Don’t close our library….save our NHS… no to war….they say cut back we say fight back… low pay no way… fair pensions for all… say no to racism… equal pay for equal work… no ifs no buts no education cuts…
What?
Renowned photographer Simon Roberts (official artist of the 2010 General Election) is coming to Salford to record the thoughts and images of local campaigners and activists.
Why?
Salford is home to the Working Class Movement Library – a unique collection that captures over 200 years of organising and campaigning by ordinary men and women who’ve wanted to improve their world.
We want to add to our collection by recording what YOU are doing now, as we suffer the biggest public spending cuts in a generation
And we’d like to show you a little bit about the history you’ll be joining.
When?
Saturday 19 May 2012, 1pm to 4pm
Come and talk to us about what you care about and bring along an object that sums up what you do or is important to your cause.
Simon will photograph or video you (it’ll be short and painless, we promise) and you’ll have a chance to find out what you have in common with campaigners in the past. For example:
Speaking out – Twitter helps people to quickly connect and have their say. Two hundred years ago you had to have your own printing press. Campaigners set up presses secretly in cellars to print their ideas in their own words, then had to dismantle them and move on before the authorities caught up with them.
Songs and slogans – Summing up ideas and boiling down messages is vital – in 1819, cartoonists and writers produced savage satires on the horror of the Peterloo Massacre. They didn’t circulate quite as fast as protest songs on YouTube do today, but they had the same impassioned impact.
Show don’t tell – Stunts like Wikipedia going blank for a day to protest against heavy-handed legislation might seem new, but in the 1830s Chartists held mock funerals to highlight their demands for parliamentary reform.
And there’s more – we have a rich collection of mugs, t-shirts, badges, photos, banners, songs etc etc
If you’re a campaigner come along and be inspired by your history.
Got something you can share straightaway? Add a picture to our Flickr site http://www.flickr.com/groups/1938946@N24/.
This event is part of Museums at Night (the annual festival that opens the doors of museums, galleries and libraries after hours). Simon Roberts is coming to the Working Class Movement Library to give a talk on the evening of Saturday 19th but has generously offered to use his skills to help us add new images and video to
our collection. This is a great chance to record what the people of Salford and Manchester are concerned about today.
The new issue of Boat Magazine has just launched with London as its selected city. The magazine includes a selection of my work.
W.M. Hunt – The Unseen Eye: A Life in Photographs and other digressions. Free talk at Somerset House as part of World Photo Organisation awards in London, 29th April 2012 at 17:30. More here.
Sandwell St George’s Day Parade, Birmingham, 2010.
After reading this article about restrictions on photographers’ around Olympic venues in yesterday’s Guardian, it reminded me of this cartoon by Steve Bell, which was commissioned by the organisation I’m A Photographer, Not A Terrorist.
Reeves furniture store in Croydon, South London, which was burnt down in last summer’s riots and became one of the defining images of the England riots. I took this photograph on 10th August 2011, the day the burnt out shell of the building was being demolished.
Today, Gordon Thompson was jailed for 11-and-a-half years for causing the fire. Read more here.
A photo-montage of the notices and messages posted by the Occupy London protesters around St Paul’s, between October 2011 and February 2012.
A French organisation launches a controversial ad campaign for photographers” rights. Read more in the BJP .
‘Photography and the art world’: debate organised by Intelligence Squared.
Wednesday 25th April, 2012, Saatchi Gallery
The discussion will begin at 7pm and finish at 8.45pm.
“In 2010 the artist-photographer Paul Graham delivered a blistering presentation to the MoMA Photography Forum in which he said that “there remains a sizeable part of the art world that simply does not get photography”. Intelligence² recently ran a debate on the topic: “Photography will always be a lesser medium than paint.” At the 2011 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize there was outrage from certain quarters that the documentary photographer Jim Goldberg should be on the same shortlist as Thomas Demand and Elad Lassry.
So why is it that there is still this complicated, rivalrous relationship between the worlds of art and photography? Why is photography still referred to in a semi-derogatory way? What is it about photography that makes it, for some people, inherently of less worth when held up against other art mediums? Are photographers such as Walker Evans and Diane Arbus really lesser artists than their painter contemporaries, Mark Rothko and Ellsworth Kelly respectively?
This event, organised to launch the Saatchi Gallery’s major photography exhibition Out of Focus, comes at a time when the world of photography is going through one of its richest and also most challenging moments. Traditional boundaries between various territories within the world of photography – fashion, documentary, advertising and art – are blurring into one another in unexpected, exciting and not always tension-free ways; in some people’s eyes ‘straight’ photography is being usurped by conceptual photography; and with that, even the labels ‘artist’ and ‘photographer’ are the subject of debate.
During this discussion photographers Mitch Epstein and Hannah Starkey will join writer Geoff Dyer and curator Susan Bright to explore the relationship between art and photography. They will attempt to define what it is that is unique about photography and the creative act of making a photograph, and enlarge the way we view the world of visual art.”
Always nice to discover a random drawing by my daughter saved on my iPhone.