An umbrella and a bowler hat sit on a windowsill in a pub – patiently waiting, it seems, for their boozing owner to return. This striking black and white vignette of British culture is an unusually playful photograph by Evelyn Hofer, taken in London in the 1960s, presented with many others that depict the capital as a hostile city, as part of the artist’s first UK exhibition.
Split across two floors of the Photographers’ Gallery in London, the show focuses on the photographs Hofer took in Europe and the US in the 60s and 70s. An early pioneer of new colour techniques, working with a more collaborative approach than her shoot-from-the-hip predecessors, she quietly changed the course of documentary photography.
Hofer was born in Germany in 1922, and her early life was itinerant. The family fled the Nazis, moving to Switzerland, where Hofer began to study photography, taking private lessons with Hans Finsler, who was associated with the modernist new objectivity movement that also included August Sander. The family later moved to Spain but, after Franco’s rise, they left Europe, arriving in Mexico in the 1940s.
By 1946, Hofer had moved to New York, but she continued to travel back to Europe. Upstairs are her visionary views of European cities in the 60s, most of them shot in black and white and evoking a sombre atmosphere: there are photographs of Paris, Barcelona, Rome and Dublin, alongside a body of work made while she was living in London, produced for a book by VS Pritchett. London, through Hofer’s eyes, appears smoky, industrious and austere. Even children she photographed in Notting Hill Gate and Battersea look baleful or despondent.
Descending a floor, the exhibition switches gear – from black and white to dazzling colour, from Europe to the US. Some of her early successes with the complex colour dye transfer printing process are here: a bar on Mercer Street, a car park in New York, signs in Coney Island – the most humdrum of scenes scintillate with the particular qualities of the technique. US cities pulse with heat and joy: the series Just Married presents 12 couples, taken one morning in 1974 outside the New York civil register office. Hofer didn’t choreograph the newlyweds, but the details of their clothing, gestures and poses suggest much about their circumstances and dynamics.
While love and leisure are common themes in the American pictures, when Hofer does turn to labour, it feels exuberant and fresh: in Secretaries in Rawlings Park, Washington DC and Chauffeurs, Washington (both 1965) she pays homage to the inexorable power of immaculate style. In contrast to her abject view of an old-fashioned Europe, the US appears modern, consumer-friendly and free.
Hofer remained concerned with society’s outliers – working-class people, people of colour and women are frequent subjects, all of them exuding a certain self-confidence. The pictures of unnamed cockle pickers and coalminers, secretaries and seminarians, gravediggers and lorry drivers have aged – but they also capture something timeless. It is in these subtleties that Hofer is most subversive, asserting the authority of her sometimes idiosyncratic interests in what, or who, could be revered in an image. In her photographs, a quivering, impossibly high beehive hairstyle or an impeccably dressed elderly woman sitting on a bridge are treated with the same respect as buildings on Park Avenue or olive trees in Spain.
As well as Hofer’s exhibition, the gallery is showing Johny Pitts’ Home is Not a Place, a series that also seeks to convey the atmosphere of a city while dissolving a sense of time. Like Hofer, in 2021 Pitts embarked on a roving journey with his camera, following the Thames east to Tilbury – where the Windrush docked in 1948 – then moving along the coast, from Dover to Plymouth, Liverpool to Edinburgh, in search of Black communities.
As well as photographs, Pitts’ installation includes objects, furniture, text and video. Rather than presenting a linear narrative, the photographs – left uncaptioned – move back and forth in time and place. At times, Pitts brings the camera very close to his subjects, or submerges them in hazy light, so they are cast as silhouettes, bodies in spaces that remain ambiguous.
Photographs can create a sense of belonging: alongside his search for a collective image that might reflect his experiences, he has also included personal family albums from a formative period in the late 80s when he lived in Japan. Spliced and reshuffled with more recent photographs taken on return visits, Pitts examines the impulse to archive, and photography’s relationship to memory.
The wistful beauty of the photographs, however, is swamped by the other elements of the installation which make it feel crowded, physically and conceptually, with an avalanche of references and ideas. The original impetus of the project – the journey around Black Britain – feels lost. A reconstruction of a living room – which now seems to be de rigueur in photography exhibitions – stuffed with relics of Pitts’ childhood home in 80s Sheffield, seems to suggest home is in fact a place, with a leather sofa, artworks on the wall and books on the shelf.
