feeling theory

I’m preparing to teach an undergraduate seminar that I run every year called “What is theory and why should it matter to photographers?” I’ve been reading what bell hooks has to say about teaching theory, and am moved by her suggestion that it can be not just useful, or even transformative, but healing:

I came to theory because I was hurting… I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend – to grasp what was happening around and within me… When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. Indeed, what such experience makes evident is the bond between the two – that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other.

(‘Teaching to Transgress: Education as the practice of freedom,’ pp.59&61.)

Language is power, and what I try to get across to students is that finding words (sometimes necessarily difficult, obscure, complicated words) to articulate the known but unsaid or unacknowledged can be part of a process of positive self-actualizion for photographers (and anyone else) in their practice.

The very first time I taught this particular session, I was dumbfounded when a student responded with genuine tears of relief, there in the seminar, to the suggestion that there was a theoretical (ie. political) discourse that affirmed and articulated the extreme tension he often felt when assigned to photograph people living with poverty, sickness or exclusion. That this ethical unease – the struggle to negotiate responsibly the power relationship between photographer and subject – had a name (broadly, the ‘politics of representation’), was for him a source of freedom. It equipped him to be a better photographer.

At the other end of the spectrum, the last time I taught this seminar, I asked students to talk to me about their experience of reading a (particularly obscure) Roland Barthes essay. One student responded with anger, saying it “made me feel stupid.” Our task as a group was then to discuss how we could negotiate a position in relation to texts like this that would be productive and empowered instead of paralyzing and frustrating (we’re still working on it).

Both of these simple examples show that theory is powerful – emotionally as well as politically. It’s no exaggeration to say that, depending on how it is handled, it can either be part of what hooks calls the ‘practice of freedom,’ or a totally alienating obstacle. Both examples also show me that her determination to resist the false dichotomy between intellect and emotion in the pursuit of knowledge is brave and essential.

the future does not exist

Corin Sworn: Endless Renovation

At Tate Britain, Glasgow-based artist Corin Sworn presents Endless Renovation, an installation inspired by a chance discovery of a collection of slides in a skip outside the artist’s house.

Corin Sworn, Endless Renovation, 2010 © The artist. Photo: Kendall Koppe

This is work got my attention for the usual reason artworks get my attention: because it’s about art itself, and the social uses and re-uses of photography, and (even better) about the fragility of memory. It’s ‘meta-art’, commenting on how and why it does what it does, as well as just doing it. Maybe I feel I’m getting my money’s-worth that way. Never mind that the exhibition was free.

It does this in the most straightforward way, by playing a voice recording of the artist’s thoughts and reflections in the gallery space, as two projectors display the mysterious slides (lots of flowers; badly framed interiors; the workings of strange clocks – the anonymous photographer was apparently a clock-maker). She muses on some of the images (“I’m drawn to this one because it looks like a photograph I might have taken”), and includes excerpts from poetry and writing, which might be pretentious if they weren’t so genuinely thought provoking. Many concern the passing of time, nostalgia and misremembering:

The present is only the top of the past, and the future does not exist (Vladimir Nabokov).

Thinking about this pile of discarded slides before it became an artwork; a mass of disconnected memories that can only be brought to the light and read one by one – it makes sense to consider them as layers of time with a present on the surface, a past underneath and a buried unconscious at the bottom. I think this thinly-veiled reference to the excavation work of psychoanalysis is why the voice recording works better here than it sometimes does in art installations. The artist digs deep, as if on the couch, trying to speak sense and narrative into memories that are not her own, as one person’s discarded memento becomes another’s present preoccupation.

At Tate Britain until 25th September

#911

Was going to post something about the 9/11 anniversary today, but most of what I have to say can be found in here, where I’m quoted by Diane Smyth in her thoughtful and far-reaching article, Decade of War: Photojournalism Post 9/11

British Journal of Photography August 2011

Struth vs Henner: the object stares back

Going to see two photography exhibitions one after another on the same day can be a good idea or a bad idea, depending how they rub up against each other. Mishka Henner’s No Man’s Land at the HotShoe Gallery and Thomas Struth’s retrospective Photographs 1978-2010 at the Whitechapel Gallery seem to be worlds apart, but maybe they’re not.

