The WIP #49: Contact Print
The Week in Photos (30 November - 6 December 2024)
Last Saturday to Agitate Gallery in Edinburgh where one of my photos was being exhibited as part of Contact Print. The gallery had received funding from Fair Saturday, an anti-consumerist alternative to Black Friday. The premise was to encourage people who had never had anything printed to share their work in public. I have visited Boots and Snappy Snaps to print film twenty years ago, but not much more. Here are some lovely friends (
, , , and Sophie) who turned up to offer interpretations that had never occurred to me.
In the Christmas fair, I was struck by the bleakness of working in a permachristmas environment. What torture to hear those same cheery songs over and over.
“Anybody over the age of 30 seen in a bus has been a failure in life”, said the poet Brian Howard (and not Margaret Thatcher). But clearly Brian had never enjoyed the thrill of the top deck.
The winter days are so short that I have been struggling to see any light, but there are images out there.
Instead, I have been taking a voyage around the kitchen, looking in the microwave and at the spatter guard.
Food is the main subject of Durty Beanz, an “action research group” who have collaborated on a billboard with Mark Titchner. In a talk last night with Sanjeev Kohli they squeezed every last drop out of the work, but it was stimulating to think about what makes us obsessively watch eatfluencers like Beard Meets Food.