Cruel and Tender: The Real in the 20th Century
5 June – 7 September 2003
www.tate.org.uk
Cruel and Tender is Tate Modern’s self-proclaimed first major exhibition on photography. Conceived and curated by Tate’s Emma Dexter in collaboration with Thomas Weski from the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, it presents bodies of work by 23 photographers under the theme of ‘photographic realism’. The exhibition is both an extremely contracted view of realism in the history of photography and, at the same time, an incredibly ambitious and well-researched presentation of the photography they have chosen.
The curators have brought together
photographers, primarily from America and Germany, along what has
traditionally been a razor-sharp divide between modernist and contemporary
colour photography. By pairing the former (until a few years ago almost
entirely overlooked by major dealers and collectors of contemporary art as a
source of aesthetic and financial reward) with the latter, the show succeeds
in highlighting the under-acknowledged forebears of some of today’s most
popular and collectable contemporary photographers, such as Andreas Gursky,
Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth.
Industrial revolution, personal alienation from a consumerist society and
the threat of social collapse all play major roles in the show, as in the
industrial photographs of Albert Renger-Patzsch, a leading proponent of the
New Objectivity movement in Germany, in Robert Frank’s images of a racially
and socially divided America, and in the moving portraits of impoverished
Russians by Boris Mikhailov. Each photographer, including widely-recognized
‘masters’ of the medium such as Walker Evans and August Sander, has been
allocated one room and, indeed, walking from room to room, the exhibition
evolves into a massive labyrinth of 23 solo shows. Most are pleasurable
experiences on their own terms, given the breadth of great material garnered
for each of the photographers, especially the number of vintage photographs
on view. Overall, this ‘solo show’ approach is the exhibition’s strength and
yields an unmissable opportunity to see influential bodies of work that can
otherwise only be found in books. The silvery square-formatted photographs
of social misfits by Diane Arbus, the closely-cropped images of Lee
Friedlander’s factory workers, and the early work of the hugely influential
colour photographer Stephen Shore, for instance, are seldom shown in large
series in Britain.
What is most obvious at first glance is the extreme difference in size between the older photography and the new. While the older work hovers close to the print size of the traditional 8" x 10" print, the contemporary artists loom large in billboard proportions. The contemporary photography could have easily dwarfed the smaller work but the curators have handled this well. Robert Adam’s black-and-white photographs of American suburbia from the 1970s, What We Bought: The New World, exert a formidable presence in a long well-paced series around a room. Lewis Baltz’s room, showing his industrial park images from the ’70s, stacked one on the other in a grid, is particularly successful.
Several hundred images have been gathered together from other collections around the world, and this is a laudable logistical achievement by the curators. However, this also highlights the slim pickings of Tate Modern’s photography collection. A look in the back of the show’s formidable catalogue tells us that only a fraction of the images come from Tate. Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Rineke Dijkstra are predictable and safe choices by a museum that one hopes would take more risks. In this way, the exhibition begs the question as to why Tate’s acquisition programme has been so meagre in its resolve to acquire contemporary photography and, furthermore, why it has entirely missed the boat on collecting modernist photography from both Britain and abroad. Notable examples of missing British photographers are Richard Billingham and Graham Smith. The historical lack of institutional support for photography in Britain has left Tate Modern with little of its own to show for Britain’s own photographic tradition, as well as that of America and Europe. One can only imagine how difficult and expensive it will be for Tate to backtrack now, as the price of both modernist and contemporary photography continues to skyrocket. In this way, the ghost of painting as the preferred medium of institutional acquisition in the UK hangs over this exhibition, trumping the show even in its deliberate absence.
Much has been made of the narrow focus of the exhibition and its American and German biases. At the same time, however, seen within the context of Tate Modern’s programme, it succeeds in offering viewers a rare opportunity to view key photographic work in one place. Now that Tate has flexed its academic muscles and shown its knowledge of the realist roots of contemporary photography, albeit narrow ones, this kind of exhibition will likely be its last historical survey, given the extreme expense and logistics involved. However, Tate Modern has announced itself now free and fit to launch future monographic shows of photographic artists in an effort, one assumes, to keep pace with its international counterparts. It will be interesting to see which photographers they have their eyes on.
Noel Daniel