photography | First Impressions

Everyone knows Carlos Saura´s work as a filmmaker: Cría cuevos, La caza, Los golfos; the peerless flamenco trilogy with Antonio Gadés: Bodas de sangre, Carmen, El amor brujo; and so much more. I knew he´s been celebrated as a photographer. But I did not really know that aspect of his work and I was really bowled over by it. His 1950s ones are classics but very powerful to see enlarged. The Chaplin pictures are intimate and beautiful, I include a selection of others like the one of Margot Fonteyn in Seville and the Lola Flores and Buñuel just because they´re fab and I imagine some of you will be interested. Such a great exhibition. His notebooks, full of drawings, water-colours, compositions, plays on light, are a real demonstration of the preoccupations of a 20th century visual artist, and I include a sampling as well.

The 50s:

Geraldine Chaplin:

The notebooks:

The famous:

The family, the man, the movie cameras:

Fascinating Fascism:

José Arroyo

Tom Seymour is the writer on art and photography that’s most incited my interest in the last year. His writing on Bill Viola and Michelangelo in Wallpaper* is what got me to the Royal Academy; his article on Don McCullin, also for Wallpaper*, is what occasioned a trip to Tate Britain. He’s how I was introduced to Chernobyl as a rave site, how I first heard of Sian Davey’s show at the National Portrait Gallery and why I was moved to petition for the release of Turkish photographer Çağdaş Erdoğan. I wanted to talk to him about all of this and more. The podcast below is the result.

Tom graduated with a degree in Film and Literature from the University of Warwick in 2007 and since then has contributed to The Guardian, The Observer, The Financial Times, The Telegraph, Wallpaper, CNN, BBC and other important newspapers and magazines. He was also the digital editor of The British Journal of Photography for several years and has recently become Senior Writer for Creative Review.

The conversation ranges from how he got into writing about photography, the experience of going to and writing about Chernobyl, how he pursued the Çağdaş Erdoğan story, and the changing cultural status of photography as well as the current ecosystem of the medium in London. We end with an extended discussion of the great Don McCullin exhibition currently on at Tate Britain, which we both urge everyone to see.