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Daily Encounters: Photographs
from Fleet Street
Until 21 October 2007
Porter Gallery
Full price £5
Concessions £4.50/£4
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Online
Exhibition supported by the
Patrons of the National Portrait Gallery. Additional support
from Getty Images
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Alfred Hitchcock with news
of another
necktie strangling, London
Evening Standard, July 1971
© Getty Images
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Daily Encounters draws upon the rich and relatively neglected
surviving archives of newspaper photography to tell two parallel
stories - one of a powerful industry with an internal culture
of its own, and the other of the often uneasy relationship that
grew between public figures, the photographic press and the wider
population of readers.
Placed within the context of the National Portrait Gallery, the
exhibition explores the pictorial depiction, through newspaper
photography, of Britain and Britishness, the creation of new
forms of celebrity, and the scripting and constant redrafting
of the rules of engagement between photographers, editors and
the subjects of their insatiable gaze. Newspaper photographs
of politicians, jockeys, gangsters, models and actors are
interwoven with images of the industry itself; the owners and
editors, newsrooms and printing presses, photographers and journalists
as they hunted and gathered stories, both alone and in packs.
Daily Encounters sets out to reposition the press photograph
within the domain of the Gallery while relating the story of
newspaper photography as one very particular strand of Fleet
Street journalism. It covers the period from photography's first
appearance in newspapers in the early years of the twentieth
century through to the demise of Fleet Street in the mid-1980s.
The photographs plot the arc of 80 years of history while the
narrative is inexorably drawn towards the tussle over the iconography
of public figures, both the politically established and the transiently
famous. The staple diet of the popular press quickly emerges:
royalty, politicians and sports stars, spiced by the added relish
of vice girls, acid-bath murderers and big-time pools winners.
But lurking in the shadows are the real stars of the exhibition,
the press photographers themselves.
The exhibition shows how press images became some of the
most socially inclusive forms of photography, counterpointing
images of celebrities and the ruling aristocracy with those of
ordinary people, often made by photographers of their own social
class. The blend of photographs, headlines and clearly-written
copy proved a potent mix, and circulation among the broad swathe
of wage earners rose steadily. The popular press catered to a
new generation equipped with the basic skills of literacy which
sprung up in Britain as a result of universal schooling implemented
after the 1870 Elementary Education Act.
With over 75 works arranged broadly chronologically, Daily
Encounters shows how newspaper photography quickly changed
the opinions and tastes of a mass audience. This progression
was echoed by the historian Eric Hobsbawm, who wrote: 'For the
twentieth century, it was increasingly clear, was the century
of the common people, and dominated by the arts produced by and
for them. And two linked instruments made the world of the common
man visible as never before and capable of documentation: reportage
and the camera.'
This new democracy in readership and press personnel brought
startling contrasts between the approaches of some press photographers
and established society photographers such as Cecil Beaton who
was forever seeking to distance himself from the rank and file
'pressman'. In his diaries of the Second World War Beaton recounted
how, when documenting the impact of the Blitz on London, he had
carefully framed St Paul's in the smoke and ruins of a burnt-out
shop: 'Through the arch could be seen, rising mysteriously from
the splintered masonry and smoke, the twin towers of the cathedral.
It was necessary to squat to get the archway framing the picture.
I squatted. A press photographer watched me and when I gave a
surly look, slunk away.' Added to this imagined insult came professional
injury, for when Beaton returned 'from lunch with my publisher,
my morning's pictures still undeveloped in my overcoat pocket,
I found the press photographer's picture was already on the front
page of the Evening News'.
Publication
With over 60 illustrations, this unique photographic history,
will accompany the landmark exhibition Daily Encounters, Photographs
from Fleet Street. Price £15 (hardback). 240 x 185mm,
120 pages
60 illustrations.ddd
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