Another London: International Photographers Capture City Life 1930-1980, Tate Britain

Unadulterated happiness: swinging on the wheel, high above the ground, at the fair on Hampstead Heath in 1949, in Wolf Suschitzky’s photograph that effortlessly conveys that sense of moving at ease through the sky.  Fourteen years earlier the same photographer, just arrived from Vienna, immortalised a gravely courting couple smoking their cigarettes over a tea in Lyons Corner House, the behatted lady apparently entertaining a genteel proposition; and inbetween Suschitzky shows us the view of total devastation in 1942, flattened streets strangely punctuated by arbitrary heaps of rubble, taken from the vantage point of St Paul’s Cathedral, that miraculous survivor of wartime  bombing.

Suschitzky – he was a film cameraman and director as well – is but one of two score photographers whose work is on view in Another London. Among the group are the stars of the profession - Henri Cartier-Bresson and Irving Penn, Bruce Davidson and Elliott Erwitt for starters – as well as the lesser known. All are from elsewhere, and they came as tourists, visitors, immigrants and refugees.

What absorbed visiting Impressionists in the 1870s occupied visiting photographers a century on

An enthralling and unexpected selection, the anthology resonates beyond this showing. It’s taken from the Eric and Louise Franck collection which has been donated to the Tate, and it’s part of the process by which the gallery has very belatedly but with almost overwhelming enthusiasm entered into collecting and showing photography as a medium in in its own right, with a very active patrons group supporting acquisitions.  One of the benefits of Tate joining the fray is evident in the installation of this show, roughly chronological and rhythmically paced throughout its seven sections, with images shown in clusters, and individual photographers in depth.  Vitrines show a number of books with images from settlers by such as the American Alvin Langdon Coburn, the German E O Hoppé, and passers by (usually on the way to America) such as the Hungarian Moholy-Nagy. 

There are claims that this is another London, and on the grounds that nothing is so remote as the recent past, there is an element of truth in this.  In Bill Brandt’s 1930s Early morning on the doorstep, four glass milk bottles form a gracefully statuesque group next to two folded newspapers, the Telegraph and the long defunct News Chronicle. The Telegraph’s front page is a dense maze of small ads, whilst the Chronicle is graced with a smiling picture of the hugely celebrated 1930s New Zealand aviatrix, Jean Batten, the dignified tableau hinting at the breakfast soon to take place behind the as yet closed door. (Pictured above right: James Barnor, Mike Eghan at Picadilly Circus, London, 1967; ).  

Everything is naturally in all shades of black and white, and the predominant silvery greys ensure that colour, often so profoundly unnatural, is not missed one bit. Among the many things we are reminded of is the ubiquity of London fog and smog, which make for a fascinating and mysterious atmosphere: what absorbed visiting Impressionists in the 1870s occupied visiting photographers a century on.