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THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
VEE SPEERS This is a series of portraits of children about to attend an imaginary birthday party. Inspired by her daughter’s birthday party Speers imagined what characters might be created if role play were pushed to imaginative extremes. The children are placed in front of the same white wall and gaze into the lens of the camera, performing within a strictly laid out frame. They reveal very little of themselves and yet this is what makes the portraits so magnetic. The childlike game of dressing up, of putting on costumes, reinforces the surreal tone of the series. The Birthday Party is “anarchistic” in its take on childhood and play, “both improvisatory and highly theatrical... unsentimental but playful, macabre... in a way which is liberating both for us as viewer and perhaps for her subjects too.” Clare Grafik, The Photographers Gallery, London “There is always a certain tension in my work which draws the viewer into what is hidden beneath the surface. My intention was to show a real side of human nature, to expose a side of childhood that is not care-free or clichéd, and project a range of emotions and definitions which are part of an imperfect world.” Vee Speers For the past fifteen years Vee Speers has been based in Paris, working in fashion, photojournalism and fine art photography. Widely exhibited throughout Europe, the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Japan and Australia, her work has also been seen in publications including The Sunday Times, Harpers+Queen, GQ, Arena and Esquire. |
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LOVIN' IT
ADAM HINTON These photographs from Shanghai explore the new culture rapidly developing in China as it expands its domestic market at breakneck speed. As elsewhere in the world, the appeal of modern consumer goods and the benefits they bring is there for all to see. But such rapid change has its dark side. As the not-so-old cultural structures become increasingly irrelevant there are threats to social cohesion as communal identity gives way to individuality and alienation. What we are seeing now is a new Cultural Revolution, a capitalist Cultural Revolution that is more complete, more total, and no less ideological than the Cultural Revolution that was instigated by Chairman Mao in the 1960s. Lovin’ It is introduced by John Gittings, for many years foreign leader-writer and East Asia editor at The Guardian. Gittings first visited China in 1971 during the Cultural Revolution and in 2001 he opened the Guardian’s first staff bureau on the Chinese mainland, in Shanghai. The book also includes an interview with Hinton by writer and cultural critic Nigel Warburton. London based photographer, Adam Hinton has produced several documentary projects based around various communities including a favela in Rio de Janeiro, a coal mining family in the Ukraine and a Himba community in Namibia. His personal and commissioned photography have won numerous awards and been exhibited at various galleries including the National Portrait Gallery and The Photographers’ Gallery, London. |
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TRUNCATED
PAUL HART Foreword by Gerry Badger The forest interior is more architecture than landscape. Amongst the trees, your concept of time is changed. As you move deeper inside, and the outside world disappears, the wind is calmed and noise filtered, temperature is altered, and light is bounced and subdued. Some trees stand like sentinels, others are stolid in ranks, an army of trees appearing out of the dark. This apparent sanctuary of stillness can strangely transform. It is it’s own world. Stepping into the forest is always like stepping into the unknown, with the semi-dark concealing much, revealing a little. A place sometimes mysterious, sometimes secretive, but always seductive and always dark. A prize winner at the 2008 Prix de la Photographie Paris, Paul Hart is fast becoming one of the UK’s leading landscape photographers. His work is used by Ilford-Photo to promote their black and white paper range worldwide. Born in the UK in 1961, Hart worked for six years in advertising photography, travelling throughout Europe and the USA, before embarking on a freelance career focusing more on the natural world. His images have been used internationally for advertising, publishing and editorial. Since 2000 Hart has concentrated solely on personal projects. Truncated is his first book. |
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I, TOKYO
JACOB AUE SOBOL Magnum photographer Jacob Aue Sobol moved to Tokyo in spring 2006. Initially I felt invisible. Each day I would walk the streets without anyone making eye-contact with me. Everyone seemed to be heading somewhere – it was as if they had no need of communication. Most mornings I would take the Chuo-line from Nakano to Shinjuku, and even though the train would be packed with salary-men and school girls in uniform, I rarely heard a word being spoken. |
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THE LAST THINGS
