Cathy's Art Diary

Charming exhibition at Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft in the life and work of the illustrator Raymond Briggs. The show was beautifully described with lots of quotes from Briggs and included a rich selection of original artwork. It was accompanied by a lovely video of an interview with him. The show also looked at his technique and compared different approaches. From the opening case of memorabilia inspired by his books I was hooked. I loved seeing the portraits of his parents painted on cupboard doors from his house. I hadn’t realised how groundbreaking his books were with “Father Christmas” being one of the first British picture books to use the comic strip format. Closed 27 October 2024 Reviews Times Telegraph

Fun selling exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery marking the summer with photographs of the British seaside. I knew a few of the photographers represented from an exhibition with a similar theme at the National Maritime Museum a few years so there was some of Martin Parr’s observational pictures and one of Simon Robert’s pictures of piers. New to me were Anna Fox’s vividly coloured images of Butlins at Bogna Regis but my favourites were Luke Stephenson’s series “99 x 99s” recording how ice cream makers across the country make the 99 ice cream unique. Closed 8 September 2024

Enigmatic exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery showcasing work by Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide. Most of Iturbide’s career has been spent documenting indigenous populations in Mexico, offering a glimpse into their rituals, traditions and struggles. This sounds quite dry on paper but the images were quirky with an eye for the strange but beautiful. My favourite picture is this one which took me a while to work out. It is a man carrying two mirrors which create images within images. I think it’s one of the best photographs I’ve ever seen. Her later work has moved away from photographing people to look at abstracted images of cacti and other plants in a series called Naturata. Closed 22 September 2024 Review Guardian    

Pointless exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of books relating to the subject of love. This was a display of photobooks, novels and fiction publications which were intended to encourage an understanding of love that is open to interpretation. They were just laid out around the room with no guide into them or themes. The large info board said it was co-curated by Develop Collective a three-year programme (2023-2026) that mentors and commissions emerging creatives aged 18-24 through a series of talks and workshops connected to a photography-based outcome each year. I’d be interested to see what they work on next as this is early in the process but it needs to have more substance. Closed 22 September 2024  

Moving exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery marking the 1967 book “House of Bondage” by Ernest Cole. Cole published the book in exile in America and it is seen as one of the most important photo books   to record life in Apartheid South Africa and revealing its brutality and injustice to the world. The pictures were shown in the same chapter themes as the book and all the commentaries were in Cole’s own words which added an immediacy to them. The images were clear and effective and told the stories of the people shown simply.    The sheer inhumanity of the stories being told still beggar belief. I kept wondering what had happened to individuals. The most bizarre pictures were of rush hour trains which highlighted the illogical absurdity of making the black populations live a long distance from the cities while providing the Labour needed in them without reasonable train provision. Closed 22 September 2024 Review Telegraph