I was hoping to write a proper review of Michelle Sank’s book and show ‘The Submerged‘, at Hotshoe Gallery until 29 September, but I just haven’t had the time to give it the attention it deserves.
The work came out of a three month residency at Aberystwyth, and by coincidence around 18 months ago I wrote in this blog:
“Somehow Aberystwyth seems to me to be the last place a photographer would go for an interesting story…”
Then I was writing about a project by Chloe Dewe Mathews, Hasidic Jews on Holiday, which did provide a clue to a couple of Sank’s pictures in Submerged. In that post I also provided a link to photolibrarywales, and another search on there, this time for Aberystwyth provided more clues.
Both show and book present Sank’s pictures without captions or any relevant text, other than a few details which Liz Wells is unable to avoid in her essay. Many of the pictures do seem to me to be rather like visual cryptic crossword clues, and for me that often gets rather in the way of seeing them as pictures.
The work on photolibrary Wales is by Keith Morris, and there are perhaps half a dozen of his pictures from the first thousand or so that I paged through, 96 at a time, that had a certain resonance with some of Sank’s pictures (as well as a portrait of Sank herself.)
The show is well printed, the book a very handsome volume with a number of fine images, but I think the sequencing on Sank’s web site shows the project better; the book at times seems simplistic (the final image the end of the pier) and at others perverse. The brighter and purer colours on the web also suit some of the images better (and makes sense of Well’s reference to a row of bright red garages which they are definitely not in the book), although the work on the page and the wall perhaps better expresses the Welsh rain and gloom.
As I mentioned in my previous piece, my last visit to the town was as a young child, on a village coach outing:
It wasnt quite like the outing in one of Dylan Thomass short stories, but there were some similarities. We did eventually get there, after quite a few stops on the way, and about all I can remember about the place was that it seemed cold, windy, wet and grey.
Having seen Sank’s vision I’m not sure if I would want to spend a holiday there, even if I did live in Birmingham.