A bit of thread necromancy, sorry about that, but this exhibition was running at the National Singapore Museum and was free of charge so we popped in yesterday. Overall I'm pleased I went and thought a lot of his stuff was good. However, both myself & my wife came to the independent conclusions by the end that sticking exclusively to black & white had the undesirable effect of many of the shots blurring into one and being unremarkable. While it certainly worked for a large number of photos, we both felt the decision to make everything black and white when it might have been a stronger image in colour did mean we were losing interest by the end. We even overheard a number of people making the same remark after they left having spent far less time vieweing than we did!
For instance, while some of his landscapes worked well in mono, many were as confused jumble of lines/shapes/blurs and once we'd seen half a dozen of these we just couldn't be bothered in looking at yet another one.
In contrast to this the portraits were almost always good, especially b&w, but even then we found ourselves wishing he'd included more colour shots. Personally, although there was a lot of nice stuff there, some of it definitely felt like filler and, with a fair number of "photographer's images" too. If it's still on at the NHM then it's worth popping in for sure. I did take a number of photos of images I like to provide an aide memoire and use as inspiration for my own interpretation/take of the subject.
I did check out the accompanying book but at $100 for the standard version, $5598 for the collector's edition and *price on enquiry* for the limited Art edition, I decided to pass
