Good evening everyone.
I’m James Hyman, the Founding Director of the Centre for British Photography, and I’m delighted to welcome you to our new shows.
For the first time all three floors have an over-riding theme: Landscape and the Environment - I’m really pleased with the ways in which the shows complement each other to create a powerful message about the damage that we do to the world of which we are an integral part.
Our major new group show, Landscape Trauma, explores our effect on the landscape, and tells a story about the past – and the landscape as a site of conflict – as well as the present - and issues around how we treat the land. Curating the show, it’s been particularly special to work with several of the photographers, including Melanie Friend, Roshini Kempadoo, and Mitra Tabrizian, to make new exhibition prints specially for this show.
I was also really pleased - and very relieved - that we could fit in Ingrid Pollard’s enormous photograph and was delighted when John Davies appeared a few days ago with a box of recent work prints for a new series on the trails left by aeroplanes, including a photograph taken just a couple of weeks ago. I’m really pleased that we managed to find some room in the vitrines for some of them.
I’m also really grateful to the photographers that we’ve worked with on the four new solo shows. On the Mezzanine all three photographers use layering and multiple exposures to address distinct, but interconnected issues, giving a strong formal and conceptual coherence. In John Blakemore’s exhibition, we celebrate not only his major black and white landscapes but also present a selection of his remarkable unique handmade artists books. Meanwhile, Jermaine Francis provides a powerful exploration of a black presence in the countryside - a place so loaded with connotations of class and privilege. And Helen Sear’s major works reflect on the indivisibility of the human and natural worlds.
Then in the basement is Mandy Barker’s important show, Plastic Soup on Marine Plastics. We first saw this exhibition at the National Trust property, Lacock Abbey, and are delighted to have this opportunity to give this show a London venue.
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When we opened in January, we didn’t know what to expect. It’s important to us that all the exhibitions are free so we knew we would have visitors but the huge numbers every single day took us by surprise. We were all overwhelmed with the incredible response; the extensive press coverage; the one hundred and ten prebooked groups; the numerous sold-out events from workshops and talks to film screenings; and our first open call for works for our front windows which attracted over one thousand entrants! Thank you to all the photographers that submitted their work and congratulations to the six winners.
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None of this could have been achieved without my fabulous team.
The last few months have been enormously busy and we could not have delivered all these exhibitions and events without the incredible efforts of our gallery manager Becky Martin and Registrar Saray Garcia. I am so grateful to you both for your commitment and professionalism and very long hours!
Thank you also to our great team of assistants – including Jarelle Francis, Selin Sari and Jess Davies.
I’m also immensely grateful to Rebecca Ward both for her press campaign and for her acute advice!
I would also like to thank our Trustees. Firstly, thanks to Gary Blaker, Claire Hyman, and Christiane Monarchi, who have been trustees from the start. And I’d also like to welcome our new trustees Marcie Larizadeh, Rene Mussai, Madeline Yale Preston, and Gregg Wilson. We are so pleased that you are joining us.
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It is working with photographers that makes this all so special. I’d like to thank all the photographers who have made these new shows, as well as our opening exhibitions and events, such a success. We are here to serve you and in turn we are grateful for all your support.
With regards to the opening shows, I’d particularly like to thank Anna Fox and her colleagues at Fast Forward and UCA. It was really important to us that our opening shows would make a statement about our values and what we want to achieve and having Headstrong. Women and Empowerment in our main space was a fantastic way of welcoming visitors. We are proud to have staged this show and look forward to working with Anna and Fast Forward again in the future.
I’m also grateful to Photo London for giving us such an amazing platform to showcase women photographers in our collection. The exhibition Writing her own Script. Women Photographers from the Hyman Collection at Photo London in May seemed like an enormous amount of work for a show that was on for just five days, but the incredible response made it really worth it. And we are in discussions about the exhibition touring internationally.
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We have always been struck by the fantastic quality of photography in this country… but it has sometime felt like it has been under-supported and under-appreciated nationally as well as internationally. So we are delighted to have demonstrated the need for this centre and to have welcomed such an enthusiastic audience.
As our exhibition and events programme demonstrate, our vision of Britain is of a diverse, multi-cultural, society. The Centre is intended as a place where all cultures are celebrated for the ways in which they enrich us all. It is conceived as a hub in which there is a fertile exchange of ideas, heritages, and cultures, and we look forward to collaborating with others on future projects.
Last but not least, I’d like to express my gratitude to those of you who have joined as friends, have made donations to the charity, or purchased works from the photography sales gallery. We really appreciate – and need - this very generous support.
As many of you know, Claire and I have provided the seed funding. However, there are limits to what we can contribute. Unfortunately, it’s been a lot more expensive to run the Centre than we had anticipated and a lot harder to secure the grants that we had hoped to receive by this stage. So we really do need people to get on board for us to survive.
I believe that we have shown what we can deliver but to continue we need to make this sustainable. So if you do have ideas about how you can support us, please do contact me or any of the other trustees.
So thank you all for coming tonight. I hope that you enjoy this evening and that you will join us in shaping and securing the future of the centre.
Thank you.