Oliver Merchant Dossier

As I'm interested in the museums and galleries sector, and in collections of photographs and artefacts, Kellie pointed me in the direction of a conference happening at the end of May; Anthropology and Photography, at the British Museum, organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute. It has some interesting talks taking place, such as 'archiving photographs and photographing archives', 'archives, art, and text', and 'photography, medicine, and anthropology'. A lot of photography and archives basically, two things I really like (can you tell my mother was a librarian?). It's not until after this blog is due for assessment, so I feel cheeky putting it in, but I'm going I swear! I've paid and everything. I've never been to a conference before so I've no idea what to expect; do people dress up for this sort of thing?

In addition to interning at Lacock Abbey, I've continued my relationship with the Pound Arts Centre, where I used to work full time before starting art school. The place is an arts venue for north Wiltshire, hosting theatre, music, film, exhibitions and more. I enjoy continuing to work there because I like being part of something; I like the team atmosphere, and I truly believe in what the arts centre does. Bringing art and culture to a rural location and being a community hub is a worthy purpose.

As I've got closer and closer to final submission, it's been harder and harder to see beyond that date. But grad show is only two weeks later. Planning for it began around a month ago when all students were asked to choose work to have in the show. This information was to be passed to me, to get some experience of being part of a curating team for an exhibition. Some people were quick to do this; some were slow and had to be chased up. Some were very detailed, whilst others were very brief.

We had a huge amount of work was submitted, both prints and books. I took this information and compiled a list in excel, and distributed it. When I compared the amount of work to the amount of available space, it was easy to see that a lot simply wasn't going to fit.

The size of the work was also an issue; the more A1/A0 work people submit, the less fits on the wall. So the next step was to ask every student how they saw their work in the show. I think this was asked to hopefully make everyone see just how much space they were asking for.

When this information was provided, it was possible to sit down with a map of the exhibition space to try and work out who's work was going where. I love this sort of thing; figuring out what work compliments what, what will fit where, what work suits this space. When I worked at the arts centre in Corsham, changing the exhibition every six weeks was my favourite thing to help with, and this felt just like that.

A number of students (myself included), requested a pedestal for our work to sit on, naively (or logically?) assuming that there was a store of them at the art school. It's the sort of thing art schools have isn't it? Anyway, pedestals are something to be acquired by ourselves. Fortunately I already knew where a store of them were being hoarded; Corsham Court. The Bath Spa part of CC always had around a dozen, some of which my previous workplace would borrow. I called up and liaised with Tom and Dave Tinkham at Sion Hill, requested half a dozen, and a week later they arrived with my name on them. It's amazing when things just work.

I'm 26 and I've never had to write a CV. The three jobs I've had previously happened because I was in the right place at the right time, or asked the right person. But now I'm applying for 'real' jobs I definitely needed to write my CV.

To force the point I applied for a job. A real one. A Proper Job. Assistant Curator for Word and Image at the V&A. Ambitious I know, ridiculous probably. But it forced me to write my CV, and a covering letter, and now I have them to use for more realistic applications. One of the criteria for this job was a working knowledge of a foreign language, something I lack...

As expected the reply was a no. A very polite and considered no, but a no nonetheless. I'm just glad I got a response; plenty of places don't even reply according to my friends.

All my books are back from the printers, and being the masochist I am I decided to hand stitch them instead of getting them perfect bound; I wanted the book to open flat, which is something that isn't possible with perfect bind as the glue is too stiff; if it opened flat the pages would fall out. 

Here are the pages of my book. Five section of four pages, trimmed and folded for me by Ripe. The workshop was lead by a bookbinder called Kate. I made guides for making the holes 1cm from the top, and 1.5cm from the bottom. Another two dots were made 6.5cm from the top and bottom dot, then dots made 1cm above (left) and below (right) those two dots. It's less complicated than it sounds. Those dots were carried on across all five sections so they're all in the same place.

