The Artist
Bob McClelland
was born in Blackley, Manchester in 1944. On leaving Ardwick
Technical High School in 1961 he went on to pursue a career
in Organic Chemistry, a subject in which he had an interest
of long-standing, and subsequently spent many years involved
with chemistry and computing in the Research Department at ICI
Blackley. It was in his leisure time that he began to become
actively involved with visual art, and with photography in particular.
‘To be engaged in an artistic activity,’ Bob maintains,
‘is more properly to be viewed as a privilege rather than
as a given right.’
The photographs
which accompany this profile were all taken within a few miles
of where Bob once lived and worked, and are intended to illustrate
certain aspects of the Manchester environment that are, in essence,
nothing less than magical. Bob sees photography as being a medium
which facilitates the capturing of something that, at a particular
moment in time, had existence within the framework of what is
generally accepted to be the 'real' world. Of course, part of
the magic is intrinsically bound up with the fact that the subjects
which are photographed were in actual fact ‘found’
by the photographer, rather than having been artificially arranged
or constructed by him. About photography in general he believes
that: ' No matter how beautiful, romantic, or aesthetically
pleasing an image may be, the essence of all valid photography
is finally conceptual in nature and documentary in effect'.
Bob McClelland's
work is to be found in a variety of collections, both public
and private, and he has exhibited in a number of galleries and
universities in the UK and the USA. In addition he has written
several reviews for the British Journal of Photography
and Creative Camera magazine and his work has been featured
in the Penrose Graphic Arts International Annual.
His main
website is: http://www.marscovista.com/
Bob can
be contacted by email at: bob@marscovista.com
Bob took
early retirement in 1995 and moved to Cornwall, where he now
photographs the Cornish light and produces 'intimate' landscapes.
(website: www.kernowimages.co.uk)
