The Year of the Print Exhibition

Tim Parkin

Amateur Photographer who plays with big cameras and film when in between digital photographs.

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The idea of a group exhibition where the exhibitors are selected by who has the incentive to put their hand in their pockets and the pictures selected by the same people initially struck me as a recipe for disaster. Without a curatorial control over such an exhibition the end result could have been a mashing together of holidays snaps and works of art; literal representations among ICM madness. So it was with some surprise that I entered the Mall Galleries on the day of the hanging that things seemed to be coming together well. It is a testament to the amateur photographer that nearly every exhibitor had something of interest on show and images that could be classed as 'snapshots' were in a small minority. One of the things that seems to have helped with this is that most people used the services of Fotospeed to print and frame their work. Even though Fotospeed offered a few options, the recommended black frames seem to have created a consistency when viewing the exhibition as a whole.

Fotospeed’s quality eye was also on the printing and between them and the clients who printed their own work (either on their own printers or through third parties) the results were almost universally good. After a preview of the preview we took a short wander around London to take in the sights (soon retreating to a local pub to escape the touron* hordes).