Review: Selfie to Self Expression

The current major show at the Saatchi Gallery, From Selfie to Self-Expression, is an interesting one: it explores the selfie, and self-portraiture, from art history to today. In other words, the Gallery have hit upon a topic that virtually everyone will have a strong opinion on, which, by contrast, makes it quite difficult to review thoughtfully.

The Gallery say:

Saatchi Gallery and Huawei have teamed up to present From Selfie to Self-Expression. This is the world’s first exhibition exploring the history of the selfie from the old masters to the present day, and celebrates the truly creative potential of a form of expression often derided for its inanity.

The show also highlights the emerging role of the mobile phone as an artistic medium for self-expression by commissioning ten exciting young British photographers to create new works using Huawei’s newest breakthrough dual lens smartphones co-engineered with Leica. 

When I left this exhibition, I wasn't sure whether I'd witnessed a playful, clever review of the state of modern image production, or whether I was witnessing a manifestation of the end of days. I'm still not sure.
It is clear that a lot of thought has gone into the installations, and that everything included is there to spark some serious debate. Whatever your opinion of selfie culture, however, the curator has done a very good job of drawing parallels with portraiture from art history, so the exhibition isn't a study in isolated tackiness.
There's a mix of photography from established artists, large scale installation work, and, of course, both researched and crowd-sourced selfies. As a whole show it has a good balance to it, and explores the idea of self-expression in a surprising amount of intellectual depth for a show with 'selfie' in the title.
Overall, I think that Selfie to Self-Expression is worth seeing so you can wrap your own opinions around it. The issues it deals with are too contentious for any one reviewer to offer a definitive statement on, so I'm not going to try to. I still don't know if I loved or hated it, but I definitely engaged with it. It is worth your time, if only to give you something to argue over.

4/5: Irresistible debate-fodder
Saatchi Gallery
Until 6th September

Review: Gregory Crewdson: Cathedral of the Pines

 Cathedral of the Pines is really quite something. Exploring Gregory Crewdson's mysterious and deeply narrative body of work, this is the collection's first UK exhibition.

 The Photographers' Gallery - Cathedral of the Pines' current home - say:

With this series, produced between 2013 and 2014, Crewdson departs from his interest in uncanny suburban subjects and explores human relations within more natural environments. In images that recall nineteenth-century American and European paintings, Crewdson photographs figures posing within the small rural town of Becket, Massachusetts, and its vast surrounding forests, including the actual trail from which the series takes its title. Interior scenes charged with ambiguous narratives probe tensions between human connection and separation, intimacy and isolation.

Crewdson describes this project as ‘his most personal’, venturing to retrieve in the remote setting of the forest, a reminiscence of his childhood. The images in Cathedral of the Pines, located in the dystopian landscape of the anxious American imagination, create atmospheric scenes, many featuring local residents, and for the first time in Crewdson’s work, friends and family. In Woman at Sink, a woman pauses from her domestic chores, lost in thought. In Pickup Truck, Crewdson shows a nude couple in the flatbed of a truck in a dense forest—the woman seated, the man turned away in repose. Crewdson situates his disconsolate subjects in familiar settings, yet their cryptic actions—standing still in the snow, or nude on a riverbank—hint at invisible challenges. Precisely what these challenges are, and what fate awaits these anonymous figures, are left to the viewer's imagination.

Crewdson's careful crafting of visual suspense conjures forebears such as Diane Arbus, Alfred Hitchcock, and Edward Hopper, as well as the influence of Hollywood cinema and directors such as David Lynch. In Cathedral of the Pines, Crewdson's persistent psychological leitmotifs evolve into intimate figurative dramas.

Visually alluring and often deeply disquieting, these tableaux are the result of an intricate production process: For more than twenty years, Crewdson has used the streets and interiors of small-town America as settings for photographic incarnations of the uncanny. Working with a large crew, he plans his images as meticulously as any movie director.

The results of this intricate process are spectacular.

The links made between Crewdson's work and Twin Peaks seem wholly justified when you arrive amongst huge photographs of small-town America, populated with strangely disconnected people. The images have stories that beg to be told, and everything about them is otherworldly and beguiling. I was completely mesmerised by them.

