Paul Trevor’s Constant Exposure, a patchwork print of black-and-white television stills, looks just like life in the age of the smartphone, quite a feat when you consider that it was created back in the 1980s. A news anchor, a war plane dropping bombs and bare breasts are among the multitude of jumbled images. Standing in front of it in the V&A’s new Photography Centre, I can’t help but laugh – here I am contemplating a work about the everyday onslaught of pictures in a new suite of galleries filled with them.
But that’s the thing. While out in the real world images come at you hot and heavy, in here they offer a respite, access to another time and place. Spread across seven 19th-century galleries in the north-east wing are 600 works out of the museum’s 800,000-strong collection that stretch from the 1840s to the present. There’s a lot – a lot of images and a lot of labels – but take your time and you’ll be duly rewarded.
