Almost every family, in every house around the world, will have an album or box of photographs tucked away on a shelf or in a cupboard. Each era presents a new style of image, from the high-resolution snaps taken on today’s smartphones to the variable results of a 1990s disposable camera. Some collections may go back generations to the sepia portraits of ancestors, while others are firmly rooted in the here and now. What these personal archives do, is records collective memory, preserving it for future relatives to look back and reflect upon the people and places that make them who they are. These five exhibitions use this same lens, scaling it up to consider how the work of artists and photographers can be used to better understand a specific time and place. They track the progress in how artists view the role of photography, as well as the rapidly changing world these image-based practitioners chose to document.
In the early 1990s, Shanghai changed like never before, with the city’s landscape, people’s lives and even their relationships with one another altering beyond recognition. Amidst the developing urban landscape that mixed with old and new, Robert van der Hilst captured the group portraits of people in different spaces of Shanghai through his lens. In these images, the Oriental Pearl Tower in Lujiazui has just broken ground, young as bamboo shoot, the commercial skyscrapers began to stand in solitude among the dense low-rise shikumen and shantytowns. Some streets had been ripped open for revamp while the old Nanjing Road waited for its modern-day remodeling. There is a duality to these works, as modern and traditional visuals collide. Through the eyes of van der Hilst, we bear witness to Shanghai’s development and transformation amidst the opportunities of the time. This exhibition brings to the fore an era filled with change and vitality, pinning down fleeting moments that took place in a time of constant motion.
Set against the backdrop of Thatcherite Britain, this exhibition explores an artistic landscape built upon protest and political activism. The 1980s saw race uprisings, the miners strikes, section 28, the AIDS crisis and gentrification – each one shaping the way artists viewed their role. The lens became a tool of social representation and cultural celebration. Tate Britain now presents the largest survey of the period’s photography to date. It features images taken right across the UK, from John Davies’ post-industrial Welsh landscape to Tish Murtha’s portraits of younth unemployment in Newcastle. The past is brought to life with powerful images of the miners’ stikes by John Harris and Brenda Price, anti-racism demonstrations by Syd Shelton and Paul Trevor and projects responding to the conflict in Northern Ireland by Willie Doherty and Paul Seawright. This exhibition is essential to understanding how the country, and the artists who live and work in it, were shaped by ten pivotal years.
On 9th November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. The scenes are some of the most famous in recent history – cheering crowds, young people perched atop the structure, people taking chisels and hammers to the stone. The city had first been divided at the end of WWII and control given to the US, UK, France and the USSR, but the wall was not constructed until 1961 in an attempt to stem the steady flow of people moving from East to West. Its fall, ultimately, symbolized the end of a divided Europe and two years later, the USSR crumbled. For Berlin, it was the beginning of a new age. Throughout the 1990s, it found itself caught between past and future, and a spirit of optimism battled with fears of loss. A group of photographers founded the photo agency OSTKREUZ as a reportage collective, documenting the societal transformation of the decade. Visitors to C/O Berlin can witness the the burgeoning subcultures, emerging techno scene and social and economic changes through the eyes of these artists.
The history of the USA has been interwoven with the act of taking pictures for more than a century. Matthew B. Brady, also known as ‘Mr Lincoln’s cameraman’ was the best-known American photographer of the 19thcentury, capturing the unfolding events of the American Civil War. As the country entered the 20th century, images documenting historical moments have often come to be just as iconic as the events themselves – consider Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936) which distills the realities of the Great Depression into a single portrait. In more recent months, the photograph of Donald Trump taken seconds after an assassination attempt has become emblematic of his presidential campaign and of the political divides in the country. Now, A Long Arc explores the American South’s distinct, evolving and contradictory character through an examination of photography and how artists working in the region have reckoned with its fraught history and posed urgent questions about American identity.
The Watergate scandal. The Vietnam War. Women’s rights, gay liberation, environmental concerns. The 1970s was a decade of uncertainty in the USA. The National Gallery of Art explores how activism and growing support of multiculturalism opened the field to underrepresented voices, while artistic experimentation fuelled the reimagining of what documentary photographs could look like. Image-based practitioners like Mikki Ferrill and Frank Espada used the camera to create complex portraits of their communities. Ferrill’s decade-long project documenting a music venue known as the Garage, an improvised music club that popped up every Sunday in a car garage in Chicago, foregrounded a space for the uninhibited personal expression of Black identity. Elsewhere, Joanne Leonard made images that examine the landscape of domestic spaces, focusing on the painful moments of her life. The questions these artists explored – about photography’ ethics, truth and power – continue to be considered today.
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
Annette Hauschild_Verhuellter Reichstag_letzte Nacht_Berlin_1995_c_Annette Hauschild_OSTKREUZ_Christo_and_Jeanne-Claude_Foundation_VG Bild-Kunst_Bonn_2024.
With her Seagull camera on the old bund©️Robert Van Der Hilst.
Paul Graham, Union Jack Flag in Tree, Country Tyrone 1985, Tate presented by Tate Members 2007.
Florida. Tomoka River. The King’s Ferry, 1898, William Henry Jackson (American, 1843–1942), photochrom, 7 x 9 in. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Gift of an Anonymous Donor, 2014.
Mitch Epstein, Massachusetts Turnpike, 1973, printed 2005, chromogenic print, Gift of Timothy and Suzanne Hyde in Honor of the 25th Anniversary of Photography at the National Gallery of Art, 2016.
