'Ways of Looking is a new festival of photography in Bradford and runs throughout October 2011.'
Ways of Looking is free photography festival that as a class we got to visit and look at the photography and art exhibited.
We met at the National Media Museum
I started at the National Media Museum
He photographed the architecture of conflict, structures built by agencies of the economic-military complex for the purposes of showing war in an efficient way.
He photographed landscape, observation, control and history.
Inspired at first by landscape of Northern Ireland
Donovan's work was displayed as large images, with a white border and black frames.
(Sketch of layout below)
Underneath his images he had a description of each, also the company the images were printed through.
Donovan's images were military architecture that is designed to observe and control. The maze was designed to confuse inmates, not an actual maze but seems like one.
Not only did he display his work with very large images he also put the images into books Maze I and Maze II which are available to buy.
At the age of 20 Donovan joined Magnum he wanted to be part of an organisation and not isolated from other photographers. He was uneducated and only knew of one photographer.
Wylies likes to call his work 'conceptual documentary'.
To shoot Maze I and II it took a year and 100 days of shooting he wanted to show the repetition of control and bring the system out of the maze one machine to another.
When looking at the images I wondered as to why the majority looked the same but this was the point he was trying to get across. They are different images or different areas in the 'maze' but looks more or less the same because the way it was built and designed. To express this more so Wylies took the images at the same angle.
I really enjoyed looking at this work as it has a hidden depth even though they look the same they aren't and he was photographing his own history.
'These are pictures, visual images, and only by engaging the viewer visually do they resonate enough to inspire the thought and contemplation they should- about history, about geopolitics, about visual representation, about what we do to each other' Gerry Badger
The other photographer’s work I viewed was Daniel Meadows.
When you entered his exhibiting area he had a wall with a collage of images on a canvas fabric. I really like this as it showed his collection of work in one area so it was like a program for the rest of his exhibition. It had a collection of things such as letters, photographs, flyers, magazines, receipts, notebook pages and newspaper clippings. It was like a collage of his life.
'Daniel is a photographer, documentarian, digital storyteller and unofficial co-founder of a uniquely British photography movement'. Greg Hobson.
In 1973 Meadows began a journey across England
Aged 21, Daniel bought a 25 year old double Decker bus for £360.20. He removed the seats to make space for a darkroom and a living area.
He used a bus as a darkroom and developed the images after taking them and gave them free to the people he took it of.
Meadows spent 14 months taking his
Greame Street studio philosophy on tour aroundEngland
Greame Street studio philosophy on tour around
He revisited the people in the 90's and took another image. So then they were able to see the difference from 20 years ago when he first started his project. Meadows had no information about the people who was in the previous images, he basically advertised and put up the images and waited for the people to contact him one of the ways was putting his images in Hartlepool Mail the news paper. (Image below of advert in Hartlepool Mail news paper).
By revisiting the people from the first project it made it much more personal not to him but the people who was in the images. Some images had people missing from where they had passed away or where children had grown up to adults.
Meadows displayed his work as very large prints, black frame with no borders and were obviously done with black and white film.
He also had a slideshow with the first images taken then the 20 years later images, so you could compare the difference which I personally feel this made his exhibition, as it showed more of a purpose and more depth behind his first concept.