18/02/12 - A DAY IN THE CAPITAL..

Last week my family were over visiting, I took this perfect opportunity to travel up to London with them, have a full day of shopping, dining out and most importantly.. go and see these exhibitions I had discovered on Spoonfed!
A bright start meant that we could get to the Saatchi gallery nice and early to see The Sunday Times Magazine exhibition which showcased some the most successful images to have been published over the last 50 years, since its launch in 1962.
The show was incredible and displayed well known images from world-famous photographers including David Bailey, Sam Taylor-Wood, Don McCullin, Eve Arnold and Richard Avedon.
Shown below are some of my favourite images from this exhibition..

Kylie Minogue by Uli Weber, 1993

Portraits of Power by Platon, 25th April 2010

Daniel Craig by Sam Taylor-Wood, 22nd August 2004

Robbie Williams by Hamish Brown, 18th November 2001

All of these capture well known celebrities, it is interesting to show how each photographer presents the model in a different way, in order to portray the desired meaning to us as an audience.  My favourite is the image taken of Daniel Craig, this was taken before he had been given the role of James Bond.  It was part of Sam Taylor-Wood's series 'Crying Men' where she ''encouraged Hollywood A-listers to break down and get-red-eyed purely for the benefit of her lens.''  Having never seen this approach used before I thought it created some unusual and unexpected outcomes; I could try a similar experiment when shooting for my 'representation' project.

Among the images in the show there were many which had quite a shocking nature behind them. Not only displaying photographs of hunters with their dead catch and an amazing image of a 5 second old baby, the show also touched on deeper issues to do with addiction, the rise in crack cocaine and the problems of binge drinking.

Casualties of War by Eugene Richards

War was also featured a number of times.      
This image which I took on the right shows Eugene Richards, 2009(published) work.
It had a huge impact on me as the subject matter was unbelievable.  It captured a National Guardsman who once served in Iraq before being in a grenade attack and losing 40% of his brain.  The emotion that the photographer has captured between he casualty and his hugging mother is incredible and very moving.

Beachy Head by Peter Marlow,
7th Dec, 1997

I could go on to talk about this exhibition for hours it really was that great, but to finish with, another image which really had a strong effect on me was 'Beachy Head' taken in 1997 by photographer Peter Marlow.  The picture on the left is a copy I found from Magnum Photos Online.  
Initially I thought it was just a landscape piece, but when I examined the text alongside I discovered that it had a very different meaning.. In an average year 20 people throw themselves off this cliff and commit suicide, this dramatically shocked me.
                                         At the time of shooting these photos Peter also
                                         managed to stop a woman from jumping off and                                              killing herself too.

After the Saatchi and a spot of lunch it was time to view one of my all time favourite photographers work, Guy Bourdin.  His work is on display at The Michael Hoppen Gallery which was in the same area as we were for the first visit.
I have always loved the work of this practitioner and researched him numerous times.  The gallery space was fairly small but still displayed some rare, limited edition pieces which I had never come across before, this made them really fascinating to view.
You can see some of the images featured in this exhibition on the Michael Hoppen Gallery Website but my favourite photograph was one I have never seen before called 'Photo France, July 1987'.

Guy Bourdin - Photo France, July 1987

Both of these exhibitions were free to enter and if you have the chance to visit them then I would definitely recommend it!