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In the years between 1930 and 1980, some of the most celebrated
photographers from across the world came to London to make work about the
city and its communities.
To coincide with the moment when the
eyes of the world are on London, Tate Britain will present an exhibition of
150 classic twentieth-century photographs which take the UK's capital as
their subject. Another London will bring together some of the
great names in international photography for whom London was a foreign
city, exploring the distinctive ways in which they saw and represented this
unique location.
Another London will show the city
as a dynamic metropolis, richly diverse and full of contrast. Emblems of
Britishness which might have been familiar to visitors such as pearly
kings, red buses and bowler hats are documented alongside iconic scenes of
London such as Robert Frank's image London (Stock
Exchange) 1951, Henri Cartier-Bresson's Queen
Charlotte's Ball 1959, Elliott Erwitt's image of a rainy London
bus stop and Bruce Davidson's photograph of a child with pigeons in
Trafalgar Square.
Alongside these works another view of London
will be shown which explores the urban poor surviving life in the city as
pavement artists, beggars and buskers. Wolfgang Suschitzky's images of
working class families in the East End from the early 1940s and Bill
Brandt's renowned photograph of a housewife in Bethnal Green from 1937 all
look at a different side of the city. Later works in the exhibition by Neil
Kenlock and Leonard Freed show the city's growing cultural diversity, while
Karen Knorr's remarkable series of punks in the 1970s demonstrates the
cultural influences of the period.
The photographers whose work
is included in the exhibition each had different relationships to London:
some came to live here and became UK citizens, some arrived as refugees,
others as passing tourists. Their experience of arriving in the city as
foreigners informed their perspectives and shaped the photographs they
took, resulting in a body of work as diverse as the city itself.
Artists represented in the exhibition include: Bill
Brandt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Horacio Coppola, Bruce Davidson, Elliott
Erwitt, Robert Frank, Leonard Freed, Emil Otto Hoppe, Neil Kenlock, Marketa
Luskacova, Dora Maar, Irving Penn, Marc Riboud, Willy Ronis and Al
Vandenberg.
Another London is curated by Helen Delaney,
Assistant Curator, Contemporary British Art, Tate, with Simon Baker,
Curator of Photography and International Art, Tate.
The works in
Another London are selected from a unique collection of 1400
photographs, The Eric and Louise Franck London Collection. It was brought
together over twenty years and has been generously promised as a donation
to Tate.
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