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Why I stopped writing about photography from Ag33 |
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For many years David Lee had written on photography - then stopped Once upon a time I would see everything at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. In the ’70s and ’80s it was one of few places where the best of the past and the most talked about, fashionable and thrusting of the present might be seen. It was the one gallery everyone interested in photography had in common and, inevitably, its activities became a permanent focus for discussion, argument and frustration. I met a taciturn Bill Brandt there, and a sad-eyed Brassaļ, and I sat through what were customarily conceited, self-indulgent talks by lists of photographers now considered the most revered of Old Masters. When I couldn’t blag review copies from publishers I bought the odd book from the shop where, like many others, I flicked through Creative Camera to save buying it. In those days The Photographers’ Gallery was a place certain of its own function and agenda in an artistic hierarchy that treated photography like a leprous, merely mechanical upstart. Of course, with the passage of time many of those photographers once officially sniffed at are now exhibited in the Tate and photography is not only the most numerous single medium featured at the Venice Biennale but newspapers employ specialist photography critics. It goes without saying that The Photographers’ Gallery held a far more central position then than it does today when virtually every other state-funded gallery shows photographs as well. Indeed, one might argue persuasively that The Photographers’ Gallery’s position is now redundant, but such a diversion would be an impertinence here. Nowadays I pop in from time to time, usually already well jiggered from seeing more important things at the nearby national museums. The last occasion was during the Walker Evans exhibition. Little had changed: let’s face it, only The Photographers’ Gallery could get away with insulting a great artist with a display as incoherent as theirs was of Evans. In fact it was ignorant. This was a gallimaufry of oddments cobbled together and padded out with indifferent, gimmicky material such as Polaroids of no discernible worth other than as the peripheral curiosities of a giant. To me, Evans is a colossus of 20th century American culture effortlessly on a par with, among others, Frank Lloyd Wright, Raymond Loewy, Robert Lowell, Andy Warhol, Buddy Holly, William Burroughs and, perhaps the prima inter pares, Bob Dylan. Next Page >> |
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