Onto the Streets showcases the work of an emerging generation of British photographers, notable for their fresh, candid depictions of public life in London.
Traditionally, New York and Paris have dominated the history of street photography. The restless mania of Manhattan and the romanticism of Paris have been captured and endorsed through exhibitions, coffee table books, magazines and mass produced prints for more than half a century.
In recent years London has discovered its own photographic allure. Photographers such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Jason Evans and Juergen Teller created a much imitated ‘London look’ in the 1990s using the street as a stage for fashion photography, while Gillian Wearing made several documentary-art projects using photography and video on the streets of the capital that made an immediate impact on the art and advertising worlds alike.
Now a new generation of London-based practitioners is returning to the idea of the ‘decisive moment’. Keenly aware of the history of street photography, the photographers in Onto The Streets insist on the continued relevance of still photography to capture the unique flux of people, matter and imagery that combine at street level. Their ability is to spot the resonance of fleeting moments of social interaction or collisions of line and form in the public places where we work, shop and play. Their observations of the dynamics of street life hold up a mirror to the kind of society we are making for ourselves, and establish London as a centre for contemporary street photography.
The exhibition is curated by Stephen McLaren and Sophie Howarth. Stephen is a photographer who has also worked in television as a director and producer for over 15 years where his projects have included the European MTV Awards and BBC's Rough Guides to the World series. Sophie is Curator of Public Programmes at Tate Modern. She has taught and written extensively on contemporary art and photography, and is the editor of Singular Images: Essays on Remarkable Photographs (Tate/Aperture, 2005).
The exhibition is accompanied by an education and events programme including a symposium at Tate Modern with speakers Geoff Dyer, Paul Halliday and Nick Turpin; street photography-based workshops; portfolio reviews with curators and photographers from the exhibition; and a gallery talk and tour led by the curators. |
