Photography
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 ...
Florence Hallett
If leafing through the pages of Vogue is a soothing balm, Wonderful Things is a bracing full-body immersion. Though it builds on the V&A’s reputation for blockbuster fashion exhibitions, this show, dedicated to one of the most celebrated photographers of the day, follows no known formula, steering a course somewhere between retrospective and walk-in fashion magazine, without being either. At a time when curators’ voices have a tendency to be dominant to the point of intrusive, falling down the rabbit hole of Tim Walker’s fantasy world feels a bit like stepping inside the photographer’s Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Kiss My Genders may not claim to be a survey, yet it seems perverse to mount an exhibition of work by LGBTQ artists who address issues of gender identity without including some of the best known names. Particular emphasis is placed, says the press release, on works that revisit the tradition of photographic portraiture; so why no sign of Claude Cahun, Gilbert and George, Urs Lüthi, Robert Mapplethorpe or Pierre et Giles – all pioneers in using photography to explore gay sexual identity ?They, or their representatives, may have declined to take part, of course – a decision that would have been Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Feelings run high at the Hayward Gallery in a fascinating pairing of two artists from widely differing backgrounds. Kader Attia muses on unhappy, conflicted relationships between cultures in visual meditations on variations of colonialism. Diane Arbus, who died at the age Attia is now, photographed people who were often at the margins of society.Once criticised for what might appear as an obsession with freakery, it is increasingly evident how her curiosity was flavoured with sympathy and empathy. Attia is mesmerisingly obsessed with the difficulties of groups and societies, while Arbus Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I interviewed Don McCullin in 1983 and the encounter felt like peering into a deep well of darkness. The previous year he’d been in Beirut photographing the atrocities carried out by people on both sides of the civil war and his impeccably composed pictures were being published as a book. Some of these photographs are included in Tate Britain’s survey of his 60-year career, one of the darkest but most compelling exhibitions you are ever likely to see. There’s the group of young musicians approaching the body of a Palestinian girl lying prone in a bombed out street – celebrating her death Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A picture is worth more than a thousand words, never more so than with the photographs of Don McCullin. The octogenarian photographer’s black-and-white imagery made the Sunday Times colour supplement the talk of international media in the 1970s. McCullin, a North Londoner born and bred, travelled the world’s war zones before coming home 35 years ago to a Somerset world of landscapes and still-lifes, whilst still periodically going off to new conflicts, most recently to Syria and Yemen. With a major retrospective opening at Tate Britain this week, Adrian Sibley’s film followed him as he once Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Psychopathologies come and go but they always tell us about the historical time period in which they’re produced.” So says the journalist and academic Chris Hedges in Lauren Greenfield’s documentary Generation Wealth. The idea the film plays with is that a psychopathology which currently dominates to a morbid degree is our obsession with being rich and, as much, with the public signifiers of wealth. Its hour and 40 minutes length is never dull, offering up regular revelatory tidbits, but rather than a driving sense of focus and purpose, Greenfield chooses to wander her chosen terrain in a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
On the eve of her tenth decade, the marvellous Agnès Varda embarked on the enchanted journey that we see in Faces Places. For admirers of the great French director – of whom there are a great many: indeed, it is hard not to be won over by her resolutely independent, profoundly humanistic substance and style – its spirit will recall her two earlier documentary films of the century, The Gleaners & I (2000) and the more autobiographical The Beaches of Agnès (2008), though the mélange between personal and social is here complete. This is a journey that celebrates a life richly lived as Read more ...
Bill Knight
Photo London seems much better this year, mainly because I am at last able to find my way around the labyrinthine Somerset House without getting lost in photography. Things got off to a good start when I bumped into Annie Leibovitz in reception. Actually "bumped into" isn’t quite the right expression – she and her entourage went through like an express train.This year's Photo London "Master of Photography" is Edward Burtysnki, whose enormous images, often taken from above, show in a strangely beautiful way what we are doing to the planet. There is an "augmented reality" aspect. Download the Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
It is a very human crowd at Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography. There are the slightly melancholic portraits of authoritative and bearded male Victorian eminences, among them Darwin, Tennyson, Carlyle and Sir John Herschel. The Victorians invented and eulogised childhood, so we see a procession of children, including the inspirational Alice of Alice in Wonderland and her siblings, bathed in a kind of wondering innocence that is later echoed by some gorgeous young women. It is the Victorian age in full flow, gleaming from the walls of the National Portrait Gallery in the gradated Read more ...