1,721,133 research outputs found
Beyond experience
Full text linkEssay text contribution.
Iain McKell took his first photographs of a small band of the 'New Age' travellers 25 years ago, the day before their buses were smashed up by the police acting under orders from the Thatcher government.
Ten years ago he set out to rediscover them and was surprised and delighted to find that a 'small tribe' had evolved from them who were now 'horse-drawn' and has settled into a sustainable lifestyle. He began to make regular trips to document them, now photographing the next generation.
Historically despised the new Gypsies are there by choice, not heritage. Unrelated to the Roma, the movement began in 1986 when a group of Post-Punk Anti-Thatcher protesters headed out of London into the English countryside. McKell followed these New Age Travellers to the West Country and over the years he watched them become a hybrid tribe - the new gypsies - present-day rural anarchists, living the subversive lifestyle in elaborately decorated horse-drawn caravans. Known as 'Horse-drawn', the new gypsies share a desire for sustainability, a love of self-reliance and a disdain for the trappings of contemporary life. For more than a decade McKell has focused his lens on travellers of all ages: parents, children, couples and loners. With sensitivity and honesty he captures a way of life that seems at once romantic, strange, beautiful and simple. The result is a deeply insightful portrayal of a culture that eschews the traditional creature comforts of urban life in favour of the simplicity and freedom of the natural world.
Photographer Iain McKell offers an extraordinary—and breathtakingly beautiful—glimpse into the lives of a real and raw group of present-day nomads whose culture is built around ideals of freedom, nature, and simplicity.
Historically despised the new Gypsies are there by choice, not heritage. Unrelated to the Roma, the movement began in 1986when a group of Post-Punk Anti-Thatcher protesters headed out of London into the English countryside. McKell followed these New Age Travelers to the West Country and over the years he watched them become a hybrid tribe—the new gypsies—present-day rural anarchists, living the subversive lifestyle in elaborately decorated horse–drawn caravans. Known as “Horse-drawn,” the new gypsies share a desire for sustainability, a love of self-reliance and a disdain for the trappings of contemporary life. For more than a decade McKell has focused his lens on travelers of all ages: parents, children, couples, and loners. With sensitivity and honesty he captures a way of life that seems at once romantic, strange, beautiful, and simple. The result is a deeply insightful portrayal of a culture that eschews the traditional creature comforts of urban life in favour of the simplicity and freedom of the natural world
Men Alone
Full text linkMen Alone is a 40 photograph artists book which explores archive photographs of men alone in photographs from the early 20th century to c.1975. This project was born from a longstanding fascination with the ability of random archive photographs to make connections and form absurdist narratives
Grace Lau Portraits In a Chinese Studio
Full text linkVal Williams edited and project managed this new book by Grace Lau, she commissioned a new essay by Shirley Read and wrote a short introduction.
In the summer of 2005, photographer Grace Lau set up a portrait studio on Hastings seafront. The studio was on a busy route, a few doors away from the Iceland store and the former Borough Parking
Office and on the main route into the tourist draw of Hastings Old Town. Over six weeks, she made 400 photographs; everyone who posed received a free digital print. She called her project ‘21st Century Types’ and the photographs speak volumes about the way we see ourselves and the way we are seen.
‘Through this project’, Lau wrote recently, ‘I am making an oblique comment of Imperialist visions of the ‘exotic’ Chinese and by reversing roles, I have become the Imperialist photographer documenting my exotic subjects in the ‘Port’ of Hastings...I played the formal photographer, asking them to sit still and look serious while I fussed with focusing and waited for the right shutter second. I also asked them to keep their accessories in the pose, their sunglasses, coke bottles, ice cream, mobiles, souvenirs, sunhats, supermarkets plastic bags.... all this added a contemporary layer to my old-fashioned studio, compressing history and the present into one eclectic image.
These rich, many layered opulent portraits, made in a community centre on a scruffy seafront, by a Chinese feminist photographer more used to portraying the fetish underworld than families with ice creams, are a monument to place, race, people and the passing of time. Acting the part of the stern Chinese studio portraitist, she created a raucous theatre of photography.
