Point of View
It seems the British Library is currently catching up with a new age of literacy which seems to hinge around visual language, snap shots of ideas and abstractions. You don’t need to be a photography fan to enjoy this show but if you like to explore a sense of marvel for the past than don’t miss it. Before photography the reader was left to rely on his or her imagination to fill in the space between the lines while painting, no matter how close to nature was obviously always caught up in subjectivity. But after 1839, when Talbot came up with the techniques to fix the world on a silver plate, we could engage and question the concept of reality in a ground-breaking manner.
This exhibition touches only superficially on the practical ‘how to’ and focuses instead on presenting the viewer with a wealth of almost 300,000 images to allow us to see a much larger picture of what life was like in Victorian times with all its social, cultural, political, scientific and domestic implications. It covers aspects of the Crimean war, gives a face to writers like Shaw, Dickens, Blunt and Baudleaire, it celebrates industrial achievements such as the building of the Underground in 1898 and the now legendary Crystal Palace, it documents social activities such as a visit at the new Zoo, and archaeological pioneering at Stonehenge.
But this exhibition also presents us with philosophical issues of the time. We learn how the concept of copyright and authorship was established by a famous photograph of Oscar Wilde which was carelessly ripped of by the Ehrich Brothers Department Store in New York. We also learn how photography was used to publicise Physiognomy Humaine which branded people due to their facial feature and how double exposure techniques created some wonderful eerie ghost photographs which informed a newly found spirituality.
The exhibition celebrates the magic what we have found through the inventions of Emerson, Talbot and Archer, right up to the development of moving images and x-ray techniques. However, there is something strangely poignant about this show too as it allows us to see landscapes and locations how we have never seen them before and will never see again. We can find photographs of the City of London without skyscrapers and car, the Swiss Alps without hotels and ski-lifts and untouched civilisations on the verge of being made commercially viable through the likes of Thomas Cook. After all, the fast growth of the Photographic Industry goes hand in and with tourism and the dream of making the world our oyster. This exhibition gives us not only the facts not only the images but an insight into a different mentality, a different way of seeing the world.
Point of View is on that the British Library until the 7 March, 2010 and is free.
Posted by Valeria Melchioretto
