Waterloo Lives.

History There's a place in Liverpool's shopping area Liverpool One, outside John Lewis, opposite some restaurants and near the Apple shop which most days plays host to some kind of promotional vehicle. A few weeks ago this was youths in t-shirts giving away free cups of Kenco Millicano, once again failing to convince me this faux-coffee house beverage doesn't taste like horse swill and last week what looked for all the world like a instabar giving away free beer.

Being essentially teetotal, or more accurately coffeetotal, I added it to the mental list of things in modern life not worth worrying about because they're so far out of my potentiality to be not worth worrying about along with foreign holidays and a relationship until the next day when I strayed closer on my way back from the cinema and noticed it was in fact a pub with no beer, a pub with no beer that was instead promoting the bi-centenary of the battle at Waterloo.

Inside, instead of pumps along the bar, iPads offered an interactive gaming experience which could lead to a holiday in Belgium to visit the site of the battle, wrangled by actors in costume improvising their way to explaining something of what happened on the 18th June 1815 through the medium of first person narrative.  With only a very basic knowledge of what happened, my interest was peaked enough to play the games and pick up the leaflets advertising local exhibitions.

This week, I've been attending those exhibitions which opened on the 6th June, at the Museum of Liverpool, the Victoria Gallery & Museum and the Williamson Art Gallery, one per day.  Each covers a different aspect of the battle and its legacy and part of a nationwide series of events and shows led by the National Army Museum.  There's plenty of others listed on this page.

Before all of that I realised I needed a primer on what actually happened and who did what to whom, so watched the useful lecture given by Peter & Dan Snow to the Hay Festival (on the occasion of the publication of their book) which is currently on the iPlayer.  Even if you're not interested in the history, it's probably still worth watching for the human interest angle of seeing the relationship between the father and son broadcasting team.

A dense hour which is sometimes difficult to follow thanks to the annoying way the editor cuts away from the explanatory maps at crucial moments it nevertheless explains in basic terms why Napoleon lost.  This boils down to him being an arrogant sod who thought himself invincible until he met a force and a tactician in the Duke of Wellington who unlike others wasn't awed by the fact that he was Napoleon, and who led an intelligent, ingenious army which wasn't afraid to try some stuff.

That was Sunday.  On Monday I spent the day at the Museum of Liverpool, though the Waterloo portion took all of twenty minutes, their contribution amounting to a single cabinet containing an engraving of the battle to take Hougoumont Farm which was an important strategic moment during the overall campaign and some miniature ship models created by French prisoners.

Despite its size, I nonetheless learnt two things from this display.  Firstly that Waterloo near Crosby is so named because of what was then called the Royal Waterloo Hotel which opened on the first anniversary of the battle and because some of the buildings in Waterloo notably the Potters Barn park buildings are replicas of the farm houses from the original Belgian area answering a lifelong question as two why we even have a place called this nearby,

The intricate models were created by prisoners placed at short notice in half-completed gaols off Castle Street as a way of earning money for them to feed and clothe themselves.  Within war during that period, the agreement was that the upkeep of prisoners was paid by their own side, but a disagreement on this occasion (over and above the actual war) meant that funds were not forthcoming and so these little ships, with their astonishing levels of detail came into the world.

At the other end of the day, my historical appetite whetted, I decided there was nothing for it but to visit Waterloo itself.  Deciding that Belgium was a bit ambitious, I went straight to James Street Station and bought a ticket for its local namesake, if only so that there'd be a decent photograph to put at the top of this blog post.  Apologies for the results.  With the best of intentions, I rushed this because I heard the train back to Liverpool and panicked.

Waterloo is the jumping off point for Anthony Gormley's Another Place, a marina and the Crosby Plaza Cinema.  But with dinner time upcoming, I simply walked the main street eyes open for any buildings which looked vaguely Belgian (none did) (not that I know anything about architecture) and visited a couple of charity shops and the most exciting thing to happen was that I banged my head on a shelf in a bookshop as I leaned over to smell a candle in the shape of a glass of coca-cola.

