN B0007C4X2C.
    • The Valleys project. Cardiff: Ffotogallery, 1985.
    • On the edge of White Peak. Derbyshire Museum Services, UK, 1985.
    • In the wake of King Cotton. Rochdale Art Gallery, UK, 1986.
    • Mist Mountain Water Wind. London: Traveling Light, 1986. ISBN 0-906333-18-0.
    • A Green & Pleasant Land. Manchester: Cornerhouse, 1987. ISBN 0-948797-10-X soft cover ISBN 0-948797-15-0.
    • Autoroute A26, Calais – Reims. Douchy, France: Mission Photogaphique Transmanche, 1989. ISBN 2-904538-16-X.
    • Phase 11 (eleven). London: The Photographers’ Gallery; London: Davenport, 1991. ISBN 0-907879-27-6.
    • Broadgate. London: Davenport, 1991.
    • Cross Currents. Cardiff: Ffotogallery; Manchester: Cornerhouse, 1992. ISBN 0-948797-32-0.
    • Linea di Confine della Provincia di Reggio Emillia Laboratorio di Fotografia 5. Arcadia Edizioni & Assessorato alla Cultra del Comune di Rubiera, Italy, 1992.
    • Skylines. Valencia University, Imp. Mari Montanana, Spain, 1993.
    • Through fire and water: River Taff. Oriel (The Arts Council of Wales’ Gallery, Cardiff); National Museum & Galleries of Wales, 1997. ISBN 0-946329-45-1.
    • Sguardigardesani. Milan, Italy: Charta, 1999. ISBN 88-8158-223-6.
    • Temps et Paysage. Tarabuste / Centre d’art et du Paysage, 2000. ISBN 2-84587-010-8.
    • Visa III, Littoral / Le retour de la nature. Filigranes, 2001. ISBN 2-914381-17-4.
    • Seine Valley. Le Point du Jour Editeur / Pole Image Haute-Normandie, France, 2002. ISBN 2-912132-21-5.
    • The British Landscape. Chris Boot, 2006. ISBN 0-9546894-7-X.
    • Cities on the Edge. Liverpool: Liverpool University, 2008. ISBN 978-1-84631-186-4.
    • Urban Landscapes / Krajobrazy Miejskie. Poznań, Poland: Centrum Kultury ‘Zamek’, 2008.
    • European Eyes on Japan / Japan Today volume 10. EU-Japan fest / European Eyes on Japan, 2008.

  • Sara Rawlinson

    Abstract Psychogeography

    ICM

  • Helen Sear

    Creative Wales award.

    Not just the eye. Uses the hand to pain in parts. Sculptural and 3D form. Liberate from computer screen. Different types of paper. Or use CAD.

    Body in the landscape, or landscape in the body

    What does it mean to be both human and animal?

    Wants to concentrate on unremarkable landscape – portrait of a field over a year. Landscape as a living being. And walk to a particular part of forest that changes through being cut down and exposes a particular view suddenly.

    Inside the view

    Beyond the view

    Pond 2011  installation at Crescent Arts Scarborough, UK, March 2011. video of frozen winter pond and trees. Occasional birds. Sheep in silhouette on the horizon.

  • Sara Pickering

    Sarah Pickering  has photographed training grounds for the fire and police service.

    http://www.sarahpickering.co.uk/Works/Pulic-Order/workpg-01.html

    In Public Order (2005), she photographed the £55 million facility in Kent that is used by the police for firearms and riot training. Her images contain no people – though the police service who supported her work wanted her to photograph action she felt that the images without people are more powerful.

     

    Pickering’s images depict a truly uncanny space, some revealing creepily accurate architectural details, others displaying almost comical crudeness in the design of the state-of-the-art facility. The strange, two-dimensional façades of these ‘streets’ give the space a film set or theatre-like quality, in readiness for some grim and violent narrative to unfold… As a viewer one can imagine waking up in this peculiar world and wandering bewilderedly through an inescapable network of streets that don’t lead anywhere and doors that open onto nothing.

