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The OMC Gallery for Contemporary Art
Will be presenting a 'Tribute to Black on White'
Photography by
Harold Chapman (UK)
Nick Dekker (USA)
Pavel Odvody (CZ)
Renate Scherra (GER)
Harold Chapman - Taken on the Streets - This is Chapman's style: the gritty snapshot-like technique of Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Brassaï. Chapman saw a show at the Archer Gallery called "John Deacon's Paris" and determined to make his own documentary. He was also inspired in this direction by the now-classic 1954 book: "Love On The Left Bank" by Dutch photographer Ed Van der Elsken, showing life among young bohemians in Paris, which expanded documentary form by appearing spontaneous and unposed. With a guarantee of his wedding photographer job back the following spring, and enough savings to tide him over, Chapman began to move between his small bed-sitter in Bayswater and cheap hotels in Paris, making his own record of Parisian life. ...There at George Whitman's English-language Mistral Bookshop he encountered Patrick Shelley. When he explained what he was doing, Shelley insisted that he meet "Mr and Mrs Ginsberg at this fantastic hotel." He took him to the Beat Hotel, at 9 rue Git le Coeur and introduced him to Allen Ginsberg and his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky. Chapman's famous pictures of Ginsberg and Orlovsky are from this first visit to the hotel in December 1957.
Barry Miles
Nick Dekker born and raised as a farmer's son in North Dakota has always remained 'Mother Nature' s Son' and communicated this sensitive and impressive. He shows nature's light in all its varieties and moods - he takes the beholder away into his landscapes and exposes him to fantastic moments bare of any artificiality. His kindred spirit with and the influence of great photographers like William H. Jackson, Anselm Adams or the Weston Family is unmistakable. As they did, so Dekker worked on opening our eyes for the preciousness of natural beauty, the fascination of nature, the value of old and new days and things. He was animated by the thought to use his medium as a tool to deliver a testimony of the greatness and power of the elements and their variety. The exhibition pays tribute to a master, who died to early.
Rolf Goellnitz
Pavel Odvody - It is only the shade that describes the light. This is a truly phenomenal, extremely unusual collection of novel picture themes that have barely anything to do with the uncountable daily offerings of photographed pictures in the media, taken in public places or at art museums. So Pavel Odvody's picture world may appear strange to us at first sight... we are unable to associate a visual experience with it, with only a few capable of sharing his perspective. But of one thing we can be certain: this isn't today's way of taking pictures - either as an applied photographer or a so-called free photographer.
Prof. Peter von Kornatzki
Renate Scherra is impressing with her prejudice free approach, her documentary realism, without being random. She continues what has been the subject matter of photographers like Atget, Bandeau, Disderi, Fenton, Beato or Struss. The focal point of her lens refers to that of the human eye, one important reason to have an immediate access to the documented situation and its perspective. Things look familiar and yet leave space enough to explore them through our own history and point of view. Scherra 's images are an inventory of existence, which also ask: What will be?
Rolf Goellnitz |
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