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TIME OUT
July 31- August 7 1991
Photographers’ Gallery |
Lala Meredith-Vula has about 3,000 photos of haystacks, taken in Kosovo
in Yugoslavia over two years on a Yugoslav government scholarship;
here she shows a selection for her first London solo show. There are
extraordinary images, sometimes of entire stacks. More often of half
depleted, messy clumps hanging speared by tough supporting poles,
where the farmer has removed the hay from the bottom up. ‘It
was a bit like going to Belfast and taking pictures of old people,’
says the artist. Kosovo, one of the poorest regions in Yugoslavia,
usually hits the news for agitation by its majority Albanian population.
But when the locals understood what Meredith-Vula (whose father is
Albanian) was after, they happily led her to the biggest and the best
haystacks. She documents the stacks as works of art, as sculpture.
Because they are shot from down low at middle distance, comparative
scale is lost to a sense of weird structures hanging between earth
and sky. Here, in an image of straw loaded down with snow, there’s
something of a Hokusai wave; there’s a remembrance of ‘Jacob’s
Dream’, a picture of a haystack and ladder by Fox-Talbot. Always
some raw detail – a farmyard mutt sleeping in the sun, or old
car tyres lying around – mitigates against detachment, against
the dull coldness of much wannabe-surrealist photography. It’s
something about curiosity: formal beauties discovered, not imposed.
Great pictures anyway.
Rose Jennings
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