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University supports largest exhibit of Ukrainian photography in the UK – University of Liverpool News
The University of Liverpool is playing a key role in a city-wide photography project that sees imagery presented on campus with a complementary app designed by the University to help people explore this key part of EuroFestival.
In collaboration with Open Eye Gallery, the University campus joins other city-centre public realm sites to display a selection of six Ukrainian photographers who tell their stories about home through images. Displayed alongside the images are responding poems written by six UK poets including Professor Deryn Rees-Jones from the University’s Department of English.
Deryn has also contributed to At Home, a special edition of Open Eye Gallery’s in-house magazine TILT, which will be available at Open Eye. The magazine, produced in partnership with the University’s Centre for New and International Writing, shows photographs by contemporary Ukrainian photographers and poems and essays created in response to them. Speaking about producing the zine, Prof Deryn Rees-Jones, Co-Director of the Centre for New and International Writing, said: “The work featured here is by current and former students of Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool, and one poet whose work is published by Pavilion Poetry. All the writers, who are at different stages of their lives and careers, have had a chance to reflect, in poetry or prose, on what home means, using the photographs as a bridge to their own memory and imagination. Working on the zine has given us all an important opportunity to reflect on the war in Ukraine and its devastating impact.”
Additionally, an app designed by the University’s Digital Innovation & Application Development team, will lead EuroFestival visitors to independent spaces to see Home-themed Ukrainian photography collections in 5 trails across the city region. The themes of the trails are Land, Making, Liberty, Resistance, Settings. Each place will have an artwork by a contemporary Ukrainian photographer and a postcard for sale – profit will go to a charity supporting Ukraine. Find out more about the app here.
Tim Seamans, Director of External Relations at the University of Liverpool said: “The University is contributing in a variety of ways to help ensure the many events and projects surrounding Eurovision have a positive impact across the city and beyond, as part of which we’ve already held a series of events on campus and undertaken a fantastic project in local schools. We’re proud to not only be hosting elements of this unique and thought-provoking display but also offer the expertise of our staff to respond to the artwork creatively as well as digitally with the app.”
Read more about Home: Ukrainian photography inspiring UK words here.
Download the app from Google Play and Apple App Store.
Tactics: Jake Shivery Brings Film Photography Into the 21st Century
In 2001 the owner of Blue Moon Camera and Machine bucked a tech trend — and has since built a global business.
Walking into Blue Moon Camera and Machine feels, at first, like a trip back in time. The store opened in 2001 in Portland’s St. Johns neighborhood and has famously never sold a digital camera. With its glass cases full of vintage camera equipment and staff operating film-processing machines, Blue Moon looks just like the old-fashioned downtown camera shops that were shuttering when Shivery set up shop. (And while the shop primarily sells film cameras and processes film, there’s even a row of refurbished typewriters for sale behind the photo lab.)
Focusing on film was a deliberate strategy, he says: He didn’t believe film photography would disappear entirely, and he wanted to plant a flag. It’s paid off, he says, as film photography is experiencing something of a renaissance, in Portland and elsewhere.
And while the commitment to analog technology and face-to-face customer service is real, it’s also, Shivery admits, not the whole story. In recent years, the store has quietly expanded its physical footprint into an adjacent building that once housed a bowling alley, and it is now a global company, offering camera sales and film processing to e-commerce customers all over the world. He wants to keep both parts of the business intact, he says, and he wants it to be around forever: He’s begun the process of transitioning to an employee stock ownership program, so his employees (of which there are currently 24) can take the reins when he retires.
Shivery spoke to Oregon Business about his company’s focus and his plans for the future. This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
You’ve said that your shopping demographic is fairly young. Has that always been the case?
In 2001 I figured that all the old-timers would be sticking with us. But they were the first people who went over [to digital]. What we find are the young people who come in say, “I want my first real camera.” I can sell them a solid 50-year-old camera with a year warranty, and I do every day — for half the price that they would pay for a phone — and they can own that camera forever, can engage in a different process and be able to access those images in decades. I think that that’s really important. We don’t ever tell people to not shoot digital, right? We’re not anti-digital, we’re just very pro-film.
Because of our production services, because we run traditional black and white darkrooms and so forth, we get a lot of work that’s very, very old. We worked with a church that gave us a big stack of 5-by-7 glass plates. When you get a roll of film that somebody found in Grandma’s drawer and never got processed, we have a process for it. We can recover images from that. I love that stuff.
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You’ve also expanded into e-commerce. So you’re now a national business.
We’re international. About 40% of the trade’s leaving the building now. We pack and ship a lot every day.
COVID has been really, really tough for retail, broadly, but it seems like it’s been harder for the bigger stores that can’t compete with Amazon — it’s Walmarts that are closing.
