Sarah Hickson

Peter Luck

Alan Larson

Angelika Bernt

Barry Cole started the evening off with a set of photos of the fantastic multi-coloured garden structures made by an almost-neighbour in Catford.
We then moved on to a presentation and discussion of Sarah Hickson’s photos taken as a contribution to a literary festival in Kolkata. The festival had taken as a theme ‘Writing Places’ and Sarah’s photos were as a response to her first-time experience of Kolkata as a place. Four local photographers had also been invited to contribute work to a possible book. This is now in production. Sarah showed both the selection made by the book’s editors and her own slightly variant selection and the discussion ranged over matters of selection, colour vs B&W (most images were best presented as B&W) and the speed at which rapport with people photographed can be established in Kolkata.
Peter Luck followed with a set of urban topographic photos, not saying which was the city viewed. It was, in fact, Venice but this didn’t become obvious until several images in to the sequence. Some discussion followed on whether cliché had been avoided and how one might go about avoiding it and whether such an exercise would benefit from being linked to a text.
Next was Alan Larsen who had photographed the Semana Santa procession in the small Spanish town of Alhaurin el Grande but rather than concentrate solely on the (slightly weird) spectacle he had also recorded those watching and the utterly deserted streets away from the processional route.
Dmitri Stepanko showed a new selection of his Japanese material and Angelika Berndt closed proceedings with photos of a place in Ethiopia where poor people are living in a mausoleum, young men are training for the priesthood in the hope that it will be a route out of poverty, and where the Orthodox church gives out food after Sunday mass. Peter Luck