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A few months ago, I read there was an exhibition of photographs by Don McCullin at Tate Britain. I thought "That one can wait, it's going to for ages and everybody knows the work of the award-winning war photographer anyway." That was very presumptuous of me. I finally went to see the show and it is now clear that i had underestimated the impact his images would have on me. Especially his portrayal of the homeless living around London from the late 1960s to the '80s.
While looking for images online, i discovered that in 1989 McCullin had made a documentary for BBC about the London's homeless, a sharply growing problem attributed to the failure of social policy: changes in the UK social security system, shortage of affordable housing, closing down of long stay hostels.. have thrown young people, the mentally ill, former soldiers, even entire families in the streets. "I started seeing people sleeping in shop doorways and when I went to Third World countries people would refuse to believe there were poor people in England," McCullin explains in the video below. "But there were many, many untold truths about this country, we had poverty, we had unemployment, we had a class system that wasn't convenient, all kinds of things that people who lived outside of England wouldn't have understood, so when I started walking the streets of London and seeing people sleeping in shop doorways, even I was shocked." The photos in the exhibition were mostly taken in the East side of London. The area is now attracting a different crowd .
Also at Tate are spectacular b&w images that shows the toll that industrialization took on the countryside, images of Berlin during the construction of the Wall and the landscapes McCullin is now shooting to try and forget the horrors of the wars he has spent decades to document.
And if it's McCullin's war photos you're after, then head to the Imperial War Museum for Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin.
Audio slideshow: 'Shaped by war'. Don McCullin's work is at Tate Britain through March 4, 2012 and at the Imperial War Museum through April 15, 2012. |
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Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935 presents archive images, abstract paintings, drawings, collages, small videos, texts describing the buildings, etc. All of them are eclipsed by Richard Pare's photographs. I toured the exhibition twice (it's not very big) and my eyes kept falling on his photos to the detriment of the rest other exhibits. Pare spent 14 years looking for the most striking examples of constructivist architecture in Russia, Ukraine and Azerbaijan for his book Lost Vanguard: Russian Modernist Architecture 1922-1932 The photo that opens Building the Revolution shows the Shabolovka Radio Tower. Completed in 1922, it was the first major structure erected after the revolution. From then on until the mid-1930s, social ideals, art and architecture in Soviet Russia will converge and give rise to a radically new architectural language. The Soviet State that emerged from the 1917 Russian Revolution needed new types of buildings: workers' clubs, schools, communal housing, sports facilities for the proletariat, factories and power stations to turn into reality the new socialist dreams of industrialisation, living quarters and offices for the new administration, bus shelters, working space for the secret police, organs of propaganda, etc. Examples below: Red Banner Textile Factory designed by Erich Mendelsohn and later partly redesigned by S. O. Ovsyannikov, E. A. Tretyakov, and Hyppolit Pretreaus. Built in Saint Petersburg in 1926-1937.
Gosplan Garage, Moscow, 1999, Built 1934-36. Architect: Konstantin Melnikov with Nikolai Kurochkin:
The DneproGES dam and power station, built in Zaporozhe, Ukraine, from 1927 to 1932. It was designed by Aleksandr Vesnin, Nikolai Kolli, Georgy Orlov, and Sergei Andrievski.
Engineering based on the principles of catenary arcs, the Dinamo Sports Club diving board, in Kiev, was designed by Vasili Osmak in 1935.
Narkomfin Communal House in Moscow, built 1928-19320. Architects: Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis. A fine example of Constructivist architecture and avant-garde interior planning, it is now almost empty and falling apart. Proposed reconstruction, in the best case, will retain only exterior walls.
The Chekist Communal House, designed by Aleksandr Typikov in Nikzhni Novgorod (1929-32) for the notoriously ruthless Cheka, the secret police that will become the KGB:
Vladimir Tatlin made plans for the Tower or The Monument to the Third International that would rival the Eiffel Tower. It was planned to be erected in St. Petersburg after the Bolshevik Revolution, as the headquarters and monument of the Comintern (the third international). Each floor would revolve separately at different speed. It was never built but the Royal Academy has erected a red model of it in their forecourt.
