Going down to Margate

Image @ Charlie Engman,an emerging fashion and art photographer included in the Wandering Bears exhibition at MargatePhotoFest.

MargatePhotoFest is back for the second year on 13 and 14 August, featuring work by some of the hottest new fashion and art photographers

Author: Diane Smyth

29 Jul 2011 Tags: FestivalsPhotography

It's already famous for Tracey Emin and the newly-opened Turner Contemporary gallery but Margate now has another attraction - the MargatePhotoFest.

Launched in 2010, the festival focuses on contemporary photography and last year included exhibitions by Jason Evans, Ed Thompson and Vinca Petersen. This time around Peter Kennard is creating an installation based on his @earth book and Wandering Bears is curating an exhibition of emerging photographers including Anouk Kruithof, who recently won the grand jury prize for photography at the Hyeres festival of fashion and photography, and Charlie Engman, an emerging fashion and art photographer who has worked with i-D, Vice magazine and Urban Outfitters, and whose image is shown above. Wandering Bears is a collective of young photographers founded by Peter Haynes plus Nik Adam and Luke Norman (who work together as elplusen).

MargatePhotoFest will include nine exhibitions in locations around Margate's old town, plus a talk by photographer and author Kevin Meredith. The festival theme is 'organic', and the organisers are calling on the photographers and curators involved to "make connections with the outside, exploring the structure of groups, the viral nature of the idea and the formation of grassroots culture". The organisers also emphasise the grassroots nature of the festival, stating that it offers an "alternative to the large scale regeneration projects in the area". MargatePhotoFest is held on 13-14 August.

It seems to be the strangest time for photography at the moment. At least it is for me.
I have been at a crossroads in my career quite a few times, but this is more like a crossroads with an underpass, a suspension bridge and a couple of roundabouts.

Its interesting that I seem to be dusting off a lot of my older images regarding prints sales and interest. For this I have no answer, if I did maybe I wouldn't be walking round the house in track suit bottoms and day dreaming about the simplicity of a 35mm Canon F1, a roll of Tri X Pan and days out with my wee dog Toby the whippet (actually no one knew what he was).

Whilst wading knee deep in negs and contact sheets the other day I was astounded at how much film I used to shoot. I was never concerned with the costs back then (don't forget it was considerably cheaper to shoot film ten years ago). I was hungry for it in a way that's hard to explain. A sort of addictive desperation to go out and shoot. But that's not something I miss as it used to drive me doolally.. I would spend whole nights in the darkroom producing print after print unconcerned with sleeping or eating. I was indeed hungry..
These days things are much slower. The urge to go out and shoot is still there, but it can wait a while. There's prints that need doing, but I need a full belly and a good nights sleep first.

My photography hasn't changed, but everything else has....

The road to success is always under construction.

V&A to open permanent photography gallery

The Brig, 1856, by Gustave Le Gray (1820-84) © V&A images.

V&A Museum in London is set to open the Photographs Gallery, its first permanent space that will showcase its collection of photographs

Author: Olivier Laurent

21 Jul 2011 Tags: V&aLondon

V&A's new permanent photography gallery, called the Photographs Gallery, will open on 25 October with a display of works by "key figures of photographic history including Victorian portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron and significant works by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Diane Arbus and Irving Penn."

V&A plans to "chronicle the history of photography from its invention in 1839 up to the 1960s," using the photographs it holds in its collections. The display will be "re-curated" every 18 months, says the museum.

As part of its first exhibition, V&A will showcase its oldest photograph - a daguerreotype from 1839 of Parliament Street from Trafalgar Square in London. It will be shown alongside works by Curtis Moffat, Anna Atkins and Gustave Le Gray, among many others.

The new gallery will also have two "In Focus" spaces, each featuring the work of one photographer "represented in depth in the V&A collection." The first two photographers are Julia Margaret Camera and Henri Cartier-Bresson.

For more details, visit www.vam.ac.uk.

AND THEN MY CAMERA BROKE...

So I had a bit of a jolly to New York (as you do) and thought it would be good to recharge the batteries and take to the city streets with a digital compact. In the past I would always have a compact loaded with film and always enjoyed producing a series of small prints.
Anyway, I was doing quite well snapping away and thought I had at least 10 worthy images. With any digital compact type camera I often don't check the screen and try to get as close to 'the olden day' techniques as possible. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake as these two images were the only ones I had on the card.
Basically the camera packed up and produced nothing but black.
I hate digital compacts..