Robert Gray

The life and times of a start-up professional photographer.

[iamrobgray]

A change of exhibition venue (slightly!)

Unfortunately someone has purchased the unit in the Corn Exchange that we were hoping to let for our exhibition next week. We managed to get into our new space for the first time today so we could measure up and make sure we have everything worked out.

The new space is much bigger, which is fantastic. We’ve gone from wondering how to cram everything in to having enough room for a reception area… Not bad, eh?

We’re sorting out everything this week like balloons (!), booze… You know, all the essentials.

We can’t wait to get set up and hang our work.

[iamrobgray]

Back in Derby!

This time I was helping Carla with her project for our exhibition in June. It's a film-noir series that explores the Femme Fatale figure and her relationship with the social shifts of the 1940's and 1950's.

I went down with our friend Alice who was modelling for Carla, it was a lot of fun! We shot all of it on location. Carla had rented out a small village hall in a place called Lockington, it was absolutely perfect for what Carla wanted - there were plenty of old fashioned chairs, tables, all sorts! 

[iamrobgray]

Back to school

It was back to school for me the other day. I was shooting another photograph for my dream series. This dream is one of my sisters and I've been waiting to do it for a while now! She frequently has dreams where she's having to revise for a test at school, despite leaving three or four years ago.

I've had this shoot planned for quite a while, but as you can imagine its a little difficult to organise a photoshoot in a school with it being so busy all the time. Thankfully the kind people at Immanuel College let me in during the Easter holidays.

Really happy with the end product, it was a lot of fun to set up and shoot, despite having to move half a classroom so I could get the lights set up properly! It took me a while to black out all of the windows too since the sun was getting in far too much. 

[iamrobgray]

Tom Martin Archive @ White Cloth Gallery, Leeds

Tom is a friend of mine, he's joined the third year of my course so it's not the first time I've seen his work! Tom's been the official photographer for bands such as Elbow, Basement Jaxx, and The Courteeners whilst working for the NME and Kerrang!

I went down the other afternoon and had a look at what he'd got up. There is a mixture of Tom's work up - music stuff, portraiture, fashion. It's a really good mix. The White Cloth is one of my favourite venues in Leeds, so well done to Tom for getting his work up in there.

Looking forward to seeing his end of year exhibition!

Check out Tom's stuff: 

Website: http://tmoose.co.uk

Blog: http://tommartinphoto.tumblr.com/

[iamrobgray]

The beginning of another series

That's right, another!

Carla moved down to Derby in February, so I went down and stayed over for a couple of nights. We'd decided that we were going to start shooting one of our projects but we hadn't quite decided which! After a good chat we'd decided to run with out 'abandoned' theme and set about purchasing props and finding locations, which was fun since neither of us know Derby at all! 

We'd both decided that we really really wanted to photograph the shed in Carla's garden - in fact we've wanted to do something with a shed for a little while now. We'd decided on making it look as though a children's party had been abandoned. We bought a birthday cake (it was delicious), cups, decorations and all sorts so that we could make it look exactly how we wanted. It was a lot of fun to set up! The end product looked better than what we'd imagined, which is pretty awesome. 

The moon was rising as we were shooting and it was huge! Sadly it was in the wrong part of the sky for us, as well as being obscured by other houses. It would have been amazing if we'd managed to get that in the shot as well.

The other shoots we'd done were of an abandoned pram in a skate park, and an abandoned car in the middle of a road. We're dead happy with how they've turned out too.

[iamrobgray]

Lord Whitney - Lore of the North book!

This morning I received my copy of Lore of the North, it came in a really awesome little package with a hand written note from Bek and Amy. I made a post about their exhibition last week here. 

The book itself does not tell the stories one by one, instead it is set out in a similar way to the 'choose your own adventure' style books you used to read as a kid. In doing this, Lord Whitney have let their readers navigate their own way through these tales of folklore. It's a really fantastic idea, and the book itself is very well put together.

The book also comes with a huge folded up map, which maps out all of the stories. Great stuff! 

[iamrobgray]

Lord Whitney - Lore of the North @ Munro House, Leeds

Lord Whitney are Leeds based artists that specialise in photography, set design, illustration and art direction. I recently discovered their work at the back end of 2013 and I absolutely love it! They've been drip feeding information about a book & exhibition through their Facebook page and Twitter timeline and I've been really looking forward to seeing it. 

They had the exhibition in a room behind Colours May Vary in Munro House - it's a nice little space and I didn't even know it existed before visiting! 

