At the Shutter Hub Open launch on Sunday an artist/writer asked me why I support the Hub. My off the cuff reply was, ‘Because it’s an antidote to camera clubs.’ That might be true in many ways, but looking round the exhibition it was especially so of how the work was shown: simply reproduced on newsprint by the hub’s partners, the Newspaper Club, image quality and meaning was strongly prioritised over pure print quality and technical expertise.
The Open, at the Alison Richards Building in Cambridge, shows the work of 130 photographers. Most genres are represented strongly (the absence of sport, wildlife and figure studies is perhaps not surprising) and the overall standard is high – images have emerged from careful looking and have been made with skill and thought. The presentation of so many images is undoubtedly a rich virtual treat, though the sheer diversity and the distribution through several floors of a working building sometimes leaves one with a certain disorientation, a sense of not quite knowing where to look. Moreover, high though the quality is, this suffers from the problem of all open shows: subjects and individual approaches cannot be explored in depth and one has to take it on trust that what is exhibited is not the result of a lot of happy accidents. It revealed how much more interesting (and valuable) themed shows and photographer retrospectives can be – essentially, project based work is much more rewarding than the single image approach.
Another consequence is that, on another level, the Open sheds light on the very nature of photography and what it is trying to achieve. Because it covers most of the popular genres it is difficult to avoid the impression of having seen it all before – that after 180 years photography has exhausted its supply of subject matter. Here is yet another portrait, landscape, building, flower, street scene, insight into the human condition and yet more accidental humorous juxtapositions.
I subscribe to John Szarkowski’s idea that photography has a central purpose of the ‘precise and lucid description of significant fact’; and I felt that work by James Gunderson, Linda Scuizzato, and Natcha Wongchanglaw achieved that in interesting ways. But I found myself searching for work that went beyond this literal, essentially documentary approach. I picked out a few photographers that seemed to be working in this way, where there was more insight as opposed a rather contrived attempts to do something different, for example, Eloise Campbell, Linda Chapman, Hilde Maassen and Junghoon Oh. Evidence perhaps that more interesting work today is made by those who would define themselves, not as photographers, but as artists working with photography.
Although the show opened at the end of November, Shutter Hub held a formal launch in a festive atmosphere on 10th December, when it hosted a book and zine fair featuring around 30 individual artists, such as Kate Carpenter, Naomi James, Ania Ready, John Walmsley and Alan Gignoux, and publishing houses like Mindful Editions and Rear Window Editions, all showcasing and selling their printed publications. Three things struck me about the work there and they resonated with the points made above: almost all of it was project based; much of it used photography in innovative ways breaking away from the traditional genre approaches; and books and zines were produced in short runs, many were hand-made and all were of high quality raising them to the level of artworks in their own right.
PS My picture Erewhon #8 was included. top right in this picture.