Thursday, get to Frith Street Gallery just after six. For some reason Golden Square - like the old Opera in Paris - disorientates me: I'm sure the gallery moves around the sides of the square. It's the private view for John Riddy's Low Relief exhibition of photographs. John is talking to Charlotte as I arrive. The show looks good and I can tell John has done the hanging. There are ten archival pigment prints each in an edition of 5. They are all London locations - the Garrick Club from outside, a south-east London estate, Burgess Park. The one of Wapping could be a 17th-century Dutch townscape - Vermeer's 'View of Delft'.
They are mostly winter/autumn scenes and at dawn or dusk, when the light lets the structural forms of the city stand out: a light on the side of some flats stands out in 'London (Wyndham Road)', a small detail against the sky.
There's a mixture of natural and artificial light, and a modulation between colour and black, as when a distant boat is black but is coloured when it gets nearer. I think of Tarkovsky's film, 'Stalker', (1979) where the film starts in black and white but bursts into colour as they enter the Zone, only for the last scene where the stalker pours his dog milk to be black and white, but filmed in colour.
Comments