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The Modern Lens, at Tate St Ives until May 10, includes works
by photographers from Europe, North and South America and Japan,
working between the 1920s and 1960s.
St Ives, 280 miles (450 km) from London, attracted major
artists, particularly after World War Two, including sculptor
Barbara Hepworth and abstract painters Ben Nicholson and Patrick
Heron.
"We felt that it was a really important exhibition to bring
together, to think about how modernism has developed in
photography, but also to think about that in relation to wider
art practice," said Sara Matson, one of the exhibition's
curators.
"We have arranged the show geographically, through various
places in the world, and that resonates with the very particular
place St Ives is."
A key influence on several of the featured photographers was
Germany's Bauhaus art school, established in 1919, and one of
its teachers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
His fotograms, images taken without a camera by exposing
photographic paper to light, feature in the exhibition.
"He talks about the camera, using new technology to see the
world in new ways and better ways that would prevent us from
having a new world war," said another of The Modern Lens's
curators, Laura Smith.
Japan's Iwao Yamawaki studied architecture at the Bauhaus and
later produced unsettling photographs of details of industrial
buildings.
Others, though, took quite different approaches, capturing
images they found in nature. Among the most striking is one by
designer Charlotte Perriand, architect Pierre Jeanneret and
painter Fernand Leger of a slab of ice lifted from a puddle and
held up to the light
The Modern Lens fills the entire gallery - a first for Tate St
Ives, which opened in 1993 and is in the middle of major
expansion work due for completion in 2017.
Drilling in connection with the project meant this was the
perfect time for an exhibition of photography rather than more
vulnerable paintings.
"Essentially it did mean that photography as a medium was going
to be unaffected by any potential small vibrations that could
have been caused... It was a perfect conjunction of curatorial
interest and work on the project," said the museum's press and
communications officer Arwen Fitch.
(Edited by Michael Roddy and Mark Trevelyan)
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