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Moscow Photobiennale 2014

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• Another London. International Photographers Capture City Life 1930s — 1970s

The ‘Another London’ exhibition presented by Tate (London) comprises works by classic international photographers of non-British origin, bringing a view of London ‘from outside’. Jacques Henri Lartigue, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Martine Franck, Robert Frank, Dora Maar, Emil Hoppé, Elliot Erwitt, Bill Brandt, Irving Penn, Marc Riboud, Wolfgang Suschitzky – masterpieces by these and many other photographers included in the exhibition were recently shown to great acclaim at Tate and donated to the museum by Louise and Eric Franck.

‘Another London’ is the highlight project of the Photobiennale 2014, the central theme of which is ‘Britain and British Photography in Focus’. This exhibition allows us to see the britis capital and its transformation over almost half a century, to delight in British eccentricity that is sometimes more obvious through the eyes of an outsider, to immerse ourselves in contrasts peculiar to the English way of life – from Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park to an urban market – to observe idlers and luminaries, princes and paupers… ‘Another London’ also provides us with an encyclopaedic history of world photography from the 1930s to 1970s.

Luminaries of world photography converged on London throughout the 20th century, and their work was a reflection of the city and its inhabitants. A few came for brief periods as a photojournalist, some were refugees and others chose to make London their home. Their photographs give an idea of how London is viewed by the ‘stranger’, the foreigner, and present a picture as varied as the city itself.  Here the canonical  ‘good old England’ – streets covered in smog, red double-decker buses and men in bowler hats – exists side-by-side with evidence of growing cultural diversity.

Since its inception with the very first images by Daguerre, the history of photography has told the story of city life. But it has been in the twentieth century, beginning in earnest with the modernist movements of the 1920s, that photography can be seen to have claimed the city as its own subject par excellence. Since the period that facilitated such phenomena as the Paris of Brassai and, later, the New York of William Klein (MAMM exhibited both photo series at the Photobiennale-2012).

From the 1930s to 1970s it was the dynamism of London that attracted people, as it does today, and photographers were also intrigued by a specific quality of light unique to this city. Elliot Erwitt enthused: ‘I think London is a very picturesque city.  In fact, I think I went to London more frequently than I went down town while living in New York. I took a lot of pictures’.

It is very important that all these artists who came to London from different countries brought to its photographic image a ‘non-British’ aesthetic and introduced this to the international modernist style. Dora Maar, perhaps best known as a model and muse for Pablo Picasso, was also an outstanding artist and photographer in her own right who shared a darkroom with Brassai. Her evident skill with a camera is apparent in ‘Pearly King’ (1935), portraying one of the London street traders who traditionally wear clothes sewn with mother-of-pearl buttons to raise money for charity. The modernist style of Horacio Coppola, represented in this exhibition by his work from the 1930s, was formed in the 1920s in Buenos Aires and honed in Europe in the 1930s, when he joined the Bauhaus group of photographers.

Illustrated journals made a major contribution to the formation of London’s international portrait and were important in popularising the modernist aesthetic in photography. From the 1930s onwards they were increasingly focused on pictorial narrative, using pictures to tell a story. This tendency was more advanced in Germany and France than Britain; we see this, for example, in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s images of George VI’s coronation. Bresson visited London in 1937 on an assignment for a French magazine, but instead of photographing the king he was fascinated by the crowds waiting for the coronation procession.

Nonetheless these shots were his first published photo-reportage. Another example of a photojournalist who introduced cross-Channel innovation to the image of London is Felix Man (his 1945 photo ‘The Lights go up in London’ features in the exhibition). Already a prominent photojournalist in Germany, he fled to Britain from the Nazis in 1934. Immediately after his arrival he co-founded the Weekly Illustrated magazine and went on to work for Picture Post, the leading British illustrated journal. After the war Picture Post became internationally popular and commissioned many young photographers from overseas, in particular Marc Riboud, who came to London in 1954 to take on assignments (the exhibition includes 9 shots Riboud took during this trip).

