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Sheffield photography exhibition celebrates Tour this weekend

Vélo: Tour de France: Showcases the uncompromising brutality of the Tour de France

Fancy some art photography with your Tour de France? Vélo: Tour de France unrealities is an exhibition of cycling images by photographer Andrew Smith that starts Saturday the 30th of June at Bank Street Arts in Sheffield.

On his blog, Bank Street artist in residence Andrew Conway describes Smith's images as capturing the “shimmering, spectral beauty and uncompromising brutality of the Tour de France.” The exhibition, he says “reframes fragments of Tour transmissions and explores the mythology and unrealities of cycling (of riders ‘dragging their souls on a string’)”

Writer Tim Krabbé, known for the cycling novel The Rider and the novel and script for classic movie The Vanishing said of the exhibition and accompanying book: ‘Cycling was mythical, but it survived its visibility. In Vélo, it becomes a visible myth.’

The 120-page book of the exhibition is currently available in a numbered limited edition of 60, signed by the photographer, priced £20.

The show opens at 6pm on Saturday, just as the Tour de France prologue finishes in Liege and runs for the duration of this year's Tour.

For more information see Bank Street Arts, and Andrew Conroy's blog. Full details of the opening event, with a bar by Bank Street's in-house eatery Cafe Juniper are here

John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.

He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.

Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.

John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.

He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.

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3 comments

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Bikeylikey | 11 years ago
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MercuryOne - the snaps are only a small part of the the p*ss take. The main thing is to write it up with a load of pretentious cr*p, or as Headfirst so eloquently puts it above, a 'load of w@nky art bollox' in words. Bollox like this for instance: ‘Cycling was mythical, but it survived its visibility. In Vélo, it becomes a visible myth.’ Aka 'pulling the wool'.

If you can find someone with a name to write the bllx for you, you stand evcen more chance of fooling the gullible. Plus you will also have the defence that those who criticise your precious bllx are 'philistines' or they 'don't understand' your bllx.

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headfirst | 11 years ago
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What a load of w@nky art bollox!

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WolfieSmith | 11 years ago
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Errrrrr??? Looking at the images isn't this just a case of taking snaps from a tv screen? An armchair sportsman is bad enough but armchair sports photographer is just taking the p*ss.  37

I'm currently working on my own book 'Euro 2012 from my sofa' and I'm collaborating with the BBC on a London Olympics book next month.

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