Now at Somerset House

One of my favourite venues in London, Somerset House, is currently showing two interesting photography exhibitions - and they're both free of admission.

The first one is Jim Lee: Arrested, an exhibition showcasing the work of fashion photographer and film maker Jim Lee. I did find the exhibition a bit funny and Lee's work a product of his time (even cosidering the fact that the exhibition has new work as well, and not only work from Lee's days of glory in the 1960's and 1970's), but that's maybe also what I liked about it. I'm a sucker for fashion from different eras (the 1960's being one of my favourites) and I love looking at the clothes in old pictures (be it fashion or not), because I think that only by looking at the clothes people are wearing, you can read so much into that era.

The other photography exhibition, Gideon Mendel: Drowning World, has a more serious subject matter. It showcases Mendel's global photography project about Flooding. He has shot portraits of flood victims, standing in the landscape of their personal misfortune. You see images of people, all around the world, standing in what used to be their livingroom or street, with water up to their knees - or even necks. Sometimes I'm very happy to be from Finland, it might be bloody cold and dark in the winter, but we don't have (that bad) floods, earth quakes, tsunamis etc.


While you're at Somerset House, they also have an exhibition with the art of the Japanese tattoo artist Horiyoshi III and one dedicated to the work of designer Wendy Ramshaw and the Courtauld Gallery in the same building is also always well worth a visit. Oh, and the bookshop's quite nice, as well as the cafés. And during the winter, there's always the ice rink...as I said, I like Somerset House!

Diamond Jubilee

The Queen: Art & Image opened today at the National Portrait Gallery. I saw the exhibition last summer at the National Galleries of Scotland and the royalist I am, I loved the exhibition and was thrilled to read that the touring show has finally come to the capital. 
The exhibition is a celebration of the Queen's 60 years at the throne, but it also shows how the expectations of the image of the British monarchy has changed during this period of time. I couldn't care less about the Olympics, but super happy about being here for the Diamond Jubilee!
Personal favourites included, among other things, a portrait of the Queen with the Duke of Edinburgh by Thomas Struth from 2011 and a casual snap by Eve Arnold from 1968. 

Deller & Shrigley at the Hayward

The Hayward Gallery has two brilliant exhibitions on until the 13th May. The first one is Jeremy Deller's Joy in People (a fantastic flashback to the 90's) and the other one is David Shrigley's hilarious exhibition Brain Activity. If you haven't seen the exhibitions yet, I recommend you go this Friday, because Deller & Shrigley will be spinning records at the Concrete Café at the Hayward from 8 pm.

Ruff at the Gagosians

Last week was the opening reception for Thomas Ruff's exhibitions at the Gagosian. He's showing his space picures at the Gagosian on Britannia Street, and his Nude-series at Davies Street. The Ma.r.s exhibition was quite fun, because you get to wear 3D glasses and I love the space (worht going to the gallery just for that), but with the nudes I can't stop thinking that he might not be as famous if he'd chosen to blow up images of squirrels or sunsets found online instead of porn images. What do you think?

Lizzy & Cecil

I love the Queen and I love Cecil Beaton, so I was thrilled when I saw the exhibition Queen Elsiabeth II by Cecil Beaton at the V&A. The coronation portrait above is just amazing. Go and see it and celebrate the Diamond Jubilee!

Paolo Roversi

In case you haven't seen it yet (I know some of you have), Paolo Roversi's amazingly beautiful fashion photographs are exhibited at the Wapping Project Bankside (next to Tate Modern) until the end of March. A must see! And a proof that fashion photography doesn't have to be crisp, highly stylized and digitally manipulated. Less is more, if you ask me.

UCA Talk

Thanks everyone who came for my talk a couple of weeks ago! I think Jonathan already posted something on the course blog, but here's some of the things I mentioned:

The YouTube video for Out of Fashion can be seen here and if you wanna know more about the project or see some pictures from the exhibitions, check out our Tumblr and Facebook. You can also always ask me, if you want to know more practical things about how to make an exhibition and/or publication happen, I'm happy to help you out.

