Peter Dench, LoveUK at Third Floor Gallery, Cardiff Bay

19Feb10

From LoveUK - Peter Dench

At first sight Peter Dench’s pictures of sordid partying and booze-addled snogging is almost unremittingly tragic. Tacky people in tacky locations, sordid gropes in nightclubs, hen parties lined up next to a gaudy stretch limos.

For Dench this is an exploration of where Britain goes to find love. But where is the love? Much of what we can see here is plain old fashioned lust in the company of stag nights and strippers with a good dose of nudity and lashing and lashings of alcohol.

Initially I had a nagging sense that we were being asked to partake in a kind of guilty voyeurism. Of course, all photographs are a form of voyeurism but there’s a fine line between documentation of bad behaviour and the exploitation of it to satisfy our prurient curiosity.

Now, nobody’s asking for a return to the days of Picture Post and the hammy glorification of the honest working man – and certainly the participants in these scenes do themselves no favours – but the complete absence of sympathy in most of these pictures can be read in two ways. Either this is a factual document of human failings or, more worryingly, it’s an artist exploiting the seamier side of life to give us a quick thrill based on an assumption that we, the viewer, are somehow above all of this. This is what people like “them” do, it’s not what people like “us” do.

The influence of Martin Parr (who has his own exhibition of South Wales Workingmens’ clubs opening this month) is pervasive. These days Parr’s approach, and his style is everywhere. The whole garish colour, hard flash, wobbly horizons look is now bedded in as the new orthodoxy for modern documentary work, supplanting the grainy black and white of the seventies and, at the moment, it’s not clear where any new approach to this kind of work is going to come from.

But amongst the squalor there are flashes of intimacy.

In particular it comes from the older people pictured here. An old couple kiss in a shelter on Blackpool seafront, an elderly man and a woman sit on a bed in their home in a gentle embrace. Of course it’s quite possible they only met yesterday having found each other on the internet, as with all these images, we bring our own assumptions to the picture.

What is nice about these quieter and less sensational portraits is that somehow they feel more open-ended and ambiguous, we can wonder a little about their life and circumstances, we are free to add our own story to the image, whereas the young girl on all fours in front of a baying stag night crowd doesn’t leave much space for the imagination to build on. What you see is what you get.

What Dench does manage to do is push the national self hate button brilliantly, the British collective sense of low self esteem. In his pictures of Britain behaving badly he manages to capture the sadness and futility of the desperate quest for happiness, and perhaps it works because even the soberest of us will recognise something of ourselves.

From LoveUK - Peter Dench

(A version of this review appeared in The Western Mail on 19.02.10)

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Tags: Cardiff, Peter Dench, Photography, Reviews, Third Floor Gallery, Wales