PU – Your latest portfolio – Fragile Mind – is a set of very powerful images. They document the last few months of your Grandmother’s life and her struggle with dementia. Why did you decide to record such an emotional and personal experience?

JS – I felt despite the fact that it was not a pleasant period in my Grandmothers life it conveyed her as a person. She was stubborn and defiant whilst at the same time still remaining graceful. Death is always considered a private matter but it is just as relevant if not more so than any other part of life. When you are aware that someone will no longer be here it changes your relationship and perspective of them.

PU – The images are beautifully expressive and also very sad at the same time. Are the images a celebration of your Grandmother’s life or a statement on how sad dementia can be to not only the sufferers but also their families who witness the mental decline in someone they love?

JS – I guess both, they definitely reflect her as a person. I’m not entirely sure how sad dementia is, sure there is a lot of confusion for the sufferer especially if people try to correct them.

Towards the end my Grandmother used to tap along to a beat, and sometimes whisper sentences that reminded me of hearing someone talking in their sleep – she was obviously living her own reality in her mind.

There were also moments when she would play with the end of her dress (she used to be a seamstress) and would hem the dress with her fingers – all with her eyes shut and it just made me think how content she seemed in her own little world.

PU – You are a big advocate of analogue photography. What camera and processes did you use to capture the images in this project?

JS – I would have hated to do this project digitally, the whole approach is different, I shoot manually so I shoot slower. Using film I’m aware that each shot costs money and there is a feel with images shot on film. Everything becomes considered and has to be done right first time. I shot, I developed, I printed the contact sheets, I edited I coated the glass plates, I exposed them, I’m much closer to the work because of the process used to create it. I shot the project using a medium format SLR (Contax 645), I have my own darkroom so develop my own film. The plates were created by an adapted gelatin dry plate technique – so the images are positives on glass.

PU – Are you looking at placing some of this work in an exhibition or maybe a book project?

JS – I would love to do a book and may well create a very limited edition hand-made book myself. The plates have already been exhibited and I’m sure I will find various opportunities to show them over the coming months.

PU – What project are you working on at the moment or have you any projects planned for the future?

JS- This project is by no means finished, I shot around 12 rolls (16 frames per roll) and there are many strong images I have simply not had the time to print as yet, so that is one job. The other is a project exploring memory through photography and is called The Beauty of Confusion… This is ongoing.

Thank you Jonathan for the insightful interview. To check out more work from the Fragile Mind series visit www.jonathanstead.com/fragile_mind.html

Jonathan was also recently interviewed for the Fascinating Photography eMagazine.

Rob Bremner was based in Liverpool, but returned to Wick in the North of Scotland to care for his father who has dementia.

He has been a professional photographer for over 20 years working mainly for newspapers and magazines, but is most comfortable doing social documentary work (he studied documentary photography at Newport). His interests include reading, walking and travelling.

Both of Rob’s parents had dementia. After his mother passed away in 2007 he returned home to Wick to care for his dad. ‘Passing Time’ is a photographic project attempting to record his memories and feelings both whilst his mother was alive and after her death when he was back in Wick caring for his father.

The following pictures are taken from the ‘Passing Time’ project:

ALL IMAGES (c) ROB BREMNER

To see more perceptive work by Rob Bremner check out another project he did, this time in Liverpool called ‘Portraits & Landscapes’.

This is an international event created to promote and celebrate the art of pinhole photography. Anyone, anywhere in the world, who makes a pinhole photograph today (Sunday, 24 April 2011), can scan it and upload it to www.pinholeday.org where it will become part of the annual Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day online gallery.

This is your chance to take some time off from the high-tech world we live in and take part in the simple act of making a pinhole photograph. Share your vision and help spread the unusual beauty of this historical photographic process.

To give you an idea of how magical pinhole photography can be, check out the wonderful work of Katie Cooke: http://slowlight.net

Katie Cooke Pinhole Photography

A Reconnection to Nature

Website: Mark Fenwick

Today I want to introduce you to the beautiful and exciting work of Lucy Ridges. She grew up in the south of England where she became interested in Art from a very young age, in 2005 she moved to the North of England to study a Degree in Fine art.

Lucy has now settled in Manchester where she is currently working in an Art Gallery whilst studying part time on a Post Graduate Photography Course (Masters) at the Manchester Metropolitan University.

Primarily working in black and white, Lucy’s photographic practise is an ongoing visual exploration of intuitive understandings and unexplained meanings.

