Thursday 13 September 2012

Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s - The Barbican

Graciela Iturbide, Our Lady of the Iguanas, Juchitan, Mexico, 1979 (a Zapotec woman wearing live iguanas)
Everything Was Moving: Photography of the 60s and 70s is at the Barbican Art Gallery until 13 January 2013.
The exhibition features the work of 12 photographers working in the period: Larry Burrows, Ernest Cole, Bruce Davidson, WilliamEggleston, David Goldblatt, Graciela Iturbide, Boris Mikhailov, SigmarPolke, Malick Sidibé, Raghubir Singh, Shomei Tomatsu and Li Zhensheng.
This was a politically dramatic (apartheid, Vietnam, Mao's cultural revolution, civil rights protest) and culturally rich period. The photographers featured are an international mix of perspectives and approaches. So diverse is the content that Adrian Searle suggests, in his review, that it might best be approached as a series of solo exhibitions. 
Read reviews by Adrian Searle and Sean O'Hagan and article at the Royal Photographic Society.
Larry Burrows, US soldier during Operation Pegasus, Khe Sanh, Vietnam, April 1968
Add captionErnest Cole, handcuffed black South Africans, arrested for being in a white area illegally; from his book House of Bondage, featuring mostly clandestine shots of the effects of apartheid

Bruce Davidson, City, 1962
William Eggleston,  from William Eggleston’s Guide, 1976

David Goldblatt, Saturday Morning at The Hypermarket: Semi-final of the Miss Lovely Legs Competition, Bocksburg, 28 June 1980

Boris Mikhailov, from Yesterday's Sandwich's series
Sigmar Polke's The Bear Fight, 1974, in which Afghanis enjoy a bear-baiting
Malick Sidibé, Studio Portrait, 1969
Raghubir Singh, Pilgrim and Ambassador Car, northern India, 1977
Shomei Tomatsu, Coca-cola, Tokyo, 1969
Li Zhensheng, several hundred thousand Red Guards at a 'Learning and Applying Mao Zedong Thought' rally in Red Guard Square (formerly People's Stadium), Harbin, Heilongjiang province, 1966