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I went to the Barbican’s ‘Everything was moving‘ photography exhibition on Friday night. It was fantastic: great choice of photographers, superbly presented (just the right amount of info on the captions: enough to provide context, not so much as to distract from looking at the images), and knocks the National’s ‘Seduced by art‘ into a cocked hat. No ‘interrogation of photography as an art form’, no tedious ‘but is it art?’, just photos doing the things that only photos can really do. The collections of Ernest Cold and David Goldblatt from apartheid-era South Africa were my highlight.
If you’ve not been, go at once (it closes tomorrow).
I absolutely loved this show. I thought it was a great illustration of how photography can not only mark history, but also give us a completely different insight into the past – the American civil rights photos and South African photos brought those eras to life in ways that I don’t think text alone ever could. I thought it was really well curated too, with palate-cleansers like the William Eggleston pics stopping the exhibition becoming too intense or hard to take in.
I really wish I’d made it along there sooner, so I could have gone more than once. By the time I made it upstairs I was a bit overwhelmed. It’s the first time that I’ve been able to really get what that fuss is about WIlliam Eggleston, and putting those images up after/alongside Bruce Davison was very clever.