Short Bio

David was born in Scotland in 1953, where he now lives. He worked in London for 30 years as a film and photography critic, documentary maker and as editor of Creative Camera (1991-2001). In 2002 he became a lecturer in photography at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he specialised in photography magazines. David has written many articles and contributed to books such as ‘A Companion to Photography’ (Wiley, 2020). He is the author of ‘Eduardo Paolozzi - At New Worlds. Science Fiction And Art In The Sixties‘ (Savoy Books 2013).

Curatorial Statement

‘Commonplace tools and objects present photographers with a challenge – especially when they seem to present opportunities. The photographer aspires to transform a table, for example, into an icon with universal meaning. But the table resists because it belongs to language, first and foremost. The common object brings language into the picture and with language comes attitudes and ideology, certainly; but also questions. Why has the seat of this chair by Ruth Stoltenberg, been renovated? Images confront us with our ethnicity, gender, class or education. Knut Maron draws attention to the worn patch on a meat slicer. My reading of this as a signifier of a post-war ethic of ‘making do’, is informed by what I have in common with Maron as a European born in the early 1950s. We are diverted by these thoughts and doubts, this positioning, and forced to remember that a photograph can never be simply an aesthetic experience.

I chose 10 pictures of objects in an effort to illustrate the struggle for meaning that photographers engage in when things refuse to be themselves, and to showcase different approaches to that challenge.’

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