that's all folks,

at least for 2010. Have a great Christmas and I'll be back in January.

I knew one was coming and I'm glad it's come from Manchester's BlackLab. I thought it might be a CYBER CHE poster that came out but I'm liking this, and the whole broken dream irony of it all.

Stuart Griffiths.

Picturehouse Cinemas Present Isolation from Institute For Eyes on Vimeo.

"Many years ago I was a coffin bearer for a fallen comrade. I remember feeling the weight as we lowered the coffin into the grave and then afterwards folding the Union Flag and presenting it to the mother & father. Through photography I want to convey a sense of personal feeling about sacrifice. These journeys take me to many corners of the UK. I am fascinated by the people that gather in the wind and rain, whom line the sixty mile route with salutes and Union Flags, from RAF Lyneham to John Radcliff Hospital in Oxford, on each day a fallen soldier returns home."

Stuart Griffiths

I've been following Stuart's work for a few years and the above quote introduces a more recent series photographs called 'Final Journey'. Stuart Griffiths is making important records on the effects of conflict on British servicemen and their families, and more and more people are beginning to take note as can be seen HERE, HERE and HERE.

Image copyright Mark Page

A title page.

The Genius Of Photography.

The whole of the series from a few years ago THE GENIUS OF PHOTOGRAPHY is now on YOUTUBE. Cheers for the 'tipoff' DUCKRABBIT.

Gordon Stettinius

Image copyright Gordon Stettinius

Them crazy Americans. Gordon Stettinius.

Who says Britain no longer manufactures and exports anything? Sorry is that in bad taste? No you're right, taking the piss out of Britain's lack of a manufacturing base is no laughing matter....

NOORDERLICHT PHOTOFESTVAL 2011 Call For Submissions

Fuck me a call for submissions that wont cost you any money ! HERE for details. Well done that festival.

Percy Dean.

Image copyright Percy Dean

Manchester has the largest Jewish population in the UK outside of London and I live just down the road from them and have done for years, yet I know next to nothing about them. This no doubt says something about me as well as so called multicultural Britain. Manchester photographer PERCY DEAN has made more of an effort to get to know this community with his series 'Clouds of Glory' and in the process produced a fine set of images.

This Time Next Week......

I shall be showing pictures HERE as I'm one fifteenth of MEATYARD ARTS. Click on flyer to enlarge and then print it off as it's your invite.

Bag(s) of Shite.

Images copyright John Darwell.

Yep that's what they are, bags of shite. Bags of dog shit to be exact. Or to give the work it's full title 'DISCARDED DOG SHIT BAGS' by John Darwell. A typology of a very modern phenomenon and I'm guessing a pretty British one. Go to beauty spot to commune with nature, into the lovely park land and then when your dog shits place it in a plastic bag and hang it from a tree like some fucking hellish totem. Once you stop giggling at the idea and disgust of the series it 'throws up' (no pun intended) all kinds of modern life nonsense. Another spin knowing John is that the exhibition prints will be spot on so beautiful prints of horribleness. You'll want to look but then a bit of sick will be in your mouth at the same time as you have a wry smile on your face. It will be a messy time at The 2011 FORMAT FESTIVAL where you will be able to see the series next march.

Corrie.

UK readers will no doubt know that this week (actually Thursday 9th) marks the 50th anniversary of the worlds longest running TV soap opera. I make no apologies for loving 'The Street', almost as much as anything or anyone it's been a huge influence on the photographs I make. Above are two original pictures I was given of a newly built GRANADA STUDIOS dating from 1958 two years before CORONATION STREET went live, look at them ashtrays and HP sauce bottles on the table! In case you missed it on tonight's TV below is the first ever episode. Produced only seven years before I was born It seems such a different Manchester (or Salford) and a different country but has much in common with an England I can remember as a kid. It represents a different type of romantic vision of England. Not the chocolate box country cottage home counties England, but the close knit communities of a Northern industrial working class town, like the ones that throughout the next few decades were systematically destroyed by successive governments and councils of both persuasions. The continuing success of the show is probably due to romance and nostalgia for times past, as well as being bloody good telly. Tony Warren knew that the daily lives of ordinary streets and people could be both fascinating and comforting and were already beginning to disappear. Large areas of Salford had already been subject to the wrecking ball with communities being dispersed all over Greater Manchester several years before the show was aired. The episode below and to a lesser degree the modern show is a lament to an England that no longer exsists and many people miss.

