Exhibition Review: Photographers Gallery (HOME TRUTHS: Photography, Motherhood and Identity & BIBI by Jacques Henri Lartigue)

'Home Truths' was an exhibition being presented throughout two galleries at the photographers gallery in London, oxford street. The exhibition included a total of eight artists (Janine Antoni, Elina Brotherus, Elinor Carucci, Ana Casas Broda, Fred Hüning, Leigh Ledare, Katie Murray and Hanna Putz) and was put together by Susan Bright. Susan Bright is a British writer and curator of photography who has helped with many art exhibitions for the national portrait gallery in London. The theme of this 'home truths' exhibition is about motherhood, identity and loss and I feel from viewing the photographs that you can see this theme throughout. I feel that the curator (Susan Bright) is trying to make us as the audience feel for the people in the photographs and really go in depth into looking at the messages shown throughout the exhibiters photographs and not just showing an illustrative message of motherhood and pregnancy etc. In an interview on the photographers gallery website, Susan Bright talks about her exhibition and states how she wanted to "look at the much more thorny issues of maternity and representation". The exhibitions consisted of many photographs from the eight artists and were spread into two rooms, grouped by the themes and messages they were showing of motherhood. Susan bright said she felt the main focus image of the exhibition was of a big portrait image taken by the artist 'Janine Antoni' called 'In Habit'.

The second exhibition being shown at the photographers gallery was called Bibi and was of a selection of photographs by Jacques Henri Lartigue focused around his first wife Madeleine Messager. The exhibition includes a series of photographs between the years of 1918 (when Lartigue met Bibi) to 1930 (When the couple divorced). The photos are arranged in a chronological order and show their time of them together before their break up. You can see this in the photographs because of how Bibi throughout the images stops being the dominant subject matter in the image. We also see in the photographs their wealthy lifestyle and I really love how these photograph could be shown as and taken as really 'tourist like photographs' but I really love how Lartigue has documented his time with Bibi because of the way he has compose the photographs.