To Tuesday and the long, steep walk up Brownlow Hill to the Victoria Gallery & Museum for their Relics and Remembrance exhibition.  Sporadically spread throughout the building in various display cases, this group of objects focuses on the conclusion and aftermath of the battle underscoring how many of the artifacts available to view are due to the efforts of souvenir and memento hunters picking over the bodies of those who'd fallen.

In the Tate Hall on the top floor there's an Eagle Standard captured from the Napoleon's 105th Infantry Regiment by the 1st Royal Dragoons which as a symbol of empire building was an easy way of demonstrating the allies had won when it was shipped to London to declare Wellington's success.  It's not a unique object, the Emperor presented nearly a hundred to his army in 1815 but like all of the object in the exhibition it's about what it represents rather than what it is.

Elsewhere there's a French dragoon's helmet, a signalling drum from the 1st Regiment of the Foot Guards, a French Shako plate and rosette from a fallen French soldier's hat, a Legion d'honneur medal, a Waterloo medal and a camp kettle and stove all taken from the battlefield at the close of business and they're uncomfortable to look at because they're someone else's property, the property of someone who lost their life on that day.

Perhaps the most gruesome revelation for me is about the trade in the teeth of the fallen.  Many of the younger soldiers were recruited because they had good, strong teeth capable of working with ammunition if necessary which were then harvested from the battlefield after their death to be used in expensive dentures.  This was called "Waterloo ivory" and it's impossible to imagine what it must have been like for those charged with having to pull them from the corpses.

Providing context is a near contemporary aquatint by Matthew Duboury created in 1817 showing the morning after the battle, the anguished faces of those still in pain on both sides, a different kind of heroism in the air from them and those treating them.  Not that there seems to be much air.  A fire at the near centre of the image is sending black smoke into the sky creating an overcast battlefield on an otherwise clear day,

At the absolute centre of picture amid the pain and suffering and looting, a farmer stands calmly with a well to do gentleman and his son, point across the field, explaining it seems the previous nights events, beginning, already, perhaps, the process of mythologising the battle, the first tour guide.  But unlike present day when visitors can only imagine the victories and horrors which occurred in the surrounding fields, here they're all too present.

Just this sort of visual reportage is the focus of the Williamson's exhibtion, which with the aid of some objects from the actual battle on loan (as most of the items in these exhibitions are) from the National Army Museum, offers some historical background to one of the largest paintings in their collection, Thomas Sidney Cooper's The Battle of Waterloo, 16–19 June 1815, the Defeat of Kellerman's Cuirassiers, which you can view on Your Paintings here.

As Dan Snow eloquently describes in the Hay lecture, this is the moment when the French Cuirassiers were sent, without other support, up a ridge towards the Allied army in a futile attempt to break through, which an Ensign Rees Howell Gronow of the 1st Foot Guards, quoted selectively in the accompanying text but in full here:

"You discovered at a distance what appeared to be an overwhelming, long moving line, which, ever advancing, glittered like a stormy wave of the sea when it catches the sunlight. On they came until they got near enough, whilst the very earth seemed to vibrate beneath the thundering tramp of the mounted host. One might suppose that nothing could have resisted the shock of this terrible moving mass."

Wanting to take everything in, approach the painting almost like a film, I took a chair from a stack within the centre of the display room and sat down in front of it. After about five minutes I took out my notebook and jotted down some odd comments which will be the basis of the next paragraph, but the experience was overwhelming in a way which is rare with still images.  As I keep having to remind myself, most classical form art work deserve longer than the glances we usually give them.

Cooper paints the scene almost like a sea landscape.  Half of the canvas is consumed by the sky, a grey, forbidding miasma created, much like in the Dubory aquatint, by fires, this time in the far distance.  In the foreground, the ridges of the Mont St Jean are laid out like rocks on a beech, the whites and blues of the French soldier uniforms and horses crashing against them in waves.  Although the faces of man and beast are distinct, the overall impression is positively abstract.

The painting was originally submitted into a competition for creating works of art to be displayed in the new Houses of Parliament in 1847 and goodness knows where it would have hung even if it is portraying an Allied victory.  After the fall of Napoleon, relations between the British and France thawed so perhaps its not surprising that it didn't end up there but in the collection of a provincial art gallery.