Italy, Controguerra, Abruzzi 2011, Mishka Henner / Panos

Henner’s work has been a bit of a lightening rod recently for the debate around ‘appropriation art’ that uses the internet as its source and/or subject matter. Responses to the current From Here On group show at Arles (in which his work also features) give a taster of some of the reactionary anxiety going on amongst the photography establishment about this kind of work. Critics as yet seem largely unable to get past the technological novelty to actually comment on the content or the point (there is also a tendency to lump all ‘appropriation/internet art’ together as if it’s doing exactly the same thing; including work about which there is nothing interesting except for the technological novelty itself). See, for example, here.

As the blurb explains, No Man’s Land explores the margins of urban and rural environments in Italy and Spain as experienced by what appear to be women soliciting sex, captured and reframed using Google Street View. On its most basic level, Henner’s work offers the suggestion that there are enough images in the world already, and that it makes sense to look carefully at the ones we already have rather than rushing to make even more.

The curation of this show seems to be an exercise in removing the images as far as possible from their original small-screen context, not just through the use of scale and production values, but also, strikingly, sound. The ambient soundtrack that fills the gallery space (languid birdsong and the occasional passing car), serves, as sound usually does, to introduce the dimension of time – specifically, I think, evoking boredom: these women inevitably spend more of their working day waiting than anything else. It’s very effective.

This work highlights the fact that photography has always been, essentially (though this can be understood in different ways), an exercise in framing the visible world. Henner takes this work of framing to its next logical stage. The fact that he uses someone else’s camera to do so just underlines the point. Photography that sees itself as something other than an exercise in framing often gets dangerously close to a defensive kind of Pictorialism and too far away from photography’s own medium specificity. Internet appropriation art (or ‘aggregation’, as he calls it) is in this sense not just modern, but essentially Modernist.

Self-Portrait, Alte Pinakothek, 2000, Thomas Struth

Struth’s Modernist credentials are of course impeccable. But the gigantic, glossy, formally alluring and very, very expensive prints on show at the Whitechapel seem to belong on the other side of the gulf that has emerged between the internet photographers and the classicists. Here, the photographic print as object reigns supreme (the visitor is reminded more frequently than usual that the pictures are not to be touched, as they are fragile examples of state-of-the-art direct Perspex-based printing and are ‘irreplaceable’).

There are, however, some interesting parallels between the two photographers’ work. The process of framing, selecting and organising masses of visual information is a key one. Another might be summed up as the detached observation of observation. Struth’s series ‘Museum Photographs’ and ‘Audience’ are about encounters with hallowed or ‘iconic’ artworks. He’s interested in the gaze of the spectator. Sometimes the camera is pointed towards the faces of the crowd (as they gape at Michelangelo’s David, for example), and sometimes over their heads or shoulders at the artwork itself, allowing us to see what they see in a manner that feels slightly furtive and voyeuristic, highlighting the fetish quality of art objects that radiate their auras from behind bullet-proof glass or velvet ropes.

Henner’s bored sex workers are also fetish objects. But it’s not the artist who does the fetishising – after all (as the critics have been quick to remark), he didn’t photograph them. He just points us, as coolly as Struth does, towards them, inviting us to peer over the shoulders of their prospective clients, observe their observation, and listen to the birds sing.

Is this an original and possibly profound connection between two disparate and seemingly unconnected bodies of work, or is it just that I saw them both within an hour of each other? Not sure.

No Man’s Land until July 25^th. Thomas Struth Photographs 1978-2010 until July 30^th.

No such thing as new media part 2: the (very) small screen

I’m preparing a talk for this conference at the University of East Anglia tomorrow, and have been thinking more about the technologies that mediate our encounters with photographs.

