Steve Bloom

Steve Bloom will be judging two major photographic competitions in the near future.

The Digital Camera Photographer of the Year is one of the largest photographic competitions in the world, attracting more than 100,000 entries last year. Entries close 5pm Tuesday 14th September. http://www.photoradar.com/photographer-of-the-year 

The Travel Photographer of the Year is a fantastic competition, showcasing the best travel pictures in the world. The annual coffee table book is a great collector’s item. Closes 9th October. http://www.tpoty.com/

MY FAVOURITE ANIMAL FAMILIES (Thames & Hudson),
a new children’s book by Steve Bloom (with text by David Henry Wilson)

This book, produced specially for children aged between seven and eleven, showcases Steve Bloom’s perennially popular photographs of baby animals. From African plain to frozen Arctic, from mountain forest to tropical jungle, Steve Bloom’s camera has focused on baby bears, cheetahs, chimpanzees, elephants, giraffes, gorillas, hippos, lions, orangutans, pandas, penguins, rhinos, seals and zebras. His remarkable images are sure to capture the heart and imagination of any young reader.

Steve Bloom will be appearing at the Bath Festival for Children’s Literature on 26th September, Waterstones Canterbury on 30 September and Durham Book Festival 26 October.

Available now in US English, International English and German; with Hungarian, Finnish and French to follow. Media contact kathy@stevebloom.com for interviews and image rights.

See sample pages from the book here.

Signed copies available.

After I gave a talk in Oxford’s Natural History Museum, Dave Dellatore introduced himself to me and showed me a tattoo of one of my photographs on his back. Dave was studying primate conservation at Oxford Brookes University and he is a committed conservationist.  I was amazed and flattered. I always ‘back up’ my digital images, but this gave a new meaning to the expression. My pictures have been printed on fine art paper, canvas, roller blinds, jigsaw puzzles, but human skin was a first. Compare the images. Photo of Dave by Felicia Ruperti.

A new exhibition of Steve Bloom’s work is on the second floor at Waterstones, St Margarets Street, Canterbury. Books and other merchandise are be available to browse and purchase. The images include classic favourites, as well as some limited edition monochrome prints. 

Download the press release here.

There is currently a group Exhibition, African Odyssey, in Cape Town which will run during during the World Cup. It is being held at Raw Vision Gallery, 89 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock. See http://tinyurl.com/34f4k37 for the range of Steve Bloom’s pictures and http://www.africanodyssey.org/african_odyssey/Home.html for exhibition details.

The Animal Art Fair will be in London from 16-18 April. We will be there unveiling a new range of  limited edition black and white prints on archival art paper. These will be in conservation frames. Details at http://www.animalartfair.com/

The Spirit of the Wild outdoor exhibition opened in St Andrews Square, Edinburgh last Thursday. The exhibition, held in conjunction with the International Year of

Spirit of the Wild, St Andrews Square, with Edinburgh Castle. Photo: Jill Todd

Biodiversity, forms part of the Edinburgh Science Festival. This is the eleventh venue for the exhibiton and the first in Scotland. The opening received wide press and TV coverage (see http://bit.ly/ceezt2 and http://su.pr/1Ax3cW and pictures at http://tinyurl.com/ygfx5a4) .

The images are accompanied by informative captions, designed to raise public awareness of wild animals and the environmental issues which affect them. The visual narrative enables viewers to go on a journey to all the world’s continents as they move around the exhibition.

Spirit of the Wild will run in Edinburgh until 16th May 2010.

Spirit of the Wild is a spectacular outdoor exhibition of animals around the world, taken by the award-winning photographer, Steve Bloom. Never before staged in Scotland, the exhibition will celebrate the International Year of Biodiversity at the 2010 Edinburgh Science Festival. Edinburgh will host the eleventh Spirit of the Wild exhibition, which has been seen by several million people across Europe.

St Andrews Square, Edinburgh, Scotland, 12 March – 16 may 2010.

WISH YOU WERE HERE – Click here for more

In November 1980 Camera Magazine published a cover story about Steve Bloom’s series of twelve multi-layered unique hand-made Cibachrome prints of British people on holiday in the UK. Around the same time, an exhibition of the work was held in London’s Photographers’ Gallery and Bristol’s Rainbow Gallery.  Amateur Photographer Magazine also ran an article about the work which was titled ‘Wish You Were Here’ .

The photographs had been locked away from early 1981 until December 2009, but have recently been scanned and made available for public viewing.

This satirical look at the British at play shows people in incongruous settings, and Bloom’s sharp eye caught moments during the odd rituals of ice-cream, tinsel, kiss-me-quick hats and seaside frolics which were so prevalent at a time before low-cost air travel lured people away to more exotic climes.

Bloom wanted to illustrate, photographically, the contrast between the actual experience of being on holiday and the fantasies that holiday resorts evoke. The original photographs were taken on black and white film, and then converted to false colours using a unique and complex process which he developed. At a time when documentary photography was almost exclusively in black and white, Bloom decided to falsify colours and so echo the intensification of colour at holiday resorts. It as if, by heightening colours at resorts, the experience of being on holiday in itself became heightened. By doing a similar thing to photographs, the images form a powerful narrative about British people at play.  

The series was first published and exhibited six years before Martin Parr published his book The Last Resort, Photographs of New Brighton – another powerful satirical look at the British on holiday.

The printmaking process was complex in the extreme. Each negative was exposed onto a 12X16 inch sheet of black and white film, to produce a photographic cell. This was done four times using a pin registration system that ensured each cell could be realigned in exact register when contacted separately onto Cibachrome colour paper. Cibachrome has always been the most intensely saturated photographic process using traditional printing methods. 

Three cells were retouched by bleaching or dying certain areas. One cell served for each of the subtractive primary colours: magenta, cyan and yellow. A fourth cell was for more subtle colour control in areas such as flesh tones. Each cell was selectively masked to the required density with either dye (for subtle graded areas) or photo-opaque (for more saturated areas). Areas which required more delicate toning were hand coloured on the fourth cell, before contact printing all four cells, one at a time, in exact register onto the Cibachrome paper. The colours were made using the additive process.  Yellow, for example, was made by first exposing the paper to green light through a green filter, and then to red light through a red filter. Yellow reflects red and green. By doing it that way, the magenta and cyan dyes are bleached out, leaving a more vivid yellow than could have been achieved by simply exposing the paper to yellow light. This technique yields the most highly saturated colours that can be produced with a traditional photographic process.

Click here to see the pictures.

The question ‘What is photography?’ is not an easy one to answer. Many thousands of words have been written in an effort to do so, in academic journals and in books by cultural commentators such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. If we acknowledge that it is impossible to provide a definitive answer, can we at least distil the meaning of photography into somewhat fewer words, and get to the very essence of the medium without diminishing its importance as an art form? This book aims to do just that. David Clark has selected 50 iconic images by some of the world’s greatest photographers and asked them to explain how the pictures were made and their creative approach. From these interviews he has chosen 100 words that encapsulate their philosophy, and which are picked out in bold in the text.

The book is now available and includes the work and views of photographers Steve Bloom, David Bailey, Steve McCurry, and Albert Watson.