Lakeside Arts hosts photography exhibition: Martine Hamilton Knight – Pevsner on Camera
Saturday 2 July – Sunday 28 August 2022
Admission Free
Lakeside Arts is celebrating the work of Nottingham-based architectural photographer Martine Hamilton Knight throughout summer 2022 with a new exhibition. Using her images for Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s guidebook – Buildings of England: Nottinghamshire as the basis for the exhibition, over 90 of Hamilton Knight’s photographs of the county are on display, together with an exploration of the challenges and conventions that surround the representation of architecture. Her phtoographs have been published globally in the architectural press for over three decades and previously appeared on show at Lakeside in 2007 & 2014.
Pevsner, an eminent German professor of art history, came to England in the 1930’s and began writing books about architecture. Published by Penguin as a series of county-by-county guides, they were designed as glove-box gazetteers to the country’s built environment which have remained in print ever since. Nottinghamshire was first published in 1951, eventually reprised by Elizabeth Williamson in 1979 and most recently with Clare Hartwell in 2020. Yale University Press commissioned Hamilton Knight to shoot Hartwell’s 812-page revision of Nottinghamshire, partly drawing on the photographer’s existing archive of the county’s more notable buildings including Nottingham Castle, Papplewick Pumping Station, Maggie’s Centre at Nottingham City Hospital and buildings for both universities.
Traversing the county visiting many of its’ lesser-known churches, civic buildings, houses and monuments, she was tasked to depict them in a style which she later came to term ‘The Pevsner way of seeing’. As a practitioner whose images are renowned for showing architecture at work, rest and play, where people are key in revealing telling story of each building, this presented significant challenges to Martine Hamilton-Knight’s usual approach to image making.
Writing in her academic paper published in Quart Journal in May 2022, she speaks about the need to depict buildings largely devoid of their contemporary contexts; cars, people, signage etc. Given the longevity of these books in circulation - the previous edition was in print for 41 years, each picture needs to be devoid of dating elements that could detract from the viewer’s ability to objectively assess the subject. For parish churches, there was little issue, but the second room of this exhibition presents mostly urban studies, where significant post-production was undertaken to neutralise the visual impact of contextual inclusions. Here, the viewer is asked to consider whether architectural photography, which is largely regarded in the same realm as documentary, where what is seen - is at it is, in this body of work, has been shifted to another reality - one of beauty, control and only partial truth.
To find out more about the exhibition and accompanying talks and workshops, visit https://www.lakesidearts.org.uk/exhibitions/event/5632/martine-hamilton-knight.html
