Tuesday 21 May 2013 6:00-8:00 Gordon Square Cinema - In Conversation: Mark Lewis with David Campany

Outside the National Gallery (2011) - 

© Mark Lewis (http://www.marklewisstudio.com/stills/Outside_the_national_gallery.htm)

In Conversation

Mark Lewis with David Campany

Organised by Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image 

Mark Lewis makes films and digital works. By using film as a gallery medium, he investigates the process of cinema production while also taking in consideration the wider tradition of photography and art. Recent films like Man (2012), Smoker at Spitalfields (2012) and City Road 24 March (2012) make direct reference to the pictorial exploration of the everyday, and in his piece Black Mirror at the National Gallery (2011) the interaction between the museum space, the mirror and the cinematic camera becomes a collaborative exercise for observation and composition making. David Campany is a writer and curator. His books include Art and Photography (Phaidon, 2003) and Photography and Cinema (Reaktion, 2008). He is currently organising exhibitions of the work of Mark Neville (at The Photographer's Gallery) and Victor Burgin (at Ambika P3).

Thursday 9 May 2013 - The Making of a Cloud Observer: Swedish Meteorologist Hugo Hildebrandsson's Photography and the 19th Century Cloud Atlas

Magnus Bremmer, Stockholm University

plate no 6 from Hugo

Hildebrandsson's "Sur la classification des nuages" (1879)

Meteorology as a modern science was largely a product of novel ways of distributing information and organizing what John Ruskin once called a ”vast machine” of observers. In this paper, Magnus Bremmer delineates how photography came to play a key––albeit, not undisputed––role in the project of educating an international network of cloud observers.

Tracing the photographic engagement of the Swedish meteorologist Hugo Hildebrandsson, an influential figure in the making of the first photographic cloud atlases, Bremmer shows how photography initially was acknowledged as an indispensible aid to observation and classification of clouds. However, as the medium was further involved in the instructive pursuits of the international meteorological circles, the photographic image eventually turned into an object of observation, scrutinized under the meteorologists’ trained eye.