Britain has a strong tradition of producing groundbreaking documentary photographers, with figures such as Don McCullin, Martin Parr, Chris Killip and Richard Billingham attracting worldwide interest. So it is perhaps surprising that photography still does not have a higher profile in UK art galleries, particularly as it is often a big draw for visitors.
But there are some museums and galleries where photography plays an important part in their programming. The Hepworth Wakefield cited its Parr retrospective as one of the reasons why it won the 2017 Art Fund Museum of the Year. The Yorkshire gallery, named after sculptor Barbara Hepworth who was born in Wakefield in 1903, commissioned Parr, a member of the prestigious Magnum photo agency, to document the “rhubarb triangle”, an area of farmland surrounding the gallery where forced rhubarb is still traditionally produced.
Parr spent a year uncovering the mysteries of the early forced-rhubarb business, a speciality of growers in the area between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell in West Yorkshire. The photographic work went on show at the Hepworth Wakefield in early 2016, along with other images by Parr, and formed what became his largest show in the UK for more than a decade.
The Hepworth is one of the few UK art galleries that champions documentary photography, Parr says. Unlike in France, Germany or the US, there is still some resistance to the idea that photography deserves equal wall space to other artforms in the UK. Simon Wallis, the Hepworth’s director, is surprised the medium is not automatically part of any gallery’s contemporary programme. “My way into art was through a love of photography,” Wallis says. Upcoming shows at the Wakefield venue include the surrealist artist muse-turned-photojournalist, Lee Miller, and the Dutch fashion photographer Viviane Sassen.
Nottingham Contemporary is another gallery where photography has a high profile. It recently showed States of America: Photography from the Civil Rights Movement to the Reagan Era, which ended in November last year. The show, which filled the gallery and was popular with visitors, included works by Stephen Shore, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston lent by the Wilson Center for Photography in the US.
Sam Thorne, the director at Nottingham Contemporary, points out that uncertainty about photography’s place is a peculiarly British thing and that institutions such as the Pompidou in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York have never seen it as an issue.
A highlight at Nottingham Contemporary in 2018 will be a show curated by Linder Sterling, who had a 2013 solo show at the Hepworth and is now the first artist-in-residence at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire.
Better known as Linder, the artist’s Nottingham Contemporary show is titled the House of Fame (24 March to 17 June) and is her surreal take on Nottingham’s lace industry and the stately home of Chatsworth’s history and collection. The show will also include long-overlooked work by the first female photographer who worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), Isabel Cowper (1826-1911). Cowper, a widowed mother of three, started work in what was then the South Kensington Museum around 1868, and some of the images she made of the early V&A collection were those of historic lace collars.
Not all negative
Martin Parr’s frustration with British curators’ lack of interest is part of what prompted him to start his own Martin Parr Foundation, which unveiled its permanent home in Bristol in October last year. This features a public space where Parr is planning to show work by some of the photographers who have been largely overlooked in Britain, including Killip, Paul Trevor and Markéta Luskacová. The current show is Town to Town (until 12 May), which spotlights the work of Niall McDiarmid, a Scottish photographer based in London.
David Hurn, a Magnum photographer like Parr, donated his photography collection to Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum Wales) in June 2017. The Cardiff institution now has not only a great collection of international documentary photography but also its first gallery dedicated to the medium. Highlights went on show in September (until 11 March 2018). Hurn built his remarkable collection by swapping works with his peers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eve Arnold, Bill Brandt, Martine Franck and Bruce Davidson, among others. One of the few prints he bought was a 1973 photograph of performers at a Butlin’s holiday camp in Filey by the young Parr. Hurn paid £5 for the photograph, having seen it at a student show at the Arnolfini in Bristol.
Over the past two decades, Parr has amassed a vast collection of prints, photobooks and ephemera. His Parrworld solo show prompted his initial idea to open up his own foundation. The exhibition, which began at Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 2008 (when Chris Dercon was the director, prior to his move to Tate Modern) then travelled to the prestigious Jeu de Paume in Paris among other venues in Europe, but no gallery in London would take it, says Parr. The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art did find space, and it was shown at the Gateshead gallery at the end of the tour in 2009.
Prettier picture
Things have changed in London, where the V&A is planning to show more photography, including works from the Royal Photographic Society collection, which the Science Museum Group controversially sent south from the National Media Museum in Bradford to be snapped up by the V&A. Its Photography Centre, designed by David Kohn Architects, will open in the autumn and will more than double the display space dedicated to photography.
