Gwil’s rant

Chair of the Archaeology and Heritage Group. GWIL OWEN ARPS.

By now you will all have heard that our exhibition has been cancelled, and that we are working on a replacement - possibly still in Cambridge. While I have been receiving prints and printing up some of mine, I have become more and more aware of my predilection for the “real thing”: that is the printed image. It’s partly a tactile thing - physically holding that crisp heavyweight paper, the different feel of a matt or shiny surface. I think, too, that it is also formed by the ability to walk up to and around an image; to see, in an exhibition, how images relate to each other. In the home it’s how you have arranged your favourites to jump out at your guests when you invite them in. This train of thought is all old hat for anyone who studies paintings. Obviously they are three dimensioned artefacts. Get right up to one of Cezanne’s luminous Provençal landscapes and see how the paint has been applied in little clumps. Go close up then for detail. Take a wide field of view for an overall story. For example try to “get” the Night Watch from only six metres or only a metre. If remember rightly you can get just about that close as it is currently displayed. Where does that leave photography then? Perhaps not as badly off as I might have thought to paint it - sorry, not a very good pun. Images are now nearly always available digitally, which exposes our works to a much wider audience, but we do miss the immediacy of a print. Our world is similar to that of music - the history of music reproduction has followed a similar path to that of photography. Take the last night of the proms: great TV - but to get the full experience you just have to be there. Many of our members follow this dictum in that they are collectors of prints as well as being photographic artists themselves. Our images, if they are good enough, will make the viewer believe that the real thing is there. But, and this is a big but, good photographs will be biased. They will present a particular interpretation of the subject with details emphasised to suit that idea. For myself, I have been fortunate for most of my professional life to have had objects in front of my camera from famous museums and archaeological excavations. I had, perhaps, taken for granted that images can be a satisfactory substitution for the real thing. My epiphany was some years ago in Berlin when I was able to have the famous bust of Nefertiti to myself for half an hour (in its display case). She has become the foremost exemplar from the ancient world of female beauty, and is reproduced widely in this context. At Tell el Amarna, her home, where I worked, her image was ubiquitous. In Berlin it was shock to realise that, close up, she is not just beauty personified. Here was a no longer young woman, a mother of six, living in a harsh climate. Elegant she is; smooth and rounded she is not. Her neck, for example, tends to gaunt and stretched. My photos do not do her, or her sculptor, justice. Go see her for real, https://www.smb. museum/en/museums-institutions/aegyptischesmuseum-und-papyrussammlung/collectionresearch/the-collection/.

Bust of Nefertitti, Egyptian Museum of Berlin.

Stop press

Our exhibition has been rearranged for January 10th for 3 weeks in St Michaelhouse, Cambridge.