Picture imperfect: Are these Britain's dullest photos? - BBC News. This photo of a terraced street is unremarkable and - arguably - dull. But it is among thousands of similar efforts uploaded by hundreds of volunteers dedicated to photographing every inch of the British Isles. What drives them? Deserted housing estates, empty fields and road signs - the mundane sights that most of us ignore but which Matthew Eyre is eager to photograph. He is one of a hardy band who spend their free time photographing every square mile of the British Isles for the website Geograph. "A lot of it does look dull," he admits. "To other people it maybe seems weird - why do we take pictures of letterboxes and things like that?
Mr Eyre, who is Geograph's second busiest member having uploaded nearly 110,000 pictures, has set himself a challenge of walking every street in Portsmouth - and he is not alone in laying claim to some big numbers. Lewis Clarke uploaded 9,982 pictures to Geograph last year. "My mum says it's quite a sad hobby," he said. Mr Eyre agrees. Did he get them all?
The way we were: Mass Observation at the Photographers' Gallery | Art and design | The Observer. "We were called spies, pryers, mass-eavesdroppers, nosey parkers, peeping-toms, lopers, snoopers, envelope-steamers, keyhole artists, sex maniacs, sissies and society playboys. " These are the words of Humphrey Spender, speaking years after he had first turned his camera on an often reluctant British public in 1937 as part of the Mass Observation project.
Founded that year by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the poet and journalist Charles Madge and the surrealist painter and film-maker Humphrey Jennings, Mass Observation's aim was to study the ordinary lives of ordinary people in order to counteract the stereotypes that held sway in the British media of the time. To this end, a team of volunteer interviewers, some trained in sociology, some simply enthusiastic amateurs, went out among the people to record and analyse their everyday lives and opinions. Not so, says Russell Roberts. "Is the web an archive? Small Town Inertia. GP practice holds exhibition documenting patients' lives. By Abi Rimmer, 30 August 2012 Dr Adams: the shots reflect the trust between GPs and their patients Dr Kate Adams, a GP at the Shoreditch Park Surgery, said she hoped the RCGP-sponsored exhibition reflected the unique relationship GPs had with their patients.
‘You’re quite struck as a GP by the stories that people talk to you about and we wanted to capture that – it's something special.’ Dr Adams worked with Swiss photographer Michael von Graffenried, to create panoramic shots of patients in their homes. The photos are displayed at the practice together with the patients' background stories.
Dr Adams said the shots reflected the trust between GPs and their patients, something that was at risk of being lost. ‘There are an awful lots of targets [in general practice] – putting people into a certain box; a disease box or a medical box. ‘We’re really at risk of losing the narrative of the patient story,’ she said. Smile, You're Fucked! Photos: Paul Graham, courtesy of the artist and Les Filles du Calvaire gallery. Photo editor: Nicolas Poillot. Between 1984 and 1985, British photographer Paul Graham took thousands of pictures in hundreds of welfare centres across the United Kingdom. Originally implemented at the end of World War II, the welfare centres enjoyed a new lease of life at the beginning of the 80s after Margaret Thatcher came to power and stuffed them full of jobless young men and women.
Graham was never given the official OK to take any pictures. So in order to snap the people who hung out there in the hope of finding jobs for themselves, he had to place his camera discreetely on a chair and take the pictures blind, without peering through the viewer, in the hope that they would turn out right. Beyond Caring is currently exhibited at Le Bal gallery in Paris, where it will stay until December 9th. This was England: the photographs of Chris Killip. Thanks Maggie - David Severn Photography. Don McPhee: photographer.