Steve McCurry
India
Chris Beetle Gallery
16th January - 9th February 2013
Earlier this month I visited Chris Beetle's Gallery http://www.chrisbeetles.com/ in Ryder Street (London) to see the new exhibition by Steve McCurry called India.
McCurry is most famous for his photograph above known The Afghan Girl taken in 1984. Whilst being about India this exhibiton had a different feel to this particular photograph. The majority of the photographs featured depicted either groups or showed typical Indian landscapes.
There was one particular image which puzzled me and that was Blue City 1996 (Featured above). This photograph was so large and had been so blown up that there was a huge lack of detail. There was no depth of field to this work of art and being placed as it was in between photographs where McCurry displayed his characterful detail and had full rein only made its limitations stand out more. I was later told by Chris that this image had been commissioned by a particular fashion house for one of their campaigns and so the way the photograph ended up looking as though it had been flattened was due to their specific intentions.
I also felt the way the exhibition itself was laid out didn't allow the photographs to fully reach their potential impact. For instance, as the gallery space is not overly large it would have perhaps been better to spread the works of art out and include interlinking clear boards across the gallery that would have therefore given the illusion of more space.
My dear readers, you may feel as though I am being particularly critical of this exhibition but the reasoning behind this is that I have been some what spoilt in the past when looking at Steve McCurry's work.
In April 2010 I had the great pleasure of going to one of the most spectacular exhibitions of all time which in fact first inspired me to want to go into the art world, and perhaps to end up in curatorship myself.
This was during my Art History Abroad Course on my gap year when we spent a few days in the beautiful Italian city of Perugia. Here the way the gallery space was transformed was truly breathtaking!
As soon as the viewer entered the space everyone fell silent: it had the feeling of a holy and sacred place where the impact of the photographs left the viewer struck dumb. This exhibition will always stay with me and i'm afraid that is why I was somewhat critical when I entered Chris Beetle's Gallery. It is however worth mentioning that there is one very significant difference with the message being given across by both exhibitions The glorious Perugian exhibition was presented in a much larger space and was not trying to sell the works, so the way in which it was laid out gave the viewer an all-round experience and one could end up getting lost within the wondrous world of McCurry. The Beetle Gallery on the other hand was selling the works it exhibited and this was the purpose of the exhibiton In whatever setting McCurry's photographs are placed in they will always leave us with an extraordinary imprint that momentarily lets us escape to the colourful, noisy, spiritual and fascinating world that is India.
Once again it has been a pleasure
The Raven's Eye Critic
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