Lore of the North explores folklore and traditions from the north of England, particularly Yorkshire. The creative duo have gone about Yorkshire searching for tales of folklore and stories of odd traditions, collecting them, and then making them into photographs.

The photographs were exhibited in a slightly unorthodox way, one which worked quite well for the series. Two wooden poles were attached to either side of the print, and then leant against the wall all the way round the room.

You can really tell that they've spent a lot of time preparing and creating the sets in these photographs, and scouting locations too. 

I've ordered the Lore of the North book, so I can't wait to see what that's like too! 

There's a really nice interview with Lord Whitney from The City Talking here - http://thecitytalking.com/lifestyle/2014/4/17/lord-whitney-lore-of-the-north

[iamrobgray]

Philip-Lorca diCorcia @ The Hepworth, Wakefield

So Philip-Lorca diCorcia has finally decided to exhibit his work in the UK, and he's chosen to exhibit it at The Hepworth in Wakefield. Amazingly convenient! Usually we have to go down to London and other such places to see exhibitions of this magnitude. So to have one in West Yorkshire is brilliant. Well done to everyone at The Hepworth.

It was great to see huge prints of these photographs I know so well. I'm used to seeing them in books or on screens, so to see them as large format print was fantastic.  

Philip-Lorca diCorcia is one of my favourite photographers, and a great inspiration to me. A lot of his photographs appear to be very banal, often showing scenes of the every day life for a lot of the earth's population. A lot of them also take on a very 'documentary' aesthetic and feel, but this is deceptive since diCorcia stages his photographs exactly the way he wants. This can be seen in his series 'Hustler' which is by far my favourite from him. The series depicts male escorts of Hollywood in a carefully selected location, with carefully selected lighting. The escorts first name, age, location and the amount that diCorcia paid them all appear within the title of each photograph, allowing the viewer a small glimpse in to each of these mens lives. 

The exhibition featured work from a number of his other series' too, including the controversial Heads (2000-01), Streetwork (1993-99), Storybook Life (1975-99) East of Eden (2008 - present) and Lucky 13 (2004)

Check out The Hepworth's rundown of what's on here: http://www.hepworthwakefield.org/whatson/dicorcia/

Get yourselves down to have a look, you won't be disappointed! 

[iamrobgray]

The Juju Shop's new venture - The Juju Art Agency

We received an e-mail the other day from The Juju Shop, the guys that organised the amazing Christmas event that we had a stall at in December. They've moved their shop out of The Corn Exchange and have relocated to bigger premises on the outskirts of Leeds City Centre and have also set up their own art agency, which is really cool. We've been invited to pioneer The Juju Art Agency and have been given the opportunity to have a free profile with them while they're setting it up. This will hopefully mean sales, jobs, opportunities, development, exhibitions, events, production services, skills development and commissions through the art agency. Exciting times! Can't wait to get started on our application form and send it off. 

[iamrobgray]

We've secured a venue for our exhibition!

We'll be back at the Corn Exchange again this summer! We had plans to look around a few venues, but as soon as we went back to the Corn Ex Carla and I had already made our minds up - we definitely wanted to go back there. It's just such a cool building. Plenty of independent retailers, and there are shops in there that appeal to our target audience as well which is good. We figured that the footfall through the Corn Exchange will be really good to us, and it's not something that's available in a lot of other places.

The unit we've chosen is on the bottom floor, fairly near the entrance so it's in a really good location for people to see us.

[iamrobgray]

Spookiest shoot ever

Last night I was shooting a photograph for my dreams project in Thornton, Bradford. This was my Mums dream, in which she's sat on the edge of a gravestone whilst being very aware that somebody is watching her. Weird! I'd asked for some advice from the Chaplin of a school I taught at last year, and he told me that Thornton Cemetery would be a good location due to its history and geographical location - plenty of open fields and rolling hills surrounding it. (Not that you'd see them in the black of night!)

We arrived just before sunset so I could get a good idea of where I wanted to set up and take the photograph. It got dark pretty quickly so it was a little bit of a struggle! The wind didn't help matters either, making the softboxes act like wind sails. We had a few nervous moments where it looked like the lights were about to take off! 

Unfortunately it started to rain too, which cut us short, but I was happy with what I'd managed to capture.

[iamrobgray]

The first shoot for my new project

The first shoot is always exciting. You can plan and draw all you like but you can never really know how the first photograph is going to truly turn out. 

