Exhibitions & events - October
Summer is definitely over. But October also brings some beautiful light and a very photogenic nature. Time to get some inspiration from one of the following exhibitions.
Photomonth: East London Photography Festival - October & November
Various venues
Photomonth 07 the East London Photography Festival features more than 80 exhibitions and events in 50 galleries and spaces in East London. Shoot Photomonth launches the festival which opens with the first photo-open at the Art Pavilion. Anna Fox gives the photomonth lecture and the portfolio reviews take place over two days at the Whitechapel. The photomonth seminar ‘Photographing the East End’ is at the Rich Mix and Stephen Gill conducts photo-tours around Hackney Wick.
AOP Gallery
81 Leonard Street, EC2
The Good, The Bad & The Future? - from 2nd until 6th October
A group show of seven photographers.This exhibition presents photographic images that highlight both the positive and negative effects that we have on the environment in London. The aim is to provoke the viewer to reflect on a question of fundamental importance: will the positive or the negative impact prevail in the future? The viewer is also challenged to consider his or her own impact on the environment. The exhibition appears at a time when these issues have never been of greater relevance to Londoners. Funds will be raised for Global Action Plan, an award-winning environmental charity.
This Working Life: LDC Photography Awards 2007 - from 9th until 20th October
The exhibition showcases the work produced as part of this innovative photography award. In its third year This Working Life brings together the work of emerging photography students and employees from a number of leading companies across the UK.
It not only encourages student photographers to create an innovative portfolio around the theme of the contemporary working environment but also seeks to find a representation of this environment from those who are already part of it. The brief asks both students and employees to focus in on the day-to-day life of selected companies in order to capture an evocative and provoking visual record of ´This Working Life´.
Superstition - from 23th October
Fujifilm Professional, B+W Filters, Black & White Photography Magazine and Genesis Imaging invited members of the AOP to take part in a black and white photographic competition. AOP members were asked to capture their own interpretation of superstition on Fujifilm black and white film. The exhibition showcases all the images selected.
The Photographers’ Gallery
5 & 8 Great Newport Street, WC2
In Focus: Web Search, Photography + Politics - until 11th November
This display will feature a selection of photographs that appear when the words ‘photography + politics’ are typed into a website search engine. The results are sometimes obvious, sometimes baffling. The presentation includes photographs of politicians and dignitaries not unlike those taken by Shemelis Desta, as well as images of unusual or enigmatic scenarios echoing Taryn Simon’s An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar project.
Taryn Simon: An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar - until 11th November
For this project Simon assumes the dual role of shrewd informant and collector of curiosities, compiling an inventory of what lies inaccessible, hidden and out-of-view within the borders of the United States. She examines a culture through careful documentation of diverse subjects from across the realms of science, government, medicine, entertainment, nature, security, and religion. Transforming the unknown into a seductive and intelligible form, Simon confronts the divide between those with and without the privilege of access.
Taryn Simon’s elegant but unsentimental images identify her as a central figure within a new generation of American photographers.
From Emperor To Military Dictator: Shemelis Desta’s Ethiopian Archive - until 11th November
Against the political and historical events that defined the twentieth century, Shemelis Desta recorded the tumultuous history of Ethiopia. For the first time in a major exhibition the key figures and moments he captured are revealed.
From the early 60’s until deposition Desta was Haile Selassie’s, Emperor of Ethiopia 1930 – 1974, official court photographer. During this time he took photographs of State leaders, including a youthful Queen Elizabeth II, paying their respects.
Following the infamous 1974 military coup and subsequent deposition of the Emperor, Desta continued to record government activity under the rule of the military dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam. Desta captured the colourful pageantry of state military processions as well as a state visit from Fidel Castro.
This exhibition not only celebrates the power of the documentary photograph and the discovery of such a monumental archive, but also the story of a very personal journey and a country that is rich in culture, tradition and history.
Hoopers Gallery
15 Clerkenwell Close, EC1
Ebru Erülkü: About London - until 12th October
Ebru started her series in early 2004. She found the mêlée of the city both disturbing and inspirational. Her images reclothed the familiar in vivid fictional clouds which alter perceptions and link the viewer with London’s dynamic past and uncertain future.
Ebru works with an analogue camera and then digitises her material to enable her to alter or add to the image. The degree of this intervention varies and may be minimal depending upon the idea.
She strives to represent what we see and fuse this with the possibilities of what we might see.
Colin Jones: The Who 1966 - from 19th October
An exhibition of Colin Jones’s iconic images of The Who from 1966. Colin Jones’ claim that his pictures tend to get better with age has never seemed more apposite.
In 1966 The Who were on the verge of their big moment when Jones befriended Pete Townshend and was allowed access to the band to photograph them performing on tour, shopping for trendy gear on the King’s Road, and in quieter, more domestic moments.
These images are a testament to the birth of a generation that defined popular music and fashion for decades to come.
