Gavin Watson grew up in a typical working class overspill town that surround London. Stumbling into photography aged 14, becoming a skinhead at 15, he inadvertently documented the real, social, interracial and musical scene behind the media’s right-wing portrayal of this demonised youth culture of the late 1970s and 1980s… Read More >
The South of France, or as it is commonly called today, the Côte d’Azur, is little more than a cultural invention of the twentieth century. In fact to be ‘common’, in its far less eloquent Dantean volgare or vernacular, might well become its future epithet given the trashy and often glitzy lifestyle-led environment it has created over the last fifty years. Increasingly, Saint-Tropez has become a brassy Benidorm for the rich; less glamour than clamor. In effect it owes part of its… Read More >
“You press the button. We do the rest” was Kodak’s slogan when Kodak No. 1 came on the market in 1889. Black is the artists’ garb. The 21th Century is a purgatory for specialists, skills, and the innocent object on the photographic paper. From all sides, the death of the medium is proclaimed, and images in galleries document first and foremost the disappearance of their own genre. Photographers no longer embark on expeditions through the streets, but wander for hours through Google Street View, like the Canadian artist Jon Rafman, taking screenshots of wondrous places that the Google camera has captured inadvertently. The avant-garde of photography doesn’t need to leave the house. And meanwhile, since everyone has a digital camera or smartphone, there has never been so much photographed by so many people and uploaded to the Internet. Photos are the new text. … Read More >
Take your pick from the latest crop of fashion magazines: Open an issue of your choice and flick through its pages. Chances are you will see what I see — white girls everywhere. On the covers, on the catwalks, in the shoots, in the ads — the color of fashion is indeed blindingly, utterly white. Try to understand why and you will most… Read More >
Around 1905 the chemist and photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky devised a plan to systematically document the Russian Empire using color photography. He received the necessary materials, a railway car refitted especially for the enterprise and a permit to enter prohibited areas from Czar Nicholas II himself. The photographs, created between 1909 and 1915, aimed to give Russian school children a better understanding of the history and culture of their… Read More >
Ultramarine is a pigment that for hundreds of years had a very special status among artists’ materials. Traditionally ground from the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, it can produce the most intense, deep, cool shades of blue. It also has a particular translucency that gives paintings a brilliance that no other pigment can provide, and, crucially, it is a stable, which means that it does not deteriorate or fade easily. This exotic pigment has been used by European artists since the thirteenth century and for a long time was the most extensive and desirable blue. Read more >