Ivo Rafailov

Image copyright Ivo Rafailo

I know nothing about Ivo Rafailov other than he is Bulgarian. I found the series 'Come in' from which the above image is taken over on Visura I felt I was looking at something I'd not seen before, I'm intrigued. In this world of mass information it's nice to have a little bit of mystery. All I could find on him was his BLOG which is also mysteriously called The Watchmaker.

My MANCHESTER PROJECT has recently got a nice little write up over on CURATED PLACE.

IS the latest upload to my WEBSITE. Originally started back in 1999 it's my ongoing documentation of my Manchester. Not sure it will get picked up by Marketing Manchester..

New Cliches of Photography #24

Pissed Russians......

Neal Andrews

When I was about fifteen or so I was sent to see the school careers officer to discuss my future job plans. Career paths in 8o's Widnes consisted of working for ICI or working for GOLDEN WONDER. I told the career officer I wanted to be a Shepherd. I was bollocked for messing about. Thing is I did, I really wanted to be a shepherd. I knew very little about it, it was probably a consequence of watching 'ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL' on a Sunday night. But for a time in 1982 I wanted to tend sheep.

Anyway enough about my faded dreams of youth, I'll have to make do with documentary photographer Neal Andrews atmospheric little film THE HILL FARMER. Below for a preview of the book.

Cedric Delsaux.

Image copyright Cedric Delsaux

How do you deal with the fact and fictions of the modern urban landscape ? Why not photograph Dubai and then fill the images with Starwars figures ? The 'off his head' yet brilliant world of CEDRIC DELSAUX.

BOOK NOW TO AVOID DISAPPOINTMENT !

Click on flyers to enlarge so you can see all the goodness you get. contact via www.teenataylor.com www.johndarwell.com www.photoweekenders.com www.theprincesshotel.co.uk or call on contact Naomi Hall on 0161 238 4761

Si Barber

Si Barber is a stablemate of mine over at MEATYARD ARTS. He is also a newspaper photographer which is where many of the images from his series THE BIG SOCIETY, snapshots of 21st century Britain come from. I think the fact that these images have have been born out of a careful edit of a collection rather than from setting out with the purpose of capturing modern Britain, gives the work a less contrived feel an unique view. The series can be seen HERE (click projects then preview then preview again) You can see what John Donaldson from MEATYARD says HERE.

Zen.

Cheers STAN.

Best of the year.

Image copyright ALEJANDRA BARTOLICHE

Reuters full focus 'Best of the Year' sounds like a dog show but some good images never the less. HERE.

"He painted Salford's smokey tops"

and weird partially naked girls? Inspired by the ballet? Yeah that would be my excuse if someone found drawing's like this that I'd done.

Rarely seen LSL sketches as part of THIS exhibition at The Lowry Centre.

I can't see these images making it onto the tea-towels and tat in the gallery shop...

I just found a new online photography mag! And because I'm immature I giggled about the title.... HERE.

Ville Lenkkeri.

Image copyright Ville Lenkkeri

Tales from the frozen north Brrrrrrrrr.HERE.

New Cliches of Photography #23

Something old something new, take an old picture and mix it together with a new one.

Image copyright Mark Page

image copyright Chen Qiulin

I got sent this from my mate ED.

Hi Mark,
How's things. I was wondering if I could get another favour? If possible
could you post about the new course the whitworth will be running? I'm just
starting to take bookings and I thought it would be of interest to some of
your followers (I think this should be readers!)... Here's the details anyway if you can.

