I guess there is something about an anniversary that gets an old historian a bit excited, but I can hardly contain myself at the moment, I think I need a mayday about VE Day. Tomorrow, me and the boys will be chatting to a vet and he's got nothing to do with animals. Then in a few weeks time the bloomin Mayor of Hammersmith is going to be on stage with me Parkinson stylie blathering about his time in the bell bottomed British navy. I've hit Ebay with a vengeance and got a load of tat to put on display. You have to question why someone has kept a box of matches from 1944 and even more so why someone would buy it. Well I'm sure they will come in useful if the lights go down. If you want to know what the world and his dog are planning for VE plus 60 then check out WW2 People's War. You know you want to.
#18 April 2005 | Comments (0)
Open Wound: Chechnya 1994-2003 photographs by Stanley Greene / Trolley Gallery, Redchurch Street, London E2.
At school I dropped geography for art, then chemistry for photography... Today I wish I could fully comprehend the effects and importance of geographical classifications and divides throughout history and the huge impacts and conflicts land has and does play in the super heightened political world we live in. Communication and technology can allow a voice of an occupied or silenced land or party to be heard, but it can also smother it.
Stanley Greene's photographs expel the air from my lungs, beautifully high contrast images of human spirit and the continuation of life shot in a uber stylised way; you would almost expect to see "CALVIN KLEIN ETERNITY" at the bottom of some of his portraiture. His subjects, in life and death, truly are models of the effects of Westernisation.
#18 April 2005 | Comments (1)