History
Open Eye Gallery opened its doors to the public for the first time at the former Grapes Hotel Public Bar on the corner of Whitechapel and Hood Street, central Liverpool in September 1977. It opened with the aid of grant funding from the Arts Council of England and Merseyside Arts.
The gallery was the latest manifestation of the already flourishing Merseyside Visual Communications Unit (MVCU), set-up in 1973 with a mission to "make more people aware of the many positive ways in which film, photography, video and sound recording can be used in a social, cultural and educative context."
By the autumn of 1976, MVCU had succeeded in attracting grant aid from a number of regional and national sources, allowing it to secure the Grapes Hotel as its first permanent premises. Initially the building housed film and video editing rooms, a sound studio, darkrooms and screening facilities. A year later Open Eye Photography Gallery was completed.
The gallery exhibited national touring shows by established photographers such as William Klein and Tony Ray Jones as well as regular showcases of new work by up-and-coming photographers based in the region, including Tom Wood and Martin Parr. Over the next few years the gallery garnered a solid regional reputation as an outlet for new photographic talent, whilst also being nationally recognised in photography circles as one of the medium's leading public exponents. The gallery's national profile was bolstered by the short-lived but highly-regarded Open Eye magazine, which was published from January 1979 to December 1981.
In 1980 the gallery began to build an archive of photographs, on an ad hoc basis, collecting prints by both established and emerging photographers through the gallery's exhibition programme. Soon the gallery became the focal point of the building and the organisation, and in 1982 the organisation changed it's trading name from MVCU to Open Eye Ltd.
By the late 1980s, however, the unity and direction of the organisation as a whole was being questioned by each of the now more distinctly separate parts. After a devastating fire and a series of floods, the Whitechapel premises fell into total disrepair and the idea of Open Eye Ltd splitting into separate entities was discussed.
In 1989, Open Eye Ltd, the Women's Independent Cinema House (WICH) and Community Productions Merseyside (CPM) formed an umbrella organisation, the Communications Arts trust (CAT), with the intention of acquiring a sub-lease on No 110-112 Bold Street to house the many media organisations based in the city. Although funding was sourced to undertake initial development work on the building, in particular the creation of a new gallery space, within 12 months CAT had split internally.
In 1990, Open Eye Ltd itself agreed to split into separate organisations with the gallery retaining its original name and acquiring the new Bold Street premises. However just two years later in 1992, the premises' landlords went into liquidation. By the summer of 1994 their entire holdings had been sold by receivers. In June 1995, the then Director left the organisation and Open Eye Gallery, unable to sustain the commercial rent levels set by the new landlords, vacated the building to operate from temporary office accommodation in the developing Concert Square area of the city centre.
In November 1996, after a period of transition at all levels of the organisation, Open Eye re-launched itself in its current location, an architect-designed National Lottery funded exhibition space in Wood Street, Liverpool 1.
Photographers whose work has been exhibited at the Open Eye since 1977 include: Martin Parr, Mari Mahr, Joel Meyerowitz, Tom Wood, Dolores Marat, Donovan Wylie, Fay Godwin, Simon Norfolk, William Klein, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, Market Luskacova, Bruce Gilden, Sebastiao Salgado, Allan Sekula, Bert Hardy, E Chambre Hardman and many, many more.