Contemporary Landscape Photography
8-week course, Saturdays starting 15th January, 1pm ­ 3pm, £100*

In response to our Land Between Us; power, place and dislocation exhibition,
submerse yourself in the world of contemporary landscape photography. Hear
from practicing photographers to inspire and inform your own work and learn
the skills and techniques needed to capture all your ideas. In
partnership with the Zion Centre in Hulme the course will be split between
artist talks here at the Whitworth and practical sessions over at the Zion
Centre. Culminating with an exhibition of your work created on the course
within the Zion Centre's gallery at the end of April.

http://zionarts.com/

*£80 for students

To book onto any Adult Programme events please call our Visitor Services
Team on 0161 275 7540.

For any queries or for further details please email Ed Watts, Adult
Programme Coordinator, ed.watts@manchester.ac.uk

Here's the link as well,

http://whitworthadultprogramme.wordpress.com/2010/11/15/contemporary-landsca
pe-photography-8-week-course-100/

Here We Go Again.

I don't mind the Royal family they're a hoot, and if nothing else they make me grateful that my own family function so well. I know all the pomp and ceremony that the world laps up is about the only thing that GB plc is any good at these days, fuck we even have to share boats with the French. Without the Queen & CO we would be about as well known on the world stage as say Luxemburge. See I can't even be bothered learning how to spell that place.

What I hate is all the shit news coverage that we are going to have to swallow over the coming months. "I thought Kate did so well at the press conference" cooed some stupid 'preppy' looking old tart of a Royal corespondent. Did well? all the girl had to do was stand up and smile. Although that's a good start, the previous occupier of the glass slippers she's about to fill was today described by Martin Bashir as "No great thinker" which made me laugh.

So a toast to the new Royal couple, and all the tea-towels, mugs, plates, T-shirts, secret lovers, nervous breakdowns, divorces, addictions, abdications, thieving butlers, billionaire Arab playboys, toe sucking army officers, racist remarks, drink problems, madness, etc etc. GOD SAVE THE QUEEN AND ALL WHO SAIL IN HER.

John Darwell @ ACC.

Image copyright John Darwell

This months speaker at THE ALTERNATIVE CAMERA CLUB is one of the UK's leading documentary photographers, JOHN DARWELL. John has made work from Chernobyl to Nevada although in more recent years England's North-West and particularly Cumbria has been central to John's oeuvre (love that word).

OK so that's JOHN DARWELL @ THE ALTERNATIVE CAMERA CLUB, THE WHITWORTH GALLERY, MANCHESTER. SATURDAY 20th NOVEMBER @ 10:30 £3 all in. No need to book but you can here- ed.watts@manchester.ac.uk

Kay May

Image copyright Kay May.

Kay May is a photographer who has a very personal connection with war. Her son is a serving soldier in Afghanistan. Her series and book 'The Hawthorn Tree' is a document of a mothers war. The series can be seen HERE and the book can be seen HERE. May's work is also included in a group show 'Bringing The War Home' at Impressions Gallery Bradford

Image copyright Mark Page

An old chesnut.

By no means a new topic, just a new set of pictures raising again questions of exploitation. This time it's Donald Weber's series 'Interrogations'. You're bound to have seen the interview with Weber over on Colin Pantall's blog. I like a lot of Weber's work but in my view this series is lazy, predictable and to use a word from my youth 'tight'. OK Weber has travelled a great distance and made contacts and been patient waiting for the Russian coppers to start acting like the pricks they no doubt are. I reckon it would take me or anybody else about ten seconds to realise the outcome of putting these people in a room with these coppers in this country and that the chances are that they ain't going to get a good meal and a neck rub. Weber's pictures do nothing to show me anything I wasn't expecting. We seem to have moved away from starving Africans and replaced them with prisoners and inmates as the new morally acceptable easy target documentary subject . What is it with VII agency? Join in the debate HERE. I'm off to photograph Iain Duncan-Smith making dole scroungers cry.

Michael Danner

Image copyright Michael Danner.

I'm not really sure what this series 'Birds of Passage' is all about, but I do kinda like it's bizarreness. Birds painted on trees and then photographed, a collaboration with illustrator Vanessa Karre. Plenty of other stuff to look at as well over on his SITE.

