Top 10 photography exhibitions of 2016

Selected by Sean O'Hagan, The Guardian
Michael Hoppen Gallery is delighted to announce that both Eamonn Doyle's installation END. at this years Recontre d'Arles Festival & MHG exhibition The Image as Question have been named amongst 2016's top 10 photography exhibitions....
 
5. Eamonn Doyle: END.
The most-talked about show at the Arles photography festival was this radically staged installation, which presented Doyle’s vivid Dublin street portraits in a maze-like room complete with abstract drawings and a suitably ambient electronic soundtrack. Some images towered above the viewer, taking up a whole wall. Others were arranged in grids, others still glimpsed in cracks and gaps in the walls. The effect was overwhelming, with the tilted angles and skewed points of view evoking and heightening the ebb and flow of his native north Dublin. Beckett is an abiding influence, but this seemed altogether Joycean in its intimacy and intensity.
 
8. The Image As Question
An exhibition that explored the photograph as proof at a time when the uses of photography in art and on social media directly challenge or subvert that suddenly old-fashioned notion. Michael Hoppen, a passionate believer in photography as an art form, gathered the graphic (WeegeeMetinides) and the chillingly evocative (Simon Norfolk’s haunting study of the stairs at Auschwitz) alongside the functional (shots of men wrestling used by Francis Bacon for his paintings). A challenging but rewarding journey into the mystery of photography.
 
- Reviewed and selected by Sean O'Hagan, The Guardian
 
 
December 7, 2016
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