Rhubard with lashings of custard

You know how it is. Friday night you’ve planned to go somewhere but everyone else pulls out. It gets to about nine o’clock and you think can I really be arsed?  Nine times out of ten I’d lock myself away but a few Friday’s back I pushed myself out the door to go and have a look at the photography on show at Rhubarb Rhubarb’s international portfolio review here in Birmingham.

I’m glad I did. It was amazing opportunity to meet with forty of so photographers all crammed into a room with their work.

Good, bad, mad and promising, it was all there.

Normally these events are full of pretentious tossers, and they may have been lurking but for me it was brilliant opportunity to talk with photographers about their work.  You could smoke the enthusiasm and get high. And where some portfolio reviews might be a cash earner everyone I spoke to genuinely seemed to be getting a lot out of the event.

Over the next week or so I’ll be writing about some of the good stuff on show.

First off then is James Clancey. An Irish photographer who describes himself thus:

There’s no bullshit about James and I was transfixed by his series BORDER COUNTRY, that opens with a motto for so many friends I’ve loved and lost along the way, for myself.

Border Country is a journey in and out of decay.  Talking to James it relates to a journey made through bereavement.  Some people will see darkness and decay in his photographs. Not me. I see places once loved, once useful but now abandoned. As a child these were the places of adventure, the spaces abandoned by adults that we could invade and call our own. Spaces we shared with nature.

I encourage you to see more  of James’ photographs in this series on his website.