Peter Luck opened the session with two fictions, one a riff on the dystopian film Alphaville, sequencing stills from that film with a selection from films of the same era, the other using just six of his own images to build up a mood of unspecific anxiety – this in imitation of the unrelated vignettes which might open a novel, their relation to be established in the succeeding pages. Maybe.

Peter Luck

Steven Stewart followed with a set of topographic images taken around Borough High Street, images recognisable as being from that part of London even before the known landmarks appeared. This prompted a debate on the merits of the recorded walk as a means of ‘getting at’ the urban environment and on the thoughts that might spring from a photo of, say, a Peabody Trust housing block (or an hop exchange).

Steve Stewart

Next the return of Gareth Davies with 360 degree panoramas of the extraordinary shingle beaches of the Suffolk coast, then a set of records of the passage of time made by culling images from a waterproof video camera such that the moments when it was submerged by an incoming wave appeared as rhythmically spaced blurs in a laterally extended image. (This isn’t easy to describe.) Lastly a couple of images taken at a stream using a double fish-eye camera dipped into the stream, so giving an image both above and below water level. This looks like a very fruitful line of investigation and the images impressed us all.

Gareth Davies

Lastly another return: Stefan Lubomirski de Vaux bringing a set of photos of highly skilled people at work: musicians, instrument makers, recording engineers, furniture makers, a painter, almost all in strong, deep colour. These were all made to commission, sparking a discussion of the professional photographer’s flow of commissions and the means of getting them.

Robert Titian at work :: image by Stefan Lubomirski de Vaux

Report by Peter Luck