    (Alexander 2013 p 95)

     

  • John Pfahl

    Born in New York in 1939, John Pfahl was raised in Wanaque, New Jersey. He received a BFA from Syracuse University’s School of Art and his MA from Syracuse University’s School of Communications. Pfahl is known for his innovative landscape photography such as Altered Landscape, his first major series of un-manipulated color photographs on which he worked from 1974 through 1978. In these pictures Pfahl manipulates the optics of the camera and plays tricks with perspective by using cleverly placed manmade objects in the landscape to mislead the eye of the viewer. For the past thirty years, Pfahl has been creating images of nature that transcribe the forces of nature and how humans affect it. His work has been shown in over hundred group and solo exhibitions and is held in many public and private collections throughout the world. From 1968 to 1983 he taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and later at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Pfahl is currently professor of photography at the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York.
    Renske van Leeuwen

    https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/john-pfahl?all/all/all/all/0

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/arts/john-pfahl-photographer-who-played-with-landscapes-dies-at-81.html

     

    Power Places

  • John Schott

    John Schott website

    The New Topographics

    His 20 images of motels show the buildings – mostly one-story with adjacent parking lots – located in comfortable surroundings, showing the relationship between the buildings and natural environment. They do not have the harsh angularity of many of the other images from the exhibition. Although the images suggest that cars are the only way to get there (they are motels after all!), there is no critique implied of that reliance. The motels themselves are not homogenised or standardised; they have distinctive architectural features and are not owned by corporate chains. Cars are parked rather than being a threat.

    Motel images from website

    The Building Remembers

    An exhibition and catalog featuring photographs of the Northfield Middle School before it was transformed into the Weitz Center for Creativity at Carleton. Images all show a very strong geometric design, diagonals, verticals and horizontals. It is not always clear why this is so apart from (over?) dramatic impact.

     

  • Nicholas Nixon

    Nicholas Nixon, born in 1947, is known for the ease and intimacy of his black and white large format photography.  As well as being one of the photographers exhibiting in New Topographics, Nicholas Nixon’s subjects include schoolchildren and schools in and around Boston, people living along the Charles River near Boston and Cambridge as well as cities in the South, his family and himself, people in nursing homes, the blind, sick and dying people, and the intimacy of couples. Nixon is also well known for his work People With AIDS, begun in 1987.

    Recording his subjects close and with meticulous detail facilitates the connection between the viewer and the subject. Influenced by the photographs of Edward Weston and Walker Evans, Nixon began working with large-format cameras. Whereas most professional photographers had abandoned these cameras in favor of shooting on 35mm film with more portable cameras, Nixon preferred the format because it allowed prints to be made directly from the 8×10 inch negatives, retaining the clarity and integrity of the image. Nixon has said “When photography went to the small camera and quick takes, it showed thinner and thinner slices of time, [unlike] early photography where time seemed non-changing. I like greater chunks, myself. Between 30 seconds and a thousandth of a second the difference is very large.”

    Interview with Nixon from Ahorn Magazine

    Urbonautica article

    Nixon’s work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among many others.

    New Topographics and urban landscape

    Nixon’s early city views taken of Boston and New York in the mid-seventies were exhibited at the New Topographics exhibition in 1975. See Google Images from the Exhibition

    His images are mostly high view images showing complexity of roadways and textured skyscrapers. Although they have a formal beauty, I do not find them as effective in terms of message or emotion as other images in the exhibition.

    His first solo exhibition was at the Museum of Modern Art curated by John Szarkowski.

    In the late nineties, Nixon returned to this subject matter to document Boston’s changing urban landscape during the Big Dig highway development project.

    The Brown Sisters

    In 1975, Nixon began his project, The Brown Sisters consisting of a single portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters each year, consistently posed in the same left to right order. As of 2014, there are forty portraits altogether.

    Forty Portraits in Forty Years—Nicholas Nixon portrait series (The Brown Sisters)

    In 2010, theMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston organized the exhibition “Nicholas Nixon: Family Album” which included “The Brown Sisters” series among other portraits of his wife Bebe, himself and his children Sam and Clementine.

     Close Far

    2013 Nixon’s book Close Far was released by Steidl. The body of work explores the relationship of the self in physical and psychological proximity to the urban landscape. Nixon presents a dichotomous group of photos made with a large-format view camera, in this case one with an 11×14 inch negative. The first half of the book contains self-portraits, comprising, in Nixons words, sketches of an old man. Filled with anxiety, longing and contentedness, these images chronicle the shapes, slopes and pores of Nixons face. The second half of the book shows views of buildings in the densest part of Boston. Made from high within the buildings and with the same camera, these images without horizons do not gaze down upon but rather through the city. With the lens in the same orientation as his self-portrait photos, Nixons results are remarkable for their richness of detail and complexity of form.

    Interview with Nixon from 2013

     Books

    • Photographs From One Year (1983)
    • Pictures of People (1988)
    • People With AIDS (with Bebe Nixon)(1991)
    • School (1998)
    • The Brown Sisters (2002)
    • Nicholas Nixon Photographs (2003)
    • Home (2005)
    • Live Love Look Last (2009)
    • Close Far (2013)
    • Forty Portraits in Forty Years (2014)