This week has been
mercifully quiet so I treated myself to two photographic exhibitions in London.
The first was the highly-rated Strange & Familiar at the
Barbican Art gallery, the work of 23 international photographers, working in
the UK from the 1930s to date, who each give a fascinating insight into
Britishness. This exhibition was curated by Martin Parr, a well-known
documentary photographer. Some of his own work is on display at the Guildhall
Art Gallery in an exhibition called Unseen City and that was the second
one that I visited.
London was its usual
heaving self, the underground system was fairly busy…
…but there were some classy
buskers!
First, a word about the
Barbican. The Barbican Estate is an unlovely desert of bleak high-rise housing
blocks built during the 1960s and 1970s in the area north of St Paul’s
Cathedral, an area that was devastated by Luftwaffe bombs during World War 2.
The architecture is (fittingly) classified as ‘brutalist.’ It has few redeeming
features but does contain, on the periphery, the Barbican Arts Centre, where
the exhibition was held, and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, oases of
culture in a wasteland of concrete cells.
It is virtually
impossible to avoid getting lost in the Barbican. While signposting has
improved considerably, the authorities continue to throw up concrete battery
cages for humans and close off whole sections at will.
I had to take
directions from the dancing couple…
…and the jolly golden
giant who pointed the way towards the Barbican Arts Centre.
Rant over.
The Barbican Arts
Centre is at the edge of Barbican Estate and has a plaza in front of it,
fountains and even a small lake. Oasis indeed.
The Strange
& Familiar exhibition is on two floors and comprises several hundred
prints by 23 overseas photographers, most of them in monochrome. The usual
clichéd images are there; top hats and bowlers, posed postmen and grimy miners,
street waifs and elderly sun worshippers, Swinging 60s etc. There’s nothing
wrong with that when it’s well done, but there is much more to enjoy, to
contemplate, to worry over, to be amazed at, to be bemused by or to be appalled
at. The whole of life is there, much of it unfamiliar – the past is indeed
another country – and quite a lot that stirs up memories and resonates, some
that you will happily pass by, but all of it reflects some aspect of Britishness
momentarily captured and preserved by foreigners with cameras.
Here’s a few of my
favourites (photograph-taking was banned and there were alert monitors in each
room to prevent any surreptitious attempts!):
Frenchman Henri
Cartier-Bresson, the master of candid photography, was invited to
photograph the coronation of George VI in the mid-1930s but mostly turned his
camera on the crowd instead. I love his candid portraits of the British
determined to enjoy themselves despite adverse conditions; there is a
tremendous downpour at Ascot, most of the spectators have gone but one
determined elderly man sits on, a sodden newspaper plastered to his head, at
peace with himself.
Another French
photographer, Raymond Depardon, photojournalist and filmmaker, was asked to
photograph Glasgow, one of the major European cities that had fallen on hard
times. This was in the 1980s before Glasgow’s slogan was ‘smiles better’ and
before it was renowned as a city of culture. This is a dark, brooding city of
tenement blocks, leaden skies, waif-like children and booze-sodden denizens.
Some of Depardon’s images are marvellously artful in the subtle use of touches
of colour as counterpoint – the subdued pink of a girl’s dress for example.
This is the Glasgow that I knew well and had almost banished from memory.
A very different
perspective is provided by Dutch photographer Hand van der Meer’s
photographs of amateur football matches. The huge swathes of sky and lush green
fields remind one of early Dutch painting, while also being current and very
English.
Japanese war photographer Akihiko
Okamura spent much time in Ulster in the 1980s during the ‘Troubles,’
even taking his family to live there so that he could concentrate on his work
of documenting the province. It’s all there; the marches and the reaction to
them, religion and violence, ugly tribalism and shallow posturing. If nothing
else, it reminds us what we’ve hopefully left behind.
Finally, at the exit, there are some huge-size portraits by Bruce
Gilden, the American street photographer, made in 2011 and 2014. The
style can be summarised as ‘up close and personal.’ Here are sitters’ faces
with stubble, warts, broken capillaries, poor teeth, blotches, mascara and
foundation applied by trowel, rheumy-eyed…as Robbie once put it ‘O
wad some Power the giftie gie us. To see oursels as ithers see us!’
Highly recommended.
Then it was on to the
Guildhall, London’s Town Hall, built in the 15th century.
Attached to it is the
Guildhall Art Gallery, built in 1999 to replace a building destroyed by the
Luftwaffe in 1941. When they were digging the foundations for it they came across medieval pottery - and the remains of a Roman amphitheatre almost 2,000 years old.
The Gallery houses
Martin Parr’s Unseen City. Martin is a member of the Magnum collective and,
since 2013, has been the City of London’s photographer-in-residence and is
uniquely placed to capture the pomp and ceremony, the centuries-old traditions,
banquets, processions and so on.
At the entrance to the
exhibition is a sign ‘Photography Allowed.’ Well done!
Let some of the photos speak for
themselves…
On the way back I
popped in to St Mary-le-Bow Church, famous for the Bow Bells. (According to tradition,
a true Cockney must be born within earshot of the Bow Bells).
The church on this site
has been destroyed and re-built several times, most famously after the London
Tornado of 1091, the Great Fire of 1666 and the Luftwaffe in 1941.
It is quite sumptuous
inside and one of the unusual features was the presence of two pulpits. Do they
have vicars in each of them? One proposing a view, the other opposing it - or
is it a form of clerical stereo?
The church and
Guildhall are only a few minutes from St Paul’s Cathedral, the late 17th
century creation of Sir Christopher Wren. I did contemplate going in but the
£16 entry fee was excessive for the 40 minutes I had available. Another time.
