Sometimes, they are used as propoganda; not so much to reflect a mood but so as to try to influence the mood of the viewer. This one is about the recent/current financial crisis. I have been finding the news, so full of gloom, increasingly depressing and stressful. I know it really is serious, but I do wonder whether the media are motivated to hype things up a bit to make it more news worthy.

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BARBARA WIDENS VIEW OF NATURE

Stroud based photographer Barbara Manzi-Fe has gained renown for her exquisite detailed portraits of flora and fauna. Now she switched her lens from micro to wide-angled and taken in the whole scenery, paying attention to the sun rays and rain clouds. Bev Hawes discovers how she found her muse.
Talented photographer Barbara Manzi-Fe has widened her view of nature  for her latest exhibition.

Earlier this year Barbara launched her first solo display with close up pictures showing the intricate beauty of flowers. But now she has gone to the other extreme of outdoor photography, with a new exhibition featuring breathtaking landscapes of Gloucestershire and beyond. Barbara usually takes her camera out in the early morning or evening to capture the different shades of sunlight.
Many of her pictures are taken from Haresfield Beacon beauty spot near Stonehouse, not far from her home at the Cotswolds’ edge.

She said” One morning, there was a covering of snow and the trees looked quite extraordinary. I also took a view of the landscape from Haresfield using three pictures which were then stitched together. It gives it a different perspective.” Barbara loves horse riding and while out on Exmoor one day, she decided decided she had to capture the scene on film. The red soil and the different hues of green on the trees provided a striking display Swiss born Barbara, 59, originally became interested in photography at the age of 14 when an aunt gave her a Kodak box camera.

When she was 20 she moved to London to take a three year diploma course in photography and worked successfully in the fashion industry.
But then she turned her back on her camera and trained and worked as a psychotherapist, after her first marriage broke up and she was bringing up her two sons on her own in Somerset.

Now she has a home near Stroud with her second husband David.
She started taking pictures of the flowers in her garden as a hobby and her interest has grown.

Barbara’s new exhibition opens at Mill’s Café, Withey’s Yard in Stroud on Monday and runs until January 11.

BODY AND SOUL    The Snapper  with a steadying  hand.

Barbara Manzi-Fe’s garden in  the Cotswolds is a scene of high drama. It might be a raindrop poised on the cusp of petal, a fly clinging to a pollen encrusted stamen or the lush curve of a velveteen petal.

This is the secret world of hidden beauty Barbara has revealed through photography. A former psychotherapist Barbara is skilled at helping people explore their inner emotions. But her photographs have revealed her skills at a different type of exploration. She uses a camera lens to expose the vibrant colour, exiting form and texture of the flowers in her own garden.

Her pictures are taken just a few inches from a flower, photographed in situ, usually in her own garden. She prefers to work outside, where “things happen”.- like mercurial, silver drops of a rain on the white curling petal of a Michauxia fllower. Natural light is vital, and a steady hand- she doesn’t use a tripod. Working on this scale means the effect of the slightest wind is dramatic.
At such close range the depth of focus is just a centimetre or two, but Barbara produces dramatic effects, with the sharpest details a fly or edge of a petal, emerging from brilliant colours “In each of them I try and get something magic so that they are not just a representation of the flower. It is about form, light and colour. You see flowers in a totally different way than before,”.

She started photographing flowers initially as a hobby, but when her artist neighbour, Judy Swaffin Vans spotted one of her pictures on the kitchen wall, she invited Barbara to exhibit her work along her own paintings and her husbands sculptures. She exhibited for the first time at Stroud Open Studios in 2001 and again this year .Now she is to have her first solo exhibition, ‘Magic in Nature’ opening at the Stroud Subscription Rooms on Saturday, September 28.
For Barbara ‘Magic in Nature’ represents a renaissance for her love of photography. Although she trained in photography in London nearly 40 years ago, she retrained and has worked as a psychotherapist for the past 17 years.
Psychotherapy was, she says “an amazing experience- to be so intimately connected to people”.

Yet it was also extremely challenging. You have got to be aware all the time and make sure you are clear what is your own emotion and what’s theirs. You need to be able to step back all the time and say, what’s going on here.”

