I’ve been inspired to write this post, one of a series, by the excellent art related tweets of Ms Helen Warlow. She has been tweeting her favourite art, most often by contemporary artists or artists who I’m unfamiliar with and a lot of the stuff she’s put up is an absolute delight. Even if it’s something that I would not want on my wall, the stuff she shares is at the very least interesting. Her tweets made me want to flex my ‘art muscles’ little bit on here. The world is full of horror, especially Islamic horror and my own sanity demands that I step away from the savagery at times. Therefore, as an ex-photographer, I thought I’d share with the readers of this blog, and on twitter, some of the photographs that made an impact on me, especially the stuff that made me sit up and take notice when I was younger. It’s not going to be in a chronological order, it’s just going to be the stuff that I like which I think has artistic value or which has an interesting social, political or technical story about it.

Most of the stuff will be going out on Twitter @Fahrenheit211 / Anglicus Apikorus but I’ll occasionally do a longer piece about a particular image on here. So watch out for the images on Twitter.

The first picture I’ve put up which is shown above is by Bert Hardy, a man whom I had the great pleasure to meet briefly towards the end of Mr Hardy’s very long and incredibly interesting life in photography. This image was made in 1942 and shows Britons seeing off their loved ones as they go off to fight the Nazis. This image perfectly captures the emotions of such an event and it’s a proper ‘decisive moment’ picture. The backlight is just right, there is enough detail captured in the faces to see what is happening. The light streaming down through the roof of the station and being scattered by the smoke and the steam from the locomotives gives the image an ethereal feel to it. You get the impression that if Mr Hardy had pressed the shutter release a microsecond earlier or later then this would not be the great image that it is.

An absolutely first class image from a man who rose from an ordinary working class background to become one of Britain’s most extraordinary photographers He went from hack-work such as ‘a fish goes to hospital’ to stuff that had a really heavy edge to it, such as his Korean images which had serious political fall out. Bert Hardy is a for me one of those photographers whose images have a distinct style of their own, which said something about what how the photographer saw the original scene, and this is probably why I like his images so much.

Link

This image and others can be found on the Guardian site and there are loads of other Bert Hardy images out there on other websites.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2013/mar/24/bert-hardy-photographs-in-pictures