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LIP GREENWICH APRIL 2017 MEETING

A good meeting.

First a bit of background: the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe includes the great brick shaft from the bottom of which the Brunels excavated the first Thames Tunnel. That shaft has now been given new access and is an extraordinary venue for creative events.

 
Last night Gareth Davies told us about his work there with singer Susanne Mecklenburg, his videos complementing her song, and he played us recordings of songs and visuals which had been part of the programme. It was their intention to avoid the obvious such as sequences of too-literal images and look for equivalence between music and vision. The techniques of visual production were complex and new to most of us but the results were fascinating as images dissolved into fluid abstraction and returned. It was generally felt that this work should have a wider audience. Steven Stewart followed with a set of explanatory photos of the venue.


John Levett then showed a set of photos taken in Sunderland where he will shortly take a day studying techniques of deriving glass objects from these images. This introduced the topic of relating photography to other media just as Gareth had derived his abstract complexity from plain photos.

Jennifer  Roberts concluded the presentations with a set of photos taken in the Barking, area in preparation for her application for the Urban Photography Summer School.She had initially been drawn to the location by the disappearance of the hamlet of Creekmouth after the 1953 floods. It is now part of an extensive industrial area with the new, very spacious residential development of Barking Riverside growing nearby, and older social housing equally spacious too. This looked like the beginning of a splendid project in record photography.

The evening didn’t end there. We spent a few minutes discussing some questions of how satellite groups might become more involved in the wider scope of LIP. One thing which appealed was that we should propose events of our own for the wider LIP community and Gareth’s work was taken as a possible starting point and one which would open the door to wider appreciation of the possibilities for an extended photography.

Report by Peter Luck