The stories behind iconic photographs

Well wonder no more, as we take a closer look at works by four photographers – Hiroshi Sugimoto, Andreas Gursky, Charlie Phillips and Diane Arbus – which have each been exhibited here at the Southbank Centre and Hayward Gallery.

First up is Sugimoto, as Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff explores his Theaters series, in which he condensed the screening of a movie into a single image. Having begun with movie theatres, Sugimoto’s series evolved to take in drive-ins, opera houses, and ultimately abandoned and decaying movie theatres, to present another sense of time evolving within the still image.

Moving onto Gursky, Rugoff introduces us to Utah (2017), one of the artist’s large-scale constructed photographs, which initially began with a mobile phone image snapped on the move from a car on a highway. ‘On the one hand an image like this is an homage to the importance of mobile phone photography today, and it also… shows us what we’re missing by looking at our phone all the time’. 

Phillips, introduces two of his own photographs of Notting Hill Carnival in 1968, including a depiction of a busy scene in Tavistock Square, and expands on the worth and challenges of the carnival.

And finally curator Jeff L. Rosenheim introduces one of Arbus’ most famous works, Boy stepping off the curb, N.Y.C. (1957-58), which shows how the street photography pioneer distorted the conventions of documentary photography.