- Venue
- Chapman Gallery
- Location
- North West England
Steve Hunt.
In Salford University’s recently painted, buffed and revamped Chapman Gallery, once a visitor has side-stepped the impressively hi-tech white vitrine-like sculpture, or rather the public access lift, pinned directly to the walls is an exhibition of photographs by Steve Hunt.
A sky-blue painted wooden palette in a vertical lean obstructs the door of a bus-station store-room rammed with caged black bin bags; a dead urban road is nearly blocked by bright yellow storage units; in front of a dead brown field, a torn white poster infects a high free-standing bill-board, in the distance two blocks of blank and sandy city flats: all immediate, attractive images but slightly too ‘arty’, too successfully composed and colour-coordinated to carry the stamp of a photographer’s idiosyncratic obsession.
Much more effortlessly successful are a series of blandly factual semi-wastelands, the ‘not quite’ areas between city centre and countryside – not quite wilderness, not quite ‘developed’- which increasingly seem to be the only organically chaotic patches of Old Blighty. It’s not so much that the town’s accumulated crap has edged into the countryside, more that urban and rural have apathetically seeped into each other, leaving scruffily spray-paint tagged tree trunks and a park lake with synchronized Loch Ness monster humps which, on closer inspection, prove to be two tyres of an upturned, submerged car.
The vague insinuation of a narrative sequence is completely abandoned in the back wall’s three deep block of images. Lobster pink sunbathers compete with a blurred speeding police car, chintzy plates, a picture of a cellophane covered noodle dish; people appear as fleshy, noisy but complicit pictorial intruders in recognisable Manchester back streets.
I particularly liked the smaller groupings of unfussy interiors with cameos from pizza boxes, angled televisions, snippets of edited furniture: little slices of artless verite.
Austin Colling’s begrudgingly poetic supporting text praises Hunt’s sympathetic recordings of day-to-day moments of booze and takeaways, urban tracks and unpretentious interiors, written with a barely restrained, but entertaining, dash of anti-art bile. It hits the right tone, affectionate, effective and a more accurate summation of the work than Aaron Lavery’s review. Buried in Manchester’s free daily rag it takes Hunt’s perpetually hung-over, semi-professional photographer persona rather too seriously, although seeing his work in tomorrow’s chip paper can’t help but maintain this semi-self-fictionalizing game-play.
Hunt has previously assisted photographers Elaine Constantine and Ian Tilton, but his images are off on a considerable tangent to fashion shots of giddy, narcissistic youth or ‘iconic’ rock portraits. They are much more usefully compared to the charming, theatrical oddness of Constantine’s recordings of elderly tea dances, or even Tilton’s promotional shots of stage plays. Cumulatively, far from being sentimental subtractions from the innocuous stuff and gristle of that overused trope ‘the everyday’, they sit on the wall like low-budget film stills emphasising the casually jig-sawed inauthenticity of the life lived by all of us.
Lavery overlooks the fact that where photography’s concerned the apparently disposable is a hard trick to pull off. Photography finds itself in the position of being cheap seductive trickery given undue substance by its claim to fix, pin down, the spontaneous truth of a moment. And, although we all know it’s a theatre of smoke and mirrors, it’s hard to shake off the desire to be presented with a casual accumulation of facts; the unproblematic residue of a mechanical activity that can cattle-prod the naïve child-within into the wide-eyed wonder of an Xmas polaroid. Just then, made now. Even if the world pictured is considerably more weary, battered and unwholesome than the one remembered.
Steve Hunt
Chapman Gallery
Salford University
Salford
Fri 6th Marc – Tuesday 24th March 2009
