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Posts from the ‘Media’ Category

Jan 14

Keep The Faith 65′

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It all started with a song ‘Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) by Frank Wilson’.

Its upbeat tempo and passion infused lyrics are intoxicating. You can’t help but feel it. You can’t help but dance to it, and you can’t help but want more.

My parents were both born in a Northern town (Leyland, Lancashire) and lived their young adult years through the sixties and early seventies. They were heavily influenced by the movement that was Northern Soul.

When I hit 25, my Dad started revisiting many of the sounds that emerged during this time. I hadn’t realised there was such a back catalogue of soul music. Music that stemmed from the great American music scene that was Motown.

I always loved Soul music – Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin etc, but I was cautious never to play it too often. I believed that the tracks were few and the sound precious. I didn’t want to wear it out!

But here was Northern Soul. A movement consisting of 1000’s of previously released and unrealised soul records.

During one family event, the music proved so popular that my Dad and his original mod crew decided to setup a charity soul event - Soulaid. Since the turn of the century the charity has held six to ten soul nights each year, each event raising up to £1000 for a local charity.

These Soul Nights introduced me to the culture that envelopes Northern Soul – the dance, the fashion, the community, the talcum powder, and most importantly, the discovery of new sounds.

And as you get a little older, and you learn about love – love gained, love lost, the lyrics, they call out to you. In 2012, they saved me. Some call it ‘Tears on the Dance Floor’.

The tempo so fast that you sweat out the heartache, the bass so strong that you can’t help but smile, and the lyrics so heartfelt that you can’t help but shed a tear.

So here it is. I’ve put together a seperate blog dedicated to my own journey with Northern Soul – keepthefaith65.tumblr.com.

The blog is an opportunity to share this unique and special sound with friends and and anyone else out there. An opportunity to promote events in the North of England as the movement continues its resurgence the 21st Century.

I aim to post Northern Soul music that I have found and why it speaks to me, but to also highlight contemporary artists who have adopted elements of Northern Soul, for example, Plan B, Angie Stone, Jennifer Hudson, Rebecca Ferguson, Emeli Sande, Paloma Faith, Amy Winehouse, Raphael Saadiq, Noisettes and many others.

I also hope to try my hand at spinning the decks in 2013 so I’ll let you know how that particularly ambition plays out.

Wishing you all a great year ahead.

Keep The Faith.

Dec 12

Tim Walker: Story Teller

tim walker flying saucer

“With more than a decade of fashion photography success behind him, Tim Walker already holds residence in The Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as The National Portrait Gallery. He has captured an eclectic cast of individuals throughout his career, from David Attenborough to Scarlett Johansson, and his photographs have graced the pages of some of the world’s most influential magazines. As well as collaborating with icons such as Kate Bush and Richard Nicoll, Walker’s career has evolved from photography to other genres of the art world and his progression into film-making is clear to see in his most recent work.

Inspired by the spreads of fashion powerhouse Vogue, amongst other internationally renowned magazines, Walker has created his most spectacular space yet, bringing together not only some striking photographs, but also the ‘back-stage’ elements of what it is to create an image. The exhibition is a beautifully constructed experience, featuring models, builders and set designers, to name a few, in their ‘production roles’, and brings out the characteristically theatrical nature of Walker’s work. A nearly life-size replica of a Spitfire fighter plane and a sprawling desert are only a couple of the pieces on display at this intriguing exhibition and visitors will also get the chance to see a series of films, specially curated by Walker himself, such as cult favourite The Red Shoes and his own The Lost Explorer.

This exhibition brings together all the ingredients intrinsic to the art of photography to create a truly stimulating, sensory experience.”

Free admission and running to January 27th 2013, there is no excuse not to go and visit.”

Review from Vintage Seekers.

18 October 2012 – 27 January 2013 (Daily 10.00-18.00)
Somerset House
East Wing Galleries, East Wing
More information at http://www.somersethouse.org.uk/visual-arts/tim-walker-story-teller

Dec 12

Seduced by Art

Seduced by Art

This exhibition explores early photography from the mid-19th century and the most exciting contemporary photographs, alongside historical painting. It takes a provocative look at how photographers use fine art traditions, including Old Master painting, to explore and justify the possibilities of their art.

The National Gallery
31 October 2012 – 20 January 2013
More information at: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/seduced-by-art

Dec 7

Is iTunes the greatest scam of the 21st Century?

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This was a question asked by a Hi-fi supplier in Manchester City Centre yesterday.

