Mick Hartley

The Photographers' Gallery has just moved from Great Newport Street to Ramillies Street, behind Oxford Circus. I used to pop in fairly regularly in the old location, but always on a Saturday. It was usually fairly quiet. Today the new place was crowded out with a group of art college or sixth form kids, all taking notes and copying stuff and being shepherded around by a couple of teachers who looked barely older than their charges.

It always leans towards the contemporary, does the Photographers' Gallery. The main exhibition at the moment is The Westerns:

Katy Grannan’s new work The Westerns features large format portraits of individuals living on the west coast of America. The artist describes these subjects as ‘new pioneers’ attempting to define themselves against the backdrop of the American west coast and an unrelenting Pacific sunlight.

Gail and Dale are two middle-aged transsexuals and best friends whose carefully coordinated clothing, hair and nails reflect both a sense of escapism and their deeper need to be visible. By contrast, Nicole is almost unrecognisable from one photograph to the next, as she changes from blond bombshell to boyish teenager.

Grannan’s subjects appear like hallucinations, uncanny and yet familiar. Through this she explores the uneasy relationship between fixed photographic portraiture and shifting personal identities, at the point where fantasy meets reality.

Exploring "the uneasy relationship between fixed photographic portraiture and shifting personal identities"? Yes indeed. If it's shifting personal identities you want, what better than a couple of elderly transsexuals dressed up like their dear old mums used to dress, and posing on the Californian beach clutching their handbags? Certainly made me ask some serious questions. Not so much about the nature of personal identity, as it happens; more about the nature of photography exhibitions. And then there was the lovely Nicole, who further undermines our sense of photographic portraiture by – would you believe it? - wearing wigs and even, on occasion, different clothes.

Nearby were some photos of morris dancers (yes, morris dancers) by Faye Claridge:

The photographs explore the relationship between living tableaux and photography and challenge photography's capacity for authenticity by making portraits that both reveal and obscure, document and create.

You see a theme here? Apart from pretentiousness, I mean. Photographic portraits are supposedly assumed by the naive observer (that's you and me) to be authentic, objective representations. But lo! Along come these subversive artists, and they cast the seeds of doubt among us. Californian beaches – isn't that all Baywatch and surfers? So where's Pamela Anderson? Where's David Hasselhoff? Good solid representatives of their respective genders. Instead we have Dale and Gail, and….well, what are they? Men or women? Men dressed up as women? You see? It's not so simple after all. 

And that Nicole! In one picture her hair's blonde, and then the next – blimey! it's dark! One picture it's short; the next picture, it's long! Talk about confusing. Not to mention the morris men. One's got his face painted black. Another one has a bag over his head. I thought my brain was going to explode with the sheer questioning-of-the-nature-of-personal-identitiness of it all.

Cindy Sherman has a lot to answer for.

And all those students? Well, it strikes me that it's mainly about what's easiest to teach. With exhibitions like this, the potential for didactic ruminations on the impossibility of arriving at objective truth and suchlike is obvious. Get the little buggers to read all the text for a start. Most of the work's already done for you in the exhibition catalogue. From that you can segue into all kinds of post-modernist delights.

Less than a mile away at the National Gallery are some of the greatest portraits ever painted. At the National Portrait Gallery there's the excellent Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize. But it's Gail and Dale who are teaching the next generation of artists.