MARCH 9, 2016
Great Britain, Strange and Familiar
BY ANDREW DICKSON

Lord Mayor’s Show, Guildhall, City of London, 2014.
Martin Parr’s 2014 photograph from Lord Mayor’s Show at Guildhall, City of London, appears in the solo show “Unseen City,” at Guildhall Art Gallery, in London. A companion exhibition at the Barbican curated by Parr, “Strange and Familiar,” features images of Great Britain by photographers from abroad.
© MARTIN PARR / MAGNUM PHOTOS

For the past forty-odd years, the photographer Martin Parr has trained his eye on all manner of British eccentricity: our Union Jack cupcakes and mock-antique gas fires, our atrocious seaside resorts and apocalyptic garden parties. Though Parr has crisscrossed the globe in search of lurid kitsch—recent projects include a journey negotiating the overcrowded beaches of Italy’s Amalfi Coast and an excursion to Hong Kong—his most distinctive work subjects the U.K. to provocative, forensic scrutiny: he’s a latter-day Hogarth with a Nikon and a medical ring flash. When London authorities allowed Parr to document their closed-door ceremonies and other functions as the culmination of his three-year tenure as the City of London’s photographer-in-residence, one wonders if they knew what they were in for.

Oxford, 1962.
Cas Oorthuys, Oxford, 1962.
© CAS OORTHUYS /NEDERLANDS FOTOMUSEUM

Now Parr has curated a show entitled “Strange and Familiar,” opening at the Barbican on March 16th, in which he turns the kaleidoscope yet again, gathering incisive images of his native country captured by artists from abroad. (A companion exhibit of his London photos, called “Unseen City,” is on display at the Guildhall Art Gallery.) On a recent afternoon, at his studio just around the corner, which is piled high with print boxes and memorabilia, Parr told me that he has long been intrigued by the idea of outsider views of his country. In his extensive photo-book collection are volumes by the Dutch photographer Cas Oorthuys, who came to Britain in the nineteen-fifties to shoot scenes of Oxford and Cambridge, and the Chilean photographer Sergio Larrain, whose wintry pictures of London Parr edited for a specialized photography press in 1998. (Both bodies of work are featured in the exhibit.) “How people see the country that we’re from, from a foreign perspective, is always an appealing idea,” Parr told me. “That sense of curiosity is at the heart of the show.” The earliest images in “Strange and Familiar” date from the early nineteen-thirties; the most recent are from 2014. Some of the photographers came to the U.K. on fleeting trips, shooting what they happened to come upon. Others made journeys in search of specific subjects.

London, 1952 – 53.
Robert Frank, London, 1952–53.
© ROBERT FRANK / NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART WASHINGTON. COURTESY OF PACE / MACGILL GALLERY

Robert Frank was somewhere in between. From 1951 to 1953, just prior to winning the Guggenheim Fellowship that took him through the United States, Frank travelled across Europe, hoping to convince Life to run some of his pictures and the Magnum photo agency to take him on. Although he failed on both counts—perhaps just as well, given that the Guggenheim allowed him to make “The Americans” a few years later—Frank’s itinerary brought him to London and South Wales. What he found was a Britain of schizoid divisions. His first images sweep us through the pea-soup fogs of London’s financial district in the wake of well-upholstered City gents in bowler hats and overcoats. Another sequence, shot in the Welsh coal-mining village of Caerau, offers scenes that could have come from another planet, not a land a hundred miles distant: wraith-like miners emerging from Stygian gloom, the whites of their eyes hollowed out by the coal dust coating their faces. Another extraordinary photograph, of an empty hearse parked on a street of grimy terrace houses, seems to say it all: postwar Britain is a terminal case. Just visible on the left side of the image, all but swallowed by fog and photographic grain, is the scribbled silhouette of a small child running away.

Evelyn Hofer, Crossing Guard, London, 1962.
COURTESY ROSEGALLERY, SANTA MONICA © THE EVELYN HOFER ESTATE

Much of the rest of “Strange and Familiar” lingers in this minor key. Decade after decade, the photographers find Britain in a bad way, trapped rather too obviously in the shadows of its past. There is a heavy coating of soot and dirt and poor Victorian housing, an agglomeration of bad dentistry, royalist fervor, and bruised skies. After visiting Wales in 1965, Bruce Davidson came back with images of exhausted mining communities that, had they been taken in black-and-white rather than in color (a rarity for Davidson at the time), could be mistaken for those by Frank. Dispatched to Glasgow by the Sunday Times fifteen years later, the French photojournalist Raymond Depardon likewise found rain-drenched streets and blackened tenement blocks. In one frame, the sole sour splotches of color are the red and navy blue of a betting-shop sign and the maroon socks of a drunk man sprawled on the pavement. “Someone told me they thought the show was very bleak,” Parr said, sounding not at all displeased with the idea.

