The American Dream: Pop to the Present: prints by Helen Frankenthaler, Carroll Dunham, Ida Applebroog, Dotty Attie, Kiki Smith, Lee Lozano, Louise Bourgeois, Emma Amos and Kara Walker.
ISelf Collection: Bumped Bodies: Maria Bartuszovà, Huma Bhabha, Alexandra Bircken, Ruth Claxton, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Kati Horna, Sarah Lucas, Pippilotti Rist, Nicola Tyson and Cathy Wilkes
Killer Heels: shoe designers like Westwood and Hadid, and videos by Marilyn Minter, Leanie van der Vyver.
The London Open 2018: Rachel Ara, Gabriella Boyd, Hannah Brown, Rachael Champion, Ayan Farah, French & Mottershead, Céline Manz, Rachel Pimm, Renee So, Alexis Teplin, Elisabeth Tomlinson and Andrea Luka Zimmerman.
Performing for the Camera: photos by Hannah Wilke, Adrian Piper, Jemima Stehli, Carolee Schneemann, Dora Maurer, Sarah Lucas, Cindy Sherman, Francesca Woodman and Amalia Ulman.
Pre-Raphaelite Sisters: Effie Gray Millais, Christina Rossetti, Annie Miller, Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, Joanna Boyce Wells, Fanny Eaton, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Maria Zambaco, Jane Morris, Marie Spartali Stillman and Evelyn de Morgan.
OK, so what is the Solander Collection? In its own words:
Dedicated to the enjoyment and understanding of photographic art in all its forms, the Solander Collection has a special emphasis on international traditions, under-represented and forgotten artists, ethnic diversity, and women. The aim of the collection is to broaden the understanding of photography as inclusive and democratic.
Nearly all works are vintage (made within a few years of the negative) and include many rarities and ‘firsts’. It is a working collection, intended to be shared through exhibitions and publications. The collection is based in Oregon and California and is available to view by appointment, when it is not on public view. (About the Solander Collection)
It’s named after the Solander Box, the cloth-covered black box that museums use to store flat works in.
This exhibition
This exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery displays over 130 works from the Solander Collection. They’ve been selected to make visitors “look again at well-known works by major artists, alongside forgotten greats, regional champions and unknown artists”. Here are curators Graham Howe and Phillip Prodger explaining.
Keywords are:
“feminist photography…connections between things that don’t always get connected…more inclusive, more welcoming…never meant to be a chronology…pockets of thought, ways of seeing, ways of thinking of photography…you’re meant to feel how organic everything is and the connections that exist between different time periods…a wider view, a more diverse pluralistic approach to looking at photography…as rich and diverse and interesting as the people of the world…”
Does it match up?
Does this exhibition match up to these brave words about diversity and inclusiveness? Well, yes and no. On the No side:
Still chronological
Although the curators claim to be eschewing chronology, the exhibition is still very chronological in feel. It starts with works from the very dawn of photography in the 1840s, when people used photos as the basis for fine art and painted over prints, or used the camera lucida as an aid to drawing, or when subjects were chosen to match the subjects of fine art and sculpture, for example the striking male nude included here by Charles Nègre.
It starts with the usual early pioneers such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton and Eadweard Muybridge. And then moves slowly forward through the decades of the nineteenth century before arriving at the explosion of Modernism around the time of the Great War.
So this is all reassuringly chronological and follows the same timeline as umpteen other history of photography exhibitions I’ve been to. The very fact that the curators feel compelled to call the exhibition ‘An alternative history‘ indicates how far they are from throwing off the shackles of chronology and arranging works by some other method. Why not call it ‘Selection from the Solander Collection’ and arrange the pieces in a genuinely non-linear, themed, or free associative manner?
Still very American-centric
Of the 130 or so pieces I counted 24 by American photographers, or about a fifth. There are also a lot from Europe, obvz, and then only a handful each from China, Japan, a few each from some south American countries, and about a dozen in total from Africa. So it may be more geographically diverse than your standard history of photography, but not as diverse as the actual world, the real world out there beyond Galleryland. In the real world the top half dozen nations are currently ordered by population thus:
China 1.5 billion
India 1.4 billion
Africa 1.3 billion
America 335 million
Indonesia 280 million
Pakistan 240 million
So, to be strictly ‘representative’, there ought to be four times as many photos by Chinese, Indian or African photographers as Americans. Another statistic is that America makes up 4.25% of the total world population so to be utterly ‘representative’ exhibitions of global art like this ought to have that amount of representation – whereas, of course, it’s nothing like that. America, with the imperial reach of its technological and commercial supremacy, is still the single most represented country.
The fact that Americans think it is an impressive achievement to feature handfuls of photographers from other countries tells you just how deep-grained American parochialism and chauvinism is, and how slavish the obeisance of British art and culture gatekeepers to American culture is that they unquestioningly, enthusiastically go along with America’s ongoing dominance.
Obscure photographers?
Well, yes, up to a point but maybe a third of the 100 exhibits were by famous photographers – the Victorians ones I’ve mentioned above, plus ‘legends’ like Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Man Ray, Edward Weston, Rodchenko, and the fairly well known African studio photographer, Malick Sidibé.
On the Yes side:
More nationalities
Yes, there are works from Poland, Uzbekistan, Mali, Cameroon, as well as East Germany, Australian, Chile, Jamaica, Mexico, Singapore, Ukraine – nations you rarely see represented in any Anglo art exhibition. It does feel as if more nationalities are represented, albeit in nothing like the proportions they ought to be.
More obscure works
There are a number of anonymous works (particularly from the early period), odd or unexpected works like the studies using native peoples of John William Lindt; and, in the later part of the show, quite a few photos from what feel like obscure and overlooked photographers, from the under-represented countries mentioned above, Poland, Mali and so on.
The Western Gaze
More important/significant/telling is the curators’ inability to escape Anglocentric or Western notions of beauty or quality or the notion of ‘interest’ which they mention in the video. On my trips to Muslim countries, in my engagement with Chinese or Indian or Japanese art, I’ve realised that many other regions of the world have traditions and definitions and canons of ‘art’ utterly different, alien from, the Christian, white western ones I was brought up in.
Feminist curators and critics go on rather a lot about ‘the male gaze’. The phrase often appears on wall labels of numerous exhibitions. But I’m not sure I’ve read so much about ‘the Western gaze’, the way all western people bring very Western values and aesthetics and judgements to bear on all the art forms – music, sculpture, photography – we encounter outside our culture. Often it’s not even clear whether it is art, as we understand it; or some part of what we’d categorise as religious artifacts or cultural traditions or traditional practices.
The mindset whereby we want to take objects from their original location and categorise and label them and put them behind glass cases in antiseptic museums and galleries, that’s quite a Western way of thinking, specific to certain locations and times in Europe then America, and not necessarily fund in other cultures. (Rooms 1 to 5 at the British Museum, the long wood-panneled room on the right of the big central atrium, are devoted to describing the invention of the Western tradition of collecting, categorising and displaying precious artefacts. Visually, it’s the least sexy part of the British Museum but conceptually, maybe the most important: it’s an exploration of the origins of the entire concept of The Museum and The Collection.
In my opinion the curators of this exhibition have obviously made an effort, and have included works from a few more countries than you might expect; but they have come nowhere near throwing off the shackles of the Western Gaze and Western aesthetics, and so barely engaged with other ways of seeing.
The narrowing effect of photography
Then again, when it comes to photography, this may be because the technology and the form themselves such Western creations. Cameras, film and all the rest of the paraphernalia were invented, developed and improved in the advanced industrial nations of Europe and America (and Japan), and exported to other countries.
Maybe photography itself is an imperialist form, colonising the minds of everyone who uses it, co-opting them into modes of observation, alienation, categorisation and detached gazing, which are intrinsically Western.
Maybe to pick up a camera (or a phone with a camera in it i.e. pretty much every smartphone in the world) is to adopt an entirely Western technology and take on Western blinkers. Maybe, on this reading, it’s impossible for photography to be truly ‘diverse’ because, even though the person taking the photograph may be from Jakarta or Kinshasa or Shanghai, or an aborigine or native American, as soon as they pick up a camera they are infected, taken over, co-opted, colonised by the Western controlling, objective, alienating way of seeing. Just a thought…
Commentaries
Arguably, the single most important thing about this exhibition is the commentaries. The Solander Collection maintains a network of contributors in countries around the world, photographers but also critics and writers, and well over half (not all) of the photos in the exhibition are accompanied by fairly long wall labels, four or five thick paragraphs long, short essays –giving detailed information about how each photo was made, the photographer, the subject matter and so on.
if you read all of these commentaries it makes progressing around the two rooms which host the exhibition quite a slow business.
Selected works
So what did I like or what stood out for me? I’ll make a personal selection i.e. create my own networks of connections through the very varied corpus or body of work they’ve selected. To give it some structure I’ll base it on topic or subject matter.
African studio photography
Several African studio photographers are represented including the famous Malick Sidibé from Mali. Apparently the golden age of studio photography in West Africa was during the 1960s and early 70s i.e. the decade following independence from colonial rule.
Studio photographers used the conventions inherited from the West (the very idea of a studio; deeper than that, the very idea of a photograph) but gave it a style and swing, matching the newfound confidence of young urban types dressing according to new Africanised forms of fashion.
I’ve selected a pic by the less well-known Michel Kameni (1935 to 2020) from Cameroon. Apparently his photos are that bit less flamboyant than Sidibé’s, which you can see in the exhibition where examples of each guy’s work are place side by side. This example uses technical tricks to create a mirror image of the same woman, momentarily appearing as her own twin. Thus it is more mysterious and strange than Sidibé’s generally cool and confident but straightforward portraiture. What is the woman looking at us thinking? She’s a kind of African Mona Lisa.
Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1813 to 1875) spent much of his own life in poverty and set out to document the lives of the poorest in society. But that’s not the most interesting thing here. The interesting thing is that this photo was constructed. Not just staged – as the girl in the foreground standing on a suspiciously clean street sweeping broom is – no, the entire backdrop, a waybill publicising an 1871 rally in Trafalgar Square against the match industry – was added to the photo of the girl. Or the photo of the girl was superimposed onto the background. Fascinating that right from the start photographs were subject to artificial intervention.
