Sally Mann at the Photographer's Gallery

If you're looking for a bit of a breather from the crowd in Oxford Street, the Photographer's Gallery is a fantastic place to visit. It's also a great place to visit per se, in which case you can just skip the madness on the High Street. It's 16 Ramillies Street, to be exact.

This is the main UK space dedicated to photography, and has hosted exhibitions by big shots like Juergen Teller (fashion), Robert Capa (photojournalism), Sebastião Salgado (documentary) and Andreas Gursky (contemporary art).



In addition to the exhibition space, there is also a cute cafe, a bookshop, and a place where you can buy prints, from the couple of hundred quid to the couple of thousand quid.

I popped in the other day to catch the Sally Mann exhibition, called "The Family and the Land". This is a collection of pictures of her family, landscapes, and corpses (sic!...or sick!!). A bit of a pell mell job, but her technique is positively stunning. She uses antique cameras and a wet-plate collodion process. I m not good at explaining the details, but this results in images that are extremly detailed, and with almost material luminosity. The effect is eerie, poetic.

Images courtesy of http://www.photonet.org.uk/

You MUST run to see this, as the exhibition ends on September 19th, and the gallery is set to close for quite a while for a major revamp.