DAVID MOORE texts by Chris Petit & Angela Weight David Moore was allowed unprecedented access to a Crisis Management facility below ground in central London, between September 2006 and April 2007. This space will be used as the first port of call in any situation where the State is under threat. The environment is sustainable for extended periods and is part of a larger network. Over an 8 month period Moore was able to observe a live working space, continuously on standby, and fully prepared for the most extreme national emergency. The facility’s hermetic, tightly regulated environment, artificially lit and air conditioned, is prescient with the threat of crisis. At once sophisticated and touchingly ordinary, part military and part civilian, Moore has documented its labyrinthine depths with chilling clarity. Small areas of certain images have been digitally altered at the request of the MoD to protect what they consider to be sensitive information. All of this begins to hint at the relationship with the MoD and imposes a conceptual requirement on what has become a censored document. Moore’s photographs are accompanied by an essay from the film-maker and novelist Chris Petit and an afterword by the curator, Angela Weight. David Moore has exhibited and published his work widely. The Last Things is his third book. |
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IN A WINDOW OF PRESTES MAIA 911 BUILDING
JULIO BITTENCOURT In March 2006 the residents of 911 Prestes Maia, a 22 storey ramshackle tower block in the centre of sprawling São Paulo, Brazil, were surprised to learn that they were to be evicted within 28 days. Whilst the building, neglected by its landlord, had apparently been empty for over a decade 1,630 people, including some 468 families with 315 children lived there. In 2003 the ‘Movement of the Homeless’ had moved in hundreds of homeless families. The new residents drove out the vermin and the drug dealers, and cleaned up the place, and the building became possibly the largest squat in the world, complete with a library, workshops and other educational activities. Bittencourt’s photographs are a powerful record of this diverse community. Photographing from the adjacent building, Bittencourt records the tower’s residents as they appear in weathered window frames. According to him, in a mega-city like São Paulo, where large buildings are packed together cheek by jowl, families and friends often communicate with each other through windows. Julio Bittencourt lives in São Paulo. He was awarded the Leica Oskar Barnack Prize in 2007 for this work. His work has been widely published internationally including Le Figaro, Stern, Leica World Magazine, British Journal of Photography and Le Monde. |
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ZEBRATO
MICHAEL LEVIN Foreword by Barry Dumka Michael Levin’s award-winning and extraordinarily beautiful photographs have a very painterly quality. In a recent feature profile, the American fine art magazine Focus declared “Michael Levin’s captivating images are soulful and evocative; he is truly one of the rising stars in photography.” Using long exposures Levin reduces the landscape to elemental shapes. Each image has a simplicity and purity capturing the essence of the landscape. Many of his photographs feature water and clouds, and show what has been described as ‘the smooth skin of light’, yet it is the architectural intrusions into these clean spaces that most engage him. Wooden posts, concrete barriers, weathered rocks, dilapidated jetties, even the elegant shape of French topiaries introduce elements which seem to haunt the landscape and introduce a human presence. Michael Levin has won a number of awards including the prestigious ‘Photographer of the Year’ award at the 2006/07 International Photography Awards in New York. Previous honorees include Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Klein and Larry Clark. Levin also won a further ‘Photographer of the Year’ Award at the 2007 Prix de la Photographie in Paris. Born in Winnipeg and presently living in Vancouver, Canada, Levin travels extensively to capture his sharply-observed black and white photographs. |
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THE ANIMALS
GIACOMO BRUNELLI Foreword by Alison Nordström “Giacomo Brunelli has been looking hard at animals. His focus is not on the framed and caged exotica of zoos but on the ordinary animals that remain with us to some extent: horses, dogs, cats, chickens, pigeons. He shows us a fox, looking sharply at the camera and poised to flee, and there are numerous birds, a snake and several toads, but this wildness is small and fragile, living in the familiar liminal space where manmade and natural meet and overlap. His animals inhabit farmyards, cobbled streets and the façades of stone buildings. There are no tigers here. Brunelli’s animals are often composed only of suggestive fragments. His spare black and white images are attuned to the nuances of a moving mane, a silhouetted whisker, a highlighted, almost illuminated wing. He favours the profile and the counterintuitive angle, setting dark unobservable features against dark undiscernable backgrounds. A dead mouse, on its back, paws in air beside an oversized flower against a stark and distant mountain is no more or less frozen in time than is the growling dog, eyes alight and teeth forever bared; both are icons of states we fear but cannot know. These pictures are timeless and uncanny, powerful in their ordinariness, and emotionally much bigger than their simple subjects.” Alison Nordström. |
