11: Fiction is stranger than truth at Somerset House this January

Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour
Tim Walker: Story Teller
Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 1LA
www.somersethouse.org.uk
Visited on Sunday 27 January 2013

There is something pleasing about the fact that while the culturecake project was devised to fill up my time following my departure from the Somerset House-headquartered National Youth Orchestra, the first cultural visit post-‘sabbatical’ actually brought me back to that very same location, for two free photography exhibitions – Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour and Tim Walker: Story Teller.

The courtyard at Somerset House

Somerset House is in interesting place to visit in itself. It was built in the 1790s, on the site of an old Tudor palace, and was intended to provide accommodation for the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Society, and the Society of Antiquaries, as well as various government offices and the Navy Board. The instruction to the architect was to create a building that would be "an ornament to the Metropolis and a monument of the taste and elegance of His Majesty's Reign". Originally the building could be accessed directly by boat from the Thames – a requirement of the Navy Board who needed to be able to travel to the dockyards at Greenwich. However, with the construction of the Victoria Embankment in the 1860s – a scheme which provided a useful new road next to the river, but whose literally underlying purpose was to create a much-needed sewerage system for the city and its burgeoning population – much of this was subsumed, and all that remains of the grand river entrances today is a central arch and the aptly-named West Water Gate (essentially, the tradesman’s entrance to the building, known by those who work there as Charmain’s Passage, after the utterly humourless security lady who guards it from within her little booth, as Brother Neil and Charlie will attest).

As it was in the early 1800s

The central quadrangle is still an absolutely splendid courtyard, though it’s often filled with temporary constructions such as the ice-skating rink round Christmas time, and accommodation for the twice-yearly hipster-and-fashionista fest that is London Fashion Week. Today, happily, it was empty and in the lovely Sunday morning sunshine it looked particularly grand.

After a rendezvous in the Seamen’s Hall, we began with the Cartier-Bresson exhibition. I learned from the information on the wall that Henri Cartier-Bresson is acknowledged as one of the 20th century’s greatest photographers, and is noted particularly for images that capture life ‘on the fly’ – that is, photos that preserve for future and lengthy consideration fleeting 'decisive moments' of order within apparent chaos. He worked almost exclusively in black and white, believing that colour would detract from the inherent power of a photo. The curator of this exhibition (one William A. Ewing) has chosen to display ten of his pieces that have never before been exhibited in the UK alongside colour photographs from more recent photographic artists who share Cartier-Bresson's fascination with this 'decisive moment’. I guess the idea is to see whether Cartier-Bresson’s idea that colour dilutes the power is really true.

I love this kind of photography because mostly the subject matter is ordinary and everyday – a man crossing a road, the reflection of a car in a bus shelter, a group of kids playing in the street. What’s captured in the photo is a moment that barely existed, one that would pass so quickly you might simply not notice it. Often such a moment is ‘decisive’ owing to the composition – for one fleeting moment, the man’s head in the foreground is perfectly in the middle of the arm of that construction crane on the site in the background, for example. The photo records the moment for us to consider and be delighted by, all the more so because we know that the very next second after the shutter closed, it simply wasn’t there any more. (Those idents for Channel 4 play on this exact theory – bundled blocks of hay float apparently randomly in the air, but as the camera moves left to right, for a split second they align to form the figure ‘4’, then the moment is gone and they are random floating blocks again).

The 'question of colour' is, I think, rather easily answered. Cartier-Bresson's black and whites are certainly powerful, but the others are no less so. I felt that their potency was if anything enhanced by their bold and vibrant colours. Moreover, many of the decisive moments in these photographs wouldn’t have existed if the image had just been black and white – for example a lovely one taken at a zebra crossing featured a man holding an orange in his hand that was at exactly the same level, and was exactly the same colour, as a dustcart left beside the pavement. It was a cute moment, pretty much insignificant in terms of its actual subject, and captured by more by luck than judgment - but the presence of colour was the thing that gave it its artistic impact. Though some shots were more appealing than others, generally this was a fascinating and delightful collection of split seconds from the 20th century that left me feeling very grateful to the photographers for bothering to capture them. Very much worth seeing.

The rooms in the South Building of Somerset House have beautiful marquetry floors, high ceilings and large windows, and as such form very pleasant, airy spaces in which to display art. As a viewer, you feel like you're strolling around a stately home, and the things you're looking at are clearly presented. Of course the space in a gallery can be used much more imaginatively, as we found with the Tim Walker exhibition, which brings to life his photographs in a vivid and almost confrontational way.

We entered the first room to find the tail fin and fuselage of what seemed to be a real Spitfire, the two pieces attached to opposite sides of the room. The descriptive information on the wall, written by the photographer himself, began very high up and descended in a curve - appropriate typesetting for the effusive and emotional wording. Some photographs were hanging on the walls, but many were displayed within shallow wooden cases set in ‘islands’ in the middle of each room and made, I suppose, to look like the kind of hay stuffing-filled boxes you might use to transport artworks around. We soon realised that the Spitfire was a prop used in several of that room’s photos, and this idea of displaying the props alongside the photos that feature them continued throughout the exhibition. Interesting.

Tim Walker’s work will be very familiar to readers of magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair. His fashion shoots go far beyond the depiction of models wearing particular clothes - they are hugely lavish, super-contrived stories in themselves. You can hardly even imagine how much effort must have gone into the shoot for each image, not least on the part of the photographer, who clearly has an enormously fertile imagination. The props, clothing, lighting, composition and post work have all been considered in minute detail, and executed with extreme care, in order to give the most robust support possible to the subject – and every single image in this collection packs an enormous punch.

In each room there was piece of flamboyant blurb on the wall from Mr Walker, outlining his thoughts and ambitions in creating the images, and laid out in a typographically quirky fashion. The images themselves depict improbable or impossible but hugely desirable scenes, where people, poses, colour and objects come together in an almost inexplicably alluring way. They couldn’t be more different in what they achieve artistically from those in the Cartier-Bresson exhibition, which are appealing owing to their serendipitous truth. Here, truth is banished with childlike glee and abandon. These images come straight from the artist’s imagination and connect with yours in a delicious visual conspiracy. Some of it is creepy – the oversized snail props on the walls, for example, or the disturbingly huge and slightly malevolent-looking doll – but mostly it’s playful, and saturated with delight in its own fantastical, fairytale world. Here are some examples of what I mean, and much more can be seen on his website:

Like a nursery rhyme come to life

Smouldering

Fairy-mong

Quirky-creepy

Clever, and funny

Beautiful and aaaaaaaaargh at the same time

Possibly the most captivating image in the exhibition

(Not in the exhibition - this is a self-portrait of the photographer)

That photo provides a rather nice segue to the baked goods part of the report. We took coffee and cake in Tom’s Deli, located just off the Seamen’s Hall. It’s not bad in there. They make a lot of effort to display the impressive selection of cakes nicely, though they’re not afraid to charge for it – two coffees and a brownie came to £7.50. Said brownie was particularly fine however – slab-like in proportions, with a wonderfully crunchy top that gave way under only slight pressure to allow the (regrettably plastic) fork to sink into a good inch of chocolate-y deliciousness. It was a 9 out of 10.

Damn pricey postcard!

All in all, I’d highly recommend both these exhibitions, particularly as they are free. The only real negative is that the Rizzoli Bookshop is shockingly over-priced and they only have a choice of three postcards on offer from the exhibitions, priced at £2.50 each! I bought one anyway. Somerset House is also worth a visit – though I think it’s best in the summer when you can go via Tesco on the Strand and pick up a bottle of wine for consumption on the lovely terrace that overlooks the Thames.