Gary Fabian Miller @ Ingleby Gallery

Admittedly some people love them, but this writer finds nothing more tedious than a room full of photographs. So it was with some trepidation that I stepped through the glass doors of the sleek Ingleby Gallery to check out their current exhibition of Gary Fabian Miller’s photographs.

It came as a pleasant surprise when I glanced around the walls and discovered not a single badly posed group scene or brooding black and white portrait. You see, Miller specialises in ‘cameraless photography’, experimenting with light-sensitive paper and colour. So instead the pristine gallery walls are punctuated with blocks of bold colour in varying sizes – it is the intensity of colour and contrast that is intriguing here. Deep-sea blues bounce off insipid yellows and pulsating purples. Reds and pinks shimmer and merge into a hypnotising blur. All very exciting, I think you will agree.

However, there are about thirty of these colour explosions positioned around the gallery, and after the fifteenth Blue in Blue or Orange Aqua, it all becomes a little repetitive. The instant gratification of the high gloss finish and scientific technique fades, revealing a series of somewhat vapid and expressionless images that require more than a five figure price-tag to remain captivating. All the works are, of course, for sale and the gallery assistants will be happy to relieve you of that spare £40,000 that has been burning a hole in your back pocket. [Ben Bennett]