Accompanying the painting are other items from the Williamson's collection related to Waterloo and the Napoleonic period.  There are three other paintings by Cooper which suggest he was otherwise interested in more sedate subjects, Cattle by a Stream, Sheep on a Hillside and Cattle in a Stream.  Painted a few decades earlier, the style is markedly steadier, more clinical, though it's clear that in these moments he's learning mammalian anatomy ready for his future adventures.

There's also a large collection of caricatures depicting international relations in the period leading up to Waterloo by James Gillray and Isaac Cruikshank, though they sadly both died before they could tackle the ensuing hostilities.  A clear forerunner of modern newspaper cartoonists, Napoleon is generally shown as a small man out of proportion with his world, Josephine as a corpulent vessel and French soldiers as grotesques.

The Emperor comes off badly from the brush of William Daniels in his portrait too, with his smudgy, indistinct skin and features resembling Peter Lorre in The Man Who Knew Too Much.  His portrait of Wellington is far more heroic and dynamic though the painter notorious fell out of favour with the Duke after turning up late and drunk for an appointment.  The Duke, finding the artist on his doorstep told him that he didn't want to have anything more to do with him.

The rest of the works are pure mythology.  Lady Elizabeth Butler's watercolour Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow and the three nearby illustrations of British soldiers by Richard Caton Woodville are of the sort you might expect to find in educational school books concerning themselves more with itemising the uniforms and landscape rather than the reality of the kind which can only really be discovered in the eyewitness accounts of the time.

After spending nearly a week learning about the battle of Waterloo, what have I learnt about the battle of Waterloo?  Everything and nothing.  On the basis of the displays and objects, if I hadn't watched the lecture by the Snows on Sunday, I'm not sure I would have had a clearer sense of the great movements of the battle, the historical signifance of some of these objects, the strategic importance of, for example, Hougoumont Farm.

Given the advertising and hype, it was disappointing to visit the Museum of Liverpool on Monday only to be greeted by a single display case which is actually smaller than the advertising banner in the foyer, especially since it has the same prominence as the other exhibitions in the publicity leaflet.  Expectations are expectations.  Which isn't to say the objects within aren't precious, and I didn't know that French soldiers had been held in the city centre.

It's through these rare objects that we get some sense of what it must have been like on that battlefield in the those days just trying to retain some sense of being, for soldiers on both sides of the battle.  Perhaps it is because there aren't too many of them that we're forced to spend more time scrutinising them, really concentrate on the implications what it means to be in their company two hundred years later.

Waterloo Lives continues at the Museum of Liverpool, Victoria Gallery & Museum and the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum until 24 October 2015.

Soup Safari #34: Leek and Potato at The Waterhouse Cafe.

Lunch. £3.65. The Waterhouse Cafe, Victoria Gallery & Museum, University of Liverpool, Ashton Street, Liverpool, Merseyside L69 3DR. Phone: 0151 794 2348. Website.

Jagjit Chuhan, the new exhibition at the Victoria Gallery and Museum at Liverpool University

Art  Tonight, briefly, I attended the private view for the new exhibition at the Victoria Gallery and Museum at Liverpool University, a small retrospective of recent work by the artist Jagjit Chuhan.

Double Negative have interviewed her here.

She produces relatively abstract or impressionistic paintings of the female form filtered through preoccupations and influences as diverse as "Bacon and Manet, Indian artists like Ravinder Reddy, Marlene Dumas, Renaissance paintings" as well as Japanese art.

Much of the work is in reddish hues, though there are newer canvases which are multicoloured and almost sculptural in their layering of the paint.

Not everything is to my taste, but there are two pieces in which she applies her techniques to more conventional structures which I love.

A landscape in which a Japanese pagoda emerges after careful spectator study and a much more formal, but absolutely gorgeous portrait called Reverie, viewable here on the artist's own website.

A young woman reclines across a red coach surrounded by lilies her face enigmatic, though apparently content, happy.

Look closer and we realise she's underneath a duvet, her head across a pillow, this isn't perhaps her house, she a visitor though obviously not a strange.

Like the best portraits we're drawn in, we wonder and our mind wanders, so although it's perhaps the most formally obvious of the works in the exhibition, it's as complex as all the others.

