Shooting from the hip

Published on Thursday 28 August 2008 20:21

KEITH INGHAM: URBAN ECHOES *** COLLINS GALLERY, GLASGOW KATE DAVIS: OUTSIDER *** SORCHA DALLAS, GLASGOW

A GENUINELY unguarded photograph of a person is comparatively rare. Some of the most famous "candid" shots in the history of the medium have turned out to be carefully staged. These days celebrities rarely leave the house without a "camera face", and even ordinary mortals seem to have a sixth sense that tells us when a lens is pointed in our direction.

This is why Glasgow-based photographer Keith Ingham often shoots from the hip – literally: he uses a small digital camera held quietly below waist level. It has resulted in surprisingly candid images, showing the human animal in its urban environment all over the world: two young men arguing in Venice; a young couple kissing in Shanghai; two women at a caf in MoMA, New York.

There is no single driving vision behind this collection of works from the last four years – a few pieces seem entirely random. Others, however, vividly capture the mood of the moment, such as the shot of two girls on a fairground ride in Kirkcaldy, hair streaming, mouths open to scream, a study of motion frozen for a fraction of a second by the lens.

Some are darker, more contemplative: a woman's lined face appears from behind the ample beer belly of an Ayr "Rottweiler Man"; an elderly man with a walking stick pauses on the Mound in Edinburgh, looking tired and cold; a woman is huddled in a black coat and hat on a bench in Glasgow's Botanic Gardens.

A series taken in Glasgow at night are more experimental, using long exposures to capture blurry street lights, neon signs, the too-bright lights of a window display. In this nocturnal world, the people are reduced to silhouettes leaving takeaways and walking past lighted windows.

A larger series of these runs as an audiovisual presentation with a soundtrack of city noise, an interesting attempt to take still images into another medium. But it also illustrates the validity of the selection process: the best works are on the walls.

Other pictures include no people at all. Images of back closes, disused buildings and city parks, however beautifully composed, are now a recognised, somewhat repetitive part of the photography of Glasgow. But there is an interesting group of images taken inside a disused takeaway in Hillfoot Street, including evocative close-ups, presented in the gallery alongside the neon sign from the window to create a kind of installation. A view of the window, its cheap lampshades like Chinese lanterns, is shabbily magical, one of the best pictures in the show.

An unguarded photograph creates a surprising distance between artist and subject, and the large photorealist paintings of Swiss artist Franz Gertsch – most famously of young bohemians in the 1970s and 1980s – also have this effect. Kate Davis, by including some Gertsch images in her pencil drawings, is aiming for a similar kind of detachment.

Davis is questioning the use of artists' personal lives as subject matter, a key strand in contemporary art practice. It was employed in a political way by early feminist artists, and is used today by artists such as Tracey Emin in a way that cleverly feeds a society with an insatiable appetite for Grazia magazine and car-crash TV.

Questioning the use of the subjective voice within its feminist context was the subject of Davis's recent residency at Cove Park, which culminated in the publication of a dialogue with feminist artist Faith Wilding. This show continues that conversation, adding artists such as Yvonne Rainer and Carolee Schneemann, and also addressing Davis's own earlier work.

Also in the background is theorist Jacques Derrida, and his ideas about the impossibility of the self-portrait. Two glass-fronted cases packed with the artist's clothes, books and other possessions are self-portraits of a sort. A series of four intricate, well-executed pencil drawings swirl together elements of her own life with images from Gertsch and a quote from Rainer: "I want everything I make to reflect my whole life." They parry with the ideas but refuse to give any clear conclusions.

The letter Davis sent out by way of a press release states: "I am not interested in making life easier for an audience."

And indeed she doesn't. In trying to approach her work as an outsider, she makes us feel like outsiders too. This is a deliberate part of her project, but it would be easier to accept if it were not something we frequently feel on encountering contemporary art: on the outside, wondering if we're smart enough to be let in, and wondering what it would add to our lives if we were.

&#149 Both shows until 27 September