PHOTO LONDON at SOMERSET HOUSE

9 Sep-12 Sep 2021

Suma Lamonte, 1973, Photograph. Credit: Photograph © Rolph Gobits

Overview

For Photo London, England & Co presents a cabinet room of photographs from the 1950s through to the early 1980s, encompassing artists' use of photography as a medium and method for experimentation and documentation: primarily as a way of bringing a material presence to ephemeral, time-based events. Highlights include images by Anne Bean that emerged from her often-perilous performances. Issues of self-identity are addressed in works by Susan Hiller and Sue Barnes. Rose Boyt's images come from two series of works from the 1970s: her ‘bath photographs’ of naked friends and family, and the images she made in Lucian Freud's studio. Clay Perry documented East End migrant life in Cable Street in the late 1950s. In the 1970s, Rolf Gobits began his series of portraits of travelling entertainers and vaudeville performers, usually photographing them in retirement in their modest homes - he feels that over the past fifty years he has been capturing a disappearing world, ‘a forgotten tribe’.

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