Bill Brandt, 81 Eaton Place, 1955
Gelatin silver print, 13.5 x 11.5 in.
Signed in pen by artist on mount margin recto, description in pencil on mount verso
Cecil Beaton, Nancy & Baba Beaton (Cecil's sisters), c.1925
Gelatin silver print, 8.25 x 5.5 in
1920s print. Stamped "Cecil Beaton Photograph" and titled and dated in unknown hand in pen on print verso
Bert Hardy, Untitled, 1940s-early 1950s
Gelatin silver print, 6.75 x 9.5 in
1940s/1950s print. Provenance: descendant of A.L. Lloyd, Picture Post journalist
If this exhibition were mounted in London, it would be mobbed. Here is England as seventeen English photographers see it--63 photographs dated from 1925 to 2005 in black and white and color. Among the images: a parsonage in the Bronte country; two debutantes (Cecil Beaton's sisters); a building bombed in the Blitz; two gents daydreaming in a pub; a child at the beach watched by a nanny in a huge black overcoat; people dozing in a Welsh park; a London street busker passing the hat; and a man celebrating at a soccer match.
The exhibition stars Bert Hardy, the documentary photographer who is best known for work that he published in The Picture Post magazine from 1941 to 1957. Hardy's sixteen photographs show people as they were: he never mocks or comments. The England in his untitled late 1940s photograph of two workmen may be gone now, but his images still seem fresh because human nature remains constant even as fashions and manners change.
Bill Brandt is the exhibition's most influential and widely known photographer. His East Durham (1937) shows what appear to be the back staircases--there are no windows--of factory worker housing. Smoke, presumably from the places where the occupants work, hangs in the overcast sky. Brandt shot this photograph after rain had wet the area down, making the pavement and rocks shine. He may have painted white lines on the fore-edges of the stair risers to increase their visibility.
Brian Seed, a transplanted Briton who now works in the Chicago area, took London buskers (street entertainers) Mutton Eye (passing the hat) (1957), an image that bursts with movement and life. London buskers was shot outdoors as were East Durham and Hardy's untitled photograph of the workmen. The light in all three is peculiarly English. Outdoor photographs taken fifty and seventy-five years earlier in Britain, using different technology, have a like quality.
There's a room full of color photographs in "There'll Always Be an England." Of peculiar interest are images of Butlin's Holiday Camps where working class Brits took the family on holiday. Men in red shirts watched the children while Mum and Dad got blotto in the pub. A cheery voice on an intercom awakened everyone in the morning to tell them what activities were planned for the day.
Butlin's is an institution that does not exist--and has never been known to exist--in any other country on the face of the earth. It is uniquely, imperishably English. You must be born to it.
Victor M. Cassidy
"There'll Always be an England!": Vintage works by Bert Hardy with works by Bill Brandt, Martin Parr, Brian Seed and others
Until 9 October
Stephen Daiter Gallery
Chicago, Illinois |
