Mark Culham
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markculham.bsky.social
Mark Culham
@markculham.bsky.social
550 followers 500 following 3.9K posts
Where the bee sucks, there suck I
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markculham.bsky.social
📷 Howell Conant A black & white photograph of Grace Kelly up to her neck in the sea, looking directly into the camera, with her reflection in the water rippling towards it. In the background we can see a strip of land and then the sky with a streak of grey In the clouds. I have added the photograph to a past thread of similar photographs. This is the fourth in the sequence.
November 11, 2025 at 10:52 PM
markculham.bsky.social
📷 Snowdon A blurred close-up head shot of Nicol Williamson in Inadmissible Evidence. This one feels like the camera has jumped up or down, but it is not clear to me how the effect was achieved. We see his left eye slightly twice, his right nostril too, and lots of blurred edges. Williamson looks into the camera, a sorrowful expression, I'd say.
November 11, 2025 at 7:48 PM
markculham.bsky.social
📷 Snowdon A second blur black & white photograph of Denis Waterman in Saved. This is a double page spread in my book. I've just photographed the right page. On the left is a pram. If my memory serves the pram with baby gets chucked off the stage, here he seems to be doing the chucking, his upper body, hands in particular, are blurred, but when I look at the whole piece the pram is clearly stationary. But anyway it's one of his blurs.
November 11, 2025 at 7:38 PM
markculham.bsky.social
📷 📷 Ugo Mulas Black & white photograph of Alexander Calder. Plain light grey background, Calder to our left, again a black top, again he's cropped, this time it's his back as he sits at a table, seemingly looking at his left hand, palm up, perhaps having made an ever so slight adjustment to the balance of one of his two wire heads resting on the table in front of him and to our right. Imagine drawing a head with a single line of a pen that doesn't leave the page, keeping it to the barest minimum, then this is what he has done with wire in three dimensions. One head, nearest to us, looks up at him, the other with an inquisitive expression looks away to the left, somewhere in the direction between Calder and ourselves.
November 11, 2025 at 6:12 PM
markculham.bsky.social
📷 Ugo Mulas Black & white, head & shoulders, photograph of Alexander Calder. Plain white background darkening in a charcoal kind of way as we go up, below Calder's black jacket goes the width of the photograph both arms cropped, in the middle lighter grey ohis tie, loosely knotted, and the darker grey of his shirt collar, top button undone. With his head slightly bent down he looks up to the camera, white messed up hair, matching eyebrows, the dark shadow lines incising his cheeks and jaw are like those of a ventriloquist's dummy, gottle of gear. An acquired pose. He's sizing me up, but I'm not there, he's intrigued by this nonsense of the camera, or he's checking the balance of one of his mobiles.
November 11, 2025 at 5:59 PM
markculham.bsky.social
And then there is this black & white photograph of Frank Auerbach by Stuart Walker, plain as you like. In a black overcoat, with a scarf, up against a white wall, head and shoulders, seemingly outside, natural lighting, thin hair, perhaps caught in a breeze, dead pan expression, looking into the camera. Must have been for his bus pass. Slightly hunched perhaps, the shoulder imbalance accentuated. I do like this kind of photograph, Daniel Meadows comes to mind. But with his there was a sense of fun, here, if anything, a sense of a necessary ordeal.
November 11, 2025 at 10:52 AM
markculham.bsky.social
Charcoal & chalk self-portrait by Frank Auerbach. He has worked and worked and worked the surface. I want to touch it and check, but I think he has ripped through the paper and added layers behind, so hard has he been drawing, then crossing & rubbing out. There are these black lines which I'm assuming are the edges of torn paper but I want to check, they are like water marks too. When he finally finished he left his head staring out at us with his left eye, his right eye blurred, his chest facing away to our left, his head turned towards us, and as I said his left eye staring at us, or rather himself.
November 11, 2025 at 10:33 AM
markculham.bsky.social
Very playful too. In one's imagination is it possible to run across this floor, or to close one's eyes and walk across it?
November 11, 2025 at 9:35 AM
markculham.bsky.social
Brilliant, he's holding his fork to his mouth. 1890, I wonder for how long. Only Lydia looks at the camera. They have wit. Thanks again.
November 11, 2025 at 9:00 AM
markculham.bsky.social
Thanks, they are an interesting family of photographers, way beyond the purely illustrative. Subject matter, sometimes quirky, framing, posing, they would have needed to hold their poses, later on Edgar's mountain photography. My interest is their creative approach to photography.
November 11, 2025 at 8:52 AM
markculham.bsky.social
I've always assumed the hammock belongs to the women and it's the men in their garden but it could be the other way round. The banjo women in the hammock is reading a banjo song book!
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November 10, 2025 at 11:41 PM
markculham.bsky.social
Yes, I went back to the original photograph (National Library of NZ) and got a detail and discovered the banjo I couldn't make out before 🙄 and quote posted it.
As for the man I think you are spot on. I came across this photograph previously in the same collection.
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November 10, 2025 at 11:31 PM
markculham.bsky.social
📷 William Williams And another, although this is more like tea in the garden than a picnic. Two men, two women. One man with a camera on a stand is setting up to take a photograph. A woman in a deckchair nearer us, she's looking towards a woman with a banjo, who in turn is looking at the hands of a man beside her who is also looking at his hands as if he is trying to do something with them but we can't see. Perhaps he has an instrument too. A hammock we have seen in other photographs, the reader will remember, is strung across in front of them all but is currently being unused. Above their heads and assortment of branches from different trees.
November 10, 2025 at 9:36 PM
markculham.bsky.social
📷 William Williams Two photographs of picnics in quick succession. This time the smoke of a fire is dominating the scene with many faces, particularly of young children, peering through it. Also centrally placed a pram side-on to the camera. On the left a woman and child sit, a young girl stands furthest right. Difficult to see at this resolution but top right there is a man sitting up there. The main body of people are to the right of the pram some sitting quite far back as the rocky land rises.
November 10, 2025 at 9:16 PM