The first piece in the show at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, Close-Up, looks like an illuminated wall painting, an abstract made up of circles and dots. It is, though, not a work of art at all, but a lantern slide from the collection of Victorian horticulturalist and gardener Ellen Willmott showing the structure of Volvox globator, a type of algae.

Willmott’s slide serves as a manifesto in miniature for this exhibition. It trains its lens on the experimental microphotography of early naturalists, its adoption by educators seeking to inform art and design with natural patterns, the use of magnification as a means of disorienting and disturbing audiences by Dadaists and Surrealists, and their fascination with the human body that endures in the work of contemporary artists. It’s a warning, too, that things, when seen in close-up, are not what they seem.

The marriage of art and science, or the possibility that art and science can be the same thing, is made explicit in the images taken from Laure Albin-Guillot’s 1931 book Decorative Micrography, where cross- sections of seeds and cells are rendered in layers of charcoal and metallic pigment, and in the plates culled from Karl Blossfeldt’s Art Forms in Nature, which see budding twigs transformed into totemic sculptures and a seed pod metamorphosed into a mosque’s minaret. Stan Brakhage’s 1963 film Mothlight, in which insects, leaves and twigs flash onscreen as abstract forms, is, in this context, an echo of William Henry Olley’s scientific studies of a bee’s sting, a fly’s cornea and the scales of a butterfly’s wing.

The capacity of photography to reveal the obscure is taken up in the next room by the Surrealists, in two senses: psychological and physical. I’m not sure if Man Ray’s photograms count as close-ups - they are made without a lens, by placing objects on photographic paper and exposing it to light - but they are pseudoscientific investigations of objects, and, thanks to the Surrealist strategy of juxtaposition, reveal hidden meanings in everyday materials.

Strangeness is to the fore in Brassao’s “involuntary sculptures”, made with Salvador Dali. Small things - smeared toothpaste, rolled-up paper, a torn matchbox - are transformed by chance gestures in a sort of sculptural take on automatic writing, then transformed again by magnification into monumental works.

The power of the close-up to transform is applied repeatedly to the body. Jaques-Andri Boiffard’s untitled photograph shows a pair of eyes peering, terrified and terrifying, out from behind a dense tangle of hair, and his deliberately unpleasant portraits of ugly big toes illustrate a George Bataille essay, captioned as medical specimens. In the infamous opening scene of Buquel’s Un chien andalou, a woman’s eye appears to be slit with a straight razor, ants scurry from a hole in a man’s hand, and, in a merger of nature photography and the Surrealist’s body obsession, the camera lingers on a death’s head hawk moth. These, the most disturbing images, are shot in unflinching close-up.

Simon Starling is no Surrealist, but he shares space with them here, and bridges the gap between the artists and the scientists, the past and the present. His 2006 work Inventar-Nr 8573 (Man Ray) 4m-400nm is a slideshow which opens with a shot of Ray’s photograph Geological Fold, then relentlessly refocuses, ending on images of cloud-like forms, the magnified molecular structure of silver gelatine used in the photographic printing process.

Upstairs, things take a dramatic turn, away from the Surrealists and toward the conceptual artists of the 1970s. Where the avant garde of the 1920s and 1930s used the close-up to fetishise things, making them strange, mysterious or horrifying, their descendants opt for politically-motivated demystification.

Giusseppe Penone’s Svolgere la propria pelle (To Display One’s Own Skin) is a pseudoscientific survey of the artist’s own body; hundreds of photographs that show Penone placing a microscope slide over every square inch of his epidermis. Carolee Schneemann uses similar tactics, isolating and cataloguing male and female body parts. These works are a reversal of Boiffard’s toes, in which a body part is shown in isolation to reveal its uncanniness. Penone and Schneemann present multiple body parts to normalise them, explicitly rejecting the idea that particular parts should be viewed with shame or disgust.

Kate Craig takes an even closer look at her own body in Delicate Issue. A camera, operated by Craig’s husband, skims over her body, set to the rhythm of the artist’s heartbeat and breathing. Craig’s aims are clear, but, just in case anyone misses the point, she interrupts the reverie with a voiceover that poses pointed questions, asking: “What is the dividing line between public and private?” While Delicate Issue must be placed in the context of the feminist, conceptual art-making of the 1970s, the piece signals a return to the surrealism of the body in close-up - folds of Craig’s skin look like desert landscapes, wrinkles offer abstract imagery - taken up by the contemporary artists that follow, who add humour.

Mona Hatoum’s short film loop, projected on the gallery wall in a small circle, again turns the body into a landscape, a strange, shifting alien one. This time, the mesmerising subject is scrotal skin, moving in response to changes in temperature. A private part made public, and made almost unrecognisable in close-up, Hatoum’s piece has much in common with both the surreal images in the lower galleries and the politicised bodies that surround it.

Next, Wim Delvoye, who is best known for Cloaca, a biomechanical digestion machine which ingests food and excretes the obvious, turns again to the body’s waste products in Sybille II. The film shows people squeezing blackheads on their noses in extreme close-up, to the sort of wishy-washy soundtrack used in nature documentaries, reinforcing the impression that these towers of sebum oozing from pores are kin to strange sea creatures, or growing insect larvae.

I am not the squeamish type, but I left the screening room feeling decidedly queasy. It’s a reaction that would have made the Surrealists proud, and Sybille indeed brings us full circle. Dali, the artist who haunts this exhibition, though he appears here only in collaboration with Brassao and Buquel, wrote in the 1934 essay which inspired Delvoye that squeezed blackheads are “alien bodies in space”.

This sort of neat, light touch by curators Dawn Ades and Simon Baker is what makes Close-Up an enormously satisfying show, and reveals their deep, broad understanding of the subject at hand, which is matched with a willingness to let visitors draw their own conclusions.

Coralling a century and a half of scientific investigation and avant-garde art, revealing surprising connections between very different movements in art history, and deftly crafting a narrative around an apparently simple artistic tactic, Ades and Baker have mounted one of the best shows seen at Fruitmarket—or, for that matter, in Scotland—for years.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 31st October, 2008.

When Conde Nast and his editor Frank Crownshield launched the first incarnation of Vanity Fair in 1913 - the year that the American public were introduced to “modern art” by the groundbreaking Armory Show - the idea of celebrity was in a state of flux, and it shows in the early photographs on show at the National Portrait Gallery.

There are actors, actresses and dancers aplenty, and even a few characters mostly famous for being famous, but politicians are absent, while authors and artists, even the most avant garde, are set on a level with the more frivolous famous. Virginia Woolf looks decidedly Victorian in a three-quarter-length portrait, Aldous Huxley glowers intellectually into the frame, George Bernard Shaw flashes jauntily the lining of his suit jacket with an eyebrow raised, James Joyce thinks deep thoughts behind his specs and eyepatch, and the beautiful Frida Kahlo poses proudly with fellow artist and husband Diego Rivera.

