We’re really pleased to be working with Liverpool’s International Photography Festival, LOOK/13 to put on Pulse – an afternoon of short talks on their opening day, Saturday 18th May.
Curated by the Miniclick team and Patrick Henry (director of LOOK/13), Sara-Jayne Parsons (The Bluecoat), Colin McPherson (LOOK/13) and Simon Bainbridge (British Journal of Photography), 10 of Liverpool’s, and the UK’s, finest photographers will be doing short talks on the subject “Who Do You Think You Are?”.
Saturday 18th May, 2:30pm ’till 4:30pm. The Bluecoat, Liverpool. Tickets are £7 (£4 conc.) and available on The Bluecoat’s website.
Our lineup includes…
Alma Haser
Born in Germany in 1989, Alma Haser moved to the UK in 1995 and gained a BA in Photography from Nottingham Trent University before moving to London in autumn 2011. Her shortlisted portrait, taken in her house in South London, is of friends Luke and James who have known each other since they were 12. Struck by their hairstyles, an East London bowl cut, Haser initially planned to take separate portraits but it was difficult to get them to focus so decided to photograph them together. She says ‘I asked them to sit on a tiny, wobbly coffee table, forcing them to almost cling onto each other. I wanted to exaggerate their amazing size difference, by making Luke slouch and James sit bolt upright. The title is designed to help the viewer make up his or her story about what is going on.’ Haser’s work has been included in over 10 exhibitions internationally, her work received third place in the People’s Choice for Foto8 Summer Show 2012, and Fourth prize in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Awards at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
Chloe Dewe Matthews
After graduating from Fine Art at Oxford University, Chloe Dewe Mathews spent four years working in the film industry. Since dedicating herself to photography, her subject matter has been diverse, from Uzbek gravediggers on the Caspian coast, to Hasidic Jews on holiday in Wales. In 2010 she hitchhiked from China back to Britain, which became a recce for a lifetime’s work ahead, informing her work both at home and abroad.
She has been awarded the BJP International Photography Award, the Julia Margaret Cameron New Talent Award, PDN’s 30, the Flash Forward Emerging Photographer’s Award by the Magenta Foundation and was nominated for the prestigious Prix Pictet. Her work has been exhibited in London, Berlin, Buenos Aires and Toronto and magazine clients include The New York Times, the Telegraph, Le Monde and the Sunday Times.
Over the next year she will be artist-in-residence at St John’s College in Oxford and METAL in Southend, developing a new body of work about the river Thames.
Eva Vermandel
Eva Vermandel is a photographer born in Belgium in 1974 who relocated to London in 1996 to live and work. Known for her still and timeless portraits which often bear references to painting (the Flemish Primitives, Ingres, Bronzino), her photographs have appeared in a wide range of magazines such as The Wire, Telegraph Magazine, Independent Magazine, The New York Times Magazine and W (USA). She has collaborated with PJ Harvey, Cat Power and Sigur Rós, doing an extensive tour with the latter in 2008 which resulted in the book “Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust”
Vermandel has had solo exhibitions at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin (coinciding with the book ‘Alabama Chrome’, 2006), Whitechapel Gallery and the ICA, London. Her work is in the collections of the V&A, London, the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh and the National Portrait Gallery, London. In September 2013 Hatje Cantz will be publishing a monograph on her series ‘Splinter’.
Martin Barnes, Senior Curator, Photographs, Victoria & Albert Museum, London: “Eva Vermandel’s photographs capture the intangible – the spaces in between the mechanics of daily lives – in which we can often find moments of reverie. I can see how some people resist the camera as a device that enables this feeling, as we too often think of it as recording the tangible and the ‘now’. But Eva seems to be using the camera against itself – or rather cancelling itself out, as something deliberately ‘out of phase’ (to coin a term from physics that is also known and used by musicians). In any case, it is not the camera, but the eyes and heart behind the lens that make the work.”
Jack Latham
Jack Latham is a Welsh photographer currently based in Brighton. He graduated from the University of Wales Newport, Documentary Photography BA (Hons) degree course in 2012. Jack is now pursuing a career in and around contemporary photographic practice. His work focuses on more conceptual subject matter and is often presented in form by using large format photography and self-published books. His most recent project saw him traveling 5000 miles across America, retracing the Oregon trail and photographing the current social landscape.
Jenny Wicks
“I am a visual artist and sometimes work with audio. My work is primarily concerned with people and their environment, with particular interest in how our communities can determine who we become. I have recently completed a residency with The Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at Glasgow University. In this research I explored key components surrounding the notion of ‘them and us’.
