Daniel Meadows gallery hang goes to plan... roll on Friday

Blogger: Ruth Haycock, Exhibitions Organiser

Val Williams (Director of Photography and the Archive Research Centre) and curator of the upcoming exhibition Daniel Meadows: Early Photographic Works visited the Museum last week, with Brigitte Lardinois (Deputy Director of Photography and the Archive Research Centre) and Daniel Meadows, to discuss and agree the exhibition hang.





With all of the works ready and laid out in the gallery we met early on the Monday morning. Excellent progress was made, and by the end of the day everything was in place, agreed and ready for our technicians to start the hang. So, following a successful day Val and Brigitte headed back to London and Daniel to the Midland Hotel in Bradford for the evening.

All will return tomorrow for the Gallery opening, and launch of the Ways of Looking Festival.

Daniel Staincliffe: Fauna Automata is being installed

Blogger: Amanda Chinneck, Public Programme Development Manager

Daniel Staincliffes’s Fauna Automata: British Wild Boar images are being installed today.



Fauna Automata explores the British wild boar population, through photographs taken by the boars themselves! It is the result of Staincliffe’s artist’s residency in the Forest of Dean and the photographs are the product of his near scientific record of the movements and habits of the boars.

Photography Focus on Eyecurious.com

Blogger: Greg Hobson, Curator of Photography



This week I’ve been looking at Marc Feustel’s very smart blog site called eyecurious http://www.eyecurious.com/



Broad in its scope, it has a strong and well informed focus on Japanese photography. Great to see that Keith Arnatt’s ‘I’m a Real Photographer’ is ‘fresh on his shelves’ too.

Filming Daniel Meadows

Blogger: Ruth Haycock, Exhibition Organiser

Daniel Meadows and his wife Georgie invited Emma Shaw (our Media Developer) and I to their home, to interview and produce films to accompany the upcoming exhibition Daniel Meadows: Early Photographic Works. So, with equipment and belongings packed and the car ready we set off for Monmouth. We received a wonderful welcome, and armed with quite a heavy agenda we started filming early the next morning.



Daniel has an extensive archive of personal documents; bus receipt, snapshots, posters, letters and so on, which span his entire career to date. These documents have been collected, cared for, and well looked after over the years. Each document reveals an interesting story about Daniel and his life as a documentarist. We asked Daniel to select ten objects from his archive to speak about, from which we would create a series of small films.



Discussing many aspects of his practice Daniel told us, with affection, stories of the people he has met and documented. Many of which he is still in contact with today. The films not only highlight Daniel’s practice, but the warmth and natural affinity he has with people, and the telling of their stories. The exhibition provides a window onto the life of others, and the films a window onto his.



The exhibition opens 30 September 2011 in Gallery Two as part of Ways of Looking, a new photography festival in Bradford.

Hilary Roberts talks about Donovan Wylie

Blogger: Philippa Wright, Curator of Photography

What do you get if you mix up the talent of a world class photographer, the support of two National Institutions and a successful Fellowship programme? In this instance our future exhibition Outposts: Donovan Wylie Bradford Fellow in Photography 2010/11.

Hilary Roberts, the Head Curator of the Imperial War Museum Photograph Archive visited the Museum and spoke passionately about the importance of this collaboration. She said that our decision to award Magnum photographer Donovan Wylie the prestigious 2010 Bradford Fellowship was crucial in securing funding for the Outposts project.



The Bradford Fellowship is a partnership between ourselves, the University of Bradford and Bradford College and has been in existence since 1985.

Growing up in Belfast during the Troubles, Wylie became fascinated by military structures, which by their deliberate placement were intended to monitor and command their surroundings. His works there include the Maze (2004) and British Watchtowers (2007).

The Fellowship enabled Wylie to extend his interest in architecture of conflict to the distinctive landscape of Kandahar Province in Afghanistan. Wylie required military access in order to photograph in Afghanistan. The IWM were responsible for negotiating permission from the Canadian military for Wylie to embed with them in Afghanistan. In doing so, he became the first official IWM photographer to work in a conflict zone since the First World War.