After a few hot days it’s refreshingly foggy and drizzly. Sorry to sound like a weather report…
More interesting news: my Miss Aniela online shop will be open for some time, where (superb quality) mounted prints of my exhibition work are available in various sizes, UK / worldwide P&P included, check it out.
Ahem, obviously not my work, but the work of Mr Guy Bourdin. (Refs for images: Top, middle, bottom). His fetishistic images tend to use legs and shoes and tights and made-up women alot, and often look like fashion shoots or advertising images. Other images look like movie scenes. Bourdin also loved the draw and paint, but photography, rather than being to ‘take a photo, was the way he ‘realized images’ from his mind. He revolutionised the use of colour in an era, in France, when mono imagery was predominant. He inspired Cindy Sherman, an artist who is frequently mentioned by viewers of my own work.
His images are a strange debatable mix of references to both feminine submission and to perhaps a feminist outcry. One image may show a woman throwing clothes at a man’s head or crushing his hand with her shoe as he reaches for his pistol; another may compartmentalise the woman’s body by having several stilettoed legs arranged like the petals of a flower. Another has a woman half hiding underneath a bed with only her bottom and stockings visible.
Bourdin’s work is inspirational to me because of its use of surrealism; hyperbolic airbrushed skin; a sense of parody of the consumerism and of the American Dream; its display of feminine accoutrements whether than is to satire gender or endorse it, and it occasional Nabokovian overtones as in the main middle image pictured.
I became aware of Bourdin’s work at Art A-Level and I feel he has been a subconscious influence in some of my work, for example The Deaths and the faceless Fragile
During a pleasant sunny Thursday 5th April in Brighton a steady stream of visitors joined in the celebration of the opening of my exhibition- entering through to the gallery above Snoopers’ Paradise in Kensington Gardens:
The arrangement of my images in the gallery - a main current of selected 70 x 50cm mounted and framed images…
… underlined by a stream of 6″x4″ foamboarded ‘incidentals’ of my entire Flickr photostream, showing the diversity of what I have uploaded in the last year:
And huge, 1 metre x 70cm sealed aluminium prints of two selected images; Stretch and Memoirs of a Woman of Leisure, on the far wall.
Drinks served:
and bowls of strawberries plus chocolate fountain (strawberries here modelled by me… doing a kind of retake of Out of Season - same dress…):
Talking with the photographer Paul Demuth who took pics for the gallery publicity:
…me
Me again:
A view of the gallery:
Me after swapping to orange juice from the champagne (I was driving…)
Matthew whom I bestowed my Sony R1 upon to snap the afternoon (in the background can be seen Kevin Mason, co-organiser of the exhibition, otherwise known as DarkDaze Photography )
Me with Delarge (designed missaniela.com):
Me with a fellow Flickrite ‘ lomokev ‘:
Myself with Nigel Swallow, owner of North Laine Photography:
And here, presenting fellow Flickrite Erin L with his signed, purchased framed print of In the Churchyard. My exhibition prints will soon be available to order from the gallery online, through my website itself. Click here for details.
Snapped by Delarge!
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