Julian Yewdall's exhibition...

With lovely pictures here:

http://www.dontpaniconline.com/magazine/ritual/julian-yewdall


Or without pictures (and arguably, therefore, without point), here:

Back when Julian Yewdall was taking pictures of rock bands, being a photographer meant being a documenter, a chronicler; a diarist almost. Not an operator of some clinical tool for recording PR images. To mix my media similes, think Johnny Rotten on the Today show and then watch (if you can bear it) Donny Tourettes on Never Mind The Buzzcocks and shake your head in despair. Anyway, I digress.

For the past 40 years Yewdall has been working as a documentary film-maker and photographer and is primarily known for his early iconic images of Joe Strummer and The Clash. However, his latest exhibition, The Language Of The Eye, is a departure from his rock roots and although there is an inescapable candid authenticity, which gives a respectful nod to that period, this exhibition is much gentler and more passive than the aggressive posturing and live action of band reportage. Yewdall's documentarian eye is evident in the composition of all his pictures. From still life to portraiture, there is a sense of an implicit curiosity coming from behind the lens and a real affection for, and genuine interest in, his subjects.

The PR blurb for the exhibition is pretty concise generally, offering only the bare minimum of information about the photographer himself and entirely failing to include any mention of Yewdall's intention and ambition for The Language Of The Eye. Perhaps it has been left deliberately ambiguous because when viewing the exhibition, there doesn't seem to be any one unifying theme.

Instead we are presented with a kind of ‘collage' of images, which are simply studies of subjects that have pre-occupied Yewdall in the intervening years between his rock period and the present day. And those subjects are many and varied, spanning the breadth of Yewdall's imagination as his natural inquisitiveness propels him towards vivid colourful landscapes of blooming flowers in ‘Poppy Field, Greece', to anonymous black and white nudes, to gritty bikers in ‘Road Hogs, Rivington-Pike Free Festival, Lancs 1977', to the self-explanatory (and personal favourite of mine) ‘Geishas On A Train, Tokyo, 1986'. Some of the prints are grainy, unpolished, but you can forgive this because they are somehow made more tangible.

The Subway Gallery's intimate, subterranean space serves to bring cohesion to what is a quite disparate collection of photographs. Each image's proximity to the next helps to pass the baton of Yewdall's own narrative thread from the one to the other - as if they were distant relatives encountering each other for the first time and recognising their resemblances. The preview night in the small gallery is chaotic. Children weave in and out of the static adults, shrieking as they chase each other; everyone suspends their disbelief as one window of the gallery becomes a walk-thru burger kiosk - a prop in their boisterous game. Some of the adults join in, shouting orders through the glass slats. In the midst of it all stands Yewdall, unassuming and friendly, observing, recording but not disrupting; his pictures doing the talking.

The Language Of The Eye is on at the Subway Gallery, until 28 March www.subwaygallery.com