This tightly choreographed Tomoe piece brought to a close the first ‘darker’ half of the Mugenkyo Taiko Drummers performance at The Sage on Sunday night.

The Mugenkyo Taiko Drummers are the UK’s longest established group and the only European touring professional taiko group.

The Wikipedia definition  of taiko drumming:

“Taiko (太鼓?) means “drum” in Japanese. Outside Japan, the word is often used to refer to any of the various Japanese drums (和太鼓, “wa-daiko”, “Japanese drum”, in Japanese) and to the relatively recent art-form of ensemble taiko drumming (sometimes called more specifically, “kumi-daiko” (組太鼓)).”

The performance on Sunday night began with a piece called Belenos or ‘new dawn’ and took the audience on a journey which involved the middle-eastern jazz flute, an enormous gong and megaphone poetry that reminded me of the fantastic The The album ‘Mind Bomb’.

With dry ice, atmospheric lighting and Miyazaki’s ethereal flute playing, the sheer physicality of this form of drumming was cleverly emphasized. Yatai Bayashi, a taiko piece from Chichibu, featured an especially physically method of playing. The drummers lay on the floor, their drums held between their legs, and came into a half sit-up to play. The piece is traditionally played inside festival floats at the annual December night festival – hence the space saving position of the drummers – and the strength needed would have challenged even the strongest athlete.

From the Shichisan Stomp to Torodoki “rumble of thunder” the Mugenkyo Taiko Drummers succeeded in their aim to ‘awaken and join with the spirit of their drums.

Thankfully the North wind did not blow quite as hard as it can last Friday night as crowds of visitors queued up outside BALTIC in Gateshead for a chance to see this year’s Turner Prize nominees. The BALTIC building reached capacity at around 7pm and from then on it was strictly on- in one-out policy as the region’s art fans gathered to see what has been dubbed ‘Arguably the world’s most prestigious and best known award for contemporary art, the Turner Prize.’

This is the first year that the prize hasn’t been hosted by a Tate venue. The work of Karla Black, Martin Boyce, George Shaw and Hilary Lloyd is on show throughout the third floor of BALTIC – with a cafe dedicated to discussion and feedback of the exhibition on the second floor.

Friday Night’s Alright for a Party

As the queues both outside the building and down the stairwell leading to the exhibition showed no sign of dying down on Friday night, the opening time on the third floor was extended for an hour but still many people – me included – didn’t see the works on show until the following day. Despite – or perhaps because of – the popularity of the Prize launch the atmosphere inside was brilliant. Strangers chatted in the glass elevators that rose and fell on the face of the building, people in the discussion cafe swapped pencils to write down their thoughts on the work and there was a buzz that extended far beyond the DJ’s in the booth at the Preview Party.

The Nominees

Karla Black

Karla Black’s sculptures and installations climb all over the room she has filled on the 3rd floor. Crumbled bath bombs, chalks, shampoo and shaving foam explode from sheets of cellophane and paper.

“I think about art in general as a boxed little bit of civilised society where permission is given for us to really behave as the animals we are.” Black explains on the video installation in the 2nd floor cafe. “A painting is an escape, its supposed to take us elsewhere. Sculpture is the opposite. It’s absolutely here and rooted … It’s its physicality that really matters.”

Martin Boyce

Martin Boyce has created an interactive landscape on the 3rd floor that includes a library table, fallen leaves, a patterned ventilation grid and a wooden panel with the words ‘petrified songs’ scattered across its surface. Most of his work since 2005 has been influenced by an image of four concrete trees by the artists Jan and Joel Martel which completely fascinated him when he came across it.

“If the trees were made of concrete what were the leaves made of – and what happening in the autumn? Did fragments of concrete fall from the trees?”

Hilary Lloyd

Hilary Lloyd says that she isn’t a film maker. She just uses film and video “like you’d use pencil or a pair of scissors.” What makes her work unique is that what is filmed is what you see. There is no editing process, rather a collaged effect is created with various images shown simultaneously.

The videos are displayed on a number of large screen which do, Lloyd muses “get in the way”. The experience of viewing her work pulls you into the present and draws attention to the details of everyday life, like the moon in the sky and the structures beneath a motorway being built.

