The Photographers 2015 - Riddle Magazine

The pictures are there, and you just take them

Beetles + Huxley and Osborne Samuel galleries showcase 150 prints spanning over 100 years of photography

Article by Andy Barnham

Currently on exhibition at the Beetles + Huxley and Osborne Samuel galleries are 151 printed works covering 105 years of photography. The exhibition shows the breath of photography as a medium and how, in different hands, it offers views into various aspects of life and industry. It presents viewers the chance to see how the camera has been used and how that use, along with the printing process, has changed.

Osborne Samuel hosts approximately 100 photos showing early masters, offering Henri Cartier- Bresson’s candid street photography using his 35mm film camera next to Herbert Ponting’s prints of Scott’s expedition to the Antarctic taken on glass. These then progress to works by Robert Capa, including shots from Spain and Paris but not his D-Day photographs, and other conflict photography leading to shots by David Bailey and of Bob Dylan. The gallery is book ended with fashion shots by Melvin Sokolsky, and his ‘Bubble’ series for the Harpers Bazaar 1963 Spring Collection, and his contemporary Richard Avedon.

Beetles + Huxley, in comparison, is showing more modern works such as Alex MacLean and his aerial photographs, recording landscapes and the changes bought about by human intervention, and Tatsuo Suzuki’s high contrast black and white Tokyo streets shots. There is a distinctive feel at Beetles + Huxley both in regards to the size of the prints, which generally are much, much larger, and the use of photography as an art medium.

The chronological sequence and the divide of the photographs in the two galleries is understandable as it offers viewers a clear and linear narrative of the history of photography. The split however does make the exhibition feel like two unassociated halves and the casual visitor may not pick up on the link between the galleries. It would have been interesting to have had old next to the new, Cartier- Bresson next to Suzuki, and the like.

The exhibition runs from now until the 23 December 2015 with the prints available for purchase.