Photographic exhibition bringing together some of the finest portrait work made in camera and in the darkroom over a 50-year period, showcasing the artistry of 40+ photographers working with film. Exhibiting at GALLERY46 over 2 floors and 6 rooms, 70+ extraordinary and evocative portraits and iconic images from some of the biggest names in photography using the analogue camera;

There is a particular kind of suspense that belongs to analogue photography. It begins before the shutter is released and ends, sometimes days later, in the darkroom, or, more prosaically, when a strip of film is finally developed and held up to the light. In between lies the unknown. The photograph has been taken, but it has not yet quite happened.

‘RETURN TO WONDERLAND’ at GALLERY46, is an exhibition devoted to that interval of uncertainty, and to the extraordinary images that emerged from it. Bringing together more than seventy works by over forty photographers, the show extends the story begun with ‘WONDERLAND’, looking back across nearly half a century of photographic practice, from 1955 to 1999, when the analogue image still held its particular alchemy.

The dates are significant. They describe not merely a period but a way of seeing, these were decades in which photography moved through an extraordinary succession of technologies and formats: from the traditions of plate photography to roll film, 35mm, Polaroid and increasingly sophisticated colour processes. The apparatus changed; the appetite for pictures did not. Eventually, of course, the digital image arrived and altered the terms of the bargain. The camera became, in many respects, less a device for making photographs than a device for making photographs immediately.

But RETURN TO WONDERLAND belongs to the period before immediacy became the expectation, the analogue photograph asks something of its maker. A decisive moment can be missed. A gesture may be gone before the shutter opens. Even when everything appears right through the viewfinder, the photographer cannot entirely know what has been secured until later. That small act of faith is everywhere in this exhibition.

Their subjects range across the worlds of music, fashion, portraiture, performance, popular culture and everyday life. Some images are intimate; others theatrical. Some seem to announce themselves immediately, while others reveal their peculiarities only after a second or third look. Together they form a portrait of photography itself: restless, curious, occasionally mischievous, and endlessly capable of making the familiar strange.

Such photographs remind us that the history of photography is not simply a history of equipment. It is a history of attention. The camera may have become faster, smaller, sharper and more intelligent, but none of these developments can decide what is worth looking at. That remains the photographer’s task. The great analogue photographs are therefore not merely relics of a vanished technology. They are records of decisions: where someone stood, what they noticed, what they waited for and what they believed was worth preserving.

There is also something wonderfully physical about the photographs in RETURN TO WONDERLAND. They carry the traces of a process in which the photographer was never entirely removed from the making of the picture. The image was not summoned instantly into existence, it was coaxed out.

To look at these photographs now, in an era in which millions of images can be made and discarded in the time it takes to walk across a room, is to encounter a different economy of looking. Analogue photography imposed limits, and limits can be productive, they encouraged patience, instinct and commitment, they made the photographer consider the frame before making it.

Perhaps this is why the images gathered at GALLERY46 feel less like illustrations of a bygone era than invitations to slow down. RETURN TO WONDERLAND is, in this sense, a celebration of the photograph before the photograph became ubiquitous. It is a journey through five decades of visual culture, but also a reminder of the peculiar thrill of not knowing exactly what you have made until after the fact.

The wonder was never simply in the camera. It was in looking. And then, despite everything, pressing the shutter.