IN SOCCER WONDERLAND > 1990-94

…In Soccer Wonderland explores a subject from the domain of popular culture, presented not as a series of classically composed images but more like disparate photographs from a personal scrapbook.

What has long been considered sacrosanct - the distinction between the public and private domains of photography - are eroded in this exhibition, with appropriated images such as family snapshots and press prints presented alongside the photographer’s own work. And for those who cannot recognise Julian via the self-portraits in the show, his work is best characterised  by its sheer scale and visual audacity. Seldom has an exhibition been framed in such a variety of materials, colours and forms - from mud and grass through to an array of football annuals. If nothing else, it is difficult to miss the point that this exhibition proclaims the generous and democratic nature of both the medium of photography and the sport of football at the end of the twentieth century.

Julian Germain belongs to a generation of British photographers who have begun to question many of the assumptions of documentary practice, a genre long considered to be the ‘backbone’ of British photography. It’s prescriptive approach to subject matter (usually confined to a handful of worthy subjects such as war, poverty and the oppressed) and notions of ‘objectivity’ have been seriously undermined in the last decade. By embracing a range of different ‘author’s’ viewpoints in a variety of media (from large black and white prints to tiny snapshots in brash colour) Germain offers his audience a multi-layered view of the subject of football. Like a good piece of drama, we are encouraged to consider the subject from a range of different perspectives - we can, for example, choose at any one time to empathise with the young football fan obsessed with her hero or that of the ‘football widow’ immortalised in her red and white painted garden.

Brett Rogers, Extract from Foreword to In Soccer Wonderland Exhibition Catalogue, British Council Visual Arts, 1995