Morning lovely people and welcome to another One a Week – Week 5!! Woohoo! Am very glad that I have started doing this blog as otherwise there is no way in hell I would have dragged myself out of the house yesterday due to monumental hang-over and it ended up being the only time I witnessed day light the whole weekend OOPS. Unfortunately I had assumed, having read nothing about my chosen pursuit and it being free, that it would be quite small. Imagine my IMMENSE terror when I turned a corner after the first 2 rooms thinking it would be almost over and I had another 95% of exhibition to go!! Ugh definitely wouldn’t recommend going unless you are feeling v. sprightly and able minded/bodied.
So the exhibition in question, recommended by my old man, was Points of View; Capturing the 19th Century in Photographs at the British Library – and, again, it was free!! Amazing! Before I go further I should state, for the record, that this exhibition was certainly very flawed. For one thing it was way too big – pretty much attempting to survey the whole of 19th century photography. Unless this was a MAJOR exhibition in terms of money, time and space I think this was just too wide a theme for the curators to manage. It would have been better, I feel, for them to have concentrated on certain aspects rather than the whole shebang. Another fault was that in comparison to text, of which there was A LOT, there were surprisingly few photographs for a photography exhibition. Also the first 3 rooms or so are devoted solely to the invention and development of photography as a technical process with lots of old cameras and letters between the early pioneers of the discipline on show. My dad found this very interesting and certainly others will too but I am not sure how necessary or productive it was to include this type of extensive information, it may have been better left to the science museum etc.
However, saying all of the above it did occur to me that the photographs displayed here are some of the most important images that the world has produced and seen, well ever really. The modern world, the world as we know it and our attitude and understanding of that world and our place within it has been moulded by these photos and because of these photos. The exhibition covers every conceivable strand of Victorian photography, from post cards, celebrity portraits, scientific photos, ethnographic photos, anthropological photos, war photos, aesthetic photos, domestic photos, travel photos and much much more. Fucking everything you can think of in short. And these images are incredibly powerful and incredibly potent. It would take way too long to discuss appropriately each genre so I shall take just a few examples;
The obvious one to start with would be the anthropological photos on display. And it is here that your mind can get a little blown on a hung-over Sunday or a very tired Monday morning. The Victorians were obsessed with documenting the world around them as the empire kept growing and we found a need to prove and justify our exploitation and dominance over and clear superiority to everyone else. I should point out of course that this was a survey of world photography not just British stuff but frankly you could apply the same understanding to most of the countries who commissioned work or who patronised it. So, the question is what came first the chicken or the egg? The need that the Victorians had to wander the earth and ‘document’ cultures that they saw as fading out, because they were mostly stamping them out, is clearly because of colonial expansion but would they have bothered their arses to document so much if they were just drawing black people pinned up against walls? Would the Victorians obsessive need to catalogue and categorise and document EVERYTHING have been so potent if it had not been for the development of photography? Would photography have developed so quickly and with such success if it had not been for the Victorians need to document everything? I don’t know, this is not the place to thrash out a discussion but is interesting nonetheless. And the images that they produced, colonial images, fake images, true images – they are images that shaped the perception we have of these cultures and places for the next hundred years or more. Even if certain photos have been proven to be manipulated and invented it doesn’t matter, they have entered the public imaginational and they will stay there. The images may be firmly routed in imagination but they permeate the way we view different cultures to this very day.
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/pointsofview/themes/science/frogs/index.html
Colonial expansion went hand in hand with the growth of tourism. The growth of tourism goes hand in hand with the desire to document said tourist excursions. The desire to document these excursions leads to the desire to make other people really jealous that they weren’t there. Thus postcards are born! Amazing! The improvement of a reliable post and things like the invention of Christmas cards is also tied up with this surely and open to more intense discussion.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2694/4046926876_86421c030e.jpg
Celebrity photography is another interesting example. As you may know I love love love the celebrities and am fascinated by celebrity culture. In some ways our modern understanding and relationship to celebrity and the concept of celebrity dates back to images displayed in this exhibition. On display they had official publicity shots of Oscar Wilde taken during his American tour, Chares Dickens and Baudelaire amongst others. These images were sanctioned and circulated at the bequest of the sitter and usually to their financial gain. Queen Victoria, being amazing as always, was also quick to see the self publicity potentials in circulating official photographs of the Royal family. You can date the current, uneasy relationship between ’celebrity’ and general public to the increasing popularity and demand for images like these. Before this you could imagine celebrities existed in almost a purely ‘fantasy’ world, totally unconnected from the humdrum or maybe not so humdrum lives of their adoring masses. However, with the advent of cheaply circulated, enormously popular images of famous people, which could be easily carried around, taken into the home, stared at on the street – these images were crossing the previously sacred boundary of public and private domains and celebrities became the property of the masses, capable of being worshiped still yes, but also capable of being derided. These images were highly curated by the celebrity in question and produced to maximise on the commercial benefits of their image which in itself is also fascinating. The question of someone’s ownership of their image and patents is also touched on here and is equally interesting.
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/pointsofview/themes/portraits/wilde/index.html
Another intriguing comparison between ‘then and now’ provoked by the exhibition were also some of the earliest images to be displayed. When photography was first developing back in the 1850s it was taken up with enthusiasm as a hobby for the leisured classes. Thus there were several images of the moneyed enjoying their country seats and pleasant country pursuits. As photography grew in popularity it was increasingly exploited for commercial ends and was thus dropped as a past time by the rich because of it’s ‘trade’ associations. This I find fascinating as we all know it has since been taken up once again with much enthusiasm in the 20th century and now, most of us have some sort of camera whether fancy digital or crappy disposable. When did photography once again become a hobby? I’m assuming it was sometime in the 20th century when cameras and film made some kind of advance and were easily available commercially but it did strike me that the images on display from as early as the 1850s, were of about the same quality as the photos you get now from most digital cameras. We have gained ease certainly, but what have we lost in terms of quality? I think a lot!
Right this has gone on WAY too long but I would like to briefly touch on some of the later work which unfortunately I was forced to whiz round as they had just announced the shop was closing!!! By the way not a great postcard selection as fucking always. The end of the exhib touched briefly on the development of ‘aesthetic’ photography and the work of a group of people called the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring which is a fab name well done Victorians very weird as usual. This is where we see the debate of photography as art/photography versus art really getting into full swing as the contemporary tastes for painting, i.e. Impressionism and the move into Aestheticism start to bare their influence on styles of photography. I am not going to go too much into this as a) I don’t know much about it (or anything) and b) it would take a thesis but I will just state that these are not only very pretty images but are also very interesting when we consider the development of photography on painting around this time. Monet, Manet, Renoir, Degas etc were all influenced by photography as a way of viewing the world and this in turn effected their artistic style. It was interesting for me to see this process reversed and witness how much art, or painting should I say, influenced photography at this time.
http://ogimages.bl.uk/images/pointsofview/8_1_large.jpg
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/pointsofview/themes/progress/centralline/index.html
Right MASSVE exhibition within which anyone in earth would find something to interest them so go – it’s only on until the 7th March.
Monday, 15 February 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)