But the biggest turnaround in attitude has been at the Tate, which has belatedly embraced photography. In 2009, Tate appointed Simon Baker as its first curator of photography. Baker, now the senior curator of photography and international art, has been instrumental in organising the part-gift, part-purchase of more than 2,000 photobooks collected by Parr, a deal that has been supported by the Luma Foundation and the Art Fund, which also helped support the opening of Parr’s foundation.
Tate recently made another big commitment to photography by appointing Kate Bush to the post of adjunct curator of photography at Tate Britain. Bush moved from her post as the head of photography at the Science Museum Group in October last year.
Parr says it is completely outrageous that Tate Britain has never had a “proper” solo show devoted to a British-born documentary photographer, so is delighted that Bush has taken up the new role at the art institution. Alex Farquharson, who joined Tate Britain as director from Nottingham Contemporary in 2015, is also a supporter of the medium. The gallery’s first photography show will be in 2019 and will focus on the work of British photojournalist Don McCullin, who is best known for covering conflicts in the 1960s and 1970s, including the Vietnam war.
Brett Rogers, the long-standing director of the Photographers’ Gallery in London, was among the speakers at the inauguration ceremony of the Martin Parr Foundation last year. Rogers says she can recall a time when documentary photography was typically “segregated” and only exhibited on shoestring budgets. But the message that the medium of photography has the power to appeal to a broad and diverse range of visitors seems to be finally getting through.
“Museum and gallery directors are not silly,” Rogers says. “They know photography attracts huge audiences.”
Documentary photography also has the power to reach parts of a community that museums find hard to reach. Few places do this so well and as consistently as Multistory, a community arts organisation in Sandwell in the West Midlands. Emma Chetcuti, its director, has been bringing leading documentary photographers, including Parr, to the Black Country for the past decade, often combining their work with oral-history projects that result in an exhibition and publication.
Parr was commissioned by Multistory in 2010 and produced a series titled Black Country Stories (it was also the opening show at the Martin Parr Foundation), which included photography and filmed interviews, ranging from a racing-pigeon breeder who has customers in Mongolia, to the elderly owners of a sweet factory in Sandwell. Parr’s portraits went on show in 2010 at The Public (now closed), an art centre in West Bromwich, then toured to Wolverhampton Art Gallery, The New Art Gallery Walsall and Merry Hill Shopping Centre.
Honesty is the best policy
South African photographer David Goldblatt is among the international photographers that Multistory has commissioned. He chose to work with people who had been in trouble with the police, recording their life stories and taking their portraits. All of his subjects were free or on parole at the time of his photographing them. Goldblatt’s series Ex-Offenders at the Scene of Crime was displayed in two simultaneous shows at HMP Birmingham and HMP Manchester last year, exclusively for prisoners and staff.
Susan Meiselas is another photographer who has been commissioned by Multistory. In 2017, the US photographer and Magnum member worked with women who had suffered domestic violence. As none of the women’s faces could be shown, Meiselas used their possessions, artworks and rooms in a women’s refuge centre to document how they rebuilt their lives.
The exhibition, Room of Their Own, opened in Sandwell on 25 November 2017 (it closed on 10 December) to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
Multistory is currently working with Corinne Noordenbos, the former head of photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the Netherlands. Noordenbos has documented elderly women in Walsall Hospital, many of whom have lung disease after years working in the Black Country’s metal industries.
While many of Multistory’s documentary photography commissions tell revealing social stories, it seems some subject matter still feels too close for comfort.
The award-winning US photographer Bruce Gilden received a commission in 2013, and produced a series of photographs that lay bare the diverse faces of ordinary people of the Black Country. No gallery was willing to display the work for three years, until 2016 when it went on show at London’s Barbican Art Gallery in the exhibition Strange and Familiar, which was curated by Parr, and toured to Manchester Art Gallery.
So maybe the tide is turning. The Barbican continues to champion photography and its first show of this year will be Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins (28 February to 27 May). This will spotlight work from 20 photographers working around the themes of gender and sexuality, drugs and addiction, youth culture and minorities from the 1950s to now. Then over the summer there are two exhibitions: the Henri Cartier-Bresson prize-winning Vanessa Winship, alongside the American photographer Dorothea Lange, who documented the Great Depression of the 1930s (both 22 June to 2 September).
While there is some way to go for photography to be truly valued across the sector, its ability to attract audiences, and reflect some of the issues facing contemporary society, will ensure the medium’s growing importance across the UK.
