Filming the BBC
To Glasgow this Friday. Doing a bit more to help with the rise and rise of Hannah Frank (96). The BBC were filming an interview with her and one with Alma Wolfson and in turn I videoed them.
Alma Wolfson is the president of the society of Glasgow Women Artists whose show Hannah is included this weekend. In the evening she and her husband Leslie invited Fiona (Frank) and myself for Shabbos dinner. Hannah Frank herself was on good form at the private view of her exhibition at the RGI. This is the latest in a series of trips here I’ve made with Fiona on this project.
top – filming Alma Wolfson being interviewed :: above – Hannah Frank at the RGI Gallery
Köln 4711
I recently came back from visiting Sammy and Sarah in Köln.
As I arrived Rosen Montag was reaching its crescendo with the final huge parade through the streets. Thousands of people out enjoying themselves. The streets were thick with broken glass from all the beer bottles, but two hours later after a massed army of street cleaners had descended on the city centre you would have barely known it… so German so efficient.
Well most of my visit was spent catching up, but I had two hours to kill before I needed to head off to catch my plane… so time to grab some street shots, as is my habit. I’ve had a bit of time now to work on what I brought back and here is one of them above.
Bilbao
A walk after dinner alongside the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao
Brugge: walk through a market
I arrived in Brugge and booked into the hotel in time to take a leisurely walk in the spring sunshine.
1 Street
1 STREET was a project I undertook that was commissioned by Novy Prostor, the Czech version of the Big Issue magazine.
Its aim was to provide a “permanent address” for each of the dozens of homeless people who took part in their scheme.
One of the problems of being homeless is that you are not in a position to receive various kinds of help that may be on offer, from the state or voluntary bodies. This is mainly because they require an address where you reliably be communicated with, so as to maintain a dialogue and monitor the help that is being used.
We created an alternative form of communication address that might fulfill this requirement by providing an email address for each registered person.
Through accessing a personalised online web page they could receive emails and other information of benefit to them. An admin person at Novy Prostor would create a user account and be able to check its usage. People on the scheme could have access to the system through computers in the Novy Prostor office, thus gaining another benefit by creating a need for the subscribers to have contact with NP staff.
I commissioned the card design above as the brand identity for the scheme.
Photoshop for Photographers
Martin Evening asked me to contribute to his book Adobe Photoshop for Photographers.
Camera Austria
I’m chuffed to be in issue 39 of Camera Austria. They chose the key piece ‘Is She: Is She’ in my series of Polaroid matrices.
Its quite a prestigious international fine art magazine. There’s a number of other artists in there, including Jeff Koons.
Düsseldorf
Going back to Kaiserswerth to teach for a week, in the outskirts of Düsseldorf, turned out to be a very rewarding time spent with the kids. We all had so much fun making 50/50 portraits, half taken with a Polaroid and half found in magazines.
Just for the record
A few sample covers from the series of 14 jazz LP/CDs I was commissioned to do for CODA Records.
click to enlarge
The Last Resort
Martin Parr approached me to print his images for the book of The Last Resort. Although already produced as an exhibition, when they put them to press a couple worked but the others weren’t doing well in reproduction. Martin found out about me asI had already produced gallery work for some other artists. So I asked if he wanted me to reproduce anything about the existing images, or if not what guidance did he want to give me… his instruction was ‘what you see is what I see’. I didn’t actually get to see the original prints, so I was coming fresh to the work. There was a heck of a lot of dodging and shading, pushing parts of the image back, pulling some forward. I made at least four work prints for each image (let alone all the sample tests and colour consistency checks) before I was satisfied with the finished result. The work was done in batches to quite short deadlines… and there was quite a lot of coffee and beer involved often working till four in the morning. So in the book* you’re getting Martin’s incredible work through my eyes and hands.
[*other than the couple included before I stepped in]
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