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Artists References-William Collie and Lewis Bush
Introduction:
In this blog post we are going to explore two artists: William Collie from the
Société Jersiaise Photographic Archive, and Lewis Bush from Archisle Contemporary Programme. we are going to explore these two artists that have worked in photography in Jersey and were going to compare their work together.
About Artists:
Lewis Bush is a photographer, writer, researcher, and educator. His practice draws attention to forms of invisible power that operate in the world taking the stance that power is always problematic because its natural resting state is arbitrary and untransparent. Regardless of the intentions of the people and institutions possessing power, these are the states to which it constantly seeks to return. The Archisle Residency, now in its fifth year, brings international contemporary photographers to Jersey to create, educate and exhibit. The residency awards a bursary of £10,000 for an exhibition of new work responding to the culture of the Jersey and set of these works enter the Archisle Collection at the Société Jersiaise Photographic Archive.
William Collie was probably the first photographer to use Fox Talbot’s calotype process in Jersey and some of his previously unpublished photographs featured alongside those of Fox Talbot in an exhibition at the Musée Dorsay in Paris in 2008 of the first photographs taken on paper in Britain from 1840 to 1860. Collie was born in Scotland in 1810 and was in business in Jersey in Belmont Road and Bath Street from before 1850 until 1878. Collie was certainly taking photographs before he diversified his business into the art, but given his undoubtedly extremely important position in the early years of British photography, remarkably little is known about him, and few of his pictures are accessible online.
examples of their work:
One of the earliest photographs printed on paper. William Collie’s picture of Jersey market women taken in 1847
Conclusion
In conclusion we can see how the two photographers that worked in the same place which was Jersey are completely different and have a really different taste in photography, while Collie is photographing more towards the darker and older photographs of people mostly, Lewis photographs newer kinds of images of old or historical things.
Artist References
William Collie
Overview – William Collie was one of the first photographers to use Fox Talbot’s calotype process in Jersey. Collie was originally born in Skene, Aberdeenshire, Scotland in October 1810 and like many other early photographers, started his professional life as a portrait painter. He moved south and is recorded as living in St Helier, Jersey, before 1841, where he had a portrait business. He became one of the earliest photographers working in the Channel Islands, operating from Belmont House, St Helier, until 1872. In the late 1840s he made a series of genre calotype portraits depicting ‘French and Jersey Market Women’.
Image Analysis –
Michelle Sank – Insula
Overview – Sank is well known for her ‘youth work’ among other projects: thematic series of portraits of young adults, often those dealing with an adolescent struggle to find their place in the world or define their identity. Her ability to evoke these human states through a direct yet deceptively potent vision. Writing about Sank’s work, the photographer David Goldblatt has observed: “Michelle Sank uses a simplicity of means that falls way below the zealous art critic’s qualifying level for success. She attempts a portraiture in which the familiar is rendered quietly, never bizarrely, new.’ Her subjects ‘seem, completely, themselves; Sank has allowed each one of them simply to be. Yet it is not a passive state, something has been evoked that seems to come from deep within…an essence which is not ordinary at all. It is the unique spirit of the other person.”
Image Analysis –
Sources – William Collie:
https://www.theislandwiki.org/index.php/William_Collie
Sources – Michelle Sank:
http://www.michellesank.com/portfolios/insula
http://www.archisle.org.je/wp-content/uploads/Michelle-Sank_Insula.pdf