Cathy's Art Diary

Witty exhibition in the sales gallery of the Photographers’ Gallery of new work by Alma Haser. Haser explores the quirks of German idioms, their origins and often unexpected English translations by creating literal sculptures and collages of the words. These create fun works often with sausage-based translations which do make you think about words. Closed 22 June 2025  

Engaging exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery showcasing the work of documentary photographer, Peter Mitchell. The work focuses on the transformation of Northern England and was shown here to reflect several series of work. I found the work drew me in and I’d liken it to the work of Martin Parr for its wry look at people and life. I loved a series recording a ghost-ride which visited Leeds every year and a clever set “A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission” from 1979 comparing urban landscape to the exploration of Mars. I think my favourites were a poignant set recording the demolition of the Quarry Hill Flats in Sheffield. Closed 15 June 2025 Review Guardian    

Intriguing exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery using AI to interrogate archive photographs. It takes the archive of Cecil Rhodes, the miner and Imperialist, held at the University of Oxford and shows how applying AI learning to them to create single shot films enhances the original prejudices as AI replies on the data it finds in the original source. Planetary Portals (Casper Laing Ebbensgaard, Kerry Holden, Michael Salu & Kathryn Yusoff) is a research group that delves into imperial archives to produce critical cartographies. It made me think more generally about how AI works and how it can distort information rather than clarifying it. Closed 15 June 2025    

Interesting exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery showcasing the four finalists in this year’s Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize. I always try to get to this show and this year it felt more connected to photography than some years. On the upper floor there was an installation featuring photographs by Cristina De Middel chronicling a journey along the Central American migrant route. They were interesting images and I love this one of a church but I’d have liked to know more about the people and places. Also upstairs was Rahim Fortune nominated for his photo book “Hardtack” looking at the conflicts and nuances associated with the post-emancipation America. These were lovely black and white images of everyday life. On the floor below was Tarrah Krajnak and I was impressed that, although she is mainly a performance artist, she records her work using photography and prints all her images herself. I particularly liked a series where she photographed her hands holding a ...

Interesting exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery in examining the photo collage work of fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville. Turbeville’s signature style was to place models in decaying buildings and to use a soft focus. I loved the series taken in Versailles for a book commissioned by Jackie Onassis emphasising the dust and objects in closed areas. I would have liked to see more explanation of the collage work, given that was the focus of the show. Closes 23 February 2025    

Thin exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery looking at the impact of the photography journal Ten.8. The journal, which ran from 1979 to 1992, provided a forum for West Midlands-based photographers to come together, share images and exchange ideas. This show focused on two issues Black Image (1984) and Body Politics (1987). This seemed an interesting topic but it was represented by quite a lot of text and just a few archive copies. It emphasised quotes from the issues without giving them very much context. I wasn’t always sure what I was looking at and why. Closes 23 February 2025

Striking exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery looking at the career of Letizia Battaglia. Battaglia mainly worked as a press photographer in Sicily and as such had covered Mafia activity on the island as well as daily life. The Mafia murder photographs were graphic but stunning. At first I found I could hardly look at them, but after a while they lost their reality and the most shocking aspect was that people were carrying on everyday life around them. My favourite works were the pictures of everyday life particularly religious activity and her pictures of children. The works were shown in no particular order to show their   breadth and the recurrence of themes. The lower galley was hung like an installation she had done in 2015 when the works had been hung from the ceiling. Closes 23 February 2025 Review Guardian    

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    

Beautiful sales exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of work by Cuban photographer, Raul Canibano. I loved the slightly surreal quality of some of these images. I couldn’t tell if this caught a moment or was a collaged piece. I loved a picture of a man though the net over a window which abstracted his image except for a defined eye seen through a hole in the net. Closed 7 April 2024

Fascinating exhibition at the   Photographers’ Gallery on the life and work of the photojournalist Bert Hardy. I went into the show not thinking I knew any of his work but was immediately greeted by an image of two girls on the seafront at Blackpool which I remember from many book covers and friends rooms at college. I laughed out loud when I read his comment on it from 1985 “People who have hardly ever heard of me will suddenly remember that picture. That’s me” and it was me too! From that moment I was hooked. Hardy was a pioneering photojournalist working for Picture Post from two years after its foundation in 1958. The journal aimed to explore social issues and he worked for them in the UK and abroad. I loved his clear, well-constructed images particularly those framed in doorways. I was fascinated by his work in the Second World War working for the Army Film and Photographic Unit. He landed in Normandy three days after D-Day and went into Bergen-Belsen a few days after l...

