Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour

Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour

10 October - 17 December 2006

Past photography exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

This exhibition focuses on eight contemporary artists whose photography and installations are made at, or suggest, the fleeting state of the world at dusk. It explores a time of day and a quality of light that presents technical challenges but also embodies a haunting mood and the possibility of narrative intrigue or psychological tension.

Their grouping shows a variety of approaches to the theme. Each artist is guided by the quality of twilight in the place where they work and by the wider social issues, cultural resonances and poetic possibilities of the magic hour.

3 of the 8 photographers

Robert Adams Philip-LorciadiCorcia

Greogry Crewdson

* All information and images taken from the vam website, past photography exhibitions.

AMAZON.UK - Information below from amazon.uk
Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour

This book draws together the work of contemporary photographers who have explored the visual and psychological effects of the transition from day to night. It examines their technically ambitious attempts to record or replicate the rapid and transient effects of daylight succumbing to darkness, and analyses the mysterious states of mind and awakened sensibilities these works suggest, at the threshold between the familiar and the unknown. In placing the photographs in their broader historical, literary, meteorological and technical contexts, "Twilight" reveals the timeless allure of the magic hour. Stunning images by such high-profile contemporary photographers as Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Robert Adams and Bill Henson are explored.

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Merrell Publishers Ltd; 1 edition (16 Oct 2006)
• Language English
• ISBN-10: 1858943531
• ISBN-13: 978-1858943534
• Product Dimensions: 29.6 x 25.8 x 2 cm

Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour (Book)
Martin Barnes and Kate Best

Martin Barnes and Kate Best are both Curators of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Other publications of Barnes include Benjamin Brecknell Turner: Rural England through a Victorian Lens(2001), Best specialises in contemporary and early twentieth-century photography. Both curators have complied this book to accompany the 2006 exhibition of the same title.

Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour focuses on contemporary art photography that was made at or evoke the fleeting moment at dusk and providing scope for narrative intrigue and psychological depth. Over the last decade or so twilight has become the vehicle for expression for some of the best photographic artist around today. The main artists covered in this book as it is pointed out by Barnes & Best in the preface, do not constitute a school or movement, their rather loosing grouping is to show variety and diversity.(Barnes & Best, 2006)
Different historical periods as well as cultural and geographical variations offer contrasting versions of what the depiction of twilight may express through art. Going back before photography their were influential artist such as Giorgione(1477-1510), Titan(1485-1576), and Claude Lorrain(1604 - 162) who in particularly influenced the eighteenth and ninetieth centuries boom in Romantic and sublime landscape imagery. This can be traced to British painter John Martin (1798-1854) within his work the dramatic effects of light often break up visual legibility to suggest emotional magnitude. In the Ninetieth century the main focus was on artist like Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) an English painter, draughtsman and etcher, keen figures of English romantic paintings representing in early works at least, its pastoral, intuitive and nostalgic aspects at their most intense.(Samuel Palmer information from tate.org.uk)

Giorgione, The Tempest, (1508) Oil on canvas
(image from: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/G/giorgione/tempest.jpg.html )

Giorgione (born Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco; c. 1477/78 – 1510

Italian painter of the High Renaissance in Venice.

"The Tempest, represents; it may be a scene from some classical writer or an imitator of the classics. For Venetian artists of the period had awakened to the charm of the Greek poets and what they stood for. They liked to illustrate the idyllic stories of pastoral love and to portray the beauty of Venus and the nymphs. One day the episode here illustrated may be identified - the story, perhaps, of a mother of some future hero, who was cast out of the city into the wilderness with her child and was there discovered by a friendly young shepherd. For this, it seems, is what Giorgione wanted to represent. But it is not due to its content that the picture is one of the most wonderful things in art. That this is so may be difficult to see in a [scan], but even such an illustration conveys a shadow, at least, of his revolutionary achievement. Though the figures are not particularly carefully drawn, and though the composition is somewhat artless, the picture is clearly blended into a whole simply by the light and air that permeate it all. It is the weird light of a thunderstorm, and for the first time, it seems, the landscape before which the actors of the picture move is not just a background. It is there, by its own right, as the real subject of the painting. We look from the figures to the scenery which fills the major part of the small panel, and then back again, and we feel somehow that, unlike his predecessors and contemporaries, Giorgione has not drawn things and persons to arrange them afterwards in space, but that he really thought of nature, the earth, the trees, the light, air and clouds and the human beings with their cities and bridges as one. In a way, this was almost as big a step forward into a new realm as the invention of perspective had been."

The Story of Art", by E.H. Gombrich

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/G/giorgione.html

John Martin


Martin is best-known as a painter of religious subjects and fantastic compositions. His paintings typically vast landscapes and cityscapes peopled with a myriad of tiny figures. (Riggs,97)


(Riggs,T, 1997, John Martin, Tate.org.uk)


EARLY PHOTGRAPHY

Horatio Ross, Hoddy and John Muro Fishing at Flaipool (1847) Daguerreotype

Daguerreotype images, are formed on highly polished and silvered copper plates, their mirrow like surfaces play tricks with light and reflections. Accidental over-exposure, most commonly seen in lanscape images in the sky creates patches of shimmering violet-blues.

Gustave Le Gray, Seascape(1856 - 58) Albumen print from wet collodion on glass negatives.

Le Gray's Seascape was not created at twilight but during daylight hours, Le Gray aimed the camera directly towards the sun hidden behide the clouds, giving a more even exposure and twilight effect.