Family relationships are a key to understanding our behaviour, and she says many of us continue to be influenced by family relationships and sibling rivalries into adulthood. She believes that “sibling rivalry” propelled her into photography. As the youngest of four children growing up in Zurich, Switzerland, she struggled to assert her own identity.

Photography was something she was “good at” and fulfilled a need to be noticed. Now aged 59, she is delighted that her older brother has taken a keen interest in her work and is actively promoting her photographs in Switzerland.
Barbara moved to London aged 20 to study photography after being smitten with photography at 14 when an aunt gave her a Kodak box camera.
Photography allowed her to “show people something that they wouldn’t see otherwise.

It is that sense of discovering the unseen that Barbara has brought to both photography and psychotherapy. As her photographic career forges ahead, it has become her focus, but she is grateful for the insights she has gained from her therapeutic work. There is a real core inside a person, just like a flower; that is so beautiful, but gets covered over by anxieties and difficulties in life,” she says. “Meeting that in another person and for them to acknowledge that for themselves is an amazing gift to both people.”

Magic in Nature opens at Stroud Subscription Rooms on Friday September 27 and continues until Friday, October 11, Monday to Saturday10-5. To find out more about her work log on to www.barbaramanzi-fe.co.uk

Barbara branches back into photos with flower show

Barbara Manzi-Fe, the Stroud based photographic artist, has an exhibition of her magnified flowers and landscape opening at the Stroud Subsciption Room this weekend.

Manzi-Fe studied photography in London but gave it up to become a psychotherapist. She was persuaded to return to photography, by fellow artist Jamie Vans, for the Stroud Visual Arts Festival’s Open Studios.

Since then, she has gone from strength to strength and is currently concentrating on luxuriant many-times magnified flower photography - reminiscent of Georgia O’Keefe - and Gloucestershire landscapes.

The exhibition opens at the Subscription Rooms’ George Room Gallery on Friday, September 27th,and runs until October11th. It is open daily. except Sunday, from10am to 5pm and entry is free.

Heavy Petal

Barbara Manzi-Fe’s photos of flowers make you feel as if summer is already here. Folio looks through the lens of this local artist.

A keen gardener, as well as a photographer, Barbara Manzi-Fe doesn’t just see all that hard work that needs to be done in the garden.  Using natural lighting and differential focusing, with a high-quality close-up lens, her images evoke the magical, fresh vibrancy of each individual flower, each of her portraits the result of careful studied observation.

Her photographs of flowers are presented as large-scale prints, the delicate, yet dramatic, exquisitely coloured pictures are taken in the gardens of England - more often than not her own - and in the wild meadows of the Alps. A variety of forms appear, some with an iridescent and delicate tissue-paper like quality; others of a more fiery trumpet-like boldness. And what’s common to them all are the gorgeous colours and creativity of nature. In each flower portrait she instinctively captures the essence of that particular bloom.

There’s no artificial lighting going on here, no airbrushing and no cropping.  “The large-scale, many-times-magnified sensuous flower photos reveal previously unseen textures, forms and colour,” says Barbara, who was born in Switzerland in 1943. “Images we carry in our minds long after we have seen the photographs - images we want to live with.”

It all started, as the best things do, with a Kodak box camera, given to her by an aunt. A neighbour helped her to get to grips with the photographic darkroom, and she went on to study photography in Zurich and London. As a student, she captured, in black and white, the slums that were being demolished in London’s Bethnal Green, as the residents were re-housed in the new town of Basildon in Essex. After a stint as a fashion photographer in Zurich, she returned to England to lecture in photography at Bath Academy of Art, as well as pursuing her own photographic work on a freelance basis.

An interest in psychology drove Barbara to train to work as a psychotherapist, a career that she pursued for 17 years. Photography, of course, remained a hobby, and she also found time to move to Gloucestershire in 1985, meet her husband David, and turn their cottage, their sheltered, fertile garden  and the few acres that came with the property into a home for an Arab horse, called Ibn Taqah, and a white goat. Not to mention a Dexter cow and calf.

