Past Exhibitions

11 December 2010 to 30 January 2011

MGA's latest exhibition, Francis Reiss: pictures of the 1940s features rare photographs of the world in crisis.

Reiss was born in Hamburg in 1927 to Danish parents and began to take photographs at a young age. As a 17 year old he began working for the famous English magazine Picture Post, which published over 60 of his photographic stories. At 21, he travelled to the United States where he produced some of his most compelling works that focussed on the economic hardships faced by Americans around the time of the Second World War.

The photographs in Pictures of the 1940s include remarkable and rare pictures of the bombing of London during the war. Also included are compelling social documentary pictures taken by Reiss in America, showing the conditions of poor white farming communities of the Midwest and African Americans living in New York. The pictures in this exhibition record an aspect of life during the mid-twentieth century, as the world attempted to reconstruct itself in the face of the trauma of war.