These Are the Sounds of Film Photography

The rather amazing gimlet eye of Norman McBeath discovered this and as he and I and many other friends and photographers spent most of our lives with these sounds he thought it worth sharing. If you never visited the original Photographers Workshop or had your own darkroom this will bring back memories, if not this might seem a bit pointless but to all those old enough to have enjoyed the days of darkroom work this will have you sighing.

It’s a 1-minute tour of the different sounds (and sights) that are part of the analog photography process, from opening a new box of film to hanging up film strips to dry after developing them. from Robert Marshall

http://petapixel.com/2015/11/22/these-are-the-sounds-of-film-photography/

the black and white darkrooms, Photographers Workshop, Oxford 1982

The gallery and finishing area Photographers Workshop Oxford 1982

Photographers Workshop 1982 front door

enlarger, black and white darkroom, Photographers Workshop, 1982

 

 

UNESCO 2015 International Year of Light

No I didn’t know there was a year of light either, funded by UNESCO or anyone else. It was my good friend Norman McBeath that brought this to my attention. He and Robert Crawford have had a number of collaborations, this is the most recent

LIGHT BOX

Commissioned by the University of St Andrews for the UNESCO 2015 International Year of Light and launched at the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 23 February, Light Box is an artistic collaboration between the poet Robert Crawford (whose biography of TS Eliot was Radio 4’s Book of the Week recently) and photographer Norman McBeath, who has over sixty portraits in the collections of the National Portrait Galleries in London, Edinburgh and Canberra.

Light Box celebrates light in all its aspects – solar, sacred, scientific, nourishing, and poetic – with Robert Crawford’s haiku juxtaposed with with black and white photographs by Norman McBeath. The relation between poems and pictures is often teasingly oblique: neither simply illustrates the other. Instead, they ‘resonate’ together, each enhancing the other.

Exactly 150 years ago the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell published his most influential paper on electromagnetism (a paper crucial to Einstein). Maxwell had a scientific instrument called a ‘light box’. Nineteenth-century scientists sometimes wrote of light ‘resonating’. This new Light Box was produced after the poet and the photographer met leading physicists who work in optoelectronics.

Designed and typeset in Warnock by Robert Dalrymple, Light Box  is published by Easel Press as a twenty-eight leaf set, in a limited edition of ten, signed on the colophon by poet and photographer. The paper measures 394 x 381mm and is presented in a black buckram archival-quality solander box with silver gilt title. A digital version of Light Box can be viewed through this link https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/digitalhumanities/node/195

Norman McBeath at the British Library

That great Scot Norman McBeath has alerted us to the aquisition of a body of work he has completed with the poet Robert Crawford. This is from The British Library website 

Photogravure © Norman McBeath

The British Library is delighted to announce it has acquired the first English verse translation of Crichton’s Latin poem. The book is a new collaboration between the poet and academic Robert Crawford and the photographer and printmaker Norman McBeath. The source of the text is taken from the two volume anthology of Scottish-Latin poetry Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum (1637), a copy of which is held at the Library at shelfmark 1213.a.7. Robert Crawford’s impressive translation will hopefully generate wider interest in this sadly neglected poem. The poem is accompanied by eight evocative photogravures by Norman McBeath which perfectly capture the enigma and splendour of that fascinating city.

Venice is published by the Edinburgh based Easel Press in an edition of twenty copies and will be available to consult in the Library’s reading rooms shortly.

– See more at here

Norman McBeath – Photographer

This is part of our Photographers Workshop alumni series. I have known Norman for nearly 30 years and only ever as a photographer although there are rumours that he had a life before he picked up a camera although I would guess it was never as much fun as it has been since he did. Norman was one of the many people who came to our original incarnation at The Photographers Workshop where we hired darkrooms and taught people how to develop and print and how to be a photographer. As I have said many passed through our doors in the 25 years or so that we operated as a darkroom hire centre and some became professional photographers. Norman went from trade to art. Norman did a lot of work for various publishers and the university but his heart was always in the art sphere of photography. He moved to Edinburgh and there worked exclusively as an artist whose first medium was photography. This is what he has to say.

Professor Richard Dawkins, ethologist and evolutionary biologist ©Norman McBeath

My life changed forever after I came across The Photographers’ Workshop in Oxford. This happened twenty-five years ago, when I’d just moved to Oxford after seven years living overseas and at a time when I wanted to give up my teaching career to become a photographer. It was perfect timing and the perfect place – lots of very friendly, helpful people and a huge open-access darkroom where I could learn about printing and processing and so start to hone my skills as a photographer. Keith Barnes, who ran the place, was one of the first people I met there and he has remained a very close friend ever since.