At the same time some photographers, primarily those who had the means to survive alone, came to the UK of their own accord. One example was Emil Hoppé, born in Germany in 1878 and therefore a generation older than most of the photographers showcased in this exhibition. Hoppé was sufficiently well established to publish from 1932 onwards a series of photographic books with views of London, his second home. The great Lartigue was quintessentially independent and apparently photographed London more for personal pleasure than publication. ‘Bibi in London’ (1926), a photo portrait of his wife, may be seen as a documentary record of London at that period, and also as a snapshot from the ‘family album’.

After the war photographers who came to London independently to work included Robert Frank, who made several visits and brought his entire family for the winter of 1951 to 1952. His photographs reveal an interest in the contrasts of the British class system. Others were Lutz Dille, who was born in Germany and arrived to make a film about Speakers’ Corner, and later, Al Vandenberg.

Some visitors to London came to study as well as to work, as they do today. This is true of Inge Morath, an Austrian native who later married the eminent American writer Arthur Miller (represented here by the photo ‘Mrs Eveleigh Nash’, 1953), and James Barnor, who moved to London from Ghana in 1959. Despite the commercial success of his portrait studio in Accra, the Ghanaian capital, in London Barnor was obliged to make a new start. But he maintained some of the international contacts already established, and in his shot of charismatic heavyweight Muhammad Ali there is a sense of privileged access.

The overseas origins of photographers that came to London in the post-war years facilitated the rise of picture agencies, which in turn flourished with increasing professionalism of the medium and operated with an international pool of photographers. The legendary photo agency Magnum established in 1947 (in Paris and New York, with Henri Cartier-Bresson among the founders) set high standards for the work of photojournalists, and also their employers. Many of the artists featured in the exhibition became members of this agency, including Elliot Erwitt and Marc Riboud (both served as president), Ernst Haas and Martine Franck (since the 1970s), to name just a few.

The ‘Another London’ exhibition is not only the history of a city as represented in photography. It conveys the history of a photographic community and the bizarre interweaving of its heroes’ destinies, facilitated to some extent by the city of London itself, one of the 20th century’s liveliest cultural megapolises.

 

• Chris Steele Perkins

Who are the English? And what images spring to mind when you think of England and the people who have made it their home?

Photographer Chris Steele-Perkins has been documenting England and the English since the 1970s, moving from Newcastle to London in 1971 and working with photographer’s collective Exit in 1975 to document social issues in British cities.

Steele-Perkins is perhaps best known for his 1979 publication ‘The Teds’, an immersive documentary of the Seventies phenomenon of the London Teddy Boy gangs. His career, which spans four decades, includes photography that covers much of the world; from Africa, to Afghanistan and Japan. He has however, always maintained a keen interest in documenting his own country; “chipping away, trying to understand, in a small degree, what I was a part of.”  

Steele-Perkins’ British photography encompasses a wide range of anthropological studies, reflecting rural life in Durham, life at St Thomas’ hospital, inner city racial conflict and the often challenging lives of caregivers and the cared for.

Steele-Perkins’ presents a sweeping, unique mosaic of what he thinks makes England truly English. Underlying themes emerge that fascinate him and have always fascinated English artists: the absurd, violence, family, humour, loneliness and identity. Tragedy and comedy are here, but in greater part comedy.

When this series was published as a book, the critic and curator David Elliott commented: “the real strength of this selection is its lack of contrivance. Unlike many other books on England or “Englishness”, there is no pretension here towards consensus or objectivity. This is unapologetically the photographer’s own England and the beauty of it is that it never set out to be a portrait of a country, but was “unconsciously” accumulated over a period of forty years, to be retrospectively selected and laid out in the sequence we see here. The ability to be both a part of something yet separate from it is precious to any artist. When working with people and their lives, it is a necessary inoculation against the self-indulgent viruses of either sentimentality, through provincial identification, or sensationalism, through callousness.”  

The photographs are Chris Steele-Perkins’ personal selection of some of the best and most important of his images. This is an honest and singular testament to this odd, idiosyncratic but magnificent country that is England; the England of the people.

