Richard Avedon, William Casby, born in slavery, Algiers, Louisiana, March 24, 1963. Courtesy The Richard Avedon Foundation(1963) © The Richard Avedon Foundation

Richard Moss takes a look at the opening exhibition in this year’s Brighton Photo Biennial. Nothing Personal runs at Brighton Museum and Art gallery until January 7 2007.

The curtain raiser to the Brighton Photo Biennial opened at Brighton Museum and Art gallery on October 6 and is a fitting centrepiece to Europe’s biggest photo biennial.

Nothing Personal is a fascinating grouping of late 20th century American photographers – featuring works by Richard Avedon, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Paul Fusco, Richard Misrach and Andy Warhol – but takes its name and central focus from the eponymously titled book by photographer Evans and writer James Baldwin.

Paul Fusco RFK Funeral Train (1968). Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos

When it was published in 1963, Nothing Personal offered a bleak vision of modern America and, like the book, the exhibition uses juxtaposition and polarity to reveal the schism in American society of the early 1960s.

Thus we see George Lincoln Rockwell taking a salute from a group of his American Nazi Party cronies next to the wonderfully naked, bearded, Jewish, beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

These are photographs rendered strange, surreal and sometimes comical or threatening by a brutal use of union and contrast.

Paul Fusco, RFK Funeral Train (1968). Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos

In many cases the emerging subtext seems to be about inequality. Nothing Personal was published a year after the assassination of John F Kennedy and was described at the time as a ‘compelling statement about the heart, mind and souls of a troubled nation.’

Importantly, we are told that the Avedon photographs do not illustrate Baldwin’s elegiac text – nor do Baldwin’s words comment on Avendon’s pictures. Rather they are described as ‘two distinct melodies in a musical score’.

Original examples of the book are presented in two long cases that occupy the centre of the gallery, whilst a selection of the powerful black and white pictures occupies the walls. Above them are pull quotes from Baldwin’s text.

Richard Misrach, Dead Animals #1, Nevada, from the series The Pit (1987). Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

“And in such a crisis it becomes indispensable to discover or invent the stranger, the barbarian, who is responsible for our confusion and pain.”

But who or what is the barbarian? A blurred Malcolm X? The giant fist of Joe Louis? The Everly Brothers? The Governor of Alabama? Or Jerome Smith and Isaac Reynolds – two black students still fighting for their rights in 1963?

Complementing these stark portraits are Paul Fusco’s moving photographs of the Bobby Kennedy funeral train. These vivid colour snapshots of a nation traumatised by the death of another Kennedy in 1968 show mourners and bystanders - captured from the funeral train as it passed on its journey from New York to Washington.

Andy Warhol [no title] (1971) Screenprint on paper © Licensed by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc/ARS, New York and DACS London 2006

Groups are shown huddled by the trackside, on mud banks, by ditches and on railway station platforms. Some are waving, others are smoking a cigarette or wiping away a tear – urban and mid America at a time of profound national shock.

There are lonely family groups, in one a solitary girl in a pink bikini is captured starkly against the shingle of the trackside. The motion of the train blurs some of the photographs – others show clearly every face and every frown in vivid Technicolor.

A small family group is shown standing to attention. The father, his trousers half-mast, the son, bare chested and covered in mud, have stopped for a moment to salute the passing cortege. Another shows a poor white family standing in a line respectfully – in rags. Astonishing pictures that seem both surreal and sad.

Walker Evans, Vicksburg battlefield monument, Mississippi. Courtesy Library of Congress

In the next room Richard Misrach’s large scale photographs of dead and rotting cattle occupy two walls. Eyes of the dead cattle are picked out by birds and entrails have been eviscerated by vultures – they make for uneasy but compelling viewing.

Why are these cattle here in the middle of the desert? We don’t know, and the viewer is offered no clues, but they make a neat companion to Andy Warhol’s equally bleak vision of mid 20th century America on the walls opposite.

The series of screen prints show the electric chair, a favourite subject of Warhol, in various grainy states of pixellation. These shocking pictures eerily evoke the finality and brutality of death by the chair.

William Eggleston, Untitled, Memphis, Tennessee, from the Portfolio: William Eggleston's Graceland (1984). Courtesy Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

The Avedon and Baldwin work is bookended in the further room by Walker Evans’ stark black and white portraits of Civil War monuments, which hang next to his ghostly studies of dilapidated plantation houses of the Deep South.

Occupying the same space but in marked contrast, William Egglestone has captured the kitsch world of Elvis Presley’s Graceland to offer another popular theme of the southern states – the good old boy made good. Photographed in 1984 in glorious full-scale colour, these photographs of the Elvis mansion seem at first to be hyper-real - surreal even. But as anyone lucky enough to have visited Graceland knows, on this occasion at least, the camera doesn’t lie.

The three adjoining galleries of Nothing Personal pack in a lot – but these historical images offer a fascinating insight into a period and a vision of USA that in the minds of many has only in part disappeared. There is a lot to see in the 2006 Brighton Biennial, but this exhibition should be at the top of your list.

For full listings and more information about the photo Biennial visit their website www.bpb.org.uk