If you’ve not yet taken a look at the pick of pictures from 2008 by Guardian photographers David Levine, Dan Chung, Linda Nylind, Martin Argles and Sean Smith, then sit down for a while and treat yourself. It isn’t a bad interface either, and if you get fed up with listening to the commentary you can go through the pictures at your own rate.
Last month I went to see Smith, whose work I particularly enjoyed in the Guardian slide shows, showing his work to fellow photographers at the Photoforum meeting in London, and I hope to get to this month’s meeting this Thursday. If you are a photographer and you’re in London why not come along. On the web site it describes itself:
“Running monthly on the second Thursday of the month, Photo-Forum, kindly hosted by Jacobs, is a place for working photographers to bring images, ideas, photo stories, approaches and work in progress for supportive debate and criticism.”
Jacobs is a photo store, often with some interesting second hand equipment and some fairly competitive prices on New Oxford Street close to Tottenham Court Road Station – opposite another large photo store that once used to get a lot of my custom, Jessops, but which seldom seems to stock anything I want nowadays. Certainly Jacobs does seem to have a much greater interest in professional photographers, and Photoforum is a good place to meet other photographers, particularly photojournalists, who are based in London.
Back on the Guardian pages mentioned above, you can also see the picture editors’ choice of images which appeared in their daily gallery during 2008. In some ways I found this a disappointing selection, although there are some excellent and dramatic images. What seems to be lacking in what they find of interest is subtlety and magic, two very important qualities in images that delight me. I can’t help thinking they don’t really deserve the photographers they have.
