Two things of note..

© Edward Burtynsky

Yep - the temperatures are Siberian, the Tories are in power and all the Christmas chocolate is gone, but I'm determined to find things to smile about this month, starting with the following..

1) The Photographers' Gallery set to re-open!

After a long (18-month) wait, during which time I have tried and failed to attend any number of Photographers' Gallery events in temporary locations around London – a combination of obscenely quick 'sell-outs' and my inability to use their website are to blame – this wonderful gallery will be back in Londoners' lives from 19th May 2012. It always puzzled me that the gallery closed so quickly after moving to its new location in Ramillies Street (off Oxford Street, W1F 7LW), but apparently this was always part of the plan - to establish the gallery in its new site, tease us with a few months of great shows and talks, and then disappear again while the gallery was renovated for permanent use.

I can't wait to see the new building; we are promised twice the exhibition space of the old gallery, a whole floor set aside for 'education' and a new bookshop, café and print sales room. In addition, the gallery have already announced the two shows that will inaugurate the new space - a 'retrospective' of Edward Burtynsky's mammoth 'OIL' series, in which he documents the workings, addresses the consequences and envisions the future of our oil-dependency; and 'An Afternoon Unregistered on The Richter Scale', a video work in which the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective reproduce and reimagine one particular archival photograph from early-twentieth-century Calcutta. While I know of Raqs Media Collective, I've never scene their work 'in the flesh', so I'm really looking forward to this one. Edward Burtynsky also appeals, and it'll be interesting to see how he engages with work that has preceded him, including Mitch Epstein's towering 'American Power' series.

© Zarina Bhimji

2) Zarina Bhimji at Whitechapel Gallery


I'm ashamed to say that this exhibition had passed me by until now (saving myself, as I am, for Whitechapel's Gillian Wearing retrospective later in the year..) but I visited the gallery on Saturday and really enjoyed seeing this work. Turner Prize-nominee Bhimji makes film installations and large-scale photographic prints, usually focussing on sites in India and East Africa and subjecting the forgotten and often dilapidated buildings in her works to a deep, sustained gaze that unravels their structure, history and visual composition.

Colour seems to be particularly important for Bhimji, whose intensely printed photographs are stunning to behold and distracting, even, in the sense that their jewel-like beauty confuses the 'archaeology of place' which is ostensibly one of her themes. It's hard to unpick or analyse the evidence of time's passage when all you can think about is how gorgeous old buildings look! Indeed, my only reservation about the show was that this rapturous, high-fidelity visual style is in evidence throughout all of the work on display, however hard-hitting (or not) its subject (as in as series about the controversial examination of women as part of British immigration protocols in the 1970s). It could begin to feel, to some viewers, like an affection that Bhimji can't shake off. In other works, however, it is precisely this attention to aesthetic 'effect' that gives the work its force. In the film 'Yellow Patch', a study of trade and migration across the Indian Ocean, the subtle movement of Bhimji's camera around the colonial port buildings of Mumbai, in combination with a hypnotic, slowly shifting soundtrack, forces the viewer to read the history and architecture of these buildings in a way that would be difficult to replicate through a single, silent still.

This show, the first major survey of Bhimji's work, is open until 9th March and is, amazingly, completely free to visitors. Might even be enough to take your mind of things until summer gets here..

State of the Union, Mitch Epstein

Photographs by Mitch Epstein. Published by Hatje Cantz.

State of the Union has the scope and character of a photographic 'Great American Novel' (even if it does not trumpet its status as such) and it's hard to avoid the description 'novelistic' when turning the pages of this handsome, thematically substantial volume. The comparison is somewhat specious, in that authorship here is the business of publisher Hatje Cantz and the Kunstmuseum Bonn - this is, strictly speaking, an exhibition catalogue rather than a monograph - as much as it is of the photographer. Strictly speaking (again) these photos also constitute two chronologically distinct bodies of work rather than one long narrative. However, the description seems to suit work that is as complex and eloquent, and as sensitive to the shifting relations of individual, social and natural scale, as this photography is. 



