February to 1st September 2024 – Floor 2, Blavatnik Building, Tate Modern, London, SE1 9TG
[Read more…]Tate Modern Review: Yoko Ono
Tate Modern Review: Capturing the Moment
One of the many apocryphal tales of Picasso holds that he conceived cubism following an opium induced dream in which the role of the painter was relentlessly belittled by the unstoppable rise of photography.
Certainly, for portraiture and similar images, photography is a cheaper and more convenient means of creating a record. However, the Tate Modern’s “Capturing the Moment” exhibition looks at photography as an art form that evolved symbiotically with the most exciting movements of 20th and 21st century art.
Click the image above to visit the Tate’s website or click below to see more
[Read more…]Most Influential Photographers and Other Artists
Last Paintings of Modern Artists
This post is nothing more than an impulse to collate the last paintings of some of my favourite artists. One cannot help but feel that they knew their time was coming.
[Read more…]Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida
Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a French philosopher and literary theorist, he was not a photographer. This book deals with the question: what is a photograph? from that perspective.
Barthes describes the essence of photography as distinct from both art and history.
Art, he contests, is the result of a creative process undertaken by an artist; whereas a photograph is primarily the preservation of “something that was”.
History is a perspective on past events; always open to challenge and contradiction. A photograph, by contrast, is undeniably “something that was”, and it is up to the viewer to infer meaning. A meaning which, as I show below, may change from person to person or evolve over time.
The photographer, and the subject, if it is a person aware of being photographed, can suggest an implied meaning. However, without knowledge of this intent, the viewer may see the image differently, and derive a meaning entirely personal to them.
Tim Flack’s fine book on horse photography, ‘Equus’, ends with this quote from Barthes’ book: “Ultimately a photograph looks like anyone except the person it represents.”
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