Anything but easy
What a cunning title curator Di Poole has chosen. There's barely a photo that isn't welcome within its elastic embrace.
Robert Polidori's cramped, faded, empty rooms in Cuba? Well, evidently, living under Castro isn't easy. It's not easy living in Johannesburg either, according to Lolo Veleko, although at least Veleko’s street kids have fancy headwear and lurid lipstick to lighten their difficulties.
Anyone familiar with Gershwin's song Summertime, from Porgy And Bess, will recognise the subtext of slavery and oppression in the lyrics from which this exhibition borrows its title.
Poole hasn't missed the point either: there are no rich daddies or good lookin' mummies here and if 'fish are jumping and the cotton is high' then Max Kandhola's ghostly divers and the forlorn worker immobilised in his sugar cane field by Zwelethu Mthethwa suggest uneasy alternatives to any idyllic scenario of lazy days amid nature's bounty.
There are fine photographers here but Poole's open-door policy lets the exhibition down. What relevance do Frederico Câmara's odd chambers have to the title? And doesn't Yto Barrada's lovely, melancholy mountain painted on wallpaper become kitsch in this context?
Poole's lack of intellectual rigour suggests that earning a living can also be easy: but that was hardly Gershwin's meaning.
The Living Is Easy
Flowers East
Kingsland Road, E2 8DP