Javier Pes is the UK editor of artnet News and former editor of Museum Practice magazine
But there are some museums and galleries where photography plays an important part in their programming. The Hepworth Wakefield cited its Parr retrospective as one of the reasons why it won the 2017 Art Fund Museum of the Year. The Yorkshire gallery, named after sculptor Barbara Hepworth who was born in Wakefield in 1903, commissioned Parr, a member of the prestigious Magnum photo agency, to document the “rhubarb triangle”, an area of farmland surrounding the gallery where forced rhubarb is still traditionally produced.
Parr spent a year uncovering the mysteries of the early forced-rhubarb business, a speciality of growers in the area between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell in West Yorkshire. The photographic work went on show at the Hepworth Wakefield in early 2016, along with other images by Parr, and formed what became his largest show in the UK for more than a decade.
The Hepworth is one of the few UK art galleries that champions documentary photography, Parr says. Unlike in France, Germany or the US, there is still some resistance to the idea that photography deserves equal wall space to other artforms in the UK. Simon Wallis, the Hepworth’s director, is surprised the medium is not automatically part of any gallery’s contemporary programme. “My way into art was through a love of photography,” Wallis says. Upcoming shows at the Wakefield venue include the surrealist artist muse-turned-photojournalist, Lee Miller, and the Dutch fashion photographer Viviane Sassen.
Nottingham Contemporary is another gallery where photography has a high profile. It recently showed States of America: Photography from the Civil Rights Movement to the Reagan Era, which ended in November last year. The show, which filled the gallery and was popular with visitors, included works by Stephen Shore, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston lent by the Wilson Center for Photography in the US.
Sam Thorne, the director at Nottingham Contemporary, points out that uncertainty about photography’s place is a peculiarly British thing and that institutions such as the Pompidou in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York have never seen it as an issue.
A highlight at Nottingham Contemporary in 2018 will be a show curated by Linder Sterling, who had a 2013 solo show at the Hepworth and is now the first artist-in-residence at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire.
Better known as Linder, the artist’s Nottingham Contemporary show is titled the House of Fame (24 March to 17 June) and is her surreal take on Nottingham’s lace industry and the stately home of Chatsworth’s history and collection. The show will also include long-overlooked work by the first female photographer who worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), Isabel Cowper (1826-1911). Cowper, a widowed mother of three, started work in what was then the South Kensington Museum around 1868, and some of the images she made of the early V&A collection were those of historic lace collars.
Not all negative
Martin Parr’s frustration with British curators’ lack of interest is part of what prompted him to start his own Martin Parr Foundation, which unveiled its permanent home in Bristol in October last year. This features a public space where Parr is planning to show work by some of the photographers who have been largely overlooked in Britain, including Killip, Paul Trevor and Markéta Luskacová. The current show is Town to Town (until 12 May), which spotlights the work of Niall McDiarmid, a Scottish photographer based in London.
David Hurn, a Magnum photographer like Parr, donated his photography collection to Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum Wales) in June 2017. The Cardiff institution now has not only a great collection of international documentary photography but also its first gallery dedicated to the medium. Highlights went on show in September (until 11 March 2018). Hurn built his remarkable collection by swapping works with his peers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eve Arnold, Bill Brandt, Martine Franck and Bruce Davidson, among others. One of the few prints he bought was a 1973 photograph of performers at a Butlin’s holiday camp in Filey by the young Parr. Hurn paid £5 for the photograph, having seen it at a student show at the Arnolfini in Bristol.
Over the past two decades, Parr has amassed a vast collection of prints, photobooks and ephemera. His Parrworld solo show prompted his initial idea to open up his own foundation. The exhibition, which began at Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 2008 (when Chris Dercon was the director, prior to his move to Tate Modern) then travelled to the prestigious Jeu de Paume in Paris among other venues in Europe, but no gallery in London would take it, says Parr. The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art did find space, and it was shown at the Gateshead gallery at the end of the tour in 2009.
Prettier picture
Things have changed in London, where the V&A is planning to show more photography, including works from the Royal Photographic Society collection, which the Science Museum Group controversially sent south from the National Media Museum in Bradford to be snapped up by the V&A. Its Photography Centre, designed by David Kohn Architects, will open in the autumn and will more than double the display space dedicated to photography.