Match Girl, 1871 by Oscar Gustave Rejlander
Documentary photography
Meaning recording the lives and practices of ordinary people. Or as the Tate website puts it:
a style of photography that provides a straightforward and accurate representation of people, places, objects and events, and is often used in reportage.
This is an apparently simple documentary photograph taken by Emilio Amero (1901 to 1976) recording a moment in a wedding celebration in Mexico. But this is a carefully curated photograph so it has depths which become clearer the longer you look.
Obviously, the woman is beautiful with a beguiling spiritual beauty which becomes more entrancing the more you look. But her dress is wonderful too, particularly the concatenation of metal necklace, pendant and ear-rings. And the bracelets on her right wrist. How beautiful she looks! And then – this is all happening in the street, far different from an English wedding in a crabbed and constricted English church. This is happening outside and, you realise, there seem to be loads of people in the background, some milling about but a row of figures on the left sitting down. Are all of these people here just for her wedding? How wonderful and sociable! How communal and shared and happy it looks. Which makes the look of concentration and seriousness on the young bride’s face all the more sweet, touching, foreboding, intense and magical.
John William Lindt (1845 to 1926) was an interesting character (Wikipedia article). Born in Germany he travelled to Australia where he built a reputation as ‘a landscape and ethnographic photographer, early photojournalist, and portraitist’. This is one of 31 photos Lindt took of Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung people in a book titled ‘Australian Aboriginals’ in 1874. There are all kinds of things going on in this charged image. Most obvious is the clash or tension between the staged background and props and the vivid presence of the woman and child. And cross-threading against that, the similarity to the great Christian image of the madonna and child which he’s posed them in.
The early photographers saw the technology as a way to copy, re-enact, reproduce the poses and subject matter of the fine arts, of the Old Masters of the European visual tradition. One of the most interesting things about photography is how long it took for its practitioners to realise it could represent the world in ways not limited to fine art precedents, it could depict the world as it is, and then the development by Modernist practitioners of realising photography was susceptible to techniques which broke with reality altogether to create forms unique to the technology, such as photomontage, solarisation and so on.
Young Woman with Sleeping Child, Clarence Valley (1870 to 1873) by John William Lindt
Feminist photography
The whole point of ‘feminist photography’ is it has many strands and many meanings. Here are two quotes which indicate what they have in common, namely the quest to overthrow gendered stereotypes and expectations.
Feminist photographers turned a medium used traditionally to reinforce gender norms into a powerful tool of transformation and emancipation, reimagining not only the possibilities of photographic self-expression, but also the kinds of subjects and environments thought to be deserving of aesthetic representation.
(Beyond the Male Gaze: Photography and Feminist Theory)
Photography became an important tool of second-wave feminism to critique the established visual conventions through which gender, sexual, racial, and class identities have been constructed.
(Women and photography)
This pair of photos by German photographer Annegret Soltau (b.1946) were made in 1975 and have no written commentary, leaving us free to interpret or make up our own meanings. I’d have thought the place to start is the way the myriad fine threads covering her face in the left-hand picture have been snapped in the one on the right. But it’s not as if this has been caused by her, for example, opening her eyes to symbolise awakening from her heteronormative slumber or opening her mouth to break the silence and express her truth etc. It’s less predictable than that. Something has snapped, but what has caused it, and what it means remain suggestive but mysterious.
Not exactly a happy couple, but the main thing about this photograph is that it was hand coloured, which explains the bright but somehow aged and faded tone of the pink shawl and yellow blouse. In one way this image links to the studio photos of the Africans, Malick Sidibé and Michel Kameni, displayed on the wall opposite – but it also links to the painted photo of the maharajah with tiger (see below) raising interesting questions about tradition and continuity.
‘Laugh, and the world laughs with you.’ Hard not to find these girls’ innocent mirth infectious. People from sometime in the 1970s and yet you feel an immediate deep contact with them, they could be a couple of girls giggling in gallery right next to me. Photography can do that, make unnerving links with people you know are long dead in places and cultures which have long ago vanished. If you’re feeling robust this can be wonderfully life-enhancing, expanding your sense of humanity. If you’re feeling tragic, it can give you a bad case of Weltshchmerz and loss. Où sont the giggling girls of yesteryear?
Two girls in Kingston, Jamaica by Unknown, possibly Ernesto Bavastro (1870s to 1880s)
Historic photography
This is the first known photograph of a Chinese police unit, which began serving in Hong Kong shortly after its establishment as a British colony in 1841. The tut-tutting wall label reminds us that colonial police forces like this were strictly hierarchical, with British officers in charge, then Indians who could serve as sergeants or inspectors, then local, in this case Chinese people who could serve as constables or sergeants but weren’t allowed to rise higher.
This wasn’t a one-off by the photographer, Lai Fong (1839 to 1890). Lai “created a body of work that laid the foundation for the art of photography in China”. The wall label optimistically declares the Lai “offered a window into the pictorial traditions, history and social structures of the late Qing dynasty” but it’s not obvious that there’s anything particularly Chinese about this photo: the staging of the men and the draped curtains to either side strongly suggest the European, semi-classical visual conventions. This is what I meant, above, when I said that, possibly, photography is an intrinsically imperialist form. If Lai indeed did lay the foundations for photography in China he appeared to do so by importing entirely Western visual conventions.
A Group of Hong Kong Native Police, 1870s, by Lai Fong
Humorous photography
This piece by Austrian artist Valie Export (b.1940) is the biggest thing in the show and more or less the only one which made me laugh. I suppose it’s straight satire, 1970s satire on the identification of women with housework, using the cut-up collage techniques which people like George Grosz pioneered in the 1920s. Obviously it’s taking the mickey out of a thousand renaissance paintings which show a Madonna holding the Christ child, satirically replacing the baby with a hoover, symbol of 1970s women’s greatest care/oppression.
It is an example of photomontage which wasn’t that represented in the show. I can imagine a section of it could have been devoted to this technique, alongside works by Grosz or John Heartfield or other photomontageurs from other traditions making political/satirical points.
Or, at the same time or alternatively, it’s also possibly an example of ‘sculptural photography’ because the silhouetted 70s woman and hoover aren’t laid flat on the surface of the painting but are attached so as to be raised and physically distinct from the backdrop. Which is why the thing requires not a flat frame but more like a glass case to cater for the depth of the effect created.
Anyway, the classical painting in the background is Botticelli’s ‘Madonna of the Pomegranate’ (1487).
Modernist photography
Double exposure became a standard Modernist device. Mark Neven DuMont (1892 to 1959) was born in Germany but emigrated to England. His friend, the avant-garde painter and provocateur George Grosz, was a leading exponent of photomontage so the curators reckon that’s where DuMont got the idea to experiment with it himself. The wall label tells us that photomontage – using two or more camera negatives to create a composite image – is as old as photography; but the striking make-up of the female model and the geometric shape of the palm tree give it a very modernist, Art Deco feel.
Patricia by Mark Neven DuMont (1930s)
If modernist visual forms (sculpture, painting, drawing as well as photography) have one thing in common it’s a love of sharp lines and geometric shapes. In contrast with gauzy impressionism, gloomy symbolism or scratchy expressionism, modernism loves slick lines and sharp angles. Almost everything in this photograph by the Brazilian photographer German Lorca (1922 to 2021) is precise and geometric: from the tiny regular squares of the paving to the straight seams of the concrete wall behind the two figures; the neatly pressed seams of the two men’s suits to the super-precise outline of the shadows behind them thrown by the hot tropical sun. It’s part of the hyper-modern effect that we don’t see the men’s face, which are turned away or hidden behind a newspaper, thus increasing the sense that this sidewalk drama is not about people but about the lines and energies of the modern city.
Looking for a job by German Lorca (1948)
Motion photography
Eadweard Muybridge (1830 to 1904) is the famous pioneer of ‘motion photography’ which caught the imagination of artists and scientists around the (developed) world. In his studio he set up series of cameras in the same position or staggered along the course of the action he wanted to record, and then fired them off at intervals, experimenting with doing it closer or further apart.
The result was his famous sets of photos showing successive stages in dramatic actions. Once he’d nailed the technique he went mad and, between 1884 and 1886, produced 781 new sequences! The art of fencing is peculiarly suited to this process because it involves dramatic gestures and physical postures while the body itself doesn’t actually change position very much.
Fencing by Eadweard Muybridge (1887) collotype
Naked photography
Lots of women artists and photographers in the 1970s and 80s thought it was a radical and subversive act to take their clothes off and stage happenings or interventions or performances featuring themselves naked, and record themselves for posterity. No doubt this was a radical, subversive and so on gesture in Russian-controlled communist Poland back in 1980. Forty-three years later it looks like a naked young woman in heels confronting a woman cop. What’s not to love?
It is a little disappointing, then, to learn that this scene never took place, but that the piece is in fact a photomontage, combining a shot Ewa Partum (b.1945) took of herself nude in the studio, superimposed on a straightforward snap of a cop in the street.
Döppelgängers always fascinate us and so we are taken by the dualistic oppositions suggested here, between the naked and the clothed, between authority and submission, between the ‘authenticity’ of the artistic naked woman with nothing to hide and the overdress authority figure encumbered with all the rigmarole of legal and physical repression (radio, handcuffs, baton, gun?)
(I appreciate this photo could also come under ‘feminist photography’ or ‘political photography’. But I’m enjoying making up frivolous headings and my own connections.)
Self and policewoman by Ewa Partum (1980)
Nature photography
Possibly my favourite photo of the 130 on display. I myself have taken lots of photos of trees, flowers, plants, lichen on stones and so on, but trees are special. I think trees are talking to us but so slowly, so very slowly, that we can’t slow down enough to hear what they’re saying. And so we chop them down and burn them, over vast areas, and will end up burning the entire planet in the process. Tant pis.
Meanwhile, this is just one of many studies the American photographer Paul Strand (1890 to 1976) took of driftwood, showing a profound feel for the shapes and twists and knots and gnarls which are created by this most beautiful of life forms. Although hyper-naturalistic in feel, capturing every fibre of the gnarled old wood, Strand’s studies like this at the same time suggest flowing zoomorphic forms and, if you’ve smoked a little dope, are gateways almost into another world, enabling the viewer to immerse themselves in the non-human world around us. Entirely naturalistic they are also like meditative states of mind.