Moisei Reisher's Water Tower for the Socialist City of Uralmash in Ekaterinburg, Russia (1929):
Designed by Sergei Serafimov, Mark Felger, and Samuil Kravets, the Gosprom Building, in Kharkov, Ukraine, was built in 1929 to house the Soviet government's administrative offices
Konstantin Melnikov's house in Moscow (1927-31)
Pare explains in an interview with Metropolismag the reason why his book stops in the mid 1930s: Stalin hands down his fiat in 1932 and dissolves all the clubs and organizations and brings them all together under the single organization of the House of Architects, which was to enforce the use of the heavy handed Stalinist classicism as the state sanctioned style. Nowadays, most of these magnificent buildings are left to decay. Even more worryingly, many occupy valuable plots in Moscow and other cities and it is feared that they will eventually be demolished and replaced by tall, very high-density constructions. The show closes rather gloomily with one of the few buildings that remains in pristine condition: Lenin's mausoleum in Red Square by Alexei Shchusev.
Related entry: Soviet Photomontages 1917-1953. Building the Revolution. Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935, runs until 22 January 2012 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. |
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A few weeks ago, the Science Museum in London opened a small but fascinating exhibition about a revolutionary music synthesiser and the extraordinary woman who created it in the 1960s. It's on the second floor, right behind the Energy Wing.
Daphne Oram was the first woman to direct an electronic music studio, the first woman to set up a personal studio and the first woman to design and construct an electronic musical instrument.
The British composer and electronic musician started her career in the BBC's music department, founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, got tired of the broadcaster's lack of vision for electronic sound and musique concrète (the ancestor of today's electronic music) and set up her Oramics Studios for Electronic Composition in Kent. She provided background music and sounds for radio, television, theatre, short commercial films but also for installations and exhibitions. In February 1962, she was awarded a grant to work on her "Oramics" drawn sound technique. This method of music composition and performance allowed the composer to draw an "alphabet of symbols" on paper and feed it through a machine that would, in turn, produce the relevant sounds on magnetic tape. The first drawn sound composition using the machine, entitled "Contrasts Essonic", was recorded in 1968.
The Guardian described how it worked: Electric motors pulled eight parallel tracks of clear 35mm film stock across scanners that operated like TV sets in reverse. On the film she drew curving black lines, squiggles and dots, all converted into sound. It looked and sounded strikingly modern. Long thought lost, the revolutionary music synthesiser was recently recovered and added to the Science Museum's collections in co-operation with Goldsmiths, University of London. The Oramics Machine will never work again. To make it operational nowadays would mean replacing so many of its working parts that it would only be a replica. The Science Museum is showing the original machine along with an 'emulator' that reproduces the elements of the Oramics Machine's operation on a touch screen. Visitors can draw waveforms, input a tune, modify the sound according to various parameters.
The museum also presents rare archive footage and will add more exhibits in the coming days. The new pieces will be co-created by people who are working with electronic music today as well as a group of Daphne's contemporaries. More images on The Oramics Machine fb page and DaphneOram.org. Sound on Sound has a more detailed article about the Oramics machine. Oramics to Electronica: Revealing Histories of Electronic Music remains open at the Science Museum in London through 01 Dec 2012. |
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On Tuesday and Wednesday i took the train to Cardiff to visit art galleries and museums. A couple of spaces i'd been recommended were in-between shows and closed but i did strike gold with the National Museum (aka Amgueddfa Cymru) which has recently opened six new contemporary art galleries. I hope to tell you more about them soonish but since you're not allowed to take picture there i have to rely on the goodwill of the press people of the museum to send me some images of the works and views of the space. Fortunately uncle google provided me with plenty of pictures and information about an artist whose work i discovered at the museum. Keith Arnatt was English but moved to Wales in 1969 and shame on wikipedia for not doing justice to his life and talent. Arnatt was photographing dog poo decades before Andres Serrano thought it would be worth a look, found photo material in trash, campy tourists and notes abandoned by his wife. Everything he shot is witty and never sarcastic (whereas Martin Parr's work is certainly witty but i wouldn't want to be the target of his camera.) Have a look:
I particularly liked 'Self Burial', 9 photos picturing him slowly sinking into the earth. A very literal take on the buzz word of the late 1960s, the 'dematerialisation' of art brought by the conceptual movement. If the art disappeared, so should the artist. For the television version of the piece, Self Burial (Television Interference Project), each of the images was transmitted without explanation for two seconds on successive nights on WDR Television, in Cologne, Germany . The mystery was cleared at the end of the week by an interview with the artist.
