Time Out Magazine -London-The future of photography - By Ossian Ward

The future of photography

• By Ossian Ward

  
  

• Ossian Ward looks at how the Tate is attempting to improve photography's uncertain future in the capital

• Anonymous portrait photograph, 1970 by Harry Jacobs

  It’s an important week for photography in London. Tate Britain’s first ever significant exhibition dedicated to photography has opened and Thursday sees the re-launch of Photo-London, the only fair to sell solely lens-based art. Tate’s extensive survey of British photography, entitled ‘How We Are’, demonstrates why the medium is so significant for the understanding of our recent past, but the fair will determine, to some extent, how much of a future photography has in the capital.
  
  The signs are not good for the state of the still image here, when you consider that we don’t yet have a photography museum to rival New York’s International Center of Photography or the Jeu de Paume in Paris, itself a fusion of three existing, nay clashing, photography institutions. Feature continues

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  We have the lone beacon of The Photographers’ Gallery, but it’s going through massive flux at the moment (as its new leadership tries to secure the money needed to move to a new home in Ramillies Street near Oxford Circus) and is beginning to show its seams at the two corridor-like venues in Great Newport Street. It also has to compete for funding with other expanding London museums such as The Whitechapel and Tate, even though neither of these galleries has a dedicated photography curator. Only the V&A can boast such a position, although the photography department has now been subsumed into ‘Word & Image’, one of four vague substrata in a new hierarchy of its collections. The V&A used to have capacious, Canon-sponsored galleries for photography, but can now only show a tiny proportion of its word-class holdings in a space no bigger than the museum’s small shop.
  
  Photography’s prospects are stronger elsewhere in the UK. The Welsh Ffotogallery is opening a National Centre for Photography in a neo-gothic Castle in 2008, and the Scottish National Gallery is considering something similar for Edinburgh. We had a National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford until it changed its name last year to the catch-all title of National Media Museum (in order to include radio and the internet) although it is still a photographic horn of plenty, including the Royal Photographic Society’s collection, among others. There was talk of a satellite venue for Bradford to show photography at Somerset House, but instead, London has become better known for its film and video venues such as the new BFI Mediatheque.
  
  Ironically, rejuvenation for our photography scene may come from even further afield, in the form of a rescue package from France. Not only did it invent the medium, but it has one of the most established photography fairs in the world, Paris Photo, whose organisers have taken the reins at Photo-London for this fourth edition. The event will take place over four days in a new venue in Old Billingsgate and will present only contemporary photography – part of the Gallic face-lift that has angered the vintage photography community here. However, it seems that London is well suited to contemporary art, so why not contemporary photography?
  
  The problem is still in the mired definition of photography, which has changed immeasurably since becoming an accepted form of art making rather than mere image making. It wasn’t so long ago that the last director of the Tate Gallery, Sir Alan Bowness, declared: ‘You have to be an artist and not only a photographer to have your work in the Tate.’ And yet ‘How We Are’ is a purist’s show covering photojournalism, documentary practice, historical record and eccentric souvenir material. It amounts to an archive of the extraordinary, as well as the ordinary, moments of daily life and contains as many differing views of Britishness as it does subjects, themes and concerns. Photography too, is a constantly widening field, perhaps more kaleidoscopic and mercurial than any other art form. We now snap more pictures than ever in digital form, yet rarely stop to appreciate or physically print one – the photo is now a resolutely flatscreen image and not a handheld object. Does photography have a future at all? If old Good Housekeeping books and studio portraits from the 1970s find their way into museum surveys of photography like the Tate’s, then who can predict what the valuable images of the future will be?
  

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