Crispy Duck

A very entertaining day spent in London.  I visited no less than three photographic exhibitions.

The first was "Concrete in Life" at the Brunswick Gallery.  That doesn't sound a particularly inspiring subject, but I had seen a couple of examples on line of the images in the exhibition which sparked my interest.  The exhibition was a display from the last few years of this competition, and consisted of some imaginative and inspiring architectural (mainly) images. You can see some of the winning images here.  Well worth the effort to visit.

My second exhibition of the day was at the Leica Gallery where they were displaying some of Elliott Erwitt's images.  It was a fairly small display, but his images are alway fun and enjoyable. See here.

Finally, the highlight of the day was the exhibition of work by Bert Hardy on show at the Photographers Gallery.  There was an extensive display of his news and sport photography, his photographs taken during his time in the Army Film and Photographic Unit in the Second World War, and his social documentary work for the Picture Post magazine.  His work provides a valuable record of life from the 1930s to the 1960s and beyond.  His picture essays in Picture Post were the finest examples of this kind of work and a forerunner of the colour supplements in weekend newspapers.  I'm not sure anything similar is being produced today, and I do wonder whether future generations will have the same quality photogaphic records of life in the 21st Century, despite the huge number of photographs being taken today - so many of which may be of little historical value and remain as digital files on social media and may no longer be available in a few decades time.

After all of this, I spent some time wandering around Chinatown and Soho, returning to some of the places I had visited on the workshop a couple of weeks ago. The area was really buzzing, with crowds of people enjoying  a dry and remarkably warm evening.  My blip was in Chinatown (rather obvious, I suspect).