The London Traveler

Following my report on ‘Last Stop’, Ralf Obergfell’s exhibition of photographs on the last eighteen months of the Routemaster’s service for London Transport, I had the chance to interview the photographer about his work.
LT: When did you first encounter the Routemaster bus? How far back does your fascination with it go?
RO: I first saw the Routemaster on TV at my parents’ house in Staufen, on the edge of the Black Forest. I was 12 or 13 years old.
LT: How did the project for Last Stop get started?
RO: I’m a founding member of photodebut, which was set up in 2002 as …read more

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18th May will see the Shoot London event taking over Tate Modern for the day.
Shoot Experience runs  photographic treasure hunts around London (and in other UK locations, like Liverpool). This one’s booked out already, though you could book yourself and friends on Shoot London Lite. You’ll follow clues around the South Bank to find ten sites, and take photographs. Teams need to be between two and four people – the more the merrier since the ticket price of £22 is per team, not per person.
And in September, Shoot Shoreditch will be back for the fourth year in a row – …read more

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Regular readers of this blog will know I’m fascinated by industrial buildings and landscapes, like the old railway stations of London or the two great ‘cathedrals of power’, Bankside and Battersea power stations.
Ed Burtynsky is another person whose heart beats faster when he sees a huge industrial building or landscape. He’s a photographer who spends a lot of time looking at massive factories, huge waste dumps, quarries, mines.

Look at this picture. At first you might think it’s an abstract. Then you see the little figures standing at the bottom of the quarry and you realise the scale of the picture. …read more

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A new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery shines a light on black talent in the acting profession with photographic portraits of thirty black British actors. They’ll be shown on a plasma screen in the Ondaatje wing of the NPG from April 4th to June 8th; admission is free.
Photographer Franklyn Rodgers has a distinctive, rather abstract approach to portraiture, using monochrome photography and dramatic lighting to create dramatic and even bizarre compositions. But the importance of the show for many will be its celebration of black culture and black success.
Coincidentally, one of the NPG’s most recent commissions shows another …read more

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