'strolling rather than scrolling' Commonplace, the modernist, Manchester

The middle-aged among you will be familiar with Pillows & Prayers. For those still in the first flush of youth, an explanation may be in order.

In its original manifestation, Pillows & Prayers was an LP selling for the unheard of price of 99p. Like a pop advent calendar, it opened a series of windows into the songs of the delightfully varied roster of recording artists signed according to the caprices of the Cherry Red record label. If, for example, you were left unmoved by the magnificent Quentin Crisp’s theatrically enunciated lament at pop music’s smothering of conversation, then you could be assured that Tracey Thorn would be along in less than three minutes to enrapture you with her precocious melodic assurance. In other words, it was an introduction – an intimation of what might chime with the personality your adolescence was Sellotaping together, like posters covering an exercise book.

Commonplace, the exhibition fleetingly inhabiting the modernist‘s bijou exhibition space, doesn’t even cost 99p, but it serves the same function as Cherry Red’s epochal compilation. Rather than an entrée to pop’s main courses, however, it acts as a taster menu to the photo magazine of the same name, published every two months by the modernist society in cahoots with East London’s Uhm! Publishing.

The pictures on the wall are a selection of photographs from the first five issues. Taken as a whole, they seem broadly representative of what lies within their pages. Unassuming, perhaps, at first glance, a more considered perusal reveals a greater richness. Intended as an antidote to the onward press of the century’s clamour for attention, the images mark time by the pace of strolling, rather than scrolling.

In doing so, they bring to the fore the kind of places that find their existence just below the threshold of awareness, showcasing the architecture of the mundane. Often, too, they capture buildings on the cusp of becoming the past, like Stephen Marland’s framing of a Blackpool shop front, the ‘P’ of its signage waving as it drowns; his snapshot as eloquent as any short story. It’s hard to imagine the ramshackle emporium with shutters raised or doors unboarded. More poignantly, Kilsyth’s Broch Bar, pictured here resplendent with a mural of a pigeon – surely the spirit animal of the dispossessed – closed its doors for the final time last year, despite a more apparent devotion to its upkeep.

Other edifices remain going concerns, like faded postcards still on display in weathered seaside racks. Stefano Samà pictures Brighton’s National Spiritualist Church, looking like something a Communist regime might have grudgingly conceded to the faithful of Eastern Europe, its doors still open to its East Sussex congregation, while Glasgow’s flat-roofed Laurieston Bar – if you ignore the tell-tale wheelie bins shunted onto its pavements – could have slipped through time from the nicotine interiors of the 1970s.

The magazine, somewhat in the spirit of Café Royal’s commitment to reasonably-priced documentary photography, is conveniently themed, its respective issues affording a still more leisurely look at, for instance, Blackpool behind its painted smile or High Street banks from the days of the chequebook. There’s a Tracey Thorn among them for every taste. Or even a Quentin Crisp.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: copyright Matt Dransfield