Bruce Davidson, Wales, 1965.
© BRUCE DAVIDSON / MAGNUM PHOTOS

The most eloquent images in the exhibit focus on overlooked aspects of British life. The remarkable Edith Tudor-Hart (1908–73), who was born Edith Suschitzky into a progressive Jewish family in Vienna and trained at the Bauhaus, spent much of her life in Britain under surveillance for her impassioned left-wing sympathies. Blacklisted, she was forced to give up photography altogether, and she ended her career running an antiques shop. The images of hers included here—among them a scene of two children peeking like polar explorers into a modernist housing estate in West London—contain, in addition to human warmth and social concern, a sense of estrangement from the rituals of her adopted home. Another European exile, Paul Strand, left America in 1949, anxious about anti-Communist witch-hunts. His pictures, taken during a three-month sojourn in the Outer Hebrides, in 1954, find a granitic toughness in these remote Scottish island communities. Their residents look unabashedly into the lens as if it were they, not we, doing the appraising. Like Tudor-Hart, Strand seems attuned to British ways of living, yet alert to what makes them peculiar.

Paul Strand, Margaret MacLean, South Uist, Hebrides, 1954.
PAUL STRAND / PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF © APERTURE FOUNDATION INC., PAUL STRAND ARCHIVE

Something similar happens in the work of Evelyn Hofer, who lived a peripatetic childhood, in the nineteen-thirties—Germany, Geneva, Madrid, Mexico, New York—and later contributed images to a thoughtful series of travel books, including one on London. Hofer’s portraits, published in 1962 in the volume “London Perceived,” allow a faint twinge of the ridiculous. In one, a female guard stands sentinel over her road crossing, shot from the side like a piece of street furniture, a blimpish white overcoat tethered to two tiny ankles. For another set of images, Hofer managed to lug her unwieldy 4×5 camera and tripod inside Parkhurst prison, on the Isle of Wight. One of her subjects is an empty cell: despite the steel door, it looks bizarrely homely, with its quilted bedspread and chintzy fabrics—and unavoidably British, too. Only after a moment do you register the collage of girlie magazines covering nearly every inch of the wall.

Foyle Road on the day after clashes between Catholics and Protestants in the Battle of the Bogside. Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland August 1969.
Akihiko Okamura, Foyle Road on the day after clashes between Catholics and Protestants in the Battle of the Bogside. Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland, August, 1969.
© AKIHIKO OKAMURA / COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF AKIHIKO OKAMURA, HAKODATE, JAPAN

The show’s standout pictures—at least for this Brit—come from two Japanese photographers, Akihiko Okamura and Shinro Ohtake. Okamura, having made his reputation with courageous photojournalism of the Vietnam War, brought his family to Dublin in 1968 and found himself drawn to the conflict in Northern Ireland, which was about to enter its bloodiest decade. Yet despite the horror that Okamura observed—one photograph of the aftermath of a Belfast street battle shows blood spattered on pavement, its mahogany-red color a queasy complement to the pink flower bouquet placed on top—the atmosphere conveyed is of stiff-necked keep-calm-and-carry-on. A second image of the same battle features two neatly dressed women, tea mugs in hand, on the way to dole out mid-riot refreshments: a British commonplace made alien by its unconventional setting.

Ohtake, who was born in Tokyo, arrived in London as a twenty-two-year-old, in 1977, speaking no English; as he later recalled, the city was “utterly distinct to any place I’d walked before.” Prowling the streets with a secondhand Nikon F, Ohtake shot obsessive, Ruscha-like series, capturing whatever on the street delighted his eye: ice-cream stands, petrol pumps, tins of peas in store windows, tinny-looking French cars standing outside garages. There is a guileless quality to these images, yet also something purposefully canny: a sense of suspended, matter-of-fact oddness. Distanced but never alienated from the landscape they depict, Ohtake’s pictures find a kind of solace in that in-between position—strange and familiar at once, and alert to details often ignored by those of us who look at Britain every day.

From the series UK77, 1977–1978.
Shinro Ohtake, from the series “UK77,” 1977–1978.
© SHINRO OHTAKE / COURTESY OF TAKE NINAGAWA GALLERY, TOKYO

From the series UK77, 1977–1978.
Shinro Ohtake, from the series “UK77,” 1977–1978.
© SHINRO OHTAKE / COURTESY OF TAKE NINAGAWA GALLERY, TOKYO

OORTHUYS, CAS - Term in Oxford

OORTHUYS, CAS; PENROSE, ROGER - Oxford en Cambridge (Contact-foto-pockets).