Through a lens darkly

In The Dark

These days, you could be forgiven for thinking anyone can pick up a camera, roll off a few snaps of friends or found inanimate objects, claim they are documenting 'the real', bung it in a gallery and call it art. So it's pleasing to find names we know from other spheres producing photography which looks like something they were born to do.

Helena Christensen is one and, perhaps obviously, film-maker Mike Figgis, whose digital photography forms this exhibition, is another.

Unsurprisingly, for a director whose film work ranges from Leaving Las Vegas to Timecode, it's an eclectic exhibition, encompassing personal shots of his mother and friends, closeups of plants and rusting objects, and polarised, treated film stills. But overarching everything is his focus on the female nude, almost without exception photographed with sumptuous intimacy, whether saturated in colour, dripping like a Visconti, or in smooth monochrome, with all the glamour of film noir femmes fatales.

True, it would be difficult to take a bad picture of his muses, but there's an intimacy here that cannot be faked, and which shines through even before you read Figgis's handwritten notes on each picture's simple cardboard frame.