Saturday 28 January 2023

RWA Photography Exhibitions

 The old nationalised British Rail used to have a slogan in its advertising: Let the train take the strain. I wanted to travel to Bristol yesterday, just for the day, as the Royal West of England was having an "exhibitors only" preview day before the official opening of the Photography Season exhibitions today, so I thought, Why not?, and decided to take the train rather than drive yet again up the M4 motorway.

The rail route up from Southampton is one I'm very familiar with, as back in my working days I used to attend regular meetings as a consultant at the HQ of a library tech company in Bristol, and it is a very beautiful journey, passing via Salisbury to Bath and Bristol through the Avon Valley, which can be spectacularly scenic, especially early in the morning. However, the railways are no longer nationalised, and seem to be descending ever deeper into incompetence and chaos. Only two carriages were provided for a busy route, and people were standing in the aisles most of the way. Combine that overcrowding with post-Covid paranoia about coughs and colds and I was only too glad to get off, a mere ten minutes late.

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of the judges for this very first RWA photography "open" exhibition was Jem Southam, one of our outstanding British landscape photographers and, in parallel with the Open, there is a large show of the work collected in his book Four Winters at the RWA. A long time ago, in 1995, I did a residential workshop at Duckspool with Jem, and we've stayed sporadically in touch since, so I was pleased to meet him being shepherded out of the building for lunch with the gallery staff as I was coming in. He was kind enough to break off from his entourage, have a catch-up chat with me and to show me where my picture was hung, leading to the selfie you see here. Jem is tall and I am short, and my picture has been hung low, so a certain amount of undignified crouching was involved.

These exhibitions are well worth a visit if you're in the area (they're on until 1st May). The Open has about 150 exhibitors, selected from nearly 2,000 submissions – you can see all the pictures here (I'm No. 45 on page 4...) – and is a good cross-section of contemporary photographic approaches. I'm afraid it did confirm me in my prejudice about over-large prints, though: nearly all of the exhibited works that appealed to me were small or modestly-sized. I think an inherent weakness of photography as a medium is exposed when "blown up" too far: the photographic image lacks what we might call the fractal granularity of other picture-making methods. A painting or an etching have visual interest even with your nose within touching distance of the surface. This is only the case with photographs made well within the resolving capacity of their grain or pixels, where closer inspection (even, in the case of large-format images, with a magnifying glass) will reveal more detail. But if you get even reasonably close to a very large photograph you (or, perhaps I should say, I) become all too aware of the unsatisfying softness of the rendering, and the collapse of the crucial illusion that you are seeing a window onto reality, with nothing substantial to take its place (like brush strokes, say, or textures). Why make work that requires you to stand on the other side of the room to appreciate? That said, I was impressed by a very large series of images by Roger Clarke, "9 plastic security trays from lanes 3, 4 and 5 at Bristol Airport" which, if you've flown anywhere recently, will need no explanation.



Jem Southam's two rooms really require more time than I was able to give them. He has taken the idea of working in series in a single location to an extreme, which means there are more dimensions, links, and resonances to consider than are revealed by simply admiring the photographs, which are inevitably rather similar in their sombre dawn and dusk variations. It is clearly a major, mature work by a significant artist, but one that didn't immediately speak to me: I need to return a few times and give it the time it deserves. What did immediately appeal to me were the accompanying works of nature illustration by the likes of John Leigh-Pemberton and Charles Tunnicliffe, so familiar to Brits of my generation from the Shell Guides and Ladybird Books of our childhood years. I particularly enjoyed "August: Life in the Sky", painted by Pemberton for Shell: that impossible mix of species sharing the same evocative setting is so typical of the encyclopaedic super-abundance of 1950s and 60s nature illustration, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who can remember poring over such pictures with pure delight.



Of course, the self-styled Great Western Railway did its best to make an enjoyable day out a truly memorable one, but for all the wrong reasons. It was not entirely their fault, I concede. The train I boarded was scheduled to depart at 14:22, but did not move and remained stationary at the platform, due either to "intruders on the line", "emergency bridge repairs" – possibly both – or possibly some more embarrassing reason they weren't going to own up to. After various intercom messages that prompted mass evacuations ("Anybody wanting to go to Bath should leave the train NOW and go to platform 12!") we did eventually leave Bristol at 15:05, pretty much at half speed, with the train becoming more and more impossibly packed with passengers at each stop along the way, many annoyed at having to miss important rail connections further down the line. I eventually got back to Southampton at 17:30, more than an hour overdue. I suppose at least the "delay repay" scheme means I should get half of my fare back, eventually. But "let the train take the strain"? Hardly... I think even Tory-voting train users must be yearning for the old days of British Rail and more than ready to contemplate re-nationalisation by now.

15 comments:

old_bloke said...

I recall that, in one of your earlier blogs, you said that the photograph selected for the exhibition was the least interesting of the three that you submitted. Did you get the chance to get any feedback about this from Mr. Southam?