We [small retailers] have more to lose, right? When Walmart closes a store, it doesn’t impact them as a company. My observation on the pandemic was you didn’t just lose your job, you lost your industry — or you did kind of well. There wasn’t a lot in between. I’m very grateful for our supportive customer base — our religiously supportive customer base. The way that we stayed open is we took the entire sales floor and we just moved outside. We were outside for 15 months, in the heat of summer and in the cold of winter. We just did everything that we do in the building on the sidewalk, with very dedicated staff, with people who were not going to let this business go down — and a very dedicated clientele of followers who were still showing up and waiting in line down the block, waiting to come to our storefront.
What would your advice be to somebody wanting to get into retail in this climate?
I think people need to be able to evaluate what they want to do and where they want to do it, and why they want to do it. I knew that this is what I wanted to do largely because I saw an industry that was moving in a different direction than I wanted to see it move in. In the past few years, we’ve seen a lot of upstarts out there getting like, “Oh, we’re going to be your film revolution headquarters,” but back in the day, they weren’t there. They’re just getting excited about it now. We’ve got 20 years of infrastructure behind us, and a lot of people who have been doing this since before digital cameras. We thrive in Portland because Portland has a cultural resonance with vintage and with analog and with permanence. It’s not something that would work in many other places.
Probably the most important question is, “What do you want?” There is no way to start any business of any kind without bracing yourself or hanging on by your fingernails for the first couple of years. Because it’s not going to be easy. I think building something can be real important for people — but sometimes people just want to go to a job and want to be able to do something else with their life. When you’re starting a business, I think, of any kind, that’s what you’re doing with your life. Make up your mind that that’s what you’re doing, because it will eclipse everything else.
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What advice do you give customers coming in for their first real camera? How do you guide them if they say, “I’ve only ever taken pictures with my phone”?
We operate almost like an adoption company more than a sales company. We’re trying to make sure we get the right piece of equipment into the right person’s hands. I will ask some preliminary questions to get a sense of what’s being attempted, and then pull out four or five relevant pieces of equipment. Then we start talking about ergonomics: If you had these three cameras laying on the kitchen counter and you were running out the back door, which one would you grab? Which one feels best in your hand?
Then we can start talking about features, and then we can start talking about brand, and then we can start talking about budget and so forth. But at the end of the day, the most important thing is ergonomics.
Then we have the flip side, which is people coming in with very specific requests. Our whole job is translating the technical nature of this incredibly broad field down into whatever that person’s vision is, understanding that every single person who walks in the door is going to have a dramatically different idea about what they want to do. But film photography is an incredibly mature technology. There’s something there for everybody.
What’s your vision for five years in the future?
I want the same thing that I’ve always wanted: I want to be the international hub for analog photography, everywhere, and I want to be the quirky little neighborhood camera store. I like shaking people’s hands and leaning on the counter and talking to them. I feel so much better when I can put something in somebody’s hands and know they’re leaving with the right piece of equipment for them.
We have now sold pieces of equipment multiple times because we’ve been open so long, and we sell a lot of stuff on consignment. So we’ll have sold it to somebody who will use it for five or six years and then bring it back and we refurbish it again and then we sell it again. We’ve been noting an uptick in the number of things that are passing through the system for the second and third time. But way more important — and way cooler — is people bringing in teenagers, because this is where they pay money to buy their first camera or their first typewriter.
Who’s your competition?
We don’t have anyone who we are directly competitive with. There’s a good number of stores out there that sell camera equipment. There’s a good number of photo-processing labs out there. There’s nobody out there that’s doing both of those things at the same time. We’re really interested in being the one-stop shop. We’re selling you a camera so that you know when you’re finished with your first roll, when you come back, we process the film and scan it or we print it. And then we go over the images, so that when all your stuff looks perfect, and it’s exactly the way you want it, great. When you get an unexpected result, that’s where we come in. We’re going to help translate the technical end. You wanted that to be brighter or darker, more contrast, whatever: “This exposure didn’t work because of this.” If all we did was sell cameras or print pictures, that would be a much different thing.
Bronze Sculpture of ‘Sleeping Jesus’ Now in Downtown Lafayette
The next time you’re in downtown Lafayette you may want to walk in front of the Cathedral of St John The Evangelist.
Indigenous ‘modern, vibrant communities’ the focus of Spurlock’s new exhibit
URBANA – A child-sized mannequin holds an adult figure’s hand in the corner of the North American room in the Spurlock Museum.
The child is wearing a small pink-and-white dress embellished with jingle cones.
