Chris Steele-Perkin‘s black and white images from Northumberland in the show ‘Haswell Plough to Harajuku‘ at HOST gallery in Honduras Street, London until 31 Jan are well worth a visit. He started shooting the work as a commission for Side Gallery (and one of the images in the show is of the late Murray Martin, one of the founders of Amber/Side, with whom Steele-Perkins often stayed while working on the project) but continued to go back and work on it for some years.
Central to his work was a market at Haswell Plough where the photographer got to know many of those he photographed. The work is a nostalgic view of the countryside as a rural Arcadia, recording it clearly but also with great affection, and I think you can see all of the pictures in the show, along with others in the display from his 2007 book, Northern Exposures, published by the Northumbria University Press and featured on the Magnum web site (click on ‘View all images’ for the obvious.)
In the HOST show, there were also a few large images and a montage of 100 colour prints from Harajuku. I think most or all of these are from his second book on Tokyo, Tokyo Love Hello also on Magnum. I felt the small images of these were actually more impressive than the larger prints, and looking at the images on the web I wonder if they are not even better there – and certainly would be so if better presented on screen. Quite understandably, for anything other than small thumbs, Magnum protect their commercial interests by using both a visible watermark and rather low quality jpegs. This isn’t a complaint – but a simple statement. Every time I go to the site I applaud Magnum’s generosity in making so much great photography available to us all.
The countryside work I find more interesting. Perhaps even though it is in my own country it is in certain respects more foreign to me than Japanese city life. When the Countryside alliance made its protest marches in London against the hunting ban, there were times when I felt a great distance between ‘them’ and ‘us’ – as the campaigners alleged.
In Trafalgar Square (C) 2002, Peter Marshall
Of course the countryside hasn’t closed down with the ban, nor has hunting entirely stopped. Different practices, a certain amount of deception and even some defiance, but country life continues.