© Ellen von Unwerth mind space “I open the door to an empty room – then I forget” – Syd Barrett, ‘Paintbox’.
Hamish Scott-Brown’s 2010 Fellowship featured deserted former mental institutions in northern Italy, and now forms an exhibition at an unusual gallery.
O
pened on November 19th, Hamish Scott-Brown’s exhibition Contrasts -
people, places, lives can be seen at the Green Chair Gallery in Canterbury until December 23rd 2011. And also glimpsed on these pages. Here’s what the gallery blurb says: “Internationally acclaimed photographer Hamish Scott- Brown's exhibition of aban- doned mental aslylums around Northern Italy provides mas- sive contrasts. Contrasts with previous exhibitions, between the beauty of locations and the harshness of lives and between levity and suffering. But in so doing Hamish's work is a chance
for personal reflection and ultimately raising the human spirit.”
There is a quality to these photographs which raises spirits of a less human kind – ghosts of attitudes which were perhaps more inhumane than today’s. Or not; these interiors seem dark today, thick with dust and patinated with a mask of digital shadows. But you catch glimpses of the light which may once have suffused such magnificant institutional archi- tecture with its ironwork, ornate plaster, Italian fenestration and grand proportion.
So it was that Hamish’s Fellowship was awarded for Ar-
chitectural Photography, not for documentary or for illustrative, or fine art. The images certainly cross all these boundaries, as they are documentary but processed in a way which the documentary discipline doesn’t embrace.
Photographers are drawn to deserted spaces, as we’ve seen in images from derelict Detroit to abandoned Ireland. You might expect to find mental hospitals littering lands where ideology locked up the sane for dissent- ing. But in the north of Italy? That is the unexpected aspect. These are pictures from a warm and sunny land even if not the warmest or sunniest part of it.
Hamish Scott-Brown is based in Ayrshire, where the Scottish climate can make an empty house look like this after six weeks in summer. His work is uncompromisingly styled, and even his portraiture can look pretty dark as his 2011 Awards merit exhibition prints showed. The gallery is at 18 St Au-
gustine’s Road, Canterbury, and houses permanent exhibitions by a range of artists in various me- dia (not including photography). But here’s the twist. The gallery doesn’t exist. It is on-line, a virtual space –
www.greenchair-gallery.co.uk – DK
Á
From the Manicomio series © Albert Watson MASTER PHOTOGRAPHY 54
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