Cathy's Art Diary

Annual exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery for this prize which rewards a living photographer for a specific body of work in an exhibition or publication. The exhibition showed the work of the four artists on the shortlist. I was very moved by the work of Zanele Muholi who had produced a series of portraits, collated into a book, of gay people in South Africa, looked in particular at the impact of homophobia and violence including the ‘curative rape’ of black gay women. The exhibition had a wall of these photographs which were striking showed them alongside the book and an art work which had invited people from London to transcribe some of the stories in the book onto a banner. I also liked the work of Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse which looked at a high rise block in Johannesburg which had been built of the aspirational middle classes in the 1970s but had become and dilapidated refuge for the urban poor and was now being demolished. They had produced ta...

Rather sparse show at the ICA of recent photographs by Viviane Sassen taken in Pikin Slee in Suriname. There were some beautiful works in this show and I particularly liked the pictures of heads taken against pastel backgrounds. These seemed to emphasis the form and the shape of the head. I also liked the pictures of everyday items like bowls of water. I say sparse because there seemed to be not many works and in quite a small format in a large space. It gave the images room to breathe but made them hard to compare or to see as a body of work.

Quirky exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery looking at the fashion photography of Viviane Sassen over the last 20 years but arranged like an installation. The way these pictures were shown was fantastic however looking back I now realized I didn’t really look at the pictures only the display! The first section was a rolling set of image which displayed across the floor and into a mirror. The way the mirror was arranged it cast an image on another wall and then reflected that image too. OK I admit I don’t understand and spent a long time standing trying to work it out, hence not looking at the actual pictures! The second section was a more conventional rolling image of the pictures but I think I was still too busy trying to work out the first room to take much in! Review Evening Standard Stop Press When I added the tags for this article I realised I had seen a very similar exhibition of Vivianne Sassen's work in Edinburgh just over a year ago!

Innovative exhibition of work by fashion photographer Viviane Sassen at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. These were fascinating photographs which often used mirrors either in the picture or to take the picture. For this reason the start of the exhibition was a moving projection of images across the floor and a full length mirror so you became part of the image. She also often uses figures in the shadows or black of colours or objects to break up the image such as the one of a model bending over whose head was obscured by a hanging towel. These were clever artistic works but I felt it was hard to describe them as fashion photos as there barely showed the clothes.