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Curated by the Ben Uri Gallery and Museum and the Centre for British Photography, Uncharted Streets: Photographers from the Hyman Collection presents five photographers who were born outside the UK but have been central to the development of photography in Britain over the last century. The title alludes to both William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and T. S. Elliot’s The Wasteland but inverts their charter’d streets to suggest the role of those from outside in charting new territories, providing new perspectives and taking British photography in new directions.

The exhibition takes as its starting point the pioneering work of Kurt Hutton (b. Germany 1893) and Bill Brandt (b. Germany, 1904). Each photographer played a pivotal role in bringing European ideas into British culture and stimulated British photographic publications such as Lilliput and Picture Post magazine. It then spotlights the work of Edith Tudor-Hart (b. Vienna, 1908) who used photography as a vehicle for social change. The exhibition also showcases two of the most eminent figures in contemporary British photography: Charlie Phillips (b, Jamaica, 1944) is one of the most celebrated documenters of the African-Caribbean community in London, and Markéta Luskačová (b. Czechoslovakia, 1944), whose work has been so influential to British photography since the early 1970s.

This is a very rare opportunity to see vintage prints by these five photographers.

We ask for £5 donation on entry to this educational exhibition towards the costs, from all who can afford.

The rise of Nazism and chaos of global warfare in the 1930s and 1940s drove over 50 art dealers, largely but not exclusively Jewish, from Continental Europe to seek refuge in Britain. Settling in London, they infiltrated existing British art networks and formed an important part of the artistic émigré network, both working in existing galleries and founding new ones. This exhibition, which offers an episodic rather than a comprehensive history, will tell some of the stories of individual art dealers, the artists they promoted, and the spaces they created for artistic exchange and dissemination, as well as reflecting on how their own experience of forced migration affected their professional decisions and choices.