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.