Wednesday 23 November 2011

INTER FAITH WEEK, DAY 4: FAVOURITE FAITHS PHOTO EXHIBITION


You may be wondering, faithful reader, what's become of the Favourite Faiths Photo Exhibition at the Leicester People's Photographic Gallery. This is part of our fourfold presentation for Inter Faith Week (and the gallery is also the venue for the afternoon introductory talks that we're presenting in association with Leicester Adult Skills and Learning Service under the banner, "Discover Communities of Religion or Belief in Leicester").

Due to a technical hitch or two, it's taken longer to get the photos printed than we'd hoped. Then Ian Davies, Director of the Leicester People's Photographic Gallery, was rushed into hospital by ambulance on Monday afternoon with sever chest pains. That threw everything out of kilter at the gallery, including our display. So I'm glad (indeed, relieved) to get a message this morning from our contact at John E Wright (the digital printing company which produces everything displayed in the gallery) that our pictures are ready and have been delivered to the gallery. I ask Arthur Winner (who's come along to help out at the exhibition in Highcross) to come up to the gallery and cast his professional photographers' eye over the pictures. I haven't decided on how the photos are going to be displayed, which ones should go together and so on. But after th ten minute walk up to the gallery, we're greeted by Rob Howden, who tells us that the photos haven't shown up there. So Arthur and I take another ten minute walk over to John E Wright in Marble Street, only to be told that the pictures aren't there, that they were definitely delivered to the Adult Education College this morning. Ah, right so ... this is part of the problem with this new venue. No one knows what it's really called (or what it's supposed to be called, since no one wants to refer to it as the Old Central Lending Library - which is the way you end up describing it when you have to accept that no one knows where it is or what you're talking about!). So Arthur and I head over to the Adult Education College in Wellington Street where - lo and behold - our photos are sitting waiting for us, protected by the biggest swathe of bubble wrap I've ever seen *POP!*


We carry the collected 16 photos (printed on board which is rather too big and unwieldy to carry through the streets) up to the gallery, unwrap them and lay them out along one of the walls, so we can judge how they can be displayed (as in the photo above). I have to say that I'm disappointed in how a few of them have turned out. I'd hoped for better results to be honest (Arthur describes the colour in some of them as "punchy" - I'm not sure what that means, but it doesn't sound positive). In the end, I leave decisions about the order of display in the capable hands of fellow Scot John Toye.


When I come back round to the gallery later this afternoon (to meet the speaker for the Jain slot at 1500), John has been trying to hang the pictures, but tells me that all but one of the larger ones just don't fit! Rather than the whole area of the photo plus white space around it being A2, the picture alone has been printed A2 then additional white space added around. This makes them too big to fit in any of the allotted spaces at the gallery. This is strange and somewhat inexplicable, as the printer (John E Wright) does all the production of these prints for the gallery and should have been working to a set standard. John asks me to leave it with him to contact the printer and talk it over. By the end of the afternoon, John E Wright has committed to printing again the anomalous pictures, to the right size this time, at no extra cost to us. Since the bigger versions are now going spare, I take them down to the exhibition at Highcross, where we can use them to add a splash of colour to the display.

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