Source
Summer 2001

The Source leopard has adapted its spots to bring you a news section to keep you up to date with the burgeoning prize market and the movements of artists and photographers. Also in this issue we introduce for the first time a book review section to bring you discussion of the best of recent critical and photographic publications from around the world. John Duncan, after three years out on the road, takes stock of his experiences of the Portfolio Days. He gives an editor’s view of the relationship between Source and Irish photographers.

The theme of the family is frequently returned to in contemporary photographic practice. In both advertising and the media the image of the family appears either as an ideal to which people aspire or as a restrictive model that they cannot attain. There are also now many different versions of the family that do not conform to the basic plan. In this issue we publish a series of photographs by Martina Clawson, Ursula Burke and Joesph Duggan that examines life within the family and the image of the family itself.

Who is the author of a photograph and thus its owner? Ronan Deazley traces the attempts to frame an answer to this question made by the legislature and legal process. Photography has proved a troublesome object for those developing copyright law. As recently as 1997 Oasis and the Sun contested who had created the staged cover photograph for the album Be Here Now and the law seems no more settled than it was in the copyright (works of art) act in 1862.

Just as it has been hard to define the authorship of photographs it is difficult to stabilize the reactive chemistry of photography. Elizabeth Martin and Martin Barnes of the Victoria and Albert Museum describe the perils of photographic conservation and give some examples of contemporary practitioners whose work has an inevitably limited life-span.

Richard West poses the question, ‘What do photographs mean?’ and attempts to answer it by looking at the titles and captions they are given. Do the words we attach to photographs give us any idea how they relate to the world and has this relationship changed with the recent influx of photographs to the art gallery?

Source is a quarterly photography magazine, available in print and as a digital edition, published in Belfast, Northern Ireland. They publish emerging photographic work and engage with the latest in contemporary photography through news, thoughtful features and reviews of the latest exhibitions and books from Ireland and the UK. Their website brings together an archive of writing and pictures from the magazine alongside current features.¹