These simple, straightforward, almost documentary shots are set against rather more hammy fare - Isodara Duncan in robes at the Parthenon, a moody Augustus John clutching a paintbrush - and, in establishing these two modes of celebrity portraiture, the pioneers at Vanity Fair established the standards followed to this day.

Indeed, when the magazine was resurrected in 1981, the tics and tactics of the celebrity photographer had been set in stone, and, aside from a willingness on the part of celebs and publishers alike to show some skin, there is next to no difference between the images of the 1900s and those from the 1980s and beyond. The merely famous are given a veneer of gravitas by the solemn, full-face portrait in black and white, now out of choice rather than necessity, shown to be real people, relaxing at home (not their own, more often than not, but one rented for the occasion), mugging with props suited to their profession, or arranged in “classical” poses, as if the photograph were a good old-fashioned painting.

The exception to this rule is Annie Liebowitz, and on the evidence here, her reinvention of the celebrity photograph is not entirely positive, with innovations resting on ham-fisted symbolism, arty pretensions and a tendency to show the not particularly great and good as they imagine themselves, or glibly to remind the viewer of how they found their fame. Lance Armstrong’s battle with cancer is explored by depicting the champion cyclist naked on his bike, riding through driving rain. Kate Winslet is dunked in a tank of water in a diaphanous dress, just in case anyone flicking through the magazine was unaware of her role in Titanic. At times, one almost suspects Liebowitz of puncturing her subjects’ vanity, or adding a satirical edge to her work, but it seems safe to say that this is in the eye of the beholder.

A shot of Arnold Schwarzenegger, gazing into the middle distance, his biceps straining against the T-shirt he’s chosen to wear, oddly, while skiing, is hilarious and sinister, the right-wing actor-politician as übermensch, with uncomfortable echoes of Leni Riefenstahl. The less said about the preposterous image of Mr and Mrs Tom Cruise cuddling their new baby on top of a mountain, the better. Jack Nicholson celebrates his bad-boyhood by smoking a fag and driving golf balls off a Hollywood rooftop. Both men look silly, and the photographer’s collaborative approach - read sycophancy - is at least in part to blame. Then there’s the pull-out covers, a much-copied Vanity Fair trademark, featuring a galaxy of stars, shot on separate occasions in separate time zones, assembled by a skilful, uncredited Photoshop expert, who doubtless removes blemishes and slims paunches along the way - these are wonderful in their way, because the idea of a gathering of the ultra-famous in one place is titillating - was there bitching on set, did so-and-so blank the one from that film? - but beyond that, Liebowitz does little but arrange actresses in flattering poses.

Interestingly, when Liebowitz plays it straight, the results are rather wonderful. A snap of three generations of the Redgrave acting dynasty is full of warmth. Martin Scorsese and George Lucas are caught in a moment of friendly banter, as Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola look on. Rupert Murdoch is cast as a friendly old duffer, messing about on his boat.

Thanks to Liebowitz’s showboating, and the strength of her simpler work, the plainest portraits and more candid shots stand out. Daffyd Jones’s shot of Mick Jagger, looking tired and rather bored on a banquette beside Tony Curtis and Madonna at one of Vanity Fair’s Oscars parties portrays three people as people, however feted they may be. Herb Ritts lets Clint Eastwood’s craggy old mug shine in an unforgiving close-up, and captures a telling moment, part public, part private when he shoots Sylvester Stallone and Brigitte Neilson from above, snogging before cheering crowds. Helmut Newton, unable to fashion one of his studied tableaux due to time constraints, shows Mrs Thatcher, cast-iron barnet intact, but tired and sad about the eyes.

Rather more twinkly is Harry Benson’s shot of Ronald and Nancy Reagan engaged in a spot of impromptu ballroom dancing. And there’s plenty more of Benson’s generous approach to his subjects at the Kelvingrove.

In fact, perhaps due to the rather fawning captions he provides, Benson seems too generous at times - the photograph of the Reagans is in both shows, accompanied in Glasgow by a sickly soft-focus image of the Clintons, a cheery Nixon on the campaign trail, and a portrait of George W Bush, then governor of Texas, smirking and playing golf.

Benson is much better when engaged in reportage. His documentary work on the Glasgow of the early 1970s is powerful stuff, and the coverage of the assassination of Robert Kennedy is little short of breathtaking, from Ethel Kennedy in a panic, pushing the photographer away from her husband’s body to the simple image of a straw-boater floating in the senator’s blood.

On the lighter, celebrity side, Benson’s unposed snaps beat his posed set-pieces hands down. The Queen is caught looking terribly jolly on a 1957 trip to a coal mine; Bob Guccione is shown sleazily touching up a model, who casts a withering glance in the Penthouse publisher’s direction; and Judy Garland looks lost and alone as an assistant lights her cigarette. For the most part, though, Benson’s work falls flat. It remains of interest thanks to his subjects - at times it feels as if he’s shot every single star of the past half-century - but not thanks to his photography.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 4th July , 2008.

All too often, the curators of group shows are guilty of shoehorning artists together, beginning with a premise, then finding work that proves it. Here, curator Lynne Cook of the Dia Centre for the Arts in New York has done the opposite, corralling three artists - Chantal Akerman, Lili Dujourie and Francesca Woodman - whose work practically begs to be shown together.

All three use the camera, whether to make photographs, film or video; all three train their lenses on themselves in their immediate environs. And in so doing, all three raise questions about gender and the female body in art, make inquiries into issues of identity, and use their chosen media to slip the usual moorings of time. Seeing them together, there are so many shared concerns, so many echoes, such a sense of dialogue between their respective practices that it is hard to believe that Akerman, Dujourie and Woodman were operating in isolation, largely unaware of each other's work.

Ellipsis opens with Woodman, who died young and relatively obscure, aged 22, a suicide. It seems fair to say that her posthumous reputation - at least among the young artists on whom she continues to exert an influence - is in part thanks to the poisonous Romantic notion that a great talent lost is all the greater, but in the room at the DCA devoted to her small black-and-white prints the weight of that reputation is lifted from the shoulders of her work. We see her in her studio, or in the grubby rooms of abandoned houses, relentlessly investigating the possibilities of self-portraiture. Mirrors and glass are everywhere. Woodman hides herself, uselessly, behind clear panes, huddles behind mirrors or crouches like a museum exhibit inside a vitrine. This tendency to reflect, deflect and direct the viewer's gaze is at its most powerful in a work where, unusually, Woodman appears only by proxy: three women, naked, stare into the lens, their faces obscured by a print of Woodman's own face.

Elsewhere, the focus is on the female body in its surroundings, with Woodman deliberately making herself invisible, concealed behind drapes of peeling wallpaper. There is a lot of blurring, too, not just to produce artefacts of long exposure, but to introduce the passage of time into the still photographs.

