Capturing The Moment

Thought provoking exhibition at Tate Modern examining the relationship between photography and painting in modern and contemporary art.

This is a topic that fascinates me and the show introduced me to lots of new ideas. From the first quote from Susan Sontag “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses” I was hooked even though a lot of the show argued against the statement.

I loved the use of quotes to plant ideas, my favourite being this David Hockney one. “A photograph is a fraction of a second, frozen. So, the moment you’ve looked at it for even four seconds you are looking at it for longer than the camera did”.

The show looked at painters who use photographs and who imitate them as well as at photographers who reference paintings. It also looked at how photographs can be constructs not just paintings and how some paintings pretend to record a moment.

I think my favourite room was the one on photography as painting and I recognised a number of the photographers whose work I had been drawn to before such as Candida Hofer’s monumental pictures of libraries and galleries and Andreas Gursky’s of apartment blocks. I was interested to see they trained together.

I’ll definitely need to go back to see this show again once I have processed the ideas. It was a lot to take in on one go and subtly laid out to make you think and question.

Closes 28 January 2024


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