Everyone Who's Visited Apple's Homepage Recently Will Have Seen
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
HEROES Penn, Hockney & Picasso LOOM.COM B TEVE S S 2011. AC O/D ss (C) STEVE BLOOM / (C) STEVE ION PICA ss KA: You’ve told me that your heroes are Irving Penn, David Hockney and Pablo Picasso. How has Everyone who’s visited Apple’s homepage recently will ©SUCCE Irving Penn inspired you? have seen STEVE BLOOM’s image of Zebras in flight, Polaroids in the 1980s, capturing a lot of different Above: Male figure violently embraces nude reclining different. Even with a sculpture he showed what female figure; plate 31 of the Vollard Suite (VS 31). 23 SB: One of the things that struck advertising the Retina display on the new Macbook Pro. viewpoints and assembling them in a collage. April 1933. Drypoint. Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973). On you can do with the simplest things; you can me with Irving Penn was his It showed the faceted way in which we see display at The British Museum until 2 September 2012, make a sculpture of a bull using a pair of handle as part of Picasso Prints: The Vollard Suite. cigarette hands. He made these He tells Kathrine Anker which artists have inspired his things. It’s almost like photography had always bars. He showed me how you can be incredibly magnificent platinum prints of been looking through a window and David inventive in the way you approach the process of cigarette hands and he showed way of seeing Hockney jumped through the window into the there’s a time and space for Cartier-Bresson’s image making, and how you can be free to me that you can find beauty in the most outside world and suddenly everything was decisive moment school of thought, but there are experiment. He said, try to be original, don’t go unexpected of subjects. You can go into the Tri-X negatives I had developed in a garage using SB: David Hockney is quite anti-photography and around you. That inspired me to experiment more also other ways of portraying life with with the flow and you can break the rules of details and photograph the textures, and cat litter trays because I couldn’t afford proper in a way that’s what I like about him. He with multiple exposure photography. I’ve photography which go completely against the aesthetics to find new ways of expressing transform the mundane into the absolutely developing trays. Although the negatives have challenges photography and he’s described the written a book called The Merchants of Nairobi whole idea of the decisive moment. And I think yourself. I think just like the cubism that exquisite. He made his prints well into his old age been digitally restored and printed since, it’s photograph as the process of a one-eyed person and in it there’s one picture where I walk down a David Hockney demonstrated how you can influenced David Hockney, Picasso was very which shows that if you’re driven by the passion what’s in those negatives that determines looking down a tube for a split-second. I agree Nairobi street threatened with developers go way beyond the decisive moment and use much interested in how we see from different of aesthetics you will find the energy to keep the ultimate quality of the prints. When you look with him, because we don’t see life as single, knocking down the buildings, and I wanted to photography in a different way. viewpoints, and his cubist pictures were working. That’s one of the great things about into the grain of those negatives there’s frozen images. He taught me how we see, how capture the vibrancy and sparkle of that road multifaceted. That has inspired me to think creativity, the passion and drive is there, you something in them that triggers an emotional our eyes dart around and we have this unfolding today. The way I did it was to take one KA: That brings us nicely on to your third hero, beyond the single frame and think about how can’t retire. response in people and I think that’s why there’s synthesis of images which are formed in our photograph, walk four paces, take another one, Picasso? you’ve got to face up to the challenge of Penn went back to traditional techniques and such an interest in old techniques. I think we’ve retina, go onto our brain for a few seconds and walk another four paces and so on until I encapsulating an experience with your camera I think we forget in this digital age we were able been very quick to forget the magic of yesterday then fade, and then it’s the next image. We move had taken 80 or 90 and walked along the entire SB: Picasso didn’t really have that much time for rather than a single, tiny slice of a moment to make the most incredible photos with film as we move on to the technological through time and space and see things from length of the road, and I stitched them all photography but he was a genius at seeing. And squashed through a lens and spread onto a flat and conventional processes. I just had an advancements of tomorrow. different viewpoints as we move around. A together. As a single photograph it’s incredibly he had a clarity of vision which I find very surface. Try to go a little bit beyond. PP exhibition at the London Festival of Photography photograph is not like that. David Hockney long, about 17 pages of the book, and as your eye inspiring. He also reinvented himself all the time. of my work in the 1970s in South Africa, and KA: What about David Hockney, what has he experimented with this photo collages and moves along you move through time and space If you look at his early work and compare it to these were old, scratched 35mm black and white taught you? moved the camera around, starting with and you have different viewpoints. I think his cubism or his later work, it’s all completely www.stevebloomphoto.com 98 99.