subscribe 0330 333 1113 I http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk I 13 April 2019 23
acreage, it’s expensive. We’ve got
more than 250 works in the
exhibition, because it covers 60
years of history. You need a lot of
space to cover all of that.
What we’ve tried to make sure
that we’ve done is contextualise
works that might be quite well
known. Exhibitions of conflict
photography are often criticised
in art galleries when shown in
isolation. We’ve also had to balance
the conflict photography with lots
of documentary work. We didn’t
want to make yet another conflict
photography exhibition, so we’ve
balanced that with lots of work,
documentary and travel
photography as well.
AD: How involved was Don with
the curation of the exhibition?
AM: He reprinted about 130 of his
photographs for the show – those
are the ones that we included; he
reprinted even more than that. He
is constantly refining his prints and
has a tendency to print very dark,
which he says is a reflection of the
darkness of the really traumatic
things he’s seen, so that translates to
the landscapes.
We wanted to make sure that
people got a sense that he is a
master printer and that is quite
unusual: to see a show of this kind
of contemporary photography
that is completely printed by the
artist himself.AD: Why do you think Tate
Britain is the ideal location for
a show like this?
AM: It’s always a bit tricky showing
conflict photography in an art
context because you’re always going
to have a problem with the
fetishisation of images of conflict.
That’s a real problem for Don, too- he doesn’t consider himself an
artist. He always says that he’s
a photographer rather than a
photojournalist or an artist. Now
that his images aren’t consumed
with the immediacy of news, it’s
really important that they have a
life beyond his archive. Somewhere
like Tate, which has such a big
footfall, and brings in
Above: Northern
Ireland,
Londonderry, 1971Left: The Murder
of a Turkish
Shepherd, Cyprus
Civil War, 1964