What a lovely way to begin our 21/22 season with a series of member presentations on the summer challenge: produce three monochrome images in the style of a photographer you admire.

Each presentation covered their chosen photographer(s) and some of their images; a bit of background about where/how they came across them; what they admire about the work/ what made these images stand out for them; their approach to producing their own images in this style; current status e.g. work in progress or completed project; lessons learned.

Mark and Judy Buckley-Sharp chose Frank Meadow Sutcliffe HonFRPS who lived and worked in and around Whitby either side of 1900, showing six of his images from his local area and their own interpretations of the content and compositions.  These too were presented in sepia as did Sutcliffe.

Peter Keeble emulated the work of Daido Moriyama, a Japanese street photographer best know for his confrontational, black-and-white images and his rejection of technical precision in favour of the grainy and high-contrast images produced by a compact camera.

Peter Polkinghorne’s influences were Bill Brandt who was a witness to the Depression of the 1930s and the Blitz of 1940.  He is credited with revising and renewing the major artistic genres of portraiture, landscape and the nude – nearly all his work is in black and white.  Peter’s second influence is Hiroshi Sugimoto, a Japanese photographer best known for his highly stylized photographic series of seascapes, movie theatres, natural history dioramas, waxworks and Buddhist scultptures.

Julia Wainwright and Ian Roberts’ influences are – for Julia,  Tony Sellen and David Rosen and for Ian,  Julia Anna Gospodarou and Ben Harvey;  they both take inspiration from all modern day (and living) photographers who specialise in B&W fine art photography – mainly architectural long exposure.  Their images reflected a recent workshop on long exposure of the London cityscape.

Many thanks to our contributors for an informative and entertaining evening.

Next week we look forward to hosting (on Zoom) The Ron Wake Trophy our inter-club print competition.

In the meantime, stay safe and well.