Category: Photography
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Shooting birds
(This is the short introduction I wrote to Murmur (2024) a new edition of a book by Lancaster-based photographer Darren Andrews of strange and beautiful photographs of starling murmurations, some of which are included below) In the late 19th century French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey became preoccupied with the challenge of studying movement, convinced that medical knowledge…
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Writing on the walls, tearing down the walls: refugee art and transformation
I have recently run a series of film-making workshops in conjunction with the Lancaster-based charity Global Link, which co-ordinates education programmes and welfare support for asylum-seekers and refugees in the area. The charity moved offices earlier this year, to a Georgian terrace near the centre of town. and speaking to their executive director last month, I…
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Pictures of Passion and Pain: Fassbinder and Ozon
Introduction to a screening of Peter von Kant at the Dukes cinema, Lancaster, 8th Feb, 2023. Peter von Kant is an adaptation of the 1972 film, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, one of the most well-known works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder was one of a group of young film-makers who began making films in West…
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Guests, ghosts and migrant histories
On Sunday morning I visited a new installation by Polish artist, Krsysztof Wodiczko in a disused cotton mill in Lancashire. The piece, a work from 2009 called Guests, consists of eight arched windows projected onto a wall, and through the semi-opaque windows we can see the silhouettes of a variety of people talking, standing around in…
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Digital synecdoche: contemporary Hollywood’s liberal self-representation
This extraordinary photograph says a great deal about contemporary Hollywood. Taken with a phone at the Oscars ceremony when the host Ellen DeGeneres stepped off stage to take a picture of herself with Meryl Streep as a stunt to try to get a record-breaking number of retweets, the photograph has indeed reportedly broken records for…
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New Zealand: Like Lord of the Rings
One of the running gags in Flight of the Conchords, the sitcom about the eponymous ‘novelty music’ duo from New Zealand, who are trying to make it in New York, is that the office walls belonging to their manager Murray Hewitt, the deputy cultural attaché at the New Zealand embassy, are decorated with posters diffidently promoting…
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Semiotic ghosts: Dubai’s architectural hallucinations
Travelling from the UK to New Zealand recently we stopped for two days in Dubai in order to make the long journey more manageable. Even allowing for the dislocating effect of flying across time zones and two sleepless nights since the hotel we were staying in was packed with raucous teams competing in the international…
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Beautiful decay (extended version): Darren Andrews’ Beloved
This is the introductory essay I wrote for Beloved, the latest book by Darren Andrews which features this series of photographs, and which is available from his website. The essay is an expanded version of the exhibition notes which were in an earlier blog post on this site. Death is the principal subject of photography. The fascination a photograph…
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Beautiful decay: Notes on Darren Andrews’ “Beloved”
These are gallery notes for Beloved, a forthcoming exhibition of photographs by Darren Andrews at Lancaster City Museum. The illustrations are photographs from the exhibition. Death is the principal subject of photography. The fascination a photograph holds for us lies in our knowledge that the frozen moment captured in the image has passed. Whether chemical or…
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Second-hand worlds: science fiction book covers
Most of the SF novels I’ve read have been battered copies borrowed from libraries or bought from second-hand book-shops and charity shops and there is something especially appropriate about this temporal contradiction. These novels, that are frequently imaginings of possible anachronistic futures, belong to the past – scuffed, yellowed, foxed relics that sit in a…
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‘Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land’: Darren Andrews’ Pleasureland (2010)
This is the introductory essay I wrote for Pleasureland [2012], a book of photographs by Darren Andrews, a Lancaster-based photographer and musicia . The photographs are all from this collection. This collection of photographs of seaside resorts in England shares its name with the seafront fairground which opened a century ago in Southport, Merseyside. In one…
Bruce Bennett 