Open your diary to the month of April before you read on. It’s the month (just) when PhotoBath’s forthcoming exhibition, The Costs of Living, will open at 44AD Gallery on the corner of Bath’s Abbey Street.
It from Tuesday 30th April to Sunday 5th May, and features the work of fifteen photographers, including associates from the UK, Poland and Zimbabwe.
PhotoBath was established in 2014 to celebrate, promote and support documentary and fine art photography in Bath and other UK areas. We have since widened our reach and become more international in outlook.
There are now active members from Poland, South Africa as well contributors from all areas of the UK and Europe.
The starting point for this forthcoming show has been a broad interpretation of the term, ‘costs of living’, beyond the purely economic, though money does, of course, shape life expectations, choices and chances. The photographers have used their local and historical knowledge, and their documentary ‘eye’, to explore race, gender, disability and age, and the lived consequences through class, wealth, housing, and physical and mental health outcomes.
Although the current crisis is reported daily in newspapers, social media, television and radio, the issues and their effects have always been with us. By showing images that reach back decades, as well as diverse communities across the world, we’ve aimed to create opportunities to make connections across time and place, to highlight continuities and differences, and persistent inequalities and social injustices.
This has brought together surprising and poignant stories of everyday life. We travel from Fran May’s dynamics in a working class cafe in 1970s East London and Rob Bremner’s portrait of a couple with a backcloth of rubble on a Liverpool street, in the 1980s, to the windswept, tragic landscape of Jamie Windsor’s Beachy Head and Paul Kaspar’s grim wasteland in Brighton, unexpectedly enlightened by the presence of a penguin. On to a cut-price, comic moment with Jon Leahy, to aching studies of the homeless on the streets of Georgian Bath by Daz Smith and Lizz Bugg, and Carlos Ordonez’s housing estate in the Heritage City where tourists never venture.
Then to Chris Niedenthal’s car boot sale in Soviet-era Poland under strict martial law, the isolation of a homeless bag lady in Central Park by Max Whitaker, and a life-changing encounter with Carlo Chinca’s Ugandan mother with polio. Continuing to Chris Roche’s inspired Indian framer in Tamil Nadu, Hannah Mentz’s beautiful, haunting portrait of a fellow Zimbabwean, and ending with a brief moment of prayer in Rome by Phil Hendy, and Anna Kot’s dilapidated architectural detail in Trondheim, Norway.
A spokesperson for the network, Carlos Ordonez, said, “Taking a long view of the crisis we’re currently living through has highlighted intractable inequalities, across time and place, and the singular power of the photographic image to record people’s lives and struggles.”
