Newspaper Article

Visual arts: The nightmare that was the nineties Blood, guts, war, famine, fire, mutilation and death Magnum's photographs of this sorry decade leave Adrian Searle's head spinning

Searle, Adrian

1999

Overview

Our Turning World is a huge compendium of photographs, filling the two floors of the Barbican Art Gallery. Taken by around 50 photographers from the famous Magnum agency, and covering the past decade, the exhibition is a sort of celebration of Magnum's half- century. Actually, celebration isn't the right word many of these images were bought back from war zones and famines and scenes of carnage, despoliation and human degradation. This show attempts a kind of ordering into themes and subjects, but still you come out reeling. There are too many images, too many tugs on the emotions, too much variety, just too much of the world in one place at one time. It's strange. Back home with the big, fat book that accompanies the show, I find myself frantically pulling yet more books and catalogues of photographs down from the shelves and flipping back and forth through the pages. Why do I need to do this? Why, when the exhibition gives us getting on for 400 photographs, and the catalogue even more, do I want to litter the floor with more pictures, more images, more takes on the world? Maybe I should turn the TV on too, to keep the flow going. There's got to be a name for this mania for images, this urge or whatever it is, to look, to see, to lose oneself like this. I find myself wanting to compare Magnum photographer Hiroji Kubot's 1997 panoramic view of the Hong Kong stock exchange with German artist Andreas Gursky's digitalised and manipulated 1994 version of the same subject, taken, it seems, from almost the same viewpoint, and depicting the same scene. And to compare real horror, real war with Jeff Wall's entirely fabricated and ghoulish Dead Soldiers Talk (shown at the Whitechapel Art Gallery a couple of years ago). I want to compare the Magnum with the non-Magnum, so to speak, or art with hard-core photojournalism. But the lines keep blurring. This isn't so much about needing to get a grip on aspects of the world as an urge to get some kind of handle on its representations.

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Art exhibits / Books-titles / Magnum: 50 Years at the Front Line of History / Photography / Photojournalism / Visual artists