Exhibition Review, Evelyn Hofer in "Strange and Familiar" at the Barbican Centre

March 25, 2016

Martin Parr curated exhibition Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers at the Barbican Centre features the work of 23 Photographers, all of whom spent time and created images in England.  From the London Review of Books, Liz Jobey spoke on the works by Evelyn Hofer:

"The German-born photographer Evelyn Hofer came to London in the early 1960s to make a series of portraits of the city and its people for V.S. Pritchett’s book London Perceived. Her subjects stand or sit patiently for her camera, willing but unsmiling, recalling, though without quite the same compositional rigour, the portraits of August Sander, which she knew and admired. Her Crossing Guard portrays solid reliability in her (yellow?) calf-length coat and peaked cap, her lollipop sign held upside-down at her side. The Bus Conductress and Postman, taken in 1977, might have stepped out of Sander’s taxonomy, People of the 20th Century, were it not for their local insignia."

Strange and Familiar is on view at the Barbican Centre until 16 June, 2016.

Read the entire review from L. Jobey on lrb.co.uk

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