Who is she?

Liverpool Biennial 2012: Victoria Gallery & Museum (20)

Art  This is the first occasion the University of Liverpool’s art venue, Victoria Gallery & Museum has been an official venue of the Liverpool Biennial and a demonstration that for all the spaces which have closed in the past couple of years there are still plenty of excellent places for them to inhabit. Not that it should be seen in any way as a new departure for the gallery which since opening in 2008 has been a venue for plenty of contemporary art exhibitions often inspired by their own collections, but not always. One of the highlights of the art that was in the city on the fringe of the 2010 festival was their retrospective of photographs by Astrid Kirchherr.

* * * * *

For the Biennial, they’ve welcomed Paul Rooney, whose solo exhibition, Here Comes Franz, He Was Afraid includes a new acquisition for the gallery, The Futurist, a twenty-five minute surrealist video piece filmed within the fabric of the disused cinema on Lime Street, originally commissioned in 2008 by Tate Liverpool and which I’m sure I had the pleasure of seeing at roughly the same time. That’s the problem with being interested in culture; you end up experiencing so much that now and then you’ll greet a piece for what should be the first time but always have a nagging feeling you’ve seen them somewhere before. It’s often the same with people.

The piece I’ve definitely not seen before but I’m most impressed by is Small Talk, projected across a corner opposite the entrance to the first gallery space. On first glance it seems like shots of two different petrol stations, but sit for long enough on one of the supplied stools and it becomes apparent that we’re looking at the same petrol station in two different time periods, and that subtitles which appear on both screens are having a conversation with one another, explaining that the two shots, or rather groups of shots were taken with nine years between and that one of the stations is now a car valet service.

Safe to say that it’s a work which works best if you’ve little knowledge of anything else which transpires with its eight minutes. Like Daniel Lichtman’s Powerpoint presentation at the 2010 Bloomberg New Contemporaries, it spins a simple idea and construction into a very rich work full of nostalgia and regret and in this case metatextual areas, entirely aware of its position as an art piece even to the point of explaining its own themes and influences including Jacques Demy’s film musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It’s also smart and funny; I laughed at least a dozen times throughout partly because the humour’s so unexpected but mostly because of its wit.

It’s also a reminder that good art is never abandoned. When Rooney shot the 2001 footage, it was because he liked the way the garage sat isolated against the wilderness and tried to intensify that with various choices of music but recognised that it simply didn’t work. So he sat on the footage for years, only later deciding to try and copy the footage again shot for shot. As Gus Van Sant jokes the spoof Simon & Simon recreation documentary, such things are impossible, you’ll never get things quite right. But as Rooney’s avatar says in the video, he’s made the imperfections a strength, demonstrating that you can never return to the past.

The Olympic Torch Relay.

Sport The Olympic Torch Relay. The Olympic torch relay. I’m not sure where the capitals are supposed to go, but I was sure that for all my cynicism about ticketing allocation, the siphoning off of money from less populist culture to pay for it and LOCOG’s shenanigans, I had to attend the Olympic Torch Relay, the Olympic torch relay. Checks main website. Olympic Torch Relay it is then.

Indeed I can’t quite understand why you wouldn’t bother, especially if you had the opportunity. As it spaghettis across the country taking in most of the major cities and at least some of the minor towns, there’s certainly enough time. I know people who desperately wanted to see it but couldn’t get time off from their employer, so in a way I felt like I had to see it for them too.

Not everyone has that spirit, it seems. Passing up Hope Street this afternoon on the way the place where I’d be standing, a mother was herding her brood up the pavement. One her boys looked up and asked, “Aren’t we staying to see the Olympic torch?” to which is Mum replied, “Why?  It’s just someone running up the road carrying a torch.”

I was desperate to say something, say “Well, yes it is, but think of your boy in twenty years when he’s in the pub talking about all this and when asked if he saw it, his story’s going to be what you just said. It might get him the sympathy vote, perhaps even a sympathy drink, but if he’s desperate to see it you might as well give him the hour.” But I didn’t because it was none of my business.

