Susan Bright: How We Are is… I think the simplest way to describe it is a portrait of Britain. It’s what photographers have gone out into the country to photograph and discover. The exhibition is divided into six different sections. The first section is all the 19th century Victorian era. Very often when you look at Victorian photography it can seem very staid, it can seem quite boring in lots of ways but it was this new medium that attracted chancers and inventors and eccentrics and we wanted to get some of that spirit into the first section of the show. The second section of the exhibition which runs from 1900 to 1918, this again was a very exciting period of British photography. You have got some Charles Jones which is some great examples of an amateur photographer and you also see it used as a record as well, so a very diverse and exciting period. Into the third section which is called New Freedoms in Photography. Where the emigrates were coming into Britain post the war, and what they brought with them was a wonderful vibrancy and technology advancing hugely so colour suddenly looms large. You don’t think of colour photography really in the 1940’s and 30’s as being something that existed even. We have got some colour portraits of plastic surgery in the exhibition which is the first time that they have ever been shown and taken out of that archive. Fourth section is ’45 to ’70, it’s a time in British history where there are enormous shifts and changes. The tone slightly changes from that wonderful excitement during the war period and it goes down a tone or two. The 1970’s and the 1980’s are represented in Room Five and what they really demonstrate again is another shift in the way that photography was understood and the way that funding was really available to photography. There was a huge rush of long documentary projects that photographers would go around England and do with a vigour and a determination photographing certain communities and that’s what we have really concentrated on in that section. The final room is section six and that runs from 1990 to present. What we see is a shift in scale, a lot of photographs are much bigger and also they tackle subjects a little more obliquely than perhaps you would have seen in earlier parts of the show, so instead of being more straightforward documentary they are cooler in a way, they are stepping back, the photographers are allowing the viewer to bring much more to the images that we see. Another kind of exciting part of the exhibition is the Seventh Gallery as it’s known which is a collaboration with Flickr and you can upload your images on to a Flickr group and they are shown throughout the duration of the exhibition on screens outside of the exhibition. At the end of the run of the exhibition we will be judging those and making a selection of the very best so at the moment if you upload then you can have your pictures shown at the Tate gallery.