Time and movement are central to the work of Lili Dujourie. Fourteen of her video works, made between 1972 and 1981 - coincidentally or not, the same span as Woodman's working life - are ranged across a bank of monitors on the gallery floor. The first five of these, all bearing the title Homage à (one of many ellipses in this show) leave the viewer to fill in the possible subject of Dujourie's tributes. That subject is any artist - male, it is safe to assume - who has ever painted a nude: Dujourie films herself on a bed, or on the floor beside it, shifting from familiar reclining poses to awkward arrangements of limbs, a device that highlights the artificial positions in representations of women's bodies. Perhaps thanks to the sometimes violent movements or obvious discomfort of some poses, these pieces call to mind more unsavoury examples of such representation - Walter Sickert's Camden Town nudes, say, or John Deakin's exploitative photographic studies of Henrietta Moraes for Francis Bacon. In other videos, Dujourie again adopts cliched poses, here a sultry vamp, there a listless housewife. While time is inevitably present in the moving image, Dujourie, in a way that recalls the motion blur in Woodman's work, injects a sense of progression into her works, only to subvert it. Oostende, a series of images shot from the artist's studio, are shown as slides, each one with a projector of its own. The mode of display will have viewers waiting with baited breath for the usually imminent shift on to the next image, but it never comes - an ellipsis with no resolution.

More ellipses follow in the films of Chantal Akerman. Je tu il elle, an installation reworking of a feature-length film, offers a deconstructed narrative on three screens. The first shows the heroine played, inevitably, by Akerman engaged in odd rituals, eating sugar from a bag, restlessly rearranging sheets of paper on the floor and, in an echo of Dujourie, shifting between poses on a mattress. The second sees a woman who may or may not be the same character chatting in a bar with a man, waiting with him in an idling truck, and watching him shave. The third is an extended, if not explicit, sex scene in which Akerman's character, or someone who looks the same, fumbles with a girlfriend. It's an exercise in mystery, obfuscation and omission, with Akerman setting up possible interpretations and leaving them hanging: are we being shown a split narrative, the imaginings of the first woman, or something else entirely? Akerman's new edit of the 1971 film Mirror provides, finally, some resolution, reflecting and combining devices just seen in Woodman's photographs and Dujourie's Homage series: a young woman stands before a looking glass and dispassionately appraises her own body, feature by feature.

This is a powerful show that explores - if you'll excuse the term - the first flowering of feminist video art. It is worth noting that these women share more than a common set of concerns in that, while they provided primary texts for feminist critical theory, and their work can only be seen today through the lens of that discourse, none of them made their work explicitly within that context. While the body, questions of identity and the mediated gaze of the camera are to the fore, Ellipsis is also a show about time. This is not the sort of exhibition you can flit through, pausing for a little while before works that catch your eye. Instead, the shifting of time in the works on show - Dujourie's frozen slides, the long static shots in Akerman's films, Woodman's stilled movements - imposes a sort of active torpor on the viewer, slowing time to the pace of a too-hot afternoon. This effect is, at least in part, down to sensitive curation by Cook, who has done much more than simply bring Akerman, Dujourie and Woodman together, and has, moreover, arranged their work in such a way as to expose new, unexpected connections between the three artists.

Ellipsis is at DCA, Dundee until June 22nd, 2008.

This review was first published in The Herald on May 9th, 2008.

On a windy Saturday morning last June, Didier Pasquette stepped off the roof of a tower block at Red Road in the North of Glasgow on to a high wire some ninety metres above the ground, and began to walk towards his target, the next block of flats on the estate.

With a long pole to aid his balance, but none of the safeguards you might expect - no net to catch him, no harness to hold him - Pasquette took tentative, oddly graceful steps into the void between the two buildings, watched by a small band of local residents.

The skywalker wasn’t taking this unconventional stroll to add to his list of record-breaking tightrope stunts - in the past he’s crossed the Thames, 30 metres above the flowing river, and walked the length of the pitch at the Stade de France in Paris - but at the behest of artist Catherine Yass.

For Yass, Pasquette’s daredevil passage between the towers of Petershill Drive marked the realisation of a work she has spent years developing, revising and bringing into being.

‘I first had the idea for this work, or some kind high wire work, in 2002,’ she explains, ‘but I never really thought it would be possible. So, for a long time, it was a dream about a dream: I was dreaming about this walk through the air, which is something people do dream about, and is a wonderful, fantastical thought.’

That flight of fancy has come to fruition in the form of High Wire, a four screen video piece recording Pasquette’s walk with accompanying photographs, which premiered last night at the CCA, a centrepiece of the Glasgow International festival of visual art.

But why film a tightrope walk, and why film it here in Glasgow?

High Wire is the latest in a strand of lens-based works by Yass that focus on the built environment. All deceptively simple, each one of these brief filmed pieces is a close examination of a single site, with roots in Yass’ ongoing investigation into the real-world outcomes of Utopian idealism, often tempered by personal concerns. For the 2002 piece Descent, which earned Yass a Turner Prize nomination, the artist slowly lowered a crane-mounted camera through a fog-bound Canary Wharf construction site. Wall traced the contours of the barrier between Israel and Palestine in unforgiving close-up, and, most recently, Yass trained her lens on the passage of a ship through the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze river, an engineering marvel that displaced millions of Chinese citizens, for Lock.

‘I’m looking for concrete manifestations in the world for things that are very much intangible,’ Yass explains, ‘You’d hardly say that Canary Wharf was built from some great Utopian ideal, but it was built on an ideal of capitalism, the wall in Israel was built as a result of a movement which had once been idealist, and in China at the moment there is this great celebration of capital, and that’s become their Utopia, as far as I understand it.’

The meditative, almost elegiac quality of Yass’ film installations masks, then, a distinctly ambivalent view of the structures she films. They are also more than dry essays on the relationship between man and his surroundings. ‘I wouldn’t have done any of them if there wasn’t a strong personal element,’ Yass admits, ‘Wall, for example, had a lot to do with thinking about how your own mind can get blocked up, how you can create barriers in your own mind, and not think imaginatively around the corners of things.’

These two sources of inspiration - the public and socio-political matched with the private and personal - dovetail neatly in High Wire, with the fantasy of walking in the air allied to what Yass calls the ‘social dreams’ expressed in the high-rise architecture of the Red Road development. ‘I was thinking about dreams and fantasies and what happens when we try to put them into reality,’ she says, ‘In this case, that was with respect to Modernism and Modernist architecture - these towers were maybe built with a sense of Utopia, and later people began to see the problems with them - and the dream of walking through the air. Then there’s the relationship between that dream which might be very personal, and a social dream.’

For those who lack a head for heights, viewing High Wire might well be less a dream, more a nightmare. The four projected loops - three track Pasquette’s progress from different angles, the fourth is a view from the skywalker’s head-mounted camera - combine to form a vertiginous vista that is little short of terrifying.

Watching it on a small computer monitor in Yass’ London studio, I found myself hanging on to the arms of my chair as if my life, or Pasquette’s, depended on it - blown up to three by four metre projections, High Wire ought really to come with a health warning.

And then, well, there’s a twist. Something happens, something which Yass has asked me not to reveal, preferring that visitors to the installation find out for themselves. Suffice it to say that, while Pasquette’s walk in the sky did not - thank goodness - end in tragedy, nor was it an unqualified success. ‘My heart,’ says Yass of this unexpected turn of events, ‘was in my mouth.’

