Richard Dickson Photography
Another Midwest Center selection, this for the Likeness exhibition November 2023.
https://www.mwcponline.com/likeness.html
I want to do more portraits but my style is very much informal, impromptu where I think you can get real essence of a person being in that moment.
If there is a material I can extract an image from I will try my hardest to do so. I obtained a few boxes of Polaroid sheet film that expired in 1982, no hope of the original chemicals working. However, it normally produces an interesting paper type negative, so with these ancient examples I experimented and found a method to develop exposed sheets using normal developer.
It works, and the negative having lived through many heating/cooling, dry/damp cycles in its life produced an image with some mottling and fine fibre marks. These ‘defects’ can give a scene a nuanced feeling or energy, unveiling a particular felt sense.
In late summer I did many walks along these hills with magnificent open views to sea or inland over the hedge-rowed fields of the farms below. I found the walks bucolic and peaceful as you wander into a space shared with sheep and cows grazing, calmly, contentedly. Still, the landscape has a harshness; the chalky soil, sometimes just bare chalk; rutted, pebbly pathways; the prickly gorse and windswept trees; the unbounded pasture and fields or craggy, chalk cliffs; the unsettling sense of exposure to the elements. From the first test exposure I took I felt that the images produced from this material would emphasise that stark, rugged beauty.
I think these would make interesting photopolymer intaglio prints so plan to work on a series.
Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA is an extraordinary organisation. Not just a gallery exhibiting works from open calls and solo exhibitions, they are an arts education establishment with a broad and inclusive outlook. It encompasses a Drawing centre that explores and promotes, unusually together, drawing and photography and have a residency program. Also, unusually, they have a prolific publication department producing a huge annual of all the year’s exhibitions, 375 pages for the last one. They also produce, every three years, on a rotating basis an annual of photography, drawing, and painting respectively. The quality of these products is superb.
For the exhibitions all the works are judged in a rigorous blind jury process prioritising quality reducing any curatorial bias or juror prejudice. In the latest season 17 publication there were 41 separate exhibitions of 567 works in total from 319 artists and over 11,000 submissions.
I may be biased as my first engagement with Manifest was being selected for the last Photography Annual, then a year later for the opening round of the season 17 exhibitions and just this year have had two works again selected. It has presented me with an opportunity to showcase some of my work with an affirmation of their quality. I am extremely proud of this especially in the knowledge of their blind jury process.
My work is photography based, often using or abusing different materials and processes. I think that photography in the US is taken more seriously and accepted as an art form. All of the works I have had accepted by Manifest have been submitted in the UK without success.
What I like most about exhibitions is not necessarily seeing my own work, I know it so well, but viewing it in relation with the others on show, appreciating their work and in the context of the exhibition theme.
A few scans of the 30 works on display.
The vanDyke prints
http://www.ipercept.co.uk/album/cather-air
Direct Positive photographic monoprints.
http://www.ipercept.co.uk/album/cather-air-direct-positive-prints
Front page of the Red Cloud Chief !
This the last sheet of Polaroid film I had, fitting perhaps with a skull. I found it behind the sofa! I thought maybe Georgia O’Keefe may have passed through but it was a previous occupier.
It has all come together, a lot of extraordinary hard work but very rewarding in many ways. Have to prepare, finish the framing and prepare for the talk now. I think I need a holiday!
It’s coming together -more expense, a few hundred $ of framing materials. The living room is now the framing area. I’ve managed to create 30 acceptable prints 8×10 inch to display in matted 11×14 frames.
I will also be displaying 4 prints from my New Mexico series , just framed these – looking awesome, first time I have framed any of that series. No mat for these but I had to apply a fillet around the glass to keep the print away from it. Doing everything as usual.
In these parts there are many small towns or villages really, defined by a small grid of streets, some as small as maybe 10 streets with a population of around 20. Whatever the size most have a railroad running through it beside which looms a massive grain processing plant.
The rest of the town consists of houses spread wide and the main street will have series of run down buildings, some closed down, many dilapidated, a small supermarket, a few other shops maybe. There will, however, be at least one church, in immaculate condition, set in well tended grounds, green lawn and flowered garden.
The number of rail lines is surprising and the fact they are still in use. Some are defunct and many removed but what remain criss cross the region connecting the towns but for freight only. The clue of course is in the grain plants the dominant architecture and centre of commerce. The towns grew from the railroad bringing people to the region to settle and farm and developed further still to take the produce away. The grain plants to me are like the cathedrals of the land, the symbols of commerce in this region.
My accommodation is the old railway depot next to this huge and active plant. One week the truck traffic increased dramatically, dust flying as they rolled in delivering their produce; I think wheat as it was harvest time for that. One day, on my return to the depot, a line of wagons appeared alongside the plant. They gradually disappeared down the line as each was filled. Then I only saw a few remaining, and thought the remainder had been hauled away when I was absent until one morning I was surprised to see a seemingly endless wagon load trundling away. I hadn’t realised they had all been backed down the line, hidden from sight by the plant.
