CHOICES FROM PHOTO LONDON

 

Photo London is a mixed bag this year. The special exhibitions and young gallery 'discovery section' are somewhat undercooked, but there's still plenty to like. For example:

Anastasia Samoylova: ‘Barge, Miami River’ 2021 at Peter Sillem, Frankfurt – stand E08

Possibly the most painterly straight image at Photo London sees the Russian-born American artist   find something of Rothko in this shot of a rusty barge reflected in a Florida River – it’s from her series ‘Floridas’, looking at the plural interpretations available of her home state as one of time capsules and construction booms.  Samoylova is shortlisted for the Duetsche Borse prize for ‘Floodzone’, a related project using Florida’s contradictions to convey anxiety at the effects of global warming.

 

Scarlett Hoof Graafland: ‘Hunters Point’ 2005 at Flowers Gallery, London / Hong Kong – A03

Also set in Florida, to very different effect… The imaginative Dutch photographer describes this early work as dealing with ‘the ultimate feeling that love can conquer everything, even a lake full of alligators.’ She was planning to shoot herself with the New York performance artist Hunter Reynolds, but he was not fit enough so she used a local artist instead, ‘but I kept the title Hunters Point, somehow I think it fits.’ I had to edit this somewhat for Instagram, suppressing the shocking fact that the local artist had a penis.

Melanie Manchot: ‘Cornered Star (From Above)’ 2018-22 at Parafin, London – G08

Manchot’s  stand is essentially about setting up collaborative and empowering relations with people during the photo-portrait process – but she also gives that an inter-species twist with images of a horse in Marl, Germany.  They were shot in the middle of the once-rich but now less prosperous town, which has many historic equestrian statues, so that the photographer replaces the rider in the partnership process. 

Mikhael Subotzky: ‘Die Vaderland (0371)’, 2009 at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg / Cape Town / London – G18

Goodman provides a four project survey Subotzky’s work, calling it ‘at once highly introspective and revelatory of the systemic injustices wrought by South Africa’s colonialist legacy’. This is from the same time as ‘Ponte City’, the 2015 Duetsche Prize winning collaboration with Patrick Waterhouse that documented Johannesburg’s most famous tower block, but taken in a different building, once a nationalist headquarters but having been abandoned once apartheid ended, was occupied by a group of Zimbabwean artists, hence the deliberate sculpture among the accidentally sculptural effects.

 

Santeri Tuori: Water Lilies #20, 2020 at Persons Projects, Berlin – G24

Tuori, a leading member of the ‘Helsinki School’, sails through the Finnish archipelago each summer to find scenes of interest, then photograph them repeatedly over the years and seasons. He then layers the images one on top of one another, sometimes – as here – interleaving black-and-white and colour negatives to encapsulate the passage of time while generating an otherworldly result from the combination of worldly observations.

 

Marianne Marić: ‘Socle’, from the series 'Les Statues Meurent Aussi', 2015 at Christophe Guye Galerie, Zurich - W3

Statues also die, according to the French artist’s series which executes a playful back and forth between flesh and stone. Here the dismount from a socle (plain low plinth) suggests a feminist perspective on exactly who should be commemorated in public statues as well as teasing the viewer with the question of whether those legs and arms can belong together.

Add some things I’ve written about before - Hannah Hughes at Robert Marat (G19), various ‘outsider’ photographers at The Gallery of Everything (E01), another chance to see Sally Mann’s Prix Pictet winning series (F09) and artist-run Hi-Noon’s lively selection of editions (D05) -  and you have my top ten stands.