In a previous post I argued that all contemporary experiences of seeing photographs on screens (I was talking particularly here about ‘multimedia’ slideshows or ‘photofilms’) have their origins in the magic lantern – a simple projection apparatus dating back to the 17^th century. Holiday snapshot slideshows, Powerpoint projections and even cinema all have their roots in this way of seeing. Generally speaking, though, since the beginning of the 21^st Century, still photographs are no longer projected onto walls or big screens, and are not collective viewing experiences. Audiences are much more likely to engage with sequences of photographs on a personal computer or, increasingly, a hand-held smartphone screen. The magic lantern can account historically for some photographic viewing conventions, but maybe the roots of these most contemporary, individual screen experiences lie in other sorts of apparatus.

from left: stereoscope, C19th; iPhone 4, 2011; mutoscope C19th

Like the stereoscope (above): a handheld device used to view specially made stereoscopic photographs (early 3D ‘binocular’ images). This technology was hugely popular and commercially successful in the late Victorian era (for souvenir holiday images, commemoration of important public events, etc.). This is interesting enough as a precursor to modern 3D technology, but it’s also significant because of its handheld design, its smallness and closeness to the body, and the immersive experience it offers. It’s not for the detached observer’s ‘disembodied gaze’ – it’s interactive and intimate.

Another very fashionable 19^th century device marking a fine line between science and entertainment was the mutoscope (above) – an early kind of slide viewing machine using card prints (not transparencies) bound together in a sort of continuous circular book. Like an elaborate ‘flick book’, it could be turned at speed to give the impression of motion. This, too, is an interactive technology (in which, crucially, the viewer controls the speed at which the action unfolds, and can even stop at specific frames if desired) for individual personal use, designed to be handled and manually operated by the body.

It’s irresistible to compare this to the personal computer or smartphone experience. Both are private, individual, hand-held, interactive, controlled by the viewer, and can be used for entertainment, education, and any combination of the two. As with any material history, the story ultimately comes down to capital. And when it comes down to capital, as so often, it really comes down to the commodification of sex. From the Victorian period right through to the 1950s, the most common use for mutoscope technology was coin-operated peepshows. It’s really no great leap from here to iphone-accessible internet porn, is it?

1890-1909 vintage 'clamshell' mutoscope picture viewer. 1940s, Frederic Lewis/Getty Images

Notes for a History of Bad Photography part 3: pixels

From left: 'British Fritzl', The Daily Mail, Nov 2008; Canadian Disruptive Pattern (CADPAT) camouflage; Male Roman mosaic portrait, Bella Regia, Tunisia

Blur is kindof romantic. It’s the sort of bad photography that’s okay – sanctioned by history as part of ‘photography’s own language’. Pixellation also represents a photographic failure, but it means very different things. Associated exclusively with digital technology, pixellation is not part of photography’s history or traditional mythology (though stylistically it could be said to pre-date photography by about 4000 years, in the form of mosaic). Blur in photography usually signifies action and movement, whereas visible pixels always mean one of two things: either the deliberate hiding of information, or the problem of being too close.

Pixels are the units of information that build bitmap images and make them visible, but they’re also used to obscure – re-arranging faces and concealing sensitive details. A great example of this is their use in designs for modern ‘digital’ military camouflage (above) – almost a fantasy extension of pixels’ obscuring properties from digital photography into real-world warfare.

I once read a quote from Susan Meiselas (that I now can’t for the life of me find), talking about the experience of photographing war. She said that war is like a tapestry or a mosaic: the further away from it you stand, the clearer the picture. Get in close and really look though, and all clarity and logic begin to break down.

Being too close is what we mean when we refer to poor quality photographs as ‘low-res’: they can’t stand up to close examination. The bigger you blow up a digital photograph, the more it disintegrates into an impenetrable geometric grid (Thomas Ruff has done some great things with this idea). Sometimes when you’re looking too hard at/for something, your eyes lose focus and vision breaks down. Digital photographs compound this frustration because the closer you look, the less there is to see. You strain your eyes further and further but find nothing – the squares just get maddeningly bigger and more opaque.

“’Intoxication is a number’, according to Charles Baudelaire. Digital optics is indeed a rational metaphor for intoxication, statistical intoxication, that is: a blurring of perception that affects the real as much as the figurative, as though our society were sinking into the darkness of a voluntary blindness, its will to digital power finally contaminating the horizon of sight as well as knowledge.”

- Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine

good grief

Stills from ‘Observance’, Bill Viola, 2002: Video installation. Colour H-D video on plasma display mounted on wall. Photos by Kira Perov

Ok, just one more post about death and loss…

A couple of weeks ago when I was in Liverpool for this (see previous post), I went to the Walker Art Gallery. After looking at Paul Trevor’s (amazing) street photographs of 1970s inner-city Liverpool, I was exploring the gallery’s permanent collection and came across Bill Viola’s Observance, a video work hidden among devotional paintings from the early Renaissance.

Based on Albrecht Dürer’s pair of altar wings, ‘Four Apostles‘, 1526, Observance is part of a series inspired by historical religious paintings. Viola uses these to explore the intensity of the human spirit – specifically the evocation of shared grief – and how this has been depicted over centuries of art.

One by one, in silence and extreme slow motion, actors step forward from a tightly jostling group towards the camera. They have been asked to look at, ‘something they’d rather not see…to say goodbye to someone who’s left them.’ This combination of pain, revulsion, love and community is extraordinarily moving. I think this is partly because, unlike Dürer’s society, we have, on the whole, lost the significance of looking as a part of saying goodbye.

For Roland Barthes, photography’s intimate connection with death corresponds with a profound shift in Western ideas and customs surrounding mourning and loss:

“Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death. Life/Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click …Earlier societies managed so that memory, the substitute for life, was eternal and that at least the thing which spoke of Death should itself be immortal: this was the monument. But by making the (mortal) photograph into the general and somehow natural witness of ‘what has been’, modern society has renounced the monument.” [1]

Of the rites of death that Barthes mentions, which seem to have been ‘withdrawn’, perhaps the most significant are the rites of looking and watching. There was a time in Western culture when it was a normal part of life to be brought face to face with loss; when wakes and vigils and the rites of death made us familiar with seeing the bodies of our communities’ dead. The vigil (from the Latin vigilia, ‘wakefulness’) is a period of sleeplessness, an occasion for devotional watching or observance. The practice (still in use in parts of rural Ireland until very recently); where a group of mourners stay in a room with the coffin watching over it for a night, or even the viewing of bodies in open coffins at funeral homes, has all but disappeared. While traditionally a means of making sure the person was definitely dead and ensuring that the spirit would not leave the body before the funeral rites, these practices have also been shown to be beneficial in the grieving process of the mourners themselves, making the reality of death easier to accept. Watching – particularly prolonged watching – and being brought ‘face to face’ with death, while painful, helps to ‘integrate’ the truth of the death in a much more complete way than if this truth is quickly and discreetly hidden from view. As Barthes acknowledges, however, death in our industrial culture is now just a sudden ‘click’, and so we often struggle to process and come to terms with it.

Viola’s film comments powerfully on this ‘underdeveloped culture of mourning’ and our need for ‘a grief that makes us more human’. He says, ‘it is about people being overwhelmed by forces that are greater than them.’ Like miracles, death sometimes needs to be seen to be believed.

repetition and the denial of death

This week I was in Liverpool at ‘Landscapes of Conflict,’ a symposium discussing photography that responds to conflict in indirect or unconventional ways. I was invited to speak about my research, and used the opportunity to explore some ideas around the convention of substituting bodies with buildings in photographs; specifically in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. I also used the opportunity to think about some of the ‘uncanny’ ways in which the twin towers’ destruction seems to have been foreshadowed over the years since they were built.

I was reminded of this quote by Joseph Juhasz, written after the 1993 bombing attempt on the towers. He argues (almost ten years before 9/11) that,

“[the towers] must terminate in cataclysm. In an allegorical sense, the vast, twinned doubled ghostly presence of WTC presents a sepulchre from which ghosts will not rise as on the day of cataclysm as the resurrected dead, rather as a tombstone it prophesies the raising of Golems and Zombies.”

