Martin Ruffe

Shipley Focus exhibition space is showing another fantastic exhibition: Kiribati is Gone about the small Pacific island of Kiribati. The photographer Ciril Jazbec spent a month photographing the island and the effect of rising sea levels and salination on the low lying terrain. The exhibition covers water pollution through the dumping of refuse and abandoned cars and the risk of infection to the population and any visitors. Visitors are advised not to swim in the water. There are photos on the affect on smaller atolls and how some of these have become inhabitable. The exhibition discusses islanders attempts to build sea defences but they have very little funding and soon the islands may be gone.

The photos are beautifully realised, many with dark hues that suit the nature of the exhibition. Great to see an exhibition of this quality in Shipley – made my day.

Kiribati is Gone – exhibition website
Ciril Jazbec website

Ciril Jazbec’s site and the exhibition site are well worth checking out.

Today six exhibitions and all in Bradford. Included in the Ways of Looking photography festival – there were more I could have seen, but there’s another month to see the rest. First walking through the Foster Square temporary park space, Bradford Grid had an open air exhibition. The grid takes chunks of the Bradford, allocates them to the permanent and guest photographers participating in the grid and they interpret each square to the theme they see fit. This showing included eleven photographers including some of the Bradford Art College associated photographers. The exhibition is described here, photographs ranging from portrait (e.g. Nudrat Afza) to urban landscape (e.g. Liza Dracup) and on to more conceptual photography (e.g. Simon Ford). The wall of photos had descriptions of the work and photographers at the beginning and the end so it was possible to remind yourself of each photographer at the end of the wall if you couldn’t remember all eleven from the beginning.

On to Popup which is currently being looked after by Fabric the Bradford Arts organisation. I think there were 6 artists exhibiting in here. Very diverse with a theme of evidence.

In Impressions new exhibitions in both gallery spaces: in Gallery 1 portraits from Bradford portrait studio Belle Vue Studio and other sources going back in time – some classics in there and some nice pics. In Impressions itself an amazing exhibition where characters not normally represented by art are rendered as ‘tableux’. The scenes show ‘ordinary’ individuals from Britain’s struggle for democracy and equality. The representations use widely used historical art styles before the invention of the camera but the images themselves are photographs. (Making sense?)

In the Media Museum two new exhibitions opened today (or yesterday?). Donavan Wylie’s photographs of the military watch towers through areas controlled by Canadian troops in Afganistan. He worked there as an embedded photographer and continues his fascination with structures of ‘conflict’. There are also some prints from his early Maze prison work. I think I glimpsed Wylie in the exhibition talking to some viewers of the exhibition after today’s talk – shame I missed this, his last talk was very interesting. The photographs are focused purely on military locations, there are many of them and you get a feeling of the scale of control being exerted by allied forces. Some of the images are in beautiful locations, some just beautiful compositions. I came out wanting to see more of Afganistan – the very narrow focus of the exhibition having strong impact – but making me wonder what else?

In the second space there was a new exhibition by Daniel Meadows which is one I will go back to – the space was quite crowded (good to see this) and I’ll go when I can get a less interupted view and watch any videos. The portraits from the 70s/80s were great – ranging through economic highs and lows in this period. Thatchers ‘boom’ years and the poorer periods around this. There were a number of shots in people’s houses (Blackburn?) showing the family groups in there period front rooms with decoration and appliances of that period that were good. I think Parr did some similar black and white work set in the corner of rooms in Northern houses included in his retrospective some years back in the Museum. I wondered if the two photographers were connected – part of the same collective perhaps?

I’d very much wanted to go to the Street Photography conference at Format in Derby, but the £70 entry fee was too much. As a consolation I decided to go down there on the conference day and check out the many exhibitions on around Derby in the photo festival month.

This is a roundup of the images and photographers I personally found most interesting or unforgettable from the day. Sorry about spelling I was scribbling on the back of a scrap of paper – hard to read.

