Eye's Wide Open!

I was lucky enough to blag 3 tickets to the re-launch of Liverpool's
Open Eye photography gallery this evening (an unexpected perk of my job!) so I took my friends Mel and Amanda along to check out the new building and the inaugural exhibitions. I also bumped into my old friend Julie and her daughter Genevieve which was a wonderful surprise as I haven't seen them for far too long.

The Open Eye was originally launched in 1977 and has been based in a few locations over the years but the new purpose-built gallery down by the Pier Head is the best yet and is twice the size of the previous site.

The main show tonight was Mitch Epstein's American Power series which looks at the production and consumption of energy in the USA. Here are an interesting looking couple contemplating BP Carson Refinery, California 2007.

There was also an archive showing of Chris Steele-Perkins' The Pleasure Principle which documents England in the Thatcherite 1980s. As Steele-Perkins says, "England is a strange place - funny, complex and sad. Distance yourself from it, experience other cultures, then look again. That strangeness becomes almost overwhelming." Quite.

The gallery's exterior wall displays a specially commissioned piece by S Mark Gubb which replicates the dazzle camouflage used on WW1 battleships to cause confusion by making it hard to estimate the size, speed and direction the ships were sailing in.

Gubb has overlaid the dazzle paintwork with the last words of Henry David Thoreau, "Now comes good sailing..."

Which reminds me that Thoreau was also quoted earlier this week by BeautifulLife.