The technical side of the photography is equally impressive. The amount of work Gregory Crewdson puts into staging the shots is absolutely immense - they are cinematic in scale as has already been pointed out - and the slide show of 'behind-the-scenes' photographs is illuminating as to exactly how much effort is required for the images to be created.

The exhibition as a whole thing is well-curated, and the body of work sits nicely across the three floors of the space. The Photographers' Gallery is a venue I cannot praise highly enough for not only the quality of their exhibitions, but also the gallery as a whole - it's welcoming, the cafe is good and shop ruinously well-stocked.

As someone with an active interest in photography I engaged with Cathedral of the Pines on the levels of both story and technique; these contrasting elements are equally captivating. However, even if you're not a regular photographer yourself, there is a lot to work with in this exhibition: I recommend it highly. Go get yourself lost.

5/5: It's strange and it's beautiful
The Photographer's Gallery
Soho
Until 8th October 2017

Review: Behind the Mask, Another Mask

Behind the Mask, Another Mask is one of the current exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery. It is being advertised with a couple of beguiling, surreal images, that don't necessarily make the nature of the show clear. So what is it?

“Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.” Claude Cahun, 1930

This exhibition brings together for the first time the work of French artist Claude Cahun and British contemporary artist Gillian Wearing. Although they were born almost seventy years apart and came from different backgrounds, remarkable parallels can be drawn between the two artists. Both of them share a fascination with the self-portrait and use the self-image, through the medium of photography, to explore themes around identity and gender, which is often played out through masquerade and performance.

My first response to the exhibition's entry point was one of a casual interest. There were photographs, they were pleasing, but they didn't really set my world aflame. Some casual links between Wearing and Cahun are suggested, but the connections are quite superficial.
Then it gets weird.
 As the exhibition progresses, we see more of Wearing's mask work, and what she has done seems to sit firmly in 'uncanny valley' territory. When you realise that you aren't looking at straight portraits, but recreations of portraits achieved by Wearing in a mask, the effect is unsettling to say the least. The same eyes stare out from faces of different ages and genders in a manner that made me feel really quite uncomfortable. The juxtaposition with Cahun's work then becomes interesting, as there is a strong dialogue between the politics of identity and the fluidity of self-representation. However, the more showy images of Wearing's are staged in a way that almost overshadows Cahun's work, which is actually the more thought-provoking of the two.
The points of intersection between the two artists could bear more development as there are clear similarities and ideological links. As things stand, though, the two artists' images sit alongside one another, talking to each other too infrequently.

Behind the Mask, Another Mask is worth a visit for thinking through the points Wearing and Cahun are making about identity, but it is a far from perfect exhibition. What makes it frustrating is that it could have been a great show. Instead, it's merely a good one.

3/5: Uncanny but undeveloped
National Portrait Gallery
Until 29th May 2017

Review: The Radical Eye

The Radical Eye is a Tate Modern exhibition, looking at the impact of Modernist photography on the medium as a whole. The exhibition is described, by the Tate, in the following terms:

This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see one of the world’s greatest private collections of photography, drawn from the classic modernist period of the 1920s–50s. An incredible group of Man Ray portraits are exhibited together for the first time, having been brought together by Sir Elton John over the past twenty-five years, including portraits of Matisse, Picasso, and Breton.

This spiel suggests that it is an exercise in big-name spotting, especially given the identity of the collector, however, it is much more than that.

The photographs on show represent a significant turning point in the history of photography, and the aesthetics that are emergent in the collection are clearly the foundation of a lot of the journalistic and commercial photography we see around us today. Additionally, seeing this particular collection of Man Ray images together is a rare opportunity to observe some of the more 'radical' uses of photography, which creates an interesting contrast with the more straight portraiture and the photo-journalistic work. The combination of straight and experimental photography is powerful, and the images on show are captivating in their purity of expression.

The only draw-back if the exhibition is the fact that, if you're coming to the work without a sense of the history of photography, it is difficult to fully appreciate how much of a dramatic change in technique these images imply. You may also be left curious, as much is made of Sir Elton John's 8000 strong collection of photographs, and we are only permitted to see a very small portion of that number. The exhibition could have been much less sparse and delved deeper into that archive, as the amount on show seemed quite small.

Overall, The Radical Eye is a an exhibition of great - but simple - beauty, on the level of aesthetics. It's real power lies in its message about the boundary between photography and art, and as such raises questions about how we perceive photography today.

