Lot 47: CRAIGIE HORSFIELD

CRAIGIE HORSFIELD B.1949 MARY MOSZYNSKA. LINHOPE STREET, NORTH LONDON. MAY 1975. 1995 silver gelatin print 192.5 by 138cm.; 75¾ by 54¼in. The present work is unique and was photographed in 1975 and printed in 1995.

London, Frith Street Gallery, Craigie Horsfield, 17th March - 6th May 1995.

Frith Street Gallery, London, where acquired by the present owner in April 2006

The present work belongs to an important corpus of photographs which Horsfield made in the 1970s and 80s but which he did not print until much later. In the case of Mary Moszynska, Horsfield photographed her in 1975 but did not print the work until 1995, setting up an intriging relationship between the original context in which the photograph was made and that when it was first experienced as a printed image. Moreover, the elegiac yet timeless quality of the present work also questions the traditional notion of photography as representative of specific time and place.

Horsfield's portraits from the period have tended to be of friends and Mary was part of the Polish community in London with which the artist shared a close affinity. He actually moved to Krakow in 1972 because 'as a socialist I wanted to live in a socialist country... I found Poland a good place to live and, as an artist, incomparably better than England. It was a much more generous climate... the artist was not as marginalised, was integrated into the culture' (Horsfield, in conversation with Jean-François Chevrier and James Lingwood, 1991, Craigie Horsfield, exh.cat., Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, October 1991, p.9). Although Mary was photographed in London, Horsfield shot many friends and acquaintances during his 7 years living in Poland. As a country that changed dramatically over a relatively short period, the change in context between the creation of the image and its printing takes on an added significance.