Interesting small exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery highlighting the publisher Café Royal Books . Since 2012 this publisher has produced a weekly publication in a small format dedicated to post-war photography from the UK and Ireland with a focus on unseen or overlooked work. Each of the over 600 issues highlights a small body of work by a specific photographer such as Martin Mayer looking at London in the 1970s. The journals were beautifully produced with nicely reproduced images and minimal commentary. Closes 2 June 2024  

Eclectic exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of the shortlisted finalists of this prestigious photography award. The award goes to at outstanding body of work exhibited or published in Europe in the previous 12 months and the show highlights the work of the top four artists. This year featured two artists who had had retrospectives and one of these, VALUE EXPORT, for Austria was showcased with a selection of work by this feminist photographer and performance artist over 5 decades. I’m not sure the work translated very well as static images. Despite being shortlisted for a retrospective Hrair Sarkissian was represented by two works. One was an eerie soundscape recording of exhuming bodies from a Spanish Civil War mass grave but the photographic element was 50 photographs of the empty homes of people who had disappeared in conflict which were very moving. In the floor below I liked Gavin Gill and Rajesh Vangad’s book blending Gill’s photography of India with Vangad’s indige...

Charming exhibition in the sales gallery of the Photographers’ Gallery of pictures of birds by five of the photographers they represent. I loved their description of this as a “curated menagerie” reflecting the number of words for gathering of birds. My favourites were pictures of show birds by Luke Stephenson. Beautifully focused images of individual birds on perches against bright backgrounds. They had a feel of Renaissance portraits. There were 21 hung together which was very effective. I also liked Pentii Sammallhati’s black and white images capturing moments in the wild which made a lovely contrast to Stephenson’s pieces. Closed 10 September 2023

Confused exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of a project by Johny Pitts. I must admit I got confused by the number of ideas which seemed to drive this show but I think in the end it boiled it down to a trip around the coast of Britain with poet Roger Robinson to address the question “What is Black Britain?” which then developed into him looking at what home means to him. Throw in Japanese ideas of a ‘personal utopia’ and you’ll see where I’m coming from. I wanted the photos of people around the coast to tell me more about who they were and where they were taken but he did explain that there were no labels to remove hierarchy and that “people and places will be apparent to anyone from that location” but what about the rest of us. I liked the nostalgic installation of a living room wall with shelves, tv, videos etc but wasn’t convinced this was recording a black experience as implied. My first student rooms looked remarkably similar. Closed 24 September 2023 Review Gua...

Strange but fun exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery looking at the history of virtual worlds. This show was part of an online resource that explores photography's increasingly automated, networked life and a three-year project with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at South Bank University. It started by looking at the history of virtual worlds with Second Life being one of the longest running. It then looked at how most fail and why. To show this they had created a game to model a world called “World Imagining Game” which you could play. Built into it was that any economic model you built for it failed. I invented a world for art history geeks!    Closed 24 September 2023

Serene exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery looking at the career of Evelyn Hofner. I’d not consciously come across Hofner’s work before but I loved her clear cool vision. Having fled Germany in 1933 aged 11 with her family, she settled in Mexico before moving to New York in 1946 to work as an editorial photographer on magazines. She was then commissioned to take photographs for a book “The Stones of Venice” by Mary McCarthy and moved into this type of documentary work. I loved her black and white photos of City life in New York, Washington, Dublin and London. Unlike other contemporary street photographers she didn’t catch a moment but worked with her subjects to produce insightful portraits. Some of the pictures, like this one of two Dublin maids, seemed to hint at a short story. I also liked her pictures of empty interiors which seemed to include the shadows of the people who had been there. Closed 24 September 2023 Review Guardian  

Fabulous exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery looking at Queer pictures of men in the 20th century and the development of physique photography. The show was arranged around areas of London where men went who were seeking other men and looked at the aesthetics that developed there that were unique to the city. The show was so tender and was as much a history of Queer London as of the images. I found lots of wonderful stories I want to find out more about. I was intrigued to find photographs by Keith Vaughan, an artist I know quite well but I’d never come across the photographs. I was also delighted to find the work of Montague Glover as I’d seen a book by him years ago, which I loved, of photographs of soldiers and working men. I’ve just looked up the book and it’s now £280 second hand! Closes 12 June 2023