The most celebrated reportage to come out the Vietnam War was Michael Herr’s Dispatches, rightly acclaimed as the most visceral journey into the dark heart of America’s first military defeat. But unlike all wars before it, Vietnam was a genuinely visual conflict, brought into the homes of the public via television and photojournalism. And among its most accomplished witnesses were two British photographers. The one everyone has heard of is Don McCullin, but his work was matched picture for picture by the Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths.
There were female pioneers of photography before Christina Broom, most notably Julia Margaret Cameron. And others have hidden their light under a bigger bushel: Vivian Meier's body of work remained stashed away only to be discovered after her death. Broom's importance is partly one of timing: she prowled the streets of London at a time of great historical significance. As suggested by Soldiers and Suffragettes, the title of a new exhibition and book celebrating her work, she was a witness to the struggle for universal suffrage and the First World War.
I had never really photographed landscape. But I spent many wonderful weekends in Suffolk and Norfolk along the coast. This project began when I just decided to photograph the sea in a very abstract way. The sky and the light and the flatness were quite inspiring for me.
Baudelaire called him a “pictorial Balzac” and said he was the most important man “in the whole of modern art”, while Degas was only a little less effusive, claiming him as one of the three greatest draughtsman of the 19th century, alongside Ingres and Delacroix.
This summer, Tate St Ives turned 21. And this makes it as good a time as any for an exhibition repositioning the artists who were associated with St Ives, the small harbour town in Cornwall, where you'll find the gallery on the sea front at Porthmeor Beach.
The trumpeting of a lone elephant can be heard all around Durham city centre, blasting across the River Wear. The organisers of Artichoke’s Lumiere Festival, now in its third biennial year, have been turning up the volume as the evening’s progressed. The 3D elephant, which is the work of French design group Top’là, is a magnificent optical illusion projected onto a replica medieval fortress arch on Elvet Bridge, complete with thunderous audio.
Tony Ray-Jones is one of the hidden greats of British social documentary photography. A huge influence on photographers working today, he documented the English at play with great empathy and often surreal humour. Touring seaside resorts during the latter half of the Sixties, his acute observations of English social customs and eccentricities were, he says, intended to capture a distinctly English way of life “before it became too Americanised”.
You can use a computer to draw, as Hockney does, every day on his iPad, yet, despite all the technological advances the 21st century has thrown our way, the pencil continues to be the artist’s most basic tool. And though there are those who lament, as they have done for decades, the “deskilling” of art, dismissing the art they don’t like or perhaps feel alienated by, drawing not only persists but remains fundamental: just as writers still write novels with plots to recreate the world filtered through their imaginations, artists still put pencil to paper to do the same.
The images in this gallery illustrate some of the links and juxtapositions made in The Springtime of the Renaissance. Classical statues which influenced Florentine artists, works reunited for the first time in centuries, sculptural forms reproduced in two-dimensional paintings (see main image) - you can find all of them below. The 20 images are arranged in 10 pairs, each of which represents a theme of the exhibition.
The London Art Fair may not have the international heft or VIP glamour of Frieze, but for 25 years it’s been the place to see and buy the best of British modern art.