“That’s one of my favorites, because this little time lapse shows the value that we put on our younger generations, that they’re always right there watching us,” said Dylan Bizhikiins Jennings.
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Jennings is a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Anishinaabe. He’s also curator of the new exhibit,“Welcome to the Pow-wow.” The dress belongs to his daughter.
The show is part of a growing movement to heal past harms committed against Native Americans. Other efforts include a bill requiring Native American history in public schools and new commitment by the University of Illinois to repatriate ancestral remains.
The exhibit will run for five years, with regalia like the jingle dress swapped out every year.
New recognition of Indigenous experts
All of the artwork is by Native American artists, but that wasn’t always the case for the Spurlock.
“It was really important for us to have Native Americans represented as modern, vibrant communities,” said museum director Elizabeth Sutton.
When Sutton took over six years ago, most of the artwork had been donated by the Laubins, a white couple.
She felt the collection blurred the lines between what the Laubins’ Native American friends had created and what Reginald Laubin made on his own. The curators didn’t always know which pieces were which.
“He was trying to create these pieces in the style and tradition of his Native American friends and these communities, but it’s just us lying, saying we don’t have time and money to do the research and just putting it up,” Sutton said.
So she took down the display.
Around this time, Dylan Jennings visited the university as founder of the Bizhiki Culture and Dance Company.
During a tour, Sutton pointed out the empty space where the Laubin collection used to be. That’s when the two decided to collaborate.
“We’ve really shifted to say that lived experience is just as important — if not more important — for educational purposes,” Sutton said. “Nobody wants to hear my voice about something in our collection. If it’s really going to move you, it has to be that authentic voice of somebody who has that cultural knowledge about those objects.”
For Jennings, the goal was to educate a community that had long held onto a mascot that stereotypes Native Americans,Chief Illiniwek. The University of Illinois retired the mascot in 2007 and has not picked a new one.
“We’re cognizant of the history that this university in particular has had with the mascot and the kind of misrepresentation of Native people here on campus,” Jennings said. “Rather than scolding someone, we believe education is a really powerful mechanism to change the heart, change the mind.”
Pow-wows are modern history
In the 1890s, the federal government was transitioning from waging war against Native American nations to assimilating them and eliminating their culture. Many Indigenous dances were banned.
“We had to be secretive as far as doing our ceremonial practices at home and keeping our things underground. But we also found ways to do things in public,” said Jason Schlender.
Schlender, also named ManidooNoodin, is a former tribal leader from the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe reservation in Wisconsin and part of the Bizhiki Culture and Dance Company. He was a consultant for the exhibit.
According to Schlender, pow-wows have evolved over time as a tourist attraction, economic engine and way to maintain community traditions.
Modern touches are visible throughout the exhibit, from a “vendor stand” of furs, beads and a CD to contemporary art by Plains Cree artist Josh Atcheynum.
Many of the descriptions and placards throughout the exhibit were written by Schlender.
“We don’t need anybody else to tell our story. We’re perfectly functional. We’re perfectly educated enough,” Schlender said.
Model for other museums?
All of this is a first for Dylan Jennings, but he hopes it won’t be the last.
“The exhibit itself is a great starting point for more good conversations to come and more bridge building between our tribal communities and universities.”
As the dance company keeps traveling, Jennings said the regalia will too. All of it is on loan and still owned by the artists and tribes.
“We love being able to use them for educational purposes, but they’re very much meant to be used in our circles that are supposed to be danced with. Someday you might see these dancing at a pow-wow with somebody.”
Discover relaxing nature classes at Caponi Art Park
Nonprofit looks to restore Snake art sculpture
Imagine discovering rest and relaxation at a Caponi Art Park forest bathing session hosted in the lush green nature area or pretending to be a rock star drummer in a “Pound” fitness class under a tree canopy.
Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival juxtaposes private and public spheres
Pedestrians hurrying along Toronto’s King Street this month will encounter haunting photographic portraits of a Black woman – larger than life yet eerily intimate. These are self-portraits by the Togolese-Belgian artist Hélène Amouzou, who uses double exposures in her works about the invisibility of migrants. In one, only her feet can be seen; in another, a semi-transparent image of her seated body is printed overtop of an open suitcase.
This traffic-stopping juxtaposition of the private and public realms is typical of the outdoor art at the annual Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival.
Every May, Contact fills galleries across the city with a vast range of photographic art – but its strongest moments often happen on the street. From storefronts to billboards, the festival includes numerous public art installations, leaving passersby to make of the photographs what they will. Many of these installations, such as Amouzou’s, draw attention with hard contrasts.
Self-portraits by the Togolese-Belgian artist Hélène Amouzou consider the invisibility of migrants.
