Street and Studio: An Urban History of Photography at the Tate Modern, London
by Amy Halliday
The street and the studio are two contrasting, sometimes coinciding and always obliquely conversing, sites of the cosmopolitan camera. The first is photography of the flâneur, the artist who dissolves into crowds, captures a portrait unseen, unkempt, revels in the fickle conditions of urban flux; the latter more consciously composed, working under conditions more controlled, but no less dynamic or experimental.
The development and dialogue of these two photographic arenas provide the trajectory for the Tate Modern's extensive 'urban history of photography', though, with over 350 works, the exhibition tends to lose focus somewhat. More troublesome is that despite being ambitiously aimed at representing the entire project on an 'international' scale, the seemingly wide angle of 'Street and Studio' is clearly cropped to a traditional western narrative with a few token gestures towards Africa. This despite the increasing international visibility of and scholarship on African photography during the last decade, as seen in major exhibitions such as 'In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present', 1996 and 'Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography', 2006.
Each room, following chronological or thematic developments (often jumping rather haphazardly between the two) glares with blindspots: images unseen, stories untold, possibilities and problematics refused.
In the exhibition's first room, 'Precursors', the technical and formal development of urban portraiture in the second half of the 19th century is largely located in the service of taxonomy and surveillance. Louis Vert's images of wandering tramps and small-time tradespeople in France, 1900-1905, are titled and arranged according to occupation, anticipating August Sander's later encyclopaedic prints of German workers in the economic and socio-psychological aftermath of war.
In Switzerland, Carl Denheim was commissioned by the police to make frontal or semi-profile photographs of vagrants from 1852-3, the beginnings of mugshots. Images of celebrities, such as the magazine Galerie Contemporaine's portrait of Charles Baudelaire, usefully reveal that these poses were more widely appropriated as generic conventions for portraiture. However, the much more significant link between a pervasive insistence on classification, the rise of the 'mugshot' mode, and the ethnographic colonial photography of Africa (as well as Asia and Australia) is never made.
'Passers-by' and 'Passengers' are other major avenues for the exhibition's navigation of urban phenomena. The anonymity of strangers seduces the imagination, their secret hopes and hidden frailties nowhere more poignantly exposed than on public transport; that liminal space where privacy is so publicly guarded. This interface proves an enduring subject, from the concealed camera of Walker Evans on the New York subway in the late 30s, to Wolfgang Tillman's recent series of London underground images for the Big Issue.
Cindy Sherman, in the 70s, merges performance art and photography in her studio by recreating - with her own body - characters that she had observed on the bus. Here studio and street, self exposure and social commentary meet and mingle, recalling Dave Southwood's attempt to find and photograph People who other people think look like [him], 2000.
Social documentary becomes allied to imaging the city, the street 'the best indicator of the civil condition of society'. Given the myriad urban scenes selected and displayed - of crowds, idle leisure, poverty and exploitation, transit, labour, alienation - one can't help but wonder: where is Ernest Cole, with his camera secreted in a brown paper lunch bag as he heads down a mine shaft in the 60s? Where is David Goldblatt, as he reveals the conditions of migrant labour on the overcrowded buses in The Transported of the Kwa-Ndebele, 1984? Where are Mikhael Subotsky's various Public Encounters, his capturing of the urban underbelly of Beaufort West, 2005-7: a prostitute arched across a car on a frequented truck route, or the legs of a petty burglar hanging out of a broken window?
Certainly Africa is curiously underrepresented in the 'street' photography of the exhibition (particularly in its social documentary mode). Only Pieter Hugo's Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, 2007, a curiously unsettling portrait of a man and his muzzled hyena below a freeway in Lagos (which seems to play to western notions of the exotic terra incognita) emerges, as do two prints from Goldblatt's On Eloff Street series, 1966-7, which are dismissed in the information brochure as scenes that 'look as though they might have been taken in New York'.
It is acknowledged, however, that 'studio photography flourished in parts of Africa', and certainly it has a long and dynamic history across the continent's major cities and ports, catering to both European and local portraiture demands. Malick Sidibé's resonant black-and-white portraits of individuals, family and social groups speak of a newly independent Mali, a zeitgeist of celebration and possibility, and the growth of a hybrid African popular culture in Bamako. While his recent success is thoroughly deserved, it comes as no surprise that he is the central representative of African studio photography on the exhibition, given his Golden Lion Award at the 2007 Venice Biennale, that eminent gatekeeper of international credibility.
Cameroon-born Samuel Fosso, now living and working in the Central African Republic, also makes an appearance, though it is his black-and-white self-portraits from the 70s that are exhibited, rather than his more recent vibrant-hued engagement with notions of representation and identity. The other African studio photographer included is Ghana's Philip Kwame Apagya. His evocative images of urban wish-fulfilment juxtapose real and fabricated - the earnest sitter and the elaborate setting - through their painted backdrops of famous cities and lavish domestic interiors, as seen in Francis in Manhattan, 1996.
As the exhibition moves towards contemporary urban photography, the boundaries begin to blur as photobooths and digital technology allow for both the anonymity of the street and the composure of the studio.
Photographers challenge and subvert the expectations of each; overlapping genres and fracturing expectations.
Juergen Teller, for example, photographs young girls who come to his London offices at the threshold of his door - the brink of possibility between street and studio. Photography, fashion and celebrity take on an increasingly aggressive interrelationship through the form of paparazzi, where photographers stalk their subjects across the highways and byways of major metropolises. The prevalent themes of fashion and fame, and their inevitable collision in the city's streets and studios (from Cecil Beaton's theatrical celebrity portraits of the 50s to Ron Gallela's unauthorised iconography of the stars), runs through the exhibition as a whole. Nontsikelelo Veleko's series of bold urban fashion portraits from the Jozi streets - Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder, 2003-4 - comes to mind, particularly given the way in which she is often situated by critics and curators in the tradition of Malian studio photographer Seydou Keïta.
Indeed, she takes this legacy of individualised, often idealised, fashion portraits out into the gritty reality of the city, capturing fluctuating contemporary trends in situ. She simultaneously illuminates something of the restless search for identity; the subjective nature of style and perception.
So many great South African and African photographers are brought to presence through their conspicuous absence in this vast exhibition, in which only five photographers from the continent are represented amongst over 100 contributors and 350 works. So many interesting and important images remain unseen, facts and fictions underexposed. Once again, it seems the 'international' lens has been selectively adjusted to focus almost exclusively on Europe and North America: a tangible loss for what might have been an otherwise noteworthy exhibition.
Opens: May 22
Closes: August 31
Tate Modern
Bankside, London
Tel: 020 7887 8888
Email: visiting.modern@tate.org.uk
www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions
Hours: Sun - Thu 10am - 6pm, Fri - Sat 10am - 10pm
