The Association of Photographers was formed in 1968 as the Association of Fashion and Advertising Photographers and has grown to be one of the most prestigious professional photographers’ associations in the world. To celebrate its 50th birthday the Association is holding a FREE exhibition in the lobby of 1 Canada Square, the enormous office block at the heart of Canary Wharf.
One Canada Square, Canary Wharf (photo by the author)
The exhibition’s full title says it all – AOP50: Images that Defined the Age: Celebrating 50 years of the Association of Photographers. The ground floor of One Canada Square is open plan in the form of a big rectangle. A central square area, where the lifts are, is only accessibly with security passes. The rest forms a sort of airy cloister which we pedestrians are free to walk around.
And it’s on these surrounding walls that some 55 photos in total are hung. They’re very varied in size: some are newspaper-sized prints, some are big prints, some have been made into enormous prints and a handful into wall-sized posters hanging in mid-air.
Installation view showing (clockwise from top left) A Fresh Perspective by Andy Green, Pregnant Man by Alan Brooking, Mothercare image by Sandra Lousada (the black hands holding a white body), L’Enfant by Spencer Rowell, and two smallish portraits titled ‘Being Inbetween’ by Carolyn Mendelsohn
The photos have been chosen as among the best produced by the association’s members; to represent breadth and variety of subject matter; and to give a sense of the changing styles, looks and subject matter over the period.
Twiggy (1966) by Barry Lategan
Obvious fashion-related images include a group of models arranged on the scaffold of a building being built, as well as stunning shots of Twiggy (above) the wondrously beautiful Jean Shrimpton. Others are famous images from advertising campaigns, like the slash in purple silk which was used to advertise Silk Cut cigarettes.
Beneath or next to each group of images there are wall labels giving detailed background to each of the images, generally an interview with the photographer and – if it was an advertising shoot – the creatives involved in the commission.
I counted 10 women photographers and about 45 men. Being all well-intentioned liberals, many of the photographers ‘investigate’ familiar issues of our time, two popular ones being the environment and feminism. Thus three or four images are concerned with disappearing habitats, the barbarity of whale hunting, or species which we’re merrily wiping out.
Alan, 1 Day Old (2017) by Rory Carnegie
The feminist ones included one about anorexia, some images of ‘female empowerment’, and this image by Clare Park, which became well-known because it was used as the cover of Naomi Klein’s 1990 classic feminist text, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women.
Installation view showing (clockwise from the top) The Beauty Myth by Clare Park, Jimmy the Quiff Phgura and his Chevy Impala by Amit Amin and Naroop Jhooti, and Shay by Laura Pannack
Whether referencing the Beauty Myth in an exhibition which features glamour shots of stunning models and cover photos from Vogue is meant to be ironic or not I couldn’t figure out.
The other major issue of all bien-pensant people – race – was covered with some striking portraits of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and probably the most venerated man of my lifetime, Nelson Mandela – both photographed by Jillian Edelstein.
Nelson Mandela (1997) by Jillian Edelstein
The exhibition was curated by leading photography expert Zelda Cheatle. She’s quoted as saying she didn’t try to slavishly find a picture from each year, but loosely grouped together images under the headings of Advertising, Editorial, Still Life, Portraiture, Fine Art and Landscape.
About 20 of the 55 images are in black and white i.e. colour is more dominant. About 20 photos don’t feature human beings, suggesting the way we are inexhaustibly interested in images of other people. I spent five minutes totting up numbers for each decade and came up with:
- 1960s – 7
- 1970s – 3
- 1980s – 7
- 1990s – 11
- 2000s – 9
- 2010s – 19
tending to suggest that, as so often, the 1970s are the decade that taste forgot, while the figures also suggest how we are unconsciously drawn to the recent past.
Given that we live – according to a recent exhibition at the Imperial war Museum – in the Age of Terror, there was surprisingly little about armed conflict, in fact I could only see three: Jonathan Olley’s b&w image of a disused British Army tower in Northern Ireland; a mine or bomb blowing up in (I think) Mexico or Colombia, titled Cocaine Wars; and Tim Hetherington’s amazingly composed and structured shot of a doctor treating a wounded soldier in Afghanistan.
Medic ‘Doc’ Old treats specialist Gutierrez, injured during an attack by Taliban fighters on the ‘Restrepo’ outpost in Afghanistan (2007) by Tim Hetherington
Hetherington was himself killed in 2011, by a mortar round, while covering the Libyan Civil War.
But while we are doing our best to destroy the environment and kill each other, much of the world still remains stunningly beautiful and unspoilt. The show includes a handful of (I counted five) stunning landscapes. Maybe my favourite was Abraham Lake, Alberta, Canada (2011) by Paul Wakefield.
Abraham Lake, Alberta, Canada (2011) by Paul Wakefield
Comment
At the end of the day One Canada Square isn’t a traditional exhibition space and that sometimes made it a little hard to concentrate – there are plenty of people walking to and fro into the neighbouring restaurants and shopping centre – and sometimes a little difficult to get a proper look at the bigger, hanging photographs.
The curators have gone to a lot of trouble to make the images different sizes (from small prints to vast wall hangings, as I mentioned above) but the lack of a chronological, conceptual or aesthetic framework made the selection seem, well, a little random.
L’Enfant (1986) by Spencer Rowell
All in all, AOP50 is not quite worth making a ‘pilgrimage’ to, as you might to one of the blockbuster exhibitions at one of London’s big-name galleries – for example, the massive exhibition of Photography on the Margins, currently in its last week at the Barbican.
But if you are in the area, or if you have a special interest in commercial photography, then it’s worth popping along to see this impressive collection which includes some truly stunning images.
Related links
- AOP50: Images that Defined the Age: Celebrating 50 years of the Association of Photographers is at Canary Wharf until Friday 1 June 2018
- The Association of Photographers website
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