This exhibition is the fourth in the series ‘Starting a Photography Collection. Ten Exhibitions in Ten Weeks’; an ambitious programme of weeklong exhibitions in the run-up to the Photo London fair this May. This specially curated series covers a wide spectrum of photography from the nineteenth century to the present. This exhibition is a rare opportunity to acquire vintage photographs by Bert Hardy, one of the most loved British photographers of the twentieth century. All works date from his famous Picture Post years.
Bert Hardy gained fame as the chief photographer for Picture Post, the most important British photograph-led news magazine of the 1940s and 1950s. He travelled widely, capturing the leading events and personalities of the day, as well as gaining acclaim for his pictures of deprived areas of Britain, including an award-winning series of photographs of life in London’s Elephant and Castle district, which appeared in Picture Post on 8 January 1949.
As well as including pictures that were reproduced in Picture Post, accompanied by their original captions by journalist A.L.Lloyd, the exhibition also displays for the first time a selection of other Bert Hardy photographs that have never previously been exhibited or published.
At the centre of the exhibition is a rare vintage print of Hardy’s most famous picture, Gorbal Boys, a picture of two boys running towards the camera, as well as familiar and unknown pictures from his Elephant and Castle series.
The wintry weather in London had much to do with the atmosphere in these photographs of life in Elephant and Castle. As a result there is an almost Dickensian quality to some of these scenes. A dense haze of smog shrouds the carts, trams and buses and the streets teem with a lively mixture of different characters.
An entrée into this world was provided by Maisie, a prostitute who appears in some of Hardy’s photographs of Elephant and Castle. She introduced Hardy to many of those he photographed, allowing him an insight into domestic life as well as life on the streets. Following in the footsteps of Brassai and Bill Brandt, Hardy shows the metropolis to be a twenty four hour city and produced powerful statements about the nocturnal as well as daylight life of the city.
Against a backdrop of bomb and building sites, Hardy captures unchanging patterns of life – street markets, coal deliveries, horse dealers – as well as providing glimpses of the modern city, such as some of London’s first traffic lights. Bursting with incident, these photographs range from intimate domestic interiors to convivial pub scenes, moving from bustling streets filled with people, buses and trams to scenes of children playing hide and seek amidst the rubble of a bomb or building site.
The exhibition also includes works from less familiar series to give an idea of Hardy’s range.
« Bert Hardy has always been one of the best loved British photographers. Our first exhibition of his work, in 2004, was a complete sell out and we are delighted to present our second exhibition of vintage prints. Unlike the punchy later prints of Hardy, these vintage prints from the darkroom of Picture Post have a murky quality that well suits the smog and thin wintery light of inner city London, and have the special hand-made quality of working prints, with their traces of use and sense of life and history. »
– James Hyman
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