My project, The Memory of My Wardrobe, can be seen on my webpage, along with other projects I've done during my stay at uni.

For anyone interested in ethical consuming and fashion, the book I recommended is called To Die For - Is Fashion Wearing Out the World, and it's written by Lucy Siegle.

Hope you're getting along well with your projects and enjoying your time at uni!

Arnold Newman's Portraits

Chris Beetles Fine Photographs is currently showing Arnold Newman's portraits of artists, mostly photographed in their studios and working spaces (from top to bottom: Truman Capote, Yasuo Kuniyshi and Max Ernst).

I loved the pictures (classics!), and it reminded me of why I first fell in love with black and white and that I should start taking portraits again. The exhibition is free and open until 11th February, so don't miss it.

Newman has a marvellous portrait of David Hockney (one of the few in colour), looking super stylish, as usual. Speaking of my favourite artist, Hockney's A Bigger Picture at the RA is almost next door, so if you're in London anyway check that out as well. It's supposed to be amazing.

P.S. I'm coming to UCA tomorrow to talk about my project, so see you soon!

Currently at the Wapping Project

Edgar Martin's is currently showing his work This is Not a House at the Wapping Project. It's a project about the mortage crisis in the US that led to the financial crisis we are in now. So it's a lot of pictures of empty half-build houses and broken dreams. These picures, that were first published as a photo essay for the NYTimes, caused a bit of a contreversy, since they were digitally altered - which kind of goes against the ethics of journalism (you can read more about it here). Since you've been working on units about the environment and the city I thought this might interest you.

Also currently at the Wapping project is Bridget Baker's installation Wrecking at Private Siding 661. It's a very interesting site-specific installation (have you ever seen a human transport basket? I didn't even know they had existed until I saw the show!) in the accumulation tower. If you decide come and see it, I recommend you come on a Thursday, because that's when I'm working there. This one's open until 11 February and Edgar Martin's in on until 4 March. Even if you can't make it to these exhibitions, the Wapping Project is a nice place to visit. It's housed in an old hydraulic power stations, there's a nice café/restaurant and you can climb up on the roof to enjoy the view. Nearby is the Thames Path, which makes a really nice Sunday walk!

Portraits

The National Portrait Gallery is currently showing the winners of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Prize, an annual portrait competition (that everyone can submit to, so remember that! The competition for 2012 opens next spring). Though I wonder how some of the shortlisted images are supposed to be the best of over 6000 entries, there where some really good portraits (like the winning guinea pig portrait above by Jooney Woodward) and the exhibition (as well as the rest of the collection at NPG) is well worth having a look at, not only because there is a portrait of Kiera Knightley that shows that she's actually human and has wrinkles (which sometimes is hard to believe looking at all those glossy Chanel ads, but because one of your tasks is to take a portrait and I find it hard to believe that there would be any other place where you could find such a wide variety of portraits of all mediums - there's not only paintings and photographs, go there and see yourself what other ways there is to portray a person.

The Taylor Wessing competition has become a quite big event and intrestingly an other competition has popped up in the shadow of it. Portrait Salon is a competition for entries rejected by the Taylor Wessing Photographic prize. The exhibition showcases 75 rejected entries and opens tomorrow at Roxy Bar and Screen at 128-132 Borough High Street, SE1 1LB. Gonna go and check out that for sure!

Exhibitions

As promised, some exhibition recommendations. More coming soon!

TATE MODERN

There's lots of great stuff at the Tate at the moment (actually so much I haven't had the time to see it all). And the permanent collection is also always good.

Photography: New Documentary Forms

An exhibition exploring the power of photography as a documentary medium, with works by Luc Delahaye, Mitch Epstein, Guy Tillim,

Boris Mikhailov

and Akram Zaatari. Could be useful for the environment unit! On until 31st March.

Diane Arbus

The Artist Rooms at Tate Modern currently show's a three room exhibition of the American photographer Diane Arbus. Arbus is most famous for her portraits of people in the outskirts of society. Hurry, because this exhibition is on only until 6th November!

Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters

In my opinion, one of the best and interesting exhibitions this year. In this project Simon is investigating bloodlines and it's an exhibition where the personal and the political meet. Simon is a master of combining image and text and the exhibition is a must see for anyone interested in portraiture and social commentary. Simon has also documented some objects of her subjects, so I think this exhibition is very supportive to both your units - and it's for free, as the exhibitions above. It's on until 2nd January.

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Besides these three, Tate Modern currently shows Gerhard Richter, I haven't seen it yet, but I'm sure it's good. He's a painter, but his work is very closely linked to photography, so do have a look at him! The museum also shows Tacita Dean's film, wich I'm also very curios about.

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Julia Margaret Cameron @ V&A Museum of Childhood

For anyone interested in portraiture, the history of photography or alternative processes, the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green in East London has a nice little exhibition of Cameron's portraits of children. And if you havent been to the Museum of Childhood before, its permanent collection is worth having look at, though I do recommend you avoid it on weekends, unless you like family fun with lots of children. Watching the museum displays is like walking down memory lane to your own childhood. Oh, and they have very nice shop!

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Bill Jackson @ The Front Room

Since you have to photograph an object, I started to think about this. Bill Jackson's exhibition Cabinet of Curiosities brings together three of the artist's series, all exploring the idea of the photograph as an object. As the daughter of a collector (and a bit of a collector myself) of everything, I especially enjoyed the series called Relics. The exhibition is on at Troika Editions Front Room gallery until the end of the month.

About My Practice

Hello 1st Years!

I thought it would be polite to start by introducing myself, just so you know who you're talking with. My name is Ida Taavitsainen, I'm 24 years old and graduated from UCA Rochester last summer. I had a fantastic three years at uni, I just wish I could have stayed there longer!

I started doing photography when I was fourteen, because my sister was into it and wanted company. As it happens, my sister never really got into it, but here I am, still trying to figure it out (so, thanks Kira!). At the moment I live in London (where I moved for the third year - highly recommended if you want to get into the art scene and keep yourself sane), where try to balance boring work that I actually get paid for and my personal artistic practice.

As I say in my little introduction on the right-hand side, I only work with film and I absolutley love - and miss - working in the darkroom. My personal projects usually revolve around my family, memories, history, collecting, the traces and objects that define us and that we leave behind when we leave this world. I have a lifelong love for fashion, but do not see myself as a fashion photographer and I love writing (which you will probably notice and suffer from) and am also very interested in the relationship between image and text.

During my three years at uni I worked on and off on a project called The Memory of My Wardrobe and that project also became my final project in the 3rd year. It's a project I started when I realized that so many of the clothes I have have belonged to someone else before me. I have garments in my wardrobe that have belonged to my mother, sisters, grand mothers, great grand mother and even great great grandmother and other family members and friends, so this project is basically a family history told through materials (the image at the top of this post is from this series - the dress belonged to my super stylish great grandmother).

I am also one third of the people behind the fashion and photography publication, Out of Fashion, that I did as a part of my final project at uni together with two other girls from my year. Hopefully the publication will soon be at the shelves of the uni, so that you can go and have a look at it!

If you want to have a look at what I've done during the past years I do have a website, it's just terribly out of date (hoping to fix that asap) and I also have a blog, but that is more a personal thing than professional, it does have pictures, but I mostly keep it to let my mom know I'm ok.

Here's some further links to my work and projects:

www.idataavitsainen.com

Blog

Out of Fashion

Out of Fashion on Facebook

Address Publications

If you have any questions, worries or comments, feel free to drop me a line anytime. I usually reply quite quickly.

On Mentoring

This autumn I was asked to be an online mentor for the first year photography students at UCA Rochester (I am an alumni), so the purpose of this blog is mainly to comment on the first year students' blogs as well as introduce my own practice and also recommend exhibitions and events in London and other parts of the world. Hopefully, by the end of the year, both the students and I have gained something out of this whole process.