Report from London.

There were quite a large number of American photographers and video artists showing in London this autumn - perhaps a development that is mirroring the recent influx of British painters to New York? Painters and photographers, whatever their nationality, once sought to capture people and nature: one was amazed by the light, the frozen moment and the artist's eye. Just as art has moved from what I heard a curator call "wall-based" (meaning paintings), to installations and conceptual works, photography has done the same by critiquing and moving beyond the concerns that also used to occupy painting.

This observation is easily applied to Sherrie Levine's work. Along the walls of the South London Gallery - a beautiful building in a relatively poor, unfashionable area of southeast London, built in 1898 for the "express purpose of bringing the best of contemporary art to working people" - in neat rows hang her 8 [inches] x 10 [inches] black and white photographs from 1993-96 of reproductions of famous nineteenth-century paintings in 1950s art history books. All the images are the same size and are arranged in series by artist. The photographs reveal the paintings' formal structures in a way that is usually superficially obscured by each artists' concern with color. When looking at a Edgar Degas ballet pastel, the texture and hues of the medium dominate, so it was a surprise to notice instead the dancers' expressions and the complex space in the work. The same could not be said of the photographs of the Paul Cezanne still-lifes in which the paintings seemed to disappear into awkward jumbles of texture and flat, misshapen fruit. On the short walls hang 24 [inches] x 38 [inches] iris prints of Claude Monet's Cathedrals. The images have been put through a computer and the colors analyzed and printed as blocks representing their density. The prints are beautiful because Monet's colors are so subtle and various. As easy as it is to criticize much postmodern work as derivative, Levine's photography forces one to examine the accusation that the only value of postmodernist art comes from the value inherent in the work it appropriates.

In contrast to Levine, the photography of Edwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969) is from another tradition entirely. Blumenfeld was famous for his fashion work at Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. However, the Barbican Gallery's well-constructed show reveals the talent and eye for design in his personal work that made him excel professionally. The influences of Dada and Surrealism combine to make his work political, moving and sensuous. Hitler (1933), an image of Adolf Hitler superimposed with an image of a skull daubed with red at the eyes and mouth, is horrifying, as is The Dictator (1937) - a calf's head perched on the torso of a mannequin draped in the Grecian style. In a female nude from the 1930's there are intimations of Edward Weston's work, and in a 1937 black male nude study, shades of Herb Ritts and Robert Mapplethorpe. Blumenfeld's famous images of nudes draped in wet silk evoke the marble folds of the Victory of Samothrace. In later years, when he retired from fashion work, his struggle with the paradoxes of human nature found expression in many nudes and self-portraits made using solarization and double exposures. These are moving visions of humanity that combine the sensual and the analytical.

At the Lisson Gallery in northwest London, the work of three artists taxed the analytical skills of viewers. Two of the artists, James Casebere and Gaylen Gerber, are American and the third, Pierre Bismuth, is Belgian. Casebere's photographs are breathtaking. Cavernous spaces seem to be deserted and pristine light filters through from barred windows and high apertures; the photographs exude peace, solitude and eerie abandonment. It was only upon looking closely at the last image, Toilets (1995), a row of toilets in a long room, that I realized (with surprise and some disappointment) that these were not "real" spaces. Casebere creates models of these rooms and then lights and photographs them. Perception of real space is undermined. His work neatly questions the function of photography's historic role as truth-teller versus artistic medium. Gerber's perfectly square paintings (1987-1992) and photographs (1995-96) are oblique and opaque. They demand repeated viewing. The silver prints of the sky on a clear day are drawn upon with charcoal, visible almost as shadows or stains, while the beige oil paintings are practically invisible. Transparent images of hands, faces and flowers seem to float on their surfaces. Support, Housing Estate and Classroom: the titles call our attention to the actual supports he is using and perhaps the support that we, and by implication society, do or do not provide. Gerber creates ephemeral landscapes that shift and change; they are entirely dependent on the viewer's perception for their meaning. A limited technique, perhaps.

In the upper level of the gallery is Bismuth's video installation Le Bruit de Son (1996). A white room houses a video machine in one corner and a pair of headphones. The room is silent. On the wall opposite the video machine, typewritten words appear. After putting on the headphones their meaning is given a context. The soundtrack to Michelangelo Antonioni's film, The Passenger (1975), was played to a typist who had never seen it and was asked to transcribe what she heard as she listened. Wearing the headphones, you hear exactly what she heard as well as the simultaneous clicking of the keys as she types. The words exist without the sound, but the soundtrack raises interesting questions of interpretation. We don't know the typist or what she brings to the exercise; the objectivity of interpretation and our own subjectivity come into play.

