I tend to arrive at his office with a tight edit because I’ve usually been working on a very specific subject over many years, and throughout that period I’d be constantly re-editing and re-sequencing the work”. Of his relationship with Smith, Power says: “Although we’d worked together before on my book edits he’d be the first to acknowledge that I’m usually pretty tricky to deal with. The subsequent book of Power’s work on the Dome, ‘Superstructure’, was to be the first in a long collaboration with Stuart Smith, a well-respected book editor and publisher who, having worked for many years as a book designer, set up his own company Gost Books, in 2013 to produce and publish artists books.
In fact, some of the most sought after photobooks are these very albums… often printed in editions as small as ten or twelve, with copies given to the architect, the builder, the mayor”. First viewing it on a one-day assignment, he subsequently gained access to the site, by persuading the company behind the project of the Nineteenth Century standard of photographing large scale public buildings ”I was making the point that back then it was normal practice for a single photographer to follow the process of a build from beginning to end. Power’s interest in documenting man made environments began in 1996 with his project on the construction of the Millennium Dome. The work in the Lab followed this structure and alongside the Lab, short experimental workshops were held for conference participants, under the guidance of Smith and Power, to engage with these same tasks applied to a pool of ‘man and technology’ themed images from Magnum’s archive. At its heart were three days themed to reflect the different tasks of the editing process: Editing, Sequencing and Narrative. Further historical context was provided by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Man and Machine, a book project that resulted from a commission by IBM in 1967 for the photographer to explore human relationships with technology around the world. The Lab itself was structured around the architecture of the conference and the book making process. It also used the methodology of book editing to explore the bigger question of why we select certain images over others, and the means by which we sequence photographs to build narrative. This project was conceived as a practical demonstration of the collaborative creativity between Power and Smith as they worked to meet this specific challenge.
Just because I was getting paid for doing it didn’t mean I took it less seriously, or made less valid work. Power is vocal about the importance of his commissioned work in general, how it sits comfortably alongside his self-generated work, and specifically about its use as material for this project, “I felt it should be a celebration of the work I’d made, all on commission, to show that it’s possible to make your own work under such circumstances.
#Sequential photography archive
Magnum photographer Mark Power and director of Gost Books, Stuart Smith, worked through Power’s archive of twenty-one years of photographs made on construction sites and in factories, reassessing the work and producing a new narrative for potential publication. Last month in Lisbon, Magnum Photos collaborated with BCG Henderson Institute to organise a five day Live Lab on book editing that presented the creative process of making a new body of work within the context of a conference, the House of Beautiful Business, whose programme explored man’s relationship to technology. ‘Don’t touch it any more,’ we exclaim, ‘now it is perfect.’ Not everybody, I admit, is quite so careful over the arrangement of flowers, but nearly everybody has something she wants to get ‘right’.”Įxcerpt from Ernest Gombrich’s, The Story of Art.
#Sequential photography Patch
We just feel– a patch of red here may make all the difference, or this blue is all right by itself but it does not ‘go’ with the others, and suddenly a little stem of green leaves may seem to make it come ‘right’. “Anybody who has ever tried to arrange a bunch of flowers, to shuffle and shift the colours, to add a little here and take away there, has experienced this strange sensation of balancing forms and colours without being able to tell exactly what kind of harmony it is she is trying to achieve.
0 kommentar(er)