There were always interesting prints being produced at the Workshop but there’s one which I watched appearing in the developing tray which I’ll never forget. It was probably the first really top-quality print I’d ever seen and I thought it was wonderful – the incredible range of tones, the deep blacks, the quality of the image and the powerful balance of the composition looking up at a military helicopter coming in to land. A month later I came across that same picture. This time it was the cover of one of the Sunday magazines and I learned that the person who had taken it and who had been gently rocking it into existence under the red light that day was Stuart Franklin, former President of Magnum.

 People have always fascinated me so right from the start I was drawn to reportage photography, then portraits after I’d had more experience. I worked a lot for the University of Oxford and Oxford University Press as well as covering glitzy events and parties for Harpers & Queen magazine in London. Although working in such different environments, a lot of the skills involved were very similar – the ability to be unobtrusive, to gain peoples’ trust quickly and to be ready at just the right moment.

Princess Margaret and Dame Elizabeth Taylor ©Norman McBeath

Baroness Margaret Thatcher ©Norman McBeath

 Dame Beryl Bainbridge ©Norman McBeath

My work at the university in particular brought me into contact with a lot of well known people which in turn led to me devoting more time to portraits. The National Portrait Gallery in London now have forty-four portraits of mine in their permanent collection. (http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp10633/norman-mcbeath). The Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh have fourteen works in their collection and two other portraits are in the Australian National Portrait Gallery’s collection in Canberra.

 

 Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger ©Norman McBeath

Sir John Tavener ©Norman McBeath

Things change though and about ten years ago I moved to Edinburgh – rather sad to leave so many close friends and such an interesting place as Oxford but at the same time very much looking forward to the challenge of new circumstances and living in another beautiful and characterful city. But I have to admit I was completely unaware and unprepared for the impact that the digital revolution would soon have on photography – clear evidence of which was the near bankrupting purchase of two new Leicas shortly before the move. I had thought these cameras would serve me well for the rest of my working life. However, not only had I failed to realise how soon they would be superceded but (apart from the lenses) they turned out to be the most unreliable cameras I’ve ever had.

 The new environment of Edinburgh had a huge impact on my life and work linked, in many ways, to a curious parallel with my time at the Photographers’ Workshop in Oxford. This time my epiphany was the result of contact with another open-access studio, Edinburgh Printmakers, a printmaking studio with a world-wide reputation in fine art printmaking. Here I discovered the incredible beauty of photogravures – one of the earliest techniques for printing photographs, relying on inked metal plates pressed onto dampened, hand-made paper using a traditional etching press.

 Photogravure – Ibis ©Norman McBeath

 I have recently collaborated with two leading poets: Plan B (Enitharmon Press, 2009) with the Pulitzer prize-winning poet and former Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Paul Muldoon and Simonides (Easel Press, 2011) with Robert Crawford, Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews. Both these collaboration have been exhibited as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival. Simonides is due to be exhibited at Yale University in September.

 I had a photograph showing, as an invited artist, at this year’s Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition in London and currently have four photographs showing in an exhibition called  Cast Contemporaries at Edinburgh  College of Art as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival. The next thing is a trip in mid-September to Yale with the poet Robert Crawford  to give a talk about our Simonides exhibition which will be showing there until October.

Norman McBeath 2012

Although Norman is serious about his work, his art, he also has, as anyone who knows him, a lighter, fey side that is full of humour and joy. When I speak to past clients about their time at the original Workshop they often comment on Norman’s explosion of laughter that could be heard above the excellent tunes we were always playing. Here are some from the section on his website called ‘Documentary”

Edinburgh ©Norman McBeath

Spider Boy, Paris (from ‘City Stories’) ©Norman McBeath

St. Mark’s Square, Venice ©Norman McBeath

Here are a couple of related posts about Norman’s exhibition and book Body Bags

https://oxfordschoolofphotography.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/norman-mcbeath-edinburgh-arts-festival-body-bags-simonides/

https://oxfordschoolofphotography.wordpress.com/2011/07/21/exhibition-by-norman-mcbeath-edinburgh-arts-festival/

You can see more of Norman’s work on his website here

Chloe Dewe Matthews photographer

The ever eagle eyed Norman McBeath took time out from his hectic schedule of cornering the market in portraits of poets to recommend this photographer he had unearthed. As the last post was about rising stars in photography I thought we should add our own views and although I knew nothing about Chloe I was very pleased to see she once was at college in our home town of Oxford. This link for The Ruskin School of Art heralds her as one to watch, so maybe we are onto something.

