As Bedford enters the most significant periods of development in its history, with the imminent construction of 19,500 homes and the regeneration or the town centre, BCA Gallery in association with Renaissance Bedford has commissioned artist Michael Collins to make a series of vast, highly detailed, landscape photographs. The photographs will show the town as it is today, and will be exhibited alongside photographs of Bedford as it was 100 years ago, from the Bedfordshire & Luton Archives Service.
Michael Collins makes ‘Record Picture’ photographs. A ‘Record Picture’ is a detailed and faithful representation of a scene, a medium historically employed to record the processes of change on large scale civil engineering developments or to document the various everyday tools and processes of industry. He uses a plate camera together with digital technology to produce extraordinarily precise, colour photographs printed to 4' x 5'. These will show facets of the town, its infrastructure and industry, on the brink of unparalleled change. The older, historic photographs of Bedford (which Michael Collins has researched from Bedfordshire's extensive County Archive collection) are also examples of ‘Record Picture’ photography.
‘Record Picture’ photographs provide the viewer with what Collins advocates as photography's unique and greatest asset, what he describes as the ‘long look’. Collins states that "a photograph will show you more than you could see at the time you made it. It is a scrupulously observed, eternal look."
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