Believe it or not this is a photo, taken about 1890 by an unknown photographer. It looks like a painting because the entire surface has been covered with a thick layer of pigment, so it is a painting: a photo-painting. Apparently this kind of embellishment or overwriting of a factual photographic base with an extravagantly idealised and Romantic backdrop and details was very common. It has a floridness we don’t associate with the European tradition and feels genuinely ‘other’.
This image links to the portrait of a couple from the 1970s shown above. Was this a distinctively Indian approach to photography? Did other cultures do the same kind of thing? Does it persist to this day? Be interesting to know more.
Maharaja with Tiger, possibly Duleep Singh, after a hunt (about 1890) vintage gelatin silver print with hand painting. Maker unknown (India)
Soviet photography
In the heyday of the 1920s and early 1930s Soviet artists made some of the boldest, most radical art of the century in the name of the new society they were building. Alexander Rodchenko (1891 to 1956) specialised in taking photos from experimental and unconventional angles. This was called rakurs in Russian. The most powerful, impactful of these is looking up at the subject from below. This conveys a string sense of dynamism and energy which, when combined or attached to an image of a youth, conveyed just the sense of forward-looking, visionary, striding-into-the-future energy which Stalin and his commissars wanted. As the commentator points out, it also makes the figure look monumental, a photographic equivalent of all those huge statues of working men and women striding boldly into the brave Soviet future which used to litter communist cityscapes.
Pioneer girl (1930) by Alexander Rodchenko
Street photography
Harold Cazneaux (1878 to 1953) became known for naturalistic studies of children, often taken outdoors. During and after the war there was an explosion of technical experimentation associated with modernism, plus a great surge in popular magazines which relied on evermore photos. Thus this photo was taken for a spread in The Home magazine. It’s what you could call soft modernism or popular modernism, in the sense that a) the focus is on the children’s faces, not the ostensible subject (the Punch and Judy show); b) it’s taken from a relatively low angle, a characteristic modernist trait, but not actually down on the ground. So it’s assimilated enough modernist tricks to be considered ‘modern’ and not rattle any cages.
‘The fact that I never had a family, a place or a story that defined me, inspired a need in me to join the community of mankind. I did so by inventing a poetic form linking this community, at least symbolically, in my imagination, through this form.’
(Dave Heath)
This is the first major UK exhibition dedicated to the work of American photographer Dave Heath (1931 to 2016).
Heath started taking photos towards the end of his stint in the Korean War (1950 to 1953). All his photos from Korea ignore battlefield heroics, firefights, explosions and hardware – instead showing the average grunt as isolated individuals caught in moments of thought, looking down, looking sad.
And this is the sensibility he brought back to civilian life. Of the 109 photos on display here, I only saw three where the subject is smiling or laughing. The other hundred and six show individuals or couples looking moody, intense, sullen, lost in thought. Inhabitants of solitude. Aficionados of introspection.
Even the handful of photos which aren’t of people, but of buildings or the sidewalk, manage to make them look lost in thought and downbeat. The result is tremendously atmospheric if, on occasion, a bit samey.
Biography
The downbeat tone was set early in Heath’s life. He was born in Philadelphia in 1931 to very young parents who abandoned him at the age of four after which he was sent to a series of foster homes before being placed in an orphanage. From then on he carried a sense of loss and abandonment which he projected, very successfully, onto everything around him.
Heath became interested in photography as a teenager, and joined an amateur camera club. He read the photo essays in Life magazine and cites one in particular as having a decisive impact on his future. Bad Boy’s Story by Ralph Crane depicted the emotional experiences of a young orphan not unlike young Heath.
In a flash Heath realised that photography could be a means of self-expression, a way of shaping the external world to fit his experiences, and a way of connecting to others.
In his early twenties he set about becoming an expert in photographic techniques, taking courses in commercial art, working in a photo processing lab, and studying paintings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His stint in the army as a machine gunner interrupted his career for a few years, but crystallised his approach to subject matter, his skill at capturing a wide range of people in moments of thought and vulnerability.
On his return, Heath developed this aptitude for capturing an ‘inner landscape’, seeking out the lonely and lost and fragile on the streets of big city America. Most of the photographs on display here were taken on the streets of Chicago and New York (where he moved to in 1957).
Heath’s subjects seem eerily detached from their physical context, shot either singly or in couples, but always intensely aware of – almost physically projecting – their isolation.
My pictures are not about the city but from the city. I’ve always seen it as a stage and I’ve always seen the people in the streets as being actors, not acting out a particular play or story, but somehow being the story itself…
It would be wrong to think that all his photos are close-ups of alienated individuals or couples. There’s more variety than that. At the busy end of the spectrum there’s a photo of a crowd gathering round a policeman in Central Park guarding the spot where a suicide has been discovered. At the other end of the spectrum, sometimes he picked out just details, lost property, street detritus, close-ups of parts of people’s bodies, which manage to convey a tremendous sense of loss and abandonment.
Heath’s photos capture that eerie moment in American history just before the 1960s exploded, just around the time JFK was assassinated and Civil Rights began to become an enormous, society-sundering issue and then, of course the growing opposition to the Vietnam War.
He had always been interested in exploring how individual photos could be tied together into sequences which created something larger than the sum of its parts. Heath once wrote that ‘the central issue of my work is sequence’ and thought that the rhythm of images arranged in collages or montages created a deeper and more complex psychological state than a single image.
A master printer – so good that other photographers asked him to make their prints for them – Heath also crafted handmade books and experimented with multimedia slide presentations. All this thinking and experimentation culminated in the book which is considered his masterpiece, A Dialogue with Solitude, published in 1965.
A Dialogue With Solitude
A Dialogue with Solitude was conceived in 1961 but not published till 1965. Heath chose 82 of his best or most characteristic photographs taken between 1952 and 1962 and grouped them into ten chapters dedicated to variations on the theme of solitude, being: violence, love, childhood, old age, poverty, war, race and death.
Each one is preceded by a short quote from a literary giant including: Matthew Arnold, James Baldwin, T.S. Eliot, William Hazlitt, Herman Hesse, Rilke, Yeats and so on. In other words, all the names you’d meet in a basic undergraduate course in comparative literature – or at least before the explosion of feminist and black and queer studies added a lot more women and marginalised writers to the canon.
The book is commemorated here by a wall-seized display which places scores of photos next to the bookish quotes, to create a sort of immersive visual and literary experience.
Installation view of Dave Heath: Dialogues with Solitude at the Photographers Gallery, showing the wall-sized display of photos and texts from the book, Dialogue with Solitude. Photo by the author
In the opinion of the writer whose wall label accompanies this display, Francesco Zanot:
The primacy of montage and sequencing in Heath’s work is made obvious. The result has nothing to do with linear narration, but rather resembles a vast poem, rhapsodic and tormented. Heath merges together on the space of a page references as refined as they are distant from one another. The book, then, becomes the ideal medium by which to carry out a reflection both through and upon photography.
Thoughts
I liked the Korean War photos best. Soldiers in a war really have got something to be pissed off about. Guys lying on their bunks or sitting on a crate smoking a fag reminded me of all the crappy labouring jobs I’ve had, and how it feels when you get a break and five minutes to just sit staring into space, too tired to think about anything, too tired or too mind numblingly bored to say or do or think anything.
The photos of sad people in Philadelphia and Chicago and New York are undoubtedly atmospheric and poignant, beautifully composed and printed with a grainy effect that carries the viewer back back back to a historic era.
And yet… and yet…. I think I’ve seen too many photographs of unhappy Americans recently – the hundred or more photos by Diane Arbus currently at the Hayward Gallery, or the long career of Dorothea Lange devoted to documenting American misery and injustice, celebrated at the Barbican last summer, or the enormous brightly coloured images of alienation and being lost in the crowd created by Alex Prager.
Upstairs at the Photographers’ Gallery, right now, the works of Mark Ruwedel don’t feature any people but they, also, convey a tremendous sense of loss and abandonment via pictures of run-down shacks in the desert or the abandoned sites of military tests.
Abandonment, loneliness, isolation, solitude, unhappiness. These seem to be the default subjects of American art photographers.
Off to one side of the main display rooms is a dark room where you can watch clips from cult independent films from the 1960s, contemporary with Heath’s works, which also focus on theme of solitude. These include:
1. Portrait of Jason by Shirley Clarke (1966), Jason being ‘a gay African-American hustler and aspiring cabaret performer’.
2. Salesman by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Mitchell Zwerin (1968) a creepy depiction of slimy American salesman.
3. The Savage Eye by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers and Joseph Strick (1960)
Interview with Senior Curator, Karen McQuaid
Curators
Curated by Diane Dufour, Director of LE BAL.
Senior Curator for the Photographers’ Gallery, Karen McQuaid
So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics.
(Burning Chrome page 218)
Burning Chrome is a collection of ten short stories by William Gibson. They include his first published work, Fragments of a Hologram Rose, published in 1977, and then all the stories he wrote up till 1986.
In 1984 Gibson had published his debut novel, Neuromancer, set in a future world dominated by digital techologies, in which he made great use of the ideas of cyberspace and the matrix of digital information. What made it really distinctive, though, was how all this was viewed filtered through a film noir, street level culture which mixed the tough guy crime stories of Raymond Chandler with 1980s punk culture – in which this brave future was not supervised by Arthur C. Clarke-style, clean-suited technocrats, but was at the mercy of international corporations, Japanese yakuza gangs, ninja assassins, dealers selling all manner of futuristic drugs, holograms used for viewing savage knife fights or holoporn showing the obvious – in other words, a future seen from a street-level view of crime and rackets and dealers and pimps and whores, all summed up in the word, ‘the biz’. And all conveyed in an amphetamine-driven, drug-crazed, super-charged prose, dense with a dizzy combination of street slang and tech terms.
Neuromancer was followed by Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive which, together, are now said to comprise Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy, so-called because in this America of the future, the entire East Coast has become one vast, continuous urban sprawl.
The stories in this collection include several which share the Sprawl world, including one which actually features the female protagonist from Neuromancer, Molly (and where we learn her surname is the rather cartoonish Million – Molly Millions).
And then there are ‘the rest’, a miscellany of non-Sprawl science fiction stories, most of them set in the future, or a future, just not necessarily the Sprawl future.