“There’s an idea with art that you should ‘get it’ and I don’t think that’s it at all.”

George Shaw

George Shaw showed an exhibition of his work, The Sly and Unseen Day, at BALTIC earlier in the year. Interviewed for the Turner Prize exhibition he explained his ambition “to make a painting that my professor of fine art could talk about with my mum – nether of them condescending to each other.”

Shaw seems to want to bypass that special language that seems to be needed to understand contemporary art and to focus instead on communication.

His paintings of the landscape of his childhood on a council estate in Coventry use Humbrol paint, “They are humble paints, made for painting bits of radiator that you’ve missed out… they’re not made for saying the great things in life like oil paint is made for – flesh and life and death and skulls and Jesus.”

His work confronts life rather than relaxing into a comfortable situation. “In many ways the paintings are painting my way out of this world” (Shaw looks into the camera at this point and smiles) “Sounds a bit bleak really doesn’t it?”

The Turner Prize

The winner of the Turner Prize will be announced at BALTIC on Monday 5 December 2011.

For more information go to www.tate.org.uk

You can join the Turner Prize debate on Twitter by using the hashtag #TP2011

The Eclectic Mix exhibition features statement jewellery by Northumberland painter and sculptress Susan Stanton whose work features semi precious Chinese stones like turquoise, coral, lapis and citrine. Art works on the walls by Tutu Benson, a recent graduate from the University of Sunderland, draw our attention to the constant connections that exist in creation with the vivid plumage of birds melding seamlessly into the ornate gown worn by a woman whose hands have turned into feathers like something from a Roald Dahl tale.

‘Ouseburn Perspective’ by Helen Moss makes a bold statement on the walls of the first gallery with strong 3D images giving a sense of light and space. Judith Frankland’s works, her first collection in eight years, catches the eye with its bold bright stripes, nipped in waists and exquisite tailoring. The illustrations that accompany her clothes, drawn by Manny More seem to move with the flow of the fabrics designed to be worn by the ‘woman who likes to say hello’.

This exhibition is a fleeting display, like a flower that blooms once a year, and is made all the more beautiful for its temporary nature. The Eclectic Mix art and design show is open until April the 15^th.

George Shaw’s exhibition, The Sly and Unseen Day, is showing at The Baltic until the 15^th of May and it depicts scenes from the artist’s childhood home on the Tile Hill estate, Coventry. The photograph-like appearance of each work, with their intriguing refractive sheen, is a result of Shaw’s choice of medium. Not for him the gloss of the oil paint or the sweep of the watercolour. Shaw paints in Humbrol enamels, that industrial paint used for Airfix models, tanks and the like, the sort of paint that could be found kicking around in the garage on a shelf, its lid rusting, its side covered in dried-on drips.

‘They are humble paints,’ Shaw says, ‘made for painting bits of radiator that you’ve missed out… they’re not made for saying the great things in life like oil paint is made for – flesh and life and death and skulls and Jesus.’

Like snapshots found in an old album or stills from a film from the 1970’s the paintings invite us into a world that Shaw remembers from his teenage years. A world lived on a housing estate that had a school, a library, a social club and five pubs, a recreation ground and woodlands created (according to the literature that accompanies the exhibition) ‘with the ingredients to provide a balanced working and social life’.

In the education room on Level Two of The Baltic a film of Shaw talking about his works plays on a loop. It makes for mesmerising viewing. He has a quiet, unassuming voice that belies the emotions held within his paintings.

‘Scenes from the Passion: The First Day of the Holidays 2003’ which is displayed on the northern external wall of the Baltic, depicts a house in the very middle of the painting. The traditional rule of thirds seemingly has no place in Shaw’s world. The house is a typical example of post-war British Social Housing, all pebble dash and painted wooden panels and yet there is something satisfying, something beautiful about its clean, crisp lines, standing in silence at the junction of a wet tarmaced road, reflecting the heavy clouds in the sky. A red post box on the street gives the yellow, black and grey walls of the house an element of added interest, of contrast and of light. There is a touch of Mondrian about Shaw’s works.

