The Bartender Never Gets Killed

Tim Atherton is back from holidays and is offering a new print as part of his small editions. Get ‘em while you can.

UPDATE.

Tim also has the series from which this image is taken online

…has a new edition available for his ‘Looking Glass Editions‘. The guy has an expensive 8×10 habit to fuel, so support him!

…only dream about it, whereas other people do it. What a great project!

I posted about John before, but I’ve just had an email from John telling me about an upcoming book launch and exhibit…

The book can be bought from the address above or direct from John

I’m a long-time fan of Keith’s work, and I’ve just heard he has his first commercial gallery exhibit in NY at the Nelson Hancock Gallery.

Seeing people like Keith get exhibits always cheers me up. If you are in NY May 10 to June 9 pop by.

Just had an email from Patrick pointing me to his latest project. A book and tour are planned for next year.

Whilst researching for a new project (working title ‘An Ideal Transition’? - probably more about this later) I came across a project by Irish photographer David Farrell called Innocent Landscapes. He, and the project, is proving difficult to track down on the web, so I can’t provide very big pics. So, making the best of a bad lot (and some of these images load very slowly)…

From the publishers website

In May 1999, The Northern Ireland (Location of Victims’ Remains) Bill was passed in the House of Commons; it provided an amnesty to help the identification and location of people who had disappeared during the ‘Troubles’. Six locations were identified and became known as the ‘Sites of The Disappeared’. These were the burial places of eight people murdered by the IRA in the 1970s and early 1980s. In thirty years of conflict and atrocities, this small group of people stood apart. They were all Catholic and, as it turned out, had not only been taken from their families but also from their homeland to be buried in the South. In June 2000 the search was finally suspended. Three remains had been located, three closures permitted; for the remaining five families there was a site rather than a spot, a closing rather than a closure.

Farrell’s project was to photograph these ’spots’…

The burial sites were from a 10 year period, some are marked, others are left with nothing to indicate what happened

BTW, if anyone can find more examples of this I’d be grateful for a pointer!

In my Oasis project, like many photographers, I’m concerned with the empty spaces, often treated as ‘common ground’, that exist either side of urban development. These places are at best transitory and documenting them is working with an endangered species. British photographer John Davies has been working with OurGround to document these places as they are changing in Liverpool and Mersyeside.

If you follow this link you’ll find a number of John’s pics from the project.

From the Our ground site.
Our Ground is about public open spaces: parks, playing fields and other grounds in Liverpool, Merseyside and beyond. This site is also about the transition of public space with images, news and links to other sites concerned with the changes that are taking place. Photographs are regularly added to this site.

Many of the spaces shown on the site are not just wasteland that has been appropriated for common use, but land currently registered and used for community use. Playing fileds, both community and those owned by public (public as in ‘public’ not private) state schools have often been sold in order to finance other projects.

Whilst looking at John’s work, its worth checking out his other projects including ‘The British Landscape’ (can’t link to it for some reason). From a review by Open Democracy

John Davies’ beautiful panoramic photographs of the British landscape capture an industrial world now lost and a modernity running away from its past.

Having talked about Patrick Shanahan in a previous post I’ve been re-looking at English photographers that capture something uniquely ‘English’. John Darwell’s work touches me very deeply - I feel as if I am coming from a similar tradition in a way.

I worked and studied for many years in the North of England - in the early 80s I was teaching in Yorkshire during ‘the’ miners strike - and much of John’s work reflects this area.

There is a lot of work on his website and you can see his devlopment and concerns.

The above image is taken from In Isolation

From his statement…

In many ways the images presented here can best be regarded as my first exploratory attempts at finding a new vocabulary within which to work and as such can best viewed as an ongoing and continually developing ‘work in progress’.

In many ways the ability to move freely whilst observing the shifts occurring in the differing layers of focus was, and is, a wonderfully liberating and exciting development within my image making.

Echoes of my new stylistic approach can subsequently be seen within the majority of projects that have followed this period of experimentation.

Images from this series were initially shown along the escalator walls at London’s Euston Station.

He’s done a number of docu projects, none of which move me as deeply as the ones concerning things closer to home. Such as The Garden of Earthly Delights from which this image is taken.

