This weekend I went down to London with a group of friends, we went to see a performance in Camden, but I thought that while down there I would drag them along to the Tate Modern….along with Carsten Holler’s slides, there was a UBS photography exhibition on, an area of the arts in which I have always been interested by. It focused on the realist photography of the 1990s, a time when photography became a much more established art form. The range of photographs exhibited showed the hugely diverse range of options available with the camera, there were clearly staged photographs hung right next to snap shots of everyday life, moments in time that were captured perfectly and made into works of art. But even though there was such a wide range of pieces each photograph I saw interested me. The colours of Andreas Gursky’s 99 cent drew me right into the picture, the thought that he saw something so interesting in this view that he decided to share it with the art world, a situation many people all over the world experience everyday, yet it was Gursky who saw its potential.
This work is connected with one of the photographers we were looking at during the seminar, Pedro Meyer, through his photography he tries to produce something miraculous from the everyday. Here you can see how Gursky has seen the potential for art in a supermarket, so much so that his photograph has ended up as part of the UBS collection.
Whilst walking round the exhibition I started thinking about the seminar we had on digital aesthetics, and how we were discussing the disposability of photography today, how it was made available to the public through Kodak’s Box Brownie camera. All in all it inspired me to carry out a little experiment, I wanted to see the difference between the types of photographs I would take depending on the camera I was using. So I went shopping and bought myself a throw away WOW camera from Kodak, for the rest of that day I decided to use my disposable camera rather than my digital camera, and the next day I would switch back. I just wanted to see if there was a huge difference between the photos taken with each camera….unfortunately I will have to share my findings next time as the WOW camera is currently being developed. The first set back of more old fashioned photography I guess.
