Oxford and the world

Oxford Photographers, Exhibition at the Mathematical Institute, Andrew Wiles Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Oxford, 2 – 24 May 2018

www.oxfordphotographers.org email: oxfordphotographers@gmail.com

Eleven photographers from the Oxford Photographers Flickr group took over the white irregular downstairs space at the Mathematical Institute as part of Artweeks for the third time this year. An ideal exhibition space, when it is not full of students eating their lunch.

A non-selling, non-curated exhibition making use of pre-existing A0-sized display panels. Main organiser Alexander Gordón acknowledged a fairly upbeat view of the world among the photographers: a lot of landscape, city architecture and little or no portraiture – apart from his own black and white brides.

Oxford featured heavily. Particularly nice, Judith Taylor used feathery shades of grey for still life (flowers) and abstract architectural compositions of aspects of the Ashmolean, Blavatnik, Brookes and University College Boathouse. (Judith A. Taylor www.fineartmonophotography.net)

Duncan Taylor – no relation – created striking double exposure images, for example of the Herms, the ‘emperors’ heads’, opposite Blackwell’s bookshop. John Duncan captured tourist photographers crouching and stretching and posing to snap the sights.

Then there were images of wherever photographers go when they are not here: Karen Morecroft (www.karenmorecroft.com) produced a sequence of bleakly beautiful colour pictures of Iceland, waterfall, marsh, site of the former outdoor parliament and a 1238 battle from the Age of the Sturlungs. She has been to Iceland six times to attend the music festival but did not exhibit her snatched image of Björk in a butterfly mask.

David Hallett (www.theunrealisticphotographer.com) in similar vein presented several starkly contrasting views of the Isle of Rum from Laig Beach on Eigg. His preoccupation with liminal landscapes, coastal scenes, both black and white and colour, taking in projecting stones on Marloes Sands, Pembrokeshire.

Howard Stanbury (www.stanbury.org) is also in a similar vein in his ‘Postcards from Dreichness’ series, taken in Orkney and the Hebrides, finding beauty in dreariness. More distinctive the flamelike red and yellow stone surfaces and light effects in pictures taken in Upper Antelope Canyon, Arizona, a slot canyon on Navajo land. Colours somewhat helped on their way.

Philip King (www.flickr.com/photos/muonphil) contributed Light Reading, a sequence of text images for the company Words by Design. Darrell Godliman had also worked on reflected multiple images of buildings from Birmingham and Bangkok. (www.dgphotos.co.uk)

Mark Crean and Kevin Taphouse also participated in the show though they seemed to have gone before the end.

Not all professionals they have made not so bad a stab at it.

The search for a unified aesthetic, forty-seven by thirty-three inches, a view of the world displayed in a clean well-lights place, is a challenge to which these eleven voyagers have risen. I for one can’t wait for next year.

© Copyright Roger Howe 2018