EDITORIAL:
Issue 11 — Spring Summer 1997
Issue 11 — Spring Summer 1997
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Taking the photograph out of the gallery and into the community hall might suggest dodgy dog eared prints on manila card but it doesn't have to be. Chris Harrison's quiet and dignified portraits made at the Older Persons Residence in Petworth are a lesson in excellence of presentation and vision. The images are now on permanent display at the community Hall in Lincolnfield were they form a backdrop to local meetings and events. The photographs were the first commission in the Country Life series by Photoworks (Kent) and we publish extracts from the accompanying book publication.
Helen Gulliver uses photography within Glasgow's Art in Hospital programme. She involves elderly patients in image making and sees the artists role as 'enabling and encouraging patients to make creative decisions and exert control over their own creative process'. This institutional connection with art is markedly different to that formed in Andrew Grannell's images made at a psychiatric institution in Surrey. The labyrinth of corridors in his photographs re-evoke his own experience of hospitalisation in Our Lady's Hospital, Cork.
'What's Your Story' was initiated by Glasgow artist Kathleen Little in collaboration with Street Level Photoworks. Run in homeless hostels in Glasgow the project utilised darkroom workshops at the gallery to cover processing and printing techniques. Direct involvement, confidence building, breaking down elitism in the arts, acquisition of new skills, the opportunity to be visually creative. All this and a set of portraits that redress the stereotypical image of the homeless.
The World Press Awards ceremony held in Amsterdam in April selected images by 3,663 photographers from 119 countries. Jonathan Olley from Network photographers won awards for his images of The Burning Man Festival, in Nevada and his piece on the Newbury Bypass Road Protest. The Newbury work that we reproduce documents ordinary members of the general public coming together to fight a common cause, getting the Department of Transport to rethink its road building programme.
In the midst of continuing electioneering Brian Newman has produced a behind the scenes look at the Young Unionists. Peter Richards uses the principles of the pin hole camera as part of his performance art. Michele Lazenby takes over a derelict council flat and converts two of the rooms into pinhole cameras. With photographic paper wrapped round three walls of the bedroom the resulting panorama images are over 10 meters long. Light, time and silver continue to combine to register information.
— John Duncan