A very enjoyable early evening outing yesterday to the preview of a new exhibition at Blackpool's Grundy Art Gallery. The exhibition: Mass Photography: Blackpool through the Camera contains over 100 photographs of Blackpool and people enjoying Blackpool through the ages, with a number of photographs having been taken during the Mass Observation social recording project of the 1930s.
Curator Nina Koennemann from Germany (seen with me above) put the exhibition together, selecting from a wide variety of sources of photographs.
We are standing in front of a group of my own photographs, some 9 of which are to be found in the exhibition.
The exhibition has excited a lot of interest. It was featured in The Observer last weekend and after the preview last night, Grundy Art Gallery Drirector, Stuart Tulloch (seen above talking to Nina) was travelling down to London to be interviewed on Radio 2, talking about the exhibition.
It runs from today Saturday 6 August for a 3-month run to 5 November 2011.
Link: Grundy Art Gallery
Saturday, 6 August 2011
Mass Photography: Blackpool through the Camera
Tuesday, 30 December 2008
Meccano Engineers
I watched the repeat of James May's Top Toys on BBC2 on Sunday and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Apart from the fact that he had come up with exactly the same design for a Lancaster bomber as my brother Frank and I used to make with Lego and had the cheek to claim it as his own, I have to agree with him that today's toys, including those still around from 40 years ago like Lego and Meccano, are absolute rubbish.
When we used to play with those building toys you had a pile of bits, either metal rods, bars, nuts and bolts, or square and rectangular bricks and then you used your imagination to build something.
These days Lego kits and Meccano kits all contain specially shaped pieces designed to build just the one particular model that is shown on the box. Since the 1980s we have been breeding generations who have never needed to use their imagination and, as a consequence, many people don't have one.
Whilst I was looking for the photos to accompany the last blog entry on Austria, I found these photos from a visit to a modelling exhibition in Fleetwood in 2000.
The chap who built that marvellous model of a steam engine in Meccano didn't do it from a set of instructions I'm sure.
And there was this ingenious device. Hardly a work of art in itself, but this complicated set-up of cogs, chains and pulleys was turning out works of art like the one shown below.
Rigged up to a turntable, the device had a pen holder in the shape of a drum with a hole in it that you could drop a ballpoint refill down and it then drew the pen back and forth whilst the turntable revolved slowly. The other bits and pieces varied the length of the stroke to come up with all the intricate geometric designs that later generations would create using Spirograph.
Many towns have a modelling society and many of them have an annual exhibition. They are well worth going to have a look at if you get the chance.
I'm sure I saw something in the paper the other day about another one in Fleetwood... What, Fran? Oh... I'm supposed to be tiling the kitchen...?
Tuesday, 15 January 2008
King Arthur's Round Table
Strange that only a week ago I mentioned King Arthur as yesterday I had an email from Switzerland, where there is to be an exhibition called King Arthur and his Knights from April through to October 2008. The exhibition is to be a joint venture between Schweizerisches Institut für Kinder- und Jugendmedien (the Swiss Institute for Children's and Youth Media) SIKJM and Museum Aargau and will be shown simultaneously in two venues: Castle Lenzburg and Castle Hallwyl in Kanton Argau, Switzerland.
The organisers wrote to me, asking to use the photograph shown here of the henge earthworks known as King Arthur's Round Table at Eamont Bridge near Penrith in Cumbria. It appears on my Stone Circles web page (using web space no longer available). I took the photograph on slide film in 1985 and over the 22 years of its existence I'm afraid it has attracted a great deal of dust and grime. Anyway I cleaned it up as best I could and sent the largest scan I could and for good measure sent some more recent photos taken in better weather which were a bit sharper.
We think of King Arthur and his knights as riding around in medieval armour, because the main stories about him were written (and the majority made up) some 600 or so years after he would have lived and they were a bit - how should I say - modernised by Geoffrey of Monmouth, to extol the virtues of 12th aristocracy. He introduced most of the characters that we associate with Arthur, including Merlin, Uther and Ygerne and even the associations with Tintagel and Avalon. A bit like historians of the future taking the film Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves as the basis for their understanding of 13th Century England...