Saturday 10 July 2010

Mende Film

A medium format film portrait of Mende Nazer


www.mendenazer.org

Beautiful Things

Things from my room:

A Scanned Rose


Beautiful quote from Roald Dahl and spilled tea.

More Play Auditions

I photographed more actor's auditioning for the play Slave: A Question of Freedom.
(www.feelgoodtheatre.co.uk)
I've been making a photographic study of the development of the play's journey, which will hopefully contiue through to it's performance at The Lowry theatre in November.

The play is an adaptation of Mende Nazer's story.



Huntarian Museum

The Huntarian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons is one of my new favourite places. it houses the collection of Medical Scientist and Surgeon John Hunter and is full of medical curiosities. Victorian studies of medicine is something that's really informing my work at the moment.
Sadly photography is forbidden in the museum, so this is a post-card showing a lizard with two tails I bought in their shop.

Mende Nazer Digital Portraits

Here are the first portraits I took of Mende Nazer to accompany an article by Susan McClelland (www.susanmcclelland.com) for Elle Canada.




Mende has been a family friend for a long time since my dad co-wrote her incredible life story about escaping slavery in Sudan. She now has a Foundation which aims to help educate the children in the Nuba Mountains in North Sudan, where she lived as a child before being kidnapped and sold into slavery.
- www.mendenazer.org -

Witchcraft Letters

As part of an ongoing portraiture project i have been contacting women who practice some things that could be considered witchcraft such as herbalism, tarot readings, shamanism, healing, etc.
Here are two beautiful letters i got in response, i'm so happy and excited to photograph their writers!

Skin

I saw the Skin exhibition at the Wellcome Collection and it was amazing, so interesting and inspirational.


The Wellcome Collection's perminent exhibitions are fantastic too, historical curiosities largely based on medical study, collected largely by Henry Wellcome, who had a great moustache: