These fields were once all houses [2]
It’s a point-and-click digital, small size jpgs, ideal for the interwebs. Thought twice, then decided to put ‘em all up here. They’re heavily saturated in the originals, with a weird turquoise sky that can still be seen (desat) in some of them, and the characteristic non-grad white sky in others. Thankfully the synch button in Lightroom dealt the whole batch the same edit. It really would be too bad to have a camera that needed every single shot to be edited in some software or other. Camera colour has been disabled for now, until this is sorted out. It may be that the camera will not handle contrast properly, like most of the cheap point-and-click efforts.
There’s not much left of Scotswood, for some value of ‘much’. Probably 10 streets, give or take a corner shop or so. Will go back with a proper camera, whatever that is, but it’ll have to be soon.
Popularity: 14% [?]
John Duncan’s Belfast
John Duncan’s ongoing Boomtown series of photographs of the streets of Belfast are a reminder of how damaged the city had become and how long it can take to recover. The pictures have a resonance here across the water where the same kinds of economic collapse (shipbuilding in particular), have produced large areas of wasteland with apparently nothing happening on them for decades.
And then all of a sudden, brightly painted board fences are thrown up, concealing well, what? Shops? Block paving, black bins with gilt ornamentation, mildly rococo ironwork, the continuing homogenisation of our public space. The remarkable thing about these photographs is that they could actually have been taken anywhere.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Fence
Some of the new and ongoing series of work, four of which were exhibited at the weekend. And there’s a book too, coffee table-style, via MyPublisher, sitting on my tutor’s desk, and there are going to be smaller 7×7″ hard- and softbacks for sale from Blurb when time allows.
Rosie from Hera wrote this artist statement for the brochure:
“The Fences series reveals the very constructs that replicate the divided inner, social and political self. The work examines obsessional psychic and physical borders of fear that obfuscate and control lives and construct both real and imagined landscapes.”
It is a political work, more than a psychological one. But that’s spot on. Click through that photo to see more.
Popularity: 12% [?]