• David Hurn – “Land of my Father”

David Hurn is a key figure in British photojournalism. He began his career in 1955 as an assistant at the Reflex Agency, but at the age of 22 he had already gained global recognition as the author of reportage on the Hungarian revolution (1956). Eleven years later, in 1967, he became a member of the legendary Magnum Photos cooperative, and in 1973 founded the acclaimed School of Documentary Photography in Newport (Wales). He has travelled the world giving master classes.

Hurn was born in England in 1934, but his father was Welsh. This factor proved highly significant for his work as a whole: for many years Wales, one of the four large administrative and political constituents of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, was the focus of David Hurn’s photography. Hurn speaks of the inherent division between English and Welsh culture as follows: ‘My father and his forebears were all born and lived in Wales. By a quirk of timing I was born in England. Although quickly reinstated to our South Wales family home, the spectre of ‘born in England’ has permanently hung over me.  The exploration of this dichotomy has been a driving stimulation in trying to understand my culture. I have wanted to discover my place in Wales and explore my contact with my fellow Welsh. If one examines life, then one should follow the argument wherever it leads. My tool is photography and the nature of photography is that, as you work, you continually record a world that has gone forever yet continually see the new unfold in front of you.’

Hurn’s photographs documented the Welsh world ‘that has gone forever’ over a period of more than twenty years. For Wales, the end of the 20th century marked a period of profound and dramatic change. Until then the economy, culture and landscape of the country had been dominated by agriculture and the heavy industries of coal, steel, and slate, but now the mines, mills and quarries have closed. A few remain, but only as tourist attractions. In 1974 Hurn recorded images of the still-operational Shotton Steel Works, but by 1997 all that was left to photograph was the National Coal Museum. Industrial production has been replaced by new high-tech industries and tourism, introducing fast food, film, television and the internet to the everyday life of the Welsh people. Hurn’s wide-ranging photo chronicle is valuable precisely because it captures these metamorphoses.  
In 1966 Hurn visited the village of Aberfan, scene of the gravest tragedy that ever befell the old, industrial Wales: after torrential rain, a landslide covered the village with thousands of kilometres of slurry, burying twenty houses and a primary school. 116 children and 28 adults perished, and in Hurn’s photographs we see two of the surviving schoolchildren as they watch the rescue attempt.

Other images Hurn took in the 1960s and 70s show the traditional gathering of Welsh bards at Carmarthen, a family relaxing during so-called ‘miners’ week’ when all the miners took their holidays (this tradition disappeared after the mines closed), farmers at the Llanybyther Horse Sales, and young people playing push ball (their aim is to push a huge inflated ball over the opposition’s goal line). In 1993 Hurn took photographs at a Black Mountain coal mine, where they still used pit ponies to bring rock debris to the surface: by now the ponies no longer lived permanently underground as they did in the 19th century, only spending as long as was necessary in the mine to retrieve the coal. Each had an individual handler who was responsible for their health and cleanliness. In Hurn’s photograph a pit pony peers into the miners’ rest room.

In Hurn’s photographs taken in the same years, Japanese factories producing microchips and digital technology, hamburger stands, Asian tourists visiting the Welsh coast, discos and even male strippers appear side-by-side with scenes from the life of the old, traditional Wales.

Every picture tells its own truth about life in Wales now and in the recent past, providing a distillation in exquisite miniature of the all-encompassing change the country has undergone.

 

• Grigoriy Yaroshenko – “Britain”

Grigoriy Yaroshenko has been taking photographs of Great Britain for more than ten years – almost throughout his creative career. You could say he knows Britain as well as an outsider can know a foreign country.

The exhibition includes a few of his early works, which are easy to identify by the author’s intentional aloofness from his subject matter. Over the years the style of his photography has changed, and now Yaroshenko is far more interested in purely professional issues: playing with citations and references to classics of British photography such as Ian Berry (author of the book The English), Mark Power and Martin Parr, by whose work Grigoriy, like many others, learned to distinguish what is quintessentially English. The photographer was also greatly influenced by Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up, which provided a source of inspiration for an entire 70s generation.