By now, all the children in Lau’s photographs will be almost adult, almost all the dogs, and some of the people, will have passed away. Partnerships and friendships may have fractured, or be still sound, family groups will have morphed, reformed, grown larger or smaller. The photographs of those days in the summer, the years into the 21st century, act as memory and milestone, precise, yet bewildering echoes from the past
Ken. To be destroyed (book)
No full textBook, edited by Val Williams, Schilt Publishing 2016
Hardcover with dust jacket. 113 photographs in full colour
Magnum Ireland (2nd Edition)
No full textLardinois’ contribution was to secure a book publication to explore material in the Magnum archive that had not been yet been collated. The book as to be accompanied by a major touring exhibition which opened at IMMA in Dublin.
Working closely with Val Williams, she conducted extensive background research. the concept was to divide both exhibition and book into decades and to commission major Irish writers to put the photographs in its historical context. With an introduction by John Banville the book features essays buy Anthony Cronin, Fintan O’Toole, Eamonn McCann, Nuala O'Faolain, Anne Enright and Colm Tóibin- and in this edition Kevin Barry describes the new decade. Lardinois and Williams co-wrote a critical introduction to the book which drew out a distinctive Irishness to the photographs and they jointly presented the exhibition at its opening.
Research consisted of the original scoping of the exhibition and volume (Lardinois) and a sustained enquiry into the large number of photographers’ work including those from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eve Arnold, Martin Parr and Bruce Davidson. The research involved identifying and retrieving photographs from a range of non-UK based archives and estates. As a consequence, little of the work had been seen before and none of it in a retrospective context.
Williams updated the author's essay and Lardinois contributed the picture research for this edition.
The original book, co-edited by Lardinois and Williams and was published by Thames and Hudson (30 November 2005) and was launched at the Irish Embassy, London (8 December 2005). See https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/1656
Remembering the counterculture
Full text linkEssay in exhibition catalogue.
This publication is a collaborative work designed for visitors to the Growing Up in the New Age exhibition at Streetlevel Photoworks Glasgow, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and future touring venues. Each of the project partners was asked to write a short piece which would give information and context to the work on show to a wide variety of visitors. It is a free publication designed to both impart high quality research while remaining accessible to the wider public. It is part of a series of booklets, published by Wolverhampton Art Gallery and made available during the exhibition and beyond
In the Detail: Corinne Silva's Garden State
No full textAn essay in Corinne Silva's monograph 'Garden State' which placed Silva within the context of photographing gardens and the position of garden photography as social activism. Silva's work looks at the ways in which garden spaces have been used in a number of Israeli settlements in the disputed territories of Israel/Palestine.
Extract from the essay:
'Corinne Silva employs photography as record, polemic, and aesthetic statement. Her work is systematic, from the research process through to the making of the photographs and their installation or publication. She is interested in territory- who owns the landscape, who has a right to it, how does politics change it. Fascinated by fortresses - of Moorish or Venetian or Ottoman antiquity - or the more contemporary, of the Jewish hillside settlements in the Occupied Territories or the gated golf community sited in the Spanish desert. Much of Corinne Silva’s photography is to do with detail- a shrub is glimpsed above a substantial stone wall, spiky palms arch over the opaque class which separates one building from another, ancient olive trees are ringed by irrigation tubes and stratified by stone paths. Silva never identifies the settlements she photographs, and we see neither an entire house, a private garden nor an inhabitant. So there is something unreal, half made, eerily municipal about the places she photographs. It is as if everything is being laid out – pipes, water retaining/weed preventing webs, and banks of soil enclosed by sleek metal fencing. Everything in this environment is very clean, very new.
