Saturday 5 May 2012

Exhibition – Jane Bown - Exposures


Bown Exhib
There is a link here to the Guardian interactive pages showing the images and video from the exhibition.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/interactive/2009/oct/22/jane-bown-photography
This was a very enjoyable exhibition covering the decades since 1949 when Jane Bown  had her first portrait printed in the Observer. I must have seen a lot of these early ones. The Observer was the Sunday paper of choice in our house when I was growing up and I used to make a point of looking at all the pictures even though the text didn’t interest me.
The accompanying video to the exhibition made it clear how simply Jane Bown worked, black and white film, available light, f2.8 at 1/125sec. With subjects as diverse as Lucien Freud and the Queen, she was able to engage them all to produce stunning portraits, some formal,(Orson Welles) others relaxed and playful (Bjork) This was a complete contrast to last week’s exhibition and a valuable insight into journalistic portraiture. especially those subjects who were photographed in context, Francis Bacon, Henri Cartier Bresson, Ninette de Valois, Jacob Epstein, which tell you so much more that a simple head shot.
Winchester Photographic Society Exhibition
A very large range of photographic subjects were covered by this exhibition, some stunning black and white portraits, wonderful wildlife and some nice landscapes. It’s a shame that HDR software seems to predominate the colour landscapes but I hope that as a gimmick it will soon pass. I think it makes everything too samey. That is a discussion for another forum. On the whole I enjoyed the work shown. A link to the Society’s website where some of the images are on display: http://www.winphotosoc.co.uk/site_1/index.php

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