Her images fit perfectly into a way of seeing that I find absorbing and beguiling, she reminds me of Nadav Kander in her approach although I do feel she is much more about people than atmosphere as many of Kander’s work exhibit.

The Telegraph featured Chloe as one of The five most promising new artists of 2011: in pictures

and The Guardian had this to say

“The 29-year-old documentary photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews was a few months into an overland trip from China to the UK in 2010 when she stopped in Naftalan, Azerbaijan. She had heard about a sanatorium where locals – since the days of Marco Polo in the 13th century – have sworn by the therapeutic benefits of bathing in sludgy crude oil heated to 37C and she thought it might make a diverting subject for a portfolio of pictures. Dewe Mathews says, “I remember thinking, ‘Would this interest anyone at all? Well, I might as well just do it anyway.'”

Validation was not long in coming: in June last year, she was signed to the photo agency Panos Pictures; then, in November, her series Caspian, including images from Naftalan, won the 2011 international photography award run by the British Journal of Photography. More enduringly, she now had a blueprint for a lifetime’s work: “I was away for nine months, but I realised it could be a long-term thing, almost a recce for my career.”

Dewe Mathews is smart and assured, and her approach is fearlessly single-minded: for example, she crossed Asia and Europe entirely by hitchhiking. “If you’re on a bus the whole time, you have that lovely staring-out-of-the-window thing,” she says, “but it’s not the same as going from one person’s car with all sorts of funny things hanging from the mirror and them telling you their stories. It makes for a much more fertile atmosphere.”

She returns to Russia this month to continue the Caspian series and will exhibit the new photographs next October at the 1508 Gallery in London. This time, however, she has been forced to make arrangements for the transport. “It will be too cold to stand out on the road,” she sighs, genuinely disappointed. “But I’m going to do couch surfing, so hopefully I will hear stories that way.”

I suggest you go to her website and see a selection of remarkable images, here is the link

Norman McBeath – Edinburgh Arts Festival – Body Bags / Simonides

I was talking to Norman today, he is a great friend and was an invaluable contributor to life at The Photographers Workshop when we had darkrooms and studios for rent. In recent years his star has risen in Edinburgh where he lives and works as a fine art photographer. He said, as you do, “my exhibition is next to Anish Kapoor’s” it is possible that he didn’t quite use those words because he is Scottish but any sentence that includes “my exhibition and Anish Kapoor” is bound to make me sit up. So I asked how his show had been going and he said really well and that The Scotsman Newspaper had given it a 5 star review so here is that review for those of you that enjoyed Norman’s laughter and good sense, nice to know him when he was a struggling nobody! This link is a downloadable pdf

090811 The Scotsman Review p10-11

and because I doubted the authenticity, not really, of the article Norman sent me this.  Here is a link to our previous post about this exhibition

 

 

Exhibition by Norman McBeath – Edinburgh Arts Festival

Norman McBeath, one time photographer in residence in Oxford and now based in Edinburgh has a photographic exhibition starting next week as part of the Edinburgh Arts Festival.

Yoam. © Norman McBeath

BODY BAGS / SIMONIDES
FEATURING PHOTOGRAPHS BY NORMAN McBEATH AND TEXTS BY ROBERT CRAWFORD
Thursday 4 August– Friday 9 September 2011
Daily 10am-5pm
Studios C3 & C4, Edinburgh College of Art, Main Building
Free admission

Visit the gallery website for more information

“Simonides’s best works are body bags. Zipped into them are what is left of human lives. This installation is a collaboration between one of the country’s leading poets, Robert Crawford, and the highly acclaimed photographer Norman McBeath.

The installation connects writing from over 2,000 years ago with contemporary wars in the Middle East and with acts of remembrance. Raising questions about the status of a so-called dead language, it also invokes issues such as counterterrorism measures and ordinary people’s experiences during conflicts.

It features black and white photographs paired with Scots (and English) translations of epitaphs by the ancient Greek poet Simonides. These epitaphs were written for civilians and soldiers killed during the Persian Wars (492–449 BC) in celebrated battles such as Thermopylae and Salamis. The texts have a short, sometimes fragmentary eloquence. Classical sculptures from Edinburgh College of Art’s historic cast collection feature in the installation.

Links between ancient and modern are highlighted and given original and elegant expression through the exquisite black and white photographs by Norman McBeath. These square-format, contemplative studies are not war photographs but scenes from everyday life – details of which thread through much of Simonides’s work. They deliberately avoid any descriptive or literal link to the texts – the relationship between photograph and epitaph is evocative and tangential. A beautifully produced hardback book, Simonides, containing 25 black and white photographs and paired texts will be available.”

There is a beautiful book accompanying this exhibition