A Host of Pictures

Having made our way around much of the London Street Photography Festival, Paul and I required some refreshment, and not too far away in Smithfield was the Rising Sun. It doesn’t have a great line in photography, though there are some pictures of the Samuel Smiths dray horses on the first floor landing, which perhaps might be considered closer to street photography than some of the work we had seen.

We tore ourselves away from there having put the photography world to rights over a pint and made our way past the Golden Lane estate to Honduras Street and the Host Gallery, which was not taking part in the LSPF, although Panos pictures which shares the building was one of the sponsors.

Packed into the fairly small gallery (apparently soon to be extended onto a second floor) was a show in its way as interesting as any in the festival, although also one that I find in some ways annoying, if not worse.

This was a photography beauty show, the Foto8 Summershow 2011, with 150 photos chosen from 2853 submitted “on single image impact alone” by the Foto8 editing team and then from these the overall winner chosen by four “illustrious judges.” Although I think it’s somewhat demeaning to the medium and insulting to photographers to judge and exhibit their work out of context in this way, I did actually rather enjoy looking at it. It was fun even if I’m not sure it is harmless fun.

You can see the short-listed 150 or so images on the wall at the gallery, where they are identified  simply by a number, or in a slide show on the web. In some ways the web show is better than looking at them in the gallery, where they crowd the walls and screens from top to bottom and it’s very easy to miss some images altogether. You get a pleasant soundtrack, though if like me you sometimes pause to look at a picture for longer than the 3 seconds required to squeeze 150 into around 8 minutes it does rather mess this up.  Some images look better on screen than on the wall, where the standard of printing isn’t always equal to the work, and if you rest your mouse cursor on the ‘caption’ link you actually get to see the photographer’s name.

There are of course also advantages to being at Host and seeing what we used to call the “real thing”, a rather debatable concept in this almost 100% digital age. A few are actually rather better prints than the web image would suggest, and you can buy (for a remarkably low £2) the small red catalogue that has every picture on its own page with the photographer’s name and caption. For the price it is also remarkably well printed – and again some of these reproductions improve on the wall prints. Also if you go along in person,  you can, as we did, vote for the ‘People’s Choice Award’.

None of my 3 votes went to any of the four pictures selected by the distinguished judges (one of their choices wasn’t bad, but still not among my 3 choices.)  I’d made my choice ‘blind’, without referring to the catalogue, and was surprised on checking after voting to find that two of my choices were by the same photographer and my third a picture I’d not seen before by a friend of mine.

I don’t think you can take either the short-listing or the selection of winners and runners up with any more seriousness than Miss World or the Eurovision Song Contest, though it is obviously nice for those who get selected and win the prizes. But the show does present an interesting cross section of current work by the kind of photographers who go in for prizes.

For a rather more interesting and more serious view of photography I can of course recommend Foto8 magazine which comes out twice a year and “is regarded as the most exciting photojournalism and documentary photography publications today.”  Better still, become a Foto8 member.