Epstein himself remarks in the engaging interview with Stefan Gronert, that he is working in 'a tradition of projects that address the idea of nation, and specifically America as a nation.' The two photographic projects presented form a coherent, intelligent overview of the artist's engagement with American life, both from a street-level, intimate perspective (more frequently in the earlier Recreation series) and from a wider, more emphatically detached point of view (in American Power). These series have been published previously as discrete monographs, but this volume makes plain how the artist's distinctive vision has persisted - and evolved - over time.

Prevailing characteristics include an ability to 'disappear' into a scene, enabling the photographer to capture intimate, even whimsical, moments in everyday life without the resulting image feeling either too staged or else incoherent. A photograph of four women crowded round an obscured object on the city sidewalk in Recreation, for example, is a cannily snapped piece of street theatre. A dense, hectic, unmistakably urban composition as well as a magical visual moment; four crazily-patterned dresses that are, the photographer knows, a joy to look at, though their owners strain to look elsewhere. There is also a genius for making visually legible the relationships between people and their neighbours, their belongings and their surroundings. In the earlier series, this skill manifests itself most obviously in portraits of groups of people, whether it be a family - strung out in a long line, each member subtly failing to connect either physically or by eye-contact with each of the others - or a crowd of Vietnam veterans, each individuated but not one detached or dispensable in terms of the composition. In American Power, an investigation of energy production, consumption and waste in the United States made in 2009, this skill transfers onto a (literally) larger canvas, where Epstein juxtaposes human beings (rarely individuals), their homes and their industry, all within the setting of grand American landscapes. 



It is hard to adequately convey the impact of these wide-angle, densely detailed landscapes, which document domestic American rituals, industrial apparatus and epic landscapes, often all within the same frame. The photographs individually become colder, both in mood and palette, partly as a result of the flattening effect that occurs when elements far and near - a golf course and a wind farm, in one memorable example - are given equal attention and brought into direct visual comparison. This is partly also, as both Christoph Schreier and Stephan Berg point out in their thoughtful, precise essays, because the photographer who was once in-amongst-the-crowd, close to his human subjects, has now distanced himself and resists the vivid, humanistic images he made in earlier, less pointedly political works. The cover photograph of this volume - from American Power, depicting an unfinished concrete bridge cutting through untamed countryside - seems to suggest that the 'State of the Union' is not necessarily cause for optimism; technologized but alienating, ambitious but without direction.

What is equally impressive, however, is the sensitivity and variety of Epstein's response to his surroundings and subjects, so that at no point do the photographs (or the book itself) become heavy handedly didactic or self-righteous. This is a point made variously by each of the three focused, analytical texts that have been contributed to this volume, as well as by the photographer himself, who states that he was keen to avoid a 'simplistic agenda' in American Power. The almost collage-like effect of some of these photographs - showing, for example, a glowing oil refinery at the end of a long avenue of trees, or a vast windfarm in the background of a sleepy small town - does not act simply as an indictment of complacent consumers, or a representation of the impassive face of big business. It is also a manifestation of the difficulties many of us face when confronted with 'energy issues', our blankness when presented with, as Stephan Berg puts it, 'the simultaneity of necessary energy production and the exploitation and destruction it wreaks.' 



The book itself makes light work of crafting an enjoyable, absorbing reading experience from two sections of dense, large-format photography, combined with a substantial amount of text in both German and English. The text is handled elegantly through a two-colour, highly readable design, and the two 'plate' sections are laid out in two distinct styles, contrasting the less consistent Recreation works with the more imposing, formal American Power. The only obstacle to the reading experience one may encounter is that the upright format of this book seems wilfully designed to disrupt the large square and landscape-format images - a deep gutter cutting right through the centre of some works. Yet somehow this 'human' orientation does not prove disastrously distracting. The format is dynamic like the work itself and seems to complement images that throw the reader back on his or her analytical skills, as much as on their appreciation for sheer aesthetic skill.

This review was originally published in photo-eye Magazine, 8th July 2011, and can be viewed in its original form here. All photographs are by Mitch Epstein, from State of the Union, published by Hatje Cantz, 2011.