The Royal Photographic Society - Picture The Poet Exhibition

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Picture the Poet

11 August 2014

Exhibitions, Industry news

From Carol Anne Duffy and Simon Armitage to Benjamin Zephaniah and the ‘Bard of Barnsley’, Ian Macmillan, some of the nation’s leading contemporary poets are set to be celebrated in a new photographic exhibition making its debut the Graves Gallery this autumn.  Opening on Wednesday 3 September, Picture the Poet comes to Sheffield on tour from the National Portrait Gallery.

Picture the Poet will bring together over 50 remarkable portraits from a host of well-known photographers to offer a unique insight into the people who have crafted images for our imaginations out of words.  The portraits cover a variety of themes including sense of place, love, loss, identity and struggle and include over six decades of artistic production from the 1950s to the present day.

Amongst the works on display will be striking images of acclaimed children’s poet, Michael Rosen, Poet Laureate, playwright and children's writer, Carol Ann Duffy, former Poet Laureate and writer, Sir Andrew Motion, and writer, dub poet and musician, Benjamin Zephaniah.  The exhibition will feature works by photographers including Jemimah Kuhfeld, Norman McBeath, Donald McLellan, Peter Everard Smith, Maud Sulter and Madeleine Waller.

Picture the Poet is part of a major three-year partnership project between National Portrait Gallery, the National Literacy Trust and Apples and Snakes.  It is complemented by an extensive programme of events and activities working with schools, teachers and young people from across Sheffield, which will include:

·         Ian Macmillan leading a day of schools poetry workshops in the gallery on Wednesday 24 September

·         A group of young adults working with photographer Chris Saunders over the summer to create their own portraits of Sheffield poets and writers, with the resulting digital photographs going on display in the exhibition.   

·         Teachers from more than 20 schools in the region will take part in special training sessions designed to help them use poetry in the classroom.

Alison Morton, Exhibition & Display Curator at Museums Sheffield said:

‘We’re far more used to the subjects of the photographs being represented by the words they write, but these wonderful portraits offer a really unique insight into the people behind the poetry. It’s a fascinating collection of works and we’re delighted to be working with the National Portrait Gallery to share it here in Sheffield.’

Picture the Poet

opens at the Graves Gallery on Wednesday 3 September and continues until 29 November 2014 – entry to the exhibition is free. See: www.museums-sheffield.org.uk

Image: © Donald MacLellan, Benjamin Zephaniah, August 1996

- See more at: http://www.rps.org/news/2014/august/picture-the-poet#sthash.wkTO9ErB.dpuf

John Hartley Williams obituary - The Guardian 14 May 2014

Poetry

John Hartley Williams obituary

Prolific poet whose work combined technical panache with extraordinary linguistic range

 John Hartley Williams co-wrote the spoof crime novel Death Comes for the Poets, with Matthew Sweeney. Photograph: Jemimah Kuhfeld/Shoestring Press

John Lucas

Wednesday 14 May 2014 17.40 BST

Hidden Identities, the first full collection from the poet John Hartley Williams, who has died aged 72 from cancer, made ripples when it was published by Chatto & Windus in 1982. The next, Bright River Yonder (1987), this time from Bloodaxe, became a Poetry Book Society recommendation. After that, collections seemed to follow each other faster than the eye could blink. As well as full-length books, there were pamphlets and works of translation, including a powerful version ofMarin Sorescu's Censored Poems (2001), and Scar on the Stone: Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia (1998), of which Williams was a contributing translator.

Son of David, a headteacher, and Sylvia, John was born in Cheadle, Cheshire, and grew up in London with two brothers, Hugh and Nigel. (The latter would become a well-known novelist.) From 1962, John studied English literature at Nottingham University, where, as a scabrous account in his 1995 prose work Ignoble Sentiments makes evident, he viewed his tutors with – at best – genial contempt. Nevertheless, at the end of three years of mildly dissolute behaviour and occasional flirtations with amateur dramatics, he emerged with a good degree, although not the first which his father, himself the author of a number of critical studies for the general reader, had requested of him. John went to teach English in France, before, in 1968, becoming an English lecturer at the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, where he met his future wife, Gizella.