Sprawl stories
Fragments of a Hologram Rose (1977) first published work
It’s very short (7 pages) and it is very fragmentary. We get the protagonist’s back story in scattered fragments. We have Hints of the Damaged Future, hints that Japanese business and culture was taking over America – the kit Parker uses to get into ASP is made by Japanese corporation, Sendai; more importantly, when a teenager his parents indenture him to a the US branch of a Japanese corporation, with its barracks and corporate hymns. He runs away. He flees to a California which has declared itself independent of the USA, under a chaotic ‘New Secessionist’ movement. Up to a point these can maybe be seen as extrapolations of trends Gibson saw in his own time.
The story already contains key themes, namely the protagonist, Parker, works on Apparent Sensory Perception (ASP) programmes. As in the Sprawl stories, you plug your brain into the player, play the tapes and you are there: the recording completely floods your sensorium.
And also, what I by now realise is another major theme, which is a surprisingly sentimental lost-love trope. The girls in Gibson (well, young women) are always slender as gazelles and tough as silicon razor nails. Sex is an olympic workout. His women can hold their own against gangsters and dealers. BUT, beneath this leather-jacketed veneer of modernity, the men are always loving and losing them, in a sentimental ‘I’m not going to cry’ tough guy way descended from Hemingway and Chandler.
Parker has woken at 3 in the morning (that’s another trope: it’s always the middle of the night, or the darkest hour before dawn) and is rummaging through her belongings and his memories. He finds the hologram of a rose which he unsentimentally flushes into the waste disposal unit. His last memory is watching her going off in a taxi leaving him standing there in the pouring rain. Sob.
Johnny Mnemonic (1981)
Super cool and fast moving, this concerns Johnny Mnemonic, so-named because memory banks (a hard drive) has been neurally inserted into his brain, so that he can store vast amounts of data which a) he doesn’t understand b) he cannot himself access.
The stored data are fed in through a modified series of microsurgical contraautism prostheses.’ (p.22)
Only clients with the password can access it. He is a storage facility or, as he himself puts it: ‘a nice meatball chock-full of implants.’
As so often the story features a meeting with a drug dealer, Ralfi, in a lowlife café. The dealer has brought a neural disruptor so, although Johnny has packed a sawnoff shotgun in an adidas bag, he is paralysed, while the dealer indicates that the hired muscle he’s brought, Lewis, is going to hurt him.
Enter a typically lean, mean, streetwise chick, who identifies herself as Molly Millions (‘She was wearing leather jeans the colour of dried blood’) and, as Lewis leans forward to hurt Johnny, flips her hand past his, somehow lacerating his wrist down to the artery. Lewis clutches it and runs off. We later learn Molly has four-centimetre-long razor retractable blades installed under her fingernails. (She has also had her eyballs replaced with digital lenses.) The neural disruptor goes off and Johnny is free.
Molly grabs his hand and runs him along to her hiding place, a disused part of the lofty ceiling of a vast mall made of geodesic domes, overseen by an outlandish gang named the Lo Teks who dance and perform on a high-wire dance floor they call the Killing Floor.
In case this is all too mundane, Gibson throws in the participation of a cybernetic dolphin, a relic from the war (you know, that war) which is kept in a rundown zoo, but features, among its other hi-tech devices, a SQUID, being a Superconducting Quantum Interference Detector, which they use to extract the data in Johnny’s head which caused Ralfi to come after him. They reward the dolphin, whose rather dull name is Jones, by shooting him up with heroin, yes, this cybernetic dolphin is a junkie.
They use Jones’s skills to extract and place the data in a construct which they leave on a shelf in the backroom of a gift shop.
And here is another classic element of the Sprawl world: the power of multinational corporations, the real rulers of the world, controllers of entire economies, and that most of these multinational corporations are Japanese.
The Yakuza is a true multinational, like ITT and Ono-Sendai. Fifty years before I was born the Yakuza had already absorbed the Triads, the Mafia, the Union Corse. (p.22)
Burning Chrome (1982)
A seminal story for several reasons.
It has all the familiar ingredients: Automatic Jack and Bobby Quine are two ex-soldiers (fought at the Battle of Kiev in the same failed war against Russia mentioned in Neuromancer). Jack, the narrator, is injured/wounded – his arm was lasered off while flying a microlight. Future technology gives him a replacement cybernetic arm, powered by nerves.
There’s a sexy chick, Rikki, who within a sentence of appearing in the story, is pulling a ‘frayed khaki cotton shirt’ over her pert, twenty-something breasts. Jack falls in love with her, then loses her.
Jack and Bobby are criminals who hack into business information in cyberspace for gain.
In terms of storytelling technique, it is classic Gibson in the way it’s based in a ‘present’, after the bank job, the heist, the caper – in which the narrator a) looks back on everything that’s happened b) dwells on falling in love with the woman and losing her – and intersperses this with chunks of exposition, which tell the actual story i.e. how Jack and Bobby enter cyberspace to break into the highly defended vaults of ‘Chrome’, a terrifyingly violent criminal who launders money for organised crime, as well as running a bar-cum-brothel, the House of Blue Lights.
Chrome: her pretty childface smooth as steel, with eyes that would have been at home on the bottom of some deep Atlantic trench, cold grey eyes that lived under terrible pressure. They said she cooked her own cancers for people who crossed her, rococo custom variations that took years to kill you. (p.196)
Same technique is used in New Rose Hotel, where the narrator is in a ‘present’, after a big criminal caper has taken place – looking back at both the build-up to the crime, and lamenting his abandonment by a sexy, feisty woman (Sandii). (She took the money and went off to Hollywood in hopes of becoming a ‘simstim’ star.)
But the most important aspect is that, by way of describing how Jack and Bobby steal all Chrome’s assets in cyberspace, it gives extended (and useful) explanations of key concepts in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe – cyberspace, the matrix and ice.
Bobby was a cowboy, and ice was the nature of his game, ice from ICE, Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. The matrix is an abstract representation of the relationships between data systems. Legitimate programmers jack into their employers’ sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded by bright geometries representing corporate data.
Towers and fields of it ranged in the colourless nonspace of the simulation matrix, the electronic consensus-hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data. Legitimate programmers never see the walls of ice they operate behind, the walls of shadow that screen their operations from others, from industrial-espionage artists and hustlers like Bobby Quine.
And I can’t resist quoting the final paragraph in this sequence because it’s a classic example of how Gibson’s mastery of a certain type of speed-fuelled prose can turn what is, basically, the boring reality of criminals hacking into computers, into soaring prose poetry.
Bobby was a cowboy. Bobby was a cracksman, a burglar, casing mankind’s extended electronic nervous system, rustling data and credit in the crowded matrix, monochrome nonspace where the only stars are dense concentrations of information, and high above it all burn corporate galaxies and the cold spiral arms of military systems. (p.197)
A bit later, the narrator tells us there are some 15 million legitimate console operators around the world, doing the daily trudgework of maintaining these vast castles of data. But we never meet them in Gibson’s stories. We only meet the lowlife, edgy, drug-fuelled hackers and hustlers.
On one level, Gibson is just the latest in a long line of American noir writers who make crime sound impossibly glamorous.
P.S.
Automatic Jack is referenced in the second of the Sprawl trilogy, Count Zero. In that novel Bobby the hacker has ended up in the 14th-floor nightclub owned by a dude named Jammer, and can’t take his eyes of the man’s cool new cyberspace deck, so Jammer hands Bobby a set of trodes:
He stood up, grabbed the handles on either side of the black console, and spun it round so it faced Bobby. ‘Go on. You’ll cream your jeans. Things ten years old and it’ll still wipe as son most anything. Guy name of Automatic Jack built it straight from scratch. He was Bobby Quine’s hardware artist once. The two of ’em burnt the Blue Lights together, but that was probably before you were born…’ (Count Zero, p.230)
Other stories
The Gernsback Continuum (1981)
The first-person narrator is hired to take photographs for a book of photo-journalism documenting the futuristic buildings of the 1930s, what the woman consultant to the project calls ‘American Streamlined Moderne’, what the publisher calls ‘raygun Gothic’, the book to be titled, The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was.
To cut a long story short, on his cruises round provincial America looking for these architectural indicators of a future which never happened, he starts to hallucinate himself into the alternative future where they were built, soaring domes, spires and arcologies linked by high-level walkways, the sky full of flying silver vehicles, and on the ground around him tough-guy blonde 1930s men named Chuck, their arms around wasp-waisted plastic women of the future, both out of the old movies Metropolis and Shape of Things To Come.
Obviously – inevitably – this being Gibson, the narrator is popping various types of drug all the time and at first dismisses the visions as ‘amphetamine psychosis’. If this were J.G. Ballard the narrator’s mind would eventually disappear into this alternative universe, while their body remained here, catatonic.
But, throughout the story, he has been anchored in reality by constant phone calls to a colleague who spends his life writing up the weird beliefs of Americans – Elvis is alive on Mars, UFOs took my husband – and who is totally blasé about the narrator’s visions and, indeed, the opening sentence tells us that it was all an ‘episode’ which is now fading.
In other words, it doesn’t go for the full-on psychosis and so comes over as rather a conventional 1950s-type story.
The Belonging Kind (with John Shirley, 1981)
I wonder what collaboration brings for Gibson. He collaborates quite a lot. In this case the setting is very Gibson – a perpetual night-time of clubs and bars, back alleyways, littered with broken glass and graffiti, the shabby single room of a low-paid single man.
Coretti is a shabby, badly dressed ungainly loner. He goes to a bar. A notably attractive woman (they generally are: Gibson’s stories froth over with femmes fatales) lets him chat her up. When she leaves, he follows her and is thunderstruck when, half way across a night-time road, she changes shape: her dress changes, her hair changes, the shape of her body subtly alters. She becomes a different woman.
From a distance he watches her visit other bars, chatting friendly to other strange men, echoing their conversation, fitting right in. He becomes obsessed. He loses his day job, takes a cheaper labouring job, loses that, doesn’t eat, lives only to track her down.
Finally, in the early hours (the characteristic Gibson time of day) he finds her in a bar, chatting in her easygoing manner to a man. They leave and get into a cab, at the last minute Coretti flings himself inside, but the other two don’t even notice. And when she goes to pay the river Corettit is stunned to see her reach inside her own body, through a pink slit like a fish’s gill, to bring out wet notes which dry as she hands them over.
