Last weekend I spend a day in Derby to see some of the work on show as part of the Format Festival 'Right Here, Right Now'. It was great to have the opportunity to see so much and such a wide variety of work, though I was quite surprised at how consistent my own reactions were to what I liked and disliked. It will be interesting to see if my views change as this course continues.
I started with a browse round the displays outside the Quad in the Market Place, and really fell in love with Constantine Manos's photographs of Daytona Beach. I love the use of colour in the composition of these photographs – for all they fulfil the remit of 'street photography' there was nothing casual or momentary about them. They all struck me as very balanced, and having a serenity and solemnity I was really expecting to find. And in fact, one of the things that struck me most about the visit that amongst all the photographs I saw, those that stuck with me were not the candid action shots of street life I'd expected to see, but those that had been composed with seemingly as much care as a still life or landscape.
In the Quad I spend a long time in front of the Baltic Street Photography slideshow (as you had to if you wanted to see it all...) I was struck by the contrast between Alexander Gronsky's Pastoral and Alnis Stakle's work. In Gronsky's photographs of people in the undeveloped wasteland around Moscow the urban development in the background seemed to tower over the tiny figures in the foreground like their overlord – something out of the War of the Worlds. The humans looked puny and insignificant in comparison, scratching around in the dust. In Stakle's work, on the other hand, the urban development frames the activity of the people – they interact with it, which they don't appear to in Gronsky's.
George Geogiou, too, lets the viewer see figures in the context of the landscape. I overheard a young girl talking to her mother about Hakkari, Eastern Turkey and she was fascinated by what he was doing up on the roof of the building, engaged in the domestic act of washing down the roof while dressed in his smart suit. With the backdrop of the city behind him I thought the composition has an epic quality – the figure looked magnificent in that setting.
I was very much looking forward to seeing Bruno Quinquet's Salaryman Projects, and in the event I was slightly disappointed that there weren't more photographs on display. I got a real feeling of tranquillity flicking through the images on my laptop; in the gallery there were barely enough to get a sense of what the project is. But I still recognised the cleanness and balance in the compositions, and how this appears to give the anonymous subjects a significant degree of dignity.
Finally in the Quad I found myself surprisingly moved by WassinkLundgren's Empty Bottles. Possibly because all the people in the photographs are engaged in the same act there is an element of ritual about them. The frames are usually uncluttered (possibly because WassinkLundgren's approach gave them the opportunity to plan elements of the composition in advance), and, again, this gives them a degree of dignity despite the fact of the act they are engaged in.
Having now established to my own satisfaction that the works I liked most were those that gave the subjects dignity and respect (or at least drew attention to the lack of it in a manner which seemed sympathetic) I was not surprised by my strong reactions to other approaches I saw on display – Peter Dench, for example, whose works struck me as very judgemental of their subjects, or Bruce Gilden's street portraits at the Museum of Derby; in the BJP video accompanying the latter I noticed the statement that Gilden had been given 'carte blanche' to shoot on the streets of Derby, and thought what an easy thing that was for the BJP to grant, given that he wasn't confronting them with his camera. Maybe it's just that I wouldn't be comfortable taking that kind of photograph myself – I definitely would not want to come across as a hunter, to use Bruce Gilden's simile.
The last exhibition I saw was In-Public, and I really enjoyed the humour in a lot of the pictures. David Gibson's photograph of the guy with an umbrella and the painted cloud on the hoardings behind him, Matt Stuart's Oxford Street, Nils Jorgensen's one-man-band and Paul Russel's photograph of two woman on the street in Bristol (with the cursory attempt at beautification on the hoardings behing them) – those all struck me as being about timing, reactions and having an eye for the potential in a subject. There were also a couple of shots which hinted at intriguing narratives: Richard Bram, Cold Night, Soho, London and especially David Solomon's photograph of two people in the window of a cafe, the oblivious boyfriend reading while the girlfriend looking wistfully out of the window, echoing the gaze of the lone man outside.
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