Through many years of ‘life in two countries’, as he writes in his autobiography, Yaroshenko has come to understand a lot about British visual culture, which is traditional and provocative at the same time. In England, as in Carroll, nothing is entirely obvious, and what is seen is not necessarily true. The English conceal deeper meaning in jokes, contexts and nuanced intonation. The same applies to Yaroshenko, whose photographs nearly always express something more than what is directly perceived, often something very different.  

Olafur Eliasson’s installation at Tate Modern in the former power station’s Turbine Hall, with the fixation of an artificial sun. The cult music festival at Glastonbury, where three Saxon kings and the legendary King Arthur lie beneath the ruins of an ancient abbey dissolved under Henry VIII, turns into a camp of merrymakers, new barbarians bent on capturing the island for the umpteenth time. In his photographs even the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton serves only as a setting for celebrations filled with a heartfelt unity among ordinary people, a unity others can only dream about.

In 2010 Grigoriy Yaroshenko travelled all over Scotland, visiting nearly every hamlet, distillery and village pub in an effort to understand the local inhabitants (true enough, the Scots, particularly highlanders, are far more open and straightforward than residents of London’s Belgravia or Chelsea). By and large he is now well acquainted with them. Hopefully we too can draw a little closer and learn more about them from the ‘Britannia’ photo project.
Nina Levitina

The ‘Britannia’ project was conceived in London 10 years ago, in 2001. Not entirely understanding what I was doing or why at the outset, I took photographs of my experiences over a period of more than ten years. This work was based on hundreds of rolls of film, thousands of printed images and several exhibitions (‘LondON’ – M’Ars Gallery, Moscow, 2005; National Liberal Club London, 2006; ‘Traces’ – Glaz Gallery, Moscow, 2009; ‘Spirit of Scotland’ – Atelier Am Eik, Dusseldorf, 2010; Leica Gallery, Moscow, 2011).
Many photographs have not yet been taken and many photographs lie ahead, but I now have a clear view of my unfinished project about a great country – great in the geographic and historical rather than political context, about a vanished Empire, the people and their life today. A land where, remarkably enough, the most irreconcilable enemies have managed to get along together, although even a hundred years later their descendants remember the injuries and insults they suffered. But they had the ability and capacity to move on, build new homes, bring up children and live peacefully while not forgetting their past, their fathers and grandfathers, their ‘good’ neighbours, their history and traditions. All together and each separately, they overcame their hatred, their pride and wrath.
I certainly do not pretend to be objective, to have conducted serious analysis or research, I simply show the viewer a small part of my long-term daily observations of the country and people. My aim was to see and show what was real, living and genuine but well concealed behind multi-layered camouflage of stereotypes, customs and behavioural norms, the sanctity of private life or written and unwritten behavioural rituals.  
Grigoriy Yaroshenko

• Philip Jones Griffiths

British (Welsh), b. 1936, d. 2008

Philip Jones Griffiths is renowned as the foremost photographer of the Viet Nam conflict. Born in Rhuddlan, Wales, Philip first studied pharmacy in Liverpool and worked in London while photographing part-time for the Manchester Guardian. In 1961 he became a full-time freelancer for the London-based Observer. He covered the Algerian War in 1962, and then moved to Central Africa. From there he moved to Asia in 1966, having just become an associate member of Magnum, and worked in Viet Nam until 1971 when he also became a full member.

Magnum found his Viet Nam images difficult to sell to American magazines, as they concentrated on the suffering of the Vietnamese people and reflected his view of the war as an episode in the continuing decolonisation of former European possessions. However, he was eventually able to get a scoop that the American outlets liked: photographs of Jackie Kennedy vacationing with a male friend in Cambodia. The proceeds from these photos enabled him to continue his coverage of Vietnam and to publish Vietnam Inc. in 1971. The book had a major influence on American perceptions of the war, and became a classic of photojournalism. Vietnam Inc. crystallized public opinion and gave form to Western misgivings about American involvement in Vietnam. One of the most detailed surveys of any conflict, Vietnam Inc. is also an in-depth document of Vietnamese culture under attack.

