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The OMC Gallery for Contemporary Art, will be presenting
from March 24 to April 24, 2007
Harold Chapman - Photographer
A Retrospective 1947 - 2007
Born in 1927 in Deal, a seaside town in Kent, Chapman automatically gravitated toward that town's artistic milieu. He originally wanted to be a painter, but in his words, he "was no good at it," and so he began taking photographs instead:
"I was astounded by all the strange things and people I used to see about me."
"If Chapman were merely a chronicler in a great documentary tradition, his achievement would be impressive enough. His lustrous landscapes of the Herault valley in the Languedoc, his priceless record of the Beat Hotel, his omnivorous, year-on-year transcription of daily life and its little undercurrents, would ensure his reputation as a photographer of the first rank. But it was constructive paranoia that made him an artist."
Booker Prize winning British novelist, Ian McEwan, in an article about Harold Chapman entitled A spy in the name of art, which was published in the Saturday Review of the Guardian. (April 2000)
Harold Chapman is still always working as a Photographer, taking photos and living up to his credo manifested in a pointed statement during an interview in December 1968:
"...there is no need for the contrived shot. Pictures are everywhere. So why set up a photograph when the natural one is infinitely better?" He added: "I am photographing for the future, not for the present... All I aim for is to record the trivial things that ordinary people use and consider unimportant." |
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