LIP Central June 2024 Meeting – LIP Satellite Groups

Featured image © Austin Guest

The June meeting of London Independent Photography (LIP) Central Group took place on 12^th June 2024 at the Old Diorama Arts Centre NW1. The theme for the evening was “still” and each of the eight presenters had their own slightly different take on the word. There were also seven diverse personal projects. Twenty members attended and we were pleased to welcome Mirella Kunic, who had recently joined LIP.

Starting with the theme of still, Nusse Belton showed a range of images beginning with people literally sitting still and a fallen scarecrow lying still on the ground. She also showed some more metaphorical images of the stillness in a landscape and on water.

Jan Cywik’s images were of still lives of flowers, mostly taken close-up and focusing on the centre of the flower. The flowers appeared frozen and allowed us to see details and an other-worldly beauty that are normally overlooked.

Austin Guest ‘s pictures from a recent photographic course in the Highlands of Scotland near Loch Leven and Ballachulish also majored on stillness in land and water. He had taken great care to line up symmetrical reflections of the hills to emphasise the calmness of the Loch.

In a change of mood and use of the word still, Eve Milner showed a moving set of self -portraits taken after hair loss as the result of chemotherapy. The point she made was that although she had lost her hair and part of her outward identity, she was still herself.

Amongst Brian Martin’s images were still moments in the hectic world of motorcycle racing and Formula 1. He had a particularly telling shot of a racing driver sitting completely focussed in his car in the pits whilst mechanics rushed around him to change tyres.

Still lives are traditionally a meditation on morality but Chloe Sastry had taken this a stage further in her series of three images by melding pictures of her own skin with the petals of the flowers to confront her anxieties about death. Her final image of a seed head , however, showed hope for renewal.

Edey Templeton by contrast showed a range of off-beat, brightly coloured still lives of peppers and kitchen utensils.

Frankie McAllister’s images returned to the stillness of landscape, showing a brooding Northumberland in mist and rain which were reminiscent of those by Paul Hart. Her picture of an ancient stone circle brought out the idea of timelessness implicit in the word still. Frankie had made a short book of her images which was also on display.

Moving on to personal projects, Sue Czapska showed three images of people in a public underpass which had been taken some time ago but which she had returned to recently and reworked in Photoshop to reflect her current personal circumstances. By switching from positive to negative in the originals and reversing colours she had made striking changes in mood and what a viewer might infer from the images.

Astrid Zweynert showed scenes from her recent trip to Lisbon where she had spent time people watching and searching out interesting buildings. In particular, she brought out the now crumbling glamour of the buildings in the old city.

Pauline Moon showed unnoticed details amongst the art in an exhibition. These included fleeting shadows on the walls and floors which gave another dimension to the work on display.

Alec Wyllie’s project centred on Joppa beach near Edinburgh. He photographed the same scene looking over to the island of Inchkeith on three different evenings at different times. The result was an interesting investigation into the effect of light on the same scene.

Dorota Boisot’s images were taken from the window of the train on the nine hour journey from Warsaw to Vienna. She focussed on quirky details in the many stations the train stopped at as well as the changing landscape as the train slipped over borders.

Janet Nabney showed a series of double exposures taken at the Michelangelo exhibition at the British Museum. Her skilful use of technique resulted in a set of images which brought out the richness of the originals whilst adding something completely different and unsettling.

Chris Burrows shared his work in progress on a book on piers. The piers were in a variety of places, Brighton of course, but also Bournemouth and Clevedon and in a variety of styles from high Victorian to 1950s Brutalist.

The next meeting will be on 10^th July and the topic will be Shibui (unobtrusive beauty).