A Handful of Dust - Whitechapel Gallery

David Campany is the curator of this exhibition, pulling together photographs from different decades and genres that emanate like a stream of consciousness from one original source - that of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp's 'Dust Breeding'. The photograph taken in 1922 looks almost like an aerial photograph of the landscape with its grid lines and swirling forms. It is in fact a photograph of a piece of art created by Marcel Duchamp that was gathering dust under a bed in his studio. 'Dust Breeding' has had a number of titles and its meaning has changed and been appropriated by various art theories over time.

    'Dust Breeding' Man Ray, 1922.

Campany uses this image as the source of an exhibition of photographs that have featured dust in some way. This idea seems so simple but yet encompasses a fascinating array of images with political overtones regarding man's inhumanity or environmental impact on our planet. An image that struck me early on as I walked through the gallery was a photograph of Mussolini's staff car, covered with dust, as it sat in storage ten years after the dictator was pulled from the vehicle and assassinated by anti-Fascist rebels. This black and white documentary picture links conceptually with other images where political choices have led to major societal upheaval; the 9/11 image of a business man covered in grey dust and surrounded by paper from the collapsed towers; Dust bowl images from the FSA photographer's where intensive farming practice led to the loss of the top soil and exacerbated by the Great American Depression; all these images link thematically back to dust. The chaos in these linked images reminds me that regardless of our actions and great social changes that entropy will take everything back to disorder and nothingness eventually.

Mussolini's Car, Unknown, 1955.

'Allowing dust to gather, as a trace of time is a sort of canning of chance. Photography too can be a way of canning chance. The dust photograph is thus a trace of a trace.' (Campany, 2017).

The title of the exhibition 'A Handful of Dust' is taken from the T.S. Elliot poem 'The Wasteland'. Campany states that:

'Eliot's great poem [published the same month as Breeding Dust was taken] is modern in the same way as the dust photograph - a hybrid work of allusion and association that pictures the world in fragments if not ruin, but sees the world's possible redemption in those fragments too. It's a coincidence I couldn't ignore.' (Campany, 2017).

I found this exhibition to be illuminating in the way that it was put together from so many different types of photography. From documentary to conceptual they all had a common link. I can take this idea of an eclectic mix of genres held by a common concept with me into my own thoughts about making new projects and how to display pieces together in an exhibition. 

Reference:

Campany, D. 2017. '1000 Words' [online] At: http://www.1000wordsmag.com/david-campany/ Accessed on 10th June 2017.