At first, it looks like a nature-themed Pinterest board, a constellation of neatly arranged, anodyne squares. Rinko Kawauchi’s photographs don’t pierce or punch, hers is a quieter gaze. As the 52-year-old Japanese photographer says “people often say that I have a child’s eye”.
Kawauchi is best known for photobooks, and this exhibition at the Arnolfini, At the Edge of the Everyday World, has the pacing of a book. The series AILA moves in clusters of jewel-like images, gently glinting, urging close study. Then the soft focus and natural light Kawauchi prefers gives way to surprises, such two images of birth – labour just after the second stage, the immense moment the head emerges into the world for the first time; another baby mere minutes after birth, umbilical cord still attached. Above the image, a newborn bird raises its neck out of a muddy nest; nearby there’s a confounding closeup of animals suckling – the connections are concise, if a little on-the-nose. Larger images swell and surge with the incomprehensible awe of nature, panning out, taking in waterfalls, waves crashing, night skies, baby reptiles held in the palm of the hand. With its rising and falling cadence, the rhythm also subtly nods to the Bristol photo festival’s overarching title for 2024, The World a Wave.
Kawauchi’s exhibition also includes works guided by the photographer’s interest in light, the essence of the medium, and her desire to visualise an inter-species solidarity. Upstairs, the dialectic between light and dark continues, with images printed on gauzy pongee cloth, rippling with the movement of viewers who pass. There are large-format photographs and a 14-minute film capturing the practice of noyaki, the cyclical, controlled burning of grassland on Mount Aso, for regenerative purposes. Shot from the foot of the volcano, Kawauchi gives the perspective of an alien, looking from outer space with detached wonder. And what strange creatures we earthlings are.
This is the second edition of the Bristol photo festival, a biennial event that started in 2021 and it is still finding its feet. At M Shed Museum, Dreamlines is an example of this – portraits of people on Bristol’s streets by 14 photographers with ties to the city. Presented in a confusing mass, and confined to a poorly signposted back room, it leaves you feeling that “community” is simply a euphemism for the marginalised and minorities – who arguably forge stronger community identities by necessity.
It’s a shame, because there are great images such as Jade Carr-Daley’s joyous portraits of smiling young Black mothers, a group who meet up on Stapleton Road, converging with Mohamed Hassan’s imposing, elegant portraits of individuals belonging to Stapleton Road’s West and north African diasporic communities.
Onwards through town, the festival steadies itself. At the Bristol Museum, Hashem Shakeri’s Staring into the Abyss is an engaging exploration of life in Afghanistan after the return of the Taliban in 2021. As international media moved on, Shakeri arrived to portray the contrasting realities of women and men, disenfranchised by Taliban’s chaotic mix of formal informal decrees and the pervasive atmosphere of fear. A machine gun lies on the floor surrounded by thepink flesh of cut watermelons. Personal items arranged in a makeshift roadside market stall create a gorgeous still life scene with warm tones of pink, red and blue – Shakeri’s trademark palette.
While Shakeri’s use of colour and composition is exquisite, he doesn’t let us forget the subject-matter. Shakeri shows men trapped by violence, shackled by weapons as they stand guard in public spaces – while women and girls are photographed in underground illegal schools or the concrete backyards of home. We get glimpses of them behind shuttered windows and shrouds; one young woman sits behind heavy drapes in a cafe designed to conceal her presence from the male customers.
Now Keep Quite Still is a remarkable tale of an archive by Herbert Shergold, who ran a tobacco and confectionery shop, took up photography after the second world war, and adopted the tricky technique of glass negatives, which allowed him to retouch imperfections painstakingly by hand. He ran his portrait studio on Cotham Hill, but left barely a trace after shutting up shop in 1967; when he died in 1982, with no known relatives, his negatives wound up on eBay. Their buyer returned them to Bristol for this exhibition at the Laundrette on Gloucester Road, five minutes down the road from Shergold’s former studio.
The portraits are astonishing – eerie emulations of Hollywood perfection, with hyper-staged poses, dramatic lighting and heavy makeup. Using stars of the time such as Moira Lister and Elizabeth Larner, alongside Bristolian glamour queens and androgynous beauties, Shergold presents a subversive kind of ideal, speaking of freedom and the desires he may have suppressed. When I visited, a woman arrived. Shergold had photographed her at his studio 62 years ago, and she now saw her portrait for the first time since it had been taken. Her picture had been part of a pageant for Bristol’s most beautiful betting-shop worker – her boss had paid Shergold 10 shillings. The small audience in the gallery applauded; tears were shed, too.
Equally emotive is Amak Mahmoodian’s One Hundred and Twenty Minutes, an installation over four floors of an austere residential building (which you can rent on Airbnb). The title refers to the average time a person spends dreaming every night – and this is the time Mahmoodian focuses on in video, photography, drawing and text. The Iranian-born, Bristol-based artist, living in exile from her homeland, collaborated with 16 other exiles now living in the UK.
Mahmoodian’s works evolve from lengthy discussions about dreams, often recurrent, which she represents in various delicate forms, from Polaroids to poems, to sublime choreographed black and white images. In the musty basement of the house is an eight-hour looped film of a person in a REM dream state. It is a heady, haunting journey into the subconscious visual realm, and a rumination on what connects us at our core, beyond invented states and imagined borders.
The dreams are sometimes edged with death and violence – one woman dreams of steam coming off of her sister’s body, another gives birth to a fist; a grandmother loses body parts. One Hundred and Twenty Minutes describes a buried visual state, a psychological retelling of exile. It’s an account of the irrepressible, restless motion of the shadows in the mind, moving like a wave.
Bristol photo festival: The World a Wave is at various venues, Bristol, some shows continue until next year