This unforeseen incident flags up something of a shift in Yass’ practice. For, while High Rise follows the precedent set by earlier pieces in terms of its central themes, it is the first time the artist has added a human actor to her work; where before her moving cameras were always precisely constrained, attached to cranes, tracks, and, in one case, a remote control aeroplane.

‘In all of these works, the camera has become the eye, and in that respect this one is no different,’ Yass says, ‘But what happened when we actually did it - what made it interesting in the end, what made it the project what it is - happened because the camera was on a person and not a machine.’

That human element resurfaces in the photographs that complete the High Wire installation. Yass has enlarged negative prints of the Red Road blocks and mounted them on light boxes, having painstakingly scratched the surface of her original negatives, marking out the lines of the high wire rope. As with the restraint shown in the filmed work, an apparently simple gesture stands in for a densely layered set of concerns.

‘If you’re printing a negative,’ Yass says, ‘It always has the potential to become something other than itself. It’s on the way somewhere, rather than being something very final. We think of photography as indexically recording something, but you can think of it as a kind of drawing - Fox Talbot called photography the ‘pencil of nature’ - so I was interested in linking drawing and photography, and was thinking about architects plans, where again we have that transformation from one thing to another.’

In the end, transformation might be the key to understanding the work of Catherine Yass: she has transformed a private dream into a public spectacle, and transformed the spectacle into a work that, ultimately, seeks to transform our understanding of the structures that surround us.

This feature was first published in The Herald in March , 2008.

Try To Do Things We Can All Understand, London-based artist EJ Major’s first solo exhibit, takes its title from the first work on show, a wall of monitors showing stills from 29 films accompanied by matching lines of dialogue, each displayed at random.

At first, it is hard not to treat the piece as a sort of quick-fire film quiz, racking one’s brains to identify a given still or quote, but as images and texts fade into one another the fragments begin to form a loose narrative.

A glimpse of Bette Davis sitting in the back of a car, her eyes downcast, calls up the breakdown of the Hollywood star system and Davis’ fiery feud with Joan Crawford. Robert Redford, looking especially craggy beside a roaring camp fire, points to the double standard that allows male actors to play romantic leads into their 70s while their female counterparts struggle to find a part, a thought reinforced by the appearance of exceptions to the rule, Meryl Streep or Sigourney Weaver. When Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette pop up, silently mouthing Tarantino’s clever-clever bon mots from True Romance, Hans Zimmer’s tinkly reworking of Carl Orff’s Musica Poetica seems to fill the gallery. More generically, passionate kisses and violent tempers, steely gazes and weeping women, hove into view, flagging up cinematic clichés and stock shots, the trite tactics directors fall back on to elicit an almost conditioned response in their audience.

These commonplaces aside, each viewer will bring their own set of memories and associations, reading these fleeting, randomised images to write their own, personal story, just as Major’s reasons for choosing these particular scenes from these particular films are unknown, rooted in her own private associations.

The snippets of dialogue work in parallel to the images, and, with the odd exception - Marylin Monroe’s memorable cry of ‘You’re three dear sweet dead men!’ in John Huston’s The Misfits - are hard to place. Free of specific associations, these brief, often prosaic texts allow a more specific, though inevitably fractured, narrative to reveal itself, with a question, ‘Why are you doing this?’, answered cryptically, ‘She looks very small.’

Taken together, the gobbets of dialogue and freeze-framed images form a densely woven work, concerned with the viewer’s response, that unavoidable urge to impose an ordered narrative on this disordered presentation of Major’s filmic autobiography, a taught essay on the tension between text and image in the language of cinema, and a meditation on the power of shared symbolism.

Autobiography, text and image underpin the most recent work on show, From A Distance, too. This time, the text is William Faulkner’s stream of consciousness novel As I Lay Dying, which Major read and annotated at 17, an age at which she periodically lost the ability to speak, while the images are culled from the pages of Brownie annuals, and other sources less suitable for children. Major matches her teenage underlinings, many of which reflect her personal, traumatic, relationship with language at the time, to the sanitised vision of girlhood provided by the comic strips. The result is a rather discomforting, if sometimes hilarious, psychosexual drama. The single word ‘steer’ is accompanied by a collaged image of a Girl Guide riding a flying penis, repeated instances of the word ‘laughing’ on a page are accompanied by line drawings of a lonely girl, sitting apart from he peers, and the phrase ‘it talks’ is illustrated with an exasperated mother and glum daughter. Some of these juxtapositions are, I think, made with a wink, but the public, adult revising of private, juvenile preoccupations, the remaking of a text already remade in the earlier act of annotation, and the implied critique of the gender roles reinforced in children’s literature combine to form a work that, like Try To Do Things We All Can Understand, offers a layered examination of language, shared elements of popular culture and the divide between the public and the private.

This divide is explored more explicitly still in Marie Claire RIP. Twelve self-portraits show Major, first as a fresh-faced, peppy teen, ending up hollow-cheeked, battered, bruised and wearing filthy clothes. The series is based on an article in the titular magazine which featured mug-shots of an anonymous woman, taken over a fourteen-year period, to illustrate the effects of heroin addiction. This is powerful stuff, and, once again, Major uses relatively simple tactics to expose a broad range of concerns. The series is at once a memorial to the unknown woman and a coruscating attack, on both the assumption that her deteriorating appearance is the most important aspect of this woman’s addiction, and the magazine’s intrusive use of the images, using the mug-shots to turn a private life into public property. It is, too, a nuanced look at the nature of photography, questioning assumptions of documentary truth, and blurring the boundaries between the portrait and the self-portrait.

After this, the mail art project Love is… comes as something of a relief. In 2004, Major took screenshots of every second of Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris, printed postcards of each image and distributed all 7,000 of them, accompanied by a note asking recipients to return the card along with their thoughts on the concept of love. The volume and range of responses is remarkable. A five year old girl defined love as ‘Mum and Dad’, an elderly lady returned the card unused, a polite note explaining that, at 85, she had no use for Major’s services. Predictably, there are several exasperated requests that Major ‘get a life’ (from people who nonetheless took the trouble to post the card), musings trite enough to grace a greetings card, and a slew of popular song lyrics.

This is an assured show, then, one that, across our distinct bodies of work deftly marries together musings on the consumption and disruption of popular culture, gender and identity by making the private public.

This review was first published in The Herald in April 2008.

The first few images in this survey of Ansel Adams’ photography are nothing short of breath-taking, but, before long, boredom sets in.

This is down to the fact that - though this exhibit is keen to remind us that, while Adams is first and foremost a landscape photographer, his practice was broad, taking in portraiture and abstract imagery - there is precious little evidence here of artistic development, with prints from the 1930s sitting happily beside those from the 1970s, because they are, in essence, the same.

