Photo Oxford Review – Unmissable photos of stinky public toilets | Photography

IIt’s the first day of Photo Oxford’s fifth edition, but the first place I arrive at, Maison Française, is closed. Is this what Roland Barthes meant when he wrote that “to see a good picture, it is better to look away”?

At least there’s an outdoor exhibit – one of 30 displays in the city’s community spaces, churches, colleges and pubs that are part of the festival this year. Michael Christopher Brown’s book “90 Miles” refers to the distance between Havana and Florida, a dangerous stretch of ocean crossed by many Cubans fleeing the country on self-made boats – a record number between 2022 and 2023. Brown uses AI the way illustrators draw newspaper illustrations before photography. He collected eyewitness accounts, news stories, and historical accounts of Cuba’s history from Castro to today, and used them as prompts for the program. In one image, figures placed on and around an old Cuban classic car, strangely stranded in turbulent surroundings, have distorted faces and limbs melting and dripping like a Francis Bacon painting. These are not real photos – but they are honest.

Truth is the theme of the festival, a perpetual issue hanging over photography; The unresolved relationship between the reality of the image and the truth it carries.

Another host’s place was closed – I was asked to wander down someone’s garden path and ring the bell. Inside a private home is a solo exhibition by Timon Benson, a young Instagram-famous portrait painter. The Voice of Matter represents a more experimental approach to portraiture that is still new – and still tentative. Benson’s desire is to translate emotion into photography, and his images are soft-spoken and teary-eyed. In his quest for a truer image, Benson also abandoned the camera altogether to create photograms, exposing the paper directly to the light. It’s not quite coherent yet but the sentiment is sincere.

Emotions run high in the old firehouse, with psychologically charged acts filled with rage and pain from Lydia Goldblatt, Jenny Lewis and Heather Agyapong. Goldblatt’s fugues are a series of vignettes and poems about early motherhood, loneliness and claustrophobia, combustible rage and bittersweet bliss, all intensified by insomnia and being a dependent body.

Meanwhile, in his work Indecent, Lewis describes endless, invisible suffering – the artist suffers from a genetic autoimmune condition. The small, domestic interior images of her bathroom and bedroom, bathed in supernatural light, evoke the suffocating confinement and discomfort of being physically restrained. Some are mounted on aluminum – reminiscent of the sharp, clinical cold of surgical instruments. It was beautifully done. These correspond to an illusory triptych by Agyepong inspired by Jung’s theories of the shadow self. Each self-portrait is layered with abstraction, achieved through double exposures: masterful effects of light, translucent fabrics in melancholy blue tones. It’s a slow, tear-jerking show that questions not only photography but also visuals as arbiters of truth.

I go back to Maison Française – it is now open (it turns out that each place has different and confusing opening times). Haley Morris Cafiero What does an ideal employee look like? She’s my reward for perseverance: six big, silly, corporate-style shots — pitch-perfect performances with an impassive gaze to the camera. Maurice Cafiero is an acerbic self-portrait painter, and in this new work, she engages with artificial intelligence software that aims to evaluate the employability of potential candidates according to personality characteristics and physical appearance.

Unsurprisingly, the algorithm favored classic “Western features,” so the artist decided to trick the machine by manipulating her face with tape to mimic the desired facial structures. The photos were taken when she achieved the highest score and looked like an ideal employee at the company, according to the algorithm. Except of course, even in her faded wool sweater, she looks far from it. It’s a funny encounter with artificial intelligence, but there’s a sinister truth buried in the foolishness. She also set up a laptop with a camera so she can monitor you for your own hiring.

This year’s unforgettable Photo Oxford show can be found in the sticky-floored, damp-smelling basement room of the city’s popular gay bar, Jolly Farmers. “I love dirt,” says Phil Polglaz, a 74-year-old photographer who exhibits his work here. His prints were still stuck to the wall along with pieces of Sellotape when I entered, all black and white photographs of public toilets in London.

However, these are not standard images of swamps. From 1979 until 1996, Polglaz worked with a criminal defense attorney to produce photographs that could be used in court to prove the innocence of the men who were on trial for gross indecency after they were in a country house. Sometimes he would reconstruct scenes or use camera angles to show whether or not the witness saw the alleged crime. One reconstruction at Blackheath showed that what the police claimed they saw was physically impossible – a man being masturbated by another man from the next room.

Polglaz had shown these images only once before – in a pub in Cumbria. Most of his archive has not been published or printed and has no online presence. In these rows of fetid urinals and dirty cubicles, there is a sense of danger – but there is also the poignant fact that places like these were used for years by members of the community to communicate with each other – until that privacy was violated as well. Polglaz says he wanted to remain neutral when he took the photos, for the sake of the issues, but when viewed outside their legal context, they read differently, as if he was reclaiming ownership of them, dirt and all. What happened in these toilets is an essential part of British culture and history that, thanks to Polglaz’s vast archive, cannot be ignored.

Today’s British art world is very stylish – after a fortnight of glamorous exhibitions and posh balls, Photo Oxford is a refreshing dose of DIY, anarchy and the not-so-commercial.