Ladies in Red
Ladies in Red is part of a body of work, Documents of British Women.
In 1982 whilst reviewing a group show John X Berger wrote:- "Keith Gray's 'Documents of British Women' also present evidence, which the photographs (the title is in the plural; each photograph is a document) profess. Their subjects are British less by the location being Nottingham than by their wearing of the nation's colours; the Jubilee did not long precede these exposures. These documents are never wholly comparable, however efficiently sampling they are (only one roll of film per colour). The framing, and therefore our frame of reference, is only relatively fixed, roughly established in the instance of the red coats over the first three shots. A forensic or taxonomic practice is here, quoted and misquoted at once. The photographer's shadow is the sign of authorship and/or an inevitable product of conforming to a Kodak manual. These documents are as saturated and lascivious in tendency as they are in colour and co-operative voyeurism. Their edges are similarly blurred: the competition between figure and ground is reflected in the passage from colour to colour. The last blue document is virtually white, as the coloured item presented shifts from "coat" to "top". These, and other anomalies (the woman in the last, extra picture shows the whole national spectrum, as had the twenty-second, but is also personally known to the photographer) complicate these compelling documents and their reading. Keith Gray has been sufficiently conceptual and intentionally slipshod."