That is not to say that the 150 prints gathered here are dull, far from it. The show opens with a brace of waterfalls, great violent cascades of white water set against implacable rock, then turns to a more intimate view, with spring water flowing over stones, turned cloudy and gelatinous by the long exposure time, in a way that is almost painterly (though Adams himself, who co-founded Group f/6.4 to champion ‘pure’ photography in opposition to the pictorialist style prevalent in the first decades of the last century, would have baulked a this suggestion). Then come the work for which Adams is best known, his views of mountain ranges and great lakes, rocky outcrops and desert sands, captured in perfect detail, composed with an almost obsessive care. They are glorious, sure, but after a little while, one finds oneself looking not at the landscapes Adams has captured, but at the photographs themselves. It is the impossibly crisp rendering of the distant peaks in Mono Lake, California that grabs the eye, not the beauty of mountains, and the sheer rock face shown in Monolith, the Face of Half Dome is notable not for its majesty, but for the tonal contrast between the grey stone and the black sky behind it.

In other words, if Adams was a genius, as the show’s subtitle would have us believe, his genius was technical, not artistic. And with this in mind, the exhibition’s fails is its complete lack of technical information. Ordinarily, this would not be an omission worth criticising - images are the important thing, after all, not how they were made - but with Adams, mastery of photographic technique overwhelms the subject almost every time. Take Mudhills, Arizona, for example, a late photograph that hovers on the edge of abstraction. It is lit at the centre by a shaft of light. Was this blind luck, did Adams spend hours at this spot waiting for a break in the clouds, or is that striking highlight the result of some innovative darkroom technique? We are left none the wiser.

Then there is the subject matter. Perhaps, as a confirmed city-dweller who tends to think that a wind farm improves a wild vista no end, I cannot truly understand these works. But after twenty, thirty, forty pristine images of ‘unspoilt’ nature, it is hard not to wish for some sign, however small, of human activity. And when Adams provides, it comes as a blessed relief - standing before Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, in which a squat, flat-roofed church and adjacent graveyard provide welcome right-angles, it is impossible to remain unmoved at these signs of lives lived in a landscape. Of course, taking a landscape photographer to task for photographing landscapes might be missing the point rather, but there is something in Adams unrelenting, nigh on monomaniacal regard for natural formations that grates, with this repetitious, touched-up and ultimately tedious parade of images ending up just short of being sickly soft pornography for the outdoor set.

When Adams turns away from the landscapes he loved, though, he falters, unable to leave them behind. A close-up of a picket fence is, seen through Adams’ lens, a monumental mountain range, the lines of industrial machinery become a rocky outcrop, and even an abstract like Stained Wallpaper Near Alturas, California bears a title that emphasises the place the photograph was taken, and can only be read as an attempt to evoke eddies on the surface of a pool or knots in wood. The few portraits gathered here are for the most part eminently forgettable, with one exception - John Martin In His Studio shows the subject slightly unsteady on his feet, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lip, a decisive moment among the too-careful compositions.

In the end, this show will doubtless be a treat for keen devotees of Adams - it is by far the most comprehensive exhibition of his work shown on these shores to date - but for those new to his work, or familiar only with his often-reproduced Western landscapes, it is sure to disappoint, offering a huge volume of works where a select few would do, revealing Adams to be, if not a one trick pony, then a photographer whose relentless pursuit of the perfect landscape photograph ultimately obscures his desire to share a love for the beauty of the natural world.

This review was first published in The Herald on February 15th, 2008.

Most people have an easy, unthinking relationship with buildings. We gain entrance through the doors, walk the corridors, and sit ourselves down in the rooms. London-based artist Alex Hartley is different, preferring to climb up, over and around the buildings he encounters - a practice known as ‘buildering’ - naming each climb, describing it, and rating it for difficulty.

Evidence of his activity is plastered across the Fruitmarket Gallery’s frontage, in the form of Elevation 1:1, a photograph of the building on the building itself, complete with detailed instructions for eight climbing routes across the facade, and drawn white lines marking out each ascent. The descriptions reveal that, while Hartley is dead serious about his intimate explorations of exteriors, he also has a sense of humour, littering his texts with obscure jargon from the worlds of architecture and mountaineering to form a comic, and often oddly poetic builderer’s argot, first seen in his mock-serious guidebook, LA Climbs: Alternative Uses For Architecture.

Inside, after walking through Elevation 1:1 - ironically, one cannot follow Hartley’s lead up it, since his photograph has smoothed over the very lintels, mullions and window-ledges he used to gain purchase - are more documents of climbs around Scotland. These digital prints, drawings and photographs are of two types. The first sees Hartley in action, hanging on for dear life to the rounded, windowless walls of a crofter’s cottage, and effortlessly clambering onto a ledge overlooking the main hall of the shamefully derelict St. Peter’s Seminary at Cardross. The second type are more generous, open-ended evocations, with lines drawn on buildings which both track Hartley’s progress and suggest, like the instructional texts that dot the front of the gallery, that we too might attempt a climb.

Next come a series of photographic works encased behind satin-etched glass, which give a convincing illusion of three dimensional space. Installation (FMG) extends a room in the gallery, the glass a barrier to entering a space which is not there. Case Study recreates a modernist Californian house, the deep view of its interior seen through the windows negated by the sculpture’s thin, wedge shape.

It is hard to describe the effect that viewing these works has. One cannot help but pace restlessly around them, searching for the perfect viewing angle, frustrated that the images remain always out of focus, sometimes disappearing entirely. Some even prompt a physical response of a different, more powerful kind, a sort of giddiness or vertigo that makes looking at them at once uncomfortable and rather thrilling - feelings familiar, one imagines, to those felt by a builderer mid-climb.

Add to this photographs of more modernist homes glimpsed as a trespasser might see them, through dense foliage, and architectural reliefs of sinister doorless sci-fi structures looming from the surface of barren landscapes, and Hartley’s dissatisfaction with the standard understanding of the built environment becomes plain. And his attitude is infectious. On leaving the gallery, the buildings on Market Street have changed, becoming more than places to enter or admire, their features now a challenge to explore.

This review was first published in The Herald in August, 2007.

On leaving the National Gallery Complex on The Mound, you could be forgiven for thinking that this show’s rather grand subtitle - A Celebration of Life… and Death - is a misprint. It really ought to read A Celebration of Death… and Death, and Yet More Death.

Of course, much of Warhol’s work is explicitly concerned with death - the Death and Disaster series, the skull paintings, the Marylins made in the wake of the star’s demise, the Jackie Kennedy screen-prints that show her grieving for her assassinated husband - but here, that morbid streak is infectious, colouring works that are generally taken to be celebrations of life, chock full of optimism.

Take the Brillo boxes that open the show. Elsewhere, these replications of the ordinary can only be read as happy Pop evocations of democratic American sameness - ‘All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good’, as Warhol himself had it - but here mass production becomes analogous to the Cold War threat of mass death evoked in the late monochrome painting Map Of Eastern USSR Missile Bases, the repeated threat of a Pistol screen-print or the grim potential for death upon death of an empty electric chair. And, too, Warhol’s studied absence as an artist in his development of Duchamp’s readymades (unlike Fountain, which is a urinal upended, renamed and signed, the Brillo boxes are simply recreated, handmade readymades) is no longer a jolly, winking invitation to elevate the everday, but nothing less than an artistic suicide.

