Focus zooms in on Chambré Hardman

Oct 22 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

For the first time since the Daily Post campaigned to save Edward Chambré Hardman’s photographic archive, a major exhibition will be devoted to his work. Peter Elson reports

THEY are all pictures at an exhibition, but the work of two of the artists could hardly be more different.

Yet they are both firmly united in emerging out of a creative Liverpool tradition that one simply could not imagine a city outside the capital producing.

At one end of the first floor will be a gallery displaying the paintings of former Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe, who left the band to pursue an artistic career in Hamburg, before his untimely death.

In the facing rooms on the same floor will be the first major exhibition of the leading Liverpool photographer Edward Chambré Hardman, for the first time in 14 years.

The last exhibition of a similar calibre was the Walker art gallery’s highly successful show in 1994, after which the photographs simply disappeared from public view.

The public, including many readers who supported the Daily Post campaign to stop Hardman’s 140,000-piece photographic archive being dispatched from the city, will finally see some of his best pictures in Liverpool Through the Lens, which opens in 10 days’ time.

The two exhibitions mark the arrival of the University of Liverpool’s newly-created Victoria Museum & Gallery as a major cultural force in the city.

Created from the former Victoria Building, with its dominating clocktower, this £8.6m museum and gallery will probably be Liverpool’s best physical legacy of European Capital of Culture completed in 2008.

It is entirely fitting, therefore, that the refurbishment of this landmark Liverpool building will host the rehabilitation of the city’s greatest photographer, who deserves his national reputation reinstating.

It is hoped that National Trust director general Dame Fiona Reynolds will visit the exhibition during the Trust’s AGM weekend in Liverpool.

Chambré Hardman was a photographer of unrivalled quality in Liverpool who specialised in portrait and pictorial landscape photography.

His photography business in Liverpool flourished from the 1920s to the 1960s, when Liverpool was influencing the world with its industrial, commercial and maritime activities.

The exhibition is organised by the university in partnership with the National Trust, which responded to the Daily Post’s four-year campaign to save the archive and Chambré Hardman’s “time-capsule” studio-home at 59, Rodney Street. As part of Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture celebrations, this special exhibition offers a window into Liverpool life as it was in the middle years of the last century, as captured through Chambré Hardman’s distinctive pictorial style.