Reviews

Empty Days: photographs by Paddy Summerfield

There is a great deal of very high quality colour photography in galleries and art magazines which uses the potential of digital retouching and image manipulation with great sensitivity. Alterations to an original negative or digital file can be so subtle that we are no longer jarred by an intervention that is uncomfortably crude. On the other hand much of this work seems cool and distant. There is a lack of emotional intensity. The ability to reconfigure a digital image has begun to make us suspicious of work that may or may not be a rendition of a 'real' world with the result that much of the photography deliberately rests on its documentary function as if to emphasise that the viewer can feel secure about the 'reality' of the image before their eyes.

With this in mind it is a particular pleasure to find an exhibition of black and white photographs that are playing no tricks with our perceptions and require a direct involvement of our emotions in order to engage with them effectively. Empty Days the latest, and long awaited, solo exhibition by Paddy Summerfield at the Ovada gallery in Oxford contains about 60 images culled from years of work by a man who first came to prominence in the early 1970s. Summerfield has since slipped from national awareness mostly through his own desire to remain disengaged from an art world that contains its share of sharks and charlatans but also because he has always stayed with the medium he understands, black and white film. His only concession to the digital revolution is that the prints in the exhibition have been printed from scanned negatives but nevertheless preserving Summerfield's characteristic rather dark, flat originals.

Because the work in this exhibition is the result of images taken over many years what we see on the walls is the result of two levels of decision. The first, and the most important, is the scraps of the world and of humanity at which he has pointed the lens and pressed the shutter. These are the marks of his own consciousness, his understanding of the world around, as Summerfield would have it, his autobiography. The second level of decision is of course the selection of all these images into a coherent collection that allow the viewer to somehow share the emotion Summerfield has felt at the moment of opening the shutter. Thus, by arranging lines of prints into a visual narrative, Summerfield has given individual images: a shoe on a stair, a broken street sign, a woman in a field, a meaning and impact that would otherwise have been obscure. As Summerfield puts it in his brief words of explanation: ' The decisive moment is not always to be found in the single image but is carried through the line of pictures'. This is something many artists attempt, particularly photographers, whose individual images can seem at times so passing and slight, but that few manage with the depth and intensity to be found in this exhibition. Here is an example of a Summerfield narrative: the scarred knuckles of an old man holding a cigarette, fag ends on a dirty floor, a seatless toilet, a discarded doll, a woman kissing a wrist, a woman in the distance sunbathing on rocks, an old couple moving away from the camera, an old man reading a paper alone on the sea front. This was read from left to right but there is no reason why we should not move in reverse. The emotional effect is the same, the narrative is different. In both cases what we discover is the work of someone who sees and understands the creases in our lives, the discreet moments that put together can often have more meaning than those 'great events' in a life. There are close-ups of humanity that hover on the edge of pornography, others that could be seen as voyeuristic in the spirit of Cartier-Bresson and some that seem to be of almost nothing, yet put together they show us the world of a man who sees with both extraordinary acuity but, more importantly, with great compassion and understanding.

This is a particularly fine exhibition by an artist who has been hidden from us for too long. The selection committee at Ovada gallery should be acknowledged for having the foresight to make this possible. There are examples of the work on the Ovada website: www.ovada.org.uk and much more on Summerfield's own site: www.paddysummerfield.co.uk .

Paul Medley
Photographer

• John Goto
• Green in Black and White
• Photo London 2007
• Paris Photo 2006
• London Polygon and the book Room
• Jude Wall - Re-form
• Welcome to Britain
• Derek Henderson - The Terrible Boredom of Paradise
• Empty Days by Paddy Summerfield
• Arles 2005
• Boyd & Evans 2005
• Frieze 2004
• Javier Silva Meinal
• Arles 2004
• Frieze 2003
• Happy Vicitims by Kyoichi Tsuzuki

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