Think about he said.

“You buy your iPhone or iPod. You buy an expensive laptop or iMac to manage your music library, you synchronise your music library, and dock your portable music player into the latest Bose, Bowers or JLB music speaker system.

And somehow it is all a little flat. It just sounds a bit rubbish.”

In my case, it often kicks out. Try transmitting your iTunes over wireless and your musical moment comes crashing down when you switch on the microwave to defrost the chicken.

2K’s worth of hard earned cash invested in the latest and greatest music technology known to man and it doesn’t even work.

But is this the greatest scam of the 21st Century?

We are all led to believe that Apple is the trailblazer for music. Buy Apple and you are at the forefront of music innovation, but it is all a big lie.

Apple has only offered us convenience. It is convenient that our music is now portable and we can carry 1000′s of album in the palm of our hand, but have we made a mistake in assuming that convenience equates to quality?

And the swindle continues. Because we have invested so much in the iTunes revolution we continue to invest and download our music from the iTunes store. But do we ever own that music? Can a parent pass on their music collection to their son or daughter? What happens to all that content once they die? It dies with them. You never truly own the music. You are just borrowing it from the cloud. You are in fact buying air.

And the air quality is thin. The files significantly compressed to save space. They are a long way from the full studio quality output often described as FLAC – lossless audio compression and decompression.

iTunes does not have a hold on this space. There are online music stores where you can purchase FLAC. You can also burn FLAC files direct from your CD.

The man in the Manchester store sat me down, he downloaded a FLAC file and networked this with losless cables to a high-fidelity sound system.

“I won’t use a CD he said, because even the turn of the CD and the laser will lower the quality of the overall result”.

And what a result. The sound filled the room. The orchestra was right there. The vocalist sat across from me. Music like nothing you had heard before. And all for significantly less than 2K!

My advice to us all. Love iTunes for the convenience – listen on the commute, listen at work, but don’t stop buying CD’s. You own them and have a tangible product in your hand. You can also share them without a complicated password and home share system.

Convenience has been a revolution, but quality should always prevail.

Demand the best media experience available.

Feb 16

Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton

Starting a career in photography, in particular portrait photography, is a daunting prospect. There is the constant nagging that you aren’t quite good enough – today will be the day that you are shown to be a fraud. There is also the dynamic between sitter and photographer – What do they think? What is their mood? Will they understand what you are trying to achieve? What if they don’t enjoy the process or simply dislike you? These tensions are surely recognised across all photography studios and I suspect played out in the minds of even the most successful photographers.

But just imagine being asked to photograph The Royal Family!? What then of those questions? How much greater must those anxieties be? What if you say the wrong thing, lose their mood or respect, and what if they seriously dislikes the pictures? Is that treason? A hanging at the gallows or ex-communication to a distant land?

With these questions at the front of mind I visited Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton.

The images are truly exceptional, clearly reflecting the changing trends and fashions over the period that they were taken.

I was a little surprised to see just how informal many of the images were. I was expecting stateliness all the way; this was the 40′s and 50′s after all (!), but instead we were introduced to a a regular family. A beautiful young daughter. A princess and a mother with her children.

The stateliness was there too, but even these images portrayed a closeness between the photographer and the sitter. Patience and friendship was clearly afforded to Cecil Beaton and further proof of this was found in the many letters of thanks he received directly from the family (part of the exhibition). He was somehow a part of their lives – trusted.

I took from this exhibition that there is a much greater back-story to the monarch that I grew to know in the 90′s and 00′s. The Queen is a lady who suffered through the war years, married, cared for her mother, raised her children, all whilst fulfilling her responsibilities to the nation and wider-world with a very human grace and normality of stateliness.

To Cecil, he is a beacon for all photographers that suffer the anxiety of a shoot. A light for us all.

–

Queen Elizabeth II by Cecil Beaton: A Diamond Jubilee Celebration
8 February – 22 April 2012
This exhibition features portraits of Her Majesty the Queen by great society photographer Cecil Beaton and charts the Royal Family across three decades. It shows the Queen in her roles as princess, monarch and mother and celebrates the 60th anniversary of her accession to the throne.

Jan 23

Vinyl Revival

Saturday night. A good meal and a few beers to the better. I am sat in the living room of my parents house. I suggest to my Dad that we play a few LP’s.

Looking through the album covers is like looking at works of art, and then there is the experience of pulling the record from the sleeve. Pop, crackle, the needle hits the track. Fuzz, hiss and the first chord is struck.

