Nigel Shafran
In their simplicity and their apparent artlessness, Nigel Shafran’s photos seem almost stripped of motive, as if he’s taken only what he sees in front of him. But we should ask ourselves this – if the making of his images is so simple, why do they linger in the mind so? What’s really going on here? Everything and nothing it would seem. The locations of his images are typically quotidian – a supermarket checkout, a baby’s changing table, an empty kitchen, for instance, each stripped of living people but rife with the signs of life. It’s hard to look at them without thinking of the shop staff or children or families that might lay claim to such spaces. And without thinking, in turn of the interior lives of all those people that we will never know. Empty space becomes psychological space. Each picture acquires a life of its own. |
|
Nigel Shafran / 31st January 2000 Horrible crumpets and Jill’s jam, rosehip tea,smoked salmon on
bread and alphalfa sprout salad,apple,left over veg haggis,
and seitan spinach and burnt rice to come! / C-type print / 58.9x47cm / 2000 / Courtesy of the artist |
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
Norbert Schoerner
Norbert Schoerner is a photographer whose work I’ve encountered in many different contexts. He creates beguiling fashion images for magazines like Pop, Dazed and the New York Times. I’ve seen his stunning portraits of actors like Ewann McGregor and artists like Richard Prince and Thomas Hirschorn. I’ve admired his short films and his beautiful, unsettling landscape photography. And in all these respects, what I love most is the unceasing curiosity of his gaze. Schoerner has an unerring ability to get beneath the surface of a subject. To render radically anew even the most ordinary of objects or locations – a bench in Babelsberg, a pavement in Kensal Road, a car park in Phoenix. There’s alchemy here. The everyday made magical. And beyond that, a never ending desire to keep exploring until all that is known stands revealed afresh in its complexity and joy. |
|
Norbert Schoerner / For Andrei Arsenevich / 2006 / 250x106cm / Courtesy of the artist
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
Dan Holdsworth
Dan Holdswoth produces starkly beautiful photos of the natural world – nocturnal skies streaked with aurora borealis and falling stars, looming mountains, snow filled valleys. But he is also an observer of the pylons and power stations and other similar machinery that jut awkwardly from such landscapes. His photos do not document nature as abstract unspoilt idyll but as a place that is tracked and scarred by human contact. Paradoxically they are all the more beautiful for that. His images are mesmerising precisely because they do not turn away from the juxtapositions of the brutal and the man-made set against the remote and rarified. In that respect, he seems to me a photographer of nature with a very modern sensibility – his world is our world, post-Lapserian, hyper-industrialised, but no less mysterious and intermittently magical for that. |
|
Dan Holdsworth / Array, from the series White Noise, 2006 / C-type print / 122x152cm / 2006 /
/ Courtesy of the artist |
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
Abdul Hakim Onitolo
Further information to be announced shortly. |
|
Abdul Hakim Onitolo / The Visual Anthropology 2 / Liquid emulsion and screen print paper / 118x82cm / Courtesy of the artist |
|
