London
Wow. A bit slack on the updates. Anyway, I went up to London to see the graduate shows of my fellow university colleagues. It was the private view of the Debut show at Proud Central, Charing Cross, but we managed to visit the other show, Iris, at the Maverik Showroom, Shoreditch. Both shows were very well presented and displayed a range of works from documentary through portraiture to fashion. Click on the links above for more information, and if anyone is passing, then do drop in.
While up in London we also visited a few exibitions, the first of which was ‘The Family and the Land’, a showcase of Sally Manns’ photographs at the Photographers Gallery. Mann, whose ten year project, Immediate Family, photographing her three children growing up in the countryside and surroundings of Virginia, gained her recognition as a photographer or note, producing some amazing, intimate photography of her children. These photos are as close to being perfect as its possible to get, but for me this was also her best work. Her later series of pictures, Deep South, Photographing landscapes that were significant during the American Civil War, just didn’t look as polished and completed. I can understand the process of large format wet-plate photography and the inconstancies that each photo will have, but to me they just looked like some blurry not very well shot landscapes. Her most recent project, What Remains, deals with the taboo of death, with Mann photographing bodies in various stages of decomposition at a research facility in Tennessee. These photos I found intriguing, and morbidly interesting, and would have liked to have seen more. Lastly as a conclusion to What Remains, Faces, was to bring the project to a close, with 30 photos of her children as adults, with very large closeup prints of their faces made to celebrate life. Again I found these photos were eclipsed by the near technical perfection of Immediate Family, but I think thats just cos I like literal photos…
The other exhibition we popped into was the Wolfgang Tillmans Exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, This I found “interesting”, and did give me a good example of ’Art Photography’, not that it was bad, but to me I didn’t really know what to make of it. Some of the photos I found interesting, but only when I thought of them as pictures, not photographs. I think this is were I start to struggle in my appreciation for the less literal, more conceptual side of photography. If I was some super art critic I think I would have liked this, but I just found it odd.
Luckily the Serpentine Gallery has a cool pavilion/cafe/tent thing for 2010, designed by Jean Nouvel. Its red. Very red. in an homage to Londons busses and phone boxes, it kinda messes with your eyes when you first step inside. Inside are bean-bags, sunken seating pits, hammocks, and table-tennis tables. Its a very cool space, and very red. Personally as a part-time architecture buff, I liked it better than the exibition we went to see, and I’m looking forward to the creation for 2011.
Red & Green, The Serpentine gallery pavillion.