BOP22 with Daniel Meadows and Mark Power
BOP is like an annual pilgrimage for photographers and photobook makers.
Last year I photographed Daniel and Mark separately. This year it was great to photograph them together as they are both giants of the photography and photobook world.
When I take a photograph that really interests me I often write a little haiku. I write them in three lines of 5/7/5 syllables. They do not have to rhyme, they do not have to describe the photograph, they are simply what the image led me to write. I only allow myself 60 seconds to write it. It is about being in the moment of seeing the photograph, just as my photographs are made in the moment of seeing.
the sound of two songs
a brace of storytellers
singing visual
Daniel Meadows
I first met Daniel Meadows in 2013, when I visited him at his home to talk about photography. My wife Shona, a journalist and our daughter Jessica came too, and the day before we went him, we went to see JRR404, the bus that Daniel toured about in during the 1970s creating his project that saw him photographing ordinary people. We created a report about our visit which you can read by clicking here
Mark Power
During the few days before BOP I had been chairing the RPS Photobook Distinction Genre, and on the Friday spent sometime with the submissions as I prepared to write the feedback. I worked in what the RPS call the Resource Room, and whilst I was there I took a break from distinction submissions and looked at some of the books in the RPS collection in that room. Mark Power is possibly best known for his book ‘The Shipping Forecast’, but I spotted this book by him on the shelves: ‘The Sound of Two Songs’. The book is beautiful, and the images are just totally sublime, shot I think on a large format film camera. They reminded me of what I used to get out of my 5×4 camera.
Like David Hurn who I wrote about yesterday, Mark is a Magnum photographer. Last year I photographed him at BOP dancing with his dog who is called Kodak.
Like David, Mark was also was one of the Magnum photographers that Multistory and Magnum commissioned to create You can read more about the project at https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/open-for-business/
He was also a member of a photo agency that I will be writing about tomorrow, when I write about another photographer I met up with at BOP
- The Snowdrop Finale
- Test post
- Abstracts of Whatton Photobook
- Ginko009: Bristol Paintworks in May
- Ginko008: Bristol Docks in May
In a haiku world a ginko is a walk through nature observing
and as I ginko I make images of the things I notice
I then write a haiku in a moment as a response the images I make, that makes me stop to think
Finally I blog here about what the image and haiku make me think about
© Stewart Wall 2022
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