- Venue
- Library of Birmingham
- Date
- Thursday, October 22, 2015
12:00 AM - Address
- Library of Birmingham, Broad Street Birmingham, England, B1 2ND
- Location
- West Midlands
- Organiser
- Library of Birmingham
In 2014 the Library of Birmingham and GRAIN commissioned artist Mat Collishaw to make new work in response to the photography archive. The commission resulted in the installation In Camera, exhibited at The Gallery, Library of Birmingham, until 10 January 2016.
The Artist Talk will start with Collishaw showing guests around the installation. This will be followed by an opportunity to hear how the commission relates to previous work and Collishaw’s ongoing interests and concerns. He will also talk in detail about his response to the archive, processes and intentions.
If you would like to attend the Artist Talk it is essential that you book via Eventbrite. Click here for tickets priced £3.
The new work prompts questions about the medium of photography, its historical role as witness and the ways in which our reading of images are affected when they shift from the private to the public. Devoid of human presence, the works invite the audience to speculate about backdrops; the identity of suspects and victims and the circumstances which led to the crimes being committed.
Here, as in the works on display at New Art Gallery Walsall in the major survey show, Collishaw continues to explore the potential for such images to be simultaneously shocking yet alluring, drawing us in with these seductive, unsettling and compelling works and asking us to look beneath the surface where complex questions and darker, more malevolent forces are at play.
In camera: a legal term that means kept private, confined or hidden.
Camera obscura (Latin: “dark chamber”): an optical device that led to photography consisting of a box or room with a hole in one side through which light from an external scene passes through to make or reveal an image.
In camera: a term used by photographers to indicate that an image is authentic, having been made from the real, and presented without any cropping or post production.
In Camera is an installation created around a series of 12 crime scene negatives made for Birmingham City Police Force during the 1930s and 1940s. Collishaw discovered these uncatalogued images, made to provide evidence in alleged and actual crimes committed in the city, hidden amongst an archive of orphaned police negatives whilst exploring the Library’s internationally renowned photography collections during 2014.
For more information about the exhibition click here or for Library opening hours click here.