Photofusion
17a Electric Lane, SW9
Pernille Koldbech Fich: Sisters / Introducing Viola - from 5th October
Introducing Danish artist Pernille Koldbech Fich to audiences in the UK with a debut solo show that includes her series Sisters and Introducing Viola.
The women represented in Sisters are ‘diakonisser’, which means church ordained nurses of the Danish diakonisse movement, founded in 1863 to help the poor and sick. Their tasks, which are medical, social and religious, are beyond those of a mere job. A diakonisse dedicates her life to the foundation and its work, rejecting many aspects of a ‘normal’ life for the cause of helping people in need. However, Koldbech Fich takes the focus away from their ‘acts of goodness’, which is typically how they are described and contextualised, and instead creates a series of theatrical portraits staged within the sisters’ domestic interiors that reveal more of their individual character than the role and the uniform they share.
A little girl, Viola, dressed for a party, is central to the photographic series Introducing Viola, strikingly shot in dark interiors. The evening before the actual photo-shoot, Koldbech Fich invites a group of mutual strangers to enter into artificial relationships that span age, status, looks and gender. This odd gathering is recreated in the same location the following day where the subjects each settle into the psychological picture she has mapped out in the brief time she’s spent with them the previous evening.
Koldbech Fich likens Introducing Viola to a family story or a portrait of a generation: the subjects are all related, although the sense of isolation within the pictures creates an ambiguity around this. They could represent a mental or shared memory within the larger idea of the family – for example, the children could be a memory the adults have of their own childhood. The allure of these photographs however lies in the sheer magnetism of the figures and the part the viewer plays in trying to unfold their story.
Pumphouse Gallery
Battersea Park, SW11
Anything You Want - until 14th October
Anything You Want is a group show highlighting some of the most innovative approaches to contemporary photographic practice by three international artists: Walead Beshty from Los Angeles, Anne Collier from New York and Annette Kelm from Berlin. For both Beshty and Kelm this will be the first substantial presentation of their work in the UK. Diverse in their approach, subject matter and techniques – which include hand-processed photograms and aura photography – all of the artists investigate with both rigour and playfulness the unique properties of the medium, as well as having dialogues with other media such as painting, sculpture, performance and film. Highly conceptual, many of the works reference historical photographic precedents, resulting in compelling images that defy easy categorisation and are laden with complex visual codes.
Host Gallery
1 Honduras Street, EC1
Tom Lemke: The Portrait Series - until 6th October
How many faces have you looked at? Who has counted them? How often have you taken a second look and nothing’s happened? Faces are fleeting. The young girl’s face in the underground, still charming, set apart from the uniformed smiles, is already on the escalator – out of sight, out of mind. A daily occurrence.
In the photographs of Tom Lemke, a person appears and their face tells their life story. In doing so, the photographer asks for a dialogue in simple surroundings: his subject sits in front of a black cotton cloth background, direct light from a softbox projecting a silhouette of the photographer onto the pupils of his subject.
The Rouleur Exhibition - from 10th October until 21st October
The centerpiece of the exhibition will be the Rouleur photography - the finest collection of cycle racing photography ever assembled in the UK. Six Rouleur photographers are showing some of their best work from this season.
Borut Peterlin: Emerging Slovenia - from 24th October
A series of portraits commissioned by Mladina magazine for their weekly section portraying creative figures working in Slovenia. Peterlin’s portraits strip their sitters of their PR image.
Atlas Gallery
49 Dorset Street, W1
Documenting Style: 60 Years Of Fashion Photography From Magnum Photos - until 2nd November
It may come as a surprise that an agency traditionally associated with Photojournalism, features a wealth of fashion photography in its archive. Dating back to Werner Bischof’s poised studio portraits from the 1940s, and Eve Arnold’s early 1950s documentary of a Harlem fashion show, it includes Ferdinando Scianna’s long-term engagement with the genre and work from Magnum’s “Fashion Magazines” by Martin Parr, Bruce Gilden and Alec Soth, between 2005 and 2007.
Victoria & Albert Museum
Cromwell Road, SW7
The Art Of Lee Miller - until 6th January
Lee Miller is one of the most renowned female icons of the 20th century - a unique individual admired as much for her free-spirit, creativity and intelligence as for her classical beauty. This exhibition will cover her extraordinary career as a photographer and is the first complete retrospective of her life and work, exploring her transformation from artist’s muse to ground-breaking artist.
Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, Miller began her modelling career on the cover of American ‘Vogue’ before meeting Man Ray in Paris in 1929. She became both his lover and muse and under his guidance started to produce her own imagery.
Curtis Moffat: Experimental Photography and Designs, 1923-1935 - until 13th January
Curtis Moffat created dynamic abstract photographs, innovative colour still lives and some of the most glamorous society portraits of the early 20th century. He was also a pivotal figure in Modernist interior design. Moffat’s archive, containing over 1,000 photographic prints and negatives as well as press cuttings, scrap books and ephemera, was generously donated to the V&A in 2007 by Penelope Smail. The donation is celebrated by featuring some of its highlights in this display. It also acts as a starting point to study Moffat’s pioneering but hitherto little-known work in more depth.
