Andy Summers’s Interview
Time:2014.05.30,14:00P.M
Venue: Pudong Library No.2 lecture hall(No.88,qiancheng road Pudong)
Andy Summers摄影艺术对话谈
Exhibition: Mysterious Barricades—Photos by Andy Summers
Duration: 2014.05.31-2014.07.06
Opening Reception: 2014.05.31,19:30P.M.till late
Venue: kunst.licht Gallery Shanghai
Add: No.210 North Ulumuqi Road
Andy Summers摄影展
Mysterious Barricades presents a dark stream of black and white photographs that are culled from Andy Summers life as a traveling musician and photographer.
From a working life that outwardly would appear to be extroverted and chaotic Summers has moved through various stages of photographic inspiration to a set of quietly compelling images that contradict the obvious. Mysterious Barricades points to a love of the night shot, photographs of darkness – the ambiguous, and the open ended question.
Summers photography covers a wide geographical map, from the Alto Plano of Bolivia to the alleys of the Golden Gai in Tokyo. The photographs convey a sense of intimacy, surrealism and situations that may be described as in media res. Summers states that his photography may indeed be influenced by his absorption with music and that in a sense the photography he creates is a visual counterpart to the music that never leaves his head. Thus in Summers musical predilections that may be termed as a taste for the melancholic, the convulsive melodic line, the dark chord with a few stray notes added we find the brooding minor key photography he is attracted to. He adds that music and photography are kindred spirits in that they are nonverbal arts, but handily, may have interchangeable terms.
He describes his own act of photography as tearing pages from a book and then reshuffling the results into a new visual syntax. The kunst.Licht exhibition of Mysterious Barricades follows on from its recent success in Los Angeles at the Paris / LA Independent Photo photography show at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood. It will travel on to Photokina in Germany later this year.
Summers has been active as a photographer since 1979 with numerous exhibitions, magazine essays, publications, and recently, keynote presentations of his photography. The recipient of a large number of music awards he is also a Doctor of the Arts and a Chevalier des Artes et Lettres.
Background information:
Andy Summers is largely known as the lead guitar player from the celebrated rock band, The Police. What isn’t common knowledge is that when he wasn’t on stage performing for stadiums full of fans, he and his camera were documenting life on the road with The Police and the cities where touring led the band. His impressions of that larger world around him will be presented in ANDY SUMMERS – DEL MONDO at Leica Gallery Los Angeles from November 9, 2013 through January 4, 2014.Now a Los Angeles resident, Summers is rarely without his beloved Leica camera. His photography is influenced both by his travels from Tanzania to Shanghai and by his profound absorption with music. While Del Mondo does not feature images of music, in a sense, the photographs he creates are a visual counterpoint to music that never leaves his head.
