Bath’s Victoria Art Gallery has just launched an exhibition with a real difference.
Hanging on its walls are the photographs we have lived with over the years – as we turn the pages of a newspaper or watch the evening news.
Taken away from the print – and framed on a gallery wall – here are images – stark, uncomfortable, shocking and thought-provoking – that record man’s inhumanity to man. Each one a moment of frozen time – and many of events that changed history.
This is photo-journalism at its best. A collection of over 75 prints taking us through almost one hundred years of world events.
For me – it was a chance to relive moments of events l remember as part of my life experience.
Things like Lee Harvey Oswold’s assassination, Don McCullin’s powerful shell-shocked Vietnam soldier, the terrible tragedy of 9/11, burning oil-wells in the Iraqi desert and the collected faces of desperate boat people.
It is a must-see.
The collection is owned by The Incite Project. Photographer Harriet Logan and curator Tristan Lund have assembled one of the largest private collections of news and documentary photographs in the UK.
This show focuses on iconic images and their power, profiling images that have changed public perception of world events. They have been selected from a collection that specialises in photojournalism and documentary photography.
We are used to seeing these images in the press, in transient form, generally accompanied by columns of text, but the Incite Project treats them as works of art.
The core of the collection are the classics of 20th-century photojournalism that have become visual markers of a moment in time.
The collection is also motivated by a passion to support the photographers and artists currently making extraordinary, thought-provoking images about contemporary issues.
Bath Newseum was able to speak to Tristan Lund – who is collection curator of the Incite Project – at last night’s preview.
Please be warned that this exhibition contains images of conflict which some visitors may find disturbing.
The exhibition runs until May 10th. £4.00 / concs. / under 21s and Discovery Card holders free. More information via https://www.victoriagal.org.uk/
