L’Oeil de la Photographie is pleased to link up with a new educational resource britishphotography.org to provide an A to Z of British Photography. Every two weeks we will present the next letter of the alphabet.
Just launched britishphotography.org gives online access to Claire and James Hyman’s personal collection of British photography as well as providing essays on the subject and links to other websites.
Established over a period of nearly twenty years, the Hyman Collection consists of over 3,000 artworks with an emphasis on photography from nineteenth century salt prints to contemporary works. The Hyman Collection seeks to support British Photography through education and acquisitions and to use britishphotography.org as a forum for promoting British Photography.
Today, as an introduction, A is for Albion, the legendary first recorded name for Great Britain.
Trying to characterise any nationality is highly charged. Britishphotography.org makes no attempt to state what yesterday or today’s Britain is about, let alone seek to define English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh characteristics. Instead we have tried to focus on the exceptional visions of a range of photographers.
It’s a strange fact that in Britain there is a generation of extraordinary photographers who remain under-appreciated. Several of them were the subject of a MOMA New York exhibition, Photography from the Thatcher Years, as far back as 1991, and others were included in Martin Parr’s travelling Parrworld show in 2009. But it’s very random and British Photography still deserves far greater international acclaim.
Often these photographers have worked, series by series, with each project culminating in a book and/or exhibition, so rather than acquiring single prints, we’ve tried where possible to acquire entire, or at least substantial, bodies of work: Anna Fox‘s Work Stations, Ken Grant‘s Close Season, Karen Knorr‘s Belgravia, Martin Parr‘s Last Resort, Mark Power‘s Shipping Forecast, Paul Reas‘s Flogging a Dead Horse, Paul Seawright‘s Sectarian Murders, Jem Southam‘s Painters Pool, Jo Spence‘s Remodelling Photohistory, Homer Sykes‘s Once a Year. It’s a long list!
But themes do emerge and over the coming weeks we’ve tried to explore some of these multiple aspects by curating an A to Z of mini thematic exhibitions of pictures in the collection.
Today, to set the scene, we present some photographs that serve as an introduction and present some of the aspects of society that are important to self-identity and to how Britain is seen by the rest of the world: Royalty, the class system, the Empire, fashion, punk, pubs, the countryside, the tourist industry, eccentricity….
INFORMATIONS
The Hyman Collection
16 Savile Row
London W1S 3PL
United Kingdom
http://britishphotography.org
