Time Travel at Tate Modern, As Snapped By the First Paparazzi

By Richard Cork

Visual art

Urban life through the lens, from a murdered Mexican worker to Beaton’s icy society queens

Street & Studio Tate Modern LONDON

Brace yourself for a marathon journey through Tate Modern’s overwhelming survey of urban photography between the 1850s and today. More than 400 images are gathered here, shot in cities across the globe. And as soon as we enter, Charles Ngre pitches us into a blurred, mono- chrome region where rag-pickers, chimney-sweeps and hurdy-gurdy men roam Parisian streets. The snapshot immediacy is deceptive: Ngre was lumbered in the mid-19th century with ungainly equipment, so he needed to pose his subjects with elaborate care. But he still managed to open up a whole new world for the camera, and the vulnerability of these alarmingly young urchins is defined with compassion.

Move into an adjoining room, and you are confronted by a New York street scene in 1988. The plump and bespectacled lawyer shown here is far wealthier than the rag-pickers, and he boasts a sleek business suit. But the photographer, Joel Sternfeld, shows him pausing at a grimy vending machine to buy a copy of The New York Times, and a heap of grubby laundry is slung over his arm. He fixes the camera with a steady, pugnacious stare. For Sternfeld did not catch him by surprise: a large-format camera and tripod were needed to take this picture, even though it belongs to a casual-sounding series called “Strangers Passing”.

So street photography is not necessarily as spontaneous and freewheeling as we might imagine. It could, however, turn out to be dangerous. Around 1912, the precocious teenager Jacques Henri Lartigue sat on an iron chair in the Bois de Boulogne and took marvellously free, vital pictures of elegant ladies – “very fashionable, very ridiculous”. He became particularly excited by someone who “stands out like a golden pheasant in a henhouse”. Trembling, Lartigue waits until she gets very close before “click! The shutter of my big camera makes so much noise that the lady jumps almost as much as I do”.

It infuriates “the man with a loud voice accompanying her who, with a furious look, starts to get hold of me”. They are the enraged precursors of today’s celebrities and their bodyguards, lashing out, in terminal exasperation, at the ever-persistent paparazzi.

Mercifully, the Tate show spares us all those tiresome snaps of Amy, Britney and the rest going through their banal and boring rituals. But it does include photographs by the tireless Ron Galella, who took pride in exposing what he calls “the heretofore- private romance of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow”.

In 1980 the “lovey-dovey twosome” dashed out to their chauffeur- driven Rolls-Royce and headed off to dinner in Greenwich Village. Undaunted, Galella and his equally resolute wife, Betty, leapt out of their car at a traffic light and snapped the elusive couple from both sides of the Rolls. The result is strangely disturbing. Woody shields his face from the flashlight’s assault while he clutches Mia’s body with a ferociously twisted fist.

Some of the most powerful and distressing exhibits close in on real violence. In 1934 Manuel Alvarez Bravo photographed a sugar- mill worker in Mexico City, sprawled on the ground during a strike. Although his eye is still open, the dark blood cascading from his head shows just how savagely he was beaten to death.

Nothing like this can be found in the other half of Tate Modern’s show: urban photographs taken in professional studios. Here, in the late 1920s, the irrepressible Cecil Beaton concocts high-gloss surroundings to enhance sitters as vain as the preening Margot Asquith, Lady Oxford; and the svelte Marquise de Casa Maury. Beaton’s shameless antics won him a contract with Vogue, while Philippe Halsman took large-format portraits of celebrities jumping. Everyone from Grace Kelly to Marilyn Monroe delighted in leaping up and down for Halsman. He even gave it a name – jumpology. And the images retain their vivacity.

But they do not sustain our attention and engage us on the level explored by Carl Durheim. Working as early as 1852-3, he photographed Swiss vagrants with an outstanding sense of sympathy. Durheim was commissioned to produce them for “Wanted” posters distributed among police stations to help them to track down “debauched subjects”. Even so, he succeeds in revealing his sitters as heart-rendingly lost, helpless and bewildered.

By no means all the studio pictures at Tate are taken by experts. In 1928, photo booths began to spread across Europe enabling anyone to pose for a strip of eight instant portraits. Escaping from the professionals’ controlling gaze, people felt free to indulge in exhilarating playfulness. It could not be further removed from the passive stillness of the sitters who posed, in the 1990s, for the Finnish photographer Marjaana Kella. She hypnotised them, so they end up slumped and oblivious.

In the end, the most impressive exhibits are the most searching. Andres Serrano, best known for his notorious Piss Christ in 1987, reached a far more profound level three years later. Setting up an improvised studio in the New York subway, he photographed homeless Afro-Americans with a monumental yet unforced dignity. Blind Pete reveals an admirable stoicism, while half of John Paul’s face is in the shadow cast by his hood. We cannot see the man’s eyes, and yet Serrano enables us to enter his life with profound, unforgettable intensity.

Street & Studio: An Urban History of Photography, Tate Modern (020-7887 8888) until 31 August

Charles Darwent is away

(c) 2008 Independent on Sunday, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.