How We Are: Photographing Britain

My parents are in town, the kitchen saga goes on (will we or won't we ever get a new kitchen?) and work is busier than I've ever known work could or should be ... hence no photography and no blogging. A sad state of affairs. Yesterday was the first day I've had off in a few weeks - I took it off to spend some time with my parents - the last time they were in the UK was 1978 so it's only reasonable that I should take a day off to show them around ...

I found myself at the Tate Britain in the very good, slightly too documentary focussed "How We Are: Photographing Britain" exhibition (see here). It's definitely worth a look, especially for the 1950s cook books which use "radical" ingredients such as olive oil and have these lovely big full page spreads of plates of grub. Martin Parr springs to mind, obviously, and oddly enough he's there too but only some of the slightly earlier stuff - according to the time-frame of the exhibition he's been and gone already. It struck me that the cookbooks wouldn't have got a guernsey in this exhibition had it not been for Parr's close up super saturated shots of food and assorted ephemera - this cookbook stuff is reclaimed because of Parr. But the poor sod doesn't get his work beyond the cost of living stuff included.

Interesting that the exhibition tended to focus on particular photographic practices within particular time frames - the 60s and 70s are all about social documentary whereas contemporary practice is only great big prints that only see the inside of a gallery and wouldn't know a picture magazine from a slice of cheese. Nevertheless, interesting, thought provoking stuff. Especially the cookbook stuff. And a few photos by a plastic surgeon after WWII reconstructing shattered faces; these were great - never seen them before.

Sllightly miffed to find that someone had stolen my idea of photographing road kill. (Never mind the fact that I've never exhibited mine or done anything at all with it). I didn't have the idea of using the latin names for all the road kill as this guy did, but I thought that was a bit wanky anyway.

What was slightly amusing was to see the way everything has just got bigger and bigger - literally. There's some little photographs by Fox Talbot; famous photographs which seem so small and unprepossessing given their importance to the photographic canon and to the history of photography, through little cartes-de-visite of Queen Victoria and other pocket sized photographic memoriblia, then larger as we move forward in time right through to the contemporary room - the last one in the exhibition - with these fuck off wall to ceiling photographs of sweating soldiers made with some sort of purpose built twin lens Nasa camera (I wanted to know more, but the caption left me hanging). What's with all this size recently? It just seems rather ... amusing.

A new, relatively small package of recently developed photographs is being delivered to me this afternoon. I might event be able to find five minutes somewhere to sit down and scan it. Visiting the photography exhibition yesterday, thinking about all this photography and being inspired by all these ideas, reminded me I'm doing the wrong thing. But that's a whole other story...