Coretti follows the couple up to a hotel room in which he is not that surprised to discover a dozen or so other people perching on beds, sofas, chairs. Motionless, their eyes covered by a thin filament of flesh. They are, he realises, roosting. They are some kind of alien life form which lives to blend in. Maybe they started off feeling normal, eating and drinking like other folk. Then got to realise they feel restless, outside, different. Stop eating. Exist off alcohol metabolised at bars, maybe…
He realises he is one of them. The story ends with Coretti, also, pulling wet money out of his gill, paying for whatever he needs, sitting passively in bars wearing whatever is required, whatever is required to fit right in.
Hinterlands (1981)
A strange and disturbing story about a strange and disturbing phenomenon. At some in our future a Russian spaceship, an Alyut 6, en route to Mars, simply disappears. Two years later it reappears, its pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Olga Tovyevski, out of her mind. Several other ships disappear at the same location. It becomes clear it’s the departure point of some kind of Highway, which is what Americans call it, while the French call it the subway and the Russians the river.
Over the years an entire space station is set up to a) despatch probes and individuals through the Highway b) ready to receive them back. The success rate is low. Of those who return 20% are dead on arrival, 70% are mad, gone, lost – only 10% or so alive and capable of speech or communication, although often badly damaged.
Why keep on doing it? Because the second or third returnee came back with metal into which was coded information including a cure for cancer. After that humanity had to continue sending people into this…. thing… junkyard? curio shop, whatever it is.
The narrative follows the protagonist, Toby, preparing to greet a new returnee, Leni Hofmannstahl. The space station has an entire area nicknamed ‘Heaven’, which is full of grass and plants and the sound of trickling water, built on the advice of psychotherapists to provide the most calming environment possible for returnees, though it rarely works.
And, being Gibson, there is a psychic element, an interference with minds, which is that the greeter (himself) mind melds with a ‘controller’, becoming one via a device nicknamed a ‘bone-phone’ i.e. an implant in his brain.
Toby’s controller, Hiro, has genned up on Leni’s entire profile, knows her inside out, while Toby is carrying the entire arsenal of drugs know to humans to try and calm Leni. But when he enters the probe, now safely docked in ‘Heaven’, Toby immediately sees that she is ‘gone’. And in a very florid way. She is pinned in her pilot’s chair and, somehow, has persuaded the ship’s onboard medical unit to flay her right arm and pin it to the plastic work surface, skin unwrapped, nerves and tendons revealed, expertly dissected. She bled to death.
That night Toby is in bed with his squeeze, Charmian. We learn that they have been recruited from the ‘rejects’, the astronauts who bob around in a probe in the right area but, for reasons unknown, are not chosen, are not taken, who feel the crushing weight of rejection, often try to commit suicide, their brains are rewritten, ‘kinked’, adjusted, and then they are used as ‘surrogates’, almost-rans, half way towards the returnees, who an operator using the ‘bone-phone’ can meld and control. The price they pay. Clutching his woman in the dark, crying, empty drug wrappers clenched in his fist.
Red Star, Winter Orbit (co-written with Bruce Sterling, 1983)
A Russian space station – Kosmograd – has been orbiting earth for decades (since the turn of the century, apparently). It is armed, so there’s a squad of six soldiers and a KGB officer aboard.
The narrative describes the rebellion of the twenty or so civilian cosmonauts aboard the station, led by Korolev, himself badly injured in some kind of ‘blow-out’ twenty years previously, against the KGB man Yefremov, when they intercept Kremlin order that the station is to be abandoned and its orbit left to decay till it burns up in the earth’s atmosphere.
As so often, half the interest of the story is the ‘hints’ it drops of the fictional future. In this future the Russians have won. The Treaty of Vienna gave them control of the entire Earths oil supply, then there was some kind of nuclear meltdown in Kansas, with the result that, for three decades, America has been ‘gradually sliding into isolationism and industrial decline.’ (p.110) In some kind of attempt to gain extra power they have resorted to sending enormous balloons up into the outer atmosphere to collect energy.
And yet the story reveals that the Soviets themselves have failed. There was some kind of attempt to do mining on the moon, which failed. And we learn that Korolev, the protagonist – Colonel Yuri Vasilevich Korolev – had been the first man on Mars, back in the day. Now, as the KGB try to organise abandoning the Kosmograd, he is set to become the last man in space. Gloomily, Yefremov tells Korolev that the entire human endeavour to ‘escape’ into space has failed.
Kosmograd was a dream, Colonel. A dream that failed. Like space. We have no need to be here. We have an entire world to put in order. (p.107)
New Rose Hotel (1984)
In the early hours it starts to rain and the protagonist lies in bed in his cheap hotel going back over recent events trying to figure out where it all went wrong and how the chick he thought he’d clicked with, got away. That’s the classic shape of a Gibson Sprawl story.
This one is interesting because it expands on the basic Gibson idea that the future will be controlled by vast multinational conglomerates, and competition won’t be so much for resources as for knowledge.
Although the protagonist takes his time piecing together the sequence of events which brought him to this cheap hotel, by the end of the story the plot is clear.
The narrator is an expert at kidnapping the scientists whose inventions fuel the vast multinationals. He is hired by a man named Fox (‘point man in the skull wars, a middleman for corporate crossovers’) to work alongside another freelancer named Sandii to kidnap a genius named Hiroshi Yomuri from Maas Biolabs GmbH who had him, and hand him over to another corporate client, Hosaka.
Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who’s come here to identify the planet’s dominant for of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged. The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form. (p.129)
Anyway, Sandii, the narrator and Fox put together the kidnap and, sure enough, Yomuri disappears from a street in Vienna, popping up again in the secure facility the narrator has arranged for him in Marrakesh. Our chaps notice a number of other top Hosaka scientists flying in to confer with him. Then – disaster.
Sandii has double crossed them. She was paid by Mass to carry out the kidnapping, but had installed a diskette at the new hideaway which released some kind of Meningococcal infection. It killed Hiroshi and all the other Hosaka researchers. Score Maas. Hosaka’s anger knows no limits. He and Fox immediately go on the run, but he sees Fox get thrown off the balcony of a shopping mall, falling to the ground and breaking his back.
Now the narrator is holed up in the cheapest, obscurest hotel he can find, trying to cover his tracks, knowing assassins are on his trail and going over it all in his mind, wishing Sandii was still with him, wishing she still loved him, wishing she was holding his hand.
The Winter Market (1986)
The narrator, Casey, is another young buck at home in the louche worlds of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll. He goes on eight-hour-long bender when he learns that a recording star he’s been working for has died. But this is more complex than it seems.
We are in the future and people can record and edit other people’s experiences using ‘neuroelectronics’ – accessing and experiencing levels of consciousness which most people can only access in dreams, dream experiences. These can then be edited to create what are in effects ‘albums’, full of ‘tracks’, which recreate – which let you experience – other people’s lives, thoughts and feelings.
The narrator is a kind of ‘record producer’ of this kind of content, and the story looks back, soulfully and sadly, on his working relationship with a particularly fucked-up woman he met in a bar, Lise, who is only able to move because her withered body is fitted into a carbon exo-skeleton.
She is an epitome of the doomed artist, but in a leather jacket and addicted to speed (or ‘wizz’, as Gibson calls it.) Breaking his own rule, Casey, shares a circuit with her i.e. jacks into her consciousness, and emerges seconds later weeping with shock at the huge awesome night-time infinitely sad depths of it.
So he uses some studio downtime to make a rough recording of her, plays it to his boss who is stunned, who passes it up to a record company who snap it up and send out smooth-talking, suited PR people (all a riff on a 1980s view of the record biz), give her a contract, Casey is given a promotion and bonus to edit her stuff together into the classic album which becomes known as Kings of Sleep.
But she is a doomed artist, doomed, man, too sensitive for this world and so we learn that she has ‘crossed over’, used neuroelectronics to transfer her entire mental activity into a construct, an AI, a ROM stored in some corporate headquarters. Her body is cremated. Casey is gutted.
His story is told via conversations with his good friend Rubin, an internationally famous artist who makes art works out of the sea of junk by then surrounding 21st century society.
there’s drugs, there’s heavy drinking, there’s finding yourself in no-hope bars in the early hours, watching the other losers, there’s future tech – it’s a whole world, a Gestalt, the Sprawl scenario.
The relentless leather jacket, rock chick, mainline drugs, 12 hour drinking binges, late-night bars, rock’n’roll altered states milieu remind me of a favourite track by Jesus and Mary Chain, Coast to Coast from 1989.
Here I come, here I come
On a road
Under a sky Coast to coast
Dogfight (co-written with Michael Swanwick, 1985)
Another lowlife on the run, this time it’s Deke, a career thief, caught and kicked out of Washington DC, put on a greyhound out of town, fantasises about travelling forever, maybe down to the warzone in Florida (sic) he gets out at a 20 minute stopover station, stumbles on gamers playing a 3-D fighter game based on First World War biplanes zapping each other – Fokkers & Spads – and is entranced.
He walks back to a shopping mall and steals the (commercially available) game and the kit to play it on, scams himself into a cheap hotel (ain’t no other kind in Gibsonland), unwraps, plugs in and plays it.
Bit later he tries to sell part of the kit to a girl down the hall, Nance Bettendorf, but she freaks him out with 3-D images she can project (in this case, of a rat). She has a ‘brainblock’ put on her by her parents who both work (which is, in this dystopian future, very ‘greedy’ of them) a chastity block, so no sex for Deke, then, although she wears skimpy clothes which ride up to show here crimson panties.
She’s a student (again, apparently, a rare thing in this future) and is completing a virtual reality assignment. Having rich parents, she can afford all the right kit:
‘Image facilitator. Here’s my fast-wipe module. This is a brainmap one-to-one function analyser.’ She sang off the names like a litany. ‘Quantum flicker stabiliser. Program splicer. An image assembler…’ (p.175)
These to oddballs, outsiders, loners, sort of knock up a rapport. Deke stays with her while he practices his skills at the game, his aim being to take on the dude he saw in the Greyhound station and make some money. When Nance tells him she has some ‘hype’, a mind-focusing drug, Deke has no scruples about attacking her to steal it – and seeing as she has panic attacks if anyone touches her, his assault-cum-rape is as cruel as can be.
