Shape of Light, Tate Modern

Shape of Light

Tate Modern

We were fortunate enough to have a day in London last Friday.  Apart from going to the theatre in the evening to see The King and I (excellent) it was to be a gallery day.  We went to the Lindley Library at the RHS to see a superb display of botanical paintings including one of Patricia a beautiful deep pink geranium I had bought for my wife a year ago and then on to the OXO  Tower to see the Evolving Landscape exhibition.  We finished just along the river at the Tate for the Shape of Light.  Not realising how large it was we annoyingly left ourselves slightly short of time to do it justice but it was superb.

Room 1, Introduction

Covering the past century this exhibition tells the intertwined stories of photography and abstract art and is the first to explore the relationship between the two.  It looks at the innovation of photographers and shows how they responded and contributed to the development of abstraction.  There are works from such as Man Ray, Alfred Steiglitz, Edward Steichen and Paul Strand as well as contemporary work by Barbara Kasten and Thomas Ruff and new work by Anthony Cairns, Maya Rochat and Daiske Yokota made especially for the exhibition. Sean O'Hagan in the Guardian points out that they embrace abstraction as a kind of compliment to their more traditional documentary work.  He says that their often stark monochrome photographs are contrasted with the formalist paintings of Braque, Kandinsky and Mondrian as well as the shiny curves of a gold Branusci sculpture, Maiastra (1911) (O'Hagan, 2018)

Room 2, Camera Work

The work in the 2nd room in the show is entitled Camera Work and introduces us not only to the work of Alfred Stiegliz and Edward Steichen, his journal Camera Work and gallery 291 but to 'straight photography' and the photographs of Paul Strand who photographed everyday objects in a way that made them unrecognisable.  He called these 'abstractions'.  Stieglitz devoted the final issue of Camera Work to Strand.

Room 3, New Vision.

Called New Vision, this room looks at a new way of depicting the world during the 1920s spearheaded by photographers and artists from Russia and the Bauhaus in Germany.  We see the work of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy in both painting and photography.

Lazlo Moholy-Nagy KVII, 1922

Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Photograms

Room 4 Objects and Constructions

Here we examine work from the 1920s and 1930s where artists used objects to produce photographic abstractions.  They also made objects more abstract by deconstructing the photographic print through collage and photomontage.  Several of the images here were made without a camera.  Man Ray termed his work 'Rayographs', after himself, although they are also photograms and the ones shown here were produced from 1922 - 1927.

Sean O'Hagan suggests that both Many Ray and 

Moholy-Nagy cast a long shadow: Moholy-Nagy in his architectural understanding of scale and detail, and his subversion of the same; Man Ray in his seemingly instinctive grasp of photography as an essentially surrealist medium, capable of bending the real out of shape in astonishing ways.  

Room 5, Finding Form

This section examines Surrealism which embraced photography of all kinds from found images to conscious abstractions.  Photography offered the opportunity to look closer at the world, uncovering the latent surrealism in everyday life.  Artists exhibited here have experimented in the darkroom and create abstractions through the distortion of the human body.  Both mirrors and extreme cropping were employed.

Bill Brandt, Bodies

Bill Brandt, Bodies

Room 6, Drawing With Light.

Photographs displayed here trace the movement of light onto photographic paper.  The idea of automatism, creativity that is not consciously controlled was used.  The surrealists believed that by applying chance to mark making artists could be released from the constraints of rational thought and become free to express their unconscious.  Photographers moved both their cameras and light sources to produce abstract images with motion blur and Jackson Pollock produced work using splattered paint.

Jackson Pollock, Number 23

Room 7, Subjectivity and Expression.

In the 1940s a generation of German photographers, led by Otto Steinert were keen to continue the ideas that had emerged from the Bauhaus.  The called themselves fotoform and considered themselves modernists, promoting innovation and experimentation with form and emphasis on materials and processes.  Brazilian photographer Geraldo de Barros developed similar ideas independently as 'fotofomas'.

Room 8, Surface and Texture

I was particularly interested in the work on show in this room as I enjoy making images in the same vein.  Shown here are found abstractions lifted from nature and the urban environment.  Through selection, framing and emphasis of tone and contrasts, photography casts a new light on the everyday.  These photographs, exhibition guide tells us encourage us to look closer.  They present peeling paint and scratched surfaces as worthy of aesthetic appreciation.

Brassai, 

Brassai is best known for his depiction of Parisian nightlife but in 1933 he bagan taking photographs of gaffiti, work which he continued for 20 years.  He also photographed abstract patterns, grooves and cracks.  These images appealed to the surrealists and he brought attention to the unusual and overlooked.

