**LATEST NEWS** Exhibition at the V&A Museum of Childhood, London 2012/2013

The Lyrical & The Ordinary involves four photographers who explore themes around the domestic family environment. Their photographs vary in style and content, but at the core of each individuals work are personal stories. It is these stories that have brought them together.

Family life in the work of these photographers involves the familiar and the strange, bringing the past into the present. Their photographs deal with worry, loss and absence, but also show humour, lightness and affection.

Emer Gillespie and Jacqueline McCullough emphasise in different ways the performed and constructed character of photography as a form of documentary concerned with complex family relationships. The work of Peter Gates and Tanya Clarke owe as much to the aesthetics of the photograph as art, as to the idea of the family album as archive.

The Lyrical & The Ordinary offers new approaches to photography as a means of documenting and exploring some of the complexities of contemporary family life.