A story in today’s Mail about photographer Michael Hallett who has taken a range of photos along the south coast – focussing on the areas the Olympics will take place.

What is most interesting is the comments people have left about his work. They are all very derisory and centre on the fact that this has been done many times before. Yes, it has… Hockney did this decades before – however, what Hallett is doing is taking a technique, genre even, and making it relevant to today. They also go on about how easy it is to do in Photoshop or with an App these days – but I don’t see them doing it! A lot of art is ‘swiped’ at in that fashion these days – ‘I could do that’ – but the point is ‘you’ didn’t and someone else did.

What I really like about these images is that they ARE ‘old school’. They aren’t uniform in shape and the feel like the way your eye flits around a landscape. They bear the nuances of colour that only individual exposures provide and we are so used to seeing images that have been manipulated to within an inch of their lives to uniformity of colour that these make a refreshing change.

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