Showing results by author "Marina Vaizey" in All Categories

Marina Vaizey reviews the work of Julia Margaret Cameron, Victorian photographer, exhibited at the Victoria and Albert, and Science Museum London.

EM Forster's famous dictum "Only connect!" is often quoted out of context but it is a resoundingly emotive phrase which might also be taken as the motto for the first major excursion by the National Gallery, London, into the history, portent and meaning of photography as a medium. Before Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present, the National Gallery has only exhibited the work of a contemporary photographer on one occasion.

Linnaeus Tripe? Shades of a minor character in Dickens or Trollope, but in fact the resoundingly named Tripe (1822-1902), army officer and photographer, was the sixth son and ninth child of a professional middle-class family from Devonport, his father a surgeon in the Royal Navy. He joined, as so many of his background did - younger son, but of a certain social status - the East India Company's army (the 12th Madras Native Infantry) aged only 17, the third Tripe son to do so.

This ample exhibition - 150 or so photographs, and a small complementary display of well chosen magazines, showing a succinct number in published form - by Man Ray (1890-1976) is described as the first to concentrate exclusively on his portraits. He was born in Philadelphia as Michael Emmanuel Radnitzky, the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants (the father's classic occupation for someone of his ethnicity and class that of a tailor); the family moved to Brooklyn in 1897, the first of Man Ray's advantageous geographical relocations.

The dazzling exhibition of Horst at the Victoria and Albert is particularly apt: classically trained in avant garde design and architecture, Horst was involved as a precociously successful photographer for Condé Nast publications, not only with the leading fashion houses, but the social and artistic élite. And he took sustained inspiration from the isms of art - past and present. In the thirties he photographed costumes by Dali and used props from Giacometti furniture. Dali designed a set for a photograph for Horst to take for American Vogue, with dresses by Hattie Carnegie.

The extraordinary exhibition of thousands of photographs ranging from cumbersome, beautifully detailed, sharply acute photographs of the aftermath of the 1860s American Civil War to mundane landscapes taken in 2013, are based on an enlivening, provocative, and even perhaps controversial organizing principle. What is novel is the unusual premise: eschewing more conventional and immediate reportage, or documentary series, the selection moving from gallery to gallery - and section by section in the catalogue - is defined by time.

Major discoveries can still be made in the field of visual art, but few perhaps are quite so surprising as the current first retrospective devoted to the French photographer Camille Silvy at the National Portrait Gallery, London (to October 24).

Several hundred photographs of varying scales, and most of them newly printed gelatin silver prints, in superb tones of greys, blacks, and whites, take us into a world that has been subliminally familiar to us for nearly 50 years. Stardust is the title given to this self-selected retrospective, three years in the making, the photographer his own curator, and the word neatly encapsulates the fascinating conundrum of photography itself. As Bailey himself puts it, "It's not the camera that takes the picture, it's the person," and these photographs are as much about Bailey as his subject.

Once upon a time in Düsseldorf, in the 1970s, there was an astonishing art academy, the Kunstakademie, with amazing teachers, and amazing students. Düsseldorf was a very proud art city, and even published at the time, a book of photographs called Düsseldorf City of Artists. The presence of that great, messianic leader, Joseph Beuys loomed large. Gerhard Richter, (and Gotthard Graubner among others), taught painting, and an outstanding couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher, taught photography.