Using a tool called an awl, which looks like a fat needle attached to a doorknob, I pierced each section at each hole, all the way through the four pages. Then began the complicated stitching process. I say complicated, but really it was just time consuming. It takes a lot of time and patience. 

Here I am awkwardly sowing my sections together. In 5 hours I managed four books, so not a great achievement. The next morning I did one in 20 minutes, so a lot of that time was learning curve.

Once it's stitched it needs to be glued. I used a press, but a heavy stack of books would work. The glue is just PVA, painted along the spine and left for 10 minutes, then dried overnight.

Everyone knows Bailey. His portraits are world famous and I remember learning how to make 'Bailey portraits' in the studio in 1st year. But I had no idea just how much work he'd produced over more than 50 years.

This show is vast; it spans half a dozen large rooms. I knew his portraits of famous actors and artists, but I'd never seen the photographs he'd made of his wife and family, his work from Papua New Guinea and India, or some of his more recent work.

A few weeks ago I joined the Museums Association as a student member (as I could get it cheap for a year). Apart from free access to loads of museums and special exhibitions, it comes with access to a network of museum and gallery professionals, the MA magazine, and listings of jobs available. Here's hoping it comes to something...

A little bit of fashion. This was a small, two room show about the 60s supermodel icon Veruschka. Until Johnny Moncada found her Veruschka was simply Vera, an East German artist who'd already tried and failed at modelling. Moncada transformed her and made her into one of the world's first supermodels.

Not enough of this story was told within the exhibition though, and I found it a bit disappointing. These images came from Moncada's archive, discovered by his daughter after his death in 2011.

With the final deadline looming just six days away, projects still to finish, finals still to print, we all felt the best course of action was a jaunt around some galleries in London. 

Somerset House was hosting three exhibitions we visited, the biggest of which was the Sony Photography Awards 2014.

The exhibition was split between two wings of the building, the amateur section in the East and the professional section in the West. There was a note from the curator talking about the difficulties of making one show out of two types of entrants, trying to talk up an 'East meets West' type of reasoning; really it was two shows under the umbrella of Sony, and putting them in different buildings cemented that.

The quality of the work was mixed, from dire to excellent. I think we all found fault with the 'winners' in each category; none of the ones we thought were excellent won the award. Particularly in the amateurs section, the winning photographs were heavily photoshopped, artistically 'soft' (but actually out of focus), or just uninteresting. Is this the type of photography most people like?

The professional work was better, but again none us agreed with the judging. To enter the competition the photograph had to be taken on a Sony; perhaps that had something to do with the quality of the entrants?

I had recently read a slating, personal attack on Penelope Curtis, the new(ish) director of Tate Britain, by former Guardian arts critic Waldemar Januszczak. In his article 'Tate Britain is in a right old mess' he personally called for Curtis to be removed from her job, based on her apparently-dire series of changing exhibitions. Less than a year ago he was singing her praises concerning the re-hang of the gallery based on time period rather than theme, so maybe she just needs to wait for him to swing the other way again. Anyway, I wanted to see what he was complaining about. (Incidentally, the re-hang saw my favourite painting, 'The British Channel seen from the Dorsetshire Cliffs' by John Brett, locked away in the vaults, despite a full restoration in 2004, so perhaps this slight is clouding my judgement of Ms Curtis).

Waldemar's argument is that Tate Britain's visitor numbers are down 10% in a year, and it's Curtis' fault because she's awful at making exhibitions. Never mind the fact that much of the gallery was closed in 2013 for a major refit, it's her fault. I enjoyed the chronological 'Walk Through British Art' re-hang (sponsored by BP). It's interesting and informative to see better known works nestled with more obscure ones from the same period, including sculpture too (Curtis' doing, as she was previously director of Henry Moore Institute). It was mirrored in the truly excellent Pre-Raphaelite: Victorian Avant Garde show in 2012-13, which displayed the 'headline acts' with their lesser known but influential contemporaries. So I can't fault that part of the Tate. I even enjoyed some of the contemporary stuff, especially seeing it within the story of British Art.

