Taken from the poster (PDF) found on Rhubarb Rhubarb‘s noticeboard:
Where?
Birmingham Central Library, Conference Room 4, floor 4
What?
A meeting to gauge interest in a new photography collective. Aimed at people who are post college, with some experience of exhibiting who want to discuss work, creating exhibitions and inviting guest speakers etc
Who?
This from Rhubarb Rhubarb:
We are delighted to announce that finally, after 17 years of supporting photographic artists, both in the West Midlands, London, UK and in the USA, Europe and Asia, we are opening our own gallery. The space is dedicated to showcasing the successes of our year round programme of mentoring and support for artists at all stages of their development, and the international names who attend the annual portfolio review in Birmingham
Appropriately enough it’ll be in the Rhubarb building on Heath Mill Lane. The launch is at the end of next week.
For the past month or so I’ve been following the pics put up on this here Internet by m.t. sullivan. I think I linked to his site a little while back.
I didn’t investigate back then, but it turns out that m.t. was on a 10 day visit from Madison, Wisconsin back in January. He’s just recently posted this about the trip:
I’ve been back in from Brum for nearly two months now. Here are the final pictures from the trip. I have also placed them on a google map, showing where the pics were taken. While I’ve transitioned just fine—I was only gone 10 days—the trip and experience are still very much present in my mind on a daily basis.
You can flick back through his pics on his blog and in this Flickr set. As a nice touch he’s gone and put all the photos on a Google map too.
The book of the exhibition, put together by Damian Brown:
96 pages of images and text documenting the artists featured in the Strong Brum project that was commissioned by Birmingham City Council and exhibited between September and December 2009 at The Drum, thanks to Mukhtar Dar.
The book itself is bookstore-quality with a hardcover, professionally printed and featuring a durable matte finish and library binding.
Available online at : blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1139729
Photographer Jak Flash is embarking on a project to re-illustrate the 22 Major Arcana tarot cards as photographic images for exhibition. Jak explains a little more on his website:
My next project, based around the imagery of the 22 major Arcana Tarot cards, is funded by Birmingham City Council and supported by Birmingham City University Students’ Union. I’m going be creating 22 images for EXHIBITION in Birmingham. The aim is to create a collaborative experience where people interested in being involved with art in Birmingham can come together.
Jak’s looking for models of all shapes and sizes, make-up artists, stylists and costume designers to help with the project too, so if you’re interested in getting involved, drop him a line on info@flashyourjak.com. The shoots are going to be taking place from the end of January till the end of February.
Here’s one of the tarot cards that is set to be turned into a photograph:
For more information on Jak Flash and the project visit his website here, or join the Major Arcana project Facebook group here.
Lucy Pryor is the snapper behind Angelfire Photography. In her own words:
Over the years she has photographed countless bands, gigs, events, concerts, portraits, and has branched out into wedding photography over the last two years. She is an avid contributor to many websites including BrumLive.com and PushToFire.com, and offical photographer to up-and-coming stars of 2009 – Rebel City Radio.
You can see more of Lucy’s shots on her Flickr account.
Helen Flanagan is a photography student. Her ‘About Page’ says this:
Helen Flanagan is currently studying for a BA hons in photography at Falmouth College University.Interested by the human psyche, obscurity and those tender, glorified moments of absence.
Jade Sukiya is a photographer with an eye for a striking image or two. Here’s her intro:
I was born in the mid-eighties to two admirably creative people. Years later that inevitable reality struck as having both my brother and I forced them to get ‘real’ jobs and lead a fairly restricted existence. My story begins at this point, although I can’t recall a thing up until the age of about four and even that’s a little hazy, sometimes I think I made my memories up…
More of Jade’s images like the one below, and many other completely different ones, can be found on her Myspace page and her Flickr account. She’s also got a tumblr with bits and pieces of her favourite stuff in it to check out too.
Here’s what fashion and portrait photographer Alis Pelleschi has to say about herself:
Alis Pelleschi is a self-confessed chip buttie lover. A proud Bradford gal, currently based in Birmingham. Taking photographs of those she deems curious and intriguing characters; becoming the people in her dreams; and drawing the icons of tomorrow.
Check out a photo from her series called ‘Rabbit‘.
Luke Halliley‘s ‘About’ page says:
I am a photographer living and working in Birmingham, England. A recent graduate from BA (Hons) Photography at University College Falmouth, I now lecture photography at Solihull College. I am available for editorial, freelance and commissioned work
This is from his series of photos called ‘There’s a lot of dads called Steve‘
De Montfort University’s MA photography students will be showing a load of their work at the Custard Factory from Friday 11 to Saturday 19 December 2009.
Birmingham’s People comes from the folks at Birmingham Photospace and is a continuation of the portrait project they carried out over the Artsfest weekend in September.
The website has been featuring the portraits taken, including the latest of ‘Radway’ (below) who, unless I’m mistaken, is none other than Violet Attack from the Birmingham Blitz Derby Dames.
The project will be exhibited at The Drum from 7 December 2009 to 29 January 2010. You can also sign up to attend the (free) private view and artists talk on 9 December.
Ian from 7 Inch Cinema correctly guessed that this video might be up my street – a collection of images they’ve compiled for Birmingham Seen which opens at BMAG today and runs until 3 January 2010.
Ian also sent over a biog of Derek Fairbrother (1931-99), whose images they are. The following is an extended copy and paste job:
In the 1960s and 70s research chemist and amateur photographer, Derek Fairbrother, made over 20 photographic time-lapse sequences showing the demolition of old buildings and their replacement by new buildings and new road systems in Birmingham city centre.