Another exhibition that focuses on the interplay between sound and video is Tacita Dean's Foley Artist (1996) at the Tate Gallery. A Foley artist is one who creates the sound effects - thunder, wet footsteps, slamming doors, etc. used in films and radio drama. In this age of digital technology, there is something touching about Dean's monitor showing two elderly Foleys at work. A dubbing board covers the back wall, charting the position and duration of all the necessary sounds for two simultaneous stories. The sounds are heard from a large player where the spooling tape is visible. We are able to experience the soundtrack in several different ways that reflect the complex overlapping of the two unfolding dramas. We can watch the Foleys physically making sounds that are the background to the words and actions. Written on the dubbing board, we see and can follow the sounds mapped out, and our minds create a story. If we close our eyes, we hear the soundtrack with the illusion of verisimilitude.

Anthony Aziz and Sammy Cucher are two artists whose photographic manipulation of reality aims to highlight the fin-de-siecle pathos of contemporary society. The show, at the Photographer's Gallery, is called "Unnatural Selection" and though technically accomplished, it seems to be too close to the condition it purports to be criticizing. The first work, Faith, Honor and Beauty (1992-95), consists of larger-than-life color photographs of physically "perfect" naked men and women with their sex organs, nipples and navels digitally removed. They are like the inhabitants of some Stepford village. The work is obviously a commentary on our plastic, hypocritical society, but is even too sanitized to be effective. Another room contains a more sinister still-life series, "Discontinued Now!" (1996). Specially constructed "appliances" (doctored electric razors, syringe casings) are covered in flesh-colored rubber and surgical bandage. They have a prosthetic quality, playing on our natural apprehension of physical damage. The objects are arranged on a gauze-like ground with no discernible horizon, and the muted colors and small scale lend a grotesque, but Morandi-esque appeal. In Dystopia are exhibited eight larger-than-life color photographs of expressionless human faces - all orifices have been digitally reworked to give the appearance of skin growing over them completely. No mouths, eyes or nostrils, just the grim notion of someone born a mutant, unable to eat, speak, see, hear or breathe. The artifice, as with Faith, Honor and Beauty, overwhelms any feelings we might have for these monumental lumps of flesh.

Humanity in all its complexity was quite in evidence at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, which is showing a diverse collection of over 30 artists (Bas Jean Ader, Charlie Ahearn, Kenneth Anger, Charlie Atlas, William Burroughs, Sean Dower, Tracey Emin, Teiji Furahashi, Peter Gidal, Gilbert and George with Philip Haas, Russell Haswell, Susan Hillar, Georgie Hopton, Gary Hume, Michael Joo, Alek Kesheshian, Sean Landers, Hilary Lloyd, Sarah Lucas, Christina Mackie, John Maybury, Tatsuo Miyajima, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Gabriel Orozco, Gerhard Richter, Sean Roe, Richard Serra, Martin Shiel, Stephanie Smith and Edward Stewart, Sam Taylor-Wood, Baillie Walsh, Gillian Wearing, Jane and Louise Wilson, Cerith Wyn-Evans and others) representing film and video of the past 30 years. Of the four videos I was able to view, one of a set of hourly groupings spread throughout the day, the first and most visually interesting was a self-portrait by Leigh Bowery, from a series that he performed at d'Offay in 1988. Bowery appears four times in four different costumes and make-up. He is fairly static on screen, lounging on a divan. His clothing is outlandish, beautifully tailored, baroque and futuristic, as is his make-up. Bowery's persona is well-known in London and though it was like watching an exceptionally creative fashion show modeled by a large, bald man, his presence gave the performance a sublime quality. The final video, Joseph Beuys's Eurasian Staff (1968), was compelling. The pace was slow and the actions were complex. Beuys moved several large staves around a narrow white room, squashed small quantities of lard between his calf and the back of his knee and generally created a meditative, otherworldly atmosphere. His dignity and solemnity gave these movements a feeling of ritualistic importance.

Chris Burden also documents ritual carefully. His exhibition is not about photography so much as the necessary role it plays in his performances. London Projects is showing a selection of his work from the 1970s: violent, masochistic and usually dangerous stunts. Some of the photographs are quite beautiful - Icarus (April 13, 1973, at 6pm) and Doorway to Heaven (November 15, 1973, at 6pm) - and capture Burden as blank canvas: a body that his brain requires to make its imaginings visible. Others, like TV Hijack (February 9, 1972), are meaningless unless one knows the context of the event, i.e. reads the captions. Burden's work has unusual power because it documents a man who seems completely unafraid of pain or censure. Many of the photos show him with staring eyes, slack-jawed, as though he's been placed on a cliff-edge but is unafraid of the long fall to the bottom.

JENNIFER GRIGG is an American poet and freelance writer who lives in London.