However I have no love for The Dock by Phyllida Barlow, Curtis' Tate Britain Commission. This monstrosity fills the central Duveen Galleries, spilling every which way through the heart of Tate Britain.

It is meant to symbolise the old docks of London, and its location in this gallery on the Thames at least gives it some geographical justification. But that's where its meaning stops; no connection to the history of the docks, no political or personal link to the turmoil of their closure, nothing. It's also shouting out to be in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern rather than the Duveen Galleries, a space too poetic and soft for this modernist behemoth.

Another fault I find with Tate Britain at the moment are the spotlight galleries. One wrong turn takes you from beautiful Old Masters paintings to a white cube showing some contemporary video. The linear nature of The Walk works so well, why is it interrupted by this misplaced modernism? 

This is the current exhibition at the excellent (and free) photography gallery at the V&A. As the title of the show suggests, it charts the history of fashion photography from Edward Steichen's 1911 photographs of models wearing designer dresses to Tim Walker and Miles Aldridge's modern fantasy big-budget sets. It's interesting to see the changes in fashion, and the changing ways clothes were photographed in. It's also amusing to see how photographers and editors did not always see eye to eye; Vogue editor Edna Woolman Chase once wrote to her staff: "Concentrate completely on showing the dress, light it for this purpose and if that can’t be done with art then art be damned. Show the dress!"

As ever, I was judging the frames. Top marks from me. 

Dark and thin, casting little shadow over the inside of the frame. I read an interview with Martin Barnes, the senior curator of photographs at the V&A, and a well-lit exhibition was something he counted as vital for a great exhibition. Too true, Mr Barnes.

The route of the exhibition was not clear. It turns out we should have zigzagged through the room, rather than hugged the walls. I only realised this when we reached the top of the room, the zenith of fantastical modernism.

On a side note, within the show was a photograph of Lee Miller by Baron George Hoyningen-Huene. I had no idea she was such a beauty. Here she is, marvellously off-set by my zig-zag phone case.

Below the Deutsche Borse Prize exhibition sits this marvellous show of Deakin's photography. The exhibition "explores the hidden corners and colourful characters of 1950s and early 60s London Soho, as seen through the eyes of John Deakin". Even Cultureless-Lawyer-Friend knew the names of some of Deakin's sitters - Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, and Dylan Thomas amongst them (he also drew attention to the visual similarity between Francis Bacon and the actor Oliver Platt). With my mind firmly on our impending grad and London shows, my attention inevitably wandered from the subjects to the frames and the gallery space. Compared to the show upstairs, where everything was slick and modern, this show had a more comfortable, relaxed feel to it. The photographs were smaller and closer together, and exhibited in mixed frames. Mixed frames! Some black, some brown (not outrageous, I admit), but not something one often sees in exhibitions of photography.

Some photographs were window mounted, some mounted directly on the paper. It gave the show a very different feel, something I hadn't really appreciated before. All very interesting.

It seems art doesn't do weekends. Or Bank Holidays. Or tuesdays! Of the dozen or so exhibitions I wanted to see over the Easter weekend, only those housed in the large national galleries were actually open; the smaller, commercial galleries had their doors bolted from thursday evening, and some were even closed the following tuesday (pure laziness!) I expected more from galleries in London. But I still saw some good exhibitions. My first (successful) stop was the Photographers' Gallery, which is currently showing the Deutsche Borse Prize, contested by Alberto Garcia-Alix, Jochen Lempert, Lorna Simpson, and Richard Mosse. By far my favourite contender is Mosse; his work, The Enclave, looks at the civil war still raging in the Congo, and shot using a discontinued infra-red film. The resulting vividly pink and mauve images highlight the horror the landscapes have seen in ways traditional documentary photography has failed to do.

