The Photographers' Gallery

The Photographers' Gallery was founded in 1971 by Sue Davies, OBE at 8 Great Newport Street, London, in a converted Lyon's Tea Café in the Covent Garden side of Soho. It was the first independent gallery in Britain solely devoted to photography. In 2008 the Gallery moved temporarily into its new premises at 16-18 Ramillies Street near Oxford Circus tube before starting an extensive transformation of the building in Autumn 2010. The new building reopened to the public on May 19 2012.

In the Photographers Gallery there was three different exhibits with a total of ten different artist work displayed. Firstly there was a whole room exhibition focusing on a new series of Laura Letinsky's work called 'Ill Form and Void Full' (2010-2011).

 There was then an exhibition called 'Perspectives on collage' which shows eight different artist perspectives to collage, these artist were: Jan Svoboda, Peggy Franck, Nicole Wermer, Batia Suter, Anna Parkina, C.K Rajan, Roy Arden and Clunie Reid. 

Geraldo De Barros

Geraldo de Barros (1923-1998)was an accomplished painter, photographer and industrial Brazilian designer. Born in São Paulo in 1923, Geraldo de Barros first established himself as a painter and founding member of the Expressionist painting studio Grupo 15. Alongside this work he also began experimenting with photography and in 1946 joined the Bandeirante Photo Club. This is the first UK exhibition of the influential Brazilian artist Geraldo de Barros. 

Laura L. Letinsky is a Canadian contemporary photographer, best known for her still life's. She is a Professor at the University of Chicago, Department of Visual Arts. Born in Winnipeg, Canada, her B.F.A. is from the University of Manitoba, 1986, and her M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art, 1991.

This was one of the few pieces of work that I liked in the exhibition. This is by Laura Letensky and was part of her 'Ill Form and Void Full' exhibition in the gallery. When I first saw this piece of work I wasn't to keen on the work and was quite confused in what it was and if it did have a meaning or not. I then started to analyse the work and look more in depth. I then notice that the objects all related as they are broken cutlery and leftover food. Once realising this I then got told by the tour guid that Letensky was trying to create this image of a family dinner and what leftovers there are from a big dinner. Lentensky created this collage on a white canvas to show the mess create from when food and drink is spilt.   

I also liked this work by Anna Parkina which was in the exhibition called 'Perspectives on collage'. This is a collage made by photographs taken by Anna Parkina. Parkina uses these photographs to change, add too and obscure parts of this original photograph of the benches in a park. I like this collage because its simple and also even though it is an abstract collage it still has this element of realism because how she has used the photographs and added thought into the composition of the photos in the collage. Anna Parkina also added part of a photograph of herself in to the collage which she does which many of her collages in this exhibition which I really like as it adds her mark/ signature to her work. 

Other Pieces of work I liked from the exhibition:

These were two from many which I didn't like in the gallery because I felt that they were very simplistic and I couldn't see a meaning in the work and didn't understand what the artist was trying to show.

Overall I didn't really like or enjoy the exhibition because I'm not a big fan of hand made collage but feel that I have seen a few ideas from the gallery which I feel that I could experiment with. I feel that it was relevant to the covert and obscured theme but wasnt so sure how I could use it in my brief of packaging.