An Elusive Presence. WG Sebald: His Writing and Photography

03/10/19

Lines of Sight: WG Sebald’s East Anglia

Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery

10 May 2019 – 5 January 2020

Winfried Georg Sebald – known as WG to the literary world and as Max to his friends – was born in the Bavarian Alps on 18 May 1944. After studying German and English Literature, first at the University of Freiburg (Germany) and then the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), Sebald came to the UK in 1966, where he was a lector at the University of Manchester, before moving to – and settling in – East Anglia, with his Austrian-born wife Ute, in 1970. He first became a lecturer at the University of East Anglia (UEA), later being appointed to a chair of European Literature, and going on to become the founding director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. Author of four genre-defying novels, largely concerning the themes of memory and loss – Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995), and Austerlitz (2001) – as well as numerous essays, Sebald was tipped as a potential future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature when he tragically died, in 2001, aged just 57, in a car accident, triggered by an aneurysm. 

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Gerty Simon: Missing Pieces in a Photographic Puzzle

06/09/19

Berlin/London: The Lost Photographs of Gerty Simon 

The Wiener Library 

30 May – 15 October 2019

One side effect of the forced migration of so many thousands of Jews from Nazi Germany in the 1930s was the significant number of highly-trained and professionally-active women, including photographers, who arrived in the UK, bringing with them new techniques and approaches. Among them, and, at the time one of the best known, was Gertrude (Gerty) Simon (1888-1970). Born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Bremen, she had moved to Berlin in the aftermath of the First World War. Both her husband (Wilhelm) and her father were lawyers. Paving her own career path, however, and teaching herself how to handle a camera, Simon started out with editorial photography in 1922, getting a work published just one year after the birth of her son, Bernard (Bernd). She soon became a successful portrait photographer, attracting, by the end of the decade, such renowned sitters as the singer (and Simon’s friend) Lotte Lenya, the artists Max Lieberman and Käthe Kollwitz, the scientist Albert Einstein, and the French politician Andre Tardieu (who later became the French Prime Minister). The recently deceased, then six-year-old, Judith Kerr, who went on to write the Mogseries and The Tiger Who Came to Tea, is also among those portrayed. Alongside these well-known personalities, Simon also captured the ‘new woman’ of Weimar Berlin, with her short hair, cigarettes, and frequently androgynous appearance. 

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Interview: Marilyn Stafford

Interview: Marilyn Stafford

October 2018

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, in 1925, Marilyn Stafford never intended to become a photographer, yet her career is one of the most distinguished there could be. Having started out almost accidentally photographing Albert Einstein – for friends who were shooting a film and asked her to help them out – she moved to Paris, where her mentors included Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, and where, alongside commissioned fashion photography, she also developed her documentary skills, photographing children living in one of the city’s worst slums (later bulldozed to make way for Paris Opera Bastille). Her onward path took her from Lebanon to India – where she spent several weeks with Indira Gandhi – and later to the London of the Swinging Sixties, where, juggling the challenges of single motherhood, she worked as one of very few women photographers on Fleet Street. Since retiring from photography in 1980, Stafford has lived in the sleepy town of Shoreham-by-Sea on the south coast of England. She is far from absent from the photographic scene, however, and, in 2017, set up the Marilyn Stafford FotoReportage Award, facilitated by FotoDocument and now also supported by Olympus, to help professional female photographers around the world with documentary photo projects addressing social, environmental, economic and cultural issues.

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Book review of Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now

30/11/17

Book review of Firecrackers: Female Photographers Now

By Fiona Rogers & Max Houghton

Published by Thames & Hudson

There has been no shortage of books on female photographers appearing over recent months, so what does this compendium, published by Thames & Hudson this autumn, add to the library that its predecessors haven’t already provided? Certainly many of the artists included have been represented elsewhere, and some of the images are beginning to feel a little overly familiar – but, in a world where Helmut Newton’s vampy erotica or Robert Doisneau’s iconic Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville (1950) are recognisable in the flash of an eye, why shouldn’t Juno Calypso’s saccharine pink Honeymoon series nymphets (2015-16) and Natasha Caruana’s faceless brides (Fairytale for Sale series, 2011) be just as familiar and ubiquitous?

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Interview with Ian Hoskin

12/09/17

Interview: Ian Hoskin

Ian Hoskin: Ladies First

Atom Gallery

16-30 September 2017    

Ian Hoskin had the embryonic idea for his latest photographic project, Ladies First, shortly after finishing his degree in 1981. He began identifying areas of gender difference that interested him but was unable to find the right way of translating the idea into a coherent series. Some three and a half decades later, he has designed a workable format and structure for the body of work, namely 50 composed scenarios making up 25 pairs of contrasting gender images. Each image of each pair is displayed above a line of text; the texts within each pair are almost identical, differing only with regards to the gender they relate to: “she” or “he”. Anna McNay spoke with Hoskin ahead of his forthcoming exhibition at Atom Gallery.

Read the interview here

Book Review of Girl on Girl. Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze

11/05/17

Girl on Girl. Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze.

By Charlotte Jansen

Hardback, 192 pages

ISBN 9781780679556

Published by Laurence King Publishing

£19.99 retail

“We see photographs of women every day, but we are used to looking at them in a few specific contexts,” writes editor Charlotte Jansen, in the introduction to her new book, Girl on Girl. Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze. “On products and billboards, in shop windows and magazine covers, in erotica and pornography.” The premise behind the book, however, is that there is a rapidly growing number of women out there photographing women, creating images where both the subject and the “gaze” are female. “At times,” Jansen continues, “there seems to be little difference between how women photograph women and how men photograph women, but women have the right to self-objectify and to exploit without critique, just as men have been allowed to do since the earliest forms of art emerged”. And here, Jansen offers 40 international female photographers the opportunity to present their work, their aims and their motivations neutrally and without critique, albeit opening themselves up for critical response.

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Interview with Dawn Woolley

24/04/17

Interview: Dawn Woolley

From Selfie to Self-Expression

Saatchi Gallery

31 March - 30 May 207

An artist and researcher whose work constitutes an enquiry into looking and being looked at, Dawn Woolley was selected from more than 14,000 entrants to the #SaatchiSelfie competition, judged by Tracey Emin, Idris Khan, Juergen Teller, Juno Calypso and Saatchi Gallery CEO, Nigel Hurst, with her photograph, The Substitute (holiday) (2008), winning first prize and being labelled by GQ magazine as “the best selfie in the world”. It is now being exhibited alongside nine other shortlisted works as part of Saatchi Gallery’s larger exhibition, From Selfie to Self-Expression.

Read the interview here