‘Looking back now over this painted ground I find myself wondering what it’s really all about and how my thoughts and feelings about the subject would be if I simply hadn’t bothered at all… If I hadn’t made a painting of a pub or tree or a certain corner in a confused attempt to recall things, recreate things, show things as they are, how they become forgotten and later erased as if they were never there at all, would I look at today in any way other than weary resignation and sarky black humour?’

George Shaw 2010

Humbrol never looked so good.

Irvin was a navigator in the RAF and, according to the gallery brochure, it is his cartographical expertise that inspired his early figurative paintings and first exercises in abstraction moving “inexorably towards ‘painting which aspires to the condition of music’.

The walls are alive – with the sound of music.

As our role models become even younger and more idealised, we are so more afraid of ageing that the quest for youthful preservation generates an obsession with our bodies. As we align our sense of self-worth with self-image, the psychological and emotional consequences are tortuous.

Zed Nelson

The Side Gallery in Newcastle was the perfect North East location for  Zed Nelson’s ‘Love Me’ exhibition. Signs on the gallery wall warned that some of the images might disturb visitors but the show was so cleverly curated that the full impact of a photograph depicting with the interior walls of a stomach where fat had been scraped away so that the skin could be stitched back into place, minus and inch or two, to create the perfect tummy tuck hit me full in the face. Nelson’s work packs punches in ways that are both full on and extremely subtle and thought provoking.

The exhibition, showing next at the Impressions Gallery in Bradford from the 4th of March to the  29th May 2011, is a delicious, delirious mixture of voyeurism, realisation and beauty. ‘Christopher, 22 – Chest wax,J. Sister’s salon, New York USA’ looked as though he had fallen from the skies and lost his cherubic wings on the descent as he tenderly stroked his hairless chest in a hand mirror.

‘Antony Mascolo, 46 Liposuction to chin and abdomen, New Jersey, USA’ looked resigned to his fate as he sat, clad in a paper gown and surgical socks with black pen marks scrawled all over his soon to be removed chin. The caption alongside the photograph, “I’m competing with men 20 years younger than me” was a striking reminder of the times in years gone by when a senior figure in the workplace would have commanded respect and have been in possession of a job for life. Times have changed and the experience and knowledge held by Mascolo seemed to count for very little in his own eyes against the rising tide of young and handsome competition that was chasing in his wake.

One thing we know for certain is that the body is the place where each of us lives, and the place where each of us will die: our body will always, in the end, betray us

Tim Adams, Writer – quoted on the gallery wall

‘Joany Macias, 33′ was pictured standing outside a sleek modern building somewhere in Los Angeles. She was beautiful. Her lips painted scarlet, her hair scraped back and piled on the back of her head, her eyes sparkling with ruddy good health. In the photograph she wore tight low cut denim leggings with a zip that vertically dissected  her groin. The caption at the side of her photograph read “To be honest I never thought that I needed it. But I read about the procedure in a magazine.” The procedure in question? “Designer vaginal rejeuvenation” surgery. Suddenly that zip seemed awfully sharp and close to the knuckle.

An image of an x-rayed foot with metal bars intrigued me. “Foot x-ray. Toe reduction surgery. Kristina Widmer, 36 New York USA” The caption read “I’ve had three toes shortened – a portion of bone removed between the joints and fixed together with metal rods. I like to wear Jimmy Choo’s, three inch heels with a pointy toe.” Like Joany’s zip, the thought of Kristina’s ‘pointy toe’ in this context made the French saying ‘Il faut souffrir pour être belle” frighteningly poignant.

There were moments of celebration, however. One of the most moving portraits in the exhibition was of ‘Belkis Estrella Maldonado, 31.’ She was ‘Contestant number 9′ in the ‘Miss Penetencaria’ prison beauty contest. She stood, perfectly framed by the bars of her cell door , with a fiercely proud stance, resplendent in a strapless black gown, her eyebrows perfectly arched, her nails shaped into long white talons with a delicate diamante necklace around her neck. The caption next to her image read, “Sentence 4 years. Drug smuggling. Rio. Brazil.”