“I like to think of my work as a bewildering, unfinished idea, with an open narrative. The images I create sit somewhere between unconventional portraiture and staged photography. The elements that most interest me are that of the surreal and nonsensical. I work with disposable ideas that stay with me for the duration of a photographic shoot, and no longer.” – Lucy Ridges

All the images that follow were taken recently using Mamiya Cameras with Medium Format film.

For me, the images have a dream like quality to them, representing flight, freedom, and joy…

Website: www.lucyridges.com

All pictures © Lucy Ridges

Phil Clarke-Hill is an emerging documentary photographer based in London. His work has been published in places such as the Independent, Creative review, Hackney Citizen, La Calle, and Se7en.

He often works in collaboration with charities and independent media, and recently produced a body of work about the coffee farmers in Coorg, South India. The area is also known as Kodagu, and is the native home of the tribal Kodava people, who now constitute only 20% of the population, and who are the key plantation workers.

The Indian coffee industry is only in its fledgling stages, so the project focused on the lives of the coffee farmers, working in an industry in the initial stages of commercialisation.

India’s rural economy is dominated by tea and cotton, so the coffee farmers are little known of, only producing 2% of the world’s annual output. The plantations are small-scale family run operations, which farm a mixture of coffee, rice and spices.

Phil documented the families’ lives on the plantations, plus the annual Huttari celebrations where the people of the region come together to celebrate the start of the harvest on the full moon.

This project “Made in Coorg – The story of Indian Coffee” is to be exhibited at the Outside World Gallery, 44 Redchurch Street, London, E2 7DP.

Opening on Thursday 7 October 2010, the show will run over the weekend until Monday 11 October 2010. The opening night is in a prime location near Brick Lane, and coincides with the start of Photomonth – the East London photography festival, and Time Out First Thursday for October.  

You can see the full project slideshow here: www.lightstalkers.org/galleries/slideshow/26962

Some of Phil’s previous projects have taken him to the streets of Bolivia with the shoe-shine boys, witnessing road building in the Himalayas and living with an indigenous community in the Amazon. The body of work he is now producing is continuing to look at agriculture, focusing on the future of British agriculture, in collaboration with charitable organizations Branches, Greenspace and WWOOF.

Check out his website: www.philclarkehill.co.uk 

All pictures © Phil Clarke-Hill

James Thorne is a freelance and fine art photographer living in Herefordshire, England. He also runs an online fine art photography gallery called Dotty Gallery.

The work of Sebastiao Salgado is a great inspiration to James, and movies – a great love of his life since childhood – play a big part in the way he sees things through his camera.

James uses both traditional and digital photography methods. He enjoys using a film camera, but prefers to print and carry out post-production work digitally.

I love his moody black and white pictures, and creative colour images:

"I take a great deal of pride in trying to capture and produce a photograph that can create positive interest. This may be by rekindling a past memory, include a favourable subject, or is on the whole, simply attractive." – James Thorne

Dotty Gallery: www.dottygallery.com

Blog: http://jamesthorne-photographer.blogspot.com

All pictures © James Thorne

Alan Thomson graduated in 1996 with a BA (hons) in Fine Art Photography at the Glasgow School of Art. Since then he has managed two camera stores in Edinburgh and is currently working freelance, mainly concentrating on wedding and event photography, whilst also working on 3 personal projects.

The 3 projects are a study of forest interiors in East Lothian, a series of prints using the Argyrotype process, and his bus portrait series.

Today I want to spotlight Alan’s Bus Portrait project: These images were taken in Edinburgh, from either stationary positions or from other buses. With diffused lighting, and a formalised three quarter length portrait format these wonderful anonymous portraits are studies in isolation and meditation, private moments in public places…

For more of Alan Thomson’s fine art photography check out his website: www.thomsonphotography.co.uk              

All pictures © Alan Thomson

The German photographer Olaf Heine started his photography career by shooting an album cover for a band in Germany. This sparked a new obsession for Heine, who moved to Berlin to study photography at the prestigious Berlin Lette Verein. While there he continued his artistic collaborations with musicians, and also branched out to shoot photos of celebrities from the worlds of film and sport.

Later he also became an award-winning director of music videos and commercials. His work as been seen the world over and he as shot countless international stars, including, Coldplay, Sting, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Depreche Mode, and REM.