After their marriage in 1970, the pair moved to the University of Cameroon. Then in 1972 it was back to London, where Williams, by now beginning to send out poems to magazines and journals, enrolled for an MPhil at London University. Once that was completed, they returned to Serbia for a year. Finally, in 1976, he was appointed to a lectureship at the Free University of Berlin, the city that would remain his home for the rest of his life.

His experience of foreign places, ranging from the dangerous to the outright lunatic, at least in his telling, made him impatient with what he saw as the tame conformity of much English poetry. "What's that supposed to mean," he asked me of a poet praised for his courageous risk-taking. "He hasn't flown to the moon, has he?" Like his close friends and fellow poets Ken Smith and Matthew Sweeney, he found more to enjoy and learn from in modern continental European and American poets. Surrealism in particular attracted him, because its freedom from the constraints of old-style realism made possible a liberated vision that pointed his own socialist, republican convictions. He was elated by the great 2011 Miró exhibition at the Tate, with its vivid delight in the things of this world.

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In 1996, he and Sweeney combined to produce Writing Poetry and Getting Published for the Hodder Teach Yourself series; and the two poets came together again for Death Comes for the Poets (2012), a wildly funny spoof crime novel in which a number of thinly disguised contemporary poets are bumped off, each in a manner appropriate to their work, pastiches of which are provided at the end of the novel.

The pamphlet A Poetry Inferno (2011) provides a grotesquely comic account in prose of the possible tortures awaiting poets who lust after official acclaim. Given that he won first prize in the 1983 Arvon Foundation award, was twice shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, and that his 1997 collection Canada was a PBS Choice, this cannot be put down to sour grapes. But he was ambivalent about popular success, valuing, perhaps above all else, art as eloquent, sometimes sulphurous, defiance of circumstance.

Phone John at any time of the day or night and you would in all likelihood hear in the background a recording of one of his favourite jazz musicians: Billie Holiday, say, or Charlie Parker or Lester Young. But it was another favourite, the clarinettist Pee Wee Russell, who typified as well as any the anarchic, unpredictable creative force he so loved and which he praises in The Theory of Gravity, the "squawking" poem he dedicated to Russell's memory. There, he speaks of the "incivility sublime", a phrase redolent of his own work, which combined technical panache with a restless imagination, extraordinary linguistic range, and, often as twinned components, the celebratory and the ripely caustic.

A tall, handsome man, full of wit and insouciant charm, he came from Berlin with the aid of his friend, Elke Lübeck, for the recent London launch of The Golden Age of Smoking, which proved to be his last collection, and concluded a memorable reading with his elegy for Smith, "His charged verses lie speechless in the sunlight."

He is survived by Gizella and their daughter, Natalie, an accomplished jazz singer. In recent years, John took pleasure and pride in inviting friends to Ronnie Scott's Club in London to hear Natalie perform.

• John Hartley Williams, poet and writer, born 7 February 1942; died 3 May 2014

Dennis Nurkse @ PEN America

Poetry By Heart, July 2014

Check out this vibrant site which has a marvellous catalogue of poets on their timeline:

http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/anthology/

Picture the Poet Exhibition - Norwich

Poetry at the Palace - 7th August to 2nd November 2014

A new forthcoming exhibition celebrating the Poets Laureate, including my image of Carol Ann Duffy who is half way through her term as national poet.

The Guardian - February 2012

Ann Thwaite - The Guardian

On Saturday 4th February 2012 Ann Thwaite published a moving article about her parents' deaths in The Guardian newspaper.

The article is available to view here.

The Christmas Truce - December 2011

A beautiful new book for my Stocking by the Poet Laureate:

Faber & Faber buy portrait of Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy - The Bees - Faber & Faber

With the launch of Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy's new book The Bees:

New Exhibition at National Portrait Gallery: 18 by 12 - 9th February 2011

New Exhibition at National Portrait Gallery: 18 by 12, opening 9th February 2011

Eighteen by Twelve, Recent Photographic Acquisitions - News Release from the NPG

4 February 2011

NEW PORTRAIT OF THE PRINCES AT NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY ALONGSIDE RONNIE CORBETT, TRACEY EMIN, M.I.A. AND BRIAN COX

A previously unseen portrait of Prince William and Prince Harry by Fergus Greer and a portrait of Tracey Emin by David Bailey will form part of a new display highlighting the photographs recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery. Eighteen by Twelve: Recent Photographic Acquisitions from 7 February 2011 in Room 41a will show eighteen sitters by twelve contemporary photographers, all on display for the first time at the Gallery.