Nelson noted that “Tavalera Bruce Maximum Security Women’s Prison in Rio holds and annual beauty contest for inmates. The prisoner judged most beautiful is crowned ‘Miss Penetencaria’, and wins a 14-inch colour television, an electric fan and cosmetics.”

Not every contestant was so assured and proud, however. ‘Miss Essex. Loser. Miss England Competition, Leicester UK’ had been captured with a torrent of black mascara stained tears pouring down her face, her mouth twisted with grief like a Munch painting, her earlobes pulled down low by clusters of diamante earrings as she clung to the shoulder of an anonymous bleached blonde man in a tuxedo shirt.

‘Katie, age 9. Winner, University Royalty Texas State Pageant. Texas USA.’ whose rosebud lips sported a thick patina of lip gloss and whose wide eyes were adorned with layers of frosted gold eyeshadow, was the poster image for the exhibition. She sported a tiara that was taller than her own head, even including the ‘carefully curled ‘up do’ and her gazed followed me up the street as I left the exhibition, the words above her angelic face declaring simply: ‘Love me.’

The book is a visual reflection of what grime represented, chronicling the conditions that spawned the genre. It is a combination of music portraiture, social documentary and architectural photography. Many black youths reject the ‘urban’ label that has been imposed on them by commerce and the media. There is a significant discrepancy between perceptions of black culture as ‘cool’ and the often-harsh reality of being born black on a London council estate. ‘Don’t Call me Urban!’ takes us through the raw environment from which the new stars of British popular music, such as Dizzee Rascal and Tinchy Stryder emerged, and introduces us to many other hopefuls who remain stranded in bedroom studios, hidden amongst concrete blocks glamorized in countless music videos.

‘The Time of Grime’ is an era when ‘clashing’ and postcode warfare have emerged, when young lives have fallen victim to absurdly trivial disputes, when rampant material aspiration collides with grim social reality. The book is a unique and penetrating document of an era in which London’s inner-city youth has veered out of control.”

I remember being told during one of my first ever photography lessons that the secret to taking great photographs of people has very little to do with what equipment you use. Nor has it got an awful lot to do with technique. The secret, my lecturer said, was what the National Geographic photographers call ‘getting inside the tent’.

Let me give you an example of what he meant. Imagine that you are traveling somewhere extraordinary, Nepal perhaps – or a remote region of China and you take out your camera to document the scenes around you. You see goat herders, children playing in the streets, women on their way to market or shepherds with livestock. The pictures you take will probably be beautiful, they will probably be ‘foreign’ enough to make your friends gasp but will they actually say anything about the people whose lives you witness on your travels?

Think of Steve McCurry’s extraordinary photograph of the Afghan Girl, Sharbat Gula. Would that photograph have the power to hold your gaze if Gula was not looking straight into McCurry’s lens? By engaging with his subject, by creating a relationship between himself and the young woman he photographs McCurry is ‘getting inside the tent’ and capturing a moment of engagement which has brought him worldwide fame.

Michael Palin does the same thing but with moving images. He lifts the lid on life across the world and gives a little of himself to each scene and, in doing so, he allows the people he talks to to meet him somewhere in the middle of our screens and engage in a relationship between us, the onlooker, and them, his subjects. Simon Wheatley, the Magnum photographer, not only ‘gets inside the tent’ of London’s urban youth in this exhibition and book, he positively zips up his sleeping bag and settles in for the night.

Wheatley’s project, Don’t Call Me Urban! spans 12 years and sees him finding his way into and beyond the Grime music scene by contacting pirate radio stations and music magazines, spending time on the streets and circumnavigating youth clubs and organisations who wanted to know ‘too much’ about his movements to spend time with young Londoners. Wheatley said at the launch of the exhibition in Newcastle that he was ‘expecting a bit of criticism’ of his works with its depictions of drug dealing, violence and the truth about life on the streets in London.

‘The haters are out there at all levels … but I want people to read the text that goes with the work’. Indeed there is extensive contextual text on show throughout the exhibition exactly because of what Wheatley identifies as ‘the tendency to stereotype this subject matter. There’s a lot of good.’ He says ‘Despite all the focus on the bad.’ When asked exactly what he had learned whilst working on the project Wheatley smiled and joked and said “I learned to spit man!”