Left: Jonathan Hyman, Paterson, NJ, 2004. Right: CNN

This is (unwittingly) a prophetic reflection on what Juhasz sees as the towers’ inherent alienation of the human body (due to their impossible scale), and the Babel-like capitalist arrogance and egotism that were behind their construction. Somehow, he says, their destruction was in-built and inevitable from the beginning.

The photograph on the left is from a project by Jonathan Hyman, who has been collecting photographs of vernacular 9/11 memorials, currently being exhibited at Duke University. The given caption doesn’t make it totally clear, but it seems that what we’re seeing here is a ‘tombstone’ to the towers themselves – this is in a cemetery but it marks the loss of buildings, not people. There is no body here.

On the right is one of a number of diabolical faces and spectres (‘golems’, ‘zombies’) that were photographed in the rising dust of the towers’ collapse.

These are the kind of eerie co-incidences that we tend to call ‘uncanny’. In his 1919 essay on the uncanny, Freud writes that,

“the ‘double’ is originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’ … the ‘invention of doubling is a preservation against extinction’.”

For Freud, the figure of the twin or double is central in accounting for the strange nature of uncanny experiences. It is the familiar made suddenly unfamiliar, when the domestic or city spaces in which we move somehow turn on us, reminding us that we do not really belong here. The perfection of the twin towers as doubled metaphors for all these things – bodies, insurance for the ego, denial of mortality, loss – is uncanny in itself.

The 'last beam' is ceremonially removed from the ground zero site, 30th May 2002

Notes for A History of Bad Photography: part 2

My imagined survey of what’s good about bad photography is taking shape…

Subway and blur, Tokyo, 1961 - William Klein

William Klein has said that blur is part of photography’s own language. This picture wouldn’t have made the edit for a lot of street photographers working in 1961, or today, but he recognises that this is photography doing what only photography can do. It’s part of the ‘medium specificity’ of the camera to signify movement in this way. In another of his most famous photographs from 1955, it turns a dancing child into ‘the kid with the beard’ (as he recalls).

Photographers seem to have a love/hate relationship with blur. For some it’s to be avoided at all costs. For others (like Marco Vernaschi for example, or Antoine D’Agata) it’s either a key part of the image’s meaning, or a by-product of what really matters and therefore not something to worry about.

Klein has a love/hate relationship with New York City. Being on the street there (or Tokyo, or London) is a reminder that our eyes are so familiar with ‘photography’s own language’ that we seem to see motion as blur (or even experience squinting into bright sunlight as over-exposure; though we might not call it that). This is why photography’s idiosyncrasies and failures are so significant: photography has shown us how to see.

the glance

Paul Graham: Photographs 1981-2006 has been open at the Whitechapel Gallery for a few weeks, but it’s taken me a while to settle on what most struck me about it. Certainly, it’s one of the best-curated photography exhibitions I’ve seen in a long time (though the number of prints shown from each body of work is small).

Pittsburgh, 2004 (Lawnmower Man), from the series a shimmer of possibility. Copyright of the artist, courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London.

Upstairs (in a room I almost missed), is work from a shimmer of possibility. These are small sequences of photographs, depicting very closely observed moments, which the photographer says are inspired by Chekov’s short stories. A man smoking a cigarette, lost in thought; a couple walking home from the store with a crate of Pepsi; a groundskeeper mowing a grassy hillside. But these are not stories at all. They don’t have a beginning, a middle or an end – instead they are persistently observed ‘ongoing moments’. This project (along with American Night, displayed in the same space) is part of a turning in Graham’s work towards the nature of photographic seeing. And it’s in this respect that it is really special: Graham is demonstrating for us so perfectly through photography what it’s like to really, really look, that it becomes poignant to the point of discomfort; even invasion. For me, the most radical strategy he uses to do this is the inclusion, within the flow of several of the groups, of two or three (seemingly) unrelated images. Because of course this is what happens when we contemplate something that fascinates or moves us – however absorbing it is, we must glance away and then return. Whether through distraction or to avoid being hit by a car crossing the street, our eyes never really rest in the way that the endless, frozen moment of photography usually suggests. Concentrated vision is both agitated and still: fixed, but always distracted. With the photographer, we look, look away, look back and (the whole point) look closer.