The first dreams I've recreated for this project are a couple of dreams from my friends Danny & Rachel. I've known them both for about 5 or 6 years now since we were on the same media course together at College. I've helped Rach out with a couple of film shoots as part of her University course so it was nice to call in a favour from her! Rachel has dreams that someone is breaking in to the house & creeping up the stairs. I'm dead chuffed with how the lighting turned out for her photograph.

Danny's was a little more complicated. He has recurring dreams of planes falling out of the sky! After reviewing the photographs  I think I can get a better shot out of that dream so I shall be going back to their house and having a redo at some point. 

I'm going to be using the Phase One for this project. Always good to use a decent bit of kit! Hopefully my prints are going to be pretty big, so I want that extra bit of quality from the camera.

[iamrobgray]

A new project!

As you can see I've been testing a few things over the past couple of months. New concepts, as well as new techniques and aesthetics as a result of that. In a previous post I talked about discovering an aesthetic I liked, but I was still without a concept. After a bit (note: a lot) of brain storming and plenty of list making, I've decided that my project will be recreating peoples dreams. Not happy la-de-da kind of dreams, the kind of dreams that leave the dreamer waking up feeling on edge or anxious. Not a happy dream, nor a nightmare, but somewhere in between. 

I've been collecting peoples dreams for a few weeks now and I'm really excited to finally get shooting and start to bring a few of these dreams to life!

[iamrobgray]

Beginning the search for exhibition spaces

We'll be organising and hosting our first solo exhibition in June this year, which is really exciting for us. We're also very aware that time is flying by and the date is becoming ever closer so we've begun the search for an exhibition space. We've been in touch with the lovely people from Leeds Pop-Ups and they've pointed us in the direction of a few spaces including: Clarence Dock, Trinity Church, The Reliance pub, and Leeds Corn Exchange.

We'll be having a look round some of these venues within the next few weeks. Choosing the right space is really important for us - we ideally want somewhere that will suit our work, and ourselves as photographers. 

[iamrobgray]

Xmas Xtravaganza @ Leeds Corn Exchange - 21st & 22nd December 2013

  We were selling our Christmas themed prints at the Corn Exchange last month as part of The Juju Shop's  Xmas Xtravaganza event. It was the first proper trade fair that we'd been to and it was a really great experience for us both - we weren't really sure what to expect when we set up. We felt like the new kids on the block to start off with, everyone else seemed to know each other!

We sold a few prints and made a few contacts, which was really important to us. There was also quite a lot of positive feedback on our photography from people, including potential clients, which is really really encouraging once again. 

We've realised that there a couple of things that we need to tweak if we're going to go to any more fairs so we'll amend those and then do it all again, hopefully soon.

Highlight of the weekend? Primo's hotdogs for lunch two days in a row. What more can I say?

[iamrobgray]

Julia Bickerstaff - Neon: Burning Light @ Leeds Gallery

Popped in to Leeds Gallery this week to have a look at Julia Bickerstaff's 'Neon: Burning Light'

It's the first time I've really seen anything like this and I was really impressed! I can only imagine the kind of work that went in to creating these pieces of art. My favourite sculpture had to be 'Light Reading' which you can see pictured above. The piece was about dyslexia, a learning difficulty that the artist has to contend with on a day to day life. The sculpture had tubes of neon light coming through various hardback books that made the words very hard, and in parts impossible to read. A really amazing way of causing the viewer to empathise with people who have dyslexia. 

[iamrobgray]

The Tetley - A new gallery space in Leeds

The old Tetley & Carlsberg brewery on the outskirts of the city centre has been transformed in to a new gallery space. The Tetley opened at the back end of November and I finally managed to get down to have a look round this week. The building is fantastic and they've managed to keep the majority of the original floors and furniture, which gives the place some real character. There are even name tags on the doors! It makes for a really interesting space - and it was pretty cool for me to see as my dad used to be an employee of Carlsberg before the brewery was shut down.

Unfortunately the only floor that was open was the first so we only had chance to look at a few bits and pieces. The opening programme is called 'A New Reality' and will feature exhibitions that look at the history of the Tetley Brewery. 

There is also a very unusual looking stage in the middle of the floor that is covered in quotes about work and art.  Theorists and academics will conduct speeches from the stage that discuss and debate 'what work is'

Since there was only one floor open, Carla and I decided to make full use of restaurant and bar area downstairs and got ourselves a hot chocolate!