Jo Spence

 

On Jo Spence, see the Wiki entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Spence

Deconstructing a Right Royal Image

I’ve been more or less aware of this photo for some while, but I only really looked at it sometime last year when I cam across an old copy of some mag at the time of Oor Willy’s marriage to his tart. I’v PSed away the text on the mag repro. It seems to me to be an image of great formal complexity. It may be my mucky mind, but it seems to me that it’s drenched in kinkery, viz:

• dominance/submission
• garment fetishism
• posing in the sense of I-see-myself-reflected-in-the-viewers’-gaze
• and, well … plain weirdness.

From the ages of the kids, it looks to have been made in the late 80s, I’d guess by Patrick Lichfield, though have been unable to confirm this by googling. I’m trying to look at it with a kind of double-vision: purely formally, in terms of symmetries, echoings and the breaking of these; also in terms of what is publicly known (or believed) of HMS Charleydi ‘s journey to the iceberg.

‘Salt of the Earth’ – Aesthetically Wonderful; Politically Toxic

For a trailer, see

This is an (aesthetically) marvellous movie on one of the world’s great photographic artists. I first knew of Selgado from an expo at The Photographers’ Gallery in the mid 80s of his astonishing photos of the Serra Pelada open-cast goldmine. For a while I’d been feeling that nothing new would happen, photographically …. his images were like nothing I’d ever seen ! Who would have thought that in the late 20th C men would labour, of their own choice, in conditions that Athenian Greeks would have recognised ! I’d never seen those photos at such a high enlargement, and I was astonished that their quality held out – then I realised that I shouldn’t have been surprised, because the negatives were 35mm format, which is, of course, the medium on which movies (until digi) were encoded.

Salgado has the most astonishing ‘eye’ for framing and composition, and a perfect sense of image tonality. His photographs have a kind of monumentality which, aesthetically, is very powerful – the closing part of this movie showed the political toxicity of this.