Raymond Depardon Villes/Cities @ Turner House, Penarth

09Jul10

For three years, Magnum photographer Raymond Depardon visited 12 cities around the world attempting to capture a slice of everyday people going about their lives.

He didn’t linger too long in each place, preferring to trust his first impressions and gut instinct.

His photographs are presented unframed, simply pinned to the wall in long strips. This has the effect of rendering the individual photo somehow less precious.

While this is crucial to understanding Depardon’s vision it also seems to point up that these are – in effect – snaps. Rapidly and almost casually composed while on the move, often while trying to remain unobtrusive.

Street photography is a well worked out genre and arguably had its heyday in the ’50s and ’60s, but it still has passionate adherents.

Done well it’s a fascinating glimpse into candid moments, people caught with their guard lowered, but it’s often done badly, turning into a rambling succession of tramps (perhaps they don’t shout back).

Depardon avoids that trap, but there are plenty of images here that fit the classic street photography pattern; a couple having an intimate moment in a New York diner, a bored looking doorman in front of an Addis Ababa hotel, etc.

You can’t get away from the cliché of street photographer as hunter, tracking down his prey and waiting for the precise moment to pounce. Often the thrill can be in just seeing if they can get away with it.

Of course there are problems with this kind of image-making in the 21st century. In a world where people happily spread intimate details of their life around the web there is – perversely – still a fine line between recording public actions and the simple invasion of someone’s private space.

But mostly Depardon succeeds in being invisible, or at least ignored (the interesting exception to this being Johannesburg where everybody seems to notice him). Few seem aware of his presence, but when they do the pictures come alive.

The two guys in front of the Dubai market, a cabbie in Buenos Aires, they break the rule and smile. In the context of all these scurrying, anonymous people, many of them with their back to us, their direct engagement with the camera is refreshingly human.

For some, the lack of single one-off iconic images in this collection might frustrate and there are few here that really punch through as timeless, individual photographs. But that might be missing the point.

It’s the way that they work as a whole that counts. It’s more like watching a film where someone travels through a strange town pointing the camera through a taxi cab window. The mood of each city seeps into your head through a series of almost inconsequential moments.

Interestingly what emerges is the similarity of places. In Berlin or Dubai people have the same expression – that blank, hurrying to lunch stare.

Depardon has brought back mundane details, the busy street corners and tied up dogs you can see on any drizzly day in Cardiff. Through his lens it’s the sheer similarity and familiarity of the world that surprises

(This review first appeared in The Western Mail 09.07.10)

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Tags: Ffotogallery, Photography, Raymond Depardon, review, Wales, Western Mail