Stephen said...

You're right about large prints Mike. I think the rationale behind them is something to do with the art market.

Mike C. said...

old_bloke,

That's right, but no, it would have seemed a little self-important to have made that point in the five minutes we spent chatting!

Mike

Mike C. said...

Stephen,

It will be interesting to see if any of the really BIG ones sell...

Mike

Huw said...

Mike, excellent photo of you and Jem - you look like two wise old men. Harry Cory Wright makes amazing LARGE prints but these are derived from 8x10 negatives, and are not reliant on granular detail. The largest print I have is a James Ravilious b&w one where the grain from the 35mm HP5 (I think) is part of the atmosphere.

Huw

Mike C. said...

Huw,

Heh... Old, yes, don't know about wise!

As I say, opinions differ on print size, and it's certainly true that the grain of film can be an important element in certain genres of photography. Just don't get too close... ;)

Mike

Stephen said...

Huw — I once had a book by Harry Cory Wright.

There was a photograph in it which I wish I had a print of — "Across the Minch " I think it was titled. (I was so taken with it I enquired at his dealer — the price was about £2000 if I remember — well out of my price range.)

He's a great photographer. (I always find myself wondering how art photographers support themselves…)

Stephen.

Mike C. said...

Stephen,

"I always find myself wondering how art photographers support themselves"

Those not in receipt of a trust fund either teach, or marry someone with a proper job...

Mike

Stephen said...

"Those not in receipt of a trust fund either teach, or marry someone with a proper job..."

— I think that's probably right Mike.

Stephen.

Mike C. said...

Stephen,

I know it's right! Nobody except a tiny minority of superstars can sell enough photographs at a price that would guarantee an income over, say, even £12K p.a. A thousand pounds worth every month? Forget about it....

Mike

Stephen said...

"Nobody except a tiny minority of superstars can sell enough photographs at a price that would guarantee an income over, say, even £12K p.a"

— Yes. The superstars are mainly American I think: Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz… a few others. They have a bigger market there, besides which I think photography is taken more seriously as an art form.

Stephen.

Kent Wiley said...

An interesting list on Wikipedia consists of most expensive photographs bought/sold, led by Man Ray, then populated mostly by Richard Price, Cindy Sherman, and Andreas Gursky. The latter is the master of the monster print. Other large prints - the transparencies of Jeff Wall, and the manufactured landscapes of Edward Burtynsky - can be as affecting as Gursky, even if they don’t make the list. They certainly dominate the space where they are displayed. The awe they create is absolutely a part of the intended experience. And let’s face it. If you (meaning any photographer) had the resources to print large and the space to display them, wouldn’t you too like to see at least some of your images printed on a massive scale?

Another thought about large prints. Perhaps artists like Gursky and Burtynsky are reaching for a “cinematic” experience. IMAX screens at 18 x 24 m are far larger than anything either of these photographers has displayed on. (And PLEASE don’t tell me you preferred the 12” b&w tv you once had back in the early 90’s ;-/) Even with the 70 x 48.5 mm film originals for the IMAX, stills on 8 x 10 sheet film (the originals for Burtynsky and Gursky when they first came to fame) are ~15x larger. Those 70 mm prints projected on 24 m screens look pretty good. Of course we don’t stand in front of those screens and regard single frames. I’m trying to say I think the quality of these big prints is there, but they certainly demand greater distance to be viewed.

I’m curious what the print size is for the images Mr. Southam has on display in the RWA Exhibit.

Mike C. said...

Kent,

Thanks for these interesting reflections.

I saw the Gursky show at the Hayward Gallery a few years ago and, yes, they are very impressive standing at a cinematic distance, but I have a thing about art that can only truly be experienced in enormous gallery spaces or the homes of billionaires. Film and video is different -- scalable, portable, affordable, etc.: it's a democratic art form. But no, I wouldn't ever want my work to be seen that way! My prints tend to get smaller, not larger, but that's just my taste.

As it happens, we've just replaced our 12" colour portable with a 32" HD TV, and are still getting used to the experience... Even a large-ish UK living room like ours is typically only about 12' wide! At least we can now read the subtitles...

Jem's photos were pretty much all as you see in the photo with the books in the foreground i.e. about 12" x 16" on a larger sheet. They were made with what he referred to as a "small" Sony digital, though what counts as small to a recovering view camera user might not be all *that* small... A more committed nerd would have pressed him for more details.

Mike

Kent Wiley said...

Congrats on the “big screen” tv acquisition. (I use one that size for one of my two computer monitors. My eyes are probably worse than yours.)

And were you able to find out if Jem made the prints himself?

Mike C. said...

Kent,

It's quite hard to find one as "small" as 32" these days -- there are generally just one or two off in some dark corner of the show room!

I didn't really ask any questions about his show, as we met before I'd had a chance to see it. I must admit I was expecting them to be bigger, as he had started to go very large when he was using a view camera some years back.

Mike