On Show in London

One of the things that I really miss with the revamped monthly British Journal of Photography is the ‘On Show’ listings. Although they were never comprehensive, they gave a pretty good selection of the photography shows in London and around the country, particularly those whose details were not covered by other listings.

There were some gaps, and in particular a number of commercial art galleries never bothered to tell BJP about their shows (and just occasionally some of the more important public galleries too.)  But often I’d rip out the page when I was catching the train up to London and thought I might have a little spare time to take in a show, and I’d spend a few minutes on my journey deciding which exhibitions to try and get to.

For a while you could also access ‘On Show’ on line, I think even for a month or two after the magazine went monthly, but it no longer appears either in the printed monthly or on the web site, and I’ve not yet found a decent alternative. The monthly BJP does have an exhibitions page, but it’s hopeless, listing just a few exhibitions that have already appeared in the Sunday papers, or are on elsewhere in Europe or the US.

Of course there are listings sites, but most of them seem defective so far as photography is concerned. Photography-now is an international site and its UK pages do include the major shows and quite a few of the commercial galleries, but not many of the other venues. Probably the best site that I’ve so far found is Spoonfed, where you can search for photography in London but the format makes it near to impossible to use sensibly – if you click on the link to see all of September’s shows you will find that a show that is open 20 days in the month gets 20 listings.

Despite the problems, I managed to find a couple of photographic shows to visit yesterday afternoon and both are certainly worth a few minutes of your time.

Chris Beetles, in Ryder St (a short walk from Green Park tube) is showing a good selection of Edward Weston pictures printed by his son Cole Weston, and you can see all 37 of them on the gallery web site.  The show is on until 25 Sept 2010.  Cole, who died in 2003, was the youngest of Weston’s four sons, and although he was a photographer himself was better known for printing his father’s work.

Prices for the prints on show range from £4000-10500, and personally I would rather spend a considerably smaller sum on one of the finely printed books of his work (and I actually have several.)  Cole’s prints were considerably cleaner than some of his father’s – those in this show seemed without blemish – but somehow they seem to lack a little of the intensity of those his father printed (and even of some of the fine reproductions in books.)

At the Michael Hoppen Gallery in Jubilee Place, off the Kings Road (the buses stop a few yards away at Markham St) are two shows that certainly offered a greater challenge, by two of Japan’s best-known post-war photographers, Daido Moriyama, (b1938) and Shomei Tomatsu (b1930.) The Tomatsu show is due to end 9 Oct 2010 and Moriyama 10 Oct 2010.

Moriyama is the more challenging of the two, a self-consciously avant-garde photographer impressed by the work of William Klein, Weegee and other American photographers and artists, who early in his photographic studies worked for three years as an assistant to Eikoh Hosoe.  On Japan Exposures you can see an interesting presentation of his early magazine work, looking at two Japanese books of his work from 1965-1970 and 1971-4.

Eikoh Hosoe looks at his camera phone in a pizza place called Alcatraz

and takes a picture of me!

Moriyama worked on the city streets, often at night, with a 35mm camera, often taking pictures without the benefit of the viewfinder, and pushing Tri-X far beyond its design criteria. Printed high contrast and on a large scale his work is often reminiscent of Pop Art’s use of dot screens (and the Moriyama foundation’s web site presents them as coarse halftones.) His work epitomises the aesthetic behind the influential Japanese magazine Provoke, “are-bure-bokeh*” or “rough, blurred, out of focus.” Started in 1968 in Tokyo by photographer and writer Takuma Nakahira and others, the magazine, which published Moriyama’s work in it’s second issue, had a short publication history (three issues) but started a movement under it’s title including many young Japanese photographers of the era.

Although the Provoke photographers (including Yutaka Takanashi, Koji Taki and Takahiko Okada as well as Nakahira and Moriyama) very much saw themselves in revolt against the photography of the past – and that very much included  Shomei Tomatsu – looking at the older photographer’s work now the similarities are rather more marked than the differences, and he is now seen very much as a precursor of ‘Provoke’.

It’s a show that is very much worth going to see, particularly for the presentation of Moriyama’s work on a scale impossible in print. There does now seem to be a considerable publishing industry devoted to his work in Japan, though rather fewer seem to be available in this country.  A new monograph, Daido Moriyama: The World through My Eyes (ISBN-10: 8857200612)  is to be published by Skira on 12 Oct 2010, and Daido Moriyama: Shinjuku 19XX-20XX, (ISBN-10: 3775717293), pictures from a Tokyo district he became obsessed with, is still available at a reasonable price.

While in the gallery I also looked through the fine  book ‘The Skin of the Nation‘, produced for Tomatsu’s first retrospective outside of Japan which was shown in New York, Washington, San Francisco and Winterthur,Switzerland in 2004/6.  And no, I’m not surprised that it didn’t make the UK. It’s perhaps unfortunate that one image by Tomatsu – a beer bottle melted by the heat of the nuclear holocaust at Nagasaki – has been so successful that it has obscured his other work. Before I started to write about the show I went on line and ordered myself a second-hand copy.

*Bokeh here does not mean the excessive pre-occupation with the rendering of out of focus areas which bedevils some areas of the Internet, but simply that things are not rendered sharply because they are not in focus.