Gary Alexander, David Gibson, Nils Jorgensen, Stephen McLaren, Johanna Neurath, Matt Stuart, Nick Turpin
showcases the work of an emergent generation of British photographers, notable for their fresh, candid depictions of public life in London.
Traditionally, New York and Paris have dominated the history of street photography. The restless mania of Manhattan and the romanticism of Paris have been captured and endorsed through exhibitions, coffee table books, magazines and mass-produced prints for more than half a century.
In recent years London has discovered its own photographic allure. Photographers such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Jason Evans and Juergen Teller created a much imitated ‘London look’ in the 1990s using the street as a stage for fashion photography, while Gillian Wearing made several documentary-art projects using photography and video on the streets of the capital.
Now a new generation of London-based practitioners is returning to the idea of the ‘decisive moment’. Keenly aware of the history of street photography, the photographers in insist on the continued relevance of still photography to capture the unique flux of people, matter and imagery that combine at street level.
Their ability is to spot the resonance of fleeting moments of social interaction or collisions of line and form in the public places where we work, shop and play. Their observations of the dynamics of street life hold up a mirror to the kind of society we are making for ourselves, and establish London as a centre for contemporary street photography.
As Nick Turpin explains: 'If we have become workers and shoppers, our lives about earning and spending; if our families are separated and our neighbours are strangers; if our media are focused on celebrity, sex and sport, where can we look to be shown the state we are in? It is in images made right on the streets that we are best able see the mixed blessings of life in a democratic, free market economy.'
The exhibition is curated by and . Stephen is a photographer, who has also worked in television as a director and producer for over 15 years, where his projects have included the European MTV Awards and BBC's Rough Guides to the World series. Sophie is Curator of Public Programmes at Tate Modern. She has taught and written extensively on contemporary art and photography, and is the editor of Singular Images: Ten Essays on Remarkable Photographs (Tate/Aperture, 2005).
The official opening of the exhibition will take place on Friday 1 December at 7.30 p.m (details below).
As part of our Metropolis season, will also include a series of workshops aimed at young photographers, in collaboration with the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography.
