Dorothy Bohm, Charlie Phillips, Daniel Meadows & more @ Centre for British Photography

blog

Dorothy Bohm, Charlie Phillips, Daniel Meadows & more @ Centre for British Photography

July 21st, 2023 by fstop

Charlie Phillips – How Great Thou Art, 50 Years of African Caribbean Funerals in London

Dorothy Bohm, Charlie Phillips, Daniel Meadows & more
5 October – 17 December 2023

Charlie Phillips – How Great Thou Art, 50 Years of African Caribbean Funerals in London
Charlie Phillips’ How Great Thou Art – 50 Years of African Caribbean Funerals in London is a sensitive photographic documentary of the social and emotional traditions that surround death in London’s African Caribbean community.

Daniel Meadows – Free Photographic Omnibus, 50th Anniversary
On 22 September 1973, Daniel Meadows set off on a long-planned adventure in a rickety 1948 double-decker bus that he had repurposed as his home, gallery and darkroom. He was intent on making a portrait of England. He was 21 years old. Over the next 14 months, travelling alone, Meadows crisscrossed the country covering 10,000 miles. He photographed 958 people, in 22 towns and cities. From circus performers to day trippers. He developed and printed the photographs as he went along, giving them away for free to those who posed for him.

Dorothy Bohm – London Street Markets
London’s street markets and especially the people who worked there were an important aspect of Bohm’s engagement with London. Having run a successful portrait studio in Manchester in the late 1940s and 1950s, it was only in the 60s and 70s, after she settled in London, that Bohm turned her lens on the city that remained her home until her death earlier this year. The markets she depicted include the old Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market, Smithfield, Billingsgate, Petticoat Lane, Portobello Road, Farringdon Road book market, as well as stalls in Camden Town and Hampstead.

Grace Lau – Portraits In a Chinese Studio
Grace Lau’s Chinese portrait studio is not just an entertaining pop-up studio but also addresses issues around Imperialism by inverting Western notions of the Chinese as an exotic ‘other’. The studio will be set up in the Mezzanine Gallery at the Centre for British Photography and visitors will be able to book a spot to pose for the camera at times throughout the exhibition’s run. Portraits from two previous incarnations of the studio will surround the studio.

The first photographic portrait studios in China were set up in the mid-19th century by Western travellers, and focused on ‘exotic’ subjects such as beggars, opium smokers, coolies and courtesans. Many of these images were reproduced as postcards to send back to amuse a European audience. In 2005, Lau created her own version of an old Chinese portrait studio in which she would document the residents and tourists to Hastings as ‘exotic’ subjects. Open to anyone passing by, the project made an oblique comment on Imperialist visions of the Chinese; and by reversing roles, Lau became the Imperialist photographer making portraits of the diverse people of a British seaside town.

Arpita Shah – Modern Muse
Drawing from and subverting the conventions of Mughal and Indian miniature paintings from ancient to pre-colonial times, Arpita Shah’s Modern Muse visually and conceptually explores the ever-shifting identities and representations of South Asian women in contemporary Britain. The portraits give an insight into the perspectives of what it means to be a young British and Asian woman. Shah examines the intersections of culture and identity, drawing on the women’s lived experiences and her own journey and life. Commissioned by GRAIN projects, this body of work has not been shown in London before.

Centre for British Photography
49 Jermyn Street, London SW1Y 6LX
www.britishphotography.org

Location: England, London, United Kingdom Type: Exhibition

blog