Indeed the photographs that lines the walls of The Side gallery in Newcastle are beautiful, intimate portraits of subjects that most people would shy away from. There are lads in hoodies, kids taking drugs, confrontations with the police and scenes that would make most of us walk away in fear. Wheatley hasn’t walked away, he’s held his lens up close so that we can see the people underneath the stereotypes. He’s there, camera steady, when two young boys come charging around the stairwell in a block of flats on Lambeth Walk, he’s there in Thornton Heath when a man is arrested in a shop for suspected possession of marijuana – a stunning composition involving two shopkeepers, three policemen, the suspect, a shopping trolley and a dislodged policeman’s hat. He’s there crouched down at child’s eye level to photograph two young boys playing in the corridor of what looks like a prison but is the outside corridor to their home on the Pepys Estate in Deptford, all mustard yellow gloss walls and a cold stainless steel gate.

Wheatley photographs the unexpected. He captures the anxious expression on an elderly woman’s face as she tentatively passes two kids hanging out on a stairwell, her handbag clasped close to her body, her eyes avoiding the added gaze of the lens that is upon her in her concern to get away quickly. We can sense the throbbing tension at the back of a bus as the noise levels rise and the see the discomfort of the passengers outside the ‘gang’ on the back seats. The stress is  tangible in the photograph Wheatley presents.

In a room on the Heygate Estate in Walworth the light falls across a young mother’s face, her child on her hip, as she gazes out of the window, the sun highlighting her cheekbones while the child’s gaze pierces the lens to look directly both at the photographer and, through him, at us. By ‘hanging around’ the people he was photographing Wheatley has managed to disappear into the back ground. He describes noticing a self consciousness in his subjects in the first frames he would shoot, an excitement at his presence in certain situations which would gradually give way to an acceptance as people got used to him being around.

The project was not without incident. Despite carrying two camera systems (one for portraiture and one for documenting action), a flashgun and a press pass Wheatley was held and searched by the police when he was ‘caught’ in a car with suspected drug dealers.

He said with a smile,  ”The police must have thought they’d found ‘the big guy’, a car filled with three black guys and a Colombian.” That was the night Wheatley spent locked up in a cell. One day was spent waiting for a photograph to depict the gun culture in the area. As he waited and waited to seize the perfect shot Wheatley found himself falling asleep only to be woken by two men prodding him with the barrel of a gun to wake up and take their picture. He got his shot.

Weeks later the same men told him “You’ve missed so much, you’ve missed it all. We’ve been holding places up – come and take a picture.” A demand, Wheatley reminisced, which would make him not so much a reporter or a photographer as an accomplice.

Don’t Call Me Urban! shows us the truth about life in London over the last decade for these people, these kids. It tells us about the Grime music scene. Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Tinchy Stryder from E3, Kano from nearby Plaistow.

As NYJA, a young woman interviewed in Wheatley’s video of the project explains, “Grime is culture, music. A love of music. You have to feel pain whatever. That’s what Grime is. It’s broken English, a poet to release your stress out”. The exhibition shows us the drugs scene, the violence “Every day day someone gets shot, someone gets knifed” NYJA says in explaining why she goes to church every week. “Church helps”.

It shows us, the viewer, what it’s like to try to belong, to find a home in the Britain that was torn apart in the 1980’s and is trying to regenerate itself from a grass roots level among dilapidated housing estates. Wheatley completed a project for The Guardian newspaper in 2007 – a series of portraits of people who were trying to make a change in these areas, a charity which targeted kids between the ages of 12 and 15 to try to give them an alternative to gang culture, to show them that the future could hold more than death or prison.

His conclusion nearly four years later is that to change the future for these kids the solution needs to be radical rather than material with an overhaul of the way we live, from the food that we eat to the sense of community in the places we live. His favourite photograph from the entire exhibition? A shot taken inside a house where a little boy rests against a door frame, his back framed by an orange wall. A pile of coats fills the frame to the right and to his left the door to the room inside is hanging askew off its hinges. “Him. He’s my favourite. He’s got nothing and his house? His house is a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament across the river. I learned a lot …”

More about Don’t Call Me Urban! can be found at www.dontcallmeurban.com

The exhibition at The Side Gallery runs until 20.11.10 The book, Don’t Call Me Urban! is now available from Northumbria Press.

