Photography
Bill Knight
Paris Photo 2021 was a wonderful show. Back after the pandemic it was moved to the Grand Palais Éphémère, a temporary structure built to host major art exhibitions while the Grand Palais itself is modernised in preparation for the 2024 Olympics. There were 178 exhibitors at the Grand Palais from 29 countries, 19 solo shows and 8 duo shows. There were thousands of images on display.Paris Photo is conceived on a grander scale than say, Photo London. The French love photography and between Paris Photo, the Rencontres d’Arles and other major shows, such as the Walther collection currently at the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Sebastião Salgado has carved out his career by documenting the unimaginable. He takes areas of life all too often ignored by wealthy westerners and reveals them in mesmerising, teeming detail.To look at one of his photographs is to experience the world not just through the eyes but through the mind of a man for whom everything is interconnected. Whether it’s a Mumbai commuter or a Brazilian gold-digger, a giant tortoise in the Galapagos or a worker covered in oil in Kuwait, each subject is revealed as a vital part of a planet that’s as turbulent as it is miraculous.He was in his twenties Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Nick Broomfield made his first film 50 years ago, and his career over those five decades (and some three dozen works) has been as distinctive, and distinguished as that of any British documentary maker. It has ranged from early films on British social themes, through overseas journeys, often around America and more extreme subjects such as penal incarceration (1982’s Tattooed Tears, his first work outside England, and his studies of serial killer Aileen Wuornos on death row) but also his including his remarkable 1991 The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife about the white South African Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Sustainability and the environment are watchwords for the Prix Pictet, the international photography prize now in its ninth cycle. Since its launch in 2008, it has responded to the state of the world with urgency and compassion, its shortlists all the more intriguing for their oscillations between the universal and the personal, the global and the local.Last year, four of the 88 living photographers shortlisted for the prize to date were commissioned in a joint project with The Guardian, their brief to move beyond fast emerging Covid tropes, of “deserted cityscapes, overflowing hospitals Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Trilogies (it is noted, in the term’s Wikipedia entry) “are common in speculative fiction”. They are found in those works with elements “non-existent in reality”, which cover various themes “in the context of the supernatural, futuristic, and many other imaginative topics”. All of these apply in some sense to The Things We’ve Seen, the latest novel from Spanish writer Agustín Fernández Mallo. The title owes itself to a line by the poet Carlos Oroza; the full version (“It’s a mistake to take the things we’ve seen as a given”) is one of a number of cut-phrases that loop and reverberate at Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
One of the world’s leading architectural photographers, Julius Shulman was the subject of a show at London’s Photographers’ Gallery this autumn, “Altered States of America”. That title surely alluded to the visual modernism that changed the face of that country over the course of the 20th century, which Shulman, working in close tandem with the architects concerned, captured over a career of almost eight decades, in California especially.Visual Acoustics, Eric Bricker’s documentary about that career, was originally released in 2008, the year before Shulman died, just a year or so short of his Read more ...
Katherine Waters
With the first round of galleries opening their doors in June and a new round getting ready to open in July, we’ve a half-way home of a roundup this week. This month’s re-openings include the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, the Barbican, the Whitechapel, the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, the Mosaic Rooms, the Estorick Collection, the Garden Museum and the Tates – Modern, Britain, Liverpool and St Ives.Visitors will typically have quite a different experience. Expect timed tickets and one-ways lanes, face masks and hand sanitiser – everything that has become normal but may Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
Moyra Davey’s biographical note, included in Fitzcarraldo Editions’ copy of Index Cards, describes “a New York-based artist whose work comprises the fields of photography, film and writing.” It is a useful aperture into the Toronto-born artist’s varied oeuvre, and to the book itself. Davey’s latest collection of essays touches on each of these forms, and more: it features passages on motherhood, Davey’s close friends, the artistic process, and the more banal questions – to paraphrase: how to manage one’s fridge?“The Fridge“ is the first excerpt in a video transcript of Fifty Minutes (2006), “ Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Paradise, according to German artist Thomas Struth, is to be found in the tropical rain forests of Yunnan Province, China. His gorgeous photograph Paradise 11 is the first thing I saw on entering the Hayward Gallery and, immediately it had a soothing effect on my frazzled urban psyche. Then I spotted the cable car dangling above the tree canopy – a sure sign that the remote wilderness of Xishuangbanna is no longer unspoiled; Paradise has been trampled on. Next I discovered that these magical forests are being uprooted to make way for rubber plantations.Since this is an exhibition review Read more ...
Katherine Waters
Bill Brandt’s photographs and Henry Moore’s studies of people sheltering underground during the Blitz (September 1940 to May 1941) offer glimpses of a world that is, thankfully, lost to us. A year and a half after the end of the bombing campaign, the work of the two artists was published side-by-side in the December 1942 edition of the pioneering illustrated magazine, Lilliput. As a caption beneath a sleeping woman reads, “It is interesting to note how often Brandt and Moore, working quite independently of each other, chose very similar subjects for their work.” The magazine’s full-page Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
In photographer Jim Marshall’s heyday in the 60s and 70s, before the music business became corporate and restrictive, and before Marshall unravelled – he was partial to cars, cocaine and guns as well as cameras – musicians asked for him, they trusted him, and he never violated their trust because, he said, “these people have let you into their life”. The pictures he took of the Beatles, Janis Joplin (pictured below), John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duane Allman, Joni Mitchell and countless others are startlingly intimate, as if, one of his friends observes, there is no one else in the room.Alfred Read more ...
Katherine Waters
In one of Dora Maar’s best known images, a fashion photograph from 1935 (pictured below), a woman wearing a backless, sparkly evening gown appears to be making her way backstage through a proscenium’s drapes. The star of the show exits the limelight, cheekily concealing her face behind a six-pointed star snatched, maybe, from the star-spangled scenery. Though she’s bracing herself against the wings her posture is also suggestive of abandon, the kind of arms-up relief that comes with finishing a race or dancing late at night when no-one cares. She flirts with the lens and the lens flirts back Read more ...