Celebrating the physical beauty of photography in a digital world
Exhibition New Photography Centre V&A
The V&A opens the first phase of its new Photography Centre, doubling its exhibition space for photography, at a moment when interest in the medium is at an all-time high, when camera-phones have turned “everyone” into a photographer, but when many of the new digital enthusiasts who should be the centre’s core audience will be too busy doing it themselves to go to a museum.
With that in mind, perhaps, the museum is trumpeting the centre’s innovative aspects: its digital wall for the “screen-bound photography of today and tomorrow”, its inaugural commission from fashionable German snapper Thomas Ruff, and a makeover by David Kohn architects.
What we actually get is the existing photography gallery extended into the neighbouring room, with which it originally formed a single space, with two small projection rooms at the end, all scrubbed up so that the ceiling lunettes, with their Victorian history paintings, positively glow. This will be music to the ears of old-school V&A fans – such as myself – who don’t want any more postmodern interventions.
The new permanent display offers “a” history, not “the” history, of the medium – in keeping with our culturally democratic times – based around the theme of collectors and collecting. If its notion of photography as a “way of collecting the world” sounds a bit pretentious, the display demonstrates quite brilliantly (if not always perhaps entirely intentionally) how many of the attributes of photography that keep people fixated on social media have been intrinsic to the medium from its earliest days.
You get a sense of this in one of the first exhibits: an album of cartes de visites (photographic calling cards that were popular in the 19th century), made in 1883 by one Catherine May Wood, who has added surreal watercolour embellishments. If it sounds eccentric, such albums were routinely made and compared by Victorian ladies. An early example of social media “sharing”?
A collection of amateur photographs of ancient sites in Worcestershire, taken under the aegis of the National Photographic Record Association, demonstrates the tendency for people to explore their common photographic interests in “groups”. And a selection from the collection of 20th-century domestic snaps made by American collector Peter Cohen, in each of which the photographer’s shadow is visible, evokes the guilty pleasure of randomly trawling through other people’s worlds offered by Facebook. Are you getting my drift?
If this is a history of photography through the eyes of jobbing snappers and amateurs as much as “great photographers”, even the legendary figures of the medium seem here to gravitate naturally to the kind of whimsically themed collections that are a staple of social media. Bill Brandt, for instance, looks at the single eyes of famous artists blown up in harshly contrasting black and white, while Brassaï presents a wonderful array of graffitied faces from the streets of Paris.
The two commissions from contemporary photographers, conversely, strongly evoke the aesthetics of painting. Thomas Ruff ’s huge enlargements of Linnaeus Tripe’s Victorian images of Indian temples emphasise the blurring and variations in the yellowish sepia to quite hallucinatory effect. Penelope Umbrico merges clouds from the backgrounds of paintings in the museum’s collection in a pleasant, but slightly anodyne, nine-screen digital installation.
But by far the best thing about the new centre is the way it highlights the beauty of photographs as physical objects, whether they’re in glistening hyper-real Kodachrome or earthy Victorian sepia. This is a post-instagram history of photography, which shows that the true beauty of the medium can never be fully apprehended on a digital computer screen.
The display demonstrates quite brilliantly how many of the attributes of photography that keep people fixated on social media have been intrinsic to the medium from its earliest days