Milton Keynes is the one place in Britain that I just don’t get on with. For those of you who don’t know Milton Keynes is a new city planned and built from scratch since the late 1960s. As a result of this it is very very regular having none of those features that come with a couple of hundred years of use. This makes the place seem soulless which I think it is. However, the villages that came together are far from soulless. One of them, Stony Stratford, was a famous stop on the road to Chester in the medieval period. It is also where the origin of the phrase ‘cock and bull story’ comes from. Perhaps in several hundred years time a future me might look at Milton keynes and think what a wonderful place. Current me doesn’t.
With all that said the reason we were in Milton Keynes was to see the Saul Leiter exhibition at the gallery, which is one of the better galleries (I know it doesn’t make sense – welcome to my life or I guess my head!). The exhibition was great if a little underwhelming. Leiter would appear to have been a jobbing fashion photographer who worked for many of the major fashion magazines. The exhibition however was not of this work but rather his person photographs captured in and around where he lived in New York city. I love this period of photography, what I call Life Magazine New York and there were some great examples in the exhibition. When ever I see works from this period the opening few moments of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue echoes around my head. This happened yesterday.
Yet at the end that, despite his reputation, I didn’t feel I had seen anything groundbreaking. Shame but there you are.
Ove lunch I found a mysterious Red Door – strange or bad planning? You decide.
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