Lowry's Deptford Painting

The L.S. Lowry exhibition at Tate Britain closes on October 20th. I took my mum and we tried to find the original of the print we had in our 1970s front room like so many other people at that time - but to be honest a lot of the pictures were very similar and we couldn't be sure which one it was! I remember being lambasted in the pub by a left wing Labour Party activist when I was a teenage young socialist and he put me on the spot about what art I liked. Frankly I could hardly name an artist at the time, so I meekly mentioned Lowry (well we had one in our house!). He jumped down my throat telling me that 'Lowry was so anti working class'. It was one of those classic 'middle class lefty would be saviour of the working class sneering at the taste of working class people' moments. I remembered all this when I saw that Tate had managed to get Marxist/sometime Situationist art historian  T J Clark to co-curate the exhibition and redeem Lowry's critical reputation - whether he succeeded or not I'm not sure. Said Labour activist turned out to be right that I should check out Picasso anyway.

Most of Lowry's pictures are famously of the north of England, but in 1959 he painted a view of Deptford Power Station from Greenwich. It is in the National Maritime Museum collection and isn't featured at Tate.

Deptford Power Station photographed in 1973 - it was demolished in 1992. The Millennium Quay housing development now stands on that site.

Another London

This week is the last chance to see 'Another London: International Photographers Capture City Life 1930-1980' at Tate Britain (it closes on 16 September). As other reviewers have noted,  I'm not sure that much of it really offers a view of  'another' city - if anything it suggests that great international photographers visiting London tended to reproduce a very familiar version of the city with guardsmen, buses, city gents in hats and cockney characters on market stalls. That was after all what the agencies and magazines they were working for expected to see - artfully executed tourist imagery. Of course there are still some great photographs which capture lost moments, like Edouard Boubat's picture of the 1950s working river by Tower Bridge, or Martine Franck's photo of a bored child in Greenwich at the time of the 1977 silver jubilee.

Another London gets better as you go around it though, and the last half of the exhibition lives up to its title with photographs documenting less commonly seen parts of London. I particularly liked Al Vandenberg's images of 1970s counter-cultural London and Neil Kenlock's pictures from the same period of Black Londoners. They may both have been migrants, from the US and Jamaica respectively, but both were settled in the city when they took their photos. Perhaps you really need to be embedded in a place for a while to step beyond the usual cliches. 

Neil Kinlock's photograph of the aftermath
 of a racist attack in Balham in 1972

One of Vandenberg's photos - featuring Lemmy (centre)

I also liked Leonard Freed's 1971 pictures of Hassidic Jews, though for a Londoner what is frustrating about these images and so many others in the exhibition is that they are simply labelled as London -whereas what you really want to know is whereabouts in London?

Are the contradictions of this exhibition simply about different perspectives of London, or are they representations of the real contradictions of London? In their essay accompanying the exhibition, Ben Gidley and Mike Gidley suggest the latter: 'London has always had an anachronistic relationship to England and Britain, and to Englishness and Britishness. In this representative photographic collection, we see images of pearly kings, milk bottles on the doorstep, guardsmen in bearskins, monarchist crowds and timber-lined pubs that point backwards to an imagined old England that tourists come here to see, while the modernity of its traffic and the relative exoticism of its hippies, Black Panthers and punks suggest a London jerked out of England by war and dislocating change' (in 'Another London: International Photographers Capture City Life 1930-1980', edited by Helen Delaney an Simon Baker, Tate, 2012)