Instead I carried on up towards the Metropolitan Cathedral, outside which the Archbishop of Liverpool was having his photo taken with five women in top hat, tails, miniskirt and fishnet stockings (Zatanna basically). Inside the cathedral’s café, a girl in a kimono practiced an intricate dance, swishing her sleeves around in circles. For a few moments, I felt like my life was being written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff.

I’d decided to stand in the university district on Brownlow Hill, near the red brick Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, guessing that the crowds would be thinner than in the city centre, and being students slightly more fun and less aggressive, mostly because I like to think that’s what I was like as a student and that has to be the template, doesn't it?

When I arrived at about four o’clock, the streets were empty which boded well for finding a decent speck.  But was early so I bought a 99 from an ice cream van, watched some of the entertainment laid on by the University radio station (Chinese drums), winced in Rymans at the exorbitant price of blank dvds and them met a friend in Blackwells who told me that the torch wouldn’t be passing by for another hour.

Eeep. Thankfully after some more strolling about, time passed relatively quickly and by about twenty to five I was standing up the hill outside one of the Electical Engineering buildings, the Sun reflecting brightly across its glass and white modernist tiling. On the balcony of the building, a group had gathered in swimsuits carrying beers. They were the happiest people there.

Waiting. Waiting. Chatting, to a couple of students stood next to me, about why we’d come, about the impossibility of buying tickets, about just what time the torch would actually be passing by. The crowds built. Random cheering ensued, mostly initiated by the people in swimsuits, sometimes after egging someone to remove most of their clothing too, something they succeeded in a few times. No, not with me.

At about 4:45, things occurred. After some stewards arrived to hopelessly ask us not to stand in the road, the first lot of support vehicles drove through, police on bikes (cheer), police car (cheer), Coca-Cola lorry (muted cheer), Samsung (cheerishing), Lloyds (cheer), yellow Olympic vehicles some carrying torch bearers (massive cheer) and then … a number 79 bus. The torch would be on time, then.

Which it was. At ten past five, more police bikes and cars, more Olympic vehicles, the security joggers in their grey track suits and in the middle the torch bearer, whoever he was. The experience of watching wasn’t unlike the Sea Odyssey giants of a few weeks ago, the surge of people, the shouty stewards, the desperate photography, the fleeting moments in which suddenly it's there, then just as suddenly it's gone.

I wish I knew who the torch bearer was. I’ve had a look at the Olympics website isn’t clear on exactly who had the opportunity when and the above photographic evidence is too indistinct for a positive identification. But he was smiling, enjoying himself and that’s the main thing. Certain other torchbearers haven’t seemed like they’ve really understood the honour.

After the biggest cheer went to the street cleaning wagon following the entourage it was over and the long walk to public transport began. I decided to head down Hardman Street to Forbidden Planet to collect my comics order (which is about what you'd expect). As I walked up Rodney Street, in the very distance I could see the torch passing another crowd outside Liverpool Cathedral.  Same cheers.

Turning onto Leece Street, I realised that the torch would be passing again up Renshaw Street. Picking up the pace, I dashed to the bottom and waltzed through the traffic onto the small island opposite the Sainsburys. Behind me the steps of St Lukes again were full and as the same vehicles passed by, it became apparent to them that they were very much in the wrong place. Surge forward.

But somehow I’d managed to plonk myself in front of all of them and was within feet of the path of the torch which, sure enough passed again. Another surge of people, more shouty stewards, more desperate photography, more fleeting moments of the torch being suddenly there, then just as suddenly gone. No photograph this time, just a memory of the torch's golden mesh sparkling in the daylight.

The Spectacle of the Lost, the new exhibition at one of the Liverpool’s unsung art venues, the University of Liverpool's Victoria Gallery & Museum

Art My first encounter with John James Audubon the artist who’s best known for his publication The Birds of America containing over four hundred life sized prints of bird species in North America when as a teenager I raided my Dad’s vinyl collection.  Although I generally ignored his Jim Reeves back catalogue, I was quickly attracted by An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer (spotify) and his song, Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, an autre piece about disposing of the wing'd "vermin" in a variety of cruel fashions. With wild abandon, Lehrer sings:

We've gained notoriety,
And caused much anxiety
In the Audubon Society
With our games.
They call it impiety,
And lack of propriety,
And quite a variety
Of unpleasant names.
But it's not against any religion
To want to dispose of a pigeon.