Every year the National Portrait Gallery acquires a diverse selection of photographic portraits which offer a visual reflection of contemporary British life and culture. The sitters in this display include recent portraits of popular scientist Brian Cox, poet Christopher Reid, actors Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Serkis and Mackenzie Crook, and singer songwriter K T Tunstall. The display will also include contemporary singer M.I.A, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, newspaper executive Rebekah Wade, comedian Ronnie Corbett, artist Frank Auerbach, and film director Terence Davies. The photographers represented range from established portrait photographers such as David Bailey and Fergus Greer to photographers whose works are represented in the Collection for the first time such as Kate Peters, Debra Hurford Brown, Richard Saker, Stuart Walker and Spencer Murphy.

Seen in the display for the first time is an informal double portrait of Princes William and Harry taken at The Commandants House at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. Photographer Fergus Greer was commissioned by Clarence House to take the portrait in December 2006 in preparation for the Concert for Diana in 2007, but the photograph was not published. The portrait is only the second double portrait of the two Princes to enter the Gallery’s Collection, the first a formal commissioned portrait by artist Nicky Philipps unveiled in 2010.

The Photographs collection consists of more than 220,000 original photographic images dating from the 1840s to the present day. Founded in 1856, the aim of the National Portrait Gallery is to collect portraits of famous men and women who have made and are making British history and culture. Other recent photographic acquisitions can be explored through the New Portraits page of the Gallery’s website www.npg.org.uk

Notes for Editors:

◦The portraits included in the display are:

Andy Serkis by Spencer Murphy, 2009

Benedict Cumberbatch by Spencer Murphy, 2010

Brian Cox by Paul Wolfgang Webster, 7 July 2009

Carol Ann Duffy by Peter Everard Smith, August 2005

Christopher Reid by Jemimah Kuhfeld, April 2009

Frank Auerbach by Stuart Walker, 29 November 2007

Jane Goldman by Richard Saker, 4 March 2010

K T Tunstall by Kate Peters, 12 September 2010

Lee Evans by Debra Hurford Brown, 1998

M.I.A by Neil Gavin, March 2005

Paul Mackenzie Crook by Richard Cannon, 27 March 2009

Prince William of Wales; Prince Henry of Wales by Fergus Greer, December 2006

Rebekah Wade by Fergus Greer, March 2007

Ronnie Corbett by Debra Hurford Brown, 2006

Stephen Merchant by Spencer Murphy, 2010

Terence Davies by Richard Cannon, 9 December 2008

Tracey Emin by David Bailey, 2007

For further press information and image requests please contact: Eleanor Macnair, Press Office, National Portrait Gallery Tel: 020 7321 6620 (not for publication) Email: emacnair@npg.org.uk; To download images: www.npg.org.uk/press

The link is Here

The Philadelphia Inquirer - January 2011

Seamus Heaney - Human Chain - in The Philadelphia Inquirer

The New York Times - September 2010

Seamus Heaney - Human Chain - in The New York Times

I was delighted to see my portrait of Seamus Heaney in The New York Times review of his new book Human Chain: Article here.

In & Around Covent Garden Magazine - November 2010

Lifestyle cover shoot for In & Around Covent Garden Magazine

Recent commission for a lifestyle festive cover scene for a local London Magazine:

Credits: Photographic assistant: Joshua Ainsworth; Hair & makeup: Sarah Lewis; Creative director: Vicky Greenhalgh; Models: Harriet Armston-Clarke & Paddy Stobbs.  Clothing by Hawes & Curtis & Fossil; Necklace by Gary Holder.  Location: The Globe, Bow Street.

