A fine view: The Photographers’ Gallery

The Photographers’ Gallery is a beacon of light on the UK’s photographic landscape. Dan Synge visits an old haunt and talks to the space’s director about its 37-year history and its ambitious plans for expansion.

Somewhere in that no-man’s-land between Leicester Square and Covent Garden in London’s West End, there is a small door that offers a big clue to the state of arts photography today. It opens into a space I have been many times before. Usually to find an escape, through still images, from the hustle and bustle of outside, but other times just to buy a cool postcard or browse the coffee table reading. There are times even when I’ve popped in just to get out of the cold only to come outside moved, shocked or inspired by something way beyond my own points of reference.

Today, there are plenty of similarly-minded souls who are queuing up for coffee and home-made carrot cake in the gallery’s café at number 5 Great Newport Street. Sitting down quietly at a long communal table some fashionably attired visitors – a mixture of culture lovers and tourists – flick through glossy contemporary art magazines or write earnestly into notebooks. On the walls around us are endless black and white photographs charting some kind of nocturnal hell; squalid tenements, drugs, sex, violence, writhing faceless torsos…ah well, it’s good to see that things at The Photographers’ Gallery haven’t changed.

For over 37 years, this legendary London gallery can claim to have been at the forefront of contemporary British photography. It has helped to promote photography as a genuine art form by enabling leading artists from around the globe to exhibit their work here. For such a limited space (the gallery currently occupies two small, ground floor premises in Great Newport Street, numbers 5 and 8) the names are impressive, bringing together the often diverse worlds of contemporary art, photojournalism, documentary and fashion. Home-grown artists to have shown their work here include Martin Parr, Richard Wentworth and Corinne Day, whilst the gallery’s list of international exhibitors reads like a Who’s Who of 20th Century photography: Robert Capa, Walker Evans, Sebastião Salgado and Andreas Gursky to mention but a few. The gallery also produces and hosts the £30,000

googling the words ‘photography’ and ‘politics’ then showing the results in the gallery entrance. “We’re very keen on the net because it is often people’s only experience of photography,” says Rogers in support of the increasingly virtual aspect of the art.

 

Caption: 16-18 Ramillies St, London. CGI created by Maganglo Ltd. © The Photographers' Gallery.

Rogers’s arrival at the gallery, itself just a stone’s throw from the more populist National Portrait Gallery with its crowd-pleasing Royal or celebrity themed exhibitions coincides with an interesting time in its history. By 2010 the gallery is to move to larger, purpose built premises in Ramillies Street, just a few hundred yards away in Soho. Spread over six floors, the impressive £15.5m development will double the current exhibition space and provide state-of-the-art technology for education, a new on-line resource centre and a street level café and bar. It’s all a far cry from black and white photojournalism and carrot cake served up in a former Lyons Tea Bar off the Charing Cross Road.

Rogers is obviously excited about the move and is looking forward to experimenting with the new, improved space. She explains: “At the new ground floor meeting area there will be a digital ‘Democracy Wall’ – it’s my response to the whole democratisation of photography. By that time, digital photography will be incredibly sophisticated and we’ll be able to invite the public to come and download images in response to the exhibition’s theme. “Hopefully it will be a way of enticing people who walk past the gallery; people who usually think that photography doesn’t impact upon their lives.”

For Rogers, it would seem that the move couldn’t come soon enough. The gallery already attracts half a million visitors a year; a figure that is

There have also been significant changes in the way photography is produced and consumed since the gallery first opened. While the Seventies was dominated by gritty photojournalism, the Eighties more a brash colour-fest and the Nineties a time when photography met fine art full-on, we are now in the fast-paced digital period where anything goes pretty much anywhere and at anytime.

Does Rogers believe that institutions like The Photographers’ Gallery still have an important role to play in this time of media saturation, cheap mobile phone cameras, online galleries and image sharing? “Definitely,” she replies. “There’s a bit of a myth that everyone is a photographer, isn’t there? It remains the most accessible art form, but I think there’s a complexity behind it, which is our job to unpick. We have a role in helping people to interpret the work.”

She then gives the example of Magnum photographer Antoine d’Agata whose work 'Insomnia' was adorning the walls of the café downstairs during my visit. “If you saw those images on the web they’d mean nothing to you,” she explains. “They don’t have the same emotional punch and his whole emotional life is there right in front of you. What you get in a gallery like this is scale and confrontation. You can’t get that through the web. “Some artists wouldn’t consider exhibiting in the café but Antoine liked the fact that he was sharing his inner life with these strangers sitting there having their cup of tea and carrot cake.”

It is clear that Rogers approves of recent developments in this growing art form but she believes that its future lies squarely in the hands of the photographers themselves. “I see real ideas, energy and ambition,” she enthuses. “Someone like Taryn Simon is fascinating because of her research-based approach. Her project, 'An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar' took five years. It’s a bit like an academic project with a visual art base. The work is so arresting and considered and the labels are just as important as the work. I like photographers who surprise me and she did!”

Since 'The Concerned Photographer', the gallery’s first ever show in January 1971, Great Newport Street has certainly seen some memorable, often controversial shows.