Capital

This exhibition, co-curated by Newth with Fergus Heron, is an exploration into how photography records and reveals the impact of economic conditions on urban experience.

The exhibition, ‘CAPITAL’ was at George and Jorgen Gallery in July and August 2012. It brought together new and existing work by seven contemporary artists with work in photography and moving image, including Emma Charles, Fergus Heron, Thorsten Knaub, Karen Knorr, Martin Newth, Eva Stenram and Danny Treacy.

The curatorial strategy was to bring together a range of photographic and moving image work, the exhibition forming a set of immersive, embodied encounters that reflected upon London at a time of deep economic recession and international attention before the 2012 London Olympics. The artists’ works highlighted London's relation to power, history, trade and economic capital.

London is depicted in a complex and fragmented relation to its history: a site of exchange, speculation, gendered power, surveillance, commodity display, desire and consumption. The exhibition offered renewed reflection upon the city and contemporary economic conditions.

Exhibition works included Karen Knorr’s politically motivated images of Gentleman’s clubs made in the 1980s, as well as more recent work such as Eva Stenram’s ‘Buckingham Palace’, exploring notions of power and monarchy, and Fergus Heron’s photographs of London’s shopping centres. A new work by Newth, ‘Panopticon’, investigated the city’s relationship to its history and the rest of the world.

Newth’s collaboration with Fergus Heron developed from the ‘CAPITAL’ exhibition into a symposium and book, in collaboration with the University of Brighton and Photoworks UK. These set out to extend discussions about photography’s potential to articulate connections between the way urban spaces are experienced and the economic forces that shape them.