Most photography exhibitions are pretty similar in terms of format: frame photos, stick them on walls, done. And there's nothing wrong with that. But occasionally, you see something different, and it really makes you think.
Case in point: Lexar, the memory card manufacturer whose factory I toured in April, invited me to an intriguing exhibition they were running in collaboration with Leica in Amsterdam.
Threads of Time: A Journey Through Silk and Lens ran at Leica Gallery Amsterdam: a lovely little two-storey building opposite the Stedelijk and Van Gogh museums. This unique show brought together two artists from China who'd never met before this project: a traditional silk weaver and a film photographer. You'd expect the photography to document the weaving. But actually, it was more interesting than that.
For context: the weaver, Jingwei, works in Suzhou in Eastern China, using kesi. It's a form of silk tapestry going back centuries, in which a set of silk threads is stretched tight on a loom to form the base, and the weaver then works in colored threads by hand. It's very slow and very fiddly – indeed, the Chinese have a saying: "an inch of kesi, an inch of gold." Jingwei makes pieces based on classical Chinese paintings, as well as work driven by his own ideas.
The photographer was Jing Huang, a university professor who won the Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer Award in 2011 for his series Pure of Sight. Huang spent time in Jingwei's studio and around Suzhou, shooting on 35mm film using a Leica III, a black and nickel rangefinder from the 1930s.
Instant emotion
How the pairing came about couldn't have been more random. Grace Su, who runs Lexar in Europe, spotted Jingwei on a home makeover TV show she was watching with her dad in Shanghai. She arranged a visit to his studio, and the idea grew from there.
The way the exhibition was set up was very different from most photography shows and I found it a breath of fresh air. You started with the kesi craft: the silk, the materials and how the weaving is done. From there, Jingwei's finished tapestries and Huang's photographs shared the space, and you could wander between them as you liked.
Huang's prints might seem weird, arty and off-putting to some: they're small, grainy and warm grey, floating in wide borders of near-black. But for some reason, they spoke to me immediately.
A blur of lines, a patch of shadow, the back of someone's head: none of this offers a clear narrative, or even a clearly defined image. But they provoked an instant emotional reaction in me – and as a viewer, you can't hope for more.
After a few minutes going back and forth between silk and the photos, the connection between them became clearer. A fan of pale lines in the photos echoed the thread stretched across the loom. Curving blades of grass resembled loose threads. A whitewashed Suzhou rooftop became a study in shapes.
Typically, when a photographer is sent to cover a craftsperson, you expect the maker and their work to become the subject. Huang deliberately avoided that. "I was not trying to explain kesi through photography," he explained. "I wanted to respond to what I encountered in Suzhou: the threads, the atmosphere and the spaces between things."
Helping you to see
To me, the cleverness of the exhibition was the way each artform helped you see the other. Huang's photos trained my eyes on line, rhythm and empty space, and when I returned to the tapestries, this helped me notice things I'd missed the first time.
The lesson here for galleries? Don't be afraid to put photographs next to painting, pottery, textiles or furniture; you might get results that are more than the sum of their parts.
There's a lesson for photographers too. If you're ever stuck in a creative rut, try spending an afternoon watching someone make something by hand. But don't photograph them: photograph something else, using something you've learned.
Finally, this exhibition provided an answer to the question Lexar wanted the show to raise: what's photography worth when AI can make an image in seconds? Because while AI can make photorealistic images pretty successfully these days, one thing it can't do is sit in a weaver's studio for days, making friends, drinking tea, and come away thinking about the world in a new way.