He as worked with Vanity Fair, Elle, Rolling Stone, Stern Magazine, and GQ, to name a few magazines. Heine was also chosen – as one of only ten photographers worldwide – to shoot a special campaign for a book about the car company Mini.

Check out this video where Olaf Heine discusses, photography, life, and Leaving the Comfort Zone his new retrospective book of photographs:

Website: www.olafheine.com

Introducing contemporary landscape photographer David Anthony Hall. He specialises in large panoramic landscape images, and says, “My creative vision is to reveal the force, power and harmony in nature, mindful of the tenuous balance between man and the environment”.

You can climb into his images and take a walk through the landscape; they have a great sense of place. Hall is an Irish artist now based in London, he has exhibited worldwide, including New York, Amsterdam, and Paris.

His work is widely collected and sought after. He produces archival prints on a wide format printer in sizes of up to three meters. He uses customised profiles and all his work is printed personally, each image is signed and numbered in editions of 15, prices range from £2,000 – £12,500.

Hall created an online solution for an alternative gallery, which takes advantage of new technology to study the relationship between the Internet and large format art, especially to show 9ft pieces effectively on a 17" screen to scale.

Visit his 1:50 Scale Gallery: www.one2fifty.com

Here is a short video interview giving a brief background with location footage and a glimpse of some work in progress:

“My work represents my emotional attachment to the forces on our planet and our fleeting presence on it, by rousing the emotions and connecting us with the beauty found in it. I want to create work that is as engaging to the viewer as it was the moment I pictured it. The large-scale nature of my work opens up a wide space for my audience to reflect upon, explore and transpose into.” – David Anthony Hall

Website: www.senezio.com

All pictures © David Anthony Hall

I have a Gallery on Flickr showcasing lyrical landscape pictures:

Click here to be taken to the Gallery

All of these images ‘speak’ to me…

They all play a ‘song’ in my heart…

And they take me on a journey…

Enjoy…

"I can look at a fine photograph and sometimes I can hear music" – Ansel Adams

Secret Hours is a new body of work by North Carolina artist Alison Overton, and is her first foray into digital photography. The series of 40 artworks have been created over the past twelve months.

Previously she had worked exclusively with traditional photography, creating beautiful, dreamy, and haunting medium format prints of landscapes, trees, architectural ruins, cemeteries, and statues. Hand-tinting the prints with oil paints. I love this work and listed Overton in my Five Favourite Fine Art Photographers post.       

For the new body of work the subject matter consists of antique dolls and curious objects (all found while clearing out her childhood home) juxtaposed with unusual flora and fauna. For Overton, the objects represent both real and imagined childhood memories, for both her and her parents.

For example, the dolls represent her mother’s love for toys, as well as her mother’s lack of childhood belongings as a result of growing up poor in the 1930s. The other objects reveal her father‘s interest in all manner of unusual items, as well as his lovingly eccentric personality.

The work visually communicates her ideas of long-ago children quietly playing, daydreaming, imagining and manifesting their personal inner-worlds. The work is bright and colourful, with a surreal, pop art feel to the images.

Overton took the pictures with a simple 5-megapixel Canon Digital Elph camera, shooting the images very close with a macro lens, and cropping the pictures to a square format.

What I really like about these photos is the interesting combination of the whimsical and the eeriness. The images bring about a feeling of reflective memories with a hint of creepiness…

For more images in the Secret Hours series visit: www.alisonoverton.com/secrethours.htm

All pictures © Alison Overton

Todd Hido is an American contemporary artist and photographer. Much of his work involves urban and suburban housing across the United States of which the artist produces large, highly detailed and luminous colour photographs.

Tom E. Hinson, Cleveland Museum of Art curator of photography said, "Hido’s photographs reveal isolation and anonymity in contemporary suburbia. Eerily lit rooms and suddenly abandoned homes increase the effect of loneliness and loss."

Check out this interesting and very insightful video showing Todd working on different bodies of work – some spanning many years – that eventually are published in photo book format:

Photographer Steve Bloom was born and raised in South Africa, but has lived in England since 1977. His nostalgia for the continent of his birth inspired him to spend 14-years working on his magnificent book, Living Africa. An intimate, visual document of the people, places and wildlife of Africa today.

For more details about Living Africa and to watch the video of Steve working on the book Click Here.

Today I would like to introduce you to the wonderful work of art photographer Diana Brennan. Diana shoots mainly with a digital SLR camera, but also enjoys using vintage film cameras and experimenting with different techniques.

