V&A Photography Centre — from steamships to deepfake drag

Before most people knew what a camera was, the V&A was already amassing photographs. Its collection — now 800,000 works — began as soon as it was founded, as the pioneering Museum of Manufactures in 1852. Just a year earlier, the magazine The Chemist reported the invention of the collodion process, which became the standard photographic method in the next decades. So the museum and the medium grew up together, and still share a unique, hybrid identity — connecting art and design, fashion and performance.

You succumb at once to that invigorating, upbeat mix in its Photography Centre, an ambitious venture begun in 2018 and fully inaugurated — four brand new galleries joining the initial three — last week. The opening exhibition Energy: Sparks from the Collection is a seductive, dynamic and original history of photography seen through the prism of its most difficult subject — things that move. Alfred Stieglitz’s train hurtles towards us in “The Hand of Man” (1902). Jacques Henri Lartigue celebrates his brother’s flight in a homemade glider “Zissou Taking Off in the Yard at Rouzat” (1910). A Hoover pipe snakes up a fishnet-stockinged leg in Jo Spence’s “Libido Uprising” (1989) and clouds of pulverised stone shoot out like rockets from a quarry in Nayoa Hatakeyama’s “Blast #5707” (1998).

That the 20th century — from American industrial might and belle époque optimism at the start to feminist and environmental pressures at the end — was the first to see itself through photographs is quite brilliantly distilled. Bill Brandt’s sooty “Miners Returning to Daylight” in Wales in 1937 is a miracle of chiaroscuro empathy. Casting dazzling light and sinister shadowy forms, Brian Griffin’s firework explodes over booming high-rise London in “Big Bang” (1986) to suggest the city as an unstoppable economic force, yet also a war zone.

Chronology is jumbled: moments assemble and reassemble like a kaleidoscope into fleeting patterns, shifting between old and new, known and unknown, the past altered by the present.

From a central space, Jack Elwes’s deepfake cabaret drag installation “The Zizi Show” (2020-23) blares out Beyoncé and George Michael and sends neon-pink and orange flickers down two long, classically hung, mostly monochrome picture galleries. The result is a dazzling juxtaposition with such gracious 19th-century landmarks as Philip Delamotte’s surging jets “Water Fountains at Crystal Palace” (1852) and Gustav Le Gray’s “Tugboat” (1856), silhouettes of a sailing ship trailing a steam-powered vessel on the Norman coast.

It’s a lovely meeting of innovative glories across the centuries. Delamotte’s images of Crystal Palace in south London and the dismantling of the Great Exhibition, along with Roger Fenton’s records of the Crimean war, were the breakthrough pictures that won photography a popular following in later 1850s Britain. Le Gray’s “Tugboat”, the steamship’s dark plumes gorgeously echoed by the clouds, as emotively atmospheric as a painted seascape, marks not only steam power vanquishing sail but photography’s challenge to painting — the mechanical camera supplanting the hand and brush as witness and chronicler.

Elwes’ subject is today’s technology: master of ceremonies Zizi is a gender-neutral, translucent, shape-shifting artificial intelligence creation compèring drag artists whose joyful ambiguities draw attention to AI bias and the threat of facial recognition systems. I loved this noisy, bright, inventive piece, playfully locating questions about the blur between real and virtual/fictive in a cabaret converging the worlds of Weimar Berlin and Silicon Valley. 

Photography’s enchantment with technology is compellingly presented throughout as inseparable from its democratic impetus. The smartphone era makes us all photographers but, even by the 1870s, amateurs were catching moments of magic and wonder — an anonymous traveller passing through York station photographed its canopied roof, intricate, sweeping and strange, rising like an exotic monster, just as in 1952 an unknown transatlantic passenger took a shot through a window of a plane’s propellers spinning over the ocean. 

Intriguing, too, are the many early works that are formally perfect in ways anticipating modern abstracting impulses; they suggest how closely modernist aesthetic sensibility evolved from industrial design. In “Bevington & Sons, Leather Manufactory”, teenage Geoffrey Bevington photographed his family’s factory in Bermondsey, south London, in 1861 as a pattern of strict verticals and horizontals, as geometric and forbidding as conceptualists Bernd and Hilla Becher’s formal depictions of industrial ruins, “Silo for Coal” and “Cooling Tower” in the 1970s. And Andreas Gursky’s panoramas of Siemens factories in the 1990s are heralded in the aerial view of the massive assembly line “Employees’ Cars at Ford Factory”, photographed by Robert Smith for a commercial company in 1936. 

The ability to capture mass experience and collective memory was photography’s winning streak over painting in the golden mid-20th century. Even the surrealists, favouring personal unconscious experience as a subject, perceived this aspect. Man Ray chose Eugène Atget’s view of a crowd on the Place de la Bastille looking up at a solar eclipse in 1912 as the cover for La Révolution surréaliste in 1926. Here Atget’s stunning picture is in company with 20-year-old Marianne Breslauer’s “Paris”, street shots taken in 1929 with a Leica at unexpected angles, boldly cropped; sometimes Breslauer displayed them upside down.

Surrealism’s odd perspectives, strange reflections and snatched glimpses determined photography’s special flair for fragmentary, elusive urban life. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Palermo” (1972) frames insouciant kids chasing a bicycle wheel by a stately, slow funeral procession: a decisive instant, classical, monochrome, masterfully composed, where the metaphysical — life running on against the background of death — is fixed in a particular place and time. 

In his haunting series “Parties” (2006), Amirali Ghasemi depicts pulsing groups of young Iranians feverishly dancing but whitens their faces and exposed flesh to protect identities in a repressive regime: the figures appear as luminous, animated ghosts, like a surrealist dream — defiant and bittersweet.

Susan Sontag called the camera a predatory weapon, and certainly hopes for progress thread throughout, from Fenton and Stieglitz to Cartier-Bresson and Ghasemi. In contrast, the latest acquisitions mostly disappoint — the open-ended, masterful image has diminished into mere coercive identity politics in Liz Johnson Artur’s “Black Balloon Archive” and Tarrah Krajnak’s self-portraits which, according to the V&A, “critique the canon of westernised photography . . . as an indigenous woman of colour” — deadly dull. But then comes Noémie Goudal’s marvellous “Untitled (Giant Phoenix)” (2022), close-ups of palm trees staged as a jungle of monumental puzzle-like broken panels — a fresh, engaging approach to photographs as environmental protest.

This is a great moment for photography. The new galleries, the UK’s largest devoted to the medium, are a significant addition to the museum landscape, and symbolic of photography’s vital role in 21st-century culture. More than any other visual art form, photography is rooted in processes of social change; from now on the V&A will be able to show how it evolves to mirror the world in ever more complex ways.

vam.ac.uk

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