Making It Up: Photographic Fictions, V&A - exhibition review
Making things up has always played a part in photography but there are still earnest debates about its truthfulness. In this small but alluring exhibition, truth is irrelevant and story-telling acted throughout; the title speaks for itself.
The photographs selected for this exhibition are drawn from the vast V&A archives, images from the 1850s to 1870s to today’s contemporaries. Some are paired across time, others stand alone, but all are engaged in detailed conversations and stories plotted for costumed actors by the photographers. Cindy Sherman greets the exhibition, an appropriate exemplar of many alter egos and photographic fictions, here presented as a Fifties or Sixties Hollywood actress.
The earliest works inevitably include the young 19th-century daughters of Julia Margaret Cameron and children of friends of Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), all carefully choreographed into familiar poses, but the lesser-known Clementina Hawarden’s girls pose like young lovers, one cross-dressed and with more edge. They complement Hannah Starkey’s colourful cinematic scene of two 21st-century students sprawled on a party sofa. A lone, anonymous and calmly poignant 1850s scene is set outside a chapel where a mournful Bride of Christ in her wedding dress is seated alongside a young nun, a story loaded with emotion but with its religious detail unexplained.
As we see, theatrical narrative serves different purposes beyond pleasure. Many 19th-century painters used it as models for their work, as with SR Percy’s staged gypsy girls in a country scene. For the Chinese photographer Wang Quigsong, Night Revels of Lao Li imitates traditional scroll paintings working the vignette sequences like a story-board.
The museum’s two recent acquisitions fit into these fictions, with William Henry Price’s portrait of Don Quixote and the contemporary German, Jan Wenzel building complex stories through photo-booth snaps.
The silent dialogues behind the frames are an irresistible lure to viewers following the made-up tales.
Until Mar 16 2014 (020 7907 7073, vam.ac.uk)
