Your head can go real screw with saucers chasing you
On Saturday, I bumped into philipstorry and we scooped snow_leopard off her train for a day of wombling round museums. Our principal purpose was to go to the Man Ray exhibition at the National Potrait Gallery.
The gallery is selling tickets in timed slots, but sadly their idea of an appropriate number of people to let in at any one time vastly exceeds mine. Many of the photos are tiny (around 3-4 inches high), so you do want to get up close to see them. It wasn't like the gallery was dangerously crowded or anything, just slightly more crowded than made for a fun experience.
However, I pushed and shoved with the best of them, and eventually saw everything. The first thing I noticed was that... well.
The way I put it, while looking at a portrait of Berenice Abbott, was that if I'd taken that photo I wouldn't have rated it. Probably would have deleted it, in fact. PhilipStorry tells me that every so often, someone posts a Man Ray photo anonymously to a photography forum, and people immediately slate the composition, the cropping, the focal depth... until someone says "you do realise that photo's worth $100K?"
Many of the shots were, I think, more famous because of their subject. If you hang out with Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali and Ernest Hemingway, your portraits do have a bit of a head start. Are any of you future luminaries, by the way? Can I come and take pictures of you in case?
So yes... some of the pictures I just didn't get. Were they only there because everyone knows Man Ray is a great photographer, and thus his photographs must be great? And then I'd happen across something like the incredibly striking Woman Smoking a Cigarette and think... wow.
I also had fun earwigging on other gallery-goers. A picture of two female sitters whose names I didn't recognise, in a horribly "busy" front-room setting, didn't really merit a second glance from me. Then I heard someone pointing to one of the subjects and explaining to their companion "You see, she was a great collector of modern art - you can see the Picassos on the walls - but look at the cracks in the walls and the peeling paint..."
The exhibition was themed chronologically, and I feel the quality improved as it went on. I guess photographic portraiture was still a relatively new medium and - certainly compared to now - far more technically challenging. Maybe he got better at it.
By the late 1920s, he was taking photographs like Lee Miller, Fashion Potrait, which I found stunning, and the fascinating Le Retour a la Raison.
I love black and white photography, and I can look endlessly at almost-abstract shots, and at oddly lit faces. I must try taking more pictures like that :)
And then, of course, there are dead-straight portraits with odd quirks for which Man-Ray-the-Surrealist was known, like the picture of Ned Rorem where he had the composer pop round again afterwards and scratch a stave onto the negative.
I wish the exhibition had had a little technical info in it occasionally - the technique of solarisation was much mentioned without any indication of what it was (though the effects were clearly visible, and very much a signature in some of his best-known pictures). There was also a very interesting frame containing two prints, printed six years apart from the same negative, but looking very different. The later one was created when Man Ray "extensively re-worked" his negatives. I've no idea what "re-working" involved, and would have liked at least a little detail.
However, if you don't mind crowds (or can go on a weekday) and do like black and white photography, I'd really recommend this exhibition.
And then we noodled round a bit more of the NPG, and lunched, and fitted in some more light noodling round the British Museum before SnowLeopard had to hop on her train home again. Altogether a very pleasant day. I seem only to go to proper, paying exhibitions when SnowLeopard organises me into it... must demonstrate non-cultural-vacuumness by self-propelling on occasion :)
The gallery is selling tickets in timed slots, but sadly their idea of an appropriate number of people to let in at any one time vastly exceeds mine. Many of the photos are tiny (around 3-4 inches high), so you do want to get up close to see them. It wasn't like the gallery was dangerously crowded or anything, just slightly more crowded than made for a fun experience.
However, I pushed and shoved with the best of them, and eventually saw everything. The first thing I noticed was that... well.
The way I put it, while looking at a portrait of Berenice Abbott, was that if I'd taken that photo I wouldn't have rated it. Probably would have deleted it, in fact. PhilipStorry tells me that every so often, someone posts a Man Ray photo anonymously to a photography forum, and people immediately slate the composition, the cropping, the focal depth... until someone says "you do realise that photo's worth $100K?"
Many of the shots were, I think, more famous because of their subject. If you hang out with Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali and Ernest Hemingway, your portraits do have a bit of a head start. Are any of you future luminaries, by the way? Can I come and take pictures of you in case?
So yes... some of the pictures I just didn't get. Were they only there because everyone knows Man Ray is a great photographer, and thus his photographs must be great? And then I'd happen across something like the incredibly striking Woman Smoking a Cigarette and think... wow.
I also had fun earwigging on other gallery-goers. A picture of two female sitters whose names I didn't recognise, in a horribly "busy" front-room setting, didn't really merit a second glance from me. Then I heard someone pointing to one of the subjects and explaining to their companion "You see, she was a great collector of modern art - you can see the Picassos on the walls - but look at the cracks in the walls and the peeling paint..."
The exhibition was themed chronologically, and I feel the quality improved as it went on. I guess photographic portraiture was still a relatively new medium and - certainly compared to now - far more technically challenging. Maybe he got better at it.
By the late 1920s, he was taking photographs like Lee Miller, Fashion Potrait, which I found stunning, and the fascinating Le Retour a la Raison.
I love black and white photography, and I can look endlessly at almost-abstract shots, and at oddly lit faces. I must try taking more pictures like that :)
And then, of course, there are dead-straight portraits with odd quirks for which Man-Ray-the-Surrealist was known, like the picture of Ned Rorem where he had the composer pop round again afterwards and scratch a stave onto the negative.
I wish the exhibition had had a little technical info in it occasionally - the technique of solarisation was much mentioned without any indication of what it was (though the effects were clearly visible, and very much a signature in some of his best-known pictures). There was also a very interesting frame containing two prints, printed six years apart from the same negative, but looking very different. The later one was created when Man Ray "extensively re-worked" his negatives. I've no idea what "re-working" involved, and would have liked at least a little detail.
However, if you don't mind crowds (or can go on a weekday) and do like black and white photography, I'd really recommend this exhibition.
And then we noodled round a bit more of the NPG, and lunched, and fitted in some more light noodling round the British Museum before SnowLeopard had to hop on her train home again. Altogether a very pleasant day. I seem only to go to proper, paying exhibitions when SnowLeopard organises me into it... must demonstrate non-cultural-vacuumness by self-propelling on occasion :)