But the biggest turnaround in attitude has been at the Tate, which has belatedly embraced photography. In 2009, Tate appointed Simon Baker as its first curator of photography. Baker, now the senior curator of photography and international art, has been instrumental in organising the part-gift, part-purchase of more than 2,000 photobooks collected by Parr, a deal that has been supported by the Luma Foundation and the Art Fund, which also helped support the opening of Parr’s foundation.
Tate recently made another big commitment to photography by appointing Kate Bush to the post of adjunct curator of photography at Tate Britain. Bush moved from her post as the head of photography at the Science Museum Group in October last year.
Parr says it is completely outrageous that Tate Britain has never had a “proper” solo show devoted to a British-born documentary photographer, so is delighted that Bush has taken up the new role at the art institution. Alex Farquharson, who joined Tate Britain as director from Nottingham Contemporary in 2015, is also a supporter of the medium. The gallery’s first photography show will be in 2019 and will focus on the work of British photojournalist Don McCullin, who is best known for covering conflicts in the 1960s and 1970s, including the Vietnam war.
Brett Rogers, the long-standing director of the Photographers’ Gallery in London, was among the speakers at the inauguration ceremony of the Martin Parr Foundation last year. Rogers says she can recall a time when documentary photography was typically “segregated” and only exhibited on shoestring budgets. But the message that the medium of photography has the power to appeal to a broad and diverse range of visitors seems to be finally getting through.
“Museum and gallery directors are not silly,” Rogers says. “They know photography attracts huge audiences.”
Documentary photography also has the power to reach parts of a community that museums find hard to reach. Few places do this so well and as consistently as Multistory, a community arts organisation in Sandwell in the West Midlands. Emma Chetcuti, its director, has been bringing leading documentary photographers, including Parr, to the Black Country for the past decade, often combining their work with oral-history projects that result in an exhibition and publication.
Parr was commissioned by Multistory in 2010 and produced a series titled Black Country Stories (it was also the opening show at the Martin Parr Foundation), which included photography and filmed interviews, ranging from a racing-pigeon breeder who has customers in Mongolia, to the elderly owners of a sweet factory in Sandwell. Parr’s portraits went on show in 2010 at The Public (now closed), an art centre in West Bromwich, then toured to Wolverhampton Art Gallery, The New Art Gallery Walsall and Merry Hill Shopping Centre.
Honesty is the best policy
South African photographer David Goldblatt is among the international photographers that Multistory has commissioned. He chose to work with people who had been in trouble with the police, recording their life stories and taking their portraits. All of his subjects were free or on parole at the time of his photographing them. Goldblatt’s series Ex-Offenders at the Scene of Crime was displayed in two simultaneous shows at HMP Birmingham and HMP Manchester last year, exclusively for prisoners and staff.
Susan Meiselas is another photographer who has been commissioned by Multistory. In 2017, the US photographer and Magnum member worked with women who had suffered domestic violence. As none of the women’s faces could be shown, Meiselas used their possessions, artworks and rooms in a women’s refuge centre to document how they rebuilt their lives.
The exhibition, Room of Their Own, opened in Sandwell on 25 November 2017 (it closed on 10 December) to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
Multistory is currently working with Corinne Noordenbos, the former head of photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, the Netherlands. Noordenbos has documented elderly women in Walsall Hospital, many of whom have lung disease after years working in the Black Country’s metal industries.
While many of Multistory’s documentary photography commissions tell revealing social stories, it seems some subject matter still feels too close for comfort.
The award-winning US photographer Bruce Gilden received a commission in 2013, and produced a series of photographs that lay bare the diverse faces of ordinary people of the Black Country. No gallery was willing to display the work for three years, until 2016 when it went on show at London’s Barbican Art Gallery in the exhibition Strange and Familiar, which was curated by Parr, and toured to Manchester Art Gallery.
So maybe the tide is turning. The Barbican continues to champion photography and its first show of this year will be Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins (28 February to 27 May). This will spotlight work from 20 photographers working around the themes of gender and sexuality, drugs and addiction, youth culture and minorities from the 1950s to now. Then over the summer there are two exhibitions: the Henri Cartier-Bresson prize-winning Vanessa Winship, alongside the American photographer Dorothea Lange, who documented the Great Depression of the 1930s (both 22 June to 2 September).
While there is some way to go for photography to be truly valued across the sector, its ability to attract audiences, and reflect some of the issues facing contemporary society, will ensure the medium’s growing importance across the UK.
Javier Pes is the UK editor of artnet News and former editor of Museum Practice magazine