Camera Obscura? Known and Strange @ the V&A.

I almost got lost in the maze of upstairs galleries in the V&A trying to find the Sir Elton John and David Furnish gallery, or gallery 101 as it's more prosaically known. When I finally did find it I got a bit lost trying to understand the exhibition. Or at least what the theme was. There were some good photographs in it for sure. But I couldn't really work out what linked them all together.

Rinko Kawauchi - Illuminance (2009-11)

Known and Strange:Photographs from the Collection is a vague enough title to not really tell you anything and even the board on the wall as you enter the room doesn't offer much more. It tells us that photographs have the "power to transform the familiar into the unfamiliar, and to make the ordinary extraordinary" and that photography can "capture many different perspectives" while allowing us to see things that, in our relatively short lives, we won't have time to witness with our own eyes.

But that could be true of any group of photographs. In truth, I think the V&A were just sat on a lot of interesting photos, had a gap in their scheduling, and decided to show some of them off. Nothing wrong with that. Not least because the exhibition was completely free.

Many of the photos on show focused on small moments, things you may easily pass by without stopping for a second look. Rinko Kawauchi's Illuminance series looked at spiderwebs, dew, and light reflected in mirrors. Her work was pleasant to look at and seemed to emphasise how beneficial it is for us to sometimes slow down and take in the wonders of the natural world that surround us wherever we are.

That's why I haven't dusted the cobwebs in the corner of my spare room for a while! Zanele Muholi's work comes from a completely different angle. Their work intends to make us look at the violence and discrimination faced by the Black South African LGBTQIA+ community. Muholi's not gone about it in an overtly political way and, instead, has simply photographed members of that community, like Sosi Molotsane (below), and presented them with accompanying testimonies. The idea, I think, is to give visibility to a community many would prefer to pretend don't exist. Almost as if a historical document.

Zanele Muholi - Sosi Molotsane, Yeoville, Johannesburg (2007)

Susan Meiselas - The Managers, Essex Junction, Vermont (1974)

Susan Meiselas - New Girl, Tunbridge, Vermont (1975)

Susan Meiselas is also in the business of giving marginal people a voice. Or at least a presence. In the seventies she travelled around New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina photographing and interviewing women who performed striptease acts at local carnivals. For good measure, she took a few snaps of the men who ran these events and, of course, they tend to be fully clothed.

But, essentially, Meiselas was trying to give these women, who would perhaps only be seen by their audiences as bodies to ogle, identities. The fact one of the images is simply titled 'New Girl', though, suggests it wasn't an entirely successful project. 

Paul Graham was another who journeyed around the US to take his photos. He seems to have been less interested in people and portraits and more concerned with how the natural environment affects us. How we can marvel at its beauty, be in awe of its power, and yet remain at mercy to its seemingly capricious whims.

Paul Graham - Washington and South Broad, New Orleans from the series A Shimmer of Possibility (2004-06)

Teresa Zelenkova - Stairs, Cesky Raj (2015)

I really liked Teresa Zelenkova's image of an old stone staircase in Cesky Raj in Czechia but all I could gather from the information boards was that she is interested in mysticism, philosophy, and folklore while also valuing intuition and coincidence. I decided that it was just a cool photo of a rather spooky looking staircase. I took much the same approach to Gauri Gill's Balika Mela which didn't have anything to read about it - and was probably better served by that situation.

Visually impressive though Mitch Epstein's American Elm photograph was I thought the reasons for taking it were not entirely true. The idea is that Epstein wandered the streets of New York looking for rare trees in an urban environment. But I've been to New York, I've been to Central Park. There are trees everywhere.

Gauri Gill - Balika Mela (2012)

Mitch Epstein - American Elm, Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn from the series New York Arbor (2012)

Let's give Mitch the benefit of the doubt. Let's say he wasn't including parks and city forests and he was specifically looking for trees in fully urban environments. In which case, especially with its concrete encasement, he's done well to find this one.

Andy Sewell, whose series Known and Strange Things Pass has given this odd little show its name, had a clearer concept behind his work. He's taken photos from either side of the Atlantic which explore not just that vast ocean itself but the cables that, mostly unseen beneath the water, carry the Internet from continent to continent. As Sewell has said:- " the boundaries we put between things are more permeable than we might like to think".

 

Andy Sewell - Known and Strange Things Pass (2020)

 

Klea McKenna - Life Hours (4) from the series Generation (2019)

I'm not quite so sure about the claims made for either Klea McKenna or Dafna Talmor. McKenna seeks to move photography away from a purely visual medium and to explore the sense of touch. Her photos look good but to touch them they feel like photographs and nothing else surely? Any feeling of touch comes from our previous knowledge of what the items depicted feel like and in that case that's no difference to a holiday snap of one of your kids making a sandcastle.

Which, to be honest, would carry a greater emotional weight. Talmor takes decent landscape photos and then ruins, sorry - alters, them by cutting them up and recombining them into hybrid compositions. I can't really see the point.

 

Dafna Talmor - Untitled (JE-12121212) from the series Constructed Landscapes (2015)

 

Donna Ruff - Migrant (2011-16)

Donna Ruff's work was a little better. I liked the use of Moorish titles to create a form of abstraction but if I hadn't read that the photo in the background was originally printed in The Independent 'newspaper' and depicts the Brussels bomb attacks of March 2016 I'd never have got it from just looking at the photo. Interesting aesthetically but if intended as a political piece then somewhat weak.

Maurizio Anzeri is another who can't leave a perfectly good photo alone. He makes what he, rather pretentiously, calls "photo-sculptures". Starting with vintage photos found in flea markets, he uses traditional embroidery techniques to mask the sitter's faces. It's not clear why but it's not entirely terrible. Lucy actually looks quite funny.

 

Maurizio Anzeri - Lucy (2018)

 

Not sure if that was Anzeri's intention. Last up is James Welling's Julia Mamaea series, one he's been working on for a full lustrum now and one that's ongoing. On a visit to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Welling came across a sculpture from a Syrian woman called Julia Mamaea who lived from 180 to 235AD. He took a photo and then made a series of carbon dye prints in various different colours, very much in the style of Andy Warhol, with the idea that we, the viewers, would question notions of repetition and difference.

Not sure that's exactly what happened but it was, along with the works of Andy Sewell, Teresa Zelenkova, and Paul Graham one of the best things in this curious, mildly engaging, yet utterly inconsequential show. I left the V&A and walked to Camberwell. On Vauxhall Bridge, I saw one of the most beautiful red skies over Battersea Power Station and near the Oval cricket ground an unhinged lunatic threatened to kill me. I dare say both those events will live on in my memory a lot longer than a show that was far more strange than it was known.

 

James Welling - Julia Mamaea (2018-ongoing)