Having prepared for weeks, Deke walks back into the Greyhound rest room ready to take on all the gamers, until the legendary Tiny Montgomery walks in. Well chugs in in his wheelchair. (Tiny Montgomery is, incidentally, a character in a song by Bob Dylan written in Woodstock and part of the Basement Tapes which, incidentally, came to mind when I reviewed the early work of New York photographer Diane Arbus.)
So the story climaxes in a 3-D battle of First World War planes controlled by the minds of the champion, Tiny, and the challenger, Deke. During the extended description of the interactions of synapse, drugs, nerves and technology, it becomes clear that both Deke and Tiny are drug-addled, screwed-up veterans of American wars in South America, Chile, Bolivia, both – seemingly – shot down and damaged, before ending up on the underside of Yank society, hanging round Greyhound stations with the other vets and losers.
As the first full flush of victory, and the drug, begins to wear off, Deke realises all the other liggers disapprove of the way he’s destroyed Tiny. Flying the digital planes was all Tiny had keeping him together. Having lost, he is crushed. Plus Deke remembers having ruined Nance’s life, to steal the drug which meant so much to him. The story ends in a mood of complete desolation.
Pattern recognition
The characteristic protagonists are men, young men – 22, 24, 28.
They take drugs – amphetamine, cocaine, and a variety of invented future drugs such as ‘hype’. A lot of the characters hang out in bars and drink to excess.
Old or young, they are often damaged – like Korosov with his shattered body, or Automatic Jack with his prosthetic arm, or Tiny Montgomery stuck in his wheelchair, or Lise with some degenerative disease which requires her to be supported by an exoskeleton. Or psychologically damaged like the receivers Toby and Charmian, or Deke and Tiny, the war veterans.
Most of the stories feature a young woman, generally thin, great figure, great boobs, but able to hold her own on the street, epitomised by Molly with the razor nails, or the mystery alien woman in The Belonging Kind, Sandii, and Rikki.
Generally, the young, lowlife, criminal male protagonist carries a torch for this cyberbabe. Generally, she leaves and breaks his heart and he spends a lot of time raking over the reasons why. Some of the stories are written more or less as letters, directly addressing this woman, who leaves, dumps, drops the writer: e.g. Rikki at the end of Burning Chrome, or Sandii in New Rose Hotel, or Lise in The Winter Market.
The male protagonists are generally criminals, most often computer hackers – Jack and Bobby the hackers in Chrome, Johnny Mnemonic who runs off with someone else’s data, Deke the thief, the kidnapping (corporate extraction) experts in New Rose Hotel – and the stories recurrent focus is on lowlife, criminal milieus, gangs, drug dealers, ninjas, assassins, all written up in fabulously street-smart, tech-savvy, turbo-charged prose.
Diane Arbus was born in 1923 into a rich and cultured Jewish family in New York City. Her older brother, Howard, would go on to become the American poet laureate. She was sent to a series of private schools. In American terms, it would be difficult to be more privileged. But her father was rarely involved in her upbringing, absorbed in running the well-known Russek department store on Fifth Avenue, and her mother suffered from depression – so Diane and her siblings were raised by a succession of maids and governesses. It was a childhood of alienation and loneliness.
Indeed, Arbus suffered depressive episodes throughout her life and in 1971, at the age of 48, she took her own life while living at an artists community in New York City, swallowing barbiturates and slashing her wrists with a razor.
By that time she had established herself as one of the most influential, visionary and powerful photographers of the post-war period, and her reputation has grown steadily ever since.
The exhibition layout
This exhibition at the Hayward Gallery includes nearly 100 photographs taken during the first half (‘in the beginning’) of Arbus’s career, from 1956 to 1962, giving you a powerful sense of how she started out, of the incredible gift she began with, and how she developed and crafted it into something really distinctive.
All the photos are black and white, and consist of vintage prints from the Diane Arbus Archive at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. They are generally quite small, discreetly framed. The earlier ones are often dark and grainy in texture, shot on the hoof as she captures street scenes. By the early 60s this has changed a lot, the images gain clarity, the prints become larger, more lucid, the subjects more obviously posed and engaged, rather than caught on the fly.
But the first and most striking thing about the exhibition is how they’ve all been hung. The images are attached to the sides of square pillars which have arranged in a grid pattern in two big rooms.
The images are not in any particular chronological order, and so this ‘pillar layout’ allows you to wander past them in a number of directions: from front to back, or from side to side, diagonally, or to shimmy through the pillars in a random pattern.
Installation view of diane arbus: in the beginning at Hayward Gallery, 2019. Photo by Mark Blower
If you saw them from above they would make a grid pattern and I suppose this could be said to echo the grid-like layout of the streets of her home town, Manhattan, the pillars representing city ‘blocks’.
Themes
The result of roaming freely through this forest of images is to make you notice recurring themes and subjects and thread them onto your own strings. Three large themes stick out:
They’re all set in the city – urban scenes, streets and cars and shops, snack bars, inside people’s homes (generally shabby front rooms and cramped kitchens of cheap apartments) as well as various places of entertainment
They’re all black and white, the earlier ones especially (i.e. mid-1950s) having a gritty, late-night film noir feel, almost like the crime scene photos and artless street scenes of someone like Weegee
They’re almost all of people. Only three out of the hundred don’t feature people as their central focus, and in all three the absence of people is their main affect.
To be more specific, the images include the following recurring subjects:
night-time street scenes, people standing in the daytime street, taxi cabs, passersby
looking into shop windows, down a passage into a barber shop, an empty snack bar
scenes from films and shows broadcast on her television
circus performers
freaks: dwarves, giants, identical twins
a waxworks museum
Coney Island, famous for its entertainment and sideshows
the changing rooms of female impersonators
unnerving children
fathers holding babies
upper class women, in the street, in art galleries, in restaurants
The subjects most associated with Arbus are circus performers, midgets, giants, freaks and grotesques, transvestites and other ‘outsiders’ – so we have photos of ‘the human pin cushion’, of a circus strong man, a contortionist seen over the heads of a watching crowd. These might all come under the heading ‘Performers’, along with shots of:
Andy ‘Potato Chips’ Rotocheff doing his impression of Maurice Chevalier
the man who swallows razor blades
the Russian midget
The Jewish giant
the Mexican dwarf
Outsiders, people who perform exaggerate versions of themselves for entertainment.
Female impersonators
Another recurring subject is images of men who made a living as female impersonators in various states of undress in their backstage dressing rooms. I guess they have a combination of cheap glamour with pathos.
Circus acts, sideshow entertainers, female impersonators. They are all people who dress up and perform versions of themselves, who create their identities.
That summary might give the impression Arbus is attracted by the glamour of show business, or be a relative of the countless photographers of Hollywood film stars or Broadway actors. Far from it.
Poor and shabby
Because what all these subjects have in common is that they are poor.
Arbus was born into a wealthy family with nannies and maids, but emotionally stifled, repressed, alienated. The photos indicate that she went out looking for trouble, for worlds which represented the opposite of her privileged, Upper East Side, private school bubble. Slumming down among the proles in their shabby bars, pool halls and bizarre Victorian entertainments.
It’s in this spirit that there’s a strong thread of grainy, gritty shots of ugly working class people snogging, getting drunk and generally being lowlives at the poor man’s seaside resort, Coney Island in Brooklyn. As distant in terms of class, culture and manners, as it was possible to get from her privileged Manhattan background.
Alongside the depictions of living freaks and performers, there are several images of the dead. For example, a handful of shots from a New York waxworks museum, including a really gruesome one of an elaborately staged crime scene with fake blood spattered over the waxwork figures (Wax Museum Axe Murder).
Nearby is a shot of a corpse at a mortuary, shot from behind the head and showing the rib cage broken open to perform an autopsy.
As a grace note to these images of the grotesque and morbid is a handful of images of the genuinely surreal. Thus she made a trip to Disneyland where she saw a number of stage set ‘rocks’ parked on the trailers or trolleys which were used to move them around.
But this kind of deliberate and rather obvious surrealism was not her thing, not least because these are objects. Arbus is a people person: weird, disturbing and unsettling people, maybe, but it the strangeness of humanity is her subject, not the wide world of odd objects.
TV and film
Related to the idea of performance, and of the grotesque, is a whole series of black and white photos she took of films or TV shows. As far as I could tell a lot of these were shot directly off her TV while they were being broadcast, although some also seem to have been shot at the cinema, the camera pointing up at a distorted image on the screen.
Either way, these film still photos are clearly related to the themes discussed above in being hammy or kitsch. Thus we have:
a blonde woman on screen about to be kissed (and looking terrified)
a kiss for Baby Doll (from a movie)
a screaming woman with blood on her hands
As you can see, she’s chosen subjects which are cheap, melodramatic and pulpy. They should be funny except that something in Arbus’s framing, exposure and printing stops them being funny. Somehow they all suggest an imaginative world of genuine trauma, no matter how hokey its trappings.
Behind the cheap histrionics of Bela Lugosi or the woman screaming, behind the appalling bubblegum world of American culture, Arbus manages to identify something much deeper and genuinely disturbing.
How the weird infects the everyday
And this, I think, was the one big idea which gradually suggested itself as I circulated round the pillars and viewed and re-viewed this jungle of images: it dawned on me that Arbus took the same sensibility which had plumbed the depths of proley entertainment, which had faced the waxwork axe murders, which had tracked down ‘the human pin cushion’ and captured rough, deformed, chavvy working-class people about their entertainments in cheap funfairs and seedy pool halls, in smoke-filled cinemas, arguing and getting drunk and watching gimcrack performers, and…
… she then brought this feel for the weird and the strange and applied it to everyday life. She found herself able to detect the strange and unsettling quality of the sideshow contortionist in random passersby, the pathos of the fat lady in the passengers in a parked taxi cab, the mystery of the circus dwarf in a middle-aged woman on a bus, the glittery pathos of the transvestites in the face of a boy about to cross the road.
Somehow, what should be everyday people and banal scenes become charged, through her lens, with a tremendous sense of weirdness and strangeness.
It’s just a woman of a certain age in a fur coat on a bus, what’s so strange about that?
Well, in Diane Arbus’s hands, lots. Everything about this image has become strange and unsettling. It’s as if she had bottled the weird, edge-of-humanity vibe she had found down among the midnight sawdust and sweaty changing rooms of the circus midget and the transvestite performers, and then come back to the ordinary, everyday world of the bustling city and stealthily blown it onto passersby, transforming everyone she pointed her camera at into the stars of some obscure, unfathomable but deeply eerie storylines.
