Pencil of Nature

Unknown Scottish photographers: the role of the works photographer
Thursday March 24 at 6.00pm
Mitchell Library, Glasgow G3 7DN
Free, no booking required.

The photographers who worked in and for Scottish industrial firms captured the surprising grace and beauty of many products. Many of their photographs were intended as a basis for engraving so high definition was essential. To that end, photographers generally used large format glass negatives for their work with often spectacular results.

John Hume, the distinguished industrial historian, explores and illustrates this fascinating and largely unknown dimension of Scotland’s photographic heritage.

Perth Museum & Art Gallery’s photographic collections are benefiting from upgraded storage facilities as part of a number of improvements to selected stores.The work has been made possible thanks to funding received under the Recognition Scheme administered by Museums Galleries Scotland.

The photography collections at Perth are important for their size and quality. They contain examples of many photographic processes from the earliest Daguerreotypes and Calotypes right through to the digital photography of today.

The extensive photographic collections are now housed inside an extension to a mobile racking system providing increased capacity and dispensing with the assorted filing cabinets and shelf units which populated the store until recently. A large new work table has also been incorporated into the design, which will be ideal for staff and volunteers as they continue to improve the documentation and storage of the photographic collections.

The Recognition Scheme is a Scottish Government initiative launched in 2007 to formally recognise and help support museum collections of nationally significant material held by non-national organisations. In 2007 the entire collections of Perth Museum & Art Gallery achieved Recognition status providing access to the Recognition Fund, which aims to assist in improving access to recognised collections and collections care for such collections.

The inter-war period must have been one of the most exciting and challenging times for photographers, so it’s perhaps not surprising then that there was such a wealth of photographic experimentation taking place. As a form of mechanical production, photography was at first criticised by the art establishment for being more of a technological breakthrough than an artistic one. Photography was impressive, a triumph of science and engineering, but it was never going to be art.

Then came the World War 1,  and from it emerged a new breed of artist, more challenging, more questioning and prepared for change. The Dadaists, a group of highly creative artists and writers who had fled Germany and Romania for neutral Switzerland in WW1,  were anti-art, anti-war and anti-establishment. Here was a group of men and women who embraced the new medium of photography and enjoyed its modern means of creating images. Their experiments with photography, excellent examples of which appear in the Another World exhibition showing at the Dean Gallery,  include the early use of double exposures, distorted perspectives and the choice of highly unconventional subjects. They also explored photograms – cameraless photographic prints – and created some of the earliest abstract photographs. Photograms were not new, William Henry Fox Talbot called his ‘photogenic drawings’, but Man Ray made them his own, calling his photograms ‘rayographs’.

When the war finally ended, Dada disbanded. Man Ray moved to Paris and joined up with another group of artists who became known as the Surrealists. One day, unannounced, the American model and photographer Lee Miller knocked on his door and introduced herself as his new assistant. It was in his darkroom that she accidentally discovered Solarisation (an effect already known but not yet fully exploited for the creation of photographs). In the exhibition there is a wonderful example of this process as well as other photographs by Miller. There is also the iconic Surrealist emblem of her left eye gazing straight at us,  like a camera lens. These new experiments in photography created some of the most irrational, dreamlike and sensual images of Surrealism. In Surrealism the lens reigned supreme.

Another World: Dalí, Magritte, Miró and the Surrealists is showing at the Dean Gallery, Belford Road, Edinburgh until 9th January 2011.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend setting aside a couple of hours to drift through this mesmerising exhibition. Edinburgh’s City Art Centre has some truly great exhibitions, so I was thrilled to hear that this Summer they were hosting this seminal Edward Weston touring show. The works, of which there are over one hundred vintage  gelatin silver and platinum prints, all belong to the collection of New York couple Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. Michael, a particle physicist, is an unlikely collector but is drawn to the very elemental essence of Weston’s work, particularly the vegetable still lifes, which he sees as equivalents to elementary particles in physics.

The photographs cover all periods of Weston’s work and as you move slowly around the room, you can begin to sense the pleasure he took in looking. The very first image you see is Weston himself, one of two self-portraits in the show, his eyes fixed on you, young and intense. From then on you are seeing what he once saw, framed through his lens with beauty and strangeness.

Weston’s early pictorial work, such as the dancing nude portrait of his first wife Flora taken when she was 4 months pregnant, suggest the beginnings of his mature work. Throughout the show there are references to the women who influenced and inspired him, all of which he made subjects of his photography. The first to really make him think about what he was doing was fellow photographer Margrethe Mather.

In Pepper No.30, 1931, luminous metallic particles gleam from the highlights. The heightened contrast of light and shadow suits these extraordinary muscular forms and leads on to the way he treated the nude. His pictures of his second wife Charis are particularly beautiful and resonant. In these images you really get the sense of a collaboration between them and beyond the perfection, the detail is telling. Seeing that famous image of Charis, Santa Monica, 1936 up close, I stood transfixed looking at the beautiful nature of her hair and even the hairs on her legs, which you can never really examine by looking at a reproduction. In one image taken she has goose bumps and knowing how Weston loved to do dawn photo-shoots you wonder just how cold it was out there in the desert and how still and calm and sublime.

Edward Weston: Life Work is showing at The City Art Centre, Market Street, Edinburgh until October 24th 2010.

St Monans Community Arts Festival, taking place over the weekend of 17 to 19 September, includes an exhibition of a private camera collection.

This is an enormous collection, concentrating mainly on those models in popular use–Kodaks, box cameras, folders, etc., and also an extensive collection of Eastern European models.

For anyone with an interest in the history of photography, this is a must. St Monans is in the East Neuk of Fife. You’ll find the exhibition at a venue in West Street opposite the Spar Shop.

This year’s SSHoP Annual Photographer’s Lecture, Et in Arcadia Ego, will be give by Simon Norfolk, on Friday 15 October 2010.

Simon Norfolk is an internationally acclaimed photographic artist who has won numerous prestigious awards for his intelligent and quietly beautiful images documenting war zones and battlefields. Using a large format camera, his photographs speak eloquently of the nature of destruction and meditate on the vanity of empire and man’s historical capacity for self-annihilation.

Date
Friday 15 October 2010, 6 to 7.30pm

Venue
Hawthornden Lecture Theatre,
National Gallery Complex, The Mound, Edinburgh

Free, no booking required.

The National Galleries of Scotland have a collection of photography released into the commons on Flickr, including a set of 51 Hill and Adamson pictures.