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Cover

Source
Winter 2010: Issue 65
English

Edited by John Duncan and Richard West.

Softcover
84 pages
260 x 240 mm
2010
ISSN 13692224

In keeping with the tenor of this issue the four artists featured have almost nothing in common. As Mari Mahr explains in her extended interview with Duncan Forbes, her work involves the layering of different photographed objects that relate to her memories of people and places. Anthony Haughey has been photographing abandoned building sites left behind by the collapsed Irish property market, a symptom of the wider crisis in the Irish economy. Meanwhile, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin have been commissioned by Belfast Exposed to make work in response to their community photographic archive. They examine evidence of how it has been handled: recovering from contact sheets the marks and scribbles of previous users, and behind stickers a collection of latent, round ‘dot’ images. Together this work shows the vitality and diversity of contemporary photographic practice and its capacity to approach any subject, be it the political, the personal or the way photographic meaning itself is constructed.

About the Artists

In 2007 we published an article about clichés in contemporary photography. This struck a chord with a number of readers but also begged the question, if these are the hackneyed styles or subjects what should photographs focus on? So for this issue we have asked a number of editors, writers and curators, what they would like to see photographed, and they have given us a number of different answers.

Not everyone we asked was from the world of photography so some have related our question to their own disciplines (astronomy and geography). Others have taken it as a philosophical question (photograph ‘nothing’) or a question of ethos (be ‘personal and emotional’). David Campany offers an exercise he conducted with students that involves a kind of random subject generator and Martin Parr wards us off more clichés (the ‘bent lamppost’). Only Mary Warner Marien has given us a list of concrete examples, so from her cue we look forward in the future to seeing more pictures of offices, shopping malls and ‘restaurant ladies rooms’.

About the Publisher

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

External links & References

  1. https://www.source.ie/main/about.php