 |
| Photographer unknown, source V&A |
The Victoria and Albert Museum is currently holding
an exhibition of photographs – ‘The Camera Exposed’ – each of which features a
camera in some way or other. Drawn from
virtually the medium’s entire history, they include snaps and professional
images and show cameras both accidentally caught and deliberately
foregrounded. Portraits, including
self-portraits, abound, but there are cameras in still lifes, technical
documentation, reportage, fashion shots, and artistic treatments. The camera turns up in all kinds of
photography, whether casually or to the point of fetishism.
Of the 140 examples in the gallery, some are by
named photographers, many by unknown amateurs.
The well-known practitioners include Eve Arnold, Richard Avedon,
Margaret Bourke-White, Bill Brandt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Friedlander,
André Kertész, W. Eugene Smith, Paul Strand, and last but definitely not least,
Weegee (perhaps overrepresented). The
most recent works are photomontages from 2014 by Simon Moretti, in which images
are combined using a scanner.
The Cameras can be on their own, isolated from their
users, or en masse, as in the hands
of ranks of paparazzi. They may be used
as a prop, or by artists to highlight the mechanics of the process. You get the sense that for some photographers
their cameras are barriers against the world (Bill Brandt peeping diffidently,
head turned, over his large format camera); yet at the same time showing us the
tools of their trade allows them to emphasise their identity as photographer.
Occasionally the camera melds with the holder until
they almost become a single android being, the kit part of the
personality. The camera eye accentuates
the voyeuristic power of the technology, while photographs of people taking
photographs (or pretending to) inject a reflexive aspect. But the camera itself is not always seen:
sometimes it is merely the shadow, underlining the point that photographs
depend on light to exist; in one picture a cable release stands in for the
camera itself, stretching the exhibition brief somewhat.
Conversely it might be the photographer who is absent.
Charles Thurston Thompson was the first
official photographer appointed by what was then the South Kensington Museum
and in 1853 he captured a Venetian mirror at Cumberland Lodge. The camera is prominent, detracting from the
required objectivity of the record, but Thompson walked away during the long
exposure and cannot be seen, thereby managing to suggest that the camera had
taken it without intervention (in another example of his mirror photographs
from the same year he is standing behind his equipment). His are reluctant self-portraits, and the
same is true of Eugène Atget’s photographs of shop windows, in which Atget and
his camera are ghostly presences, half-hidden among the items in the
display.
‘The Camera Exposed’ is full of interest, but the
emphasis is overwhelmingly western European and American, probably a drawback
of having to rely on the V&A’s own collection. A self-portrait using a mirror by
Jamaican-born but London-based Armet Francis is a graphic reminder that the net
has not been case wide geographically.
Surprisingly there are no smartphones – they must appear frequently in pictures
simply because of their ubiquity, but here they are ignored in favour of older
technology, creating a glow of nostalgia but not telling the entire story of
the camera exposed.
This is then only a thin slice of a huge and
fascinating theme. There is a lot that
could have been included and, rather than reduce the number of exhibits to fit
the small space downstairs, using Room 100 on the first floor would have
allowed the curators greater freedom to explore the topic. It is fine as far as it goes, but leaves the
viewer conscious that it is far from the last word.
The exhibition runs until Sunday, 5 March 2017. Admission is free.
