Subtitled ‘A Century of Photography’, this is an absolute crowd-pleaser of an exhibition, precision-tooled to draw in the fascinated tourist alongside the domestic royal-watcher. However, whatever your views on the monarchy (which, I can assure you, it won’t change in any way), I still think it deserves your attention. This is a show equally concerned…
Category: social history
Forward thinking: ‘Science Fiction’, Science Museum, London
With a lack of planning that would probably rule me out of any responsible position in the building of a future society, I have only just made it to this captivating exhibition – which has a single week left to run. Worth catching if you’re in the area, but as ever, I’ve tried to give…
Narrative threads: ‘Africa Fashion’, V&A, London
This was one of the most purely exciting exhibitions I’ve seen in a long time. So vibrant and visually assured, it stimulates one’s sight in the same way a complex gourmet meal explodes in multiple flavours across the taste buds. Seasoned visitors to the V&A might not be surprised by this. Quick note for those…
Alpha tale: Pete Paphides, ‘Broken Greek’
I am extremely late to this party, as ‘Broken Greek’ has now been in paperback for a couple of months. Back in 2020, its initial appearance was greeted by a chorus of rave reviews and widespread, well-deserved appreciation. It not only won the Royal Society of Literature’s 2021 Christopher Bland Prize, it was also my…
A Remarkable Meditation on Masculinity at the Barbican
Masculinities: Liberation through Photography at the Barbican is an exploration of male identity from the 1960s to the present day! The subject is vast and being the Barbican, it’s a big show, taking up two levels of floor space and showcasing three hundred artworks from celebrity photographers such as Richard Avedon and Robert Mapplethorpe, through…
SCANDI-NOIR IN SE21: Harald Sohlberg the Dulwich Art Gallery
There is a sense in these works of the landscape giving form to thought, a quality that puts you in mind immediately of the similarly curious, almost uninhabited cityscapes of Atkinson Grimshaw.
Don McCullin
Don McCullin, who has a fair claim to the title of the UK’s greatest living photographer, was born in 1935 in Finsbury Park – a bloody tough area of London before the war, and even more so after, when much of it had been bombed flat. The first photograph McCullin was paid for, in 1958,…
ARTMUSELONDON 