Sally Mann
Photographers' Gallery

Pete McGovern
Sally Mann at The Photographers' Gallery
Voyeurism and Surveillance at Tate Modern
Wolfgang Tillmans at Serpentine Gallery
Steve McQueen at National Portrait Gallery

There's so much art photography on view around London this summer. So much you might wonder if the medium has come to be not only routinely accepted as an art form but, arguably, it presently stands astride the art world as the ultimate contemporary practice of choice. Blimey. No mean feat, particulary as it has happened largely in the space of just one generation. To illustrate the point, take a lap around the annual BP Portrait painting show at the NPG, as has been the case in recent years it is simply heaving with canvases mimicking the vocabulary of photography.

Sally Mann's work at The Photographers' Gallery is a more modest version of a show that has been touring Scandinavia and is, oddly enough, her first solo exhibition in Britain. Nice to see they've gone to the trouble of decorating, lighting and dividing the space in the fashion of a late 19th century, gas-mantle lit salon, providing atmospheric context. Such is the longevity of Mann's photographic career she has witnessed the remarkable rise of the machine in art at first hand within her own working life. Her increasing interest in historical processes certainly marks her as an all-encompassing figure, salvaging technologies and re-evaluating methodologies. Way back in the 80's I was never quite able to feel comfortable with her highly personal documenting of her children's lives. It is done with an almost lustful intimacy that it is not easy to look at without feeling intrusive and awkward. Even the valley location seems remote, lost in time. While her motherly eye may have been uninhibited there is a certain level of unease standing before her detailed, deeply lush, big prints in a busy gallery gazing upon her children at their most vulnerable - even if they are themselves described as 'collaborators' in the work. But it is only when giving in to a vision that is so forceful and beguiling that your natural reserve eventually succumbs and you appreciate the level of achievement.
In the magnificent depiction of these dream-like, sensual moments permission transcends suspicion and you grasp something of a rich familial experience.

Yet it is not all sweetness and light. The languorous water and heavy masses of foliage imbue a shadow-filled mournfulness. The later landscape and recent portrait works go on to adopt the equipment and processes of the early pioneer American photographers. They employ fragile tonalites, shallow depth of field and limitations in resolution, with exposures falling spent in the furthest corners of the negatives and handling damage evident to the delicate materials. Into the vistas she literally brings death, perhaps in a reaction to the earlier explorations of the passing of childhood, with harrowing images of decomposing cadavers, overwhelmed by nature. She's a heavy hitter and the various shocks of the profoundly metaphysical in Mann's work are not commonly addressed - perhaps her and Andres Serrano being rare examples of contemporary art photographers proving themselves capable with such subjects.

Tate Modern continues to build on its last minute conversion to the medium with another monster show. It was clear they were playing it safe again getting outside help, this time with Sandra Phillips of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art holding their hand. Despite hearing bad word of mouth reviews what a terrific space, though - easily matching the Barbican, Hayward and V&A who have all been supporting photography in the UK for decades. Obvious concerns are the laziness of the premise and the ensuing superficiality - for instance early in the show is the 50's Marilyn Monroe 'Seven Year Itch' promo shot.
Exposed - Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera - is about as flimsy as you can get while still at least sounding academic. The term voyeurism is applied so loosely here it covers almost all photography and particularly the documentary and street traditions - while carefully avoiding the question of how an audience looks at images. It is such diluted usage to be simply any form of lens-based visual curiosity. In the past the old-art establishment used to bang on about voyeurism in an effort to make photography go away - clearly it didn't - but it is as if the squeamishness of high-culture/polite society didn't go away either and resonates on in hollow fashion. Tate has only begun to embrace photography for what it is, a genuinely democratic form, but at the moment they appear to be milking this cash cow while maintaining a certain level of residual distrust.

The central theme is applied in such a way that not only could much from the other three shows in this review have slotted in in a heartbeat so could work from probably every other photography show. As for the matter of surveillance, compared to a liberated space like the Saatchi Gallery the most prominent aspect of this theme was ironically the CCTV in every room backed up by ever-vigilant ushers with walkie-talkies alert to the danger of someone surreptitiously using a camera, all without any trace of irony.

As Larry Sultan & Mike Mandel showed with their seminal book of found photographs, 'Evidence' back in 1977, since most photographs are made in a mechanically similar way, disparate images can form an unexpectedly coherent whole. So, while this exhibition fails to address any relevant, contemporary discourse it nevertheless is at times engaging and there are gems to be found due to the sheer quantity served up So while the latest incarnation of the Nan Goldin 45 minute slide-show 'The Ballad of Sexual Dependency' diary piece might be looking a bit tired, it was a real pleasure to see again the Sophie Calle 'chambermaid' series with its compulsive wit and to discover Mark Ruwedel's more sombre New Topographics influenced colour works - a record of the oddly banal traces left in the desert by migrants attempting the potentially life-transforming crossing from Mexico into the US.


Even in a shoe-box of a space Wolfgang Tillmans manages to curate in his own slightly anarchic unique way. And it's quite unlike his neat (and exhaustive) compendium of 2,400 thumbnail images 'if one thing matters everything matters'.

This Serpentine Gallery mini-retrospective it is a reminder that repeated themes can go a long way and continue to build up a momentum of meaning - and there are examples of homo-eroticism, the windowsills full of bric-a-brac and the sheets of vibrantly coloured photographic paper conjured in the dark-room. While I was there art critic and national treasure Andrew Graham-Dixon had a brief nose around but while he might have got the point quicker than me I think there's benefit to be gained from hanging around a bit and pondering what's on offer. The billboard size prints of nothing recognizable while not all that engaging did offer sublime areas of interest upon close-up inspection, and reflection. The low-res blow ups (perhaps literally referring to the 60's Antonioni film 'Blow Up') also reminded me of some Paul Hill room-sized landscapes from the late 70's where the granulation of the silver grain structure of film was exposed in a vital way, with similar interesting texturality of light. The coloured sheets of printing paper were oddly lovely and the playing with creasing and folding added further elements in the handling of materials. Their free-form layouts were, perhaps accidentally, reminiscent of the Gerhard Richter painting show at this gallery a year or so ago, of more rigorous grids of colours. Particularly effective were the use of the vertically mounted, colourless, transparent boxes, in the best case not only to preserve an immaculate, dust-free jet black surface but through the discrete use of a supporting strut to hold a bend in the bottom quarter of the sheet of paper at precisely the right angle. That attention to valuing something so ephemeral and inconsequential was noteworthy. As too the crumpling in a sheet of dreamy pale blue, buckled most probably by his fist punching its centre while suspended in mid-air.


In Room 37 at the National Portrait Gallery is Steve McQueen's piece 'Queen and Country'. Consisting of an imposing cabinet in the centre of the room - slightly evocative of a coffin lying at rest - it is full of narrow sliding drawers each containing a sheet of postage stamps, each sheet bearing the image of a different British soldier killed in the war in Iraq. At face value it is a tribute to 'our boys' sacrifice but perhaps in the associated campaign to pressure the government - with a petition accompanying the work on tour - to actually issue these stamps there may be a more subversive aspect. Considering McQueen's previous works have not shied from expressing the complexities within conflicts it may be the only way to explain why this should not be seen simply as an official war artist's belated riposte to Giuseppe di Bella's Abu Ghraib series (2004-2006).