During my research on the justice system and perceptions of society on the imprisoned, I responded by creating two bodies of work; They are us and we are them and Working Places Punishing Spaces. Both series challenge stereotypically held notions that we can pass judgement on a person based on photographs of their face and surroundings. In response to how the media have used the mugshot, I have used photography to offer a more nuanced view of the individuals caught up in this system.
An exhibition “Correct: the meaning and construction of space” which consisted of They are us and we are them and Working Spaces Punishing Spaces has recently been on show at The Briggait Gallery, Glasgow.
My work Root Ginger (an exhibition, book and film project) is a tribute to a trait that is most common in Scotland and Ireland but is scattered around the world. My photographs explore the genetic lottery we all play taking the biological perspective of a recessive gene such as red hair and how we assume we know more than we really do about our genetic make-up. The series of portraits take on an ethereal quality with a touch of almost scientific sampling which echoes the biological aspect of the work.
Playing on my interest in sub-groups and sects, the photographs show that the “every day” and ordinary can quickly became fascinating or exceptional when they are looked at in isolation.
Red hair conjures up a plethora of images and provokes a range of reactions from people. The work looks at the social aspect of having red hair and how society views and treats a minority group. For many it is considered the last bastion of political incorrectness.
I have been published extensively and exhibited nationally and internationally and I am represented by Millennium Images in London.”
www.jennywicksphotography.co.uk
Jim Mortram
Jim is a documentary photographer and environmental portraitist based in East Anglia, UK. Jim’s work is centred on creating an expansive long-form photographic essay, Small Town Inertia, which explores the intimate and untold stories of marginalised individuals in the small rural community in which he lives. He is also a Carer within his family home and a member of the photo/film collective Aletheia Photos. His photography has been awarded and published widely.
www.smalltowninertia.tumblr.com www.jamortram.posterous.com
Maja Daniels
Maja Daniels is a Swedish photographer based in London. Using sociology as a frame of research and approach, Daniels’ work focuses on human relations in a western, contemporary environment.
She is the recipient of the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, and was a second prize winner of the Sony World Photography awards 2012. She was a participant in the 2012 World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass and selected as one of the 2011 and 2012 Magenta Foundations Flash Forward Emerging Photographers.
Daniels photographs have been included in exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts (London), The Photographers Gallery (London), The National Portrait Gallery (London), Belfast Exposed (Belfast) and Getxophoto (Bilbao).
Niall McDiarmid
Niall has been an editorial photographer since graduating from the London College of Printing in 1993. He works for magazines and book publishers in the UK, Europe and US.
In January 2011 he began the Crossing Paths project, photographing people he met as he travelled across Britain. The series has been profiled widely by photography blogs, news websites and magazines and was awarded a Lucie International Photography Award in 2012. The project is ongoing.
Sophie Gerrard
(Sheep farming, Lauder, Scottish Borders)
Sophie Gerrard (Scottish, b.1978) is an award winning documentary photographer specialising in contemporary environmental and social issues.
Sophie began her career in environmental sciences before studying photography at Edinburgh College of Art and completing an MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at The London College of Communication in 2006.
Sophie’s first major project E-Wasteland won a Jerwood Photography Award, a Magenta Award for emerging artists and was exhibited and published widely in the UK and overseas. Since then Sophie has spent a great deal of time working and photographing in India for NGOs, editorial clients and on personal projects.
Currently based in the UK, Sophie’s work has been published by clients including The Telegraph Saturday Magazine, The Guardian Weekend Magazine, The Independent on Sunday, Portfolio Magazine, Foto8, Greenpeace International, Scotland on Sunday and Geographical Magazine. Sophie’s work has been exhibited internationally, and is now held in the Sir Elton John Photography Collection.
Sophie is represented by The Photographers’ Gallery and Eyevine in London.
Tadgh Devlin
Tadhg Devlin is originally from Dublin but left Ireland in 1993 to study photography in Falmouth. After leaving Cornwall he worked as a freelance photographer in London for a variety of clients for over ten years before moving to Merseyside in 2011.
His work ‘The Fifth Province’ is a study of contemporary Ireland through the eyes of the returned emigrant. Ireland is made up of four provinces; the fifth is where the Irish diaspora resides.
Saturday 18th May, 2:30pm ’till 4:30pm. The Bluecoat, Liverpool. Tickets are £7 (£4 conc.) and available on The Bluecoat’s website.
The Miniclick Photo Talks 
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