Frogs, 1984
From Elton John to Juergen Teller: London's photography exhibitions view the world with radical eyes
Sir Elton John started collecting photography when he had just come out of rehab in 1990. As he put it, “It’s a much healthier addiction to buy photographs, so I just switched…photography became this incredible companion. It went hand in hand with my sobriety.”
Now Sir Elton’s holdings stand at more than 8,000 photographs and are still expanding; but from the 200 or so works currently on show at Tate Modern it becomes immediately evident that, while undoubtedly still a personal obsession, this is also a very serious enterprise indeed.
We may be welcomed by a jokey Irving Penn portrait of the Rocket Man in 1987 looking rather like Alan Bennett with his glasses wonkily askew, but what unfolds is a dazzling parade of some of the most iconic images by some of the greatest names of modernist photography from the first half of the 20th century.
There are Man Ray’s intimate, arresting portraits of the surrealist artists, thinkers and muses of avant-garde Paris, as well as his classic and controversial 1927 Noir et Blanche, the pair of positive and negative images of his lover Kiki de Montparnasse holding an ebony African Baule mask – which normally hangs above Sir E’s bed.
Other thrilling moments in the show’s abundant portrait section are Edward Steichen’s marvelous veiled Gloria Swanson, Berenice Abbott’s portrait of Jean Cocteau, and Irving Penn’s classic crammed-in-a-corner images of Noel Coward, Duke Ellington and Gypsy Rose Lee.
The roll call continues with many more key portraits, landscapes, still lifes, documentary and abstract works by the likes of Tina Modotti, Brassaï, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Dorothea Lange – to name but a few. This is the period when photography was first being explored as an artistic medium in its own right.
Tate Modern’s selection has been deliberately made to span the wide range of styles and darkroom techniques that artists were using to develop a modern visual language. Among these are Rodchenko and László Moholy-Nagy’s "worm’s eye" and "bird’s eye" views of the modern city, as well as a number of camera-less experiments, such as Man Ray’s Rayographs and the light abstractions of Harry Callahan.
Even more impressive is that fact that many of the photographs on show are also the original vintage prints. Notable among these are the tiny André Kertész 1917 contact print of Underwater Swimmer which still bears his original pencil crop marks and from which came all subsequent versions; and Man Ray’s 1932 Glass Tears which set a world record for a single photograph bought at auction when it came under the hammer to Sir Elton for £112,500 in 1993. (Now of course such a price would be considered a bargain.)
Both a top-notch encyclopedic survey as well as a much-loved private collection (you only have to look at the frames…) we - and the Tate - are lucky that Elton John was happy to take it down from his walls and share it for a while.
While on the subject of important photographic surveys, there is also a unique chance to explore two more recent sensibilities across town at Alison Jacques Gallery. Here, to coincide with what would have been the late Robert Mapplethorpe’s 70th birthday, leading German born, London-based photographer Juergen Teller has been given the run of the entire holdings of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to curate an exhibition that reveals much about both of these two provocative chroniclers of our times.
Like Mapplethorpe, Teller moves between commercial and fine art photography and doesn't shy away from a sexually explicit image. Yet while there’s no shortage of male members thrusting their way through this very singular selection, they are interspersed with a great many images that you wouldn't immediately associate with Mapplethorpe.
These include an almost abstract table top with a spoon of instant coffee; some delightful portraits of children, a peculiar hanging bat and many intensely observed still lifes of fruit, bread and antique silverware. There’s also a haunting tiny polaroid taken in 1973 of Mapplethorpe’s early soulmate Patti Smith, naked and pressed against a window pane that is worth the visit to this show alone.
Teller’s show confirms that whether Mapplethorpe is shooting a bread roll, live frogs on a plate, rows of apartment windows, or two forearms vanishing up a male backside, all his photographs are so meticulously composed and exquisitely lit that you are drawn into the beauty of even the most hardcore and explicit images before you realise what it is you are looking at.
Reciprocally, the most innocuous subjects can also be infused with a full-on sexual suggestiveness. Forget the close-up hard-ons: for me one of the most erotically-charged images is an exquisite silver gelatin print of single pear that seems to hover in a dark void, its sides gently bathed in stripes of light. Then one of the most disturbingly psycho-sexual works is that of a small kitten nestling in the almost obscenely labial folds of a sofa.
Both these important, unmissable exhibitions confirm the much-quoted statement of pioneering Bauhaus photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy that photography allows us to “see the world with entirely different eyes”.
The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection is at Tate Modern until 7 May 2017; Teller on Mapplethorpe is at Alison Jacques Gallery until 7 January 2017