Jane Bown (Audio)

Interview with Jane Bown

Jane Bown has been a photographer for over 50 years, spanning from the end of the Second World War onwards.

She is known for photographing many famous faces, and has a refreshingly simple approach to her art. She works in black and white, without special lighting and prefers to not know anything about her subjects. She became known for take portraits within ten minutes and sounds understated and appears the same, approaching most shoots with no other equipment than the camera. She has captured some really iconic images of really iconic people.

She was interviewed on Woman's Hour a few weeks ago, and I have uploaded the interview here as an .mp3 for you to listen to or download.

She's really interesting to listen to, and you can see more about her, and her work:

• Jane Bown Gallery (Observer)



• Jane Bown (Wikipedia)



• Jane Bown (National Portrait Gallery)

World-Wide Moment

This looks an interesting project, though the time zones thing could be confusing.

Anyhow, could be fun.

I thought that this might be of interest for some of you. More details and photos from past World Wide Moments can be found at www.worldwidemoment.com. I hope some of you will participate! Here's the gist of it:

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In 18 days I would like to host a new World Wide Moment.

The code will be:

00:00_01.01.08-YTZ

That's midnight_January 1st, 2008-Your Time Zone.

Simply put: World Wide Moment is a large-scale photo experiment where everyone takes a photograph at the same moment.

So if you believe in this project and have suggestions for how to spread this idea to people in other countries, or to new people in the U.S. who have not participated in WWM-IV, please let us know!

Thanks!
-Brett Brownell aka Benji
Host/Creator WorldWideMoment
worldwidemoment@gmail.com
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Local Newspaper Publication

The TJ Hughes 'Hug' photo I posted about here has been published in the Sheffield Star.

I missed it myself, but have been told by others who saw it. I'm rather pleased!

Supertram in Motion

DSC_4924, originally uploaded by incurable_hippie.

Taken in the early evening on Wednesday in Sheffield city centre, in the rain.

Ninety Smokers by Dan Donovan

Dan Donovan undertook an interesting project. To create a photographic documentary of smoking in the run-up to the smoking ban. He photographed smokers, smoking in places where it would soon become illegal.

I undertook this project with the aim of taking a series of portraits of smokers in locations that will be affected by the smoking ban; to archive the final moments of their freedom to smoke publicly.
This collection of work isn’t about either promoting or vilifying the act of smoking; it’s intended to capture an honest representation of smoking culture in Britain pre-July 2007.
The act of smoking has been increasingly demonised over the last number of years and these portraits take in individuals from all over England, from every walk of life, who were prepared to make a visual statement of their objection to being represented in this negative way.
The people here are law-abiding citizens who would be committing a criminal offence if they posed for a photograph in the same location today.

Interesting extra:

On my travels I met up with two people who work in the field of mental health, Kate Parry in Oxfordshire and Steve Thompson in Derbyshire. Steve says Nicotine has been shown to reduce the side-effects of psychoactive medication – more than 90 per cent of people with schizophrenia smoke, and nicotine is being used by self-medicating sufferers. Steve has been challenging attempts to try and outlaw smoking for patients.

You can see his collection of ninety smokers, and read the story behind it on his website.