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COAL, FRANKINCENSE & MYRRH
Yemen and British Yemenis TIM SMITH The reputed home of the Queen of Sheba, Yemen has been at the crossroads of Africa, the Middle East and Asia for thousands of years thanks to its position on the ancient spice routes. Ten thousand years of trade along Yemen’s Red Sea and Indian Ocean coasts, over its mountains and across its deserts made it a meeting point of people, ideas, money and goods and the centuries of trading generated much wealth. There has been a British presence in Yemen ever since the early 1600s when the East India Company set up trading posts in Mukha, a port then famous as the world centre for trade in coffee. In 1839 the port city of Aden was captured to provide a base to protect British trade routes. This began an even stronger relationship which would last some 130 years until 1967 when the British finally pulled out. Yemen is the mother country of the longest-established of Britain’s Muslim communities. Yemenis came to Britain from the 1890s onwards, many as an indirect result of having joined the British Merchant Navy, and after World War Two there was further emigration. By the mid-1970s there were some 15,000 Yemenis in Britain, though today this figure has shrunk back considerably. One of the poorest countries in the region, Yemen still maintains much of its tribal character and old ways. People wear traditional dress and the custom of chewing the narcotic plant khat in the afternoons is still widely observed. Yemen remains a country of great mystery and, though security is an issue, it has attracted the curiosity of a growing number of tourists. |
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THE MIDLAND HOTEL
photographs: SIMON WEBB texts: SARAH HALL & MICHAEL BRACEWELL. Commissioned in 1932 by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway Company, The Midland Hotel is one of the great statements, internationally, about the nature of both modernism and modernity. Its architect, Oliver Hill, put together a list of contributing artists and designers who were all first division modernist chic. With its famous carved reliefs by Eric Gill and Eric Ravilious, a mural by Edward Bawden, furnishings by Duncan Grant and rugs and mosaics by Marion Dorn, this was a hotel as not just a work of art, but a statement of modern aesthetics. Sadly, over time the art deco building became a derelict and decaying reminder of the heyday of Britain’s seaside resorts until developers Urban Splash took the decision to reopen it again. This book is a unique collection of photographs and texts documenting and revealing the transformation. It records, imagines, and celebrates the bringing back to life of a much-loved building of historical and architectural importance. Simon Webb lectures in photography at the University of Chester and has exhibited in galleries across the country. Sarah Hall’s novel The Electric Michelangelo – set in Morecambe and Coney Island – was short listed for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. Her most recent novel, The Carhullan Army, won the 2007 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Michael Bracewell is a writer, novelist and cultural commentator. He was a Turner Prize judge in 2007. |
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A VERY ENGLISH TOWN
JOHN COMINO JAMES High Street, Buttermarket, Cornmarket, Pump Lane, North Street, Park Street, have such a deceptive familiarity to the English ear that they might be found in any English town. They are names that suggest a sense of continuity and tradition – something very English. Yet the reality is often not quite what it appears. John Comino-James has photographed the streets, shops and shopkeepers in the centre of Thame, an historic market town some 45 miles from London. Portraits, texts and candid photographs are contained in a sequence representing a meandering walk through the town, during which are encountered the last cattle market operating in the area, travelling showmen at one of the two annual fairs, and the weekly street market. The accompanying interviews reveal pride in the continuation of family businesses, as well as small enterprises both challenged by and benefiting from the increasing impact of the internet. While the presence of supermarkets and services such as banks, travel agents and estate agents is acknowledged, in choosing subjects for portraits Comino-James was drawn to those shopkeepers whose aim might be summed up in the words of one of them: “To keep the character of Thame as a Market Town and not a Supermarket town”. |
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