Through her lens they all become aliens caught in the act of… of doing something… of being something… strange and incommunicable.
A boy stepping off a kerb, what could be more mundane and boring, right? Except that in Arbus’s hands – through her eye -–transmuted through her ability with camera and print – this kid seems to be a representative from another planet. Or to be hinting at strange unsuspected depths, of mysteries which can never be fathomed, right here, in this hectic, over-crowded city.
And so it is with a huge tranche of these images, even the most thoroughly ordinary – a girl with a pointy hood 1957, a woman with white gloves and a pocketbook 1956, a woman carrying a child in Central Park 1956 – all are super-charged with rare meaning and some kind of fraught but invisible symbolism, felt but not understood.
She was dead right when she said:
I do feel I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things. I mean it’s very subtle and a little embarrassing to me but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.
Very subtle, but very very powerful.
A box of ten photographs
She didn’t stop photographing the weird and the uncanny. Well into the 60s she was photographing giants and midgets and twins. But as the 1950s turns into the 1960s, you can watch how she perfected her ability to capture the ominous quality of people doomed to be outsiders, losing the grainy look of the 50s and producing images which are much clearer, starker, all the more moving for their bluntness – and at the same time more and more subtly injecting that freak quality into deceptively ‘ordinary’ scenes of everyday life.
In a change to the white pillar layout, a room to the side of the main exhibition is devoted to one of her last works, a limited edition portfolio containing just ten of her photographs which she considered her best. Beautifully printed and presented, the limited edition boxes were priced at a thousand dollars apiece!
All ten of the photos she selected are on display here, and include several of her greatest hits, such as the identical twins.
Also included are A Jewish giant at home with his parents in the Bronx, N.Y. 1970, the Mexican dwarf, the King and Queen of a Senior Citizen dance, and the boater-wearing young man who is a supporter of the Vietnam war.
In just these ten shots you can see her major subjects recapitulated: circus freaks, grotesque chavs, transvestites (the guy with curlers in his hair), the everyday weirdness of the middle-aged nudist couple in their living room.
Posed weirdness against spontaneous unease
So far so obvious. But the image I liked most from the set was of the youngish couple lying on loungers in their big garden while junior plays with a paddling pool in the background.
The wall label tells us that her friend, the photographer Richard Avedon, bought two of the boxes, one for himself and one to give as a gift to the film director Mike Nichol.
Now Nichol has made a whole rack of excellent films, but that image of the couple on their loungers reminded me strongly of The Graduate from 1967, starring then unknown actor Dustin Hoffman, alongside Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross. The Graduate is set in wealthy suburbia, is a story about people with nice houses with big gardens and swimming pools, and powerfully conveys the smothering politeness of American middle-class life which you only had to scratch the surface of to reveal a seething underworld of jealousies and animosities, lusts and betrayals.
It’s a very uncharacteristic photo for Arbus. Not urban, city streets, not at night. A suburban garden. Yet somehow (to pursue my thesis of her ability to find the weird amid the banal) the couple’s awkward pose and their strange indifference to their rummaging child, conveys – to me, at any rate – just as much un-ease, as much edginess, as a photo of, say, the spooky twins, or another one nearby, the kid with the hand grenade.
This is a famous photo. It has its very own Wikipedia article. After getting talking to him in the park and getting his parents permission to photograph him, she circled him getting to adopt different faces and poses, before selecting the one where he’s pulling the funniest face and looking, well, weirdest.
In the later photos, the exhibition gives us an increasing sense of the photographer arranging, engaging with and posing her subjects like this, a change from the more casual, fly-on-the-wall street photography of the 50s. They become more clearly framed and shot. It’s after the period covered by the show, from 1962 onwards, that she produces the images she’s most famous for.
But this, I think, is why I like the couple in the garden – it’s obviously been set up but it’s not a pose, it’s one among, presumably, a set of shots, and yet it captures very well the quality I’m on about – the more subtle end of her work, the capturing of dis-ease in the midst of the what ought to be the everyday.
Only connect
There’s another aspect to the Child with a toy hand grenade photo. The boy’s name was Colin Wood. Years later he gave an interview to the Washington Post about the experience of being photographed by Diane Arbus.
My parents had divorced and there was a general feeling of loneliness, a sense of being abandoned. I was just exploding. She saw that and it’s like… commiseration. She captured the loneliness of everyone. It’s all people who want to connect but don’t know how to connect. And I think that’s how she felt about herself. She felt damaged and she hoped that by wallowing in that feeling, through photography, she could transcend herself.
It would be easy to take this testimony and what we know about her unhappy childhood, to conclude that alienation and disconnect is the single dominating and defining quality of her photos.
It’s a powerful interpretation because it does, in fact, eloquently express the look in the eyes of all those transvestites, midgets and so on, the taxi drivers, the woman with white gloves and a pocketbook standing marooned on the sidewalk – people who seem somehow abandoned in the middle of their own lives.
But I tend to shy away from interpretations of books or art which focus solely on the psychology of the creator. Obviously it’s important, often decisive, but it is never enough. For me the most important thing is the work itself, the book and the words or the art and the images. The interest for me is in deciphering how it works, why it moves and transports us, in analysing the choice of subject, the maker’s skill with composition, framing, lighting, with contrasting effects of graininess or smoothness and so on.
It may be that the haunted loneliness in Diane Arbus’s personality sought, drew out and depicted the fellow loneliness she found in the people she photographed. But this psychological sympathy isn’t a sufficient explanation for her achievement. The same, the ability to coax secrets from subjects, might be said of social workers or therapists.
Any full explanation of the photographs’ impact must not lose sight of the fact that she was a photographer of genius. It is because she was a superb technician that her personal vision of the world didn’t die with her but is preserved in literally thousands of haunting photographs (some 6,000 at the most recent count).
The rise of weirdness
Looking at all these images of shabby circus performers and seedy changing rooms suddenly made me think of the cover art of The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan. In the same year as Arbus shot the Identical twins – 1967 – Dylan retired to Woodstock where he and the Band made home tape recordings of scores of songs which were later released on the album titled the Basement Tapes.
The album cover (in fact created a decade later) is an effort to depict the surreal cast of characters who wander through the forty or so songs Dylan wrote that summer, a deliberate invocation of the circus world of bizarre and offbeat performers – a ballerina, a strong man in a leopard skin, a harem odalisque, a fire-eater, a midget, a fat lady.
It feels as if the rich vein of American weirdness which Arbus mined in her very personal photos from the late 1950s onwards was somehow destined to become part of the pop mainstream less than a decade later.
Cover of The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan (1975)
Arbus’s photos progress from a film noir and Naked City world of the late 1950s – distilled in her grainy shots of empty bars, barber shops, Coney island fairground lights and so on – to a much clearer, early-60s aesthetic which presents its subjects much more openly, candidly and vulnerably.
But I couldn’t help thinking that in both incarnations, she eerily anticipated what by the mid-1960s had become a very widespread interest in outsiders, freaks, the circus, transvestites and the rest of it.
In 1957 the word ‘freak’ meant someone suffering a deformity of body or mind, unacceptable to the average smartly-dressed, Middle American family. But just ten years later, the word ‘freak’ was being used to describe the pioneers of a new Zeitgeist, the trippy, zoned-out prophets of new ways of seeing and living. As soon as I hear the word ‘freak’ I think of the cartoon characters, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, who first appeared in 1971, and the whole freak aesthetic went on to have a long dwindling afterlife in the 1970s.
From what I read Arbus herself was never anything like a hippy or flower child – but she was certainly way ahead of the curve in her obsession with freaks and outsiders. And in her ability to find the freakish and the uncanny in the everyday, she had nailed and defined a whole thread of Americana before its emergence into broader pop culture a few years later.
Cover of Strange Days by The Doors (1967)
Not just illuminating ‘some slight corner on something about the quality of things’, Diane Arbus pioneered a whole way of seeing America, the world and modern urban life which shed light, not only on the obviously weird and bizarre (what she’s famous for), but also suffused countless banal and everyday scenes with wonderfully strange and ominous undertones.
What a great exhibition. What a brilliant photographer.
This is a big exhibition. It showcases the work of 20 leading photographers from around the world and brings together an impressive, almost overwhelming range, of material, with over 300 works from the 1950s to the present day, including vintage and contemporary prints, archival material, specialist magazines, rare audio recordings, films and photo books.
The theme is ‘outsiders and rebels’. As the press release explains:
By recording and documenting those on the edges, or outside of the mainstream, the images in Another Kind of Life bear witness to how social attitudes change across time and space, charting how visual representation has helped shape current discourse in relation to marginalised or alternative communities.
The rebels and outsiders come in roughly two forms, social and sexual. By ‘social’ I mean rockers, bikers, street gangs, criminal gang members, Teddy boys and so on. By ‘sexual’ I mean the pronounced thread of work which focuses exclusively on transvestite and transgender people, people of ‘unorthodox’ or outside sexuality, often prostitutes.
It struck me as I went round the show that you could categorise these as rebels-by-choice and rebels-by-sexuality.
Broadly speaking the pictures in the downstairs rooms are from the 1960s, by photographers born in the 1930s and 40s, who are American or European, and the pictures are in black and white. Up in the first floor galleries, the photographers are younger, the prints are in colour, a lot bigger and from a wider geographical reach (Russia, India, Chile, Mexico, Nigeria).
Each of the photographers has a room dedicated to their own work and for this purpose the normally fairly open gallery space of the Barbican has been converted into a warren of smallish rooms. The walls partitioning off the display areas are black and arranged in such a way that there are ‘dummy’ or empty spaces between them, converting the downstairs area into quite a maze. Indeed, they hand out a map with arrows to help the visitor find their way through it. If I’d had small children it would have been quite a good layout to play hide and seek in.
First a thumbnail sketch of the photographers and their work, then some thoughts.
The photographers 1. Downstairs
Diane Arbus (1923 to 1971) American. Arbus became famous for taking photos of marginalized people – dwarfs, giants, transgender people, nudists, circus performers, and people stricken by what ‘normal’ standards might be called ugliness. Pictures of what we used to call ‘freaks’. She is quoted as describing the way she tried to go from being an outsider to the strange worlds she recorded, to going ‘inside’. The wall label explains that her work underwent a significant transformation when she started using a square format camera. Maybe she’s here at the beginning because she introduces many of the themes the exhibition will pursue.
