Day 14 Artist Talk Oliver Harrop (Photographer) and photographic exercises

 On Tuesday we had the chance to hear directly from a practitioner in the Arts who is teaching regularly at St Martin's, is now working with Tracy Emin  and was formerly a part of the FDA team at CityLit.  


A mini tripod from Ebay about £5


Oliver spoke about how he was brought up around photography with his father working in Photography (at the time when it was a chemical and darkroom process), he then studied at Goldsmiths (in Communications and Sociology)  after which he was able to take on an internship at the famed international photographers' co-operative Magnum.



After this experience Oliver pursued what I'd describe as an ethnographic immersion in  South East London Life (New Cross area) as a programme that he described as a 'cleansing' /social engineering exercise that created a 'new' district for the 2012 Olympics London - Artists were given favourable terms for working/living areas in buildings that would be demolished - I think Grayson Perry has spoken about this 'Art-washing' 

Oliver now lives in London-by-sea Bohemia Margate and spoke about a certain degree of disillusionment about how artists were used in the development process.

Some of Oliver's picture of 'social' housing reminded me of the V&A Robin Hood Gardens film I saw a couple of years ago.


We saw some of Oliver's work  shot in New Cross shop (Rubbish and Nasty)  as well as his recent collaboration on a book around 'older' artists.

In groups of two we were able to work on photographing work and experimenting with reflectors as well as hear what Oliver thought about many styles and approaches.

Lightbox from Flying Tiger 


Here I used a small tripod and performed a sort of move with it....



I worked with some simple stop animation and using a light box for a title piece.


 

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