This might seem a wilful, even tenuous reversal of Warhol’s stated intent and long-accepted critical interpretation. If so, this show is to blame, thanks to a didactic tendency to divide Warhol’s legacy in two, pitting life against death to an extent that forces one to question the truth of that division.

For example, the catalogue essay insists that there is an optimistic twist to the skull paintings - which have an overwhelming, immersive room to themselves - since each skull casts a shadow in the shape of a baby’s head. If this is true (and, to be honest, it seems a bit of a stretch) the shadow baby is a glum little thing. Not a symbol of rebirth, but an acknowledgement that, from the moment of birth, we’re all hurtling towards the grave. And their irrepressibly jolly colour-schemes are no sign of acceptance, but a grim joke at life’s expense, just like Self-Portrait With Skull: platinum wig aside, it’s hard to see the difference between the man and the memento mori.

Even the Paintings For Children, hung low against fish wallpaper here, as they were when first exhibited in 1983 at a Zurich gallery, are deadly. Warhol did not paint animals or people for children, but clockwork toys; lifeless things with rictus grins, condemned to death each time their mechanisms wind down.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. One room is given over to Silver Clouds, an installation of reflective, helium-filled pillows, and, on my visit, full of toddlers gleefully ignoring the notice to interact ‘gently’ with the exhibit. Then, in the lower galleries, we are treated to a selection of Warhol’s early illustration work. There are glorious drawings of shoes and handbags using the ‘blotted-line’ technique that prefigures his later use of screen-printing, and line drawings of beautiful boys smacking their lips, too. But the next room will wipe the smile off your face. It contains vitrines piled high with the contents of Warhol’s boxes, time capsules full of ephemera explicitly destined for posthumous examination. As a record of Warhol’s daily existence these collections of fan letters, playbills and press cuttings are simply fascinating, but as works of art, these boxes must be read as an attempt to stall time, to cheat death.

And, with that thought, the room full of celebrity portraits upstairs is recast. Instead of celebrating beauty and fame, revelling in superficiality, they become another attempt to guard against the future and its inevitable end. So, Debbie Harry is preserved in aspic, not held up for admiration. And, conversely, Truman Capote is shown not as the the absurdly gorgeous, plump and pouting seducer that Warhol fell for in his youth, but sad-eyed and thin-lipped: another skull painting in all but name.

This is a wonderful show, then. Not just because it offers the chance to view works never before seen in Europe, let alone Scotland, and not just because it is beautifully put together, especially when it comes to the recreated installations, but because it will more than likely change the way you think about Warhol and his work, whether you end up agreeing with its central thesis or not. Considering the ubiquity of Warhol’s images, the never-ending stream of retrospectives devoted to his work, and the volumes of popular and academic criticism devoted to his legacy, this is no mean feat.

This review was first published in The Herald in August, 2007.

In the run-up to its tenth anniversary, Ingleby Gallery is playing host to a rather hectic year-long programme of twenty-six installations, each one pairing a contemporary artist with something they have chosen, be it another artist’s work, an object or a concept.

The third installment of this inventive curatorial conceit, and the first of four that coincide with the Edinburgh Art Festival, consists of three works by Rachel Whiteread and Robert Burns’ breakfast table.

At first glance, it’s an odd pairing - what on earth does this curiously low folding table once used by Scotland’s favourite son have to do with the work of Rachel Whiteread? - but the more time one spends with Whiteread’s work and the piece of furniture she has chosen as a counterpoint, the more connections between the object and the art appear.

First, there is the matter of absences. Whiteread’s work is, on a simple level, all about that which is not there. Her sculptures, from the Turner Prize-winning House to Embankment, the 14,000 polythene boxes that filled the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2004, are all solid casts of spaces where something isn’t, so to speak.

Here, to match Burns’ table, Whiteread is showing Cushion, a plaster casting of the interior of the titular object set upon a steel chair frame. It is a sagging, soggy and soft thing, though it is made of a brittle substance, and it is attractive too, almost demanding to be pinched or squeezed, a fact recognised by the rather terse note on the exhibition handout forbidding any such contact.

In this context, sitting beside Whiteread’s transubstantiation, Burns’ little table is an eloquent object, one that tells of a series of absences. The first absence is, of course, Burns himself, but his work is also absent - this is not his writing table, after all - and so, too, are its owners, some of whom are listed on an engraved metal plaque set in the table’s top. That Burns and those who owned the table after him are as absent as is possible, all of them long dead, points to the morbid aspect of Whiteread’s work. This is most obvious in her series of casts of mortuary slabs, but equally present in her casts of domestic interiors, which commemorate the lives lived in them as much as they solidify negative space, and in early works, which had a distinctly nostalgic bent, with casts of the furniture that surrounded her as a child, and the space beneath her bed.

Even the fact that the table can be folded away seems apt: unfolded, it is solid like a Whiteread cast, but when folded it occupies one space, and offers the potential to occupy another, like the space a Whiteread cast describes.

The table might, too, be a meditation on fame, selected as a sort of autobiography by proxy. Unlike her fellow YBAs, Whiteread is famously uncomfortable with the fame her work has brought her, and, given her status, it is not inconceivable that, one day, someone will pay good money for some ephemeral, irrelevant object from Whiteread’s own home or studio. If so, the choice of Burns’ breakfast table can be seen as a pithy, even acid commentary on the essentially ludicrous importance attached to unimportant objects like this one, that bear the patina of celebrity, and are revered by association at the expense of the famous artist’s work.

In short, it seems as if Whiteread is using Burns’ breakfast table as a sort of critical object, a means to provoke a conversation about her practice as a whole, not just the works shown alongside it.

And so, if there is a problem with this exhibition, it is that Burns’ breakfast table is too eloquent and too loud, its silent commentary on Whiteread’s work threatening to overwhelm the work itself. The pair of works on paper in particular are coloured by the table’s presence. Both consist of photographs of interiors with sections removed, sometimes replaced by pencil lines. In Books, a teetering pile of volumes rests on a chair, while Open Door shows a door and its frame, the space between them removed. Here, thanks to the table, they feel more like preparatory sketches or new routes to understanding Whiteread’s sculptural work than complete pieces, as if the excised portions of the photographed rooms might exist elsewhere or in the future, as casts made of plaster, resin or concrete.

In the end, this is a remarkable show, much more than the sum of its parts. Just as Whiteread uses a seemingly simple tactic - the casting of objects and spaces - to make works that are, more often than not, awe-inspiring, so this quiet little collection speaks volumes.

This review was first published in The Herald on August 3rd, 2007.

A visit to the Changing Room always feels like a special treat.

This might be down its setting - the gallery is tucked away in a shopping arcade, rather than huddled together with other spaces in an artsy ghetto, or standing aloof on a grubby side-street awaiting impending gentrification - or the layout, which has visitors clamber up a dimly-lit stairwell before entering the bright, light-filled exhibition hall. More than these accidents of geography and design, though, it is the Changing Room’s consistent and unerring knack over the last decade for mounting thought-provoking group shows that prompts such a sense of anticipation.

