The Open College of the Arts recorded this excellent audio interview, and Si has included a BBC Radio Sheffield interview about the exhibition on his blog. The Leeds-based Culture Vulture ran this article, which notes that the show’s ‘honest, raw imagery highlights the differences between how we live, and how we think we live.’ Not all feedback was so positive, and one of the more critical comments that sticks out from the college lectures was that the project was ‘cynical and exploitative’. Come and find out for yourself. Bank Street Arts is open until 17th December when it closes for the holidays and reopens in early Jan, when the show continues until 13th January.

Copies of Si’s The Big Society book and exclusive prints are available from Bank Street Arts’ shop and also via Si’s site.

The catalyst for the project, which examines the inherent problems and contradictions of the coalition government’s intention to build ‘a big society that will take power away from politicians and give it to people’, came as Si ’was listening to the radio when Prime Minister David Cameron was describing the way he wanted to reshape Britain. I found his nostalgia for the certainties of his privileged upbringing quite sinister really. It reminded me of an Enid Blyton story.’

Si will be in Sheffield for a few days to give lectures and take part in workshops with local colleges and universities, culminating in an open afternoon at Bank Street Arts on Friday 18th November. This will run from 3-7pm and anybody with an interest in the project is very welcome to come along and talk to Si about the exhibition and his work on The Big Society.

If you follow either my Twitter feed or Bank Street Arts’ you’ll have the opportunity to win a signed copy of The Big Society book, plus find out about the related projects we’ll be rolling out at Bank Street over the coming months.

The book is filled with the sort of sweetly intimate, technically clumsy fragments of home life that have come to define the family snapshot as a photographic genre; the collection’s impact heightened by the knowledge that the factory’s quality control staff, ‘making their choices about focus and exposure… carrying out their own personal censorship of the memories and moments of others’, had dismissed everything here as being unfit to be returned to their owners:

The book has an extra resonance in that the photographs are presented against the backdrop of the war raging in Vietnam and ‘the violence that flickered on our TV screens’. It’s an interesting, ambitious way of framing the collection, creating a stark contrast to the scenes depicted. Aesthetically, in the context of the current vogue for the retro-hip of expired film, toy cameras, light leaks, and chemical burns, a number of the collection’s photographs resonate with the sort of nostalgic, ethereal beauty that now comes as standard with iPhone camera apps.

As 21st century life becomes ever-more subject to photographic documentation it’s interesting to see how a previous generation responded to innovations in mass market photography, both in terms of how the elements within the frame were staged and arranged, and what was seen as being worthy of photographing- amongst the images of family celebrations and days basking in the early autumn sunshine are scenes of random everyday activity that, viewed without any contextual frame of reference, seem positively loopy to modern eyes. Gottlieb’s inspired sequencing of the images weaves a narrative thread that accentuates this, subtly and cleverly guiding the viewer through a unique collection, drawing parallels between the forces of global politics and details of everyday life.

Lost and Found in America is available through the peerless Dewi Lewis Publishing.

Our first night is on Thursday 20th October, kicking off at 7pm, and will be taking place at Bank Street Arts. The second session will be at S1 Artspace on Thursday 24th November. Admission is free.

Photographers and/ or curators interested in screening their work at PushPull can find further details here.

PushPull is also on Facebook and on Twitter.

Clicking here takes you to a slideshow of the series. The music featured is by Richard Dooley and Philip Jones. You can download it here.

www.andrewconroy.info

If you’re in Sheffield between November and January you’ll be able to see for yourself- Si has very kindly agreed to exhibit photographs from the book at Bank Street Arts. Below are just a few of the 40-odd images that we’re putting together for the show, which I’m very pleased to note will also include a number of new, previously unseen photographs:

Si will be coming to Sheffield to do a Q&A session about The Big Society and there’ll be a series of related events to tie in with the show. Details are tbc, and the best way to find out about where and when and everything will be happening is to follow me on Twitter.

As well as being a timely piece of work given the recent unrest in England’s cities, The Big Society is also testament to one photographer’s determination to bring his vision to the wider world: not only has The Big Society been an enormously labour-intensive project for Si, he also produced and self-published the book that the exhibition is based on through his own Eye Ludicrous imprint. Click here to buy a copy for the outrageously decent price of 12 quid.

Follow Si on Twitter here and view his website here. You can also read an interview he gave about The Big Society here.

I Am Karen has been exhibited before in Sheffield, at the Creative Spark event during summer 2011. The Bank Street show differs in that it will feature 6 curator’s texts produced by a group of Bank Street’s resident artists, hence the ‘re-interpreted’ subtitle. The texts will be expanded throughout the show’s duration, and one will feature a conversation Sabine and I had about her work on the project.

The show runs from Tues 6th September to Fri 30th September. More information and details of the residents involved can be found here.

www.andrewconroy.info

Photographs that the children took are on display until the middle of this month at Bank Street Arts, the Winter Garden, Ponds Forge, and Sheffield Cathedral.

Each of the sessions will run for two and half hours. The first part will be spent looking at and discussing a particular area of photography- street photography and minimalism, for instance, but these are by no means set in stone and the course will be shaped by the interests of those who sign up to it. The rest of the session will then be focused on organising a practical assignment to be worked on independently over the course of the following week, and then assessing everybody’s images from the previous week.

Exploring Photography‘s emphasis is very much on the creative rather than the technical, and taking part in the course is really just a matter of you having access to a reasonable digital camera- not even necessarily a dSLR- and some understanding of transferring images to a computer, tweaking them in processing software, and uploading them to the net. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re fairly new to photography or have been shooting for some time- the main aim of the course is to provide an accessible and supportive environment where photographers can develop their ideas and participate in discussions around lens culture.

You can sign up to the course here and by all means drop me an email at andrewdconroy[at]yahoo.co.uk if you want to know more.