FORMAT 11: International Photography Festival - "Right Here, Right Now"

FORMAT 11 International Photography Festival in Derby will run from 4th March to 3rd April. The theme is Right Here, Right Now: Exposures from the Public Realm - that is, street photography, or photography in public places.

Alessandro Marchi
An exhibition, Right Here, Right Now in the Quad Gallery will survey contemporary street photography featuring more than 20 photographers, including, Brian Griffin, Joel Meyerowitz, Zhao Liang and Raghu Rai.
Take to the Streets - Magnum will be a large scale outdoor exhibition in Derby Marketplace featuring the work of 7 Magnum photographers: Constantine Manos, Richard Kalvar, Raymond Depardon, Chris Steele-Perkins, Bruno Barbey, Trent Parke and Alex Webb.
A number of exhibitions will be taking place at Derby Museum and Art Gallerty, including Bruce Gilden: Head On and Mehraneh Atashi: Tehran’s Self-Portraits. A little further afield, Raghu Rai: Invocation to India is showing at New Art Exchange, Nottingham until 20th April.

Mehraneh Atashi

Raghu Rai

Events include a conference on 4th March at Quad, which will address the topics: Beyond Street Photography and From the Decisive to the Indecisive. Speakers include Sophie Howarth, Nick Turpin, Michael Wolf (see also, below, and short video of him talking about his Google Street View work), Bruce Gilden, Geoff Dyer and others.

For full details of these events and many more go to the Format Festival website.

Bruce Gilden

See feature by Sean O'Hagan

Ray Kaczynski & Ove Volquartz - Xposed Club, 4th March

Poster by Mark Unsworth.

Ray Kaczynski ('electronic sculpture') & Ove Volquartz (contra bass clarinet) will headline the Xposed Club event on 4th March. The session will also feature Cheltenham based ''xbox xistentialists', Brown Torpedo and The Pete Crooks Trio with special guests Clive Skinner (trumpet) and Nicole Warfield.  

Ray Kaczynski & Ove Volquartz

This will be the last Xposed Club event to be held at Pittville Studios - event organizer Stuart Wilding says: “After four years of innovative, world-class musical concerts, this will be our last gig at Pittville before we look for a new home. So please get yourself and many friends along to make it a very special night to remember.” 

Xposed Club: in the atrium, Pittville Studios, Cheltenham on Friday 4th March. £5.00 (£3.00 concs.) on the door, starts 8.00pm.

16mm film (Tacita Dean)

Tacita Dean, still from Kodak, 16mm colour film, 44mins, 2006 (Tate Collection)
I welcomed the announcement that Tacita Dean had been awarded the commission for the next Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern (see below) – and wondered what she might do. An article by her, Save Celluloid, for Art's Sake, in the Guardian reveals that it will involve 16mm film. However, the point of the article is to lament the news that the last professional lab in the UK to print 16mm film has ceased to do so. Dean’s interesting article eloquently describes the skills and resources that will be lost as a consequence.

The news renders even more poignant, the current exhibition The Days of Darkrooms and Reel to Reel: ANALOG showing at Riflemaker until 5th March (see below).

World Press Photo Awards 2011

Jodi Bieber's photograph of Bibi Aisha (below), an Afghan woman disfigured as punishment for fleeing her husband's house, has been selected as World Press Photo of the Year, 2010. View a brief interview with Bieber, about making the photograph, here, and read David Campbell's blog comments and comparison with Steve McCurry's famous 1985 portrait of Sharbat Gula (better known as 'Afghan Girl'); see also Jim Johnson's blog comments: Category Mistake at World Press Photo Awards ~ Top Prize Given Not for Photojournalism But for Propaganda.

Category awards are made for  Spot News, General News, People in the News, Sports, Contemporary Issues, Daily Life, Portraits, Arts & Entertainment, and Nature and include some astonishing and horrifying pictures. See the World Press Photo: Winners Gallery.

I was particularly interested in the Contemporary Issues, 'Honourable Mention' to Michael Wolf for: A Series of Unfortunate Events: Google Street View.

 Wolf has produced a substantial body of work derived from the vast image bank produced by the Google Street View project. In an interview in the British Journal of Photography, Wolf explains his method: 
I use a tripod and mount the camera, photographing a virtual reality that I see on the screen. It's a real file that I have, I'm not taking a screenshot. I move the camera forward and backward in order to make an exact crop, and that's what makes it my picture. It doesn't belong to Google, because I'm interpreting Google; I'm appropriating Google. If you look at the history of art, there's a long history of appropriation. He speculates: I think a large part of our future will be the curating of all these images. Can you imagine the number of images stored in our world today? It's unlimited. In 100 years, there will be professions such as 'hard-drive miners', whose mission will be finding hard-drives in electronic junkyards and developing software to sort these images. And then there will be art projects and sociological projects created using images mined from electronic storages. The whole idea of curating this incredible mass of images that has been created has tremendous potential, and I've just scratch[ed] the surface with my Google Street View project.
Needless, to say there is some scepticism about the validity of his work as 'photojournalism' or even 'art' - see comments posted at the end of the BJP interview. Listen to Wolf talking about his response to the 'controversy' and his work.

Michael Wolf, selected images from A Series of Unfortunate Events: Google Street View

The Open West - Summerfield Gallery, Pittville Studios

The 2011 Open West exhibition will be in the Summerfield Gallery, Pittville Studios, University of Gloucestershire from 9th February to 5th March. 45 artists have been selected by Richard Billingham, Matthew Raw, Lyn Cluer Coleman and Sarah Goodwin.

11 of the selected artists will give talks about their work at Pittville Studios, on Saturday 12th February: Fergus Jordan, David Kiely, Matthews & Struthers, Richard Ansett, Alicja Rogalska, and Bobby Nixon in the morning, from 10.00am; Ellen Nolan, Howard Silverman, Jon Mayers, Helen Murgatroyd and Laura Clarke in the afternoon, from 1.30pm.

 Open West, installation views.

David Behar Perahia - Gloucester Cathedral

David Behar-Perahia, artist in residence at Gloucester Cathedral, will present an exhibition of his work in the cathedral from 12th to 28th February. The exhibition, Invisible Structura I: Body, Sound, Space and Harmony will be launched by a performance at 6.30 on Saturday 12th February: this will feature a procession in collaboration with composer Edwin Hillier, dancers Katherine Glicks and Ruth Cross, Gloucester Cathedral Stone Masons, members of the Cathedral choir and the artist.

Chris Cundy & Dominic Lash + BC - Xposed Club at the Chapel: 11th February

Poster by Mark Unsworth

Chris Cundy (bass clarinet) and Dominic Lash (double bass) - billed as 'Two Plump Daughters',  + BC: Belinda Belle, Stuart Chalmers, Mark Anthony Whiteford (playing a mixture of found objects and electronics) will perform the first Xposed Club gig of 2011.

Xposed Club at the Chapel: FCH Chapel, Cheltenham on Friday 11th February. £5.00 (£3.00 concs.) on the door, starts 8.00pm.