Oakhill Gallery Exhibition

A few weeks ago a friend suggested I submit some images for a photography exhibition at a small local gallery - The Oakhill Gallery. I thought about it and in the end decided to submit four images. It has been a few years since my last major exhibition.

The first was a 1999 image taken in San Gimignano Italy - an image of an arch in the via di Matteo. It was about midday and midwinter. The sun was low in the sky and the fog kept rolling in to the medieval hilltop town from the valley below. It was cold. As in many medieval villages there are arches crossing the narrow streets. I walked down the hill through the arch, stopped and looked back along the street and took some photos. Then an old man passed me and walked through the arch and around the corner. I kept taking photos. A few seconds ater a mass of Japanese tourists came along the street and any hope of more images of an empty street was lost. When I arrived home a few weeks later it was the image of the old man walking beneath the arch that captured the essence of that cold midwinter day in San Gimignano.

In 2005 I again visited Italy and stayed in Florence. One morning I went oput walking without a definite aim in mind and walked past an open door in the via del Studio, just near the Duomo, the Florence Cathedral. I glanced throough the open door and discovered it was a sculpture studio in which replicas were being made of ancient sculptures. There was a large statue of a saint or some other Biblical prophet and a nearly completed gleaming exact replica standing next to it. I had a chance to take a couple of images before the attendant came out and locked the door. I thought about the sculpture studio and the images that were being created inside. It reminded me of the story of Pygmaleon and Galatea in which the sculptor creates a beautiful and perfect image of a woman and falls in love with the woman he has crated. She comes to life. Or at least in his imagination. And so the image I created for this exhibition also includes Pygmaleon and Galatea, taken from Gerome's famous 19th century painting of the story.

The third image was from a 2005 visit to Paris. I visited the Eiffel Tower and marvelled at the intricate tracery created by the metal. Modern buildings have nothing that is intricate nor decorative.

The fourth image was taken in Geneva in 2008. I was walking along a side street and looking up I noticed that the shutters on an otherwise nondescript apartment building had been painted different colours. The colopurs contrasted with the drab grey of the walls, the pealing paint and cracked plaster. And through the windows I could catch glimpses of of people preparing their evening meals, the sounds of music, fragments of conversations.

I went to the opening of the exhibition this afternoon. There were works by perhaps twenty other photographers also being exhibited. By the time I left to come home I had sold one copy of the Sculpture Studio and won a prize for the same image. The exhibition runs for another four weeks.