From early photography to the present day, Collected Shadows displays a vast array of images, taken by both professionals and amateurs, which juxtapose time periods, geographies and photographic techniques.
The exhibition is now on its second tour, organised by Hayward Gallery Touring, part of Southbank Centre, London. Collected Shadows will open at Void in Derry, before touring to Stills: Centre for Photography in Edinburgh; The Edge, University of Bath and Peninsula Arts, Plymouth University.
Cross-cultural and transhistorical, Collected Shadows combines images of earth, air, fire, water, divinity, astrology, flight and portraiture, creating associations between the elements, the cosmos and humanity.
Spanning the history of the medium from the 1850s to the present day, Collected Shadows displays a great variety of photographic techniques from early albumen prints and cyanotypes to silver gelatin prints and polaroids. Cross-cultural as well as trans-historical, this hugely diverse selection includes press images of major historical events, such as aerial photographs of war and an atomic bomb trial in Tahiti in 1970, astronomical images such as Victorian studies of the surface of the moon and early-twentieth-century photographs of comets, early ethnographic images, film stills, and personal snapshots. “The areas covered in this show are more than eclectic,” writes curator Timothy Prus, “In one moment we will be in the Pacific Ocean of the 19th century and the next in outer space. African kings rub shoulders with 19th-century botanical images printed in the beguiling cyanotype blue. Icebergs sit next to studies of cabbage leaves. Still, the salon style hang establishes connections between these most disparate worlds.”
“The areas covered in this show are more than eclectic,” writes curator Timothy Prus, “In one moment we will be in the Pacific Ocean of the 19th century and the next in outer space. African kings rub shoulders with 19th-century botanical images printed in the beguiling cyanotype blue. Icebergs sit next to studies of cabbage leaves. Still, the salon style hang establishes connections between these most disparate worlds.”
