museum

Rana Begum, No. 1367 Mesh

I first saw this backlit, as you see here, and didn’t think much of it, but as I progressed through the museum, catching views of it from different angles and in different light, I kept seeing new pictures of it.

Love’s End?

Last month we went to see the big Tracey Emin retrospective at the Royal Academy. The best work, for my taste, were the large paintings from her latest period, which she considers a kind of rebirth. For me, the earlier work was very much like reading a teenage girl’s private diary, full of adolescent anger at people who “just don’t understand me,” and extremely narcissistic (to be fair, private diaries probably are all mostly narcissistic, albeit not often shared publicly). I took a lot of pictures – here they all are in roughly reverse chronological order (click on any one of them to see them all full-sized):

Repetition

Staircase

from below and above

Lee Crowd

Although we had timed tickets for a Monday morning, upon entering the Lee Miller exhibition we were met by a scrum just to get close enough to read the introductory text. This continued, annoyingly, throughout the otherwise excellent and well curated exhibition, breaking Miller’s career into 11 phases. As we wanted to see it all, it took 2½ hours, patiently waiting for other viewers to move on before we could stand, briefly, in front of each image.

Museum Views (Koak)

Floaters

We visited Charleston in Lewes to see the Vanessa Bell exhibit. It was bookended by the Quentin Bell sculpture above and the Koak exhibit, below.

“The Dreamer (2025) presents a woman in suspension – self-contained, serene, and held in a peaceful dream state. Her body is sculpted in concrete, a material often associated with foundations and stability, yet here taking on a surprising tenderness and warmth. The figure reimagines Quentin Bell’s sculptural series of levitating women, and Louise Bourgeois’s arched figures, as an embodiment of powerful vulnerability and radical dreaming.”
– Ella Slater, from the brochure accompanying Koak, The Window Set.

Towner

Dial M for Museum

Not really there

Brighton Shop Fronts

I was in Brighton with my former classmates and Evoke/Provoke collective members for the private view of Views in Transition, part of the Brighton Photo Fringe. I had about an hour between a truly excellent set of presentations from CRUX: Landscape of Inequality in the afternoon and the beginning of the private view to walk around Brighton for the first time. To see the pictures below larger, click on any one of them (on the web, if seeing this in email click the post title, above, first).

Wrestler

The painting above, with embedded video was from an exhibition about a local man who escaped the mines by becoming a flamboyant wrestler. I can’t find any trace of it on the museum’s web site.

We also saw an interesting exhibition called The Valleys, with work by over 60 artists including Tina Carr and Annemarie Schöne, photographer Robert Frank, Josef Herman, photographer Bruce Davidson, and Ernest Zobole as well as introducing the work of collier artists and makers including Nicholas Evans, Harry Rodgers and Illtyd David.

© Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos/Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales

La Petite Ceinture

Almost a year ago, I visited a delightful park in Paris called La Petite Ceinture (the little belt), created on the remains of a disused little railroad circuit. Imagine my surprise to see this photo story at the Musée Réattu taken back when the railroad still ran.

Musée Réattu

Hunting for the Transcendence show at Vague, I came upon the Réattu Museum, its courtyard and windows on the river (Rhône). I came upon a well-known French photographer with whom I was not familiar, Jean-Claude Gautrand, who documented many important stories for the latter half of the 2oth century and into the 21st. Click on images below to see them larger.

National Museum

We visited the National Museum (of Art), Muzeum Narodowe. Once again I was more interested in photographing the spaces and the geometry than the art and artifacts. Click any of the images below to see them bigger.

Warsaw Rising

We visited a museum dedicated to the Warsaw Rising of 1944 (not to be confused with the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, when the segregated Jews revolted). In this case, as the Germans retreated westward and the Russians advanced from the East, the people of Warsaw rose up. As usual, rather than photograph the objects in the museum, I focused my camera on the space and, of course, found a reflection of myself to photograph as well.

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