meish dot org: life, unfolding

I went along this afternoon to the How We Are: Photographing Britain exhibition at Tate Britain.

Some observations:

1. The gallery was rammed. I know it’s a ticketed event, and that’s supposed to mean that incomers are staggered to keep an even flow throughout the opening hours, but it was like being at Borough Market on a Saturday. Just loads of people shuffling around the perimeter of a series of big rooms. As a result, you didn’t have time to linger in front of and particular images - just keep on moving along the human conveyor belt, lest the person behind you start clucking in a disapproving fashion.
2. Partly as a consequence of the above, people were viewing images from a distance of about 12 inches. Viewers were literally right up against the exhibits, which meant that you couldn’t stand back and look at bigger images, because there’d inevitably be 89 people crammed in front of it at any time.
3. …And because of the way the images were captioned (e.g. a set of info panels at the beginning of a row of 5 images), you ended up reading the panels first, then seeing the images and being unable to backtrack and go “who was that again?” Too late!
4. Because of the proximity issue (we were shuffling along the parquet borders, I’m not kidding), people were in many cases pointing at the subjects within the images and leaving fingerprints. Hands OFF, people.
5. Again with the crowd control: Maybe it was the Sunday afternoon date factor, but my goodness there were a lot of people sauntering around, jabbing at images, reading captions out loud and providing a running commentary for everyone else “ooh, hasn’t he got big hair! Look, this one says it was taken in Notting Hill! In’t it different?! Ooh, I like her coat” etc etc. And if it wasn’t that, it was the other half, cooing at each other loudly about composition and tonal structure. Now, I’m not some kind of gallery nazi who insists on hushed reverential tones at these things, but I’d like to be able to experience it for myself, really, without the witless banter, especially if it comes in the form of trying to impress your new girlfriend by quipping that the suffragettes “all looked like lezzers.”
6. There was a broad overall structure to the exhibition, moving through time, but because there were images on each of the 4 walls in every room and in display cases in the centre as well, it was difficult to get a sense of narrative. As a result, it felt like we were being jerked forwards and backwards in time and through different subjects, techniques or photographers. I’m totally willing to accept that the disruption to the curation of the exhibition was probably exacerbated by the maddening hoardes (once you were on that human conveyor belt, you couldn’t get off, I can assure you).
7. I felt disappointed by the 1990- section. Although I’ve previously confessed to being a big Martin Parr admirer, I couldn’t help but feel a little underwhelmed by the selection on offer within this exhibition, and his contemporaries didn’t come off so well, either. Maybe it was just that, after the striking, ardent images created by photographers through the preceding century documenting our nation(s) in a complex process of identity-renewal, discovery and social change, the pictures offered by contemporary photographers of colour-saturated jumpers at a garden party, the contents of rubbish bags at a dump, fashion models striking poses and a new housing development on the outskirts of somewhere anonymous just felt kind of self-indulgent and flat.

There’s a Flickr element to this event, which is good to see. Anyone can contribute up to four photos taken in Britain in the categories still life, documentary, portrait and landscape to this Flickr group, and the submitted images are then shown on four big screens outside the exhibition.

Inside the gallery, however, there’s a monitor also showing a slideshow of Flickr images, but I was confused to see that they were drawn from the last 7 days of Interesting photos from the whole Flickr community - so, not taken of or in Britain, and not representing one of the themes above. As a result, the pictures of sunsets, flowers, cats and exotic birds seem out of place (though lovely photos, I’m sure) and make the monitor and accompanying blurb seem like crude adverts for Yahoo’s photography community, rather than adding anything to the event itself. That’s a shame.

Incidentally, I’ve submitted three images to the pool so far:

Portrait:

Still Life:

Landscape:

But I’m still struggling to decide what to put in to represent documentary. I’ve whittled it down to these so far - any suggestions very welcome!