Phil Penman returns to COOPH with From Port to Pavement, a black-and-white record of a spring spent crossing Europe with a Leica and no fixed plan. From April through June, the British-born, New York-based photographer traveled from the Atlantic coast of Porto to Berlin, stopping for exhibitions and festivals and spending long hours on foot.
The route began in Porto, where he opened an exhibition at the Leica Gallery Porto. It then ran through Madrid, on to Dublin for the city's annual photography festivals, and to London. In Italy he hosted a second Leica exhibition in Milan before heading south to Naples and Rome, then on to Zurich and finally Berlin.
In this series, Phil looks for the lone figure inside the architecture. A gull keeps watch from an iron bridge as walkers fade into fog. A woman waits on a sunlit platform beneath a vast station roof, and her reflection repeats in the side of a train. Beside Milan's Gothic spires, a chain of workers passes a steel truss hand to hand up a scaffold. In a baroque sacristy, a rack of white robes stands alone on a checkerboard floor. Elsewhere, a line of ballerinas holds a pose on the cobblestones while a girl on a bicycle looks on, and at Madrid's Rastro flea market a man ducks into a low doorway surrounded by leaning paintings.
Across the series, Phil sets the monumental beside the incidental, and faith, labor, and ritual turn up in ordinary streets. For him, the work always comes back to the people met along the way and the stories carried home.
