Paul Seawright has had a relatively rapid but deserved rise as an art photographer, and he figured in the Imaginaire irlandais exhibition(s) in Paris. He works fairly big, and usually in colour, using for the most part close-up perspectives which give an effect of physical and psychological immediacy. The 12 pieces in this show give a fair summary of his range.
The themes are almost all urban ones, some of them with a certain note of dereliction, as in the impressive Book, Under- pass showing an abandoned book or ledger lying discarded in a corner amid anonymous, big-city detritus. Man Drink- ing exploits - almost to the limit - an unusual angle of composition, so that the man's features vanish in a huddled overcoat and mat of hair. In Christmas, fairy-lights on a tree contrast poignantly with an overpowering background of high-rise flats, all with dark and vacant windows.
Seawright rather overworks the technique of enlargement, or "blow-ups" as they are called in the trade; this nowhackneyed device all too easily equates with the commercial visual shorthand of billboard ads and cinema posters. He uses it well, admittedly, but in my opinion rather too often. And perhaps he is a little too much sold on the kind of fashionably grotty, glum subject matter which since the Seventies has become almost a camera cliche.
The successes of the show, however, are obvious and immediate, particularly Bird, Night Shelter, which is imaginative and quite haunting, and the cool, almost minimalist Shirt. In these, his fine colour sense is shown, as well as an individual sense of placing and balance and a sensitive use of light. Path, in the lower gallery, is simple, direct and with an odd sense of loneliness.
Until February 23rd.
