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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