What let it down for me was the framing. These prints are huge, 2A0 at least, and they have thick, dark grey frames, with the print deeply set into the frame, so the top two inches of each photograph is lost in shadow. This is a pet hate of mine; it's something so simple! Every gallery is lit from above, so don't put the work in frames that will cast shadows across the top of it! I noticed it at the Tim Walker show at Somerset House too; for someone for whom detail and lighting is everything, you'd think he'd be pissed about that happening in his exhibition...

Back to the Deutsche Borse show; some of the photographs were taken in the Congolese province of Kivu, a name I recognised from a lesser-known John Le Carre novel entitled "The Mission Song", a depressingly credible book about a supposed-peace process for the region, that turns out to be a front for mineral extraction and Western interests. Richard Mosse's photographs pair well with my imaginings from that book.

Not to tar all African conflict with the same brush, but it also made me think of a new film, 'Half of a Yellow Sun' that I have yet to see. It covers the Nigerian civil war of the 1960s, better known as the Biafran war. Starring Thandie Newton (Mission: Impossible 2) and Chiwetel Ejiofer (12 Years A Slave), it garnered only 2 stars from the Guardian but I'm still keen to see it, as a piece of post-colonial cinema.

I also enjoyed Jochen Lempert's submission, which feels a little like a random collection of works from an amazing archive. There are some marvellous photograms of frogs, some caught mid-jump, bundled with a a photograph of a freckled shoulder, a tulip, and some more photograms of textures.

It's like he's been away for a week and documented everything he saw, and here is a selection from that. All printed on lovely fibre paper (so lovely even my cultureless-lawyer-friend accompanying me commented on it) and hung directly on the wall, no frames. Very effective.

The father of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot, lived and worked at Lacock Abbey, a country house nestled in the beautiful Wiltshire countryside not far from Bath. To immortalise his achievements, a building adjacent to the Abbey has been converted into the Fox Talbot Museum, which illustrates his life and work.

The abbey itself is well worth a visit too. It's hallowed ground to photographers (or me at least), and fascinating to see where Fox Talbot lived and did so much of his work. You can see his desk! And THE window where the first negative was made.

But this wasn't just a jolly day out. Roger Watson, the curator, was keen to form a link between the photography department at Bath Spa and the museum. So a few of us went out there to find out more. After being showed round by Roger, we agreed on various jobs we could do. Over the next month I went out to the museum several times to help give classes about Fox Talbot's photogenic drawing printing method. This was the first ever photographic processes that could be fixed, i.e. the image stayed on the paper without fading immediately on contact with sunlight.

These classes were given to groups of visiting university students, that all happened to be American. I helped him prepare the chemicals, the 'darkroom' (a small converted cattle shed), made sure the students were understanding his instructions, and cleaned the equipment after the lessons. On one of the visits I was lucky enough to observe the production of a daguerreotype, from the preparation of the plate through to it's development. It's a long process, and expensive; the visiting university group paid over £1000 for the demonstration (but they got to keep the daguerreotype).

Iceland is an appropriate place to hold an exhibition called The Weather Diaries - it is possessed of the most varied weather I've ever experienced. My sunny walk home one afternoon was interrupted by a 15 minute snow storm, followed by blazing sun again. But this exhibition shows so much more than that. Artists Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer were commissioned by Nordic House to not only curate the 2014 Fashion Biennale but to create an artistic presentation of the event, and The Weather Diaries is this creation.

The work is principally photography, with an awful lot of post-production. I can't begin to imagine how they went about making them. They play heavily on 18th and 19th century Dutch portraiture, and are embellished in the most beautiful, painterly way. 

The title came from a synonymous book, written in Iceland in 1975, as a set of memoirs about living in the country. The book features in the publication as a series of quotes.

I can't stop adding photographs from the show! They're all so stunning. The photography is married with incredible examples of Nordic fashion throughout, which admittedly I know little about. But the photographs offer this vision of hard beauty in the clothes and textiles, something reflected not only in the models, but in Icelanders too.