Whilst waiting for the Paralympic marathons to start this morning, I crept in early (it opens at 10am) at TB to see:
Another London: International Photographers Capture London Life 1930-1980 (
www.tate.org.uk) and would urge you all to go before it closes on 16th September, 2012.
It has been harder to find time for anything but the Olympics and Paralympics these past two months but at last I seem to finding my rhythm again with a couple of movies and a show already under my belt.
Another London includes a wide range of non-Brits (41 in all) who for one reason or another (fleeing Germany; winning an assignment; being bored) found themselves in London and by and large either stayed, lived or kept coming back for me. And this is reflected in their photography - there's hardly a harsh print - and the street scenes, though familiar, are not Buck Palace, Trafalgar Square, Parliament or St Paul's though they feature sometimes as a backdrop. This exhibition is more about the people who lived here. The clothes. the dullness and the apparent hardships seem to belong to the early 20th century not the middle and latter years and yet even those of the 1960s and 1970s felt to me they belonged somewhere else. Of the ones that I found most telling were those photos of Jamaicans in the 1950s and 1960s who scratched a living in appalling conditions but never lost their pride.
Brilliantly curated by: Helen Delaney & Simon Baker