A Cyclical Poem
Photo50, London Art Fair
Business Design Centre Islington London N1 0QH 17-21 January, 2013
Press: Guardian, Photomonitor, Another Magazine, The Telegraph, The Independent, BJP, It’s Nice That, Art Lyst, F22
Curated by Nick Hackworth, Assistant Curator: Ashley Lumb
A 'Cyclical Poem' is a partial and elliptical look at the relationship between photography and a cluster of themes: time, memory and repetition. It brings together photographers who have had long and significant careers. The British documentary photographers with works in the exhibition are Ian Beesley, Brian Griffin, Dorothy Bohm, Paul Hill, Sirkka Liisa-Kontinnen, Marketa Luskacova, Chris Steele-Perkins, and Homer Sykes.
In some cases the works selected are the result of the photographer returning to the same or similar subjects over or after a long period of time. Sometimes the images are from one period, but made in concert with the passing of time. Many of the images included date from well before the digital era. From a certain perspective this might render the show perverse and out of date, for digital culture has fundamentally altered the relationship between image, time and memory. If this is so, then this exhibition becomes, as a whole, a picture of a culture of scarcity and selectivity, one that has already dissolved in the vastness of the ever growing digital datastream that appears to structure contemporary experience.
Can one meaningfully set the images presented here alongside those found on social media sites that record and present the lives of their makers in exhaustive detail? What is the relative relationship between these different types of image to time and memory?
Sirrka-Liisa Kontinen
Born in Finland in 1948, Sirrka-Liisa Kontinen studied photography in the UK in the 1960s. She co-founded Amber, a collective of photographers and filmmakers. In 1969 she began a five-year project, interviewing and photographing the residents of Byker, an area of Newcastle, that culminated in her celebrated book ‘Byker’. Recently she returned to the area to create a new body of photographs, entitled ‘Byker Revisited’.
“There’s the obvious question of how documentary photography has changed over this period. For me it changed from an observational approach to the more collaborative method, reflecting the change in the access I had to people’s lives. Back then I lived in the area and no one worried about
a young woman walking about with a camera. Nowadays people worry if there are people with cameras around children. I don’t think I would have been able to do now, what I did then. So this time I collaborated with people. We’d talk and try to come up with one image to portray them.”
“The girl on the Space Hopper! I took that in 1970. She flashed by me in a moment, bounded into a back lane and disappeared. I never found out who she was. Then, quite recently, the Space Hopper girl got in touch. She called and said her brother had found the image on the web. When she saw it she said she was transfixed and her whole childhood flooded back. She got in touch with me because she wanted to let me know that her life had turned out well. She lived in Manchester, had a family and a good job. She thanked me for taking the image. I made a big print of the image and sent it to her.”
On the image of David McArdle’s family...“I photographed a very dignified, elderly lady from Beirut and she said, ‘you must photograph my grandson, who lives a couple of doors down with his family.’ And there he was, a big Geordie lad to look at and he had this exotic, Lebanese grandmother. It seemed everyone I spoke to in Byker this time round had a foreign connection. That was a real change from before... David’s family were about to move and the whole house was in cardboard boxes... They owned a fierce looking dog. I asked if we could have the dog in the picture. It turned out the dog was crazy about soap bubbles...”
Brian Griffin
Born in Birmingham in 1948 Brian Griffin began his photographic career in 1972. He came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the generation of Chris Kilip, Graham Smith, and John Davies. A major retrospective of his work was held in 2008 at Les Rencontres d’Arles.
“When I reached the age of 60, I started this project called ‘Freedom Pass’, because as a pensioner you get a pass allowing you to travel on public transport for free which is great because I can spend more money on my photography. Anyway these images are simple really. They’re about the infinity of darkness and my own sense of mortality... There’s no light at the end of these tunnels... One of my favorite paintings is by Edward Hopper, of a tunnel in Queens New York.
I guess that was lurking in the subconscious.
These other images were taken in the 1980s. I was commissioned by the developers of Broadgate and they let me do whatever I wanted. I lost my father in 1985 in an industrial accident, so I wanted to pay tribute to him. I styled these photos of workers from the Broadgate development on the medieval tombs of knights and kings you find in cathedrals where sculptures of the dead lie on top of the tombs.”
Marketa Luskačová
Born in Prague, Marketa Luskačová has been working as a photographer since 1968 and emigrated to England in 1975. Luskačová is famous for photographing street life in England and Czechoslovakia. For Photo50 we present a series of images, shot by Luskačová in consecutive years, of carnivals held in Czechoslovakia.
On the Czech Carnivals Luskačová said they represent “the renaissance of the old customs in the early years of democracy, the joy that they were now allowed. My private joy to hear the old songs, which I was missing and a return home in a photographic sense, almost full circle... In Czech, my mother language, one of the words for ‘to photograph’ is ‘zvěčnit’, which in English means: ‘to immortalise’. Photography is a powerful tool, a weapon against forgetting. That is a great strength of photography: through it things and people are remembered. And perhaps that is what held my interest in photography throughout my life.”
Dorothy Bohm
Born in 1924 in East Prussia, Dorothy Bohm has lived in England since 1939. She is best known for her portraiture, street photography, early adoption of colour, and photography of London and Paris. Dorothy was involved in The Photographers’ Gallery from its beginning in 1971 and was its Associate Director for the next 15 years.
“I found the poster photographed here years ago now, near the Hayward Gallery. There used to be an advertising board there. It’s one of my favourite images, possibly because of the Guernica fragment and the terrible things I experienced in my youth... Sometimes I see a poster and I watch and wait for them to deteriorate. There was one very sad one and I went home to get the camera because I felt, after waiting, that it was finally ready for me, ready for what I wanted it to say. However I never interfere with the posters.”
Paul Hill
Paul Hill was born in 1941 in Ludlow, Shropshire. He trained as a reporter and worked on local newspapers for six years, gradually adding photography to his journalistic skills. As a photojournalist he worked for the Birmingham Post & Mail, The Guardian, The Observer, The Telegraph Magazine, and the BBC amongst others. He was the first photographer to be awarded an MBE for his services to photography.
“I returned to the pictures I made in the 1970s in the series The Corridor of Uncertainty, begun in 2006, after my wife died. I started playing with Polaroids I took and combining them with prints from the 70s. ‘Too much Time to Think’ was about this different phase of my life, when I had to take command of my social life and get about and meet people. The Polaroid is shot in a garden centre. There was a sign aimed at pensioners. I am a pensioner but the thought of being thought of as a pensioner was an anathema. I hope I have more interesting things to do than to tend to my herbaceous borders... The image, behind it, is from the Prenotations series from the 70s. Then I was interested in unusual juxtaposition and framing, the whole thing of the image is using the cutting edge of the frame...”
