Art
In the depths
John McEwen
Photographs as investment may not be quite the boom they were, but the echo reverberates on nevertheless in galleries private and public. There are several photographic shows at the moment, the 'Gardens' of Eugene Atget (RIBA till 28 July) inevitably the pick of the bunch. Little is known of Atget's life. He struggled along as an actor till he was 40, then moved to Montparnasse and opened a photographic studio supplying prints to artists looking for subject matter for paintings. It was a venerable trade dating back to the 17th century when artist-draftsmen supplied the same material in the form of patterns. The handmade sign on his apartment door read simply 'Documents pour Artistes'.
Atget took infinite pains even over his, printing the autumnal yellow and delicately rippled edges were both designed to enhance the image but he never pretended to fine artistry. He was a documenter, selling his photographs for as little as five francs a piece, living meagrely, but aware enough of the historicai importance of his work to ensure that when he died his collection of glass negatives would be safely enshrined at the Beaux Arts.
All photographs, however banal, are records of time, and accordingly contain some poetic potential to move us, but no photographer has plumbed this inherent melancholy of the medium to such Prous-, tian depths as Atget a comparison made all the more apt by their sharing the same epoch and place. William Howard Adams in his catalogue-monograph demonstrates how quotations from Proust (and Henry James) could well act as captions to these deserted views of Versailles, Arcueil, StCloud and the wilderness of Sceaux. Places so 'aristocratic and demoralising', as Proust wrote, that one is 'not even troubled by. remorse that the lives of so many workmen should have served only to refine and increase, not so much the joys of another age, as the melancholy of ours.' But while it is easy to agree with the consensus that no one has surpassed Atget in communicating this quality photographically, definitions of why he succeeds better than literally hosts. of others continue to elude Jacqueline Onassis in her' sympathetic introductory note as much as they once did Walter Benjamin in his famous essay. Perhaps Atget cared more for such subjects than any other photographer has. Perhaps the better art is, the more mysterious it becomes. Only a visit will reveal how these original prints, frail as the skeletons of leaves, defy illustration no less successfully.
'People in Camera 1839-1914' (National' Portrait Gallery, 15 Carlton House Terrace till 12 August) is a more educational survey of the work of some of Atget's most famous predecessors: Daguerre, Fox Talbot, Mrs Cameron, Lewis Carroll, in fact, every 19th-century portraitist of any note. But of equal documentary interest is a section entitled 'The Other Half', which shows the results of the advent of cheap photography. This led to the foundation of Photographic Departments as at Dr Barnardo's and pictorial cataloguing of every sort from 'Portraits of 23 Birmingham prisoners' to 'The Last Tasmanian Aborigines'. The exhibition has been mounted in collaboration with the Granada Television series 'Camera'. If you have liked the series many of the photographs from it are here. If you have missed it you can make amends in the TV room provided, where instalments are shown at various times throughout the day.
'Three', or rather, 'three perspectives on photography' (Hayward till 8 July) brings us bang-up-to-date with an Arts Council survey of some current British trends. It is no less disappointing for being thoroughly predictable. Two-thirds of it is dreary polytechnical agit-prop, the rest aesthetic. The aesthetic section appears to have fallen foul of some fifth-columnist because, of the leading photographers in this field, only Thomas Joshua Cooper is included. Consequently it looks even more wet and decadent than it need have, very much to the advantage of the robust SocArt of the red brigades next door. SocArt a concoction of the so-called, the socialist and sociological deprives itself of political credibility by selling out to the market forces it most condemns through posing as art in such promotional palaces as the Hayward. In fact without the Arts Council it would not exist as 'art' at all. With the exception of Cooper, this exhibition will, only add credence to the idea that the Council exists to be exploited.
Bill Beckley (Nigel Greenwood till 30 June) and Jan Groover (Waddington till 23 June) are too esteemed photographers from America. Beckley's arch amalgamations of blown-up images and texts have rather more literary and compositional substance than Groover's ad-abstractions of the glories of washing-up, but both hold close to the mainstream of fashionable expectation.
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