Neil Drabble,

Untitled © Neil Drabble

In my Visiting Artist Seminar yesterday we had a visit from Neil Drabble, an English artist. He's a jack of all trades and works not only in photography but also painting, sculpture, installation, video, graphic design and performance. He's all over the place! Neil gave this gigantic presentation to us and went on for almost two full hours! In the beginning I was captivated but after an hour I was fading fast. He showed a massive amount of images!

The most interesting part of his lecture was definitely when he showed us commercial portraits he does. He takes no equipment with him other than a camera and a light meter and only maybe a tiny on-camera flash and travels all around the world making photographs of famous people. The photographs were nice but honestly I found that his descriptions of the events were much more interesting. With so many of the portraits he talked about what happened when he was making it, some crazy event that occurred. During a shoot in Italy of filmmaker Gore Vidal he ended up skinny dipping with the writer he was with who got stung by a wasp in his nose as he was jumping into the pool and they had to rush to the hospital soaking wet! Stories like the ones he told were so interesting that I found myself being more eager to hear the next one than to see the next image.

Jackie Chan © Neil Drabble

He told another story about shooting Jackie Chan after a day of filming. When they got back to Jackie's hotel room Neil found a scene of washed underwear surrounding him, Jackie apparently wants to wash his own underwear by hand instead of getting it washed with the rest of his clothes, and he drapes underwear all over his hotel room to let it dry. I think the knowledge of this surrounding the photograph makes the photograph more interesting.

I suppose with something like commercial photography the backstory tends often to be more interesting than the image, but I don't think it should. It's something that can happen in fine art photography as well, and it's a dangerous zone.

Untitled © Neil Drabble, from American Sculpture

Anyway, take a look at Neil's website, he's a really interesting guy with so many facets and is worth a look. Perhaps some of his other artwork will appeal to some of you as well. His series American Sculpture is pretty interesting in concept, as they're all photographs.




side note: Every day I encounter this and I can't get over it. People here call their photographs 'pictures'. I know it's such a small thing but I feel like there's a huge difference between the two words, that the word pictures isn't at all serious. There's a level of professionalism and self-confidence that comes with saying These are my photographs. But here everyone says oh my pictures this, my pictures that, I took some pictures yesterday...It's so strange. Do any of you think that's as strange as I do? Hm...

Also, I got an internship! Finally! It's with this man Bill Morse who runs a scanning and printing shop for photographers and artists, does his own photography and is in the process of making a monogram of his grandfather's photographs of 1913 urban China. I'm so excited, I really feel like I can learn a lot from him. He wants to teach me how to do marketing better, which is great. Also there's an event like Gallery Night here but it's called First Friday and happens the first Friday of every month, and he said I can have a space in his studio to put up my own work during the opening! Every month! I'm so excited about it! It's a great opportunity, the building his studio is in is made up completely of artist studios and galleries so hopefully I'll get some good publicity because of it.

Rose