This year has seen a new home for the internationally recognised Photographers Gallery. Expanding its capacity over three floors, this cave of white has already hosted exhibitions like Simon Foxton, The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and Andrea kertesz. This month see’s the arrival of the first Magnum photographer to grace the walls of this new build. Jim Goldberg offers the public a sentimental photo essay titled ‘Open See’
The photographic quality of the exhibition is rightly it’s strongest attribute. An overt interest in the primordial nature of instinctual survival, Goldin captures quietly, man in his most basic state. Photographing people who have abandoned their homeland country fleeing from war and poverty. Goldin tells us the on going struggle and survival for man in the 21st century. Just when we thought that peace was favored in a collective society, we are reminded that man has not moved much further in his quest for sympathetic reconciliation. At points in the exhibition the images may be dominating in exploitation but still this remains true to the subject matter in its honest depiction.
Goldin is at his best when positioning man in the environment. Showing people salvaging debris or simply documenting their escapism, Goldin moves the gallery into a very desperate place when positioning these ethereal images around the space. Shot in the morning light, we are offered a romantic authentic quality that sells us the brutality of the environment in a very poetic seductive way. This is pushed away at times by the unorthodox display of the show, hanging large format photography, 35mm and Polaroid in a scrap book style arrangement. The viewer is thus forced to deal with the images in their own environment creating a pensive interaction between viewer and subject. The show then becomes either heavily embracive or easily passive.
Magnum, the bastion of the photographic world, offers a contemporary look into the age-old notion of war and consequence. Open See becomes the reminder of all the things western media and western civilization wants to quickly hide and forget. The show will run until January, it be a injustice to the exhibition to be missed.