Review: Everything was Moving

(Exhibition Review) Barbican Centre. 13 September 2012 - 13 January 2013

Everything was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s at the Barbican Centre, is a major survey of photographers and photography itself. The exhibition purports to tell ‘a history of photography, through the photography of history.’ The symbiotic nature of history and photography is investigated by 12 photographers from across the globe - Japan, Russia, China, India, Mexico, South Africa, Germany, Mali, America - all detailing the varying social and political realities of the 60s and 70s.

With over 400 works, and the examination of so many different socio-political situations, the show is inevitably overwhelming. In a half-hearted attempt to combat this, the works of each photographer are split into chapter-like sections. Chapter One is the black and white imagery of David Goldblatt. The life-long preoccupation of Goldbatt has been the country of his birth: South Africa. Over five decades he has made a series of critical explorations of South African society, which cumulatively form a tableau of life during and after the apartheid. Goldblatt is a considered voyeur; careful to create a balance between the critical and judgmental, detachment and involvement. In this sense, there is an anguished absence in his images; the carefulness with which he manoeuvres the impartiality of photography, and its inability to act, is felt like a weight as heavy as the situations he captures. His images are caught up in their own futility.

The discipline of photojournalism is one that is central to this exhibition; the ways in which it is acknowledged, negated, deviated from, deconstructed and, in some cases, completely obliterated, is perhaps the most interesting element of the show. Goldblatt’s viewpoint allies him with photojournalism’s original intent to document and inform. Similarly, Ernest Cole’s didactic photography aims to describe every dimension of the ‘quality of repression.’ After somehow persuading the Race Classification Board in South Africa that he was not ‘black’ but ‘coloured’, Cole started work as a journalist. Cole’s images are sparse, but rich in understanding. The titles attributed to the images are, however, the most enlightening. For example, an image of several black men leaping on to an apparently moving train at a station, is dramatic but meaningless until expanded by a text describing that ‘Black trains’ were given no signs or numbers; no indication of direction, and thus became a lottery of destinations.

The photographs of Golblatt and Cole are inevitably compared; both work in black and white, focus on the apartheid in South Africa and understand the importance of photographic captions. However, Cole was black and Golblatt is white. Cole died in poverty in 1990, his negatives given away, supposedly, in lieu of an unpaid hotel bill. Goldblatt is over 80, represented by the Marian Goodman Gallery and has exhibited his images all over the world. Is there any difference in the veracity of the images they took? Photography is, ostensibly, an objective medium but whether it always real, and necessary; and whether whomever saw it, captured it and rendered it indelible is a pertinent question of photojournalism.

Comparatively, the work of William Eggleston is devoid of journalism. His work was originally criticised for its lack of subject matter and political agenda. In contrast to the four surrounding rooms, entirely comprised of black and white imagery, the colours of Eggleston’s photographs are undeniably seductive. According to curator Kate Bush, one of the key questions the show raises is whether we are prepared to erase the distinction between art and documentary photography? In this context, the decision to include Eggleston in the exhibition suddenly seems contrived and antagonistic. Nevertheless, the gulf between his images of near hallucinatory perception of everyday scenes in Southern America and the unflinching shots of Goldblatt, while it does not lessen, does become less significant.

Adrian Searle, in his review of the exhibition for The Guardian, asks: ‘Is there a connection between a jukebox on a wall in Los Alamos, shot by Eggleston, and a soldier’s helmet to which the skull has fused, in a photograph by [Shomei] Tomatsu? If there is, it has nothing to do with photography, though it might have something to do with Los Alamos where the atomic bomb was developed, and Nagasaki, where it was dropped.’ However, isn’t it surely the point that it has everything to do with photography, and nothing else? Photography collapses everything it captures into image; where everything exists on the same plane. To deny the unifying link that photography affords such varying situations, seems to evade the crux of this particular exhibition. Photography is its own world; it simply reflects our own.

Further pushing this blurring of distinction between art and documentary are artist/photographers Boris Mikhailov and Sigmar Polke. Mikhailov, constrained by Soviet domination of the Ukraine, developed a unique photographic approach in order to evade censorship and satirise the political occupation. His series Yesterday’s Sandwich/Superimpositionsinvolves two slide transparencies; a banal image, such as a sandwich, superimposed onto forbidden subjects such as politics, religion and nudity. The results are somewhere between the grotesque and the beautiful and are complex, witty explorations into life under the Soviet regime. 

Polke, similarly, employs a confused/confusing aesthetic with a sequence of images entitled Der Bärenkampf (The Bear Fight), which have been obscured by a printing process, leaving random chemical marks across the surface. These manipulated photographs have been interpreted as a pre-figuration of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 - four years after the series was created. By obfuscating the image detail and the unity of the photographic plane, Polke has created a series of images that divert the viewer from a wholly ‘documentary’ reading, focusing instead on the intended symbolism.

The works of Mikhailov and Polke, through their use of encryption and obscuration, make it clearer than most the possibilities, and impossibilities of photography. Their work highlights the complicated nature of a viewer’s relationship to images; that photography is as complex as the subjects it captures. In this respect, the title for this exhibition, Everything was Moving, could not have been more suited; vague and ethereal, it contrasts with what it ostensibly a direct show. However, it mirrors photography’s ability to be fixed and unstable; to encompass everything, to seem concrete, while be constantly moving. 

Kathryn Lloyd

First published on the Line Magazine blog

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