Starting at Quad – a great space with room to show many photographers in the main exhibition space and around the corridors. There were a couple of photographers I liked who didn’t have their names up so I can’t mention them.

Zhang Xiao – Two dogs on bicycle, People in Sea, Car with Dog
Raoul Gatepin – tracks off road through snow
Amy Stein – broken down car set
Martin Koller – man with head down drain with bicycle and chicken
Wassink Lundgren – picking up litter
Gulid Kahn – photos through a Humvi window in Afganistan
Kurt Tong – recreating locations using Google street view when forbidden to revisit them by US security

In the Magnum display in the square outside I particularly liked Constance Manos set from Daytona beach.

At Mob FORMAT HQ Edward Swindow’s shafts of light in urban scenes with a single figure and some prints from Decisive Moment including one of a seagull on a car window by Claire Atkinson(?) and a childs face by Ivan Redic.

In the City Art Gallery there was a shot of a broken crossing ballard that I liked. Mehraneh Atashi shots from Tehran with her face in red were very memorable and I have to mention Bruce Gilden’s set taken in seven days on the streets of Derby.

Also:

Jesse Marlow, a man on a grass verge and people in a green bin were funny.

Nils Jorgenson, I liked all three shots: a woman crouching behind an umbrella, a man with a drum and guitar at urinals, and a man looking over a parapet with a statue head with a similar expression.

David Solomon’s woman in a green dress with a finger missing.

Paul Russel, two women with walking sticks, kites on the beach, man on shore with boat.

David Gibson – woman with back to camera sat on lap of man with river behind.

The Royal Insurance Buildings was an interesting space – I tried to avoid being filmed by a camera crew as I went in. There was a series called ‘Degeneration’ on run down housing including the Boot estate in Liverpool and Park Hill flats in Sheffield built by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith based on an idea by Le Corbusier. These flats despite their state of repair still exist – they are hideous but kind of a landmark for Sheffield.

Then I took a bus out to the Uni but got the wrong campus and had a bit of a diversion. A free bus took me to the Arts campus which was quite impressive all new custom built – a great place to study. The exhibitions went right round the corridors and I felt a bit of a usurper wandering around ‘a waif and stray’ in off the street. There were really good pieces in there – these were slightly less well known photographers but some very interesting stuff:

Allesandro Marchi – silver car and driver
Harri Palvirante – ‘Battered’ set – violence in Finnish public spaces
Jack Simon – reflections in windows, child with spiderman stuck to window and another child at a window
Andrew Glickman – Washington DC commuters
John Darwell – plastic bags from dog walks
James Royell – from the window of the smallest public train, the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch railway – very strange shots (good)

Coming back from the Uni I stopped off at Pickford’s House – a restored Edwardian house complete with curiousities such as a Toy Theatre exhibition, a slide barometer and a enormous shower/bath contraption. The main photo piece was shots of Derby at night taken pinhole camera style from bird box housings. Kind of interesting.

And finally at Banks Mill (ring the doorbell to get in) a small space with 4 artists including work on identity – negatives people had sold and no longer cared for with the peoples faces scratched out by Hannah Mitchell, and a strange set of wild animals photo’d in urban scenes by Mark Wild.

There were many many more great shots and sets by photographers I haven’t mentioned, and this is a event that must be checked out.

Bradford is getting its fair share of photo exhibitions these days. With Impressions and the Media Museum, there is now a space opposite the town hall in Centenary Square called Pop Up. Up at the University Gallery II which I haven’t even got to yet.

The first exhibition I see at Popup is Under Construction by Bradford Art College first year students. There are also shots by some of the college tutors and a couple of their ‘star’ ex pupils. A great place for photography – I hope it remains and is not just a temporary thing.

