The Engine

British Orientalist Painting, Tate Britain, London  Perhaps moving on from Edward Said's groundbreaking study 'Orientalism' this is a full-scale attempt to come to terms with, interpret, explain, account for Britain's continuing involvement in Middle East affairs from the seventeenth-century onwards. The Renaissance period is indeed the exhibition's starting point with an already evolved and evolving interface between Britain and the Ottoman Empire. It has to be remembered that the West developed in tandem with the East and didn't really begin to accelerate in terms of its development until 1870 or so, when it adopted dynamite, the machine gun and other modern, epoch-defining inventions. The exhibition references this and intriguingly attempts to contrast British images of the Orient with French ones, perhaps the most revealing aspect of this exhibition for it subtly contrasts and sends up two attitudes. The exhibition maintains that French artists tended ...

Street and Studio: An Urban History of Photography at the Tate Modern, South Bank, London Street and Studio seems to be a roundup of all the greatest photography of the late 19th and 20 centuries. Obviously the exhibition attempts to make a contrast between impromptu camerawork and studio photography, yet it’s hard to make sense of what exactly is being done here. For all that, the exhibition is patently very enjoyable so long as you’ve seen the photos already, know the great names and their significances, but if not then it does seem a mite confusing. That hardly matters though for there’s so much on offer here it’s hard to know where to begin to describe it all. Work by Lee Miller, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus contrasts effectively with the work of more conventional or more established photographers such as Cecil Beaton and Henri Cartier-Bresson. However, the exhibition often tries to do too much, leaving the spectator waiting to fill in the dotted lines between each phot...