CREATIVE CAPTURE: Exhibition open for StAnza!
Our Photographic Collections team was hard at work yesterday installing an exhibition in St Andrews Public Library for this weekend’s StAnza Festival. The exhibition, entitled “Creative Capture: Six St Andrews Poets,” is a temporary installation of the permanent exhibition recently installed in the University Main Library.
The exhibition features portraits of six leading contemporary poets, all of whom are or have been teachers of Creative Writing in the University’s School of English. The six are: John Burnside, Robert Crawford, Don Paterson, Jacob Polley (all of whom currently teach on the Creative Writing Programme), Kathleen Jamie (now at the University of Stirling) and Douglas Dunn (now retired). Each poet has provided some lines of verse in their own hand, and the resulting poems and portraits will be on display.
Norman McBeath is an independent photographer, based in Edinburgh, whose work focuses on people and places. The National Portrait Galleries in London and Edinburgh have over fifty of his portraits in their permanent collections. The Australian National Portrait Gallery in Canberra has also acquired two of his portraits. His work has been shown widely in the UK and overseas. A number of award-winning writers have produced original work in response to his photographs, including Jeanette Winterson (Oxford at Night, 2006), A. L. Kennedy (Evidence, 2006) and Janice Galloway (City Stories, 2008). Oxford at Night was shown at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the first exhibition in the museum’s history by a living photographer. He has recently collaborated with two leading poets: Plan B (Enitharmon Press, 2009) with the Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Paul Muldoon; and Simonides, (Easel Press, 2011) with Robert Crawford, Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews.
The exhibition is open from today, 15 March, until Sunday, 18 March, from 1:00-5:00 pm and is free.
***UPDATE*** 19 March 2012, 12:45 pm
To see this exhibiton space being used as a seminar room for one of StAnza’s poetry workshops, see this StAnza blog entry fro Day Two.