|
October 19, 2011
Ways of Looking is a new festival of photography in Bradford, England. It runs throughout October 2011, has its own Flickr group, and explores the theme EVIDENCE---that record and document different ways of looking.
Some of these are quite unusual--eg., Red Saunders' meticulous recreations of the 'hidden history' of revolutionaries and radicals in England. These are akin to cinematic stills which recreate events in the long struggle for parliamentary representation and democracy in Britain. These events are the 'hidden' neglected scenes of working class history.
This is the first in a series of Hidden History tableaux:
Red Saunders, "William Cuffay and the London Chartists 1848", 2010
The image was shot over two days using a traditional large format camera, later composited. It uses volunteers ( themselves workers and trade unionists ) as Chartists and every costume is accurate - staff and students from the London College of Fashion donated their time to help.
The method refers back to those Victorian photographers who made a composite of several different negatives, cutting out and merging the images to produce the finished result. Today, digital photography and retouching extend and re-invent the tableau tradition giving it greater meaning and more relevance to our times.
|
