Photographs from the Shutter Hub Open 2025 are on show at the Alison Richards Building in Cambridge until 21st March. The exhibition includes around 170 photographs from over 100 photographers.
Like all open shows, which depend on what people choose to submit and how much the selectors feel the need to fill the available space, the work on includes the good the, bad and the indifferent. Happliy, there is much that is excellent, a lot that is good and not much the falls short of an acceptable standard. Some of the weaker entries should have been left out and there are some repetitions that could have been pruned – you can have too many wellingtonias.
I tried to do a rough analysis by genre. This worked fairly well for landscape/seascape, townscape/architecture, portraiture and street photography, which accounted for about half the work. Portraiture and street photography felt under represented with less than ten per cent of the work in each category. The picture was more confusing when it came to abstracts, nature/wildlife and detail/close-up, the other half. While there were pictures that fell clearly into one of these genres a lot did not. Some nature/wildlife subjects were presented as close-ups/still lives; subjects that might be considered nature/wildlife or detail/close-up were rendered virtually as abstracts; and some abstracts appeared to be only that, with the precise nature of the subject hidden. A complication factor across all genres was the use of multiple exposures. How many of the people submitting work would call themselves ‘photographers’ and how many ‘artists working with photography’?
One of the five pictures I submitted was included, see here and above.
