As with the Sony Photography Award, Photo London at Somerset House was a maze of images. It was difficult to navigate and most of the people working there had no idea where anything was. I had booked on two talks – one for the Discovery Section for a tour of emerging artists, which as far as I can tell never happened, and one an interview with Edgar Martins and Edmund Clark which I only found by fortuitously bumping in to the festival co-director who showed me where it was.
Prix Pictet talk: Edgar Martins and Edmund Clark
While both photographers were obviously used to negotiating access to difficult situations, it was interesting to me that they focused on the difficulty of avoiding tropes. The concept of an impossible document as a record of an unactualised possibility was discussed – in other words using documentary photography creatively to portray the essence of a situation rather than what is visually present, which photography can clearly present in great detail but might misrepresent in the process. Photographs were felt not to humanise but to reinforce preconceptions – the audience sees what it wants to see, through a cultural veil. This was a good point, although of course there is also a whole trope of humanist photographers such as HCB…
Therefore the idea of photography as a performance – being performed in front of the camera but perhaps also the whole photographic process (e.g. Martins travels in Libya could be seen as a type of performance?). How to photograph unusual situations so that they do not appear normal – e.g. using pinhole cameras and movement. How to photograph erasure e.g in prison – photographing the prisoner’s original environment (e.g. domestic) from which they are now absent.
There was also a discussion on negotiating control structures, which are often not, as might be expected, set by large, state institutions but outsourced to small private organisations.
Writing her own script. Women photographers from the Hyman collection
This installation acted as a kind of extension of the inaugural exhibition at the new Centre for British Photography. It was interesting to note that “70% of the artists, curators and gallerists are female” (Photo London website).
A number of images fought the aesthetic to present a more realistic view of the female experience e.g. Maisie Cousins and Rosy Martin – a route perhaps championed by Jo Spence, who was represented here by a less typical but (to me) more interesting image that incorporates several visual strategies:
Here Spence depicts herself as the groom, questioning the role of women both in that traditional relationship as well as within the wider economic work, with the qualifying “almost” quietly referring to the (male?) expectations both in marriage and of a woman who would take any work.
Other exhibits
Other images that caught my attention included work by Polly Penrose that followed a similar strategy to Scaarlet Hoofgarden, this time using the body within a domestic landscape. There was a beautiful print by Laura Pannack, also a domestic scene but wonderfully lit and reminding me of Tom Hunter’s work. Also a shocking image of Siouxsie Sioux in the queue at the 100 Club for the first Punk Rock Festival (1976) wearing a swastika armband “It was an anti-mums and dads thing. We hate older people always harping on about Hitler” (quote provided by the Hyman collection as context to the image).
Another female artist, Rhionnan Adam, presented a truly heroic polaroid emulsion lift photomontage – I heard her discussing the difficulty and stress in producing such a piece as the process is extremely delicate even for one image and to get so many lined up seems almost impossible. Adam has completed a number of these constructed, dream-like landscapes:
On a similar theme a more formal and very large grid of framed cyanotypes emphasised the constructed nature of the landscape.
There was a striking “emergent form of post-human digital agent, generated from aggregated images of humanity” by “latent space models” (latent space is multi-dimensional, in which the closeness of objects represents their similarity). The “portrait” was labelled “Made by Ai”, making a statement about the potential future direction of photography. Interestingly, the more we become involved or even obsessed with this type of technology the more it fulfils the concerns regarding its eventual control over the human species.
Work by Sam Burford also made imaginative use of time to represent whole films and made AI work from text generation – something I have struggled with recently without good results so far.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
- Spence, J. and Dennett, T. (1979) The Highest Product of Capitalism (After John Heartfield). At: https://britishphotography.org/artists/88-jo-spence/works/3607-jo-spence-the-highest-product-of-capitalism-after-john-heartfield-1979/ (Accessed 30.5.2023)
- Adam, R. (2023). Good Riddance. At: https://opendoors.gallery/artworks/rhiannon-adam/photomontage/rhiannon-adam-good-riddance-2023 (Accessed 30.5.2023)
- Post Human Art Vol 6 (2023). Made by Ai 2. My installation photograph.
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