Just under two weeks to go for the Photographers' Gallery show featuring Andy Warhol, William Burroughs and David Lynch.
A theme that photographers and show curators are often keen to explore in their inimitable art-speak style is the idea of interrogating preconceptions, and playing with the cultural baggage that the viewer brings along. Curiously there's no mention of such subversive notions here, despite their particular relevance. After all, why bother to come and see the photos of these three, none of whom made their names in the field of photography, if they weren't famous? Why should a film director, or a writer, be any better than anyone else at taking snaps? And would the people poring over these photos - and paying money to enter: this is one of the Photographers' Gallery's few exhibitions which isn't free - be bothering if these were just photos by some unknown Fred Bloggs?
Well, that's a touch disingenuous perhaps. Andy Warhol as an artist did his best to cut out the personal and emulate a machine, so his camerawork might be expected to be of some interest. Burroughs was keen on his cut-outs - collage, if you like - and he also took some snaps of well-known friends like Jack Kerouac. And Lynch's factory photographs are dark and brooding - and so might possibly be seen to resonate with his dark and brooding films.
Up to point. As it happens I wasn't particularly impressed with any of them. Warhol 's photos are fine, but nothing special. Photos of an array of jars on a kitchen sink are copied and stuck together, echoing the multiplications of his paintings, so we can say, ooh, just like the tins of Campbell Soups - but real, and in black and white. Alastair Sooke, reviewing the show when it opened in January, thought he detected signs of a social conscience in Warhol's choice of subjects, like the man on a bench in Central Park. I think he may be reading too much into it.
Burroughs' efforts really are snaps, and generally uninspired; by a man who didn't seem to have much of a feel for the visual at all. If you want Beat photos, Allen Ginsberg's are more interesting.
Lynch's are the best: shots taken in the 80s and 90s of old industrial sites around the US, Britain and Poland. Atmospheric, certainly - but then photos of industrial ruins are hardly ground-breaking; there's now a whole sub-genre of this kind of stuff. Still, maybe he was ahead of the game:
There's a Lynch gallery here, at Mail Online.
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