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On Photography and the Contemporary Urban Landscape

Drawing from his ongoing archive of photographs, Richard Wentworth’s keynote ‘On Photography and the Contemporary Urban Landscape’ presented specific pairs of photographs assembled for their quality of friction in setting up a spatial or psychological relationship. At the centre of this talk were questions of mortality and potential where fragments of the modern landscape and mundane snapshots became the subject of contemplation.

Framed through his categorical methods, ‘Making Do and Getting By’ and’ Occasional Geometries’ Wentworth draws attention to happenstance, placement and coincidence, Wentworth constantly adds to and reconfigures his photographic archive through lectures and exhibitions. According to Bittencourt Grasso in ‘Guide to Unique Photography’ (2012)‘, ‘Wentworth captures pictures of improvisation, where objects are removed of their original context, stripped of their ordinary function and yet often rendered functional in an altogether new and unexpected way.’ The originality of Wentworth’s photographic project lies in its central impulse as an encounter rather than a staging of the object.

Contemporary reiterations of Wentworth’s project include his commission for The Royal Academy’s exhibition ‘Modern British Sculpture’ (2010) in which his photographs of contingent objects were projected in tandem with a rhythmic soundtrack by Ry Cooder, and ‘The Sculpture Show’ at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2010), where his photographic series was included in a survey of sculpture ranging from masterpieces by Rodin and Degas to contemporary works by Turner-prize nominated artists.

Most recently, Wentworth’s ‘Making Do and Getting By’ (2013) was included in the Hayward touring exhibition ‘Curiosity’. The exhibition’s curator Brian Dillon describes Wentworth’s work as ‘an archive or glossary of semi-sculptural modifications to the fabric of the everyday.’ Significantly, Wentworth’s pictures are abstract projections of the peripheral vision by which the artist negotiates the world.