Category: Photography

The Observer’s Jane Bown took this portrait of the painter Frank Auerbach in 1986, when he was chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. Auerbach, who died last week aged 93, was already by then a figure of renowned artistic compulsion. Laurence Marks, whose interview ran alongside Bown’s portrait, marvelled at his “austere and solitary communion with his pictures”. Auerbach had arrived in Britain on a kindertransport aged seven, and after the war discovered that his parents had perished in concentration camps. Finding his vocation as an artist at 25, he had, Marks observed, subsequently “worked seven days a week, nearly every week of the year, starting at 7am and continuing until 9pm in the same studio in Mornington Crescent, painting the same handful of friends and the same half-dozen or so London scenes over and over”.

Bown’s portrait seems to capture all of that sense of Auerbach’s refusal to see any margin between life and work; his clothes and the floor and every surface of the studio have become alternative canvases. He never let up, discarding and scraping and reimagining each painting, with layer upon layer of pigment, until it resolved itself into something he could live with.

Auerbach wasn’t a fan of talking to journalists, but I met him once a decade ago for a piece in which we wandered around the Tate, looking at his beloved Turners and Constables. I asked him at one point if he ever felt like he had done enough. He suggested not – “but,” he said, “as I have got older it is just the doing of it that is the fun, and nothing beyond that matters at all”. He smiled. “I have just been so lucky to get up in the morning, every morning, and be able to do something that may at any point in the day surprise me.”

At first, it looks like a nature-themed Pinterest board, a constellation of neatly arranged, anodyne squares. Rinko Kawauchi’s photographs don’t pierce or punch, hers is a quieter gaze. As the 52-year-old Japanese photographer says “people often say that I have a child’s eye”.

Kawauchi is best known for photobooks, and this exhibition at the Arnolfini, At the Edge of the Everyday World, has the pacing of a book. The series AILA moves in clusters of jewel-like images, gently glinting, urging close study. Then the soft focus and natural light Kawauchi prefers gives way to surprises, such two images of birth – labour just after the second stage, the immense moment the head emerges into the world for the first time; another baby mere minutes after birth, umbilical cord still attached. Above the image, a newborn bird raises its neck out of a muddy nest; nearby there’s a confounding closeup of animals suckling – the connections are concise, if a little on-the-nose. Larger images swell and surge with the incomprehensible awe of nature, panning out, taking in waterfalls, waves crashing, night skies, baby reptiles held in the palm of the hand. With its rising and falling cadence, the rhythm also subtly nods to the Bristol photo festival’s overarching title for 2024, The World a Wave.

Kawauchi’s exhibition also includes works guided by the photographer’s interest in light, the essence of the medium, and her desire to visualise an inter-species solidarity. Upstairs, the dialectic between light and dark continues, with images printed on gauzy pongee cloth, rippling with the movement of viewers who pass. There are large-format photographs and a 14-minute film capturing the practice of noyaki, the cyclical, controlled burning of grassland on Mount Aso, for regenerative purposes. Shot from the foot of the volcano, Kawauchi gives the perspective of an alien, looking from outer space with detached wonder. And what strange creatures we earthlings are.

This is the second edition of the Bristol photo festival, a biennial event that started in 2021 and it is still finding its feet. At M Shed Museum, Dreamlines is an example of this – portraits of people on Bristol’s streets by 14 photographers with ties to the city. Presented in a confusing mass, and confined to a poorly signposted back room, it leaves you feeling that “community” is simply a euphemism for the marginalised and minorities – who arguably forge stronger community identities by necessity.

It’s a shame, because there are great images such as Jade Carr-Daley’s joyous portraits of smiling young Black mothers, a group who meet up on Stapleton Road, converging with Mohamed Hassan’s imposing, elegant portraits of individuals belonging to Stapleton Road’s West and north African diasporic communities.

Onwards through town, the festival steadies itself. At the Bristol Museum, Hashem Shakeri’s Staring into the Abyss is an engaging exploration of life in Afghanistan after the return of the Taliban in 2021. As international media moved on, Shakeri arrived to portray the contrasting realities of women and men, disenfranchised by Taliban’s chaotic mix of formal informal decrees and the pervasive atmosphere of fear. A machine gun lies on the floor surrounded by thepink flesh of cut watermelons. Personal items arranged in a makeshift roadside market stall create a gorgeous still life scene with warm tones of pink, red and blue – Shakeri’s trademark palette.

While Shakeri’s use of colour and composition is exquisite, he doesn’t let us forget the subject-matter. Shakeri shows men trapped by violence, shackled by weapons as they stand guard in public spaces – while women and girls are photographed in underground illegal schools or the concrete backyards of home. We get glimpses of them behind shuttered windows and shrouds; one young woman sits behind heavy drapes in a cafe designed to conceal her presence from the male customers.

