The East Anglians; Subversive Spaces: Surrealism and Contemporary Art
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, until 13 December
Most exhibitions of photographs could be viewed just as satisfactorily from an armchair with a book of high-quality reproductions, but not The East Anglians. There are 58 colour photographs in this show, and they need to be seen in situ, partly because of their scale (some are very large), and partly because of their darkness, which would not transfer well to the printed page. The darkness is not helped by the slightly overweening black frames, which add a funereal air to the proceedings, but perhaps this is not inappropriate in a body of work that chronicles the decline of a way of life. These intensely atmospheric images tell a story of dwindling communities and disappearing livelihoods, of loss of that intimate connection between man and the soil that is the cause of so many of our problems today.
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