E. H. Cocker explores a defiantly beautiful ‘broken Britain’ in Si Barber’s exhibition at Bank Street Arts in Sheffield.
In February 2011 Prime Minister David Cameron delivered a speech targeting social reform in the country, promising to mend “broken Britain” by making it easier for people to volunteer, and asking them to sign up to The Big Society. It was Cameron’s vague notion of providing the masses with the means to contribute to a community, laden with the nostalgia of a by-gone era, that inspired Si Barber’s current exhibition at Bank Street Arts.
Taking its title from The Big Society, Barber’s own version of 21st Century Britain forges links with reality that cut through the crass politics of conservatism, and expose the day-today lives of an enduring people. As Barber says, this collection of honest, raw imagery highlights the differences between “how we live, and how we think we live.” Perhaps the dualism implied in this observation is also an accurate critique of Cameron’s own behaviour. In response to the young politician’s membership of the Oxford Bullington Club, in which drunken and unruly behaviour were a must, Cameron was quoted as saying “We all do things when we’re young and we deeply regret them.” There’s how we live, and how we think we live.
The exhibition of Barber’s own broken Britain stems from his publication, in which a number of photographs from across the country were beautifully bound together in a landscape format book. In the book relationships emerged in an almost linear narrative. In the gallery, however, images take on new meanings and establish conversations across the room, encountering one another in brand new formation. Decisions about where each image should sit in relation to another are occasionally formal, and often explorative. One of the joys of taking the photographs from the book and putting them into the gallery is the surprise invoked by their juxtaposition.
A photograph of a repossessed home in Hampshire sits neatly by an image of a caravan covered in the Union Jack – a Royal Wedding remnant left in disrepair. Sex workers, trolleys and tattoos talk between walls, and visitors are confronted with both the hopeless and the hopeful. Life emerges from the rubble, and Barber’s keen eye invites you in to witness it. Documentation of people at work, people in conversation and people at social events are shot through with an inquisitive gaze. Barber is a social commentator and political enquirer, but first and foremost he remains an observer of the human condition.
The unpretentious hanging of these images, tacked lightly to the walls, is reminiscent of the transient nature from which they stem. The fragility of a country, in which the majority cling onto their walls in the hope that the powerful few won’t knock them down, is reflected by the simple yet striking way each photograph sits unframed, in simple alignment with it’s neighbour. But for all its unostentatious presentation, there is a potent vitality inherent within the content of this work. Each image carries a power, which speaks of the relentless attitude of British culture, to ‘keep calm and carry on’. With a quiet determination and powerful undercurrent, Si Barber’s work reminds us that the true beauty of Britain lies not in The Big Society, but in the powerful determination of a small and diverse country.
The Big Society by Si Barber, curated by Photographer in Residence Andrew Conroy, can be seen at Bank Street Arts from 15th November 2011 –to 13th January 2012.