On friendly Ward’s Island, Claudette Abrams and Anthea Baxter-Page offer dark and mysterious images of blank spaces and in-between places that are mounted in cute little vitrines. The cheerful visitor leaning in for a closer look may well be surprised.
Images of blank spaces by artists Claudette Abrams and Anthea Baxter-Page are mounted in vitrines dotted around the Toronto Islands.
Other images speak strongly to their locations. This year, on the eastern lakefront, the Donald D. Summerville pools, site of many a careless summer splash, play host to large-scale photographs that comment on recreation’s darker side. Toronto photographer Sarah Palmer contributes her surprising colour images of poolside passengers frolicking on “last-chance” cruises, trips to disappearing environments that hasten the degradation of the very places they have come to admire.
At the Donald D. Summerville Pools on Toronto’s east-end lakefront, a jogger notices Sarah Palmer’s images of ‘last-chance cruises’ that visit disappearing environments.
Some projects insinuate themselves discreetly into the urban fabric. Above an east-end sandwich shop, artists Kyle Jarencio and Michelle Joseph undertake a quiet investigation of Toronto’s changing cityscape, with photos best viewed from across the street (or perhaps from the windows of the Coxwell Avenue bus).
In images tucked in windows above a sandwich shop on Coxwell Avenue, Kyle Jarencio and Michelle Joseph investigate Toronto’s changing built and natural environment.
Photographer’s images of Madeira show why ‘it doesn’t look real’
Photographer’s images of Madeira show why he declares it an island ‘so stunning… it doesn’t look real’
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‘Every piece of this island is so stunning, that sometimes we can’t believe it’s real.’
So says photographer Karol Kru, who has been capturing spellbinding pictures of the Portuguese island of Madeira since he moved there with his wife, Mary, last year.
Karol, 31, says that he and Mary, 30, ‘immediately fell in love’ with the island, known as the ‘Pearl of the Atlantic’.
The Polish adventure photographer tells MailOnline Travel: ‘There are so many places to be explored, so we’ve decided to stay here longer. Madeira has many amazing places, and that’s not an exaggeration. It has got everything from mysterious forests, high mountain peaks and graceful waterfalls to green valleys, sharp mountain spires and rough cliffs.’
Despite its beauty, Karol notes that Madeira is still a lesser-known travel destination for many. He says: ‘Coming here for a holiday isn’t a cliche. We like [to] explore the island, discovering new places [and] hidden gems.’
Mary, who is originally from Ukraine, occasionally features in his landscape photographs. The couple met whilst studying in China and have since devoted their lives to travelling the world, with photography eventually becoming Karol’s full-time job. Karol says that he sets out to show his followers the ‘real, raw Madeira’. Scroll down to see breathtaking pictures from his portfolio…
![This picture shows a winding coastal path in Achadas da Cruz on the northwestern coast of the island. Karol says: 'You can get there within a steep hike... or with [a ride on] the steepest cable car in Europe. Whichever option you choose, it's steep!'](https://www.mecreates.com/story/news/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/70533275-12037883-image-a-27_1683125057066.jpg)
![Above is the view from the peak of Pico do Areeiro. Karol says: 'For me, Madeira is at its most magical on cloudy days. Just imagine… moody sky, rich colours, furious ocean… all of it makes [the island] really mysterious and powerful at the same time'](https://www.mecreates.com/story/news/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/70486361-12037883-Pico_do_Arieiro_PR1_Trail_-a-107_1683037998140.jpg)
To see more photography from Karol visit his website, Instagram account and the YouTube account he shares with Mary.
Royal Sculptor Frances Segelman Unveils King Charles Sculpture
Ahead of the Coronation, Royal sculptor Frances Segelman has created a new bronze sculpture of King Charles III.
Future-Proof Your Digital Identity With a .ART Domain
“Heterosis” by Mat Collishaw and Danil Krivoruchko for OG.ART, which showcases curated collections of dynamic generative art and offers a space for renowned digital artists to experiment with dynamic NFTs
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Elevate your online presence with a premium .ART domain that stands out as a unique and artistic identifier. Examples of projects embracing the power of thoughtfully chosen domains include OG.ART, a platform curating collections of dynamic generative art; C2.ART, a full-service firm specializing in investment-level art; and NORTH.ART, a regional online art gallery and art news source for the North of the UK.
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Ali Sabet (SABET.ART) is an Iranian American contemporary artist and designer who founded his own branding agency
Yakob (YAKOB.ART) is a photographer and digital creator who uses the Ethereum blockchain to showcase his work, combining photography and glitch art to create distinct and engaging pieces
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Future-Proof Your Digital Identity With a .ART Domain appeared first on Colossal.
