Release Issued be The National Media Museum
The National Media Museum is pleased to welcome Neeta Madahar as the 2008-9 Bradford Fellow in Photography.
The Bradford Fellowship, a partnership between the Museum, the University of Bradford and Bradford College, is a prestigious award given to active mid-career photographers with consistently high levels of achievement. Each Fellow spends time in Bradford and works with students from both academic institutions and the Fellowship culminates with an exhibition at the Museum jointly credited to all of the partners.
Previous Fellows have included Fay Godwin (Bradford in Colour) and Paul Graham (In Umbra Res) and Sarah Jones – the most recent Fellow who’s exhibition Sarah Jones: Photographs was exhibited at the National Media Museum in 2007/8.
“Neeta Madahar came to our attention with her Sustenance series in 2003. Since then she has been making consistently rich and imaginative work,” said the Museum’s Curator of Photographs, Greg Hobson. “The Museum, and Bradford College and University, are extremely pleased that we are able to work with her as the 2008-09 Bradford Fellow in Photography.”
Neeta Madahar was born in London in 1966. In 2003 she was awarded full graduate sponsorship to study a Master of Fine Art degree at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts in the US, and took part in the National Graduate Seminar at the Photography Institute, Columbia University in New York in 2004. In 2005 she was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and went on to become a visiting lecturer in photography at University College for the Creative Arts in Farnham.
Madahar’s solo exhibitions have been exhibited at the Purdy Hicks Gallery, London (Sustenance, Nature Studies), Julie Saul Gallery, New York (Falling, Sustenance) and Institute of International Visual Arts in London (Neeta Madahar). Her exhibition Sustenance was curated by Martin Parr for the Recontres d’Arles Photography Festival in Arles, France in 2004.
Madahar’s Fellowship project will be Flora – a new photographic series compromising around sixteen photographs of some of her female friends alongside plants with feminine names such as Heather and Jasmine. The series explores notions of “ultra-femininity” and the associations between female beauty, nature and the landscape. The portraits are being shot in the style of 1930-50s Hollywood or society glamour images, very staged and theatrical and evocative of a bygone era.
“There is a clear progression of ideas between Flora and my earlier series’ Sustenance, Falling and Cosmoses, where elements of the real world appear unreal and vice versa,” said Madahar. “The desire to create slippages between artificial or natural occurrences, thus moving the viewer into an imaginary, fantasy realm is a common theme in my work.”
The Bradford Fellowship began as a partnership between Bradford College and the National Media Museum (formerly National Museum of Photography, Film & Television) in 1984 – with the University of Bradford joining in 1990.
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