I recently discovered Diana’s captivating images when browsing Flickr ~ here are a few sets to highlight her enchanting work:

Natural History

Woodland and Botanicals

Black and White

Diana communicates her unique view of the natural world to others; her work evokes her love of natural New England. She is continually learning about and being inspired by nature, in addition to her photography, Diana works as a Wetland Scientist.

To learn more about the artist and to see more of her unique work check out her website: www.dsbrennan.com

I’ve just read an interesting interview over at Phototuts+. They talk to Martin Lawrence, a wonderful landscape photographer who regularly sells his work to magazines, publications, and collectors.

Martin has some fantastic advice to share with budding landscape photographers, and those wishing to make their hobby a full-time career…

Check it out here: http://photo.tutsplus.com/articles/reader-profiles/phototuts-reader-profile-martin-lawrence/

Website: www.martinlawrencephotography.com

Under the spotlight today we have a young and exciting new photographer Imogen Cunliffe. She has produced a bold and inspiring body of work and is only 17 years old!

Imogen was born in 1992 and lives in rural England. It wasn’t until 2008 that a camera found its way into her hands, but she has since not looked back. She has been featured on various blogs, online magazines (Cliché, RAW), in a book (Click, 2009), and is a Getty images contributor, as well as recently being announced a winner of the H&M/Lookbook collaboration competition.

Her passion primarily lies in fashion photography, drawing inspiration from photographers such as Denise Grünstein and Nicholas Routzen, as well as from everything around her in her day-to-day life.

Imogen’s goals for the next year or so are to work with a bigger creative team more frequently so she can improve improve improve! She would like to keep photography as a hobby throughout university, and then see where that takes her. She doesn’t really have any set plans on what job she would like to do in the future, so photography is definitely still an option.

Whatever happens, I’m sure in the future we’re going to see more wonderful work by this young talented photographer! Watch this space…

ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT IMOGEN CUNLIFFE

To see more work by Imogen check out:

www.flickr.com/photos/imogen_c

www.talkingpictures.carbonmade.com

Step into the Spotlight!

If you are a photographer and would like to have yourself and your work under the spotlight contact me with a link to your portfolio and I will check it out. Thanks.

There are so many talented photographers out there, and today I want to introduce you to just five of my favourite fine art photographers.

I want to spotlight other brilliant photographers in future posts, so if you would like to be featured in a future post please contact me with a link to your web site or blog so I can view your work. I’m looking for photographers across all disciplines.

Also if you have a favourite photographer and think they should be showcased please contact me with details. I would love to see their work!

Today’s 5 wonderful photographers (in no particular order) are:

Kamil Vojnar   
After years of making images for book and CD covers in New York City, Kamil found refuge in St. Remy de Provence, France, where he is now fully concentrating on creating his own personal world of images…
 

Website: www.flyingblindpictures.com

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Jen Kiaba
Jen’s fine art photographs aim to explore the realms of the unconscious. The worlds of reality and fantasy collide and blend in her work. Each image tells a story and her work has a vintage romantic feel to them…
 

Etsy shop: www.etsy.com/shop/jenkiabaphotography

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Ashley Lebedev
Ashley, of Bottle Bell Photography, is a 26-year-old artist & fine art photographer, specializing in conceptual portraiture, abandoned buildings, and moodscapes. Her images are emotional, atmospheric, and nostalgic. She stopped shooting commercial photography a couple of years ago to focus on her passion of being an artist, relaying her personal vision through photos…
 

Website: www.bottlebellphotography.com                        
Blog: http://bottlebellphotography.blogspot.com

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Tom Chambers
Tom creates photomontage images that reveal a personal vision about the nature of children, animals, and their interactions. The images he creates illustrate fleeting moods in the form of improbable, yet possible, views of the world characterized by an aura of mystery and spiritual narrative…
 

Website: www.tomchambersphoto.com

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Alison Overton
Alison captures pictures that have an ethereal and timeless quality. She strives to explore and expand her definition of the unique and the mysterious in life and nature. You enter into a dreamy world and on to another plane of existence… 
  

Website: www.alisonoverton.com

Scottish landscape photographer Bruce Percy is attracted to the wilderness and believes photography is a great way of getting closer to the land. He runs photographic workshops in Scotland, and in this video you hear him describe some of his work and why he shot it the way he did…

Website: www.brucepercy.co.uk