Yesterday I travelled up to London to deliver my Taylor Wessing 2013 National Portrait Prize entries alongside Keith Locke (http://www.keithlocke.co.uk) , a consummate professional when it comes to photography. We had eagerly awaited the delivery of our entries for weeks now. However, the day dawned with the release of results from the university and all was not evident in the raw markings downloaded from the web. We await the context of written and verbal feedback to fully understand the rationale behind marks allocated. I suppose that I for one have never fully grasped the tenuous nature of marking a subjective subject such as photography, but moreover, the relative aspects of artistic interpretation of assignments submitted. That, I think, will forever remain a mystery for me.

All said and done, we had an uneventful and punctual journey to London after having bumped into one of our course tutors at Ipswich railway station, he on his way to work and us off on a jolly. The setup at LCC where we submitted our work was perfection. We were in and out in 5 minutes and off we headed to TATE Britain.

Sausages & Food is what I was interested in and if ever there was a reason to trog through the glaringly white hot streets of London to an art gallery it was this one. The only snag was that half of London were taking shelter in the coolness of the gallery. Keith Arnatt’s work had been excellently curated and delightfully mounted and framed. The way work is presented is of paramount importance to my eye and the arrangement of the different works was subliminal. Wolfgang Tillmans had work hanging in the 1990 room (I think) but I was less than impressed with prints cello-taped to the walls.

Arnatt’s work is classified as conceptual as is Tillmans’ but give me Arnatt’s any day of the week. I would describe his Welsh scenes as very calm and deadpan, beautifully rendered in tonal black and white. Photographs of rubbish discarded were very well executed and rendered in square format colour in groups of four. The arrangements worked very well indeed.

Anyway, for what it is worth, here are the TW2013 entries I submitted;

Recently, I have been working through a series of images shot on Adox CHS Art 100 in 5×4 format. A before dawn start resulted in this shot just after sunrise.

This was the last of my batch of this film and although I liked the effect it gave with the very high silver content, I was less than impressed with the flaws in the emulsion that required hours of spotting to correct. I will attempt this shot again with FP4 and HP5. That said, I believe that Adox no longer make this film with its 1950’s emulsion recipe.