CAMERA Exhibition: Steve Bloom: Beneath the Surface – South Africa in the 70s
Steve Bloom: Beneath the Surface – South Africa in the seventies @ The Beaney Canterbury Friday 18 October 2019 to Sunday 19 January 2020
Steve Bloom
Steve Bloom creates evocative images of the living world. Born in South Africa in 1953, he first used the camera to document life in South Africa during the apartheid era. He took his pictures to England in 1977 where some of them were subsequently published by the Anti-apartheid Movement and the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, resulting in his political asylum and exile in the UK.
During the late 1980s he co-founded one of London’s leading photographic special effects companies, initially using traditional analogue darkroom techniques. An early adopter of digital retouching when it was first conceived, he quickly built up a world-wide client base and worked on many prestigious campaigns, including the official posters for the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games.
In the early nineties, during a safari holiday, he returned to pure photography when he began photographing animals, and within a short time he had swapped his established city career for the precarious life of an international travelling photographer. Steve Bloom’s concern for the environment is strongly evident in his natural history work. He strives to capture the animal’s spirit, and blur the lines separating different species. His venture into animal photography was a continuation of his exploration of different genres of photography, and it struck a chord with the general public. His goal was to use images to communicate with the masses, and take photography exhibitions outside galleries.
He has won international awards for his work, including the Power of Photography Award and the Golden Eye of Russia. Numerous magazine publishers such as Life, Time and National Geographic have featured his pictures. He has had fifteen books published internationally in twenty-two languages and has held numerous solo exhibitions, including large outdoor exhibitions in city centres. The free outdoor exhibitions, promoting environmental issues, are major events staged in conjunction with city authorities, and attract visitor numbers in the millions.
His work is held in the Bodlean Library and has been been exhibited at venues and museums including the National Portrait Gallery, the Photographers’ Gallery, and the Museum Folkwang.
His return to photographing people resulted in the book Living Africa, published in nine languages in its first edition. Trading Places - The Merchants of Nairobi is a book that features an engaging community and its street art.
He constantly reinvents himself, redefining his approach to visual storytelling, making it hard to stereotype him as belonging to a specific genre of photography.
Camera is on
Thank you for all your support.
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