SHADOW CATCHER
Exhibition to May 31 2008
Alastair Thain Edward Sheriff Curtis
Shadow Catcher is a rare opportunity to see the extraordinary work of two acclaimed and iconic photographers working a hundred years apart, but demonstrating unmistakable similarities. They are both creators and groundbreakers, developing and building their own cameras, and at times enduring severe hardship in pursuit of the images they were chasing. Thain was inspired to work in photography after seeing Curtis’s dazzling photographs while visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Thain on Curtis:
"I believe that the medium that I choose to work in, photography, is extraordinarily revealing... that, bizarrely for such a mechanical medium, almost every frame of the photographer is autobiographical and with Curtis it seems to me his sincerity, his energy, his commitment, and his passion were truly epic."
GALLERY
Click images to enlarge
ALASTAIR THAIN
"…quite rightly regarded as one of the greatest portrait photographers of his generation" (British Journal of Photography ‘04), Thain rarely shows his work in the UK in any quantity. Its depth and breadth is astonishing, including celebrity portraits last seen in "Rapture" along with Martin Parr and Jeff Wall in the Kunsthalle Museum in Mannheim; his enormous and raw portraits of young marines in "How We Are Now" at Tate Britain at the end of last year; war photography (some too bleak and terrible to bear, and some astounding in capturing resilience and renewal); the lost underbelly of America, and other random events.
Throughout his career Thain has been unfettered by the normal boundaries and conventions of photography. Wanting to capture images in the same depth as live experience, he designed cameras based on the system NASA used to photograph the earth from space. These unique and large format images capture with extreme resolution and clarity the subliminal movement and expressions that reveal in an intimate and nuanced way something essential about the sitter.
EDWARD SHERIFF CURTIS
From the 1880s to the 1930s, Curtis criss-crossed the United States taking images and capturing rare ethnographic information from over eighty American Indian tribes.
Building his own cameras, Curtis too photographed celebrities. Uniquely trusted and respected by the tribes, he captured the likenesses of the powerful and celebrated Indian people of that time, including Geronimo, Chief Joseph, Red Cloud, Medicine Crow and others, and was the only white man allowed to observe and photograph their secret ceremonies and sacred rituals.
This great undertaking to record "The Vanishing Race" that was the Indian Nation was supported, until the wall street crash in 1929, by JP Morgan and Theodore Roosevelt. It produced truly iconic images; they are powerful and beautiful, and given our knowledge of what came afterwards, profoundly moving.