“Maddock’s views and snatches of life are both surreal and individual. He has the enviable ability to turn nothing much into something quite profound.” - Martin Parr
Opening tonight at TJ Boulting, is Robin Maddock's God Forgotten Face, an exhibition in conjunction with the book of the same name, published by Trolley, which examines aspects of
the everyday life in Plymouth, a port town still bearing the
scars of the Blitz.
The exhibition showcases both key
images from the book as well as new additions, taken more recently.
In the words of gallery director, Hannah Watson, these have the
effect of “introducing a slight shift to a lighter and more
lyrical interpretation of the city.”
In her press release for the show she
goes on to say: “After two years spent living in the town,
where he has had family all his life, Maddock achieves a familiar
interaction with his subjects, visible through his portraits in night
clubs and pubs, and in the witnessing of the various goings on down
at the sea front or in the local rec. In the misty early
morning a nun stops to call her dog, whilst later a police forecourt
is bathed in light and transported to a sunny LA; Maddock’s insight
into the city is at once affectionate and optimistic in outlook, but
stamped with his own aesthetic and curiosity.
In the book Owen Hatherley writes with
a similar affection In Praise of Blitzed Cities, citing that the
negative and concrete environs that come into most people’s minds
when they think of Plymouth are in fact overlooking its “shabby,
ad hoc vitality that most heritage cities would die for.” As a
town, Plymouth’s past has been one of ongoing economic and cultural
isolation since the shrinking of the Navy. Now it reflects more a
broader England in decline, whilst all the post-modern ironic
contradictions of the evolving new economies are present; ‘Francis
Drake’ is a shopping mall, and what was the ‘Royal Sovereign’
pub is now a ‘Firkin Doghouse’.
His childhood memories of the place are
also challenged by more adult quotidian realities of Maddock’s time
there, and his own preconceptions; the journey’s question shifting
from, ‘What am I doing here?’ to the more telling, ‘What am I,
here?’ The ‘God Forgotten Face’ of the title, originally
derived from the 1945 Philip Larkin poem Plymouth, and the
words “Last kingdom of a gold forgotten face...”, perhaps
coming to represent his own personal account as a photographer
finding himself changed in the face of the subject he had returned to
find.”
The exhibition runs until 2 June 2012.
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