Impressions Gallery in Bradford, Forty Years Old

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Impressions Gallery at 40 Iain Bloomfield celebrates …

The first forty years of life give us the text: the next thirty supply the commentary.

Arthur Schopenhauer

It’s not often I get to quote Schopenhauer in fact, truth to tell, I’ve never had the need to before but the above quote does seem pretty apposite in terms of where Impressions Gallery sits as it arrives at its fortieth birthday.

Established, in York, in 1972 as one of Europe’s first specialist photographic art galleries, Impressions, I guess, marks the point at which photography, as art form, entered the public consciousness.  Now I’m not a visual art expert so I’m not going to go very much further down that line and start regurgitating Susan Sontag.

Ok, ok, I considered it but thought better…..
Suffice it to say that Impressions Gallery has played a significant part in establishing the credentials of photography in this country, supported artists who have changed people’s perceptions of what photography is or could be, and has always had a genuine focus on the communities that have surrounded it.

That they chose to relocate from York to Bradford seems to me every bit as important, that the gallery sits slap bang in the city centre the same.

As much as the ‘nay-sayers’ will tell you that art has no place in working-class cities, that the solutions to our travails are economic, that what we need are shops and jobs… it is a truth too little spoken about that Bradford was (and remains) a city of original thinkers, of original artists, of mould-breakers. From Delius to Priestley through Hockney, the Bradford College greats – Jeff Nuttal, John Fox, Sue Gill and Welfare State, the creation of the Bradford Mela, The Bradford Festival, the support offered to the likes of David Edgar, Howard Brenton, we have as a city consistently welcomed, supported and mentored artists. They have come from us and come to us because of who we are a bustling, part-radical city of migration, of people living cheek by jowl and trying to work out how to live together, how to talk about ourselves.

That we have also, frequently, pissed them off so much that they have left for pastures new is in no small way to do with the other strand of thinking in the city, paternalistic, materialistic, masochistic, the thinking that denied us a University in the 19th century.
The greatest challenge of the early 21st century, globally, is how to change our thinking. We know that the old social and economic models are falling apart. This, to me, is why daring art and the spaces that facilitate it, like Impressions Gallery, are important. They offer cities like Bradford the chance to see differently, to think differently, to feel differently. I’m enthusiastic enough to believe that that creates at least some of the groundwork to allow us to DO differently.

And Impressions have been brilliant at that, commissioning and creating both exhibitions and events like their partnership ‘Ways of Seeing’ project that saw people travelling around the city in buses or on foot, offering us the opportunity to see art in both conventional and unusual spaces, to consider both making and context.

It is worth, also, noting (and I have personal experience of this) that they are very generous partners, both thoughtful and challenging in a way that allows one to get beyond one’s preconceptions.
We have, as an arts sector, had many reasons to disagree (shall we say) of the decisions made by the local authority but the one made to support the move of Impressions to Bradford, the further one to create City Park right outside it and the (hopefully fingers crossed and all that) potential decision to hand the former Odeon Building back to the community to oversee refurbishment, looks like a stroke of genius to me.

So, as Impressions reaches forty, let’s raise a glass and celebrate that wonderful milestone and then look resolutely forward to the ‘commentary’ they can make about the place of high quality challenging art has in a working class city over the next thirty years. Let us also follow the lead and look, think and support different thinking. It’s one of the things we are very, very good at, given the chance.

2 comments

  1. Raising a glass – most definitely! Happy 40th. I like this review – especially the opening quotation.A resounding YES to noticing and supporting different thinking. I wonder what commentary the next 30 years will bring?

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