4/5: Well worth your time - incredible if you know the field, but might bear a bit of prior research if not.
 
Tate Modern, Bankside: 10 November 2016 – 7 May 2017

The Jump Artist

Last week, Penguin Books UK very kindly sent me a copy of Austin Ratner’s The Jump Artist to review. Consequently I spent several (unusually) pleasant tube journeys and a sunny afternoon working my way through it.

---- SPOILERS AHEAD----

The Jump Artist is a fictional reworking of the life story of photographer Philippe Halsman, a photographer who’s work you might be familiar with even if you don’t know his name. It is Halsman’s later body of work that provides the strange name of the novel - it stems from his assertion that by photographing people when they jumped he was able to capture something more essential about them - an element of their soul.

Ratner justifies his project by describing it as ‘...an artistic tribute... more like a painting or a sculpture [than a biography].’ Rather than relating history, he takes Philippe Halsman and turns the photographer into a literary character. This move is potentially risky for a careless author, but in this instance I think such a strategy works because Ratner contextualises his creation with accurate historical fact, preventing the novel from becoming too fanciful.

Halsman becomes the medium through which we observe a portrait of Europe during the rise of fascism, the outbreak of the Second World War and the creeping ugliness of anti-Semitism. The way in which Ratner deals with this incredibly serious, and frequently explored, bit of history is subtle but fascinating. The psychologised Halsman doesn’t focus constantly on his identity as an individual of Jewish descent, instead he is introverted and centred on punishing himself for a lack of self control, and exploring his emotional state. He reacts rather than acts, and the novel reflects this, for instance, in the first part of the book concerning the trial, where the event is narrated by Halsman’s inner monologue, rather than manifesting as a dramatised version of a court appearance.

The attitudes of the people around him, and the rise of the Nazi Party, however, force Halsman to react in a physical way to his surroundings through an exodus first to Paris and then to the US. In the real world this final move provided the photographer with his big opportunity and made him into a great American success story, which Ratner downplays by maintaining Halsman’s quiet train of thought and constant haunting by a sense of misplaced guilt.

It seems ironic that [the character] Halsman reveals so little of his interior monologue as the trajectory of the novel leads to his photographic identity as ‘The Jump Artist’. Ratner’s creation seems to be very reluctant to be as open with people as he expects them to be with his camera. Susan Sontag in her hugely influential work On Photography suggests that photography can be understood as a process of people trying to verify and refine their real-world experiences. I think it would be possible to argue, in the light of her work, that Ratner’s Halsman seeks to establish his identity, his place in the world, through photography. The production of images implies the production of a series of fixed, unchanging points in time, in contrast to Halsman’s thought pattern, which is always in a state of drift. Photographs might appeal to the literary Halsman as a form of certainty or stability.

...

Conclusion:

The blending of the factual with Halsman’s fictionalised interiority creates a slow, dream-like pace for the novel. I found myself drawn into the character that Ratner has created, but I suspect the slow glide of the prose won’t be for everyone.

The Jump Artist is well worth a read (unless you thrive on fast-faced novels, in which case give it a miss), and is especially suitable for readers who enjoy work like W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

I would like to thank Penguin Books UK for sending it to me, because I don’t know if I would have picked it up of my own accord. Give the opportunity to read it, however, I enjoyed it a lot and would suggest you pre-order yourself a copy!

All the best,

Alison

New find

I found this photograph in a new vintage shop in Afflecks Palace, Manchester. This was a rare, special find for me due to the fact that the subject of the photo has signed it with her name, Yvonne, and addressed it to a friend on the back. Not only does this add a name to a face from the past, but Yvonne dated the note so we know exactly when it was from.

Finds 20/02/2010.

I found this necklace at the weekend on a visit to 'Bygone Times' in Ecclestone. It's real silver, though I'm not sure if it's real Tiffany's... but I only paid as much as I would've for a silver chain of that weight anywhere, so either way I'm happy. On the same trip I picked up some 1950's copies of Woman's Weekly, a 1940's Amateur Photographer, and a 1950's Picture Post.

I also scored two beautiful Victorian photo albums.

 The large one is a photo album proper, whilst the smaller is a collection of carte-de-visite, and they are proving a great source of interest and mystery to me as I have no idea where they came from or who the images are of. 

They appeal to my imagination anyway.

All the best,
A.