The difference between Montagu Street and Montague Street is an ‘e’ and being about half an hour late for your client!! It never normally happens, I’m sorry!!

Curvy House in Denmark Hill, London, Nic anthony Architects

The rooms to watch the films were overflowing and I only managed to see a few minutes of the one upstairs so most of my experience centred around the large-scale colour images.

The work is firmly in the category of pictures of places that look quite bland but hint at something deeper both for the artist and for society as a whole, or the archeology of place as the Whitechapel grandly puts it.  This is normally one of my favourite categories of art photography, the recent Thomas Struth show, also at the Whitechapel, was a perfect example of such work. But this exhibition left me a bit cold.

It wasn’t until reading the text on the walls and talking to my companion during the evening that I was made aware of the way Idi Amin had treated the Asian community in the early 70s in Uganda and that made the social and personal context clear. But I was left wondering how the images actually responded to this historical event, in a way it was documentary but with sufficient ambiguity for the viewer to learn anything about the issue (a gap that is called art in some circles and called bad art in others).

The people walking around the exhibition all seemed half familiar from my BA and MA days at University and it reminded me of the theory laden imagery that promised so much on paper but didn’t deliver when you actually looked at the work itself. Where she directly addressed an issue like the virginity tests at UK immigration on asian women in the 70s then the subject became fascinating but the work seemed subdued in its ability to address it and simply resorted to clichés like the spices across the floor  as part of the installation (and if this was ironic then it was lost on me).

It’s great to address periods of history with photography in a sideways art documentary way and for an artist to address her own personal history within it, I just didn’t know where the way in was for me as a viewer. This was particularly disappointing coming on the back of Thomas Struth and Paul Graham at the Whitechapel, two of the best photography shows I have seen in years.

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/zarina-bhimji

I was looking through some old invoices today and an interesting stat popped up. I had 18 shoots with my (then) main client in 2008. The following year (after the collapse of Lehmans) I had 0 jobs with that client. The following two years I had 2 jobs a year with them and this year looks like being an improvement on that.

Like many people I talk to with my work (mainly architects), there has been a real push to market more and more of our services to potential clients as a result of the structural change to our client base. For me this has proved a useful, stabilising and moneymaking exercise. I now rely much less on any one company for my work and have spread it over many people offering regular but less frequent commissions. It is more enjoyable working with more people, more rewarding having a diverse list of clients (albeit within the same overall sector) and ultimately safer to spread my risk. You get work through word of mouth and more happy clients means more people hearing about you.

In a meeting with a local architect yesterday the same topic of conversation came up, it appears that now, with redundancies made and costs slimmed down, the only avenue for architects to grow and survive is to go out and gain new clients which would explain to me why this year has seen a massive increase in people asking me to shoot their buildings to update their website and marketing materials.

Long may this phase continue.

……and here is a shot I was commissioned to take last night in London of a building site…..

Although Gove doesn’t seem to think that architects and architecture has much role in school buildings with his comments on the need for a flatpack design for schools, here is yet another example of how listening to the end users and designing a space carefully can result in a change for the better. We’re all going to be old one day.

This is particuarly the case at Beaver Green School on the outskirts of Ashford. The light pouring into the rooms, the large double height central spaces, the colour, the careful thought that went into how the pupils move around the space, the high end lighting choice that creates interesting diagonal shapes (rather than buzzing strip lights to make your ears and eyes ache). All in all the architecture (by Guy Holloway I think) and the interior fit outs by KCS led to a happy school with happy staff and pupils. It was a million miles from the cold port-a-cabins and graffiti ridden wooden desks of my day!