As John Pilger wrote, “I never met a foreigner who cared as wisely for the Vietnamese, or about ordinary people everywhere under the heel of great power, as Philip Jones Griffiths. He was the greatest photographer and one of the finest journalists of my lifetime, and a humanitarian to match… His photographs of ordinary people, from his beloved Wales to Vietnam and the shadows of Cambodia, make you realise who the true heroes are. He was one of them.”

In 1980 Griffiths moved to New York to assume the presidency of Magnum, a post he held for a record five years. His assignments, often self-engineered, took him to more than 120 countries. He continued to work for major publications such as Life and Geo on stories such as Buddhism in Cambodia, droughts in India, poverty in Texas, the re-greening of Vietnam, and the legacy of the Gulf War in Kuwait. His continued revisiting  Vietnam, examining the legacy of the war, lead to his two further books Agent Orange and Vietnam at Peace. Human foolishness always attracted Griffiths’ eye, but, faithful to the ethics of the Magnum founders, he believed in human dignity and in the capacity for improvement. His hero Henri Cartier-Bresson – the man whose picture had first inspired the 16-year-old Jones Griffiths at the Rhyl camera club – later wrote: “Not since Goya has anyone portrayed war like Philip Jones Griffiths.”

Philip Jones Griffiths was honored in 2007 for Achievement in Photojournalism, at the 5th Annual Lucie Awards in New York.

The exhibition Recollections present a period much closer to home, with many previously unseen images taken of Britain in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The pictures depict social and political affairs, and landmark events over three decades of change and upheaval in Great Britain. From the Beatles in Liverpool and coalminers in Wales, to CND marches on the streets of London and funeral processions in Northern Ireland, the images are acute, human, and full of his trademark perceptive commentary. They describe an important transition in British society, most importantly through the eye of this unique master of composition and narrative. Recollections presents a domestic revolution from one of the world’s greatest photographers, whose international fame covering a country on the other side of the world, is now put in the context of his equally incisive work at home.

In 2008 the images were exhibited in Liverpool at the National Conservation Centre, as part of their City of Culture Celebrations. An exhibition of his Agent Orange work was exhibited at the Brighton Photo Biennale, October 2008.

Philip Jones Griffiths died after a long period of ill health from cancer, at home in West London, on 19th March 2008. His work and archive survives through the Philip Jones Griffiths Foundation for the Study of War and Conflict, managed primarily by his two daughters, and in his books. Following Viet Nam Inc, A Dark Odyssey, Agent Orange (Trolley, 2003) and Viet Nam at Peace (Trolley, 2005) there will also be published by Trolley Recollections, which accompanies this exhibition, and a new book in 2009 on Philip’s work in Cambodia.

• Simon Roberts: Landscape Studies of a Small Island

Landscape Studies of a Small Island surveys a number of recent bodies of work by British photographer Simon Roberts (b. 1974). The exhibition will begin with a single image from Roberts’ Motherland series, an expansive social documentary project photographed across Russia between 2004 and 2005. This image marks a catalyst for Roberts and leads to over 50 photographs taken in Britain since Roberts returned there with a renewed interest in photographing his homeland.

The exhibition will weave through various series including Pierdom, We English, The Election Project and XXX Olympiad. Brought together here for the first time, the works demonstrate a sustained photographic investigation by Roberts into the terrain and shorelines of his native small island. The works picture the social practices and customs, cultural landmarks, economic and political theatre that define the space as uniquely British.

These large format photographs are taken with great technical precision, often from elevated positions. The distanced vantage point allows the relationship of individual bodies and groups to the landscape to be clearly observed, and echoes the visual language of history painting. The photographs point to contemporary issues specific to Britain, but equally engage with universal ideas of the human relationship to landscape, of identity and belonging.

The exhibition is realised in collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery, London.

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