Uncommon Grace: Photographs from the Open Eye Archive
Curated by Mitch Epstein
Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool
14th May – 12th June 2011

Uncommon Grace showcases a selection of 30 photographs drawn from the Open Eye Gallery’s archive of over 1,600 prints. This will most likely be the final exhibition to take place at the gallery’s current Wood Street site which it has occupied since 1996. It is therefore appropriate that the exhibition exists as a conduit connecting the gallery’s history to its future developments at its new Waterfront premises. The show’s curator is the New York based photographer Mitch Epstein. Epstein, in his role as curator, closes Wood Street’s exhibition programme ahead of his own show as artist that is due to launch Open Eye Gallery at Mann Island later this year.

The majority of the prints cover a period between 1984 and 1989 and point to a network of photographers working in and around Liverpool at the time. From February to June 1985 John Stoddart, Steve Conlan, Rob Williams, and Paul O’Donnell filled the exhibition programme with solo shows. All had benefited from funding schemes, such as the Project Assistance Scheme, which awarded photographers £500 to develop bodies of work for exhibition at Open Eye. As a result of the funding agreement these works helped to grow the Open Eye archive.

Seven images in this show belong to Tom Wood and represent three of the six Open Eye exhibitions that have included his work: Parks and Gardens (1984); The Last Resort (1985); and Care in the Community (1989). They include the only colour work in this show and serve to remind us that Wood, along with Paul Graham and Martin Parr, was one of the pioneers of new colour documentary in 1980s Britain. The photographs from The Last Resort (1985) also make clear that although we usually think of Parr in relation to this project Tom Wood made significant work on the theme of New Brighton. Wood’s three ‘Last Resort’ prints are alone worth the visit to Uncommon Grace.

The aesthetic of the exhibition has been created by displaying the 30 photographic prints as objects, drawing attention to their materiality and to the process of analogue photography and wet darkroom development. The prints, supported on all sides by transparent hinges, allow the edges of the photographic paper to be seen. The four large prints by John Davies reveal the photographer’s pencil marks normally made invisible in the framing process.

Portraits and urban landscapes distinguish the two gallery rooms. The exception is John Stoddart’s photograph of the Open Eye Gallery following an arson attack in 1983 when the gallery occupied the former Grapes Hotel at Whitechapel. The negative for this picture has only recently been rediscovered by Stoddart. Whilst it has not knowingly been exhibited at Open Eye before, it does indirectly represent an Open Eye exhibition. Stoddart’s first solo show New Evidence was on display at the time of the attack.

Only the portraits by New York photographer Bruce Gilden, for the exhibition After the Off (2000), show something other than Liverpool and its people, however, their inclusion connect the archive to the curator and confirm for the viewer the international scale of Open Eye’s remit which has existed since the gallery’s early days. The new build on the Waterfront includes a gallery dedicated for the display of its archive and for the exhibition of artists who have made up Open Eye’s history. Uncommon Grace clearly exists as a conduit knitting together the gallery’s past to its future.

Julia Garcia Hernandez