The WIP #13: Textures, Shapes and Objects
The Week in Photos (23-29 March 2024)
Negative inspiration is where you see something that makes you want to do the opposite. We often don’t vote for a party, but against another. Watching Tish last week strangely made me less confident in taking photos of people. The incredible human connection in her photograph make mine seem inadequate. Read more about Tish Murtha in this week’s newsletter.
Instead, I’ve been drawn to textures, shapes and objects.
I made it across to Edinburgh on Sunday and saw Nicky Bird’s impressive exhibition in the National Portait Gallery about coal mining communities. These villages had been documented in the 80s by Milton Rogovin, whose photos gave Nicky a point of reference. As you enter the show, they have a set of clothes you can wear to imagine what it would be like to look like a miner. It was fun but felt a bit glib, especially as the rest of the exhibition is about the effects of closing the mines on people’s lives. To get a more serious perspective, I read George Orwell on going down a mine.
The photo above was kindly taken by one of my favourite writers on Substack,
, who is pictured here intently listening to Eugene in one of Edinburgh’s lovely pubs.
Yesterday, I visited the Provand’s Lordship, the oldest house in Glasgow, which reopened after renovations. My favourite things there are the Tontine Heads in the gardens.
They are quite weird things, but possibly not weird enough for Rae-Yen Song, who talked with the curator Sophia Yadong Hao about her exhibition at the CCA. Much of it went over my head, with references to Heidegger, Badiou, Rugoff, Barad, and lots of other people I haven’t read. Neither had Rae-Yen. But then she actually makes things which is a kind of embodied thinking.
