pete mcgovern

Hats off to the generous gallery staff who, on a bitterly cold evening, had watched the official 8pm finish time sail by so as to let everyone get their turn with Ansett for a natter. The show: It's big, it's bold and, most unexpected of all, it has happened in Lincoln, (where?). Well done, Mr Ansett.  Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize Academy members, where are you? It was a treat to have a complimentary hug and brief word with the photographer himself and also with Jason B and Paul G from the Take One A Day & Man Up photography exhibition last year, Ben the videographer who put together some street footage with an impressive interview, and the Usher curator who has breathed new life into this quiet, provincial gallery and who, intriguingly, has more plans in the pipeline. 

“From 1995 to 1998, I worked on a series of photographs of isolated houses in the desert at the east-end of the Morongo Valley in Southern California. As I meandered through the desert, a dog would occasionally chase my car. Sometime in 1996 I began to bring along a 35mm camera equipped with a motor drive and loaded with a fast and grainy black-and-white film. The process was simple; when I saw a dog coming toward the car I would pre-focus the camera and set the exposure. With one hand on the steering wheel, I would hold the camera out the window and expose anywhere from a few frames to a complete roll of film. I'll admit that I was not above turning around and taking a second pass in front of a house with an enthusiastic dog. Contemplating a dog chasing a car invites any number of metaphors and juxtapositions: culture and nature, the domestic and the wild, love and hate, joy and fear, the heroic and the idiotic. It could be viewed as a visceral and kinetic dance. Here we have two ...

London based photographer Richard Ansett recently spent a week in my hometown, undertaking a self-initiated residency.  His typical areas of interest are, broadly speaking, portraiture and documentary, so hearing that he was coming up for a few days of street photography was a bit perplexing. Lincoln has a relatively small population with few areas of high footfall. I did the maths, and all things considered, I figured the chances of him getting even one exceptional street image seemed extremely low. As in nil.  Turns out when he showed up he had more than just a camera and flash, he brought some ideas. Day one, and we washed up in front of a Costcutter, situated just around the corner from the Usher gallery where his Man Up men's mental health project was being exhibited. My part in this undertaking was to hold aloft a stand with a high powered flash-head. It was a studio-type unit which discharged with a thud felt through the stand. My instructions were to keep it up high, ...

Opening tomorrow. A photo by Phil Crow showing Richard Ansett checking the final install of  'Liminal Presence'  before the opening tomorrow evening - 6pm Lincoln Usher Gallery, everyone welcome. To get an idea of scale, Richard is around 6' 2" (despite looking more like 2' 6").

Coming to photographer Sally Mann's second book of writing about her photography and life, 'Art Work', immediately after finishing a collection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield, (1888-1923), I can't help but imagine they would have been firm friends should they have met, and keen admirers of each other's oeuvre even if they had not. There is striking commonality between them in regard to their choice of subject matter, both intently engrossed in the familial while effortlessly able to extend beyond the familiar .  Mansfield only made it to age 34, while Mann is 74 at the time of writing and going strong. She has had the span of life to rummage around for other, but still specifically local themes that resonate for her, moving to landscape. This may be a consequence of that first significant body of work, images of her children, which brought initial acclaim quickly followed by sharp criticism. While the fiction writer is rarely held to account for intimately...

Vegans, (upper case V , always). Hm. Yes. And what makes it worse is that those god-like beings act nornal. They don't particularly bother being smug about it. Whereas with us vegetarians (lower case v ), let's just say if we get into a conversation with someone new, give it 30 seconds and we should be well into pontificating modestly ahout the subject, in passing, It's a well-known phenomenon. First of all, I acknowledge someone, HG, for leading by example decades ago. I traipsed behind her skirt-tails and at least made it to the non-meat consuming side of the food intake equation. No fuss, no words, she was just doing her thing. I never even asked why. More recently, maybe three years ago someone at work, a smiley, overly well-adjusted person (as Vs always are), never declaiming their holy status, mentioned some weekly vegan meet-up thing, a sort of community cafe, a bring you own home made, healthy food sort of event, and suggesting that I might like it. Obviously it sou...

I recently discovered the Mosfilm 100 years in Cinema channel on Youtube. Everything is free to watch and without ads.  And so, straight to Andrei Tarkovsky and to start the ascent to the mighty Mirror  I chose Solaris . Unfortunately I don't know if I read just before or just after watching it that in an interview during the making he had mocked Kubrick's 2001 . Either way, I am currently rather prickly about the merits of Solaris . As a teen I was mesmerised, but now, not so much. There are small odd echoes of 2001 in there funnily enough, perhaps satirical, and of course there is also the same major theme from his source material, the novel by Polish writer Stanisław Lem as with English writer Arthur C Clarke, contact with a conscious off-earth, unseen life-form.  In my annoyance I have spent far too long considering some of the dubious wardrobe decisions, such as protagonist Kelvin in his string vest and leather jacket who looks like he's off to an underground New Yo...