WEX Photographic Exhibition Review

Wex photographic celebrates the fourth year of its #wexmondays twitter competition with a pop-up exhibition of winners and runners up in the old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane. This year the weekly competition to find the best British photograph of the past 7 days received a bumper crop of 17,000 entries. The result is a varied exhibition of portraits, landscapes, architecture, nature and animal photography, and macro (super close-up).

While the photographs can be found on twitter, a dedicated exhibition is a different experience for a couple of reasons. First, a dedicated and curated space where you can focus on the winning entries really allows you to have a proper look at the work. Second, the photos have been printed in high resolution on aluminium plate- in these days of super-high resolution screens it can be easy to assume this will make a difference, but it really does. A back-lit screen does not give the same quality of light as that reflected off the plates, which give the photographs a creamy, almost oil-paint like luster.

This years winner was Neil Burnell (with four winning entries! Our favorite is below), who started participating in #wexmondays 2016. Specializing in landscapes and macros, his entries can be seen towards the front of the gallery and vary in scale and topic from close ups of jewel-like tiny spiders to vistas of the milky way over the sea.

This isn’t a big exhibition- it’s a single, large room and depending on your level of interest in photography it could take a few minutes (if you’re skimming for favorites) to an hour to go around (if you’re the sort to stare at a photo for a good couple of minutes). Given the location it’s well worth building in a trip if you are going vintage shopping in Brick Lane or going to the Whitechapel Gallery- and it’s also just a short walk from Spitalfields.