London Photo: mostly but not only the same big names

Is there anything left for photographers? Obviously I don't mean the millions taking selfies; I mean for men and women with cameras who want other people--strangers--to look at their work. It is real easy to get the feeling that it has all been done before.

   Make it bigger, very bigger, was one solution. Thomas Struth and Candida Hofer certainly have done well with it. But not me. I look at one of their images and it is as if I've seen them all. The subject matter changes but the result is always the same: Slick and empty.Not empty intriguing;  empty tedious.  Still when I heard about Photo London at Somerset House, the city's new photography fair, I wanted to go. And did.

   Too much. That was my first reaction. So many images..Wall after wall covered with them. Black and White; Color. Landscapes, still lives, portraits. Animals. Visual jokes. Sex and leather. Hundreds, then thousands. 

 It isn't fair to photographers.nor to the rest of us.

 Seeing so much or rather being confronted by so much by so many, living and dead means that I was stopped as I shuffled along by what grabbed my attention; which doesn't necessarily mean what was best. My head and eyes never got clear enough, focused enough, to work out what if anything I think is exceptional as in wonderful at this fair. But I did enjoy some surprises: the first of them a series of three images by Iwajla Klinke, a young Berlin photographer who was being exhibited by Paris- based Galerie Polaris. 

 Klinke likes rituals that include young persons dressing up. When she finds out about such a ritual that appeals to her she goes to it. She does not then ask her subjects to visit her studio in Berlin and recreate their characters. She photographs them on the ritual spot. For all that, the images are not photographers in situ.

A black cloth is hung up; the boy or girl stands before it and all sense of context is removed.  The result is a captivating mixture of the authentic and the artificial. Or that is the way it works out in this this series taken in south Germany in 2014 at the festival known there as Fastnacht Reliquiar. Fat Tuesday, we call it in America. The day before Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent. .

   Amusing, engaging, attractive and not expensive: The set of three framed images is priced at euros 3,300. 

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Rembrandt Late and better than ever

The Jewish Bride   Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

I've loved it since I first saw it a long time ago when I lived in Amsterdam. But it always made me squirm a little. I don't like thinking that I am a prude but prudish is what I felt when looking at it. It is so beautiful and intimate, the cloths worn by the bride and groom are so lusciously glamorous. Rembrandt's "The Jewish Bride," is moving, touching, of course, but touching was just the trouble-- for me. Standing opposite it, I felt like a voyeur, as if I were eavesdropping on a sexually charged intimate moment. Or was there a feminist angle to this: Did I squirm because the  groom was acting like an exhibitionist?  And the bride, alas, a creature trapped in marriage with no escape? So on it went; for years I loved it and felt funny about this painting. Then three days ago when I went to Amsterdam to see the magnificent Late Rembrandt exhibition for what was surely the last time since it closed today. It is a show I first saw here in London at the National Gallery where it ended in January.

At the Rijksmuseum, on a wall to the right of "The Jewish Bride," hangs a small drawing, not easy to make out.. (See below) Only when I'd read the caption and looked again, hard, did I see the head of a man in its upper right hand corner. "The Jewish Bride" was painted between 1665 and Rembrandt's death four years later. The drawing was done in 1662. Whether it was a sketch for the later painting or an example of Rembrandt thinking out loud isn't known. With the help of the caption and Googling, I now know the drawing, and very likely the painting, too, connect to the Old Testament story of Isaac and Rebecca. The couple (I suspect he more than she) were keen to keep their marriage secret because beautiful Rebecca might be a prize worth stealing. They therefore pretended to be brother and sister. But the king, Abimelech, up in the top right hand corner of the drawing, got a look at them when they thought they were alone and saw what we see in both drawing and painting. No wonder I felt like an eaves dropper; a voyeur. In the drawing the king is looking on from behind the couple. In the painting, we--standing in for Abimelech--are face to face with them and at the same time invisible.Their story had a happy ending: The king protected them both. It was happily ever after for them and through Rembrandt, for us. It is one of the most memorable of the many memorable pictures in the show.

Rembrandt, Isaac and Rebeccah spied upon by Abimelech, ca. 1662

And this was not all that was gained by seeing the show in Amsterdam. Not only was the drawing there to "explain" and engage, there was placed next to "The Jewish Bride," a painting not seen in London. "Family Group," Rembrandt's only such portrait, although painted about the same time is the image of the bride five or six years after that secret, stolen moment. She, the same model, is seen together with her husband (a different guy) and their three small children. Here they pose with the desire to be seen for the proud parents they are--or wish.  It is lovely to see the paintings together. The group is neither as charged an image nor as beautiful a painting as the bride but it is made memorable by being shown side by side; a less intense, less intimate later chapter in the story.

Family Group Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig

In London where it ran from October until January, the show was a knock out even if the special exhibition space in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery is too cramped to do justice to almost anything shown there. Maybe my determination to try to get to Amsterdam to see it at the Rijksmusum was the product of some sort of cock-eyed geographical mysticism; as if because Rembrandt spent most of his life there; did most of his work there, it had to be the best place to see it. And I'd heard it was going to be displayed in natural light. (Only partly true as it turned out.) In fact the timing was terrible. I was in New York then back in London with work to do. If felt a little nuts and was expensive in money, too, to rush to Amsterdam to get one more look at the pictures Rembrandt made in the last few years of his life.  Then I just up and did it. 
 Was it worth it? YES YES. I hope anyone reading this managed it too.

One last image; a painting that captured me near the end of the show. You can Google the Bible story. In it, Simeon the old man was near death; Rembrandt was, too.

The Presentation at the Temple or Simeon with the Infant Christ in the Temple,Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.