Yesterday we hung our show, Taken in London, at the Shoreditch Gallery, part of The Juggler, a café in Hoxton Market – which, rather confusingly is not where Hoxton Market actually takes place. The street Hoxton Market with the Juggler is just north of Old Street, behind the Holiday Inn and on foot you get to it by turning right about ten yards up Pitfield Street, then first left. It’s an open pedestrian square and a very pleasant place to sit at the tables outside the Juggler on a sunny day with a tuna mayo roll and a bottle of Budvar or a coffee. The weather was right for it yesterday, but we were too busy for sitting around, though we did pause briefly for refreshment.
One of Paul Baldesare’s pictures for the 2005 show Café Life
The gallery has got a little smaller since I first hung a show there, the appropriately sited Café Life in 2005 – prints,paintings, drawings and photographs on that theme – with one end of the room being taken for storage, but it’s still a nice space, now basically two walls, each with enough space for around 20 double-hung 20×16″ frames, so ideal for a show by two photographers – myself and Paul Baldesare, though this time there were very few cafés in the pictures.
Oxford Circus, Paul Baldesare
Hanging where you, as here you have to drill holes and screw the frames to the wall with mirror plates, is really a job that calls for three people, and we had another photographer, Dave Trainer, to lend his professional expertise (as he told us during the day, he was once covered with Picasso’s paint while hanging one of his works.) Dave showed with us last year, again at the Juggler, in our show English Carnival.
From the series ‘Today I’m Someone Else’ by David Trainer in the show ‘English Carnival’
Getting forty or so pictures fixed in the right places wasn’t entirely plain sailing (the walls could be described as distinctly choppy to continue the metaphor) but eventually we were able to stick up the text and captions that I’d printed a couple of days earlier and stand back, and it didn’t look bad.
Although some of the work is shown on the exhibition web site, I’d decided that I wanted to include quite a few more recent pictures, and roughly two thirds of my pictures are now from 2009, including a couple from August.
Druids gather to celebrate the Spring Equinox, March 2009
Wedding die-in at Northwood Against War in Afghanistan, May 2009
The show continues until 31 Oct and the private view is on Thursday 8 Oct, 6.30-8.30pm – it would be good to meet some of you there.
Taken in London is a part of Photomonth 2009 The East London Photography Festival, and of the This Is Not A Gateway Festival 2009.