The work by Arnatt i found most brilliant is not shown at the museum, it's a series of blown-up images of the notes left around the house by his wife shortly before she died.
Of you're in Cardiff, check out Keith Arnatt and Richard Long: Ideas into Art at the National Gallery. Entrance is free. In the meantime, if you're curious about Wales, then visit Wales on fb. |
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Today i feel like recommending The London Street Photography Festival which opened a few days ago with exhibitions, talks, walks and workshops. There's a particularly moving show at the German Gymnasium, right outside St Pancras station. The images are splendid, elegant and often humorous but the moving part is the story of the photographer.
Very little is known about Vivian Maier. She moved from France to Chicago after World War II, learnt english by going to the theatre and soon found work as a nanny. She was very secretive, wore men's shoes and big hats. Everywhere she went, she had a Rolleiflex camera hanging around her neck. She would photograph the legs of passersby, capture quirky urban moment or portray any eccentric characters she encountered during her walks, from the lady in pearl necklace to the homeless guy sitting on the pavement. One of the perks of her job as a nanny for rich families was that she had a private bathroom that she would use to develop her rolls of black and white photos.
As she got older, she amassed dozens of boxes of photographs or negatives, she also collected newspapers, and recorded audiotapes of conversations she had with the people she photographed. Having no space in her flat to keep them, she left some of them in a storage locker. Towards the end of her life, Maier may have been homeless for some time. She lived on Social Security, but the children she had taken care of in the early 1950s bought her an apartment and paid her bills. In 2008, she slipped on ice and hit her head. She never fully recovered and died in 2009 at the age of 83. Meanwhile, the negatives and documents were still in a storage locker and she had not enough money to pay for the fee. In 2007, John Maloof, then a young real estate agent in Chicago, bought the contents of her storage unit at an auction. He paid $400 for a box of what he hoped might be negatives of local architecture photographs.
Maloof regularly updates his photo blog with new shots by Vivian Maier. If you're in London, Vivian Maier: A Life Uncovered is up until 24 July at the German Gymnasium. |
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Thomas Hoepker was the first West German photographer to receive an official authorization to live and report from East Berlin when the city was still divided by a wall. He was followed by the constant gaze of East Germany's secret police but his work was uncensored. An article in Deutsche Welle explains: Hoepker's reports gave West Germans their first glimpses of how "the other half" lived. Unlike the East Germans, who could watch West German TV, most West Germans had no idea what life in the GDR was like.
Some 280 photos from Hoepker's work in Eastern Germany are currently on view at the German Historical Museum in Berlin. The exhibition, titled On Living. Photographs by Thomas Hoepker and Daniel Biskup, marks the 50th anniversary of start of the construction of the Wall. And i'll leave you with his pictures even if i posted far more in one go than anyone could stomach.
Hoepker's pictures are followed in the exhibition rooms by Daniel Biskup's photo documentation of the political and social upheavals in the former German Democratic Republic, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the clashes in the Balkan states.
Photo galleries in Zeit online, RP online and on the website of the museum (Hoepker - Biskup) On Living. Photographs by Thomas Hoepker and Daniel Biskup remains at the German Historical Museum open until October 3, 2011. Related sotries: Eros und Stasi, East Side Stories. German Photography 1950s-1980s, Art of Two Germanys, Cold War Cultures, etc. |
