Review: Blood & Fire: Our Journey Through Vanley Burke’s History
Review of Vanley Burke’s Birmingham Festival 2022 exhibition Blood & Fire: Our Journey Through Vanley Burke’s History at Soho House Handsworth
Review of Vanley Burke’s Birmingham Festival 2022 exhibition Blood & Fire: Our Journey Through Vanley Burke’s History at Soho House Handsworth
Paradise 1974-2016 is David Rowan’s photographic requiem for John Madin’s Birmingham Central Library
Early in 2020 GRAIN Projects commissioned 11 projects from photographic artists to create work within communities across the rural English midlands.
Georgiou & Tolley’s Zersetzung: A Quantum Poem for Generation Z (The Concluding Part of the Magician’s Trilogy) an hour long single-channel sound installation, commissioned for Coventry Biennial 2021
Janine Wiedel’s “Vulcan’s Forge” a photographic project documenting the West Midlands’ traditional industries created between 1977 and 1979 is being shown at The Hive, Birmingham until 7th January 2021
I was lucky to be able to catch-up with mining heritage project worker and tutor Dr. David Amos to talk about Mine-Craft the Prequel: The Photographic Story of East Midlands Coal
In the early 1990s Germany documentary photographer Peter Bialobrzeski spent a year in the UK as an exchange student. He documented his travels and experiences in the country in a body of work which has now become the book “Give My Regards to Elizabeth”
Living in Birmingham and being interested in photography I have long been aware of the brilliant body of documentary photographic work produced by Pogus Caesar over the last four decades. However, it only through Kieran Connell’s excellent Black Handsworth which came out last year, that I became truly aware of his status as the premier visual chronicler of the 1985 riots which took place in that area of north west Birmingham. As such, when I found Café Royal Books were publishing Handsworth Riots 1985 a series of Caesar’s work documenting the event, I knew that I had to get a copy. Published almost 35 years to the day the riots began, the staple bound pamphlet in Café Royal’s trademark austere, black and white minimalism (resplendent in connotations of the best post-war British photo reportage publications) completely fulfilled my expectations. On a primary level what the photos selected for the volume convey to the viewer a sense at once of what rioting in a mid-1980s inner Birmingham suburb looked like, and how the area looked in …
Review and commentary upon Coventry Biennial’s screening of the artist’s film “Otolith 1” (The Otolith Group, 2003) in mid-August 2020.
Interview with the photographer Andrew Conroy about his South Yorkshire coalfield photography