And, with Tender Scene, they have done it again, presenting works by Fiona Jardine, Alex Pollard, Clare Stephenson and Gregor Wright that fizz with unexpected connections.

Pollard - who as well as exhibiting curated the show, billed as a ‘collaborative installation’ - dominates the proceedings. Building on Black Marks, his recent solo show at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice gallery, Pollard continues to mine a rich seam of thematic concerns, centring on the seedy glamour the New Romantic movement, with nods to the Pierrot clown of the Commedia dell’Arte, and to jesters, clowns and fools in general. While Black Marks was a rather overwhelming installation, with a batch of three foot wide bronze medallions and a huge wall drawing looming over the huge number of paintings on show, the trio of new works here have a quieter, more meditative air about them, as if, freed from the pressures of a major solo outing, Pollard has relaxed into this still-new strand of his practice.

These works, like all Pollard’s recent output, are monochrome, with a deliberately limited palette ranging from deep black to dark grey. Comet shows a tangle of snapped lipsticks, wonky eyebrow pencils and heavily distorted lines and numbers, only just recognisable as bar codes, with an overlapping set of forms that might be the trail of the titular heavenly body, or the hairspray-stiff fringe of a New Romantic. Jester is a faceless entertainer making himself up with the gooey contents of a make-up bag, while Grey Argot is Pollard in self-referential mode, presenting an amorphous blob of a cartoon speech balloon made of more sticky lippy that might almost serve as a painted manifesto for his current work.

Fiona Jardine’s contribution, They Became What They Beheld, runs alongside Pollard’s fascination with masks and make-up. A pair of photographs show a figure seated on a plinth, his two-piece suit protected by a paper boiler suit. In both images, the face is obscured by a bulbous spherical helmet, bearing a triangle in one photograph, a star in the other, a sinister update to the sock and buskin masks of classical theatre.

Clare Stephenson is concerned with theatre, artifice and disguise too. Miss Verily-Existant and Miss Quite-Transcendant are, a note informs us, a pair of ‘existential drag queens’. They star in two drawings, both clad in ruched metallic robes based on repeated forms borrowed from medieval church sculptures, both with sinister porcelain doll faces and awkwardly animated limbs, both performing beside mysterious wooden structures of unguessable purpose.

And then there’s Gregor Wright, who knocks the whole show off-balance, like a past-tipsy gatecrasher stumbling uninvited into a private party. An untitled work shows what appears to be a thermos flask rendered in disconcertingly fleshy pink. Every Extend Extra sees a set of cubic forms piled up like refugees from a game of Tetris gone rotten, while Caffeine is a cartoon portrait of a grinning little chap, steam billowing from his head. In the centre of the room sits Metamorph, an awkward, lumpy construction jury-rigged together from off-cuts of Styrofoam and wood panels, a low-rent Transformer robot caught in the act of shifting from man to machine.

Wright is a peculiar proposition at the best of times. His unfinished aesthetic and deliberately slapdash methods are hugely attractive, not to mention good fun, and the studied incompleteness of his work offers a winking challenge to the viewer, who is invited to finish off what Wright has started. Here, surrounded as he is by a trio of artists who are, if not party members, then at least fellow travellers, bound together further by subtle alterations to the gallery space - the floor is striped like an Everton mint, and patches of wall are covered in dazzle ship-like camoflague patterns - he sticks out like a sore thumb.

And yet these blowsy works fit with the quieter, more considered pieces around them, acting as grist to the mill, or sand in the Vaseline. Without Wright, Tender Scene might have been a rather ordinary group outing, a decent-but-uninspiring look at a group of artistic allies. With him, the lines connecting Jardine, Pollard and Stephenson are drawn all the more clearly.

This review was first published in The Herald in July, 2007.

Walking and Marking begins at the beginning, with A Line Made By Walking, a piece made in 1967. The line in question is of trampled grass. This simple gesture might not have the capacity to shock that it must have had at the tail end of the 60s, but it remains hugely eloquent, and, in a sense, serves to encapsulate Long’s practice - in the imprint left by one short walk, he makes the natural world both his subject and his material, questions the nature of sculpture, pits absence against presence and, as the line stretches off towards the horizon, claims the act of walking, of movement in a landscape as his medium.

And, since 1967, Long hasn’t stopped walking, devising different means to record his movements.

The most striking works build on that first line by leaving marks, quiet monuments to a departed presence. A Circle In Ireland shows a ring of rocks arranged on jagged ground, Manang Circle situates another circle or stones, this time in Nepal, overlooking a settlement. A diptych, Stones On Stones, shows evidence of Long adding stones to the tops of cairns in Norway. Stone Line, meanwhile, brings the landscape into the gallery, with thick, irregular fingers of stone forced into unnatural linear regularity.

As well as rearranging and transporting natural elements, Long uses them to create. A series of River Avon Mud Drawings are made by dipping paper in mud from the river near his home, another deceptively simple act that offers breathtaking results - each drawing bears evidence of microscopic tidal patterns, that together suggest aerial views an impossibly dense, vast delta.

There are, too, more amorphous works, offering tangential evidence of Long’s walking, consisting of wall texts or annotated maps. And, once again, these short statements are richly layered. When Long tells us that he has been ‘marking time with muddy footprints’ he evokes movement, landscape, and his temporary, impermanent place in it. Tide Walk is described as ‘a walk of two and a half tides relative to the walker’, a factual statement that nonetheless turns conventional methods of marking out both time and space upside down.

When it comes to these activities - words like ‘action’ or ‘performance’ are, perhaps, too loaded - Long also raises a thorny question: is the work to be found with Long, as he walks, or in the photographs and text mounted in a gallery that document those works? In his essay ‘Notes on Works’, Long identifies his texts as ‘a description, or story, of a work in the landscape’ but these brief statements seem to be much more than a record. Like arch-conceptualist Lawrence Weiner, who boiled away the physical manifestations of his sculptures, presenting them instead as gnomic statements of intent, there is a sense that when Long tells us, sometimes in the present tense, about a journey he is not only recounting an event from his past, but also offering the possibility that we too might make such a journey, or even, more simply, that such journeys are possible.

It is this open-ended potentiality found in the text and photographs that marks out Long’s best work from the weaker, often more conventionally sculptural pieces on show. For an untitled work from 2004, Long has marked a section of a tree trunk with fingerprints of china clay, and there is a series of pieces in which similar marks are applied to Berber tent-pegs, or a found disc of scrap metal. The paintings made by casting diluted mud from the Firth of Forth onto the walls of the gallery show this divide, too. The great uncontrolled geysers of Throwing Muddy Water contrast with the hand-made sworls and defined shape of Firth Of Forth Mud Arc, and the latter seems lacking in comparison. Long is also sometimes guilty of offering too much information, as in Silbury Hill, which shows a spiral sculpture the same length as a walk down the hill in a straight line, but muddies the waters of this transformation of one structure into another by repeating a legend attached to Silbury.

