The Society kick-started its 2007-08 programme on 17^th September when GAMMA member John Wells FRPS from Lincoln took the ‘stage’ with his Permajet sponsored print lecture he called ‘Second Coming of Age’. It was his ‘second coming’ to our Society (his digital programme in November 2004 quite blew us away!) but was he kidding us with his throw away jest that he is emerging from a ‘second childhood’ (?) Well might we wonder; for this man we fondly ‘lampooned’ as a completely unexpected ‘one-off’, a ‘maverick’ and which is why we invited him again!

We weren’t disappointed. With his talent for ‘banter’ he casually worked his audience, engaging members in ‘wicked’ repartee as he flippantly tossed his prints onto the platform, encouraging feedback and criticism in equal measure.

Armed with a telephoto lens and his new Sigma wide-angle lens, John was in his element and with a passion for architecture, old and new, he went hotfoot to Salford Quays where he delighted in the clean lines of the modern Lowry Museum. With the digital cropping tool, he turned his images into squares and in the case of red bricks, desaturated them to a soft pastel. His image of the Humber Bridge, however, taken from underneath, provided him with a stark diagonal composition and by using infra red, his final print became all the more powerful. He took the infamous New York ‘flat iron building’ by day, the Alhambra Theatre in Bradford by night.

He made a panel of pictures with the windows and arches of Lincoln Cathedral and would experiment with his colour work, turning it into monochrome, then sepia and gold and selenium tones, not by sweating in a traditional darkroom but using his Photoshop software! He made it all sound so easy but John would spend hours over it and using the digital tool to fudge the borders he created the fine vignetted look of old etchings. This he did with street scenes in Italy, Prague, Rotherham, wherever he found the ordinary he would change its image into something quite extraordinary!

His mischievous pranks knew no bounds, when zooming into a bouncy castle at Cleethorpes (!) and using his flatbed scanner to make a photo gram, not of flowers which we saw earlier in his programme but of all things a crushed ‘Fanta’ can! Wacky or what!?! Influences of Andy Warhol and David Hockney spring to mind.

"Challenging and inspirational, we have seen the world according to John Wells, certainly different and always entertaining," said Richard Bown ARPS in his vote of thanks. A future third visit of Wells must be assured.

Kay Aldcroft LRPS

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