ART REVIEW
* gist—mm; '-
PHOTOGRAPHY GALLERY & WORKSHOP 279-281 HIGH STREET, GLASGOW, G4 008
TEL: 041 552 2151
OUT OF THE DARKROOM, INTO THE LIGHT
(MIEMBIERS' EXHIBITION) 9th MAY - 6th JUNE
"Vita brevis, ars longa"
Title:
OPEN TUES-SAT, 11—530
Street Level is subsidised by the Scottish Arts Council & Glasgow District Council
Photographs by Sarah Mackay & Stewart Shaw
Banners of the World /\ unique and compelling art form
l-3I May
New Arts: Fellow Travellers Design for IVlusic - The Story of" an [\lhum Campaign
l May-7 lune Buying for the Future
Contemporary Art Purchases Until 7 june
Andrew Stark Portrait Photographs Until 7 June
British Gas
\Vildlil‘e Photographer of the Year 8 May-7 June
Jock McFadyen Fragments from Berlin
9 May-2| june
g 0 o: 0 .2. 5 Lu 2 2 3 Lu (I) D 2 U : rd E In ..| .I < 0 E <
0 .c H H
(U j. (I) I.” it < Z
Admission Free
i
Glasgow IVluseums Art Gallery and .Vluseum. Kelvingrox'e,
Glasgow (‘13 BAG 'l‘el: 041-357 392‘)
=l
L___L. .__ _ .___
I _
i
i 3
i i ! l l i
i in; “1" ‘. oA ’ 4‘ 3. “if;
Serra Pelada Gold Mine, Brazil
Photojournalism can. at worst, appeal to the macabre voyeur'in us all. Horrific visions ofwar. famine and poverty are captured on film, printed up in the clean folds of the Sunday supplement and then thrown away.
But the people in Salgado‘s sharp black and white prints have a presence which is hard to forget. As a member of the Magnum group of photographers since 1979. he has travelled the world documenting the rawest edge of human existence. This exhibition ofsome 50 prints shows a vision of the 805 which often comes close to hell on earth: starving Africa, where young boys stand naked in deserts with the expressions ofold men and a man holds the hand of the corpse of his wife; the quagmire of the Sierra Pelado goldmine in Brazil. where men swarm up the sides ofthe mud-filled
OWBI‘
pit like ants, faces worn with fatigue.
Elsewhere, he portrays manual workers in the so-called civilised world. In the decaying colonialism of Bangladesh. men, women and children work in a collapsing Victorian brick coal mine, and in a shipyard, the blackened faces of shipbuilders look numb to the surrounding filth and daily strain. Salgado also looks at his own background and several studies of Latin America portray a continent where Catholicism and poverty have turned people into chidren.
Importantly. Salgado does not divest his subjects of their dignity. There is no savagery, for example, in his study ofchildren scavenging on a Brazilian rubbish dump. surrounded by hovering vultures. Even at their bleakest, there is an unsettling sense of composure about these images.
Artistically, the photographs are stunning— the compositions metaphoric, filled with movement and texture. In ‘Angola‘. two small boys peek through the slats of a wooden platform while the boots and a rifle butt of a soldier tower above, dividing the picture into two halves.
Bold, deeply disturbing and often beautiful, this show is a profound portrayal ofhumanity. Looking down from the clean white walls of the gallery. however, the look in these people‘s eyes turns to irony. (Beatrice Colin)
Sebastiao Salgado is at Glasgow Arts Centre until Sat 23 May.
[- All the world’s
Stags have a good life, or so the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ fraternity tell us. Until they get shot, of course. But The Highland Game is not an exhibition to pass judgment. Glyn Salterley spent ten years recording the landowners, socialites and servants on the most highialutin of Highland estates, and he does his job with a dispassionate eye. Well, as dispassionate as you can be when dealing with such an explosive subject matter.
‘ The photographs fit neatly into sections — preparing for the hunt, a spot of fox culling (fox-hunting, it seems, is a cissy Sassenach pastime), pheasant and grouse shooting, fishing and finally, triumphantly, stag spying, stalking and shooting. It is clear why Satterley has landed on these pursuits for his main subject matter: his shots of servants making breakfast or dusting the Duchess's study are well composed and often beautifully lit with natural light, but they have no soul. It is only when the photographer sets off onto the moors, trailing in the wake of a sea of Barbours, that his eye finds the perfect image. The Highlands have probably never looked better.
The hunters, usually accompanied by
Glyn Satferley: ‘he does his job with a dispassionate eye'
doe-eyed Iabradors, stand in the foreground of stark, forbidding landscapes, aiming with either rifle or binoculars. In many of the pictures, they are the subjects standing alone; only towards the end of the exhibition do the steps make an appearance, but never in their natural, living state. The only healthy animals on show are the ones that have pledged allegiance to the ‘sporlsmen'. But Salterley is not a judge, more the court recorder, and his subjects will certainly feel like fairly-treated witnesses rather than the accused. However, to the-objective viewer, the noble sportsmen have been given plenty rope with which to hang themselves. (Philip Parr) The Highland Game is at Portfolio Gallery until 23 May.
54TH}; List s—ii Mayiwi