I came across John’s work whilst researching for my Scene of the Crime project, his Black Dog work touched on a similar area

from the artist statement

This work is the culmination of three years of research and marks another major shift in my development. Here I attempt to take the viewer on an allegorical ‘journey’ through the process of depression as viewed from a first-hand perspective. Combined with the images are two text pieces * that carry the work forward to a conclusion that can be positive or negative depending on the perceptions of the viewer.

I start ‘loosing’ John after the garden of Earthly Delights - the series up until then I really enjoy. But definitely spend some time on his site.

Patrick Shanahan is someone I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. An English photographer-turned-academic whose work strikes a chord with its unique Englishness. We are swamped with various US-centric aesthetics, the German School etc etc so it is nice to see something so essential English.

His last published project, Esperantis also contains images shot in Spanish locations, some, like his Sitges pics, I’ve shot the same location, so you also get the same sense of ‘Brit in Spain’ I feel with some of my images. He seems to have a close link to Spain and has produced a number of bodies of work here.

My deliberate nod to this pic was this one, taken of the same location but from a different viewpoint

But enough of my pics and back to Patricks…

Terra Vision was a foreruner to the Esperantis project

However, my personal favourite was cornwall: a post-landscape project that looked at how the lack of local industry and the turn to tourism has changed the Cornwall landscape…

I love the kind of irony dealing with nationalist symbols that is almost completely lacking when dealing with American flags etc

Looking back from current work to the early work it is interesting to see how Patrick moved from producing icons to showing more context within his images

Although I’d love to have this hanging on the wall

Out of the blue I had an email from Keith at the weekend, and I’ve been spending some time since then going through his new work, and re-looking at his older stuff.

Keith is an intereresting guy. He’s done/doing the pj and documentary photographer stuff, he’s now also producing documentary video work. He works 35mm, digi, LF, BW, colour you name it! His subject matter is also extensive - landscape, urban, people etc etc

I first really started taking notice of Keith when I saw this image of his:

It is an image of excquisite beauty; the red motif, repeated squares, the light, the viewpoint is perfect.

I think viewpoint is something Keith is very good at - he finds images that can only be described from this one POV - many photographers utilise ‘the moment’, but more for Keith is the ‘where’.

Keith is currently working on a project called Uniontown . Unfortunately these are on flickr and I haven’t found a way to link directly to the images. But spend some time on his flickr site. It is really refreshing to see a photographer with so many interests.

Tim Atherton beat me to talking about Mike’s work , but for a long time, I’ve been totally captivated by Mike’s photography. The reasons for this are numerous, but I’ll mention just three;

His way of working is to not edit or work with his images until significant time has passed. From personal experience I know that this gives you the opportunity to distance yourself from your images and also to allow your idea of the ‘keeper’ to develop.

His vision is something that I know is lacking in my own work. Even when I can’t compose on the gg and just point and guess, my pics have a formalism that I can’t (not sure if I want to, either) avoid. In comparison, Mike has the art of capturing the glimpsed moment down to perfection.

Mike’s aesthetic also brings with it an intriguing problem that I can’t wait to see resolved. When you look at his work and speak to him, you know that the individual image is subservient to the whole - you cannot pull images out of the set - everything needs to be looked at as a unit. So the question, how do you present this? As sequenced images printed as one and put on the wall? As a web gallery? A book? A multimedia display? I’m working my way through this problem in a couple of series I’m doing - no answer yet - but for Mike I think it is an urgent question that needs resolution.

For those looking for a place to start, I can recommend this series , or Mike’s latest collection here.

(Edit)

Forgot to add that Mike’s latest series has two more components, here  and here.

I’m always interested in photographers who try to construct narratives within single images. Frank Rothe is one - check out his Shanghai work…

I’ve a great fondness for a lot of the colour work coming out of Memphis - notably Chris Patterson and Huger Foote.

However, another photographer whose work I like a lot who has the same personal use of colour as the ‘Memphis School’ without actually living in Memphis, and who has an intimate style reminiscent of Todd Deutsch , is Ralph Ballerstadt.

Over the last few years, Ralph has been developing a style where the composition and use of colour are integrated in a way few photographers seem to manage.

One slightly (only slightly!), annoying aspect of Ralph’s work is he never gives us complete bodies of work, but he prefers small, self contained, ’sets’. But trawl his website, well worth it!