People find every day delight in: colour, the play of light and shade, small objects, leaves and flowers, letters and signs. Or at least those are the things, the incidentals of daily life, which delight photographers. Shutter Hub has joined the Free Space Project, a charity supporting arts and community initiatives within Kentish Town Health Centre, Camden, to present Everyday Delight, an exhibition all about ‘the joy in the small things, finding the magic in what might at first appear mundane, and discovering the beauty in the everyday’.
Following a call for submissions the exhibition brings together 112 images from 65 photographers on the first floor of the Health Centre. Supported by the Newspaper Club, Shutter Hub has used the new familiar newsprint technique to create economically a lively exhibition, which perhaps givees some comfort and maybe a little joy to people as they wait to be called for their appointments.
If Everyday Delight shows the things that are delightful, it also explores ways of seeing. The success lies in taking time to look, in looking up and looking down, in getting in close, in unusual angles, in abstraction (often enhanced by shallow depth of field). This is about things close at hand, the quotidian: while landscapes may delight, they are a minor feature here, so are people for that matter. I guess that some (many?) of these photographs were taken on mobile phones, but they give the sense of being the work of people who do not spend their lives walking around chasing the latest diversions on line. The delights here are soft breaths of serenity in a hectic world.
EVERYDAY DELIGHT Free Space Project, Kentish Town Health Centre, 2 Bartholomew Road, London, NW5 2BX, 5 December 2019 – 28 February 2020 Opening times: 8.30am – 6.30pm, Mon – Fri.
(Three of my pictures were included in the Exhibition: previously posted as Patch of Blue (15/9/19), Orange (14/10/19) and Cambridge Station (22/10/19))