Blog
Details of Brighton Photo Biennial 2008 events have now been added to this website. See events page.
See details below of The Magnum Workshop Brighton, a particularly exciting opportunity for photographers.
The Magnum Workshop Brighton UK is a five-day practical event intended for advanced photographers wishing to proceed with the next stage of their photographic careers. Led by three Magnum photographers Carl De Keyzer, Mark Po .....
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This is an incredibly moving picture diary from the battlefield of S. Ossetia. Following my blog post from Monday, I wanted to draw attention to it.
It is staggering on many levels. Just days after combat, it gives the world an icredibly honest humanist view of what the war conditions are like for the Russians fighting.
The overtone of the series of pictures is not political. The pictures do not illustrate a point - or an article, as they do in the media. No Western .....
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A shift in attitude towards war photography is taking place on the Internet.
While analysing patterns of web clicks on media images, I've noticed that photos of the heroic or tragic moment in war receive much less interest than I would have predicted.
The snapshot worthy of historic war photographers like Phillip Jones Griffith has all but lost its power on the contemporary (Internet savvy) audience. Here are some recent reasons why I think that's happening – along with .....
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We have been having quite a lot of difficulty securing loans and rights to use photography of the ‘other side’ in the Vietnam War: the photographs taken by the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese Army. This photography is highly distinct from our stereotypical image of the Vietnam War. First, it shows the other side, living, laughing, resting, labouring and fighting, and through those pictures we get a glimpse of how they and their state viewed their struggle. The W .....
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I have just recorded a half hour talk about the Biennnial for Resonance FM's 'Free University of the Airwaves'. It picks up on some of the themes in 'Words Without Pictures' below. The talk will go out the week of the 18th August, probably more than once.
Details of the Free University here: http://resonancefm.com/archives/215 .....
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I have been reading two books with lots of material about photographic images but no pictures. One, by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story, constructs the events at Abu Ghraib through interviews with the prison guards and other US Army personnel (Morris has produced a film of the same name using the same material). The authors do not reproduce the notorious photographs because they argue that the pictures in and of themselves are misleading, and what .....
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Julian Stallabrass on Memory of Fire .....
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Helen Cadwallader, Executive Director of BPB, introduces the Brighton Photo Biennial and its team. .....
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Sean Smith, Iraqi Prisoners
The strange power of this photograph is that it appears to be something out of a fairytale, in which the bound and blindfolded men are stuck to the Golden Goose that leads them. The drama of the light and the clouds beyond reinforce the sinister but also slightly comic effect. It may also appear as an image of victory, of the single hi-tech soldier over his numerous but primitive opponents, their archaic character suggested by their long robes, the strength .....
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I have been working through the 300-odd publicly available images from Abu Ghraib to make a selection for the University of Brighton Gallery exhibition, Iraq Through the Lens of Vietnam. It is far from being a usual curatorial task. How to select among the various horrors exhibited? Should one stress the repetitious nature of this photographic trophy taking, or give full scope to its variety? How should such images be displayed? Should they be differentiated from the examples of photojournali .....
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This is a photograph taken by a US military photographer. It is a typical example of one of the most durable genres of such photography: soldiers getting on well with children in an occupied country. Many such pictures were taken by US Army photographers in Vietnam, and skewed and subversive versions were made by Philip Jones Griffiths, who took photographs of soldiers offering children cigarettes and pornography.
Here in a sunny Iraq, it is a scene of smiles and curiosity, though the .....
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