One
Hundred Great Photographs: A Collection by Bruce Bernard
The Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, until 7 September
Winifred Nicholson in Scotland
The Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, until 7 September
The trouble with art collections is that they are often accumulated
over generations in the shadow of changing priorities and fashions,
sprawling like conurbations beyond their original city boundaries.
It is therefore an eye-opener to see Bruce Bernard’s carefully
selected collection of 100 photographs, dating from the earliest days
of photography in the 1840s until Bernard’s death in 2000. Bernard,
a leading picture editor, was commissioned by a private collector
in 1996 to amass the collection to his own taste, and the results
are stunning.
Bernard had an unprejudiced eye for a good photograph, whether it
be a studio portrait, professional photo-journalism, a postcard or
an amateur snapshot. The quality of the works – of all these
genres – is unquestionable, and the content is equally intriguing.
Each image is so compelling that the urge to read the captions in
full is unusually strong: indeed this must surely be the mark of a
good picture editor, otherwise newspapers might never be read.
Previously shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the
exhibition is not packed with the usual suspects, nor does it leave
them out. Fox Talbot, D.O. Hill, Mubridge, Man Ray, Weegee, Brassai
and Eve Arnold are all represented, but so too is a significant proportion
of anonymous photographers and a number of lesser known names.
Bernard was fond of pub photographs, such as David Wise’s Girl
in Hartlepool Pub (1986), whose quiet grace recalls the guarded vulnerability
of similar subjects by Manet and Degas. There is a high sense of violence
and tension in William Klein’s Fighter-Painter Ends Mural, Tokyo
(1961), showing the Japanese artist contorted before a wall which
divides the composition between unleashed natural energy below, and
ordered Western architecture above.
Bernard went to great effort to track down the arresting 1850s ambrotype
of a Waterloo veteran with his wife, which he had published 25 years
earlier in the Sunday Times. The small photograph conveys the enormous
character of the pair, somehow not looking their finest despite their
Sunday Best.
There are hardly any colour photographs in the exhibition, and even
those are mostly hand-coloured, such as the anonymous 1880s tin-type
of three children, which is freakishly out of proportion and a good
example of things gone wrong, but at the same time haunting and unforgettable.
Along the corridor is an intimate exhibition of Winifred Nicholson’s
oil paintings of Scotland’s Highlands and Islands, drawn from
private collections around the country. Nicholson was known for her
colourful flower paintings, but was attracted to the shifting patterns
of light and colour in Eigg, Canna, South Uist and the mainland village
of Sandaig.
It is tempting to draw comparisons with the work of Jon Schueler,
currently at the City Art Centre, because he too was fascinated with
the Western Isles’ shifting atmospheric conditions, but the similarity
ends there. Nicholson’s work here, far from being abstract, is
actually – and unavoidably – quite twee. It is at its best
in Loch Hourn (1952), where three glasses of flowers seem to float
effortlessly in front of a luminous soup of shimmering water, brooding
sky and cloud-tipped mountains, and at its worst in The Piper who
Played the Retreat at Tobruk (c.1952), where lurid green grass and
two loyal dogs attend a stiffly posed piping shepherd.
Catrìona
Black, Sunday Herald 20.07.03