125th Anniversary Exhibition at Gallery 1885 - October 2010

125th Anniversary Exhibition at Gallery 1885

In these blustery days of changeable weather; dimming evenings and misty mornings, it would be easy to start to wind-down for Winter.  But just when I thought everything was easing up... my work has been selected to form part of an exclusive 125th Anniversary Exhibition at Gallery 1885, entitled 'Timeline.'

"Founded in 1885, The Camera Club is one of the oldest and most distinguished photographic societies in the World, and many notable figures in the history of photography have been members. The Camera Club owns its own London Clubhouse this enables it to offer the outstanding facilities to members, which many might otherwise find almost unavailable or unaffordable." 

Apparently I'll be in the company of some extremely notable photographers and only recently came to know what a very fine archive of images we have in the Club's possession.

It's also nice to note that it was once a men-only establishment!

Faber & Faber - September 2010

Christopher Reid - Faber & Faber

When I visited Christopher Reid at his London home I made a mental note that the lunch he provided was one of the best I'd ever been given.  For such a well-travelled person as he this was no surprise.  (I also found out later that he has written a book called 'The Song of Lunch').  He was altogether gracious and it struck me that the simple act of sharing your food with someone else, is actually symbolic of the way in which they treat one in general, and inclusive in many ways.

I was naturally delighted, then, when such a kind person as Christopher found such success this year with the  Costa Prize for 'A Scattering'.

I felt privileged at the time of my visit (some year or so before this award), to meet Christopher, and was proud to have taken his portrait for its own sake - rather than in the wake of the tidal waves of press which signalled his very-deserved win.  

Faber and Faber have now acquired my portrait of Christopher for their publicity archive:

For anyone interested in reading more about Christopher's poetry, may I direct you to the finely-analytical work of my old tutor Tim Kendall when he was Editor of Thumbscrew?

Also in an exciting turn of events 'The Song of Lunch' is set to be filmed and released on National Poetry Day 7th October 2010.  More information here.

More press for Christopher Reid involving my picture:

Cheltenham Festival 2010
Ledbury Festival 2010

National Portrait Gallery, London - 2010

National Portrait Gallery, London, acquires six portraits for national collection

It is always an honour to enter the hallowed halls of an old establishment, such as one of the wonderful galleries in London. To me (perhaps because of my up-bringing surrounded by artistes!) galleries take on the same hues as a Church. Those of reverence and awe.

I once had a memorable opportunity to enter the National Portrait Gallery out of hours, as assistant to a talented fine art photographer. We were documenting the vast collection of the gallery, much of which is housed off-site and then apparently rotated 'in' every so often. That day we had come to shoot some Hockney pencil and pen-and-ink drawings. They were really wonderful and I really enjoyed just staring at them while the photographer did the business of focussing, squaring up, testing, metering... (those were the old days of shooting on 5x4 inch neg when only one person could really be under the dark cloth at a time).

So it is with great pleasure that I heard the news that the NPG wished to buy 6 more of my poet portraits, bringing the total held in the collection to 12. 

The catalogue of my portraits held in the national collection are here.

The Listener, New Zealand - August 2010

Fleur Adcock - Dragon Talk - The Listener, New Zealand

The Listener celebrates Fleur Adcock's first new book in ten years with a review:  The book is here.

The Times - June 19th 2010

Anthony Thwaite - Collected Poems & Larkin's Letters To Monica - The Times June 19th 2010

The Collected Poems edited by Anthony Thwaite is here.

Larkin's Letters to Monica is here.

The New York Times - April 11th 2010

Charles Bernstein - All The Whiskey In Heaven - The New York Times Review April 11th 2010

The first time I met Charles Bernstein we were in London and at the beautiful and private Penn Club in Bloomsbury.  It was a clement day and we got some great shots quite quickly.  I found him a very easy to talk to, humorous and open kind of character, and he was not as perturbed as some of my subjects by the lens. 

Just as we were about to call it a day and head back to the Club, I spotted some dusty -admittedly rather dirty- corner of a London street with the odd pattern of brickwork which you see in the picture... and the simple regularity of the shapes seemed to fit with Bernstein's interest in puzzling over language, sorting and playing with it.  For want of a better word it clicked. 

When his new book, a collection of works past and present, was to appear, his publishers bought the shot.  I delightedly wish him every success with the book.