KT Lindsay: "Photography Born of Purpose". Oxford Artweeks 8th-15th May.

I have spent a huge amount of time recently preparing a collection for an exhibition I'm putting on for Oxford Artweeks. Artweeks is a brilliant annual visual festival held throughout Oxfordshire where local artists and crafty types open up their homes and studios to share their art. Over 400 exhibitions are made freely accessile to the general public, and this year I am one of them!

It's been an experience drawing together a themed collection and a lot of research was done on where best to get the prints from (Ilford) and how to optimize my prints for the best possible results. Mounts had to be custom measured and made (picturelizard.co.uk) for the frames I ordered (cargo.com), bios written and picture plaques authored and made (using foam board). It's all being hung tomorrow and I can't wait to see it!

The collection I have chosen to display is predominantly a series of black and white landscapes to illustrate the theme of conservation, the need to preserve and protect parts of our planet that have been and will continue to be under threat by our own actions. The collection is thus 'born of purpose', a compulsion to create images that tell the story of people and places in slivers of time that may be lost. Seeing the prints together, physically, for the first time will be incredible, and I hope to inject a bit of femininity into what is largely a male dominated area of photography.

All prints are available for purchase in limited edition of 10 from the exhibition venue or via my website.

My exhibition joins those of a number of my colleagues, other closet photographers, jewellery makers, and painters and will be on display from the 8th-15th May at 13 Banbury Road, Oxford.

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Photograph featured: Pine in Profile. Yosemite National Park, CA. 2009. 10 x 15 inches. £45.

Never Tell Them

A play by Stuart Lee is using a piece of my digital art for its playbill and is now on show all over Oxford in the lead up to the 2010 OxFringe Festival.



Never Tell Them
Winner Oxford Playhouse Short Play Competition 2008
Wed 24th - Sat 27th March, 9.30-10.30pm, New Road Baptist Church, Oxford
Tickets: £8/£6 from http://www.wegottickets.com/ (search 'never tell them')
Part of the OxFringe Festival, 2010

3 London exhibitions I plan to see before xmas

1. Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, The National Portrait Gallery, WC2
- Whilst there I'll also pop in to see the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2008
2. This Is War! Robert Capa at work, The Barbican Gallery, EC2
- Whilst I'm there I also want to see Gerda Taro: a retrospective and On the Subject of War: artistic responses to Iraq & Afghanistan
3. Francis Bacon, Tate Britain, SW1

Composite Photography

I've really been wanting to have a go at a 'levitation' image for a while, mostly influenced by Love Loren and Chrissy White (two amazing teen flickerites), and anitmethod.

Click on image to see bigger of view an alternate Large On Black.

Even though it is so fairy tale like there is a lot of me in this image, sometimes I think it is easier to express yourself through the surreal. I've been reading a lot about arabian fables lately, one in particular, 'The Indian Bird', influenced this, it kind of stuck in my head - the way a good fable is meant to. But other things are in there, but well, take from it what you will!

How did i do that......?
I used four images in total for this - three photographs (the bird, me and the cat, and the street scene), and one texture from Nichol Van. The street scene 'Alley' was found using flickr creative commons and was taken by damien_m_in_japan. The bird is an oldie of mine and the one of me and the cat was taken this morning.

I used photoshop's extract tool to dismember me and the pigeon from the photographs, and then really it was a case of tweaking and refining. I used Michelle Black's 'Even out and contrast' and 'Honey Glaze' as a starting point to bring all the colours together and I twiddled a lot with the layers, curves, selective colour, and also burned and dodged overly contrasty areas. Finally I added the texture (a bit like grey blotting paper) on multiply and that was that. This version is very desaturated, there's a more colourful version on my flickr site with the story to go along with it.

I'm sure that I'll come under quite a bit of criticism for this...it's not 'proper' photography, but sometimes there is more there than what you see through the viewfinder.

Oh, and hope you like the new look blog!

Photography Snobbery

An article appeared in the New York Times this week that annoyed me a little. In "Sepia No More" by Virgina Heffernan photography is classed as an art form that should be reserved for the Art College photographers who still shoot on film and post process in their darkrooms. Anything digital or that has been "photoshopped" is just not proper art. Heffernan particularly looks to Flickr and Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir (who's name she can't even spell) in her criticism. Stating that the whole of Flickr encompasses a certain common "style" (of digital manipulation) that is not considered a pure art form, of Guðleifsdóttir, this photographer she writes:

might have amounted to nothing in analog times, when elaborate deference to institutions, hard-won group shows and expensive years spent in unnoticed toil were the only way to success. But just as certain ne’er-do-well writers have found themselves in blogging, and failed filmmakers have taken to online video, these seemingly out-of-step artists have both invented and mastered the Flickr photograph. Other photographers have added still more levels of processing — including the otherworldly contrasts achieved with high-dynamic-range photography — to the quintessential Flickr image, and it’s becoming only more eye-popping and stylized.