You could say that the photographic object, in its material being, could almost be insubstantial within this scenario- in Corinne Silva’s journeying across Spain and the Mediterranean and, for Garden State, across the occupied Palestinian territories settled by Israel, she was in search of evidence- of political and social intent. The material manifestation this evidence is presented in a deliberately fragmented and allusive way, even questioning the idea of photographic proof. Reading through the various descriptions of her work in the project ‘Garden State’, it is perhaps surprising then to see her aims so clearly described- in ‘Wounded’ and ‘Gardening the Suburbs - the two photographic series (incorporating soundscape) which make up ‘Garden State’ -she describes quite clearly how the work examines ‘ how the Israeli state uses tactical landscaping to exert control over the Occupied Palestinian Territories… Taking the viewer through national parks and suburban gardens, Silva’s artwork reflects on how gardening can be used to mark out and progressively expand territory, as well as to encourage the Israeli population to spread and settle, to make roots and grass over divergent historical narratives’ (1. Press release: Ffotogallery, Cardiff, 2013).
The garden has long been used as a way of marking territory, of establishing difference or marking lifestyle. From the utopian model villages of 18th century England to the garden cities of the mid twentieth century and the new suburbs of the inter war years, the garden has become of focus of cultural and social intent. From the Enclosure Acts of 17th century Britain, when rural people lost many of their land rights, to the partial ‘regifting’ of land back to the people in the form of allotments it has been recognized that garden land use plays a significant part in the health of the national psyche. Gardens are symbols of wealth, or taste, of aspiration, and community of diligence and knowledge. In photographer Fergus Heron’s continuing series of photographs of executive estates in the south of England (Charles Church Estates 1996-2006), it is planting and landscaping which give the demographic clues rather than the built architecture. In David Spero’s ‘Settlements’ series (2004-6), the beautiful shack dwellings made in Wales by alternative livers are again defined by the landscape in which they are situated. The planted roofs made by these new age settlers are as much a signal to us viewers as are the pampas grasses of Fergus Heron’s estates.
In post war Britain, photographers and photography became deeply engaged with the depiction of the English rural landscape. Gardens played a significant part in this documentation, and the undisputed master of garden photography at this time was the architectural photographer Edwin Smith, who, often working with his writer partner Olive Cook and with the émigré publishing house of Thames and Hudson, set about making a comprehensive portrait of the British landscape which was serene and eerily empty of people. Smith worked with Thames and Hudson and the gardening writer Edward Hyams on The English Garden, an outsize volume published in 1964. Unusually for Smith, the photographs were in both colour and black and white, and the focus of the book was very much on the ‘great’ gardens of England – Sheffield Park, Stourhead, Chatsworth, Kew. Throughout the Second World War, the colour photographer John Hinde had worked with Adprint (which would later morph into Thames and Hudson) and writer TC Mansfield to produce The Garden in Colour a series of books about the English garden, including Roses in colour and Cultivation (1943), The Border in Colour and Alpines in Colour and Cultivation. For Smith, Hinde, Adprint and Thames and Hudson, the English garden emerged as a kind of vision, a microcosmic England as a place of safety and calm, without people, without disturbance- as if it had always been there. As clean and as bright as the landscaped places that Corinne Silva found in her wanderings around the West Bank settlements, and in their own way, as troubling. No people disturb the visions of Hinde, or Smith or Silva or Heron or Spero. Would a crowd of visitors at on the Chatsworth Lawn have made the gardens look less autocratic, less out of our reach? Would children playing or a family bringing home the shopping make Fergus Heron’s Charles Church Closes seem warmer, more welcoming and would a senior citizen taking the air on one of the benches in Corinne’s Silva’s settlement photographs make these places seem less threatening, less elitist? If a family emerged from one of David Spero’s Welsh settlement houses, cold, hungry and unkempt, would the effect of this fairytale dwelling remain intact?" End extract
Anna Fox photographs 1983-2007
Full text linkThis retrospective features selections from all of Fox's major projects. Beginning with her earliest projects, Basingstoke, Work Stations and Friendly Fire; each a critical exploration of the social make up and behaviour of Thatcher's Britain in the 1980s; the book charts her progress through more personal, diaristic bodies of work including Hewitt Road, Coackroach Diary and My Mother's Cupboards and My Father's Words. More recent projects, Country Girls and Pictures of Linda chronicle Fox's relationship with the musicians Alison Goldfrapp and Linda Lunus through a series of intimate, playful and performative portraits
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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