At the age of about thirteen I didn’t know who Audubon was, or why he should have a society, and didn’t much care without the internet to help me, but I did very much enjoy singing his name (later I discovered the Audubon Society is essentially the US RSPB).  It wasn’t until years later when Liverpool Central Library had an exhibition about his book that I made the connection and grinned as I realised that I finally understood one of Lehrer jokes decades after I’d first heard it.  This Guardian article reminds me that was as late as 2004.

One of the reasons the Central Library was interested, apart from owning a copy of the book, was because in 1826, Audubon visited Liverpool to fund and publish his portfolio. He apparently stayed with the Rathbone family who were resident at the Greenbank House just around the corner from where I live in Sefton Park, a period in which he continued painting, presumably because of the mass of wildlife on his doorstep.

All of which makes me the perfect audience for The Spectacle of the Lost, the new exhibition at one of the Liverpool’s unsung art venues, the University of Liverpool's Victoria Gallery & Museum on Brownlow Hill, for which I attended the private view this evening. Curated by Laura Robertson of The Double Negative, it’s a gathering of works by the Birds' Ear View Collective, a group of artists interested in how birds interact with the modern urban environment.

Cleverly, the show begins in the museum’s own permanent display of Audubon paintings and drawings (the largest outside of the US), giving the visitor some visual tutelage in what the artist achieved. These are considerable images illustrating the visceral endeavours of a hawk pouncing on partridges or the noble, proud American wild turkey, with its tall neck and slightly arrogant features.

The power of Audubon’s achievement is undimmed by modern technology. Yes, television and film can build narrative and knowledge through editing and voice over and photography an even greater sheen of realism, but Audubon’s creatures have a presence, the unreal nature of painting somehow capturing aspects of their behaviour which still vividly leap from the page or canvas.

The rest of the show seems to seek to illuminate the brilliance of Audobon’s observations with an interest in the mortality of birds, with paintings and photography which underscore Audobon’s success in gifting his subjects such a rich inner life with a strong message of how man, at the risk of sounding like a Werner Herzog voiceover, in failing to appreciate their beauty ultimately causes their doom.

In the next room are further, rarely displayed examples of Audobon’s work, contrasted with the first pieces from the modern collective by John Barraclough. whose immense watercolours on paper show birds in their specimen status from the collection of National Museums Liverpool. Having seen examples of the originals when I worked at Liverpool Museum (as it was then) I can attest the accuracy of the fine brushwork on display here.

Yet, these prone eyeless bodies are somewhat depressing for all their formal brilliance.  They are scientifically important and at the Museum many are held in environmentally controlled areas with single existing examples of their species locked in bombproof safety, modern attitudes protecting the birds more now than we did when they were alive apparently.

That interest in the mortality continues into his Impact drawings which mimic the subtle remains of the shape a bird makes when hitting a window, white pages covered in scratches, and the photographic prints made with Alexandra Wolkowicz across the walls in the main space depicting birds which have fallen fowl of the city, carcasses found in diverse buildings across New York like the World Finance Center Gym and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Splayed across black backgrounds in shapes not unlike Audobon's own action paintings, the colours of the bird's feathers remain colourful even in death.  To be honest I'm not sure how we're supposed to feel about them.  Perhaps like the Audobon's what we're seeing is a record of bird behaviour, the repetitiveness of a particular kind of death within an environment stolen from them by humans.

The evening was topped off by a performance from Rob Peterson, whose audio work reading samples from Audobon’s diary also features in the space. Having flown in himself early this morning, he fittingly read entries describing Audobon’s own first impressions of Liverpool. He mainly talks about how polite we all are especially when giving directions, but notes an example of man's intervention, a caged bird near the breakfast table.

Perhaps it’s a bit ironic that my first inclining of Audobon is through a satirical song about man’s cruelty to bird and now I’ve attended an exhibition on just that same topic. It’s the kind of exhibition which is enjoyable because it’s interesting, because it asks questions and challenges the visitor. It certainly speaks to my own inherent double standards in being repulsed by the sight of the birds who had little chance against man’s progress, but adores roast chicken.