And now Barbara has turned towards photography once again. Artist Judy Swaffin and sculptor Jamie Vans invited her to exhibit as part of the Stroud Open Studios in 2001, in a former farm building cleverly transformed into a gallery with the help of a lick of white paint. Barbara’s work has been compared to Georgia O’Keefe, and “wonderfully sensitive” , “brilliant” and “inspirational” were among the comments from visitors to her ‘ Magic in Nature’ exhibition, which led to more invitations to show her work at the Brewery Arts Centre in Cirencester, the Riverstation restaurant in Bristol and Cheltenham hospital. Future plans include more venues in Gloucestershire later this year and Sotheby’s in Zurich from January 2003.

Barbara still finds the time to take in a bit of long-distance endurance riding, though. And she’s learning to belly dance, too - good for her back, apparently. Barbara’s garden is, as you might expect, full of picture-friendly flowers such as tree-poppies, dahlias, peonies, hellebores and clematis.

Flower Powers

Variety is the spice for a psychotherapist who turned photographer, writes Suzanne Savill

Life can work out in unexpected ways. Take Barbara Manzi-Fe - she worked in fashion photography, and then became a psychotherapist.

But after 17 years working in psychotherapy she has made a fresh impact working as a photographer specialising in detailed studies of flowers.

Barbara began to take pictures of flowers as a hobby and only exhibited her work for the first time last year after encouragement by an artist friend who spotted some of her work hanging at her 17th century farmhouse home near Stroud in Gloucestershire.

“I suppose I started it because it was a contrast to the work I did with people,” she says.

Yet it could be argued that the way her photographs put familiar flowers into a new perspective is as much the result of her training as a psychotherapist as her training in photography. Her collection ‘Magic in Nature’ some of which is on display in a group photographic exhibition  at St.George’s Undercroft, Brandon Hill, Bristol- owes much to her ability to observe.

“People tell me that after seeing my  photographs they look at flowers in a different way. I like to go beyond the surface and see the beauty deep within”, she says. Rather like psychotherapy?

I certainly found it very fulfilling to help people go beyond the surface.

“There is something wonderful when they gain confidence and don’t have to pretend any more.”

“I suppose you could say they start to open like flowers.”

“Part of my regrets no longer being in that privileged and intimate position of working with people at such deep level, and seeing them developing different patterns of behaviour, but I have decided at the moment to concentrate on my photography.”

Given that anyone can point a camera with a close up lens  at a flower, Barbara’s talent for observation may help explain why her work has become so popular so quickly.

After showing her work at the annual  Stroud Valley’s open Studio, she was invited to display her work at the fashionable Riverstation restaurant in Bristol.

Her Magic in Nature collection will be featured in exhibitions later this year at the Brewery Arts Centre Cirencester; Hooks house Pottery, Westonbirt; and in the Stroud Valleys Open Studios Exhibition. Her photographs of flowers, mostly from her own garden, but also from other English gardens and the Swiss Alps- bring out the individuality of different species, showing the tissue- paper quality of petals in some, and the brightness and baldness of others

“It is important to choose the right moment and the right light.”

” I have to set the alarm for 5am if I want to photograph a Morning Glory as it begins to open up,” says  Barbara, who always uses the slowest possible shutter speed.”

” When it just rained and the sun comes out, I have to run out into the garden and take photographs.”

Barbara, 58, was born in Switzerland, and moved to London to study photography.

She became interested in psychotherapy after her first marriage broke up and she lived on her own in Somerset with her two sons.

” I became fascinated by the way in which our childhood can leave us stuck with certain patterns of behaviour,” she said.

She is married to her 2nd husband, David, who is part Italian, and believes she has found contentment in her personal life and in her work.

“Previously in my life I have strived to do things. This is something that has come from inside me,” she says.

* Barbara Manzi-Fé’s Magic in Nature is part of the Lens group photographic exhibition at St. George’s Undercroft, Brandon Hill (off Park Street) in Bristol, which continues until the 25th May. Telephone 0117 923 0359 for more information.

When you look at your flower bed, what do you see?

Masses of colour? Contrasts ­ heights, forms, shades? Or do you, like most gardeners, seeweeds and jobs to be done? I¹m certain that few of us see what Countryside member Barbara Manzi Fe sees. Her photographer¹s eye takes in the colour and all the rest of it and because she is a keen gardener as well as a photographer, she probably sees the weeds and the jobs too ­ but she looks for something else. Drama. Drama of a sort that comes from a combination of lighting, differential focusing and a high quality macro (close up) lens.

