The Weekly Diary
Come, sit with me. Let the world be
The 4th edition of The Weekly Diary is here, featuring my weekly findings from around the internet.
Today I am introducing Nowhere Diary FM — the Nowhere Diary radio station.
Enjoy!
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Raymond Meeks — PhotoWork Podcast
In episode 51 of PhotoWork Podcast with Sasha Wolf, photographer Raymond Meeks has a very open and frank conversation about staying true to yourself as an artist while also exploring new ways of making work. Ray talks about how he started in photography and his origin story.
Definitely worth a listen.
PhotoWork Podcast is a series of conversations with amazing photographers including Aaron Schuman, Paul Graham, Mimi Plumb, Ron Jude, Alec Soth, Rahim Fortune, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Mark Steinmetz, Todd Hido and many more.
V&A to create largest space for a permanent photography collection in the UK
This is going to be amazing.
The V&A has announced today further details on the second and final phase of the V&A’s Photography Centre, which opens in spring 2023. The Photography Centre will become the largest space in the UK for a permanent photography collection, and the seven galleries – four of which will be new additions – will showcase the museum’s world-leading holdings and enable visitors to experience photography and its diverse histories in new ways.
The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
Photography inspiration galore.
The Grapes of Wrath is a 1940 American drama film directed by John Ford. It was based on John Steinbeck's 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. The screenplay was written by Nunnally Johnson and the executive producer was Darryl F. Zanuck.
The film tells the story of the Joads, an Oklahoma family, who, after losing their farm during the Great Depression in the 1930s, become migrant workers and end up in California. The motion picture details their arduous journey across the United States as they travel to California in search of work and opportunities for the family members, and features cinematography by Gregg Toland.
The film is widely considered to be one of the greatest films of all time. In 1989, it was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Tom Stoddart
One year ago, British photojournalist Tom Stoddart passed away and to mark the anniversary, a selection of his work is being made available to buy for the first time.
I met Tom once. Only once. It was at a Sony World Press Photo event at the Empire Leicester Square, one sunny evening. We exchanged brief words and then went about our business. Unbeknown to me he was following what I was doing, with my Hungry Eye magazine and subsequently with The United Nations of Photography. So, when I asked him if he would contribute to the A Photographic Life podcast, a contribution that was included in episode 13, he had no hesitation in saying yes.
Listen to the voice of Tom Stoddart in this haunting 5-minute audio clip, from a conversation with Dr. Grant Scott, the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography.
Images of the Week
Books
A Geography of Abandonment by Raymond Meeks
The place we call home hides very deep roots: they insinuate themselves into the earth and deform its foundations, the foundation on which to walk. Roots to be desperately sought in the earth, to be uprooted or re-compacted as clods. Roots full of symbols, dreams and memories define Raymond Meeks' language of abandonment.
Périphérique by Mohamed Bourouissa
(Winner of PhotoBook of the Year, Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards 2022)
In this breakthrough series of photographs, Deutsche Börse award-winner Mohamed Bourouissa chose to appropriate the codes of history painting by staging scenes with his friends and acquaintances in the Paris banlieues where they used to hang out.
Marion by Christopher Anderson
Christopher Anderson began photographing his family in a completely organic way. His images were simply the natural action of a partner trying to stop time, and not let one moment of his relationships slip by.
AND is an annual selection of some of the best up and coming influential documentary and portrait photographers from across the globe, showcasing in this heterogeneous collection of poignant and inspiring imagery, a response to a shifting culture and change to the way photography is produced, shared and consumed.
Under the Apple Tree by Regina Anzenberger
For her book project Under the Apple Tree photographer Regina Anzenberger invited her family members to portrait sessions and condensed the resulting works into an album. The pictures were taken with a Rolleiflex camera, mostly outdoors, in gardens that refer to the apple tree in the title.
H — The Notion of Humanist Photography
In 2022, two European cultural institutions, the Centre national de l’audiovisuel (CNA) in Luxembourg and the Kaunas Photography Gallery in Lithuania, joined forces to create a collaborative project that brought together a group of international artists to explore the notion of humanist photography. Twenty-three artists, four authors, three mentors and one designer (Nicolas Polli) were invited to be part of this crossing borders project.
Scientists, led by Frank Drake, sent an encrypted code containing information about humanity and Earth into space in 1974. To this day, the Arecibo Message is on its way to the star cluster M13, waiting for a listener. Perhaps it is better that it remains the biggest soliloquy in the universe. What do you think?
The photographs in Gli Isolani (The Islanders) by Alys Tomlinson, inhabit a hinterland between fiction and reality. Over a period of two years, Tomlinson documented the traditional costumes and masks worn during festivals and celebrations on the islands of the Venetian lagoon, Sicily and Sardinia.
To make the pictures in Meadowlark, Ian Bates spent years driving the vast, sparsely-populated spaces of the American West, often sleeping in his car. This is a project borne of both passion and patience, and though Bates was initially inspired by the Western Meadowlark—state bird of North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Kansas, and Nebraska—the bird ultimately proved elusive, and appears here only once, as a crude facsimile painted on a weathered scrap of plywood.
That’s it for this 4th edition of The Weekly Diary — a shorter more frequent newsletter for subscribers of Nowhere Diary.
If you have any suggestions for interviews, features, topics, interesting work or books that I should check out, don’t hesitate to reach out!
Stay safe and keep shooting.
Kim
Thanks!
Perfect playlist to go with the post, and the zeitgeist!