At Impressions recently I’d seen Joy Gregory a female black artist. Her exhibition a retrospective going back 20 years. The pieces that interested me most, her set on the Kalahari where she draws attention to indigenous languages. I also liked the Interiors set from Sri Lanka. Beautiful dark shots of the inside of a house she was forced to stay inside due to Monsoon rains.

A great exhibition at the Media Museum by Swedish photographers Anders Peterson and JH Engstrom, I have been to many times now. Peterson’s black and white images of Varmland show Swede’s engaging in activites in a manner well outside my normal view of the urbane sophisticated city dwellers I have met in Stockholm and around Europe. These are people living in the rough, ‘gritty’ images of life unfolding with great energy, many humorous and often with great passion. I think my favourite exhibition at the Museum I’ve seen to date.

An exhibition I’ll be looking out for: Grand Trunk Road by Tim Smith in March.

Shipley Focus’d is a small gallery in Shipley town centre. It is part of the national Arts in Empty Spaces project whose purpose is to use empty shops in town centres for arts projects ‘bringing the town back to life’.

The first exhibition I saw there was by Roger Moody titled ‘Step Inside Shipley’. These are photos of shopkeepers from the town centre in or outside their shops. He says he wanted to ‘capture the personality of the people who are the lifeblood of the shops and businesses of Shipley town centre’, and the photos are taken in the tradition of shopkeepers being ‘proudly’ depicted with their shops.

The shops are mainly the smaller shops in Shipley, and it’s very good to see that rather than as I often think of Shipley being destroyed by a very large supermarket in the centre, that there are still quite a number of these shops in existence. It does take you back to when there must have been many more of these shops thriving across Yorkshire towns. From a personal point of view it was also good to see these shopkeepers, many of whom you see every day in Shipley centre, and recognise who they are and which shops they run.

An engaging exhibition with some good photography that seems ideally suited to the Empty Spaces project. I read that Shipley Focus’d will be presenting a new exhibition every six weeks – which is great.

For Saltaire festival the roof space of Salts Mill was used to host an exhibition by Asadour Guzelian. Guzelian had run a photo agency in Saltaire for many years which now has been moved back to Little Germany in Bradford centre.

The roof space is amazing when you enter it – stretching off to way in the distance. The exhibition ran halfway down it, showing Guzelian’s mainly news photos. Some of the images were more reportage and others editorial.

The images were mainly from the 80′s and 90′s many of which had featured in the national press. Portraits of politians, entertainers, artists, and prominent people. It was a bit like
looking back in time seeing these portraits from recent history. People whose faces you
know so well but who now are mainly no longer in current affairs.

I think my favourite picture was of Cyril Smith with his dog on the election trail juxtaposed against a guy who looked a bit like ‘Philthy’ Phil from Motorhead in punk/metal clothes who just seems to be hanging around.

Had earlier seen Simon Roberts work on his travels through Russia with his Russian wife. Thought were very good, but for the We English exhibition I’d only seen small reproductions of images in flyers/brochures.

The photos at the exhibition were very large, and at this scale you saw the detail in the landscapes that made them come alive. There were a few pictures that were simply very beautiful landscapes with Lowry like figures dotted around, but the rest of the pictures were made by the details of people you could see at this large size.

Some of the photos taken nearer in would have worked at smaller sizes, but for many the format he was using worked best.

There were a series of videos complementing the exhibition and I felt these really gave you a better understanding of why he had taken the photos in this way – he says he was looking for activities that hadn’t been widely covered before, and he had looked to the people for help in this – asking them for suggestions of places to photograph on the internet.

A work that could be extended a very long time I’d say – this could be something he could revisit many times and find many other activities and changes in people’s behaviour through the country, but maybe he will do something else – a bit drafty stood up on the roof of that van…

Robbie Cooper’s Immersion project were a set of brilliant photographs of people watching TV/Computer screens. The camera must have been sat in the screen somehow – and he catches the reactions of the people from young to old as they respond to the program/game they are watching. Some of the expressions are just fantastic.