A reel experience
Photography seems to be the height of exhibition fashion at the moment. In the last couple of weeks I have been to no less than 5 photography shows at major national museums, all of which have in some way considered the nature of photography as an art form and its relationship to their permanent collections, which are, in the majority, not photographic.
The National Maritime Museum is staging a beautiful show of landscape photographs by the famous American photographer Ansel Adams. His lucid grey prints are displayed to consider a series of responses to types of landscape: coast and sea, trees, rapids, and so on. An accompanying film discusses Adams' life and his place in the history of photography. It is mesmerising to see the subtle differences in landscape that his images reflect, or 'extract' as Adams has termed it, evoking the way that he feels images contain the meaning of the place and time for the photographer. The cloud images particularly inspired me.
Annual exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery and Natural History Museum showcase the best of portrait and wildlife photography respectively. These are more 'traditional' images that we might expect from a magazine, giving an illuminating view of a celebrity, insight into a community, or showing nature red in tooth and claw, in conflict with the man-made environment. Some of these are stunning in the way that we have come to expect from photography, bringing visible subtleties of light and setting to bear in order to emphasise certain features of the individual or animal represented. I was particularly struck by the portrait of author Hilary Mantel and by a young photographer's image of a seagull floating on the Thames, deep in reflected window lines.
Yet, there is also something predictable about the nature of a lot of these images, they work within the genre we expect from modern media. More arresting is the small show at the V&A called Light from the Middle East, which showcases modern photographers working in that region. The show is staged as a consideration of how photographers play with the supposed immediacy and accuracy of the medium - what we in fact intrinsically expect from it - to reframe and resist as well as record their surroundings. Images here deal with religious rituals, warfare and social conflict. I felt some, in playing obviously with their accuracy, made less visually successful images, but said something interesting about their genre and political surroundings.
This is the same message that my final exhibition, Seduced by Art at the National Gallery, seemed trying to make. This marshals an impressive range of master paintings, early and contemporary photography to make an argument about the visual debts of the latter two to the former. Some rooms are very successful, particularly, I thought, the discussion of still life imagery, with Sam Taylor-Wood's sped-up image of a bowl of decay. Likewise, the range of panoramic battle scenes, pairing war journalism with a canonical painting of naval victory by Vernet. Yet, I felt the first room which 'set the scene' - both interpretatively in terms of the argument the exhibition should make, and conceptually by looking at how the different paintings and photographs set their scenes compositionally - failed to make the connections adhere.
This is a brave show from the National Gallery, which seems to have been playing it safe with recent exhibitions, but seems a nod to photography rather than a real salute. Three photos have been paired with paintings in the permanent galleries. Those I felt made a bold statement and enhanced the permanent painting displays. Why not integrate the entire exhibition and make it a 'reel' visual challenge for the visitor?