The National Media Museum in Bradford has just opened a new exhibition exploring how babies have been represented through photography.  Given my current interest in family snapshots and childhood photographs, I found it a fascinating exhibition.  It showed how many of our images of children are ‘idealised’ – from Victorian times when any photograph had to present the baby perfectly dressed and presented – to today’s glossy images of celebrities with baby-accessory.  Images of the Royal Family showed how these formal photographs created a ‘template’ for other families to use when photographing their own families.  There were images of babies displayed in ‘baby pageants’ wearing frocks and swimsuits costing hundreds of dollars, and most disturbingly of all, photo-enhanced to ‘pluck’ eyebrows and add lipstick.  All of this was offset by some wonderful examples of photo-realism, pictures taken in photo-documentary style and showing families bringing children up in extreme poverty, as well as photographs of new mothers standing in hospital corridors with their tiny purple babies, looking honest and amazing but not at all cute.

All in all well worth a visit if you are in the area.  The website has some images from the exhibition as a taster.

Richard Wheater  is an artist working in glass, exploring our relationship with the natural environment.  We went to the private view of his installation ‘Them and Us’ on Saturday at Dean Clough galleries  in Halifax.  Over a period of several months, Wheater travelled around the UK with a mobile glass furnace.  For each location he worked in, he made a number of glass birds relevant to that location (e.g. Sparrows in Sheffield).  At dawn, on location, he created his glass birds and then released them into the sky.  Needless to say they came crashing back to earth.  The installation consisted of several large format photographs of these events, some displayed in light boxes; the much-travelled furnace; and a few glass birds (mostly broken).

I found it remarkably moving.  Wheater ‘released’ the birds just as you would a real bird, and in the photographs the glass birds were caught in flight above his up-stretched arms.  Although I knew the project was doomed to failure, I still wanted them to fly.  I felt that the artist’s act was one of humbleness and respect for nature.  Although he could make these beautiful glass birds, they were not a patch on the real thing.  It was also, for me, literally a ‘letting go’.  As an artist, we make too much stuff.  As people, we hoard too many possessions.  It is the making, the creative act of living, that is important.  For Wheater, it is also a political comment on the collapse of industries such as glass in the UK, as companies source cheap imports from abroad.