Sunday 8 August 2010

Stateside Exhibition at the Side Gallery

On Saturday 8 August, I visited the Stateside American Documentary exhibition at the Side gallery in Newcastle. The exhibition was nearly all social documentary, and was entirely in black & white.

By way of background, the gallery was set up by Amber, a photography & film collective. I have found their website to be a rich source of thought provoking material, all the more interesting to me with it being local. A link to the Amber online website is here:

http://www.amber-online.com/sections/about-us/pages/introduction

Amber came to Newcastle in 1969 to create its own "social document" - an exploration of working class and marginalised cultures and of the lives and landscapes of northern communities. It thus had a lot in common with many of the featured photographers in this exhibition, which included Lewis Hine, Russell Lee, Walker Evans etc. They were part of the FSA commissioned photographers to document the lot of poor farmers and sharecroppers brought to the brink of starvation by the Depression. Under Roosevelt's New Deal, the agency was headed by the economist Rexford Tugwell & Roy Stryker. Both men were convinced of the power of photographs to give a human reality to economic arguments, and how right they were.

Russell Lee in particular was well suited to this task as he was happy to spend many months on the road, and had a straightforward "Lets get on with it" attitude. He took honest, decent, non invasive pictures that said to the viewer "These folks have a problem here, lets give them a little help so they can solve it". Russell Lee himself came to Side. I was particularly taken by 2 of his images in this exhibition. One was titled "Weslaco, Texas, 1939" and showed a mother and her 3 children sitting in the dirt; none of the children had shoes. Whilst this was not dissimilar to "Migrant mother" by Dorothea Lange, the most striking feature of Lee's shot was the empty eyes of the mother and her daughter. The soul had been drained right out of them. Put another way, they look utterly pissed off. It is a very natural shot and captures the negative emotion in an empathetic way. This is a link to the photo on the Amber website.

http://www.amber-online.com/exhibitions/american-mining-communities/exhibits/033

The other image by Russell Lee that I was drawn to was "Christmas dinner, Smithfield, Iowa, 1936". Here's the link to the photo:

http://www.amber-online.com/exhibitions/american-mining-communities/exhibits/009

Although the children have shoes, it is evident that they are in great poverty, yet they look quite content - the excitement of Christmas has washed away their worries for the day.

The exhibition also contained an interesting display of children's photography - Wendy Ewald's Portraits & Dreams. Although I confess I did not personally like the images, I though the concept was pure genius. When Wendy Ewald arrive in Kentucky, she wanted to document her new community in a way that would capture the rhythm & soul of the place, but the camera seemed to get in the way. By teaching children photography and helping children "to see", she was able to achieve this document, through the images of the children.

The exhibition also contained some of Berenice Abbott's buildings (even though she is best known for portraiture) - I particularly liked her use of shadow play and strong graphic compositions in those shots.

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