PHOTOGRAPHY: Inside the Outskirts

('Uwe & Stefan’- Andrew Duke)

People buy all sorts of terrible art in galleries but the one thing that is guaranteed to depress me is to see them shelling out 500quid for an ‘original’ giclée print or, worse still, the ultimate fraud of a hand-finished giclée print. For the uninitiated, a giclée is an ink jet copy of an original painting; it’s a step up from a photocopy, though not a very significant one. Such prints will usually be limited edition, and each signed by the artist, though those editions frequently run into the hundreds. The hand-finished version is when the print, often applied to canvas for added verité, is embellished by a few touches of real paint from the artist’s own hand. This would all be fine were it not that these products are often sold in such a way as to dupe an unsuspecting buyer into believing them to be rather more than a cheap mass-produced copy, a poster in a frame.

The strange thing, given the art-buying public’s willingness to splash out on flat copies of paintings, is its reluctance to pay anything at all for original printed photography. Perhaps things are different in London but up here in Scotland photography really struggles to sell in galleries. Many gallery owners will exhibit a little photography because they happen to like it, but few expect to make anything out of it and fewer still are prepared to mount pure photography exhibitions. The public refuse, it seems, to accept that photography is an art form worth paying for.

A gallery that defies convention to support photography is therefore something to celebrate and Amber Arts in Edinburgh’s East End is such a gallery. Its current show, Inside the Outskirts, which opened on Wednesday, brings together ten photographers who cover both the fine art and documentary styles. The exhibition follows on from two solo photo shows they have hosted recently and underlines their commitment to the value of the photograph as art.

The style of the work, unsurprisingly given the number of contributors, is very mixed and as Amber Arts is only a small gallery each snapper is sadly limited to just three or four images. Nevertheless, it is fascinating to see all the different approaches, from Ayesha Malik’s oblique look at city features or Andy Shaw’s sweeping, abstracted study of the soon-to-be-demolished Meadowbank Velodrome, to Anastasia Voronina’s rather haunting early morning Russian landscapes. If there is an underlying theme in the work on show here, it seems to be connected to the passing of time, the loss of community, the end of eras.

Malcolm Irving, for example, uses a now discontinued type of film in an old twin lens reflex camera to record a series of Edinburgh's old Police Boxes, using an outdated camera to capture an outdated subject. Two of the photographers, Andrew Duke and Keith Brame, share a strong documentary aesthetic. Brame shows windswept images of crofters on John Muir Trust land across the Highlands, while Duke’s work looks at people in search of their own way of life: those who reject societal norms to inhabit the fringes of communities. Duke travels all over the world exploring issues of social justice through his lens and the gallery also stocks some extraordinarily powerful and beautiful images from his work with religious communities in Jerusalem.  There’s not a dud image in this exhibition and it deserves to do well.

('Meadowbank, Turn 3' - Andy Shaw)

What’s the difference between buying that print of a painting and one of a photo? The print is the point of a photo, as in etching or screen printing; without the print there's nothing. It is the original, not a secondary knock-off to spin out the profits. Most of these photographs are digital c-type prints; a couple are traditional hand printed monochromes; all are archival quality and come in small, numbered editions available either framed or unframed. The skills of the professional photographer are not easily acquired and while we might all appreciate Ansel Adams, Cartier-Bresson or David Bailey, we should not forget that great artists of the lens operate here and now – and not just in newspapers or advertising. If you see them in galleries and you like them, think about supporting them too.

Inside the Outskirts
22 September – 6th November
Amber Arts
78 Montrose Terrace
Abbeyhill, Edinburgh, EH7 5DP
Tel: 0131 661 1167

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