Event Item: 00010

Daily Encounters: Photographs from Fleet Street

Exhibition: 5th Jul 2007 to 21st Oct 2007

Source: http://www.npg.org.uk

A new exhibition Daily Encounters, opening 5th July in London at the National Portrait Gallery, will draw upon the rich and relatively neglected surviving archives of newspaper photography to tell two parallel stories - one of a powerful industry with an internal culture of its own, and the other of the often uneasy relationship that grew between public figures, the photographic press and the wider population of readers.

Placed within the context of the National Portrait Gallery, the exhibition will explore the pictorial depiction, through newspaper photography, of Britain and Britishness, the creation of new forms of celebrity, and the scripting and constant redrafting of the rules of engagement between photographers, editors and the subjects of their insatiable gaze. Newspaper photographs of politicians, jockeys, gangsters, models and actors will be interwoven with images of the industry itself; the owners and editors, newsrooms and printing presses, photographers and journalists as they hunted and gathered stories, both alone and in packs.

Daily Encounters sets out to reposition the press photograph within the domain of the Gallery while relating the story of newspaper photography as one very particular strand of Fleet Street journalism. It covers the period from photography's first appearance in newspapers in the early years of the twentieth century through to the demise of Fleet Street in the mid-1980s. The photographs plot the arc of 80 years of history while the narrative is inexorably drawn towards the tussle over the iconography of public figures, both the politically established and the transiently famous. The staple diet of the popular press quickly emerges: royalty, politicians and sports stars, spiced by the added relish of vice girls, acid-bath murderers and big-time pools winners. But lurking in the shadows are the real stars of the exhibition, the press photographers themselves.

The exhibition will show how press images became some of the most socially inclusive forms of photography, counterpointing images of celebrities and the ruling aristocracy with those of ordinary people, often made by photographers of their own social class. The blend of photographs, headlines and clearly-written copy proved a potent mix, and circulation among the broad swathe of wage earners rose steadily. The popular press catered to a new generation equipped with the basic skills of literacy which sprung up in Britain as a result of universal schooling implemented after the 1870 Elementary Education Act.