Guy Bourdin, Untitled, 1950s

Aaron Siskind

Works by Aaron Siskind were exhibited alongside paintings and assemblages of found objects.  Many noted similarities between such images and the gestural brush strokes of contemporary painters.  However, in using the world around us to make images that highlight texture and surface, photography retains a sense of subject that painting does not.  These photographs have more in common with assemblage, the repurposing of everyday objects as art.

Sean O'Hagan argues that the work harks back to older forms of expression such as cave drawings.  (see my private blog for cave paintings visited this June and also here. )  O'Hagan continues by saying that more intriguing still are Aaron Siskind's photographs of cracked, peeling paint on weathered surfaces, which possess a tangible sense of materiality and a tonal quality that speaks of time passing and, with it, the slow, inexorable decay of buildings, objects and those who created them.

Room 9, The Sense of Abstraction

This room goes some way to recreating a MoMA 1960 exhibition of 1960, The Sense of Abstraction.  Included are examples of 'accidental' abstracts to experimental work that sought to break new ground.  The exhibition guide tells us that the variety of images spoke to photography's complex relationship with abstract art.  Some of the photographers, including Minor White were surprised at the inclusion of their work as they felt that they were not abstractions.  Minor White said that, although his images may resemble abstract paintings it was coincidental and not intentional.  The MoMA exhibition we are told paved the way for a further 60 years of experimentation.

Alvin Langdon Coburn, Vortograoh, 1917

Room 10, Optical Effects.

The work here shows allegiance to the 'Op Art' movement.  Photographers carried out experiments with the camera and in the darkroom before capturing the results on photographic paper.  Light was manipulated through movement, moving materials and equipment by hand and also by mechanical means.  Light was also passed through filters.

Room 11, Minimalism and Series.

Minimalism clams that art should have its own reality and not be an imitation of anything else, the exhibition guide tells us.  Minimalist artists make no attempt to represent the outside world, their experiences or emotions.  They want the viewer to respond only to what is in front of them.  Other images look at serial art and conceptual practices, which often involve following strict sets of rules to determine their outcome and composition.  The work here creates order through repetition and highlights the form and structure of the world around us.

Sean O'Hagan says that Lewis Baltz's almost bland minimilism is a much-needed breathing space from the sensual overload of the exhibition.  He says that his evocation of the banality of postwar suburban American architecture - grey concrete surfaces in small frames - has a social, even political, undertow in that it draws attention to the deadpan way to the spread of these soulless environments.  This, he says is the mundane made abstract.

Lewis Baltz

Room 12, Contemporary Abstraction.

This final part of the exhibition features work made since the launch of the first digital camera in 1975 and some of the works have been made especially for this show.

Paul Graham,

In 2009 while scanning work for a retrospective show of his documentary work Graham noticed the different structures of photographic film.  He took these scans and made extreme closeups of the type of film used in each body of work.

Maya Rochat, A Rock is  River, 2018

Maya Rochat's work is more of an installation than a photograph.  It comprises a mesh banner, inkjet printed on paper, woven cotton, photographs, painted surfaces and projections.  Rochat says of her work that each person has an experience that's unique - just by being there , you are activating the show .....the people, are changing - each moment is there just for you, and then it's gone.You can't really document it. It's also a way of sharing what happens when you make an image - you have these apparitions that appear in the moment.  If it's too fixed I feel a little bored.  It's not the end result it's the process.

Thomas Ruff

In 2011 German photographer began experimenting with a new way of producing photograms.  He worked with a 3-D imaging expert to design a virtual darkroom that allowed him to choose and manipulate the size, material, colour and transparency of the digital objects his photogram would record.  The result was a digital darkroom environment that offered limitless possibilities and control.

I agree with Sean O'Hagan when he says that this is an exhibition that demands a constant attentiveness to detail and, as such, will repay a second or even third visit.  The sheer amount of work on display is at times overwhelming.....

I totally agree with this statement; we chose to visit late on in the day not appreciating the extent of the show.  I suffered somewhat from visual and conceptual overload.  It was, however, fantastic and I would love to be able to make another visit or perhaps spend £25 on the exhibition catalogue.  I did come away with a clearer understanding of how much photography has been intertwined with abstract art over the last 100 years.  Abstract photography both using ICM, long and multi exposure techniques and also making close-up abstract images of things such as patterns on beaches, peeling paint, rust and the bark of trees has long been an interest and fascination of mine.  Until this exhibition I have always regarded it as 'fun' and 'playing' but perhaps now this 'play' has been given academic legitimacy.