Erwin Blumenfeld was unknown to me, but he is clearly revered in some quarters because the prints on display were painstakingly produced in Paris from original negatives and plates as the existing prints were no longer available. He is best known for his post-war fashion photography in New York, but that was only the end of a long journey which enabled him to absorb influences from many sources. He was born in Germany but moved to Holland to run a leather goods store, where he found an unused dark room at the back of the stop. He exploited his interest in art by teaching himself photography, incorporating the local Dadaism and surrealism into his work. He then went to Paris and earned a high reputation for his fashion photography. He escaped to America during the war, where he continued to work in fashion, becoming one of the most famous colour fashion photographers in the USA. (Look out for a BBC4 documentary on him next year.) Given his varied background, it's not surprising that his work shows wit and inventiveness as well as great technical skill, while giving due respect to both the clothes and the models. Frankly, I never expected to find fashion photography so fascinating. Blumenfeld's work stands out because he treated fashion photography as an art while remembering its purpose is fundamentally commercial.
The third exhibition was of the category winners of an annual international competition for amateur astronomical photography, which requires huge patience, skill and (I suspect) good luck. But the results were dazzling, with the dramatically beautiful colours and shapes of deep space, the deep shadows of rugged moonscapes, and eerie darkened landscapes filled with spectacular images of the night sky. The display at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich was beautifully staged, with the images shown in large photo boxes which really brought out the scale and detail of the subjects. (By coincidence, one of the images was taken nearby on Blackheath Common.) It was difficult to believe the photographs were the result of a part-time hobby. I would have been interested to know which came first for these photographers, the science or the art, or were they equal?
It now strikes me that all these shows related to subjects where photography has rightly pretty well taken over from other media. Although in the past fashion and theatrical costumes were recorded via sketches, often of great skill, and many painters recorded the clothes of their sitters with great realism (though only Tissot seems to have regarded the clothes as equally important as the sitter), photography is far more immediate, and the clothes are clearly being worn by a real (if not typical) human being. Similarly, in the past buildings were recorded in sketches, engravings and watercolours - I remember the Cotman show last year at Dulwich, which skillfully did just that for the architecture of Normandy just after the Napoleonic wars, for the benefit of those who could not travel to France. But again, colour photography works much better. People still use buildings as subjects for paintings, but rarely as a straightforward record. The astronomical photographs brought to mind the apocalyptic 19th-century paintings of John Martin, but the reality dwarfs even his imagination. I can recall paintings of astronomical features in children's books, but these photographs transported me to outer space in a way those illustrations never did.
Interestingly enough, in the one area where you would expect photography to have wiped the floor with the opposition - the portrait - painting and drawing have held their own, and for most people have higher status than photographic images. Perhaps this is partly the result of the ubiquity of the family snap, or maybe the portrait painter's longer contact with the sitter allows him or her to portray the person behind the image in a way that a photographer's studio session rarely does. When it comes to landscapes, colour photography probably has the edge these days, and of course photography is unsurpassed for instant impressions and reportage, to the extent that artists in other media now imitate photography, from Andy Warhol to Gerhard Richter. An interesting reversal from the early days of photography when posed photographs often imitated contemporary paintings. But I don't think there is any real rivalry nowadays - individuals are free to choose which media suit their interests and abilities, and use them individually or mixed together according to what works for them, with photography as much an accepted part of the repertoire as any other.
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