Stills Exhibition: Close-Up

Open Mon-Sat 11am–6pm Sun 12noon–5pm
The Fruitmarket , in Edinburgh, is possibly my favourite gallery. The exhibitions are normally compact, certainly varied and always thought-provoking. Also the food is excellent!! I recently went to see Close-Up which has finished but there is always a good exhibition on there.
Closeup was great - it was mostly (but not all) old b&w photos - from people like ManRay (his 'Dust Breeding' photo was there as a contact print), Karl Blossfeldt (lovely detailed photos of plants showing fabulous design structure), a very cool surrealistic film by Dali called 'un chien andalou' (actually directed by Lois Bunuel) which is famous for the opening scene which is a close-up an an eye being slit open - which would have been quite shocking when it came out in 1929!! Simon Starling did an interesting series of shots zooming in progressively closer on a ManRay photograph, getting deeper and deeper into the molecular level of photography - a different take on 'close-up'. I also really liked some of the other more modern (1970s) photographic series, such as close-ups of various body parts, often of the photographer him or herself! Eg Carolee Schneemann, "Portrait Partials", 1970. All in all it was a fascinating exhibition, with a wide range of mediums (film, slides, photos, books) all with the 'close-up' theme. It was great to be refreshed with different ways of looking at everyday objects and by extensive use of black & white (or monochrome) to look at light and texture carefully. I really enjoyed this exhibition and went back for a second visit!

John Hilliard, "The most plausible Theory". This is 3 photographs, each of the same pool of water, each with 3 different focal points. Fascinating photos! Stand back and taking in the scene, the 1st is detail, near ground, sticks in water - some shapes in mid- and back-ground not identifiable. 2nd - we can see the light object in the water - a watch under water, now foreground is blurred, as is background. 3rd photo - we now see the background - it's the reflection of a tree (with a man's body hanging in it!), and a cloud. We still see shapes in the foreground that match up to photos 1 and 2. A very (very?) large aperture with extremely narrow DOF for each photo. Project 2 done very well!!! The story is about a man falling with a parachute or something, but the execution is amazingly good! I really like this! I put a photo below for my own record. Also here is a link to some of his other work at the tate. And a talk that looks quite interesting.

Photo taken at the Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh, John Hilliard, The most plausible theory, 1976.

From the Fruitmarket website:
The latest in The Fruitmarket Gallery’s series of group exhibitions curated by eminent scholars, writers and artists, Close-Up explores the defamiliarising effects of bringing a camera lens very close to its subject. Trans-historical and cross-generational, the exhibition brings together selected experiments in close-up film and photography from mid-nineteenth century microscopy; avant-garde film and photography from the 1920s and 30s; post-war conceptual art; and contemporary art from the 1990s and 2000s.