To all in the room, it was like discovering music for the first time. The quality of the sound oscillating from the speakers tugged at every emotion. You could feel the bass and almost witness the guitarist strumming. It was media in its purest form. The crowd cried out for more, and before the end of the night the room was dancing.

Why did it sound so good? Why did it affect us so strongly? Some clues can be found in our tolerance for quality. The innovations and social pressures of the digital age has suckered us into convenience as a replacement to quality.

Listening to that Hi-Fi on Saturday night I was reminded of what it feels like to have a band playing right there in your living room and later it made me think about what we have lost in our great march towards iPods and online players?

According to the article ‘Are You Buying Pre-Ruined Music‘, the formats adopted by popular music players is about one-eleventh the size of a full resolution CD, so the quality is invetibitably far inferior. It goes onto say that that such low-resolution tracks played through an iPod docking station that feeds into a decent hi-fidelity sound system is a disaster area.

Digital was designed for convenience, carrying your music with you when travelling or out running.

“I for one live and continue to use vinyl” Daniel Ek CEO of Spotify. According to Daniel, they believe that a lot of people will dip into music first on Spotify, and if they like it, they will buy it on vinyl or CD. Spotify is not a replacement medium. The evidence seems to confirm this claim – 86% of music sold in the UK is in physical form. While sales of singles are now almost exclusively digital, albums remain physical, with just eight per cent downloaded (1).

Presumably the tech industry will respond by improving bandwidth to rival the quality found on CD or Vinyl, but will they ever replace the tacit feeling of holding a record or the sense of ownership one receives from owning that experience. Where does the pop and crackle come from?

Perhaps technology was only ever a convenience. It was never meant to replace life, simply here to help us out a little.

I suppose there will always be two camps. Those who see the convenience of the web channel as a replacement medium and those who look to technology to simply manage the data that sits around our experiences with media, possibly capturing, sharing and documenting our experiences.

I have an inclination that the model could shift back a little. Back to high-fidelity sound, pure music, where we actually listen to instrument, voice and soul. The Internet is only an add-on that we use to collect and feed data. It is just data.

As we move further into 2012 it seems that even bigger questions are being asked of technology? According to Daniel Sieberg, technology has overwhelmed our daily lives to the point of constant distraction. Many of us can no longer focus on a single task or face-to-face conversation without wanting to reach out—or retreat—to the virtual world every few minutes. This is a real and significant problem (2).

Looking to the future of technology, John Harlow writes in The Sunday Times that after a technological advance from the iPod to Twitter, the flood of true innovation seems to have dried up – “techies are running out of ways to rock our world… Apple, Google and Microsoft are now mature refiners, concerned about their environmental footprints, not radical change, and with share prices to defend” (3).

Stronger challengers take this much further. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, passionately argues that Silicon Valley is only interested in harvesting quick profits at the expense of creating truly disruptive technologies that will solve some of the world’s biggest problems, for example, famine, cancer and new social and political systems (4).

Whilst the media and technology wars will inevitably play out for how and where we access our next media hit, I think I might take a moment to sit back, source myself a record player and start putting together the components for hi-fidelity sound. Bring on the revolution. It is the vinyl revival people.

And if the tech industry can do anything for us, can they please figure out the basics like a phone that actually keeps a signal?

–

1. Is this the end for your CD collection? Andy Kerr, Whathifi.com, 04-Jun-2009.

2. The Digital Diet: The 4-step Plan to Break Your Tech Addiction and Regain Balance in Your Life. Daniel Sieberg, Souvenir Press Ltd, 01-Dec-2011.

3. Out with the old, in with the … arm, any ideas anyone? John Harlow. The Sunday Times, 15-Jan-2012.

4.Peter Thiel To The New Yorker: “I Don’t Consider [The iPhone] To Be A Technological Breakthrough”. Techcrunch.com. 21-Nov-2011.

Nov 11

Decasia: The State of Decay. A film by Bill Morrison

Merry-go-round. Nothing much to do with anything. Just for fun // The baby looks aged. The life transparent before it has even begun. // Oliver Twist . // Who or what is the boxer punching? // Death, pain and suffering contrasted with lightness, humour and touch. // A play on human emotions. // The film plays with our sense of time, in particular the references and aesthetics like the Egyptian hieroglyphics, even though the film could not have been shot more than 100 years ago and the birth of the camera. The pictures suggest we are looking at the beginning of time – the first dawn, the first sunset. The decomposition strips away reference of time and we only see human form – love, tragedy and drama. // The pictures and the intentional message of the film becomes something else – mutated. // Is that a bird or a plane? Birds of Prey or a Spitfire? // Just because it looks weird, does it mean it’s good?

