Death: A self-portrait (The Richard Harris Collection)

A free exhibition which should not be missed! 300 treasures gives complex and contradictory attitudes toward death. Ideas related to death: Contemplating Death, The Dance of Death, Violent Death, Eros and Thanatos, Commemoration giving different perspectives about Death.

I have got 2 favorites:
Calevera Mondongo collective (Argentina) which is a collage and is so complex and colourful.

The second favorite is a George Grosz collage: "Faces of Death". Final truth about death - its uncanny facelessness. Transposing skulls onto "found" photographic portraits, also poking fun at the conventions of art and advertising.

Seduced by art

One of the most beautiful and enormous photo exhibitions. There are so much to learn.
Setting the scene: Jeff Wall, the destroyed room evokes the destructive frenzy of Delacroix`s painting: The death of Sardanapaulus. Tom Hunter also creates a picture about Coltelli, the central figure of painting.
Marin Parr - Signs of the Times
Thomas Gainsborough Mr. and Mrs Andrews
The figure of human body, human bodies photographed on a way like paintings.
Madonna and child -Tableaux - elevated subject and historical art might raise the status of their "mechanical" medium. e.g. Thomas Struth`s photo about people looking at exhibition at National Gallery. Reconstruction of "mother and child" Alen Chadwick one Flash (Christ child is a female)

William Klein and Daido Moriyama

Klein treated the past as sacred. Revisits odl images through new technologies, digital print techniques. Big walls full of pictures, street-photography from everyday moments happening in different cities. New York, Paris, Moscow, Rome, Tokyo etc. (gelatin silver print) different times 1954-1984-1995 forming a unity, a timeless, placeless big city where people are in continuous movement, action.
Moriyama states:
"My approach is very simple - there is no artistry, I just shoot freely". That`s what I want to do. Moriyama is a key photographer in avant-guarde magazine Provoke.
Series of pictures about one subject: platform, meshed world, photo theatre, the tales of Tono Monogatari, Memory, found objects, urban detrins

"Everyone has desires. Desires are real. Photography is those desires."

Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes

Just taking notes about the main points of this book to keep in eye in the future this so important and interesting topic.
Studium - extent body of information, application to a thing, taste for someone, commitment without special acuity. Political, historical, cultural figures, faces, gestures, actions, the settings.

Punctum - disturbs the studium
"in photography the punctum is an accident which pricks me."
"what the photograph thinks of itself"
(pictorialism)

Camera Lucida (Roland Barthes)

Everything was moving (photography from the 60s and 70s)

A great exhibition in Barbican displayed in 2 levels showing photos from 60s and 70s of many different cultures like South africa, America, USSR, Asia, West Africa. I wish I could visit again.
Just mentioning 2 favorites:
William Egglestone, 1939, American photographer, brilliant innovator who revolutionised photography with the use of colour and his "war on the obvious"... his democracy of vision."
Eggleston`s subjects are ordinary, seemingly straight forward, yet are transformed by a sense of heightened, near hallucinatory perception".

Shomei Tomatsu 1030, considered the godfather of modern Japanese photography. His images having deep relationship with the real world but he expresses his point of view by visual fragments, elliptical metaphors and sometimes abstracted surface.

Shakespeare staging the world

Exhibition in British Museum where we can find out from a visitor (tourist) from 1599 that London is not in England but rather England is in London. Is great to immerse yourself in the world of Shakespeare, to see London differently, also the all world.

A portrait of John Donne is impressing where the poet poses as an archetypal melancholy lover.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/aug/28/shakespeare-britain-world-culture)
This beautiful scene has a surprising effect in our society where everyone wants you to smile and be happy all the time. Loving melancholy gives a different perspective. You might feel you are left alone by society and in this term you need the courage of recognising, showing your melancholy.

Heatherwick Studio, Desing the Extraordinary

An exhibition in V&A where the visitor found works from architecture, furniture, engineering, sculpture and urban planning. "Projects are united by a passion to create intriguing yet funtional three-dimensional forms." (spinning chair, rolling bridge, expandable zip bag, power station, bus).

Even the leaflet given to the visitors has an unusual format which gives a good variety of reading and there are displaid all sort of programs like exhibitions, events, lectures, family events.