Hollow people

There is a lot of building work going on around Royal Arsenal in Greenwich - a lot of residential housing going up. However, the new locals seem a little stiff and grey, and even a little hollow.

Seriously, I need to visit Greenwich with my camera and spend some time there. Yesterday I had very little time for photography. I went to the Greenwich Heritage Centre there to view the Royal Photographic Society International Print Exhibition which finishes this weekend.

I seem to recall really enjoying this exhibition in previous years. This year, I wasn't so sure. The introductory blurb talks about the wide range of subjects and the selectors' desire to achieve a balanced exhibition. However, of the 100 images, at least 45 were portraits and just 1 was natural history with the rest a mix of other things. That doesn't feel balanced to me, although I suppose it might represent the mix of subjects in the 6,600 images which were submitted for consideration.

Of the portraits, some I really liked but some seemed to me to be rather simple and not saying much about the subject. (Nevertheless, the range of portraits was rather like the range often seen in the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait prize at the National Portrait Gallery each year - some great and some really rather uninteresting.)

There were quite a lot of photographs which were part of "a series". Some were fine, but others - which might well have formed an important integral part of the set of images which made up the series - didn't (for me) stand up on their own. The introduction to the exhibition did say that visitors would like some images, hate some, and find some challenging. There were more challenging images than I would have expected!

Certainly the style of photography was quiet different from normal club photography, and that was of real interest to me. I think more club photographers need to get out and see what else is happening in the photographic world. Overall it was well worth seeing. You can see all the images at the RPS website, but it's nothing like seeing the prints on a wall.

One interesting fact: at least 14 of the 100 images were from analogue originals.

After leaving Royal Arsenal (with a few, quick photographs captured en route) I made my way across to the Royal Albert Hall for the first of 3 nights promming. The main works tonight were the Schumann Piano Concerto and Beethoven's 5th Symphony.