National Portrait Gallery
St. Martin’s Place, WC2
Daily Encounters: Photographs From Fleet Street - until 21st October
This exhibition will draw upon the rich and relatively neglected surviving archives of newspaper photography to tell two parallel stories - one of a powerful industry with an internal culture of its own, and the other of the often uneasy relationship that grew between public figures, the photographic press and the wider population of readers. Placed within the context of the National Portrait Gallery, the exhibition will explore the pictorial depiction, through newspaper photography, of Britain and Britishness, the creation of new forms of celebrity, and the scripting and constant redrafting of the rules of engagement between photographers, editors and the subjects of their insatiable gaze. Newspaper photographs of politicians, jockeys, gangsters, models and actors will be interwoven with images of the industry itself; the owners and editors, newsrooms and printing presses, photographers and journalists as they hunted and gathered stories, both alone and in packs.
21st Century Portraits - until 28th October
The sixteen photographs in this display reflect the wide variety of contemporary photographs recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery. Each year the Photographs Collection acquires approximately 200 new photographs, from a cross-section of professional image-makers, which range from personal projects to commissioned works.
The majority of portrait photographs offered to the National Portrait Gallery have originally been commissioned by magazines and newspapers. John Reardon’s award winning photograph of thirteen chefs posed in a tableaux resembling Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper was commissioned for the Observer Food Monthly and has been reproduced many times in other periodicals. This print is in an edition of thirteen.
In contrast, Ghanaian-born Sal Idriss is undertaking a personal project to photograph black British people that are recognised for significant achievement in their professions. His portrait of Sokari Douglas-Camp is one of twenty that the Gallery has collected to date. 1960s model-turned photographer, Jill Kennington, is currently undertaking a personal project photographing her contemporaries, one of which is the designer Margaret Howell.
James Hunkin has recorded prominent people from different fields in a series of collections. His previous collections include theatre people for the Royal National Theatre (1997), religious leaders (Faces of Faith, 1997) and a collection of leading scientists, commissioned by NESTA for Science Year. (2001), examples of which are represented in the collection. The group of six artists shown here is part of a large ongoing commission by the Royal Academy to record all living Royal Academicians.
In The Making: Fashion and Advertising - until 14th October
This exhibition showcases images by leading English fashion and advertising photographers Elaine Constantine, Warren Du Preez & Nick Thornton Jones, Alexi Lubomirski, Sølve Sundsbø and Paul Wetherell. Each exemplifies a particular approach to working in the industry such as composition, digital platforms, working with celebrities, the studio and natural light published in magazines.
Audiences readily recognise the faces and products that fashion photographers popularise, but rarely know them by anything other than their picture credit. Together with their work, this display features a specially-commissioned portrait of each photographer by London-based image-maker Immo Klink with quotes from interviews about individual working methods to further reveal the processes of how these team driven images are created.
Proud Galleries – Central
Buckingham Street, WC2
Sod Carnaby Street - until 20th October
This exhibition presents a collection of photographs shot in Manchester and the north-west, which exposes another side of the 1960s - a world away from Carnaby Street, miniskirts and swinging London. Here George Best, Coronation Street’s Pat Phoenix and painter LS Lowry all rub shoulders with children in the slums of Manchester’s famous Moss Side. Called the photographic equivalent of Ken Loach, Sefton Samuels is one of Manchester’s leading photographers with a career spanning four decades. This collection of documentary photographs reveals the 60s to be a decade of stunning contrasts where glamour emerges alongside grit and poverty.
The Bigger Picture - from 10th October until 17th October
An exhibition of over 80 iconic images which have appeared in The Big Issue magazine since its birth, sixteen years ago. The exhibition brings together unique celebruty images alongside photo reportage and vendor shots.
Michael Hoppen Gallery
3 Jubilee Place, SW3
Eyes Of An Island: Japanese Photography 1945-2007 - from 4th October
This exhibition will bring together some of the most important and iconic images by recognised masters including Shomei Tomatsu, Daido Moriyama, Hiroshi Hamaya, Shigeichi Nagano, Hiromi Tsuchida, and Eikoh Hosoe. Whilst much of this work has been exhibited at major museums world wide this exhibition is a rare opportunity for this work to be re-examined. Eyes of an Island also integrates recent work by well-known photographers such as Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ryuji Miyamoto, Naoya Hatakeyama and Nobuyoshi Araki -amongst others.
There will be three stages of development charted in this period of Japanese photography: from post-war documentary bearing witness to the destruction of war; turning inward to personal and subjective interpretations of the rapid changes in Japanese society; to a contemporary movement which consistently pushes the boundaries of the photographic medium. These photographers illustrate the diversity and virtuosity of the unique Japanese visual language.
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