Margaret Salmon, Lens Diary

Notes on relational optics.

(or… what lens did I use and what it felt like to use it, how it affected my physical proximity to people and things and how it determined a photograph)

Margaret Salmon presents a technician’s diary and slideshow of photographs made in collaboration with G20 Youth Festival, a non-profit youth club based in Maryhill, Glasgow.

Through a narrated photographic slide-show Salmon demonstrates and responds to a set of fixed length lenses starting with a 28mm, then 50mm and finally 85mm. Each lens represents a consecutive day’s shooting, mapping a progressive emotional and physical image-making process realised through time and optical magnification. The 35mm photochemical stills were made in June 2020 and document G20 Youth Festival’s daily program of food distribution and community engagement during Covid-19 in Glasgow.

Lens Diary will be available online until Friday, 21 November 2020. Captions by Collective Text.

Supported by On & For Production and Distribution, an initiative co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union

Born in 1975 in Suffern, New York, Margaret Salmon lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. She creates filmic portraits that weave together poetry and ethnography. Focusing on individuals in their everyday activities, her films capture the minutiae of daily life and infuse them with gentle grandeur, touching upon universal human themes. Adapting techniques drawn from various cinematic movements, such as Cinema Vérité, the European Avant Garde and Italian Neo-Realism, Salmon’s orchestrations of sound and image introduce a formal abstraction into the tradition of realist film. Margaret Salmon won the first Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2006. Her work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and the Berlin Biennale in 2010 and was featured in individual exhibitions at Witte de With in Rotterdam and Whitechapel Gallery in London among others.