Photographs by Stephen Gill

Venue : Queens Hotel, City Square, Leeds
Dates : 27th Sept - 3rd October 2001
Times : 6pm - 5.30am
Price : Free



'I never knew what the pictures would look like - which was very appealing, very exciting.' - Stephen Gill

'The poet and film director Jean Cocteau, always happy to get mystical about the mundane, was fond of describing the cinema audience as a kind of mass seance. 'The darkness of the theatre and the lunar glow of the screen,' he once wrote, 'are quite liable to produce the collective hypnosis exploited by Indian fakirs.' I think he would have liked Stephen Gill's photographs of audiences at London's Prince Charles Cinema, because even the least fanciful observers would have to concede that you can see ghosts here. These pictures are haunted by the audience itself - as they fidget and shift, unable to escape from the delicious headlock of Hollywood.

For Cocteau it was the film itself that was the spirit - taking hold of a disparate group of people and moulding them into a single, multi-headed organism - and that sense of willing surrender to a form of possession finds an echo in Gill's explanation of what he was trying to capture: 'I always started about 10 minutes into the film,' he says, 'because that's the time I was really interested in … that moment when the film takes you'. And that film takes us all in different ways is one of the revelations of his pictures.'

- Thomas Sutcliffe (Independent Magazine 10th March 2001)


Photographs by Julius Shulman

Venue : Queens Hotel, City Square, Leeds
Dates : 4th October - 12th October 2001
Times : 6pm - 5.30am
Price : Free



One of the central characteristics of Modernism has been its impulse to organise space. The impulse has been manifested in many ways: photography's particular arrangement through flattening and framing, its presentation of the system of perspectival viewing as natural, is one such technique. Elsewhere, modernity has redefined space through law - town planning, industrial zoning - fixing the once haphazard boundaries of the urban against the rural, cleansing the medieval muddle of lanes and alleyways. We know - or like to think we know - when our cities begin and end, we know - or like to think we know - where we are going. Perhaps above any other characteristic, though our experience of modernity has been expressed through architecture. America was, of course, the perfect place for Utopia. Julius Shulman was fortunate enough to be a young photographer in Southern California at the moment when the Depression turned slowly to economic revival, and a few brave spirits commissioned equally inventive architects.

It is as if Shulman shared the architect's utopian idealised vision of space - a vision inevitably compromised by the effects of the weather, the building's interaction with landscape - and can through the modernist technology of seeing revive and refresh that ideal. We see perfect homes for perfect lives: the modernist dream, whether in Adolph Loos' and Walter Gropius' designs for egalitarian communities, or in the homes and offices built by Koenig, Frey or Neutra for wealthy individuals and successful corporations.

That point is where the Modernist Utopia meets American Dream. The beautiful people posed in Koenig's Case Study House no.22, or Buff, Straub and Hensman's Bass House, are idealisations that match people to space - the perfect citizen - consumers of Eisenhower's America. But these buildings are strangely un-American. At odds with the limited vernacular of the colonist's architectural heritage and profoundly conservative appropriations from classicism and older European styles.

Shulman's genius is to realise the radicalism, the designs for living, that these buildings contain, to construct a vision that promises perfect light, uncluttered space, unrestricted vistas. From being a 'mere' technology of documentation, in Shulman's hands, as instrument of Shulman's gaze, the camera becomes a means of visualising the brightest dreams of the past century.

- Dr Chris Townsend, Royal Holloway University of London