The annual Mary Moser Award, established in 2003, honours the work and commitment to Artweeks over many years of Lady Moser, whose enthusiasm and tireless energy helped get this popular Oxfordshire festival started. The award is intended to help develop the career of a professional artist who has taken up art as a second career later in life.
This year's award goes to photographer Simon Murison-Bowie, whose remarkable pictures are created on a Rolleiflex camera that calls for a 120 roll of black and white film, which he develops and enlarges himself. He forged an interest in photography as a teenager, but spent much of his working life in educational publishing. It was only when he retired 35 years later that he took his photography seriously.
His work can be seen at the North Wall Gallery, Summertown, from May 12-20. He has called his show Fragments, after the elusive fragments of images - caught somewhere between after-images and the latent images that sink into countless strata of the mind - that he's trying to capture.
He does this by leaning his camera on a café table and taking a shot without looking through the viewfinder, or by shooting straight from the hip at any angle that the camera happens to fall, which he admits is obviously a hit-and-miss affair.
People certainly don't notice him placing his finger on the button and releasing the shutter, because it happens so casually. This means he captures some delightful unrehearsed moments in which his subjects are acting naturally. The real excitement, however, comes later, in the darkroom, where he gets to see what he's taken.
His inspiration for this mode of photography comes from Daido Moriyama, the ground-breaking Japanese photographer who describes himself as a stray dog who is always scratching around at things.
Once Simon was introduced to Daido Moriyama's work, he said goodbye to the conventional clean image and began taking photographs that really stretch the limit of what's describable.
He is particularly fond of pictures that allow the eye to see through the backs of others towards some thing or some person that the eye may have missed.
His camera steals images taken against a backdrop of lines in the pavement, chairs outside a cafe, tables too, with the texture of handbags and clothes all influencing the moment he presses the shutter. His aim is to understand better the significance of the everyday. This exhibition helps us do just that.
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