Twelve photographs, one room, no captions.
The most disciplined photographic show of the season — and a quiet rebuke to the form. The photographer has spent six years on twelve images. The show has the gravity of that arithmetic.
The show is, on first impression, almost confrontationally austere. The room is roughly seven metres long and four metres wide. The walls are white. The floor is unfinished concrete, sealed but not polished. There are no plinths, no benches, no chairs. There are no wall texts. There are no captions next to the prints. There is, at the entrance, a single small printed card listing the photographer's name, the title of the exhibition, and the dates between which the photographs were made.
The dates are: April 2020 to October 2025. The exhibition contains, on the four walls of the room, twelve photographs. They are roughly A2 in size, framed simply in unstained wood, mounted at viewing height with what appears to be unusual care. There is, on the wall opposite the entrance, the only piece of additional information in the room: a small printed sheet, available to take, listing the locations at which the photographs were made. The sheet does not say which photograph was made at which location.
What is in the photographs
The photographs are, in subject, varied. Two are landscapes in the conventional sense — wide, atmospheric, uninhabited. Three are interiors of domestic spaces. One is a portrait, of a woman in her sixties, photographed from slightly above. Two are of objects on tables. Two are of buildings, photographed at unusual angles. Two are difficult to categorise: one appears to be a long-exposure of a piece of moving fabric, the other a still life of three small objects that I could not, on either visit, fully identify.
What unifies them is not their subject. What unifies them is their relationship to time. Each photograph has been made with a long exposure — in several cases, the exposures appear to be several minutes long. The result, in every image, is that the photograph contains traces of motion that the eye does not, at first, recognise as motion. The landscapes contain ghosted clouds. The interiors contain the slight blur of a curtain. The portrait contains a faint doubling of the woman's hand. The objects on the tables contain — in one case — the trace of a fly that has, at some point during the exposure, walked across the field of view.
The result, in every image, is that the photograph contains traces of motion that the eye does not, at first, recognise as motion.
What the room does
The room, deliberately or otherwise, slows the viewer down. The absence of captions means that there is nothing to read on the wall except the photographs themselves. The viewer cannot, on a quick walk-through, "do" the show. The show refuses the format of the brisk gallery visit. The viewer who tries to spend less than half an hour in the room will leave with, essentially, no relationship to the work.
I spent, on my first visit, just over an hour. On my second visit, two days later, I spent nearly ninety minutes. The second visit was, almost entirely, given over to looking at the photographs I had not yet looked at properly on the first visit. There are twelve of them. Half an hour each, on a thoughtful viewing, is not, by photographic standards, a long time per image.
What the absence of captions means
The decision to omit captions is, like the decision not to frame in the drawings show reviewed elsewhere in this issue, a real one. A caption is not, in a photographic exhibition, a passive piece of information. It is an interpretive instrument. It tells the viewer what the photograph is "of" in a way that closes off other possible readings. The photographer here has refused that closure. The photographs are presented as photographs. The viewer is invited, in a way that almost no contemporary photographic exhibition invites, to look at them.
This is, in my experience, much harder than it sounds. We are not, as viewers, used to looking at photographs without the scaffolding of caption, wall text, and artist's statement. The first ten minutes in the room are, for most viewers, mildly uncomfortable. The captions are missed. The wall texts are missed. The viewer wants to be told. By the second ten minutes — if the viewer is willing to stay — the discomfort begins to subside, and a different kind of attention begins to settle in.
What the six years were for
The photographer has, by her own account, made many more than twelve photographs in the period covered by the exhibition. She has, she estimates, made several hundred. The twelve in the room are the result of a long process of selection that has, in many cases, involved years of looking at individual images before deciding whether they belong in the final set. The selection itself is, she says, part of the work.
This is — I am aware — close to a cliché of contemporary photography. The artist who has refined and refined until only a few images remain is a familiar figure. What distinguishes this show from the cliché is the quality of the looking that the photographer has clearly done on each individual image. The twelve photographs are not, in the conventional sense, a "selection from" a larger body of work. They are twelve photographs that have each been individually finished, over a period of months or years, until the photographer has been satisfied with what each of them is doing in the room.
What I would say to a visitor
Go, if you can. Spend at least an hour. Do not look at the printed sheet of locations until after you have looked at every photograph at least once without it. Be patient with the room's refusal to help you. The reward, when it comes, is considerable.
The show closes at the end of the month. There is, I am told, no publication. The photographs will exist, after the show closes, only as twelve framed prints in the photographer's archive. This is not, on the part of the photographer, a marketing decision. It is part of what the work is. The work has been made for this room and for this period. After that, it will go away.