Braving the January Cold

On my day out in London, went to check out the Photographers' Gallery in its new location. It doesn't yet feel right, like a supermarket that's reorganised its layout. Ramillies Street is a drab cul de sac in a particularly sterile corner of Soho. A commercial desert tucked away behind the tacky facade of the retail Hell that is Oxford Street.

Well away from the bookish bustle of the Charing Cross Road and the crowds drifting between Leicester Square and Covent Garden. Well away from the cultural ambience of theatreland and the National Galleries. It takes an effort of will to leg it from familiar territory to somewhere with so few attractions, except perhaps for the HMV store on Oxford Street. The only compensation a chance to ramble through streets I knew so well in my student days, Wardour Street and the Berwick Street market. I might even start to become a customer again of Cowling and Wilcox in Broadwick Street.

I suppose it's character-building to have the comfort zone of your routines shaken up a bit by change, so I hope I will start to find my way to Ramillies Street when I'm in town. It's nice to see the cafe unchanged by the flit, and perhaps the gallery will rediscover its talent for putting on exhibitions of significance – ones that linger in the memory for years.

OK. SELF-TEST: Name some shows from long ago that I still remember.

• Danny Lyon (bikers)
• Koto Bolofo (fashion/portraits)
• Martin Parr (The Cost of Living(?) consumer culture)
• Historical photographs showing the construction of the Forth Rail Bridge

An odd selection, others would spring to mind on a different day.

Of the two shows on at present, I preferred the downstairs show, Soho Nights.
Far too small in scale to do its Brassai-like subject justice, it nevertheless gave a tantalising glimpse of the smoky bohemian glamour of London-noir. Anna Jay says some nice things about the show in her mondo a go-go blog.

The French Pub: Unofficial HQ of the Free French
From: Picture Post, 1941. Photographer: Kurt Hutton

Even in my student days (the seventies), the York Minster (AKA the French Pub) in Dean Street retained its glamour as a thrilling place for a student to go for a drink, carrying as it did the exotic ambience of dangerous and subversive worlds beyond our own provincial shores. And always the odd disreputable celebrity (of the George Melly type) spotted but studiously ignored in the smoky gloom. At least that's how I remember it!

Speaking of remembering, I must find time one of these days to go for a meal again at Jimmy's in Frith Street. Fiona took me there when we were students. She had been there for a meal with Adrian Henri, so it had a kind of kudos. It must be twenty years since I last ate there, but it's still very much alive and kicking according to a great review by NilliJoon.

Let the Good Times Roll

It's always good to make time for a trip to London. This time, the Great North Road seemed quiet enough, so we drove straight past the railway station and didn't stop until we reached the hem of Old Lady London's petticoat: Mill Hill (in the Borough of Barnet). This is where the traffic really begins to build up and slow you down. It's generally easy enough to get parked up and continue by Thameslink into the city itself.

The two highlights of the trip were the exhibitions at the Photographers' Gallery and the BP Portrait Award show at the NPG (National Portrait Gallery). The Photographers' Gallery is always an essential point of call for me because I like its simple cafe. Nothing fancy, but a decent cup of coffee (in a cup, not a pint mug) and simple tasty sandwich. Mine was Brie cheese and salad in a roll, Flore's tucking into Mozarella and salad in a ciabatta roll above.

Anyway, for once, looking at the exhibition was a pleasure rather than a duty. The one-person shows can be pretty heavy going sometimes, but this one was a group show that meant you could skip the work that didn't engage you and spend more time enjoying the rest. The exhibition may be over by the time I post this, but the work is still online at: www.photonet.org.uk/freshfacedandwildeyed08
As the title of the show suggests, it's a show of some of the best current postgraduate student work. While it was all pretty good, I was most impressed by Gavin Fernandes's 'Monarchs of the East End', formal portraits of fictional characters from a dreamlike subculture who could people mythologies as old as time itself.



Simon Dixon's 36 Views was fun, parodying Hokusai's famous series of woodcut prints showing Mount Fuji from a variety of viewpoints. Dixon's Fuji was Roseberry Topping, a hill on the edge of the North York Moors, seen from a variety of distinctly unpicturesque locations.


Murray Ballard's Cryonics Facility was creepy but compelling.



Just round the corner, down the Charing Cross Road, the NPG continues to assert its trendy credentials with the BP Portraits Awards exhibition. It was a show to really renew one's faith in the viability on oil paint on canvas. Diversity of scale, diversity of technique, it was an object lesson on what can be achieved with this most fundamental medium.

Craig Wylie's K was the overall winner, and deservedly so. One of the largest paintings in the show at 6ft10in high and 5ft5in wide (2.10 x1.65m), it dominated the first bay in the gallery. I'm not a fan of the Photorealist style, but this painting is a tour de force.
In the best tradition of Summer Shows, there was something there for everyone, and all the work was worth a closer look.

Wylie's painting had, for me, echoes of the best of Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs, particularly the one I love the most, her photograph of Mrs Keene, The Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty, made in 1866.

The painting and the photograph share someting in common. It's to do with what Roland Barthes called the punctum, in this case the eyes, which in both images engage you directly and inescapably. They gaze out at you and create the sensation that the sitter is there in front of you in this elusive moment we call the present.

The ability of the best photographs to reach out across time and space, is key to its extraordinary power. Mrs Cameron's hundred-and-forty year old albumen prints do it as well as any other. A good place to see online examples of her work is in the George Eastman House collection (www.geh.org). George Eastman was of course the founder of Eastman Kodak and his mansion in Rochester, New York is now a museum.