The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: photography

  • Dirty Dozen

    Dirty Dozen

    Dirty Dozen is a series of photographs with all the dirt, dust, specs and scratches left on the negatives to be visible after scanning. The aim is to explore the intricate dialogue between process and subject and between what is acceptable and unacceptable in photographic process. When displayed online against a pure white background, it…

  • Surface Tension

    Surface Tension

    Surface Tension is a project investigating life, pollution and biodiversity on the River Lea using photography and sound. Focusing on the blurrings of the natural and unnatural, clean and unclean, built and self-willed in a Lea Valley landscape that is constantly being rewritten and remade, the photographs here were taken on 120 film, and the…

  • Chasing Suns

    Chasing Suns

    The arc of the sun across the sky is one of the most enduring images: repeated every day for all to see. And yet, each time it’s a little different, varying according to geographical location, visibility, and time of year. Chasing Suns is an ongoing long-term photographic project by artist Pauline Woolley. The images were…

  • Open Call: Clean Unclean

    Open Call: Clean Unclean

    Cleanliness, they say, is close to godliness. And the pig has long resided in the realm of the unclean. Even today: “It’s like a pigsty in here!” – as if the pig has much choice in how he lives… More than ever do we feel the urgency of cleanliness: clean hands, clean homes, clean minds….

  • Lost in Fathoms

    Lost in Fathoms

    Stumbling dim across the surface of the earth: humanity. Our legacy not culture or religion or science, but ruin. Our lasting traces that of footprints, not brain waves. Is this what makes us unique? A geological force in our own right? Certainly this is the view announced in 2012 at the 34th International Geological Congress…

  • The Beast is not only the Tiger

    The Beast is not only the Tiger

    The top floor of a modernist apartment block seems an unlikely location for the studio of an artist best-known for his engagement with botany. Nonetheless this is where we find Alberto Baraya, one of Colombia’s most prominent contemporary artists: his working environment not the cavernous white-walled spaces favoured by Bogotá’s other leading practitioners, but a…

  • Touching Wood

    Touching Wood

    Rarely do curators at large public museums co-ordinate concurrent exhibitions to complement each other. But by chance or design, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC) in Santiago, Chile, is bucking the trend. Of the half-dozen or so solo exhibitions currently on show, there are three which share a common material interest: wood. They form, if…

  • The Dogs of El Chalten

    The Dogs of El Chalten

    The village of El Chalten is a service settlement. Located in the Parque Nacional los Glaciares in Patagonia, southern Argentina, the village is a four-hour walk to a network of ancient blue-white glaciers and the sharp, serrated peaks of Fitz Roy, Cerro Torre and Cerro Chalten. Thousands of tourists come to El Chalten each year,…

  • Leap Towards Yourself

    Leap Towards Yourself

    This February sees the publication a new book that spans the entire career of Israeli photographer Sharon Ya’ari. Coinciding with a major exhibition of his work at the Tel Aviv Museum, Leap Towards Yourself demonstrates Ya’ari’s interest in the apparently mundane and frequently overlooked. Frozen in the photograph, however, these scenes become the subject of…

  • Objects in the Field

    Objects in the Field

    Collaboration between the arts and the sciences is both increasingly prominent and, perhaps as a consequence, increasingly problematic. Projects and practices describing themselves as interdisciplinary collaborations are on the rise, in part as a result of funding availability. But it’s also more complex than that: art is always drawn to power, and few institutions in…

  • To Leave a Light Impression

    To Leave a Light Impression

    An exhibition of large-scale landscape photographs of ethereal beauty opens today at the Bermondsey Street outpost of White Cube. Darren Almond’s latest work follows on from his last solo show with the gallery, 2008’s Moons of the Iapetus Ocean, and includes images taken as far afield as Patagonia, Tasmania and Cape Verde. The heart of…