Doubtful Sound

19 JUNE – 19 SEPTEMBER 2010

As a Yorkshire girl I know a thing or two about marching bands. I sang with them in my youth as an enthusiastic member of The Huddersfield Choral Society Youth Choir. The strains of ‘Jerusalem’ at full pelt accompanied by The Brighouse and Rastrick Band must have echoed up, down and across the slopes of the Pennines all those years ago, thanks to the acoustics inside Huddersfield Town Hall. I know that brass instruments take an awful lot of effort and skill to play and that the sound a marching band makes can make lot of people of a certain age in Yorkshire cry. I also know that brass bands are loud. Very, very loud.

Cornelia Parker’s brass band, on show in the UK for the first time at The Baltic this month, is not very loud. Cornelia Parker’s brass band is, in fact, silent. And flat. Very, very flat. I don’t mean that the notes it plays are flat. I mean that the whole thing is flat, as flat as a flattened frog on the roadside. Flat, silent – and utterly beautiful.

Parker’s work, Perpetual Canon, consists of an orchestra of brass instruments that have been industrially flattened by a 250 ton press and suspended on wires in a circle from the ceiling around a single electric bulb. It fills its space within the gallery with light and shadows, the inner circle of the instruments bask in a golden glow from the iridescent bulb at its centre, the outside surfaces appear cold and strangely visceral. These outside surfaces, with their crushed valves and elongated tubes have taken on flesh like qualities in the process of their being flattened. Silver ‘intestines’ and folds of ‘skin’ seem to wrap around the main recognisable body of each instrument with a cold, leathery caress.

Shadows are cast on the gallery’s walls by each instrument. The shadows give each one of the crushed pieces the third dimension that the press’s weight has removed as the French horns, the trumpets and the cornets finally folded in on themselves, exhaling their last breath. The shadows also take the place of the musicians who could no longer make a note from the pieces, no matter what their skill.

As I wandered around the outer circle of Perpetual Canon (its title is a musical term that describes a ’round’, the repetition of a phrase of music again and again) and realised that the work was actually exhibited in silence I was surprised. The sight of so many iconic shapes seemed to trigger the sounds of the instruments playing inside my head. As the Baltic’s guide to the work says:

‘Parker’s suspended instruments produce a cacophony of shadows that replace the sound. Both amplifying and containing the instruments, the shadows of the viewers replace the absent players.’

It is almost as though one’s senses force imaginary sounds from the instruments as the eyes work with the brain to connect and make sense of such a strong and visually stimulating display.

There is a real presence to Celia Paul’s exhibition: Mothers, Daughters and Sisters.

Visitors to the University Gallery at Northumbria stood back from the water-colour paintings which hung at the entrance as if to give the framed female figures space to breathe. Light played upon the creases and layers of fabric in each of Paul’s works. The white dress worn by her mother in My Mother seemed to glow in places and to take on the colours of her skin in others. Cotton robes stretched taught across ample bosoms and strained at the knees of the long white robes in Five Sisters giving the women’s limbs both form and movement. One could almost sense how it would feel to wear the robes, to have one’s knees rest against the inside of the cloth and to feel the weight of it against one’s ankles.

The paint from each sister’s figure drips down the paper, leaving parallel trails of pigment. Stripes of mustard yellow, tangerine, chocolate brown, fern green and chartreuse streak towards the floor as though a prism has been held in front of the sisters and fractured their component parts for us to see. I was surprised to see how many colours there were. At first glance the paintings seem pale, as though areas within them have faded in bright sunlight, but when the paints separate as the bottom of the paper the many layers of colours and light within each piece are revealed.

Celia Paul paints flesh beautifully. Her mother’s face in the first painting in the exhibition is detailed in a way that reveals the strong emotions between mother and daughter. It was almost as though I was interrupting a personal conversation. My Mother holds our gaze, tolerates it even, as if waiting patiently for us to leave so that she can be alone with her daughter once more.

