Visiting London is always an experience. I visited the Photographers Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery where the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize Exhibition was being held. Walking down Carnaby Street, I looked up and saw some amazing Christmas lights. I loved the colourful buildings and shop fronts. Beginning in the Photographers Gallery, I walked around a Food Exhibition, which was both interesting and bizarre. It sparked off some inspiration but I can’t say it gave me a lot for my project on ‘Inside Outside’.
Below are some images that I took of the artists I found the most intriguing.
Laura Letinsky’s image, Untitled 54, 2002 from the series Hardly More Than Ever, captivated me as it contains the remnants of family gatherings and hint at action outside the frame. They consciously suggest a lifestyle advertised in magazines as it brushes against the messiness of real like. Her work is filled with intimacy, hospitality and love, along with the pressures of consumerism and the tensions of want and need. This image inspired me due to the suggestion of action outside the frame. This could tie in nicely with my theme out inside outside. I could possibly do some images capturing something that isn’t normally captured, such as at a family gathering; rather than capturing the people at the gathering, capture the leftover food or things that you would always try and get out of the shot.
I loved Sarah Lucas’ self-portrait with fried eggs. I am not even sure why, possibly because it would have tied in nicely with my last project of ‘Gendered Objects’. In response to 1990’s ‘lad culture’, which also coincided with the rise of celebrity chefs like Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsey. She is a British artist and employed food such as bananas, fish and chicken in her photographs and sculpture to call out the base language used to refer to women’s bodies and also to reclaim it. In doing so, she takes the eroticism of food and turns it into sexual politics instead. I love this!
Another image that stood out for me was Victor Keppler’s image, ‘General Mills advertising campaign – Apple Pyequick, 1947. He was an early adopter of colour photography, quickly realizing it’s potential in advertising. `he once claimed: “Colour makes commonplace objects look glamorous”. This stands true for the sumptuous red apply in the Pyequick advertisement, where just four colours stand out from one another. The relative simplicity was especially effective in ads and food packaging where the emphasis was on consumption, with both the eye and the wallet. This related to my theme of inside outside due to the colour theory I have been studying. I could well look into how colour effects advertising however I think I could get quite bored with that quickly!
This image moved me massively. I love the unity; community and family feel to it, yet heart breaking at the same time. The artist JR’s image of Migrants, Mayra, Picnic Across the Border, Tecate, Mexico, USA, 2017. JR is a French artist and he hosted an epic picnic across the tense Mexican and American border in 2017. The surface of the table featured the eyes of a “dreamer”, one of the immigrant children under a hotly debated US arrivals policy. The meal was an act of defiance, repurposing the division between two nations into a global table of shared humanity. “The table goes through the wall, and the people eat the same food and drink the same water and listen to the same music,” JR said. “For a minute we were forgetting about it, passing salt and drinks as if there were no wall.” This image says so much; it challenges the media, politics and the US Government. To them, there is no wall. Stuff you Trump!!
Rinko Kawauchi’s image, Untitled, 2004; from the series AILA caught my eye also. Concentrating on tiny gestures and musing on small, fascinating details, Rinko Kawauchi’s photographs feel like a sigh of serenity in a frenetic world. Often described as visual haikus, her pictures have a Spartan elegance. Photographed with an undulating perspective, moving in and out of focus, the most simple and delicate of foods – fish eggs or melon – became something wholly more substantial, without heavy symbolism, but with the subtle context of the domestic space and Japanese culture.
I am not a huge fan of social media, certainly not photographing ‘food porn’; therefore this artist highly amused me. Joseph Maida used this platform to publish the series ‘Things “R” Queer’. He crafted absurd juxtapositions that take their first cues from the social-media trope of food porn, and add purposeful doses of Pop art humour, advertising gloss, and Japanese cuteness.
Holger Niehaus’s work did remind me of the “Inside Outside” project. He created still life images of peeled fruits. The still life tradition is continued in this picture, but with the gentle intervention of removing the peels, Holger Neihaus makes the lushness of the fruit seem slightly more clinical as they lie exposed on the marble slab. In peeling off the layers of the skin, Holger Neihaus is also peeling away the layers of symbolic associations within the still life genre.
The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize Exhibition on the other hand was very interesting and I spent most of my time there looking at the amazing photographs that had been exhibited. I absolutely love taking photographs of people, whether its candid, documentary style or just portraits. When there’s a story behind the picture, even better. The exhibition brings together a wide selection of works that exemplify leading approaches to the genre of photographs. Below are some of my favourite images. They receive a total of 3,700 entries by 1,611 photographers from seventy countries around the world, demonstrating the continued international appeal of the Prize.
The first photographer that caught my eye was Amy Friend, not only because we have the same name but her use of light. Friend was born in 1974 and began taking photographs as a young child in the fields and rivers surrounding her home in Canada. Inspired by a sense of wonder and the unseen, she produced this portrait, ‘Wayfinding in the cold light’ from the series Multi-Verse by altering and re-photographing the original photography to include the vertical shard of light that cuts through the young boy’s figure. Piercing the image, the light alludes to portraiture as ‘a portal to another reality, a version of who we were, who we are and who we will become’, and is emblematic of the transitional period in the boy’s life. Friend’s work has been seen in numerous exhibitions including being selected as a finalist in the Lens Culture art Photography Award, 2018 and Winner of the Fine Art Photography Category of the Julia Margaret Cameron Award, 2017. The line of enquiry I have been looking at in my project for “Inside Outside” recently has been mental health and dreams/nightmares. Friend’s work looks at alternate reality, which I really like because dreams to me, feel like alternate realities. I feel like when I sleep I go somewhere else, to a different dimension where the laws of the universe no longer matter; I can fly, swim underwater without needing to breathe and I wear invisibility like it was normal. My dream life is so interesting to me; I’d love to push exploring this further in waking life.
Thinking about the mental health line of enquiry, Sirli Raitma’s series, Eha:
Portraits of my Mother interested me. Raitma was born in 1975 and is a self-taught photographer. Born in Suure-Jaani in Estonia, she has lived and worked in the UK since 2004 and her work has been seen in exhibitions in the UK and France. This series shows the photographer’s Mother Eha in unusual and distinctive situations poses and dress. Raitma started the series in 2015, when her Mother began to struggle with depression, as a way to give Eha a new focus beyond the procession of doctor’s appointments. She was a natural model, happy to play along with her daughter’s increasingly imaginative visual fantasies and inhabiting each new concept effortlessly. Raitma observed that Eha became visibly more confident and engaged through the project, taking increasing pride in her appearance.
Rebecca Naen’s portraits of Emily Bador and Dr. Fatumina from the series ‘Learning to Love’ are exceptional. Naen was born in England in 1987 and raised in a small town in Ireland and is of Malaysian descent. She found is difficult to accept the skin she was in. With the series ‘Learning to Love’, Naen initiates a positive conversation with women of all ages and backgrounds about the importance of loving oneself beyond societal expectations. She photographed women she found inspiring, including Dr. Fatumina Said Abukar, a doctor and engineer with a PhD in regenerative heart medicine who is also an accomplished musician and model, and Emily Bador, who rose to fame on social media promoting body positivity. Naen’s use of close framing and selective focus draws attention to the eyes of her sitters, conveying a sense of intimate connection and communication.
Here are some more images of the rest of the trip in Trafalgar Square.
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