Myth, Manners and Memory
Another trip to Bexhill on Sea and the wonderful De La Warr Pavilion, a building I confess I never tire of photographing. The weather started rather better than it had when I went to Brighton, but there was the slightly added stress of the train leaving four minutes' earlier - which makes a difference to me at 8am, even though I was going to get there ten minutes ahead of schedule. If the weather held, I figured I could go on the beach - but it seemed to be fenced off for about half a mile, and so I never got back to it after lunch.
The draw this time was the Brighton Photo Biennial, which has an offshoot at Bexhill in the shape of Myth, Manners and Memory: Photographers of the American South. It is on until 3 January 2011, but there's a series of films in Gallery 2, and I especially wanted to see William Eggleston in the Real World (2005). It has to be said that this is a pretty lofi effort - with poor quality sound, and most of Eggleston is subtitled, and needs it, not so much for a southern accent, but because the recording is so poor. It also appeared to be out of focus, but that may have been the venue, who seemed a tad tardy in starting the film, or rather unlocking the room where the film was to be shown. Eggleston seems a weirdly normal person, wandering around with his son, snapping photos, nearly getting run over, photographing the everyday and the mundane in such a way that it is never kitsch or camp. I like his stuff a lot, and I do fear that he's going to be an influence on my own stuff. I liked his refusal to theorise for the interviewer - what if photographs are real because they last and reality is the dream (he'd never thought of it that way) or how long does he take to set up (he just photographs). He also composes music (I'm agnostic on this evidence) and was an early exemplar of video art (which shows the faults before the current practitioners did).
The exhibition brings together ninety years of southern photography - Walker Evans's documenting of the south (which appears to be available via the Library of Congress, and I need to follow this up), Susan Lipper's oddly surreal pictures of a small town (cue David Lynch), Carrie Mae Weems's Louisiana, Alec Soth's Mississippi, William Christenberry's Alabama and, of course, Eggleston's beautiful colour landscapes and rare portraits. Lots of names to follow up; a couple of books to order from Amazon.
I was a little sidetracked by the building - in this case the interference patterns when photographing out the gallery windows:
Curiously, there was a biography of Evans in one of Bexhill's secondhand shops. I didn't buy it at a fiver, but maybe I should have done. I'm not sure who wrote it - darn. I think the cover was yellow... Still, if I'm meant to buy it, I'll see it again.
Next week, hopefully, back to Brighton and the Brighton Photo Biennial 2010.
The draw this time was the Brighton Photo Biennial, which has an offshoot at Bexhill in the shape of Myth, Manners and Memory: Photographers of the American South. It is on until 3 January 2011, but there's a series of films in Gallery 2, and I especially wanted to see William Eggleston in the Real World (2005). It has to be said that this is a pretty lofi effort - with poor quality sound, and most of Eggleston is subtitled, and needs it, not so much for a southern accent, but because the recording is so poor. It also appeared to be out of focus, but that may have been the venue, who seemed a tad tardy in starting the film, or rather unlocking the room where the film was to be shown. Eggleston seems a weirdly normal person, wandering around with his son, snapping photos, nearly getting run over, photographing the everyday and the mundane in such a way that it is never kitsch or camp. I like his stuff a lot, and I do fear that he's going to be an influence on my own stuff. I liked his refusal to theorise for the interviewer - what if photographs are real because they last and reality is the dream (he'd never thought of it that way) or how long does he take to set up (he just photographs). He also composes music (I'm agnostic on this evidence) and was an early exemplar of video art (which shows the faults before the current practitioners did).
The exhibition brings together ninety years of southern photography - Walker Evans's documenting of the south (which appears to be available via the Library of Congress, and I need to follow this up), Susan Lipper's oddly surreal pictures of a small town (cue David Lynch), Carrie Mae Weems's Louisiana, Alec Soth's Mississippi, William Christenberry's Alabama and, of course, Eggleston's beautiful colour landscapes and rare portraits. Lots of names to follow up; a couple of books to order from Amazon.
I was a little sidetracked by the building - in this case the interference patterns when photographing out the gallery windows:
Curiously, there was a biography of Evans in one of Bexhill's secondhand shops. I didn't buy it at a fiver, but maybe I should have done. I'm not sure who wrote it - darn. I think the cover was yellow... Still, if I'm meant to buy it, I'll see it again.
Next week, hopefully, back to Brighton and the Brighton Photo Biennial 2010.