An exhibition opening at The Barbican Art Gallery on 28th February looks at the lives of those on the margins of society, the different and the disenfranchised from all over the globe.
Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins features over 300 works from 20 photographers from the 50s to the present day. The images displayed show a diverse cast of cross-dressers, junkies, drifters, gangs, urban nomads and other outsiders.
There are works from famed photographers such as Diane Arbus to the more little known work of the likes of Russian photographer Igor Palmin.
His pictures The Enchanted Wanderer (1977) and The Disquiet (1977), feature Soviet Hippies in their bell-bottoms and flower power hair bands, playing guitars in opium filled trailers or standing alone on desolate lands.
The arresting series of photographs, Adam’s Apple (1982-87), by Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz are of a community of transgender sex-workers working in an underground brothel in Chile in the 1980s. Taken during the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet when gender non-conforming people were regularly subjected to curfews, persecutions and police brutality, the photographs are a defiant act of political resistance.
Recently discovered at a Manhattan flea market, were a collection of around 400 prints taken during the mid-50s and 60s at Casa Susanna, a private retreat for transvestites.
This was a safe haven in upstate New York where they posed for the camera, in glamorous dresses, playing cards, eating dinner and having drinks by the fire.
The exhibition is part of the Barbican’s 2018 season The Art of Change, which reflects on the dialogue between art, society and politics. Get down to the Barbican to celebrate all the wonderful difference on display.
Another Kind of Life opens at Barbican Art Gallery on 28 February 2018. For more information click HERE.
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