And none of it looks like Diane Arbus or Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photographer many critics still consider the greatest of all time.

Well, blow me down with a feather, could digital photography perhaps be an art form in itself and it's photographers actually artists in their own right? I see Photoshop as tool, just like the paintbrush is the tool of the painter or the clay the tool of a sculptor. Arbus and Adams manipulated their pictures massively in the dark room, they didn't just come straight out of the camera. I don't see why I should be belittled for using a digital darkroom - it's simply more efficient. What's more what post-processing has enabled us to do is an abandonment of reality and I find that really interesting. Of course I don't consider myself an "artist" really, but through photography and photoshop, exhibiting on Flickr, I have found my means of artistic expression and creativity. It's just like publishing really, just because you get your work in a high brow journal / gallery doesn't mean it's the best piece of work in the world, just that some editor / gallery owner thought you were good. When you open up your art to the world, you open yourself up to the disapproval or acceptance of anybody and everybody and I get more through that. Oh well, each to the their own. Personally I don't consider a half-filled bag of sand being exhibited in the center of a big white room "art" (I'm still recovering from my last trip to the Hayward). All this art snobbery is a bit pretentious really!

Photography of the First World War

I have just noticed that this has made it to no.2 in Flickr Explore which is my highest ranking photo ever! I work a lot with WW1 poetry and images and I took this photo of a toy soldier reconstruction of a trench in the Flanders Fields Museum. The stretcher instantly made me think of Isaac Rosenberg's poem "Dead Man's Dump", a poem that I consider to be one of the most brilliant poems produced during the First World War.

I think the photography of this particular war is a very interesting topic. Of all the arts it was photography that failed to capture the battlefields of 1914-18. But I think of the subject - the sprawling mess stripped of colour and shape, literally nothing. Photography can not visualise emtyness. What was left was empty or perhaps it is more accurate to say what was left was full of emptyness. As Nash said "the void of war". Painters like Nash captured it better with thick paint, pigment heavily saturated with ocre and umber, a modernist representation of the swelling turbulent mass of the battlefield. May be this was because a more abstract medium was needed to try and capture the almost uncapturable nature of the war.

Phone a Glacier?

Today a unique piece of art was unveiled by Katie Paterson which invites views to phone a glacier - in Iceland - to listen to it's "death throes", live via a submerged microphone. Callers can hear the splashes, creaks and groans as great masses of melting ice sheer off and crash into the water.

The melting glacier, Vatnajokull, is Europe’s largest glacier.

What the water gave me

When I posted Let me just lie here up on Flickr I had many comments (counting 38 now with 28 favorites!!), I was pleased, then intrigued when three or four of them said that the photo reminded them of a painting by Frida Kahlo called What water gave me, asking me if it was a tribute to her. I am sorry to say that I had never heard of Kahlo or seen any of her work, so no. However, I hunted down this artist and painting using the mighty Google:


It seems like I am not the only one inspired by my foots reflection whilst taking a long soak!! However, I think that Kahlo thought a little more about it than me with my brief Eureaka moment (although I was inspired enough to actually get out of the bath into the cold, hunt down my camera and manover carefully back into position). In What water gave me Kahlo seems to be contemplating the many symbols of her life in the water of her bathtub. Her life was eventful, marked by a long series of physical traumas which left her unable to bear children and her right leg and foot disfigured, then limp, then eventually amputated. Herself and her husband, Diego Rivera (a fellow Artist), were active communist militants. She embarked on a series of affairs with both men (including the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky) and women, and thruogh her work she constantly refered back to her Mexican routes and culture.

In the water we are presented with her mother and father, her Mexican dress, an accident with the bus, a tower from New York that is rising from a volcano, and an injured bird are reflected in the water along with the toes of her feet. The busy composition is contained by the symmetrical rounded dome of the tub. Her feet and legs anchor the painting in reality, while the fantasy is colorful and dramatic.

Although often classed as a "surrealist" Kahlo always said: "They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality."

I like that.