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.

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.

Visit to the André Kertész Exhibtion at the Jeu de Paume, Paris

Blogger: Ruth Haycock, Senior Exhibitions & Partnerships Organiser
Ruth and Rebecca from our Exhibitions team were lucky enough to fly to Paris last month to take in the André Kertész exhibition at the Jeu De Paume, and while their visit was purely for pleasure, they kindly agreed to tell me about the trip for the Museum blog.
Day One: Saturday 5th February
After a landslide near Halifax and a delayed flight for two and a half hours, we arrived in Paris only to attend an exhibition that had closed a week early - not a hugely successful start!
We did manage to find Le Bal and an exhibition titled Five Strange Family Albums, showing works by Erik Kessels, Emmet Gowin, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Alessandra Sanguinetti and Sadie Benning. It was an interesting exploration of the family album, where the uneasy and unnerving undercurrents of relationships was explored.
Following a fairly long day, we wandered through the streets of Montmartre, stumbling into a rather lovely restaurant where, in the style of Gilbert and George, we ate the same food, and drank the same wine - except that Rebecca had an extra glass!
Day Two: Sunday 6th February
We rose early about 8am so we could get to the André Kertész exhibition. We arrived at the Jeu De Paume before the doors opened. This was the reason we'd made the journey to Paris and it being the last day of the exhibition we didn't want to take any chances. Six hours later we emerged from the gallery and there was still a long queue of people waiting to get in which was really surprising, yet encouraging to see that a solo show was pulling in such huge crowds.

The exhibition covered three main periods of his life: Hungary, Paris and New York. It was fascinating and we both realised that Kertész had a possible obsession with legs, particularly amputated ones, and prosthetic limbs or parts of mannequins - I'm sure there's a thesis in there somewhere!
Opposite Jeu De Paume was a shop selling a beautiful array of men's hats, and in homage to Eugene Atget's Lichtbilder (1930)

we took this photograph:

In the same vein we took a shadow portrait, as Kertész pictured himself in shadow on a number of occasions.

Untitled, 12 December 1979 (1979). André Kertész

Later in the afternoon we went to Petit Palais to see 100 Photos by Pierre and Alexandra Boulat for Press Freedom. This again was a popular exhibition although the curation and exhibition design was a little disorientating. The interpretation and feel of the exhibition would have perhaps been more successful if father and daughter had been shown independent of each other.
If you want to see original material by André Kertész and Eugene Atget you can visit The Lives of Great Photographers here from 15 April – 5 September 2011, and The Art of Arrangements: Photography and the Still Life Tradition will tour from early 2012.

Simon Roberts: We English Exhibition on Tour

Our temporary exhibition galleries are now closed while we prepare for two brand new exhibitions to open on 15 October.
Robbie Cooper's Immersion will be replaced by Land: Revisited, to mark the 25th anniversary of Fay Godwin's Land, a celebration of the British landscape.
Simon Roberts' We English will be replaced by From Back Home, a body of work by contemporary Swedish photographers Anders Petersen and JH Engström, which became an award-winning book and is being exhibited in this country for the first time in our Gallery One space.
If you enjoyed We English, you'll have another opportunity to view the work when it tours to Croyden Clock Tower - not the only National Media Museum exhibition to go on tour...
Ruth Haycock, our Senior Exhibitions and Partnerships Organiser, has developed a Touring Exhibitions strand whose aim is to increase public access to our Collections both here and abroad, develop cultural partnerships, boost the profile of the Museum and champion our world-class Collections.
We English and three other exhibitions taken from our photography Collections are available to tour: Lives of the Great Photographers, The British Landscape and The Art of Arrangement: Still Life and the Photographic Tradition.
Our exhibition and design teams will create a graphics and identity package for the exhibition, and while we provide core pieces, the host venue may extend and compliment the exhibition with work from their own collections to make it their own - we can work with the host venue to develop layered interpretations to meet their requirements and the needs of their audiences.
If you're interested in hosting a National Media Museum exhibition, or would like to find out more about our Touring Exhibitions programme, talk to Ruth Haycock:
Tel: 01274 203 343
Email: ruth.haycock@nationalmediamuseum.org.uk.