Object of the day: Brighton Beach goes technicolour

Please do bear with the recent break in my usually regular posts. Things will be back to normal within a few weeks – but meanwhile, a quick find I'd like to share.

I've seen this print – or, at least, very similar – in numerous interiors shoots, and I have coveted it HARD.

Tonight, while researching for the Independent Christmas Gift Guide that I'm in the middle of compiling, I stumbled across it on Clippings.com. Hurrah!

I was surprised to discover the photograph was of Brighton Beach, rather than somewhere glossier and hotter. Though when you look closer, it all makes sense. The image is by photographer James French, who has "done a John Hinde" on his final print, giving the colours a technicolour buzz just as the old English postcard master once did.

The limited edition prints start at £75 and are available at Clippings.com

Object of the day: Slim Aarons photography made affordable

I have previously lusted here over Slim Aarons' gloriously glamorous seventies photography. 

But have never been able to afford it... until now.

Just when I thought digital wall print experts, Surface View, couldn't get any more exciting (you may have seen my breathless post about their John Hinde range a few months back), they pull another corker out of the bag: yes, now you can get your mitts on one of these babies for as little as £60.

 

So, for £60 you can get a poster version of one of the prints, while wall murals are priced at £60 per square metre. Canvas prints and birch ply prints start at £145 and £175 respectively. Check out the full range at Surfaceview.co.uk

Surface View collaborates with the John Hinde Collection

I've written about Surface View and their brilliant wall murals before. 

Highlights, for me at least, have included gems by Hemingway Design and George Stubbs' Whistlejacket, from SV's National Gallery collection. I didn't think it could get any better – and then I heard about the new John Hinde collection...

Regular readers may know of my Hinde infatuation. And if not, and the name means nothing to you, a quick synopsis: John Hinde photography was the British company behind the UK's most iconic postcard images of the 1960s and 70s. 

Gloriously retouched, because real life just wasn't colourful enough, and – as I found out when I tracked down one of the company's original photographers to interview for a piece in the Independent Magazine – also routinely staged, the postcards are now nostalgic reminders of holidays from a bygone era.

The postcards also captured tourist spots all over the world and some of these examples, as well as some of the British ones, have been turned into these giant wall murals by Surface View in collaboration with the John Hinde Collection. The John Hinde Collection is not, in fact, anything to do with the original postcard company; it is a small organisation founded in recent years by two Hinde superfans who acquired much of its photographic archive and have since set about lovingly preserving, restoring and painstakingly re-colour-touching hundreds of the original photographs used to create the postcards.

Above are (from top) the Icod de los Vinos Wall Mural, the Florida Waterway and Beach at Dunn's Falls. Along with the other images available in the range, these cost from: £60 per square metre in wall mural format; £145 for a canvas print; £175 for birch ply prints; £60 for a poster; £125 for a textile wall hanging; £85 for window film; £85 for lampshades. You can even get the image printed onto ceramic tiles, though at £515 that might test even the most hardcore Hinde lover's purse.

Any of the options are a bit of an outlay, but when something is so very special, it's worth blowing the budget.

Find out more and buy at Surfaceview.co.uk

Post by Kate

Exhibition: Clip Cut Gel, or masculinity explored through 80s barbershop photos

If you've ever gazed at those faded barbershop model shots, of men you can't imagine ever meeting, sporting hairstyles that never age beyond the 80s, then you'll love this new exhibition by artist, Julia Riddiough.

The angle of Clip Cut Gel is modern masculinity: male grooming, gender politics and the gaze and what it means to be a man today.

The photographs above, titled (from left to right), Playboy, Toyboy and Rough Trade, are part of the exhibition, which takes place online, at the website of innovative east London gallery, A Brooks Art, which Riddiough also owns.

The show will also pop up in local high street barber shops and at regional UK art festivals along with live performances by a barber shop quartet. And you can watch an intriguing accompanying film, focusing on the three throwbacks above...

 

The models featured were picked by Riddiough from male hairdressing magazines she's collected since the 1980s. As she explains: "The portraits reveal amplified masculine characteristics; drawn from male stereotypes that we see in the visual language that surrounds us everyday...[and] Clip Cut Gel plays with the way the male is looked at and builds it into a spectacle itself. Here the image of the man is seen as passive and raw material for the active gaze of the spectator."

The photographs are also for sale, in limited editions of 50.

I've written about A Brooks Art gallery before (so-titled as it was the name of the long-standing florist who had previously owned the site) when it was exhibiting a wonderful selection of photographs of abandoned cinemas.

To find out more about the artist and the gallery, check out Julia Riddiough's website and A Brooks Art. See more about the exhibition, including live dates, at the Clip Cut Gel page.

Images © Julia Riddiough

Spotlight on... photography for walls

I love a framed beach photograph.

And this one, taken on a packed Bondi looks great in a clean white frame on a white wall, don't you think?

The photograph is by Louisa Seton and part of a limited edition of 500 for sale in this A1 size at the reasonable price of £50, from a new company called Lumitrix.

It reminds me a little of this, which I featured in a previous post.

Good, commercially available photographic prints – unless bought directly from the photographer or at a gallery exhibition – is so often mass produced, dull and tackily reproduced. So it's great to see new outlets doing different.

I'm not sold on all of the stuff so far on sale on the site, but this dramatic equine image taken by Astrid Harrisson also (and unsurprisingly) caught my eye.

It was taken on a farm in Iceland and also £50 and sold as part of a limited edition too.

There's definitely an art to displaying photography on your walls. Here are a couple of other ideas I like.

Not so keenon the subjects in these photos, but love the large format colour images displayed in white frames. I'm inspired to expand my John Hinde display – taking photographs from a book is another way to afford to adorn your walls in this way.

Images: Street Style Fashion; A Estate Studio

Exhibition & Book: "I've Lived in East London for 86 ½ Years"

London-based photographer Martin Usborne met Joseph Markovitch, 86 ½, on an unusually hot day in Hoxton. 

He asked to take his photograph (in "the hope of winning some award") but that one meeting turned into a project that has resulted in a series of beautiful portraits of Markovitch. These are part of a new exhibition and also feature in a very special coffee table book.

Markovitch, who sadly passed away last year, was a life-long Londoner and eccentric who said he'd only once left the city, for a trip to the seaside with his mother. And he saw east London change dramatically (I like his tragic story about the local mayor "also a chimney sweep" falling off a ladder to his death as he put up decorations for the Queen's coronation in 1953).

The images juxtapose Markovitch and his memories with the startlingly modern, technicolour east London in which he remained his whole life. The results are beautiful, poignant and witty.

The exhibition also features 50 People of East London, wry illustrations from Adam Dant. On until 30 March at cafe/bar/gallery The Proud Archivist, 2-10 Hertford Road, London N1 5ET. Tel: 020 7749 6852. 
All images by Martin Usborne from his book, I've Lived in East London for 86 ½ Years, published by Hoxton Mini Press.