In other words, when it comes to Long’s presence in his work, he either passes through it, as he passes through the landscape in its making, or stands stock still, asserting himself. And, the more evidence there is of the artist in the work, the less impact it has.

These lesser works don’t mar this retrospective survey of Long’s influential practice, though. In fact, their comparative weakness only strengthens the best pieces found beside them, adding up to a truly remarkable exhibition, one that has the capacity to change the way we understand the environment around us, and, too, the way we understand art itself.

This review was first published in The Herald on July 6th, 2007.

William Eggleston earned the epithet ‘the father of colour photography’ thanks to his groundbreaking 1976 show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It dragged colour photography away from the commercial and advertising worlds and into the gallery, and Eggleston did more than any photographer before him to excise any doubts about the format’s status in a fine art context.

Three decades on, such doubts seem rather absurd, but it only takes a few moments in the company of his images to understand why they had such an impact.

Step into the light-filled galleries at Inverlieth House, and these never-before-seen prints offer an immediate, sometimes shocking blast of pure colour - the hot, flat blue skies of Eggleston’s native Southern States, and the lurid palette of mid-70s fashion - and a wealth of subtler tones, especially of his subjects’ skin, from sallow off-whites to deep browns.

Step closer, and there’s another shock to be found in quality of the prints, and in Eggleston’s skill with the camera. Every pore on a face is visible, as is every strand of hair on a head, and, thanks in part to subtle tricks with depth of focus, some portraits give a distinctly three-dimensional impression - the image of young black woman in a purple dress, for example, seems about to rise up from the blurred backdrop behind her.

This takes some getting used to. At first, the temptation is to examine every detail, to wonder at the mysteries of technique. But, before long, it becomes clear that Eggleston’s work is profoundly human, above all about everyday people and the places they inhabit.

Once the barrier put in place by the quality of the photographs has been overcome, it is impossible to avoid conjuring up a romantic back-story for Eggleston’s subjects. The faded beauty gazing off into the distance has surely loved and lost, the Johnny Cash-a-like with dandruff in his quiff might well have shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die, and the piggy-eyed president of the Tex Ritter fan-club must be the product of a union between first cousins.

It is more tempting still to wonder about the precise, decisive moment at which Eggleston released the shutter. Thanks to the unwieldy nature of his bulky 5 x 7 camera, a type more usually confined to the photographic studio, Eggleston did not have the luxury of firing off shot after shot to capture these perfect portraits: more often than not his images are the result of a single exposure. And so the half-smile that plays across the face of the girl with too much make-up on, or the defiant stare of the kid, proudly cradling a transistor radio must have been, at least in part, Eggleston’s doing, making these works both portraits and records of a relationship, however brief.

In the end, while this exhibit might lack the blockbusting appeal of Warhol at the National Galleries, or the exhaustive survey of Picasso at the Dean Gallery, it stands alongside those shows as the best the Edinburgh Art Festival has to offer.

This review was first published in The Herald in August, 2007.

Juergen Teller is a slippery customer. In the early 1990s, his work for the style magazines turned fashion photography on its head. Reflecting the haute couture set's adoption of grunge by focussing not on clothes, but on the model, snapping away with a point-and-shoot camera, Teller exchanged the artifice of the high gloss pose for a no less artificial aesthetic of studied nonchalance. Then, effortlessly, the commercial photographer became a fine artist, changing the context in which his work is shown, and his subjects, but not, importantly, his methods.

The result, spread over four rooms of Inverleith House, is no less slippery. Awailable is a survey of sorts, six year's worth of work selected by Teller, it seems, to show the breadth of his practice, which takes in portraits of artists, models, designers and actresses, shots of his children and family, and, in the Nürnberg series, a pseudo-documentary look at the environs of his family home in Bavaria.

Vivienne Westwood appears twice, both images playfully subverting her public image. In Vivienne At Home, the designer appears as the wild-eyed bag lady of tabloid opprobrium, in Boadicea Vivienne, she is the done up as a punk warrior. Similarly, Gisele Bündchen is shown in two lights, first writhing in faux-ecstasy at a fashion shoot, then, in Gisele In My Bath, she undermines any sense of vulnerability with a steely gaze. Along with the wit, there's a good dollop of sentimentality, but again, one suspects Teller is winking as he opens the shutter. Cherub sees Teller's son Ed striking an angelic attitude, Tante Elfriede shows his aunt and her poodle at home, in a style that seems to wilfully misunderstand the legacy of Martin Parr.

There's no question about the status of this work as art (it's in a gallery after all), nor does the photographer's commercial past taint it in any way. Instead, it seems that Teller is self-consciously addressing these uncertainties. His fashion work is like informal portraiture, and his informal portraits seem to be schilling a product, from happy family life to effortless glamour to snowfall in the countryside. Thanks to Westwood's presence, it is hard not to remember Johnny Rotten's ambiguous question at the fag end of the Sex Pistols' career: 'Did you ever get the feeling you've been cheated?'. Just as Rotten was asking himself the same question as his audience, so Teller's work is about his own role, as fashion world rebel or art scene interloper. That awkward status is not as troublesome as Teller might hope, but it is what makes his work if not powerful, then at least intriguing.

It's tempting to attempt a neat segue from Teller's exhibit to the work of Andrew Miller, which fills the lower floors of Inverleith House - they both delight in subverting modes of representation, engage in reconfiguring reality, and force awkward questions on their audience - but, really, they have little in common.

Sixes And Sevens is a set of new works, all completed in the last year. The first, Mirrored Pavilion is a meticulous recreation of a shack Miller spotted while working in Trinidad. It is a mysterious structure - it could be a small dwelling, a store house, even a signal box for some long-abandoned railway - and years of decay have further obscured its purpose. Miller has recreated it twice over, too. First, in Room 1, then again, as a perfect mirror image, in Room 3, an act that, in creating an imagined twin, simultaneously completes the building and raises further questions about its nature, heightened by the addition of mirrors to its frame.

Between these two halves sits another structure, titled Station, again of unknown purpose. Built from the memory of a fleeting encounter, this time in the lane behind Miller's studio, the object might be a desk, or a fixture from a hairdresser's salon, or something that could be put to more sinister ends. Miller also reminds us that he is a sculptor - the Station bears more mirrors, is lacquered in deep black, unlike the original object, and is awkwardly propped up on concrete block.

Outside the gallery, in a Secret Garden boxed in with high hedges, sits another reconstruction, Frame. It is the skeleton of a municipal playground swing, carefully aged with painted streaks of rust.

This last piece is, perhaps, the key to understanding Miller's work. It is immediately evocative, a musing on time and place, but also undeniably sculptural, a formal piece with nods to Modernism.

Miller is not turning the real into art, or revealing the beauty in overlooked objects, he is questioning the nature of reality and of art, dissolving the distinction between the two and, with his careful alterations - the mirrors on Mirrored Pavilion, the lacquer on Station - turning acts of remembering, his and ours, into a series of aesthetic choices.