Last Thursday I went along to the opening of Beyond the Battlefields: Kathe Buchler’s Photographs of Germany WWI
Grosvener Gallery, Manchester Metropolitan University, Oxford Road, M156BR on until 2nd March 2018.
I’d not heard of Kathe Buchler before and was intrigued to see she was an early practitioner of the Autochrome process, a popular topic of conversation within the alternative photographic community of late. An autochrome has a visual quality rarely seen nowadays and I always take the opportunity to seek them out when on display.
Here are some of the monochrome prints on show.
This has to be my favourite image from the exhibition.
Buchlers images documenting women at work during WWI were reminiscent of the WWI Women at Work album held in the Visual Collections of the John Rylands Library.
Why no images of autochromes? Unfortunately the exhibition was showing modern prints of Buchlers works and no original autochromes. There were some colour reproductions but I seem to have only captured a handful of the monochrome prints. Don’t get me wrong, the images are immediately striking and each makes you stop and look closer. Its just I’d gone to see some autochromes….
Go see the exhibition if you get a chance, the Grosvenor Gallery is a small side space in the Holden Gallery. During the opening event there was an exhibition booklet with essays on Kathe Buchler by Melanie Tebbutt, Jacqueline Butler and Matthew Shaul. See if you can get hold of a copy as the information was invaluable.