Tate's 'Light and Magic' Redefines Pictorialism Canon — SkimNews
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- Tate's "Light and Magic" is described as the first retelling of the international, pluralistic pictorialism movement, with roughly half the works never previously shown in the UK
- The show draws from photographic salons, circles, and clubs across London, Sydney, Hong Kong, and Brazil, juxtaposing those scenes with Korean and Sri Lankan work
- Yip Cheong Fun's 1940 "Father's Care" — a cinematic image of a father guiding children across rocky terrain — is singled out as a standout on parenthood and the passage of time
- Further highlights include Lionel Wendt's charged Colombo studio study of a young Sri Lankan man, Han Youngsoo's 1955 noirish Korean street scenes, Kate Smith's 1925 bromide prints "The Listener," and Limb Eung-sik's "Feet 2"
- The critic flags that the exhibition declines to critically interrogate pictorialism, leaving politics largely aside and dismissing the technique timeline and full-scale darkroom recreation as unnecessary intrusions
- The review closes that the show is "as intelligent as it is beautiful, as whimsical as it is informative, as rhapsodic as it is real"
Why it matters: With roughly half its works never previously exhibited in the UK, the show materially expands British audiences' access to a globally pluralist canon of early art photography that institutions in Britain have historically underrepresented.
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