Here is the second ‘film teaser’ from the National Media Museum in the run-up to the exhibition of We English (which opens at the Museum on 12th March). The film discusses my reasons for getting public participation in the project and was mostly shot last December on a couple of cold and windy day’s in and around Bradford (hence my bad hat and sometimes pained expression!), whilst I was producing the photograph for the Bradford commission.
There is an online showcase of We English entitled ‘Leisure as a National Mirror’ on today’s New York Times Lens blog, with a short article by Nadia Sussman.
My exhibition Motherland, Homeland was being installed at the Bonington Gallery in Nottingham over the weekend. Here are a few teaser photographs (shot on a mobile phone) by Geoff Litherland, Exhibitions Co-ordinator, who was overseeing the hanging. The exhibition opens this Wednesday (24th February).
I’ve got an exhibition opening at the Bonington Gallery in Nottingham later this month. Motherland, Homeland will feature pieces from both my Motherland series and We English. The private view is on Thursday 4 March 2010, 6.30 pm – 8 pm.
I will also be doing an ‘In conversation’ with Professor Stephen Daniels from the University of Nottingham, Bonington Lecture Theatre, Thursday 4 March, 5 pm – 6.30 pm.
If you would like to attend the private view or talk, please RSVP to: boningtongallery@ntu.ac.uk
Exhibition date: Wednesday 24 February – Friday 19 March 2010
Opening times: Monday to Thursday: 10am – 5pm, Friday: 10am – 4pm, Saturday: 1 – 5pm
Location: Bonington Gallery, Bonington building, City site. View the map here.
A series of twelve photographs from We English has just received 3rd Prize in the Daily Life Stories section of this year’s World Press Photo Awards. Congratulations also to my former assistant Laura Pannack who won 1st Prize in Portrait Singles.
During my commission for the Bradford photograph, I took a few shots at some Sunday league football matches. An experience which reminded me of Hans van der Meer and his fantastic body of work European Fields: The Landscape of Lower League Football.
European Fields by Hans van der Meer (Steidl, April 2006)
Several shots in his book were taken in Bradford, including these-
© Hans van der Meer
© Hans van der Meer
© Hans van der Meer
Here’s the publisher’s blurb – At the beginning of the 1995 football season, Hans van der Meer set out to take a series of football photographs that avoided the cliched traditions of modern sports photography. In an attempt to record the game in its original form – a field, two goals and 22 players – he sought matches at the bottom end of the amateur leagues, the opposite end of the scale to the Champions’ League. And he avoided the enclosed environment of the stadium and tight telescopic details and hyperbole of action photography. Preferring neutral lighting, framing and camera angles, he chose instead to pull back from the central subject of the pitch, locating the playing field and its unfolding action within a specific landscape and context.Van der Meer has applied his democratic viewpoint across the playing fields of Europe over the past decade, having travelled to every country with a significant history of the game.taken him from small towns in the remote regions of Europe – from Bihariain in Romania to Bjorko in Sweden, from Torp in Norway to Alcsoors in Hungary, from Bartkowo in Poland to Beire in Portugal – and to the fringes of the major conurbations including Greece, Finland, UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Slovakia, Denmark, Belgium, Spain and Italy.
By the way, my Bradford commission photograph will be unveiled at the opening of the National Media Museum We English exhibition on 11th March 2010. (nb. it’s not of Sunday league football!).
As part of one of my upcoming exhibition of We English photographs at the National Media Museum (12th March – 8th September), and as discussed previously on the blog, we will be including photographs from the Museum’s own collection, introducing the English at leisure from a historical perspective.
Since September last year I’ve been working closely with Ruth Kitchin, Collections Assistant, on the selection and curation of works for the exhibition. Also involved was Stephen Daniels (Professor of Cultural Geography at Nottingham Trent University and author of the essay ‘The English Outdoors’ from We English) who was invited to the Museum to discuss the development of the selection. Here is a short film, shot in the Museum archives on 24th November last year, when we all came together to discuss some of the considerations for the selection.
Since 2005 Stephen Daniels has been Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s programme in Landscape and Environment. He has published widely on the history and theory of landscape imagery and design. His books include The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge University Press, 1988) co-edited with Denis Cosgrove, Paul Sandy: Picturing Britain (Royal Academy of Arts, London July 2009) and the influential book Fields of Vision (Polity Press, Jan 1994).
Writing in the latter, Daniels describes landscape imagery “as not merely a reflection of, or distraction from, more pressing social, economic, or political issues; it is often a powerful mode of knowledge and social engagement. As exemplars of moral order and aesthetic harmony, particular landscapes achieve the status of national icons, and imperialists, almost by definition, have annexed the homelands of others in their identity myths, projecting on ‘foreigners’ pictorial codes that express both an affinity with the colonizing country and an estrangement from it.” In the book Daniels shows how various artists–including painters, landscape designers, and architects–have articulated national identities in England and the United States from the later eighteenth century to the present day.
You can download Daniel’s essay ‘The English Outdoors’ from We English, here.
There is a review of We English in the current issue of The Art Book (Volume 17, Issue 1, February 2010), written by Guy Lane.
You can download a pdf here.
“True to his word, Roberts’ pictures are unmistakably his own. Photographed in colour with a tripod-mounted 5 x 4 plate camera, they exhibit a disciplined compositional restraint, a richness of palette, and – often – a wealth of narrative incident…..His intent to mine the country’s overlooked moments – the trivial and the quotidian – is made good.†Guy Lane.