Now Keep Quite Still is a remarkable tale of an archive by Herbert Shergold, who ran a tobacco and confectionery shop, took up photography after the second world war, and adopted the tricky technique of glass negatives, which allowed him to retouch imperfections painstakingly by hand. He ran his portrait studio on Cotham Hill, but left barely a trace after shutting up shop in 1967; when he died in 1982, with no known relatives, his negatives wound up on eBay. Their buyer returned them to Bristol for this exhibition at the Laundrette on Gloucester Road, five minutes down the road from Shergold’s former studio.

The portraits are astonishing – eerie emulations of Hollywood perfection, with hyper-staged poses, dramatic lighting and heavy makeup. Using stars of the time such as Moira Lister and Elizabeth Larner, alongside Bristolian glamour queens and androgynous beauties, Shergold presents a subversive kind of ideal, speaking of freedom and the desires he may have suppressed. When I visited, a woman arrived. Shergold had photographed her at his studio 62 years ago, and she now saw her portrait for the first time since it had been taken. Her picture had been part of a pageant for Bristol’s most beautiful betting-shop worker – her boss had paid Shergold 10 shillings. The small audience in the gallery applauded; tears were shed, too.

Equally emotive is Amak Mahmoodian’s One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, an installation over four floors of an austere residential building (which you can rent on Airbnb). The title refers to the average time a person spends dreaming every night – and this is the time Mahmoodian focuses on in video, photography, drawing and text. The Iranian-born, Bristol-based artist, living in exile from her homeland, collaborated with 16 other exiles now living in the UK.

Mahmoodian’s works evolve from lengthy discussions about dreams, often recurrent, which she represents in various delicate forms, from Polaroids to poems, to sublime choreographed black and white images. In the musty basement of the house is an eight-hour looped film of a person in a REM dream state. It is a heady, haunting journey into the subconscious visual realm, and a rumination on what connects us at our core, beyond invented states and imagined borders.

The dreams are sometimes edged with death and violence – one woman dreams of steam coming off of her sister’s body, another gives birth to a fist; a grandmother loses body parts. One Hundred and Twenty Minutes describes a buried visual state, a psychological retelling of exile. It’s an account of the irrepressible, restless motion of the shadows in the mind, moving like a wave.

Exhibition of the week

The World of Tim Burton
Enjoyable tour through the goth film-maker’s imagination, though short on surprises.
Design Museum, London, until 21 April

Also showing

Framing Fashion: Vivienne Westwood
The couture maverick’s fascination with rococo art is explored in this show celebrating her unique imagination.
Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, until 2 March

Medieval Women: In Their Own Words
The lives of European women more than 600 years ago as revealed by illuminated manuscripts and other artefacts.
British Library, London, until 2 March

George Rouy
Fleshy, fragmentary and fashionable paintings by this British artist.
Hauser and Wirth, London, until 21 December

Stills Salon
Edinburgh photographers who use the analogue and digital facilities at this gallery show their works.
Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, until 30 November

Image of the week

Baron Munchausen stands on a lunar landscape looking at a silhouette of the Earth, in Ray Harryhausen’s proposed adaptation of the classic Rudolf Erich Raspe novel. This is a rare oil painting by Harryhausen, which features in a new exhibition at Waterside’s Lauriston Gallery in Sale, Greater Manchester, examining the workings of one of the greatest animators in cinema history. See more images from the show, which opens on 26 October, here.

What we learned

Roma families are defiantly filling rural Romania with Las Vegas bling

The David Bowie archive will be a big draw at the V&A archives next year

Photographer Alejandra Carles-Tolra had a bruising time with a women’s rugby team

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s fabric collages pay tender homage to her Romani roots

National Gallery of Australia’s $14m commission from Lindy Lee proved controversial

Painter Jack Coulter explained how his synaesthesia made music a key inspiration

Michael Blebo resisted pressure to join Ghana’s army and became a ‘creative military’

Afro-Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino’s work is being recognised across the world

Masterpiece of the week

Aurora Abducting Cephalus by Peter Paul Rubens, about 1636-7

The baroque genius of Rubens glows in this spontaneous sketchy painting, as does his admiration for women. Aurora is not just a strong female character but an actual deity, the Greco-Roman goddess of dawn. The chariot which she is due to ride through the sky waits in the background, its white horses rearing and eager to be on their heavenly path. But she runs, powerful and muscular in her swirling robes, to embrace Cephalus with whom she has fallen suddenly in love. This is an image of the thunderclap of desire, disrupting nature itself as the dawn is delayed by Aurora’s obsessive passion. Rubens makes you feel as well as see the story with his eye for a world in supercharged motion.
National Gallery, London

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