This is only the second photography show from Munich dealer Daniel Blau’s Hoxton outpost, and it’s already had its laptop nicked by scooter kids; truly, Toto, we’re not in the nineteenth century any more. Still, if the owners are wistful for a less motorised age it is highly appropriate to an exhibition that creates a kind of nostalgic chain reaction: we look back at stylised images by mid- nineteenth-century photographers of an even more bygone past. Maxime du Camp’s Egyptian temples, Disdéri’s loot from the Chinese Summer Palace and more photographs of Roman ruins than you can shake a tripod at are beautiful in their own right, they are also steeped in longing for an idealised nevermore.
However, there are entirely unromantic reasons for rückblick (‘looking back’) too: in an era of slow shutters, a building could be guaranteed to stand still long enough for a competent photograph.
Not that this exhibition sticks to the more stately forms of nostalgia. There are images by Victor Hugo’s son Charles of the family in exile and several pictures by Charles Nègre that look back preemptively: he was deliberately preserving on film the street-vendor denizens of Parisian neighbourhoods that Baron Haussmann, the city moderniser, was about to pull down.
Photography itself is a form of mechanised nostalgia – a fact this exhibition uses to include whatever it likes, from Swiss trees so ruthlessly monochrome they make everything else look tawny, to a tourist and musician in Egypt by the great Roger Fenton. Romanticism about nature can be a kind of nostalgia – just ask Blau’s countryman, the nineteenth-century Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. But orientalism was something else entirely, and it’s hard to see where a beautiful, anonymous nude, bottom-side up, fits into this scheme either. What really unites this show is the longing for a quieter, slower world, where beauty is properly prized and history and nature respected – but it’s not the photographers, with their cutting-edge equipment, who are feeling it.