By Lowie Trevena, Wednesday May 12, 2021
The intersection between arts, health and wellbeing is the focus of one of Bristol Photo Festival‘s first summer exhibitions to open.
Jo Spence: From Fairy Tales to Phototherapy runs from May 18 to June 20 at the Arnolfini and celebrates Spence’s work as a photo therapist, in which she used photography as a medium to address personal trauma.
Described as an “underdog” in the art world, the month-long exhibition will explore how Spence used photography as a tool to raise difficult questions and call out the social inequalities that they experienced or witnessed.
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Untitled (Karen Blixen with her friend Erik von Otter), photographed by Thomas Dinesen between 1921 and 1925 Image: courtesy of Messums
Messums, the UK gallery known for 20th-century and contemporary British art, has launched a new photography department with an inaugural London exhibition straight out of Africa. And a rare archive of 15 photographs of Karen Blixen, the Danish author whose memoir of life in pre-war Kenya became an Oscar-winning film, provides historically sensitive material for the gallery’s new venture.
The vintage prints, from the early 1920s, were mostly taken by Blixen’s younger brother, Thomas Dinesen, a veteran of the First World War and recipient of the VC. They feature informal shots of Blixen at home on her coffee farm in the foothills south-west of Nairobi seen with her dogs, on horseback, taking tea but also staged, awkward pictures of her black servants and local natives lined up for the camera, images fashioned by colonialist