Street and Studio: Tate Modern (From The Oxford Times)

Street and Studio: Tate Modern

2:24pm Wednesday 13th August 2008 in Leisure By Claire Nichols

This show celebrates the cultural importance of the portrait in historical and contemporary uses of the photograph. In this exhibition, the studio and city streets are motifs that set a yardstick against the evolving relationship of artist and subject. Wwe navigate the viewpoints of more than 100 photographers chronologically, from the 19th into the 20th century. It is a steep and informative journey through social ideologies, Modernist trends, clothing fashions and industrial booms.

The exhibition provides an academic pursuit of the lens, starting with its embryonic technological and social stages, This is a long and well-trodden road: along the naïve unassuming routes of photography typified here in John Thomson's images of Caney the Clown and his Covent Garden Flower Women (1877), en-route to the well-known golden era of studio photography encapsulated by Cecil Beaton's photocratic' class of elegant celebrities. There are, however, some beautiful, non-standard, shock moments in this exhibition. With the 1930s seeing the studio a safer' commonplace tool, the photographer had to find new ways in which to become marketable, and so emerged the cheeky surprise' street photographers who startled their subjects in amusement parks and fair grounds. Mobile studio in tow, they tried to sell their somewhat humorous real life' portraits to their subjects, and these curious prints are collected here for our delight.

Seventy years later, in the guise of Martin Parr in the Contemporary Street and Studio' room, we witness the development of this roaming' photographic industry. For his Autoportraits series, 1999-2001, Martin Parr poses with a fake friendly' camera smile, perhaps conveying a sardonic stance towards the studio industry.

Jumping from the war years to the inter-war period, from 1960s Liberation' to internationalism, a dynamic political undertone seems to lie at the heart of this exhibition. This political focus appears less interested in iconic photography than in social and aesthetic developments, such as the evolution from singular portraiture to image series and image-text combinations. Between beautifully composed originals by Henri Cartier-Bresson - pioneer of the decisive moment' - and Ron Galella's aggressive, unauthorised paparazzi shots of celebs' such as Woody Allen and Mia Farrow (pictured), we are immersed and seduced into the medium as much as we are given a safe critical distance. The show ends with Rineke Dijkstra's hilarious filmic document of trashy late 1990s clubbers, a convergence of studio and location photography in the medium of video.