An umbrella and a bowler hat sit on a windowsill in a pub – patiently waiting, it seems, for their boozing owner to return. This striking black and white vignette of British culture is an unusually playful photograph by Evelyn Hofer, taken in London in the 1960s, presented with many others that depict the capital as a hostile city, as part of the artist’s first UK exhibition.
Split across two floors of the Photographers’ Gallery in London, the show focuses on the photographs Hofer took in Europe and the US in the 60s and 70s. An early pioneer of new colour techniques, working with a more collaborative approach than her shoot-from-the-hip predecessors, she quietly changed the course of documentary photography.
