In the Face of History: European Photographers in the 20th Century
Barbican Art Gallery

Photography exhibitions have specific considerations which must be met in order to be pleasurable. We have some experience in this field. The In the Face of History exhibition we designed for the Barbican Art Gallery Exhibition should be viewed in relation to our design of another major British exhibition 20th Century photography, Tate Modern’s Cruel and Tender, 2003.

In the Face of History brings together the work of some of the greatest European photographers of the 20th Century against a backdrop of one hundred years of change and conflict from East to West. Unlike Cruel and Tender which was arranged thematically, In the Face of History is hung chronologically with works from the early twentieth century through to the 1960s arranged in the upper galleries. The majority of the works from this period are small in size, numerous and delicate in tone and are displayed in a series of similarly scaled rooms painted in a range of colours (from white, silver and grey tones through to dark purple/black). The selected colours are loosely based on the location of the photograph and the imagined colour of the sky at the time, sometimes a night sky, as for Brassai.

The lower galleries are treated as a single space, uniformly painted light grey and divided by abstract forms: a glass pavilion for the work of Wolfgang Tillman's work and a dark enclosure for projections by Annelies Strba.

Exhibition dates: Oct 06 – Jan 07
Client: Barbican Art Gallery, London
Photographs: David Grandorge