1.
Best culture 2020
The best photography and architecture of 2020: high camp
to Dungeness
Sean O’Hagan and Oliver Wainwright
Sat 26 Dec 2020 09.00 GMT
Photography
Sean O’Hagan
5
Sunil Gupta: From Here to Eternity
The Photographers Gallery, London, until 21 February
The first British retrospective of Sunil Gupta’s work brings together material from across his long
and varied career, from the scenes of everyday gay life in New York that he chronicled for his
breakthrough series, Christopher Street, in 1976, to 2008’s elaborately constructed and highly
symbolic vignettes, The New Pre-Raphaelites. “What does it mean to be a gay Indian man?” he
Contribute
News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle

2.
has said of his photography. “This is the question that follows me around everywhere I go.” Read
more.
4
Photoworks festival 2020
Various venues, Brighton
In the most challenging of times, Photoworks managed to host various exhibitions, online
events and, most imaginatively, a Festival in a Box – a limited edition publication/artwork that
could be installed on a wall “at home, in your office, in a gallery, in your classroom or with your
community”. Featuring work by Pixy Liao, Alix Marie, Ronan Mckenzie and a host of other
artists, it was perhaps the most imaginative response to the constrictions of the pandemic.
Deftly curated … Northumbrian Miner at His Evening Meal, 1937, part of an exhibition at Hepworth Wakefield. Photograph: © Bill Brandt/Bill
Brandt Archive Ltd. Photo: Yale Center for British Art
3
Bill Brandt Henry Moore
Hepworth Wakefield, now closed
A deftly curated show that explored the overlapping creative journeys of a photographer and
sculptor who first crossed paths when they both were commissioned to create images of
civilians sheltering in the London Underground during the blitz. Moore’s artful photographs of
his sculptures were a surprise, while his up-close drawings of Stonehenge contrasted
dramatically with Brandt’s more haunting images of the standing stones rising up from snow-

3.
covered fields. Another England reflected through the eyes of two brilliantly perceptive postwar
artists. Read the full review.
2
Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography
Barbican, London, now closed
A vast, ambitious and timely group show that featured more than 300 works from 50 artists,
including Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar, Annette Messager, Catherine Opie and Karlheinz
Weinberger, Masculinities explored the ways in which maleness is represented, coded and
challenged through the medium of photography. Highlights included Karen Knorr’s acutely
perceptive series, Gentlemen, which explores male privilege and entitlement through the prism
of private male clubs in Mayfair, and Jeremy Deller’s film about wrestler Adrian Street, a study of
a peculiarly English form of theatrical high camp. Read the full review.
1
Zanele Muholi
Tate Modern, London, until 31 May
A casualty of England’s second Covid lockdown, this important survey show has now been
extended. It surveys the work of one of the most dynamic and politically engaged
photographers and activists working today, through her extraordinary documentation of the
lives of South Africa’s black lesbian, gay, trans, queer and intersex communities. Central to the
show is the epic series Faces and Phases, which merges striking portraits with moving
testimonies from people threatened daily by violence and discrimination. Read the full review.
Architecture
Oliver Wainwright
5
Space Popular
Bringing a splash of colour to what has otherwise been a dull, grey year, the Swedish-Spanish
architectural duo of Space Popular injected a bolt of supercharged visual joy into 2020. An
exhibition at the RIBA on the history of style was sadly cut short, but was then brilliantly
reinvented as an immersive virtual environment, where you could browse the show online as a
computer game avatar. Meanwhile, the pair demonstrated their skills beyond the virtual with
the completion of a dazzling new house in Spain that saw wafer-thin terracotta tile vaults
suspended inside a bright-green steel frame. We’re in for a treat when they start to build big.
Read more.
4
Stealing from the Saracens by Diana Darke
There is a dark side to social media that sees rightwing nationalist groups use images of
traditional western architecture to bolster their vision of a “pure” European cultural identity.
This book takes an eloquent sledgehammer to such dog-whistle propaganda, revealing that
everything from Notre-Dame cathedral to the Houses of Parliament has its roots in the Middle