Points of View is a largely historical exhibition charting the technological progression of the medium of photography and recreating a comprehensive dialogue between it and the burgeoning Victorian world. Yet, due to its consistent attempt to weave a tight line between art and science, Points of View shouldn’t fall too far beyond the interest of an art history student: old friends Eadweard Muybridge and 19th century textbooks of physiognomy are present, and the array of images on display attest to both the aesthetic charms and the documentary precision of the medium.

The main focus of the exhibition is aptly explained in the title, and it is ultimately successful in revealing photographic cross-sections of 19th and early 20th century life, through travel, technology, architectural expansion, commercial portraiture, personal snapshots, scientific experiment, aesthetic pursuit, and celebrity obsession. Of particular interest is the unfaltering Victorian belief in the medium’s ability to unearth ‘objective’ truth: from botanical documentation to clinical records of ethnographic ‘others’; from operations of democratic control to the otherworldly talents of the ‘spirit photographers’ who claimed to employ the camera to access supernatural realms. There is also a striking contemporaneity about some of the images: the sense of urgency and transient expression captured in Etienne Carjat’s Portrait of Charles Baudelaire appears as though it could have been recorded yesterday.

The intricate display of the small prints brings the exhibition to life, evoking an intriguing sense of riffling through personal albums at times, at others of peering into cabinets of curiosities. Interactive elements also make the exhibition of the medium that has become the instrument of the masses suitably public-friendly. Unfortunately though, the shady lighting necessary for preserving these photographs was at times a hindrance when viewing small black and white prints.

Until Mar 7

LAURA HAYHURST-FRANCE