Prosaic scenes of strange beauty
With photography rivalling painting in today's international salerooms, a TV documentary on the subject is long overdue. BBC4's six-part series, which begins this Thursday (with a carefully informative accompanying book), is also illustrated through an exhibition drawn from the Magnum archives of influential images along the time- line of photographic history.
The earliest example, André Kertész's 1928 street scene, Meudon, is an exercise in sophisticated composition and narrative intrigue and still a model for photography students. His study of a fork - a feast of shadows and angles influenced by Russia's Constructivists - possesses a lasting modernist appeal lacking, for instance, in the now clichéd curvaceous pepper by Edward Weston.
Photojournalism inevitably threads through a Magnum show and Don McCullin's soldier, shell-shocked in Vietnam, remains a relevant statement. Cartier-Bresson is an essential presence; his "decisive moment" is represented in the thankfully less familiar image of a captured French Gestapo informer, which sits well against the careful detachment in Stuart Franklin's tanks in Tiananmen Square (1989).
Portraiture is explored across the decades including a remarkable crosssection, from Imogen Cunningham's character study of Frida Kahlo, Steve McCurry's green-eyed Afghan girl decades later, and Aleksandr Rodchenko's remarkable 1924 close-up of his mother's face.
What is most notable about this informative but relatively small exhibition is that it reveals a continuing fascination with exploring the photographic potential of the unremarkable - albeit in quite different technological guises.
Andreas Gursky's small colour photograph, Duisberg (1989), showing a flyover and field below, Peter Fraser's strangely riveting paper airplane lying on a dirty floor (2001-4), and Jem Southam's colour landscape of a frosty Devon morning (2001).
Its visual chaos - farm equipment and nature's tangles - compares with cacophonous cityscapes by Thomas Struth and Trent Parke. Such everyday scenes neatly link to pioneers like Kertész who helped transform our sense of where beauty lies.
Until 3 November. Information: 020 7224 4192, www.atlasgallery.com.
The Genius Of Photography
Atlas
Dorset Street, W1U 7NF