She and her husband David live close under the Gloucestershire escarpment in a seventeenth century cottage that is surrounded by a traditional cottage garden, her outdoor studio. She uses a Minolta 35mm camera with a 50mm macro to shoot 400 ASA Kodak Gold negative (print) film; she has no truck with artificial lighting and her pictures are not the result of clever cropping, but of observation and the ability to choose exactly what she wants to show, no more, no less.

Born in Switzerland in 1943, her interest in photography was launched when an aunt gave her a Kodak box camera and a neighbour introduced her to the magic alchemy of the photographic darkroom. She studied photography in Zurich and followed that with a three-year photographic course at the Regent Street Polytechnic. She got her diploma with distinction and then went back to Zurich to work for a fashion photographer. Cupid interfered soon after that, his arrows driving her back to England where she got a job as a lecturer in photography at Bath Academy and a husband too. In the summer of 1970 Barbara Manzi Fe worked for the Institute for Swiss Art Research, photographing the entire output of Max Gubler.

That curricula vitae suggests that her dramatic flower pictures might be just one expression of her photographic training and her artistry. True. As a student she recorded the dying throes of Bethnal Green in London when street after street of slums were demolished and the area¹s residents were rehoused in the new town of Basildon, Essex. Her pictures were taken on black and white stock and they bear comparison to the work of the best  ­ and rather older ­ contempory photographers.

The performance was there, as well as the promise, so why isn¹t the name Manzi Fe up there with the rest? Well, Cupid¹s judgement proved to be flawed and having two children to bring up on her own rather cramped her style. She freelanced for some years as and when she could until her burgeoning interest in psychology persuaded her to become a psychotherapist and to relegate her photography to the status of a casual hobby. She became interested in horses and her move to Gloucestershire in 1985 brought everything together ­ she met her husband David, they made their cottage and its garden an oasis of peace and calm and the few acres that came with the cottage provided the means of keeping an Arab ­ called Ibn Taqah ­  and a white goat. At one stage they even had a Dexter cow and calf.

The psychotherapy period lasted for 17 years, which brings this story up to last year. Since then she has returned to her first love ­ photography ­ and she punctuates the time she spends behind a lens with long distance endurance riding (foot and mouth allowing) and sessions of drumming and learning to belly dance; the latter, she says, is very good for her back.

Her garden is flat, sheltered and fertile and the envy of neighbours further up the flanks of the escarpment. It is crammed with photogenic flowers such as poppies, clematis, tree poppies, dahalias, peonies, helibores which make it an irresistible source of powerful images. Given Barbara Menzi Fe¹s vast circle of friends ­ virtually all of them artistic or creative in one way or another ­ her pictures were bound to be brought to the notice of a wider audience.

A few months ago she was invited to exhibit by her neighbours across the field; artist Judy Swaffin and sculptor Jame Vans as part of the Stroud Open Strudios. This entailed choosing a selection of prints, having them enlarged to 20″ X 30″ and 18″ X 12″, mounted and framed. The ehibition took place in a one-time farm building which needed only a lick of white emulsion to turn it into a bright, attractive gallery. Husband David produced very handsome labels on his laptop iMac and when her pictures were hung they looked stunning.

Well over 100 people turned up to her exhibition and their comments were a litany of “Superb”, “Evocative and inspirational”, “Wonderfully sensitive”, “Brilliant,” “Gorgeous” and “Exquisite”. She sold a sufficient number  of pictures to make the venture worthwhile but, more important, her exhibit has lead to further invitations to exhibit at venues such as the Brewery Arts Centre in Cirencester, at the Riverstation Restaurant in Bristol and Cheltenham hospital.

Barbara Manzi Fe says she finds taking close-up photographs of flowers combining form, colour and light, to be exciting. Large-scale photographs bring the viewer into a new relationship with their surroundings and are another way of presenting the familiar in an unfamiliar fashion. Next time you go to a nature in art exhibition, look out  for large, dramatic pictures of flowers. And look out too for the name Manzi Fe. It is bound to crop up sooner rather than later.