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CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, 2002 "I admire the severely rectangular geometry of American cities." Here a woman pauses to pull up her sock, while glancing at an athlete in full flight.
GREENWICH, LONDON, 1997 A backlit view from One Tree Hill in Greenwich Park.
JOE FARMAN, SCIENTIST, CAMBRIDGE Farman is famous for discovering the hole in the ozone layer while working with the British Antarctic Survey. An example of his professional work for magazines, Nicholas Sack says, "I wanted to reflect the lines and contours of his face with those of the chart... He was an incredibly peaceful man, who had spent a lifetime in solitude and was unfazed by the distractions of urban living".
SMITHFIELD, LONDON, 1999 "I returned several times to this street corner, with its truncated building and dominant verticals. The man in the doorway and the foreground figure were the result of patience - and luck."
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Nicholas Sack photographer
ACCIDENTAL ARTIST
The Guide, April 2003 Hill
Publishing
I get what Nicholas Sack is getting at straight away. His first photograph is a picture of a picture, two pictures actually: a photograph he has made of two fly-posters randomly pasted up to make, when framed in his lens, a new picture. A girl has her finger to her lips; "shush!" she's saying, her eyes giving the game away. She's looking sideways at a woman in a shower; "shhh!" she's saying, "something's going on here!" Something's going on in all of Nicholas's pictures. The photographs of the posters are from a series he has created in and around London's East End last year. "It's Accidental Art," he says, accidentally capitalising his words. "It's not self-conscious; it's found art. It's not contrived, which really makes it more joyous." Nicholas has an exhibition on until May 2 at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery in Greenwich. Like so many galleries in London, it is only open during the day, when most people are at work, so it will sadly go unseen by many. It is a collection of 53 black-and-white photographs, hand-printed by himself, and covers a few of the things that have caught his eye over the years. Thus we have the poster photographs. Images made up of Mata Hari eyes and veiled, smoky stares from Bollywood movie posters are jam-packed onto walls in Brick Lane. Layer upon layer of old posters, ripped and shredded, tell stories that were never meant to be told. And there are the Chicago photographs, images of life in the city that he visited for a working holiday last year. "I love all this geometry in American cities," he says. "Poles, wires, fences, street furniture, everything. It all adds up to something I find really exciting." Then there are his images of the City, Docklands and Greenwich, emphasising the scale of the buildings we live and work amongst. And there are his portraits, "what I call the Big Head shots with no background". Photographing captains of industry for the corporate world and trade magazines has been his bread-and-butter work for many years: serious, staring, well-fed people forced to sit still for 10 minutes between calling New York and executing deals. Nicholas has a confession to make. He edited The Guide in 1985/86, when he was studying for a postgraduate degree in journalism. He wanted to write, but the camera bug caught him. He's been around a while and recalls the fuss not so long ago about Canary Wharf, how the proposed buildings would destroy the view, how development was a curse. How things change. "I know old-timers, 70 and 80-years-old, who were really against it. But now they love it. They love the excitement of it all." Nicholas has been photographing London for 20 years and more. He was employed by a construction magazine to photograph Docklands, "when it was just a banana warehouse," and was lucky enough to work for it throughout the building work. He's been up scaffolds, in hoists, on roofs, in mud-filled holes, photographing and documenting the creation of this new centre. In all his photos in this, his tenth exhibition, the themes of structure, line, tone, light and shade dominate. And in all of them is a person or at least a representation - a shadow perhaps - of a human being: a woman catches her tights below a giant poster of a swooshing athlete; a woman raises her leg, balancing her bag on the cusp of dark and light, the man just coming into shot possibly threatening; a naked renaissance statue and a giant painted sunbather get a little too friendly for decency above an unknowing woman, chatting into her mobile. It's not pictorial: "I hate pretty pictures!" he says, agreeing that his pictures need a little interpretation. To see what he sees you have to flatten perspective and allow the juxtapositions he has created to jump out at you until they're screaming, "Obvious! How did you miss me?" Obvious Nicholas is not; subtle he is. His images have taken work. His portraits of business leaders had their settings scoped out a week beforehand. At other locations he's waited hours, like a wildlife photographer at the watering hole. He says he had known about the street corner at Hayne Street in Smithfield, with its abruptly truncated building, for a long time, and returned several times to get the right photograph. The coincidence of a man in the doorway and a shadowy figure in the foreground was the product of patience, he says. And luck, he adds. "My method is quite deliberate," he says, "I've been aware of the settings for years. I set up the camera, wait, and shoot pictures.?
Copyright The Guide, April 2003
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