Liverpool (4): Iron Men and Terracotta Warriors

On my second day I went to Liverpool's World Museum to see the exhibition: China's First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors. Here the photographic challenge was low lighting levels and forbidden use of flash. With every attempted photo, my camera asked me to please turn on the flash. More interestingly, its automated face recognition immediately focussed on the warriors' faces.

After a day spent with the iron men, meeting the terracotta warriors made me think a lot about Golems - the creatures in Jewish folklore, animated and humanoid, magically created from inanimate matter (usually clay or mud): Golem, Warrior, Sculpture, Frankenstein's Monster, Robot . . . these figures have an ancient and abiding fascination (sometimes macabre) for us.

Liverpool (3): on and around the beach

 

Liverpool (2): Iron men modified

The figures are modified with additions by local people, and affected by the elements, by tides and shifting sands.

Liverpool (1): Antony Gormley - Another Place

Last week I went to Liverpool for a couple of days. My first visit was to Crosby Beach, to see the Antony Gormley installation, Another Place. It happened that the day I arrived was the day that Storm Ali (the first named serious storm of this season, bang on time for equinoctial gales) started to batter the north-west coast. I have never experienced such difficult conditions for taking photographs. At times the wind was so fierce that I had to hang on to the promenade railings to avoid being blown over. Holding the camera steady was a real struggle and I wasn't sure, until I got home and uploaded the photos to the computer, whether any of them were sharp shots. Sand was blowing everywhere and was stinging my face, getting into my ears and my clothes. The light was changing by the minute.

But it's a haunting place and a striking installation. The figures are more spread out than I had thought - commercially published photos have clearly been taken with a very long lens, producing a foreshortening effect and making the figures appear more bunched together than they are. They are spread over about 200 yards depth and two miles length of beach. The effect is not so much of a group of figures staring out to sea, but of many isolated individuals, each alone facing the sea.

And it's not a 'pretty' beach - the surroundings are industrial, the sand becomes mud further out, tides can be high and dangerous.

I managed some photographs . . . they could be a lot better, and you can see the swirling sand in some of them. Some are grainy because of the poor light conditions. I would like to go back: in gentler weather, when it would be safe to walk further out towards the water line, and pleasant to spend more time there; in better light for photography; with a tripod and a much longer lens . . .

 

Central Birmingham photo walk (7) - people and objects seen by the canal

This last post in the series is a miscellaneous collection of people and objects seen alongside the canal. It ranges from padlocks attached to a bridge by couples, for luck (even on this very modern Birmingham bridge, with no historical romantic associations!), to a municipal flower display, a modern abstract sculpture, people walking along . . .

Central Birmingham photo walk (6) - glassy reflections

The last part of our walk was the pedestrian route from Symphony Hall to New Street station, along hoarding-bounded walkways between construction sites . . . also alongside buildings with huge glass walls reflecting everything. As with the 'watery reflections' in the previous post, all these images are reflections of structures already seen in other posts.

Central Birmingham photo walk (5) - watery reflections

For about two thirds of our time we were walking by the canals . . .. so there was water . . . so there were reflections. Below is a series of images of reflections, moving gradually from figurative-realistic to ever more abstract. The abstracts were there in the water: these images are 'found', not manufactured or constructed. They are all reflections in moving water of structures that appear elsewhere in this series as the buildings or objects themselves.