Until Saturday 25 August 2012. 

Astrid Kirchherr: A Retrospective at the Victoria Gallery & Museum, University of Liverpool.

Photography The university’s art gallery and museum reopened in 2008 with a retrospective of “fifth Beatle” Stuart Sutcliffe’s paintings and two years later they’re poignantly offering a show of photographs from the other side of one of the more tragic cultural romances, with a selection of Astrid Kirchherr’s photographs from throughout the 1960s, focusing on Sutcliffe and the fab four in their earlier incarnation and some of her documentary work capturing the people of Liverpool.

After spending last Friday evening failing to visit the Open Eye Gallery because of the length of the queue outside, I had the rare pleasure of seeing Kirchher's work in an almost empty gallery save for a fellow visitor dashing out into the corridor with her mobile phone. My mp3 player spontaneously began playing the soundtrack to Lost in Translation, Kevin Shields and Air the perfect accompaniment to the images.

At one point a section of dialogue from the film played which I'd originally recorded for a mix cd as a message to someone but as I looked at this collection, I couldn't help but make a connection between Charlotte's uncertainty and Astrid who was similarly uncertain about her place in the world (judging by the interviews I've read). But whereas Scarlett Johansson's character chose writing, Kirchher stopped at photography:

Charlotte: I'm stuck. Does it get easier?
Bob: No. Yes. It gets easier.
Charlotte: Oh yeah? Look at you.
Bob: Thanks. The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you.
Charlotte: Yeah. I just don't know what I'm supposed to be, you know. I tried being a writer, but I hate what I write. I tried taking pictures, but they were so mediocre. You know, every girl goes through a photography phase. You know, horses... taking dumb pictures of your feet.
Bob: You'll figure that out. I'm not worried about you. Keep writing.
Charlotte: But I'm so mean.
Bob: Mean's okay.

If anything, the show best demonstrates the uncertain position Kirchherr retrospectively finds herself in, whether she (like Yoko later) (sorry) her connection with The Beatles chronology is what makes her work interesting or if she deserves our scrutiny in her own right. Would Astrid have been granted this retrospective on the strength of her ability to point and click alone if one of her subject hadn’t been the most famous rock band in the world?

The Beatles manager Brian Epstein certainly thought her a good enough photographer to commission her when he unveiled the new suited look for his band and she was the only photographer allowed to cover the Hard Days Night period which he'd otherwise forbidden from being seen. Otherwise her gender made working as a freelance photographer near impossible unable to attract magazines unless she was offering a new photo of John or Paul which is why she gave up in '67, relatively early in her career.

Fans will no doubt be very familiar with most of this work and the earlier shots pre-Ringo. But judging by the accompanying information, the curators have tried to include the less recognizable discarded frames offering more a sense of Kircherr’s process. Even the subtlest of differences between near identical headshots can and do mean whether we consider a Beatle to be brooding or charismatic or have a brooding charisma.

For those of us who don’t have a biography of the Beatles hardwired into our brains and think some other good music has been made since the 1960s, it’s the more artistic pieces that force us to linger. Kirchherr was a fan of the double exposure which she employed to essentially clone Sutcliffe in one street image and to show us what he might be thinking in another, merging a scene of them kissing with a portrait of the artist deep in thought.

Arguably the most interesting material is strewn through the two or three cabinets in the middle of each of the rooms filled with unlabelled candids of Astrid and various anonymous faces in Hamburg and elsewhere. It’s these which most persuasively suggest that were it not for The Beatles’s subsequent fame, many of the photographs framed and glazed on the wall could also just have remained well composed snapshots; it’s only in the later decades that they’ve become historical documents.

But the exhibition also has self portraits of Kirchherr and shots by fellow photographers. As well as eradicating the impression I had of her from Sheryl Lee’s portrayal in Ian Softley’s film Backbeat, they add lustre to the rest of the work, contextualise it. The iconic image taken by herself of herself by herself, used as the exhibition's poster (an early entry into the mirror project?) demonstrates that she had a presence all of her own.

Until 29th January 2011.