Raymond Moore | >Re-PHOTO

FotoArtFestival Diary: Back in June 2005 I was at the first FotoArtFestival taking place in Bielsko-Biala, Poland. This was an international festival with exhibitions featuring one photographer from each of 25 countries, including some of my post-industrial urban images from London. But the pictures in this post are some of the colour pictures I made during my visit to Poland on a compact digital camera.

I was also there to give a couple of talks. As well a presentation on my own work I also talked about the work of other photographers from the UK, including Raymond Moore, Tony Ray-Jones and some personal friends including the London-resident American John Benton-Harris, Paul Baldesare, Derek Ridgers and Mike Seaborne.

I hadn’t really anticipated the problem of translation, and although both festival organiser Inez and another translator did their best to translate my talks into Polish, it meant that the talks took more than twice as long with me having to wait between paragraphs for them to repeat my sentences in Polish.

The on-screen presentations which accompanied my talks consisted almost entirely of pictures. When I went back two years later I had prepared a presentation with key phrases and captions along with the pictures and a much shorter text for the translators. But for this occasion I had to edit my presentations on the hoof, leaving out or précising some whole sections to keep within the time allowed. But you can download the full versions (without images) online.

My talks, given in English but translated into Polish, must have gone down well, as I was invited back to speak again at the second FotoArtFestival. And John Benton-Harris was invited to show work at that, while the gallery in nearby Krakov (whose director was in my audience and who I had a long conversation with) put on a show of the work of Tony Ray-Jones.

After I returned home I published my FotoArtFestival Diary which is still on-line, with many of the pictures I took during my stay. I had a fantastic time there and it was particularly great to meet many other photographers there, including some of those whose work was also on show.

Here is an extract from that diary with more about the festival and the start of my ‘Thoughts from Bielsko‘ I wrote while there.

FotoArtFestival

The festival set out to invite the best photographers in various fields from around the world, and included some well-known names – such as Eikoh Hosoe, Ami Vitale, Boris Mikhajlov and Malick Sidibe, as well as many rising stars and a few of those no longer with us, Mario Giacomelli, Inge Morath and Robert Diament.

The 26 major shows represented work from 25 countries – just one photographer from each, with a group show of older Polish photo-reportage. It was truly an effort to be international, although concentrating on European countries, including Albania, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the Ukraine and of course the UK, as well Iran, Japan, Mali, South Africa and the USA. France and Switzerland were also represented, with a representative from Magnum and a presentation on the work of Werner Bischof.

Thoughts from Bielsko

Gatwick and Hell

I hate travelling, especially travelling by air. Endless waiting in arid lounges, surrounded by retail irrelevance, shops of pointless and unwanted items.

It’s an enforced spell of purgatory, with what must be the most infuriating announcements ever devised to punish the lost souls, “Please enjoy the facilities in the lounge” in an irritatingly banal false female voice. You realise Douglas Adams travelled this way.

Eventually we are allowed to go through the departure gate, for yet another spell of waiting until we can clamber into a bus to be driven across the apron to the waiting jet.

After take-off I try to see where we are heading. The first place I can definitely place is Canvey island on the Thames estuary where I was taking pictures a couple of months back.

Two hours later we are bumping down through the clouds and into Krakow airport. Fortunately this is so small it takes a relatively short time to collect my case and go through to meet the driver who is to drive me and another festival visitor, Marta Daho of Magnum, to Bielsko-Biala.

Life Imitates Art

Life imitates Art,

Art Imitates Nature.

Nature abhors a vacuum,

Hoovers suck.

Life? Well, sometimes it happens.

Always it happens, magic or shit.

Bielsko was brimming with magic.

I Translate

I translate

It rans late

And everything did run late, due to the tremendous enthusiasm of the audience to the presentations by all the photographers who had come to talk about their work. In a later post here I’ll post part of an introduction to my talk which I wrote in my hotel room in Bielsko-Biala, as well as some more pictures including some of the other photographers taking part in the festival. And I even did a little translating although the remnants of my ‘O Level’ French wasn’t really up to it.

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Ten years ago today – 22nd August 2010– I was standing on the Cumbrian coast at Silloth, my first visit to an area that I had previously known from the photographs of Raymond Moore (1920 – 1987) who had moved there in 1978 and spent the last years of his life there.

Ray was one of the first real photographers who looked seriously at my work – at a workshop at Paul Hill’s the Photographers’ Place in Bradbourne, Derbyshire, where I went to a series of three weekend workshops with him, and Paul Hill in 1977-8. He very much set me working in a far more disciplined way, investigating the areas which really interested and involved me rather than simply making pictures.

And of course I was highly impressed by his work and attitudes toward it. So much that there are a few pictures that I took in those years and a little after that are perhaps too clearly me trying to make a ‘Ray Moore’, though never really successfully. But over time I think I managed to integrate a little of his influence more successfully into my own work. I met him a few times in later years – and was able to send him some of my published work – but was shocked at his early death, and regret greatly that I never took up his invitation to visit him in Cumbria.

I wrote a piece about my experiences in those workshops for William Bishop’s Inscape magazine around 2000, under the title ‘Darbis Murmury‘ and ten years later put the text online with rather more pictures from them.

Raymond Moore was one of the first UK photographers to achieve wider cultural acclaim, with a major retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1981 – I think then the only photographer to be honoured in this way since Bill Brandt in 1970 (though that came there from MoMA in New York.) Since his death his work has largely disappeared from view (in part for legal reasons) and he had been forgotten. There are no dealers with his prints to push and maintain interest in his work. I gave a presentation on his work (and that of Tony Ray Jones) at Bielsko-Biala in 2005, but had to use the reproductions of his pictures without permission. My text there – which you can still download – ended:

The British photographic establishment seemed by the time of his death to regard him as an unfortunate and rather embarrassing episode that was best brushed under the carpet. Many photographers who knew him or have come across his work in the few slim volumes, myself included, still regard as a major figure in photography.
http://buildingsoflondon.co.uk/poland.zip

Ten years ago I was on holiday with friends, and the pictures that I took that day are more an illustration of that day out than a serious attempt at photography.

Tag: Raymond Moore

FotoArtFestival Diary – 2005

FotoArtFestival

Thoughts from Bielsko

Silloth 2010