The British Journal of Photography somewhat surprisingly announces as a scoop the news that London’s Photographer’s Gallery will be closing for a month from September 19.
I thought the closure had been long planned and remember going to a presentation by the architects who were overseeing the redevelopment last year. And when I got home after the opening of the current Sally Mann show on June 18th I wrote:
I was disappointed in various ways at the Photographers Gallery opening of a show of Sally Manns work yesterday evening, the last to take place in their current premises before they close for extensive rebuilding. But the show, The Family and the Land, which continues until 19 September 2010, is certainly worth at least a brief visit.
So I’m hardly surprised at the news!
But the feature on the Photographers Gallery is perhaps one of the few interesting items in the otherwise rather tedious September issue of BJP, and you can read it online.
It’s also hard to understand the headline that says ‘Photographers’ Gallery to close down for a year, answers criticisms‘ as it seems to me that it rather signally fails to do so in the article. I’ve been a member of the gallery since soon after it was founded in the 1970s (except for a short period where they lost my membership details) but find it hard to disagree with the criticisms that so many photographers have of it and its programmes.
Quoted by the BJP are Magnum’s Chris Steele Perkins (the BJP gets him to expand on his June statement I dont hate The Photographers Gallery, I just think theyre shit) and Brian Griffin, along with other figures in photography.
The Photographers’ Gallery is funded as if it was a major institution covering the whole of photography in the UK, its £852,693 grant being almost as much as the other photographic recipients – Photoworks, Impressions Gallery, Open Eye Gallery, Photofusion, Redeye Photography Network, Hereford Photography Festival, Four Corners Film and Pavilion put together. What we really need is something rather more like New York’s ICP or Paris’s MEP, rather than an organisation that seems to be pursuing just a particular niche which many of us feel is peripheral to photography.
You can read my thoughts about the differences between the PG and the MEP in a post from two years ago, Paris and London: MEP & PG, and more of my thoughts about the gallery in a post from the opening of the gallery at its new site, Zombies in Ramillies Street.
I’ve always supported public funding for the arts in principle and still do, but I often find it hard to do so when in so many areas so little of the funding flows directly into supporting arts practice and so much into questionable institutions.