Showing results by author "Marina Vaizey" in All Categories

One of Shakespeare's most often quoted lines, from Hamlet, simply asserts that "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy." The current retrospective at Tate Britain of the art of Richard Long, the first in London since the Arts Council's Hayward Gallery show in 1991, has been titled Heaven and Earth by Long himself, a phrase he had earlier used for specific works of art.

The extraordinary exhibition of thousands of photographs ranging from cumbersome, beautifully detailed, sharply acute photographs of the aftermath of the 1860s American Civil War to mundane landscapes taken in 2013, are based on an enlivening, provocative, and even perhaps controversial organizing principle. What is novel is the unusual premise: eschewing more conventional and immediate reportage, or documentary series, the selection moving from gallery to gallery - and section by section in the catalogue - is defined by time.

Major discoveries can still be made in the field of visual art, but few perhaps are quite so surprising as the current first retrospective devoted to the French photographer Camille Silvy at the National Portrait Gallery, London (to October 24).

It is an enthralling and unexpected selection, and the anthology resonates beyond this showing. It is from the Eric and Louise Franck collection, which has been donated to the Tate, and is part of the process by which the gallery has very belatedly, but with almost overwhelming enthusiasm, entered into collecting and showing photography as a medium in in its own right, with a very active patrons group supporting acquisitions. One of the benefits of Tate joining the fray is evident in the installation of this show.

Several hundred photographs of varying scales, and most of them newly printed gelatin silver prints, in superb tones of greys, blacks, and whites, take us into a world that has been subliminally familiar to us for nearly 50 years. Stardust is the title given to this self-selected retrospective, three years in the making, the photographer his own curator, and the word neatly encapsulates the fascinating conundrum of photography itself. As Bailey himself puts it, "It's not the camera that takes the picture, it's the person," and these photographs are as much about Bailey as his subject.

Once upon a time in Düsseldorf, in the 1970s, there was an astonishing art academy, the Kunstakademie, with amazing teachers, and amazing students. Düsseldorf was a very proud art city, and even published at the time, a book of photographs called Düsseldorf City of Artists. The presence of that great, messianic leader, Joseph Beuys loomed large. Gerhard Richter, (and Gotthard Graubner among others), taught painting, and an outstanding couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher, taught photography.

A collection of reviews and studies of photographers published since 2001. Includes David Bailey, Horst, Cecil Beaton, Don McCullin, Lee Miller, Francesca Woofman, E.O.Hoppe, and others.

Francesca Woodman killed herself at the age of 22, the biographical fact that colors her work and which it is de riguer to mention. She left behind paintings it is said, as yet publicly unseen, and literally hundreds upon hundreds of negatives and 800 proofs of black and white pre-digital photography.

Cv/VAR series 104 reviews "David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture", exhibited at the Royal Academy from January to April 2012. The project of creating monumental landscape paintings was based on a small area near the artist's home at Bridlington in East Yorkshire. Works developed with time-framed films, photographs, iPad studies, drawings, sketchbooks, oils, and watercolors, recording particular motifs and places in the changing seasons.