I’d been looking forward to the Teamphoto exhibition ever since hearing Brian Griffin mention it at a BJP event last year, but I somehow missed out on the news that it had opened in September, and only stumbled upon it by accident a few days before it closes, as I was killing time waiting for a train at the newly renovated St Pancras station (nice brickwork, shame about the half-mile walk to the tube station).
Griffin was commissioned to document the building of the High Speed 1 rail link to the Channel Tunnel, “the UK’s first high speed railway for over 100 years”. The result is a monumental series of portraits which really lives up to my expectations of it.
I had a great time wondering around and around the show, looking and looking again at all the photos, and it’s one of the few photo exhibitions where I have actually laughed out loud. Griffin’s photos fall roughly into two categories: his portraits of the workers are epic, mainly black & white studio portraits. In a similar manner to much Soviet artwork, they clearly portray the worker as hero. By contrast, the photos of management are very much in the style which Griffin utlised during his many years as photographer for Management Today: the subjects are placed in Kafkaesque scenarios where they seem unsure or unaware of what’s happening to them and what they’re supposed to do. Even more than with the Management Today photos, I was left wondering “how the hell does he get away with it?”
For the rail project’s American project managers, Griffin had reserved an even more bizarre approach: they were captured in what seem to be half-staged, half-candid poses which remind me of nothing quite so much as Twin Peaks. Their American suburban location adds even more to the strange disconnect from anything to do with the UK-Europe rail link.
There were also a few group photos styled as Frans Hals paintings. On their own these seemed a little uninspired, given the frequency with which photographers seem to be ripping off the Old Masters nowadays, but thrown into the melange of strangeness which made up the Teamphoto exhibition, they added a little extra spice.
It’s a very daring move from Griffin’s corporate client, and one which leaves them open to ridicule, but I’m very glad that they’ve apparently allowed him free reign on this project, and I think the results are something of a landmark.
As I was walking around the exhibiton, I overheard one woman saying to another “The only thing I would have done: I would have kept it all black & white, I wouldn’t have had any colour. I think that would have been really powerful”. That made me laugh nearly as much as the photos did.
If you’re in London, get yourself down to the Gymnasium (in between St Pancras and King’s Cross) sharpish: the exhibition ends on 16th November.
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