Image copyright Mark Page

Ralph Gibson.

Image copyright Ralph Gibson.

A few words about sequencing and bookmaking from someone who knows how to do it. Take a look at his 1970 series "The Somnambulist" (in the archive 1 section)

"In 1959 I was a young photographer's mate aboard the USS Tanner. With time to spare I explored the ship's library. One slim volume attracted my attention. It was "Four Quartets" by T.S. Eliot. These poems created a strong and unfamiliar impression on me. The cadence of the words implied an imagery that come from their very position on the page. It was only ten years later that I began to understand the real meaning of sequencing images on a page.The sequencing of photographs in "The Somnambulist" was a direct result and pursuit of the feelings I experienced many years before in the ship's library Eliot's word-shapes on the page spoke in many ways, precise but never too literal. I was drawn to this kind of experience and understand this now to be an aspect of how the process was to reveal itself in my own work. Surely there are parallel examples of this phenomenon.

An exhibition of my prints in a gallery or museum reveals how I relate to the medium of photography. Immediately one can see my attitude towards film, light, lenses and camera handling. A book, however is another story. In a book we see how I think about my photographs and the context in which they are intended to be seen.This is an important distinction. Context, as Marcel Duchamp made abundantly clear, is everything. A beautiful nude torso entitled "The breasts of Venus" will be perceived in a totally different way than the same photograph entitled "Still no cure for breast cancer". In a book I can be fully responsible for the context of the work.
The ancient Greeks invented the concept of the proscenium in the theatre. Behind the prosce- nium anything was possible, reality ended in front of the arch over the stage. The title of a book of photographs functions much in the same manner. The title informs the viewer of the context by which the images are to be seen.

I can start a book project with as few as 10 or 15 images.The first few spreads, usually around 4 or 5, set the tone of the sequence to follow. The sequence is then altered by the addition of newer images as they arrive.The title sets the tone and the point of departure for the work to follow. This can be sustained for years, some projects ongoing for a lifetime. I have been photographing in France and Italy for over 30 years.The same is true of the nude. One never comes to the end of such studies.

Whereas the viewer at an exhibition of photographs is free to wander about the gallery at will, the viewer of a book holds the book at a certain specific distance from the eyes, usually seated in a favorite well lit chair. This viewing distance is almost always the same from person to person.With this in mind I can be assured that certain spatial relationships between the images will be consistent and will be seen by all the viewers in a similar manner. I can build on this principle. Next comes the sequencing of the spreads, often designed to create a non-specific narrative or an elliptical linearity The sum of the images exceeds the total of the parts. Books can be about anything but when successful a book is an unbroken string of right decisions."

Ralph Gibson

Phantasmagoria!

Phantasmagoria. No not the 1985 Album that finally killed off for good any illusions that
THE DAMNED where a proper Punk band, but an evening (and afternoon for scared-ey cats) of Victorian inspired weird spooky marvelous-ness that our nineteenth century ancestors where so good at, and not a pickled two headed baby in a jar in sight. It's all to be held in what has to be the ultimate setting for this kind of thing, THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY. So Ladies & Gentlemen, ROLL UP! ROLL UP! Details below.



"Monday 8th November Mervyn Heard, the world's finest Phantasmagoria Magic Lantern Projectionist, will be performing a show at John Rylands Library, Manchester.

4.30 - 5pm a family friendly show

7.30 - 9pm an evening event where things get a bit more sinister and spooky!
...

ALL WELCOME, the event is FREE! call 0161 06 0555 to reserve yourself a free seat or email jrul.events@manchester.ac.uk

John Rylands Library, 150 Deansgate, Manchester M3 3EH see
http://www.heard.supanet.com/html/performances.html
for more info about the show"

Rachel Phillips

Image copyright Rachel Phillips

I like the delicate Japanese 'Willow' feel to This work by RACHEL PHILLIPS. Ssssshhhhh lets be quiet and calm tonight. Zen.