Nov 3

Lost Book Found from Jem Cohen

Those things that are left behind. // “As you live, you leave traces.” // Is there any order. // “Nobody makes the world, it is just a place you are born into.” // There is a musical rhythm to this film; a beat to each image/scene. // Classifications and patterns. // “Glass is a liquid.” // Reflection of life – What is it? // Just look. We often never see. // Signs, messages, notes, graffiti – are these clues to a greater meaning? // What ties things together? // Obsession with retail, shop fronts, capitalism and commerce. // “We exist to perform a function.” // When you push ideas together what does it create? Can you clash images together? What comes out as a result?

Oct 19

War Photographer

“I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.”

James Nachtwey.

Documentary war photographer James Nachtwey, considered by many the greatest war photographer ever, describes some of his experiences as the express elevator to hell.  // Poverty, genocide, political unrest. Not just war photography. // Are you a participant or an observer? Is it right to stand back and watch a man get killed? // Famine – the most destructive weapon in war is starvation. // The images are a form of communication, but James never feels complete or satisfied with his work. Over the years his sense of purpose grew stronger - “the subject is more important than myself” James Nachtwey. // He gave up everything for the job. Any normal sense of a relationship or family life. // James has the optimism and belief that war will not be forever and that his photographs will force people to look at it and to make the change. His optimism is what keeps him going. All emotion, anger, remorse he tries to channel into his photographs. // “Is it possible to end human behaviour that has been there since the beginning through photographs? Is photography the anti-dote to war?” James Nachtwey // The photographer is putting himself at risk to mediate for peace – “nothing is worth the pain … If you were there you would change it … But not everyone can be there. That is why you have photographs.” James Nachtwey. // “Personal ambition should not overtake personal passion” James Nachtwey. // He lives with himself because he connects and lives with the subject. // Do these images need to be graphic to get a reaction in today’s de-sentised world? // We are dealing with hugely complex issues. Issues that are often simplified by the mass media and presented as a snippet of entertainment. Images can though effect change, but is it the censorship that actually effects change? Vietnam (James Nachtwey’s inspiration for his career) and the images came back to change public opinion. Since then governments have controlled image, but is again being challenged with the Internet, but having said that, the lay-man is still fed content through media corp and popular websites. Controls therefore come from the consumer. They demand the entertainment and the simplicity. People who buy a photo-book already believe in the subject matter.

Oct 16

Meaning & The Single Image

“The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled”. John Berger.

When given a photograph you read all four corners of the image. You look at parts within that photograph to determine meaning (the internal structure of an image).

John Berger states “All photographs are ambiguous”. A photograph has fact of object, but any analysis is surely false. “Only occasionally is an image self-sufficient” Jean Matr.

Berger lists reasons why photographs are ambiguous. There is a conflict of interest. A meeting place where interests come together.

a) The Photographer

b) The Photographed

c) The Viewer. Eyes in the future. We might look at the picture through romantic eyes. Time breads nostalgia that is nothing to do with the original photo.

d) Those who are using the Photograph.

Berger also argues that another reason for ambiguity  is its lack of content. Single photos are fragments taken out of a continuity (of real-time). The make no sense. We make sense of an image only by lending them a continuity ourselves.

“The pro photographer tries when taking a photo to choose an instant which will persuade the public viewer to lend it an appropriate past and future“. John Berger.

For Berger you can eliminate ambiguity by adding text or a caption. This provides a context. However some writers say that the text limits the photograph. Text has a kind of voice. Image has another. The picture can be manipulated through text.

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Another Way of Telling. John Berger & Jean Mohr.

Photographs don’t lie–or do they? Another way of telling explores the tension between the photographer and the photographed, between picture and viewer, and between the filmed moment and memories it resembles.

The Spoken Image: Photography and Language. Clive Scott.

Language has always been central to the meaning and exploitation of photographic images. However, the various types and ‘styles’ of language associated with different photographic genres have been largely overlooked. This book considers the nature of photography, examining the language used in titles, captions and commentaries, particularly as they relate to documentary photography, photojournalism and fashion photography.

Context as a Determinant of Photographic Meaning. Walker, J.

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