Paul fills the space allowed to her with living, breathing flesh. Feet and fingers look as though they might twitch as we look at them, faces are alive with personalities although they are calm and tolerant of the painting process. Each of the Five Sisters is dressed the same but we can see their personalities through Paul’s brushstrokes. The Gallery seems calm as people look at each piece for a long time. We have entered a different space and have been allowed in to a very personal, very emotional world.

The exhibition is on show at The University Gallery and Baring Wing between now and July the 16th

One photograph in particular, titled, ‘Old Lady Living Alone, Middlesborough.1976′ was literally stopping people in their tracks as they moved around the gallery. ‘How did you take that?’ one visitor asked  Steele-Perkins, congratulating him on both the image’s intimacy and its quiet respect for its subject. ‘I used to do social work in the West End of Newcastle’ the visitor explained, ‘and I looked after a lady who was just like that. In fact, looking at that picture I can almost smell her house, it takes me right back there.’

‘I just knocked on her door,’ Steele-Perkins said. ‘I knocked on her door and I said that I was taking photographs of poverty for a project and she invited me in. I went into her house, into that room and I did an interview with her, a taped interview, and then I took some pictures. This is one of them … Life was different back then, people kept their front doors unlocked. Of course some people told me to go away … but she didn’t.’ And so Steele-Perkins has captured life as it was for an elderly lady who lived alone in the Middlesborough of the 1970’s. Sitting on her sofa with her legs perilously close to the open fire, her buttoned up coat and her hat squashed squarely onto her head she seems vulnerable and yet strong. The visitor continued, ‘What’s amazing to me is that you have managed to keep her dignity, you haven’t exploited her. She is as she was and that’s something quite special. I wanted to thank you for that.’

Steele-Perkins’s work does have dignity, by the bucketload. His most recent work has been to photograph carers in their daily routines and the images are raw, beautiful and above all, real. ‘Bromley. Kelly, who is 15, Helps look after her ill mother. 2009′ is the perfect case in point. We see a young woman leaning against a tall fridge in a kitchen, a coffee cup clasped to her chest. She wears a tight striped cotton vest and a white cardigan and a chunky silver Tiffany necklace that seems too large for her small frame. Her eyes hold the camera’s gaze and we can see the weight of the world on her narrow shoulders.

‘Couple in a Hospice for the Terminally ill. 1992′ shows us an elderly couple, she in the bed and he at her side, holding her hand. The frame is filled with textures, from the age spots on his hands to the wrinkles on her face, the fine cotton knit of her jumper to the chunky weave of the handmade blanket that covers her legs. She looks at him, her eyes full of what? We do not know. It could be sadness, it could be love, it could be fear, it could be need. Whatever it is he does not meet her eye but looks beyond and past her, his handsome nose in profile against the lens. The photograph shows us all what life, death and marriage are all about.

Elsewhere in the exhibition Steele-Perkins shows us the lighter side of life. We see a ‘Picnic at the Glynebourne Opera. 1988′ with enough cerise taffeta to deck a three piece suite. The picnic in question is watched over by a line of Friesian cows in an adjacent field and includes a crystal vase of flowers, Portmerion china (the ‘wild strawberry’ pattern), a wicker waste-paper basket for the rubbish and, joy of joys, amongst the strawberries and the Veuve-Cliquot, that bastion of the English picnic: Tupperware.

In ‘Juliana’s Summer Party. 1989′ we see a bow-tied rascal hoiking down the candy floss pink cocktail dress of a young woman who is bedecked in pearls, diamante and lashings of pale blue eyeliner. She reveals an enormous white toothed smile and, amid a flurry of boned and ruched satin, her left nipple. You can almost hear the ‘Benny Hill’ theme-tune in the image.

According to the gallery guide Steele-Perkins ‘would resist being called a cultural anthropologist … His stance is nonjudgemental or, more precisely, of Dickensian largesse, but his preoccupation with the truth about England, brilliantly captured, means perhaps that he really loves it, warts and all.’ What I would say is that when I read that Steele-Perkins studied psychology at Newcastle University his photographic vision of the world, and of what makes the people in that world tick, suddenly made an awful lot of sense. A beautiful slice of life, warts, nipples and all.