The completed sequences, often running to some fifty images taken over a period of five or more years, were then connected together in a narrative sequence in the form of a strip of postcard sized prints. Fairbrother intended to use a cine camera to photograph each sequence, thereby compressing years of work into a series of short films. However this ambition was not realised in his lifetime.
After his death in 1999, his widow Gaynor gifted his prints and negatives to the photography collections at Birmingham Library.
These short films, which will be shown for the first time in the exhibition Birmingham Seen (Gas Hall, 31st October 2009 – 3rd January 2010) have finally enabled Fairbrother’s work to be seen in the way he intended.
Thanks for the thoughts and input into the future of CiB. I hope it didn’t seem I was suggesting it be disbanded – I wanted more to open up debate on how technology itself has moved on from when CiB began and that the direction/organisation/intention of CiB needs looking at. Your suggestions have been very interesting and insightful – many of you proposing things I have been musing over anyway (eg. a collaborative approach, funding avenues, etc.) and in the next few weeks I’m going to be following some of these things up.
In the meantime, Birmingham’s creative communities continue to toil away and many things have been going on. Here’s a snapshot of where we’re at right now!
‘Hey for Lubberland!’ can be spotted gracing the canals around Brindley Place. This work, by Simon and Tom Bloor (and part of Ikon’s off-site projects) will be in situ on the towpath behind Bank Restaurant in Brindleyplace until 13th September 2009. Visitors can be transported by this working barge, and whilst onboard peruse the floating library of utopian design. The title ‘Hey for Lubberland!’ was derived from a 17th century English ballad about the New World, mistaken for utopia, but in fact a kind of fool’s paradise. You can be transported between 13:00 and 17:00 on Tuesdays – Sundays, and best of all admission is free!
If you’re interested in creative networking opportunities, then there’s a new group which will have it’s first meeting on August 13th. Creative Playground is being organised by Steve Gray and Kate Manion, and offers:
..a chance for people who work in a professional capacity in the creative and digital sectors to get together for drinks and a chat, make new friends and hopefully make some new collaborations as well. Ultimately it is about strengthening the city’s creative community and we’ll be looking to the RDAs and various bodies for support to help us do this.
It looks like a slightly different group of people to those you might meet at BSMC etc. and will hopefully prove rather interesting! You need to signup with meetup.com and then apply to become a member as there is a selection process as explained here:
The ground rules of joining are: 1) You must be in a professional role within the creative industries, 2) You or your business must be located in Birmingham, 3) You must fill out all the introductory fields in your profile with sufficient detail, 4) You must upload a photo of yourself to your profile. No company brands etc.
Also on Thursday 13th August is the private view of a brand new collection of work, entitled SAMPLE:
New work has been created by a range of Midlands artists including Daniel Westwood, Martin Donnelly, Matt Clugston, Steve Ellis, and Joe Mitchelmore. The work will be available to view online after the launch at the SAMPLE website, so even if you can’t make it you don’t have to miss out!
And lastly, so that this post isn’t completely ridiculously long, on a transatlantic note, Birmingham-based photographer Chris Keenan (who recently featured in the Visual / Art of Ideas 2 exhibition) has had a piece of work selected for a world-class international exhibition, Art of Photography.
This year they received 16,000 entries from 57 countries. 111 images were chosen for the final exhibition and Chris Keenan’s Franz Joseph Glacier (above) was one of them. The selection was made by Charlotte Cotton, curator and head of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
If you’re likely to be in and around the San Diego area any time between 29th August 2009 and 1st November 2009 then stop by the Lyceum Theatre Gallery and marvel at some Birmingham talent!
I’ve often wondered why museums and galleries aren’t using their web presence in more innovative and useful ways. I worked within a gallery for a number of years, and this gave me the unsurprising insight that many factors contributed to this: underpaid overworked staff, simply no capacity (in terms of time) to explore new avenues, gallery staff restricted to working within strictly defined roles with little room for experimentation, and those who do maintain the web side of things being under supported and in need of upskilling. Plus above all, there are many challenges facing gallery collections (from conservation to valuation to interpretation and beyond) that the additional pressure of creating new ways of accessing that information sits at the bottom of anyone’s agenda, particularly when it could just end up as a copyright/intellectual property/Digital Rights Management nightmare.
Finally, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery have been brave enough to tackle these issues head on with the decision to publicly release their world-class Pre-Raphaelite collection, the largest in Europe, becoming the focal point for this work. With assistance from JISC, BMAG appointed Birmingham-based digital agency TAK! after a five way pitch to design and develop a website application to achieve their goal. And the resulting site is a beautiful, delicate and sensitive piece of design. Visitors will be able to access high quality content which will enable schools, universities, and the general public to have a greater understanding of the collection in their own time, and in their own space – which in turn could encourage new visitors and raise the profile of the museum.
“TAK! have helped us create the largest online Pre-Raphaelite collection in the world” concludes Linda Suprdle, Project Manager at BMAG. “It’s a fantastic resource and provides an unparalleled level of access and quality to the works on display. Anyone with an interest in art should visit the site and discover the importance of the Pre-Raphaelites.”
I hope that this project will encourage other museums and galleries to consider making their collections accessible online. They have the opportunity to create such valuable learning resources which could cross so many diversity and access barriers, and it seems a shame that the majority of artworks only ever see the light of day if and when a curator deems them relevant enough. Using online technology, all collections could eventually be available to view regardless of current exhibition theme!
If and when that does happen, I will be interested to see how the role of ‘the curator’ responds to that change. The Pre-Raphaelite collection site already encourages users to create their own personal collections, so how far a leap would it be for people to share those collections and reasons for their choices with other users? Imagine an itunes playlist or an amazon reading list – but for art, complete with personal interpretations, anecdotal thoughts, factual evidence and academic input. THAT would be something I could become obsessive about!
