Photography's art history laid bare in UK show
by Stephanie Pett and Paul Casciato

Reuters    Translate This Article
30 October 2012

LONDON (Reuters) - Photography's artistic roots are laid bare in a new show which brings historical paintings, early photographs and contemporary pictures together in a new show at Britain's National Gallery.

'Seduced by Art: Photography Past & Present' explores how photographers from the medium's earliest beginnings to the present day stand on the shoulders of artistic predecessors stretching back to ancient Greece.

'They had no history, they had no template, so where would they go to find their direction,' Curator Hope Kingsley told Reuters on a tour of the show.

The exhibit, organised into genres such as portraiture, still life and landscape, shows how photographers from the earliest Daguerrotypes imitated classical works, employed allegory and eclipsed the painted portraiture they initially aped, gradually establishing their medium as an art form.

Paintings such as Thomas Gainsborough's 'Mr and Mrs Andrews' and Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet's giant 'Battle of Jemappes' share a show with 19th century photographic pioneers such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Oscar Gustav Rejlander as well as photographers and photojournalists from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Gainsborough's late 18th century portrait of 'Mr and Mrs Andrews', depicting landed gentry, is contrasted with Martin Parr's photograph of a proud young 1990s British couple in their first home and Tina Barney's 'The Ancestor', a 21st century photograph of a European aristocrat in his family pile beneath an aged painting of a distant ancestor.

Still Life gets explosive with Ori Gersht's 'Blow Up'. Gersht recreated the bouquet of Ignace-Henri-Theodore Fantin-Latour's 19th century still life 'The Rosy Wealth of June', hanging nearby. Then he froze the flowers with dry ice, attached explosives to them and took photos while they exploded.

The resulting picture, blown up to several times its size on a black background, creates a dynamic 'still life' image, which demonstrates photography's greater mastery of action.

Vernet's spectacular tableaux of the Battle of Jemappes, teeming with horses, soldiers and wounded on a battlefield covered with smoke, hangs above former photo-journalist Luc Delahaye's 2001 photograph showing the aftermath of a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan, where the vista is similar but the battlefield empty save for smoke from the bombs.

The show includes almost 90 photographs alongside selected paintings from the National Gallery's collection.

Key photographs come from the Wilson Centre for Photography, with loans from Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Media Museum in Bradford, Fundació La Caixa in Spain, and direct from the photographers themselves.

Seduced by Art: Photography Past & Present begins at the National Gallery in London's Trafalgar Square on Oct 31 and runs until January.

(Reporting by Paul Casciato and Stephanie Pett; Editing by Jason Webb)

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