The next room contains works by legendary American photographer Bruce Davidson (b.1933), specifically from the series The Dwarf and Brooklyn Gang. These were taken in the late 1950s and feature skinny youths in jeans, white t-shirts with rockabilly hairstyles on the beach at the cheap seaside resort of Coney Island, or hanging out in the streets and stairwells of New York.
Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama (b.1938) is famous for his seminal work, Japan Photo Theatre (1968). This features shots of ordinary people captured in candid moments, in bars, restaurants, drinking heavily, smoking, as well as shots of prostitutes and transvestites in Tokyo, belying Japan’s reputation for propiety and and conformity.
Japan Theatre from the series Japan Photo Theater by Daido Moriyama. Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, UK Courtesy of Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation
Danny Lyon (b.1942) is an American photographer and film maker who works on the immersive principle. The works here record him becoming accepted in the mid-60s by the ‘hard-drinking’ motorbike gang, The Outlaws. Lots of photos of these tough guys wearing sleeveless denim jackets to showcase their tattoos, riding their rigs, smoking tabs and kissing their women.
The second Japanese photographer in the exhibition is Seiji Kurata (b.1945) represented by starkly lit images from Flash Up (1975 to 1979), a work depicting the seedy, often violent underbelly of gang culture in the notorious Ikebukuro and Shinjuku districts of Tokyo, featuring ‘leather-boys and bargirls’. The young toughs in Danny Lyon or Bruce Davidson are dead proud of their tattoos but they have nothing on these Japanese gang members who are covered from head to foot with intricately-drawn tattoos, often containing violent and threatening imagery.
Another American, Larry Clarke (b.1943) is a director, photographer, writer and film producer who is best known for his photography book Tulsa, in which he recorded in black and white photos (and in a rough and ready b&w film, on show here) the dead-end, semi-violent, drug-influenced world of his twenty-something schoolmates, shown smoking, drinking, snogging girls, driving cars, shooting up heroine.
Untitled (1963) from the series Tulsa, 1962 to 1971 by Larry Clark. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London
Igor Palmin was born in Russia in 1933. The commentary explains that during the 1960s and 70s going on an ‘archaeological expedition’ was a good way for dissident youths to get away from the stifling conventions and social spying of home. Through these trips Palmin discovered scattered communities of young people trying to copy the western ideal of becoming hippies and ‘dropping out’. This resulted in the two works on show here, sequences of black and white photos set in the grungy post-industrial landscape of Southern Russia, The Enchanted Wanderer (1977) and The Disquiet (1977). The first one features numerous shots of the same long-haired, bell-bottomed hippy wandering round what looks like an abandoned gravel works; the second features a few more hippies, complete with flower power hair bands, playing guitars in abandoned buildings or smoking joints in a scruffy caravan.
The Swiss Walter Pfeiffer (b.1946) emerged on the peripheries of documentary photography in the 1970s and now flourishes in the mainstreams of contemporary fashion and style bibles. He’s represented by his body of work about his young transsexual friend Carlo Joh, from the Zurich gay scene. Partly inspired by Lou Reed’s recently released album Transformers (1972), Pfieffer took a whole series of black and white and colour photos and films of Joh over a few months in 1973, showing him in various states of undress, with or without wigs and make-up, playing with gender imagery.
Born in 1959, Frenchman Philippe Chancel is best known for his work documenting Paris street gangs in the 1980s, specifically the Panthers and the Vikings. The commentary describes the gangs as being ‘in thrall to an idealised version of 1950s American youth culture’, and explains that they treasured vintage U.S. Air Force jackets and listened to hot jazz. The Vikings were named after the Del-Vikings, the first American rock’n’roll group to include both blacks and whites; The Panthers are named after the Black Panthers. Note both the American-ness and the datedness of these influences.
To my eye it was just another set of young dudes, wearing jeans, with rockabilly quiffs, smoking tabs, showing off their tattoos, dancing in nightclubs and getting off with girls. Far from being ‘outsiders’ I was struck by how much they were just copying what, by the 1980s, had become the international conventional look of youth ‘rebellion’. Some of them packed baseball bats and one had a gun. As sure as night follows day, we see all this revelry leading to street fights and then to some of les jeunes being carted off by les flics.
Untitled, 1982 from the series Rebel’s Paris 1982 by Philippe Chancel. Courtesy of Melanie Rio Fluency, France
Casa Susanna is not a person but a collection of around 400 prints taken during the mid-50s and 60s at a private retreat for transvestites, a safe haven in upstate New York where they posed for the camera in glamorous dresses, playing cards, eating dinner and having drinks by the fire. This treasure trove of old prints was recently discovered at a Manhattan flea market and here it is, now a treasured part of gender-bending social history.
The last room on the ground floor showcases black and white photos by ChrisSteele-Perkins (b.1947) who was commissioned by the Times in 1976 to do a feature on contemporary Teddy boys. First time around in the 1950s, Teds were so named because they adopted the style of Edwardian dandies, with Brylcreemed quiffs, three-quarter length drape jackets and beetle crusher shoes. Steele-Perkins captured the lives, loves, music and fashion of the Ted revival of the mid-70s, with the usual cast of pimply youths hanging out in pubs and clubs, smoking tabs, showing off their hard man tattoos, dancing with stockinged girls, and showing respect to some of the wizened elders of the movement. I took a particular fancy to ‘Tongue-Tied Danny’s Wedding’, partly because of the title alone.
The exhibition continues upstairs in the nine rooms on the first floor, and the mood here feels distinctively different. The American photographers here come from a markedly younger generation than the ones downstairs, and there is a much wider range of nationalities.
You are immediately arrested by the work of Jim Goldberg (b.1953) and the selections from his harrowing work, Raised by Wolves (1987 to 1993). This details the life of street kids Goldberg befriended in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the 1980s, including Tweeky Dave and Echo. There are plenty of photos but also physical objects including what appears to be the actual denim jacket covered in scrawls which one of the kids wears in the photos, FUCK OFF etched repeatedly in biro. And there are ‘photo-texts’ where a print of one of the street kids is accompanied by a white sheet with their scrawled, hand-written messages on them, such as:
I’m Dave who the fuck are you?
Or:
My mom was a junkie slut
My old man is a biker asshole from hell
the fucked-up asshole shot me in the gut when I was 10
These kids are really, really damaged. Another big print of a teenage boy with grazes on his face is accompanied by a text describing how sleazy old men pay to jerk off in front of him for money and how only taking drugs makes it bearable.
In some of the carefree biker photos of Lyon or Davidson, among the denim-clad young men lounging around smoking fags of shooting up or handling half-dressed women, there are babies. You can’t help thinking that Goldberg’s photos show what happened to those babies. Or what happened to the children of those babies. A couple of generations on from the original rebel chic of the late 50s to mid-60s, much of America is an urban wasteland of abandonment and dereliction and drugs.
This message is rammed home by the work in the next room of New York photographer Mary Ellen Mark (1940 to 2015). She worked on a long-term project, Streetwise (1983) recording her time spent with Erin Charles, a street kid known as ‘Tiny’, who she first met as a 13-year-old surviving on the streets of Seattle. In the last of these brutal photos teenage Tiny is crying, blurring her mascara.
Having consumed more than their fair share of American TV and movies through the magic of the internet, both of my teenage kids think America is the most fucked-up country in the world. Hard to disagree on this evidence.
Boris Mikhailov (b.1938) specialises in brutally realistic colour photos of the bedraggled, ugly, poor inhabitants of his native Kharkov. The homeless have a special name, the bomzhev, and the Mikhailov room is devoted to a particularly humiliating sequence of two ugly old bomzhev preparing for their marriage, the ugly dwarfish woman, often topless, showing her haggard body and flat breasts, the bearded husband playing around with a twelve-inch dildo. Here are the happy couple:
Some light relief came in the form of a room of photographs by Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz (b.1944). General Augusto Pinochet headed a military dictatorship in Chile from 1973 and 1990. Any form of political, cultural or religious non-conformity was punished with arrest, torture and executions. Errázuriz created a series depicting the community of transgender sex-workers working in an underground brothel in Chile, which was gathered together in the book Adam’s Apple (1982 to 1987). The photos here focused on the transgender brothers Pilar and Evelyn, the latter a particularly handsome man, who makes a fine-looking woman. I needed cheering up so I was relieved that some of the photos show Evelyn, apparently with other, straight, members of his family, laughing and joking. One of them catches a moment of real love and affection. Phew.
By now the visitor might be forgiven for being overwhelmed, both by names and biographies of the photographers and the histories of their various projects, and by the rather exhausting emotional response some of the more harrowing photographs provoke. But there is still quite a lot more to see and process.
So it’s perfect timing that the visitor is taken by surprise in the next room which is devoted to five or so giant colour prints taken by Pieter Hugo. Hugo, born in 1976, is South African, and the selections are from the series named The Hyena and Other Men (2005–2007). This records members of the Nigerian gang of ‘debt collectors’ who go around with tamed hyenas to collect their debts. Yes. Tamed hyenas. I’d pay up pretty quickly, wouldn’t you?
Just as you’d begun to forget how wrecked America is, there’s a room of photos by Katy Grannan (b.1969) depicting what the Yanks themselves describe as ‘trailer trash’. There are some black people in there, too, but mostly it’s poor whites, economically and socially downtrodden.
As sudden and unexpected as the hyena men is the next room which is devoted to a big screen showing of a film of Mona Ahmed, a eunuch from New Delhi. This is by Indian photographer Dayanita Singh (b.1961) who met Mona in the 1980s and formed a lifelong friendship with her. Mona was born a boy, castrated when young, and grew up to assert her identity as a member of a ‘third sex’. Beside the film is a series of stills of Mona which include her own ‘honest and frank words’ as accompaniment.
Born in 1969, Alec Soth, another American, by chance came across a guy living in the wild, completely detached from modern life, the state and so on, and this led him to uncover the whole sub-culture of American men (it is mostly men) who live ‘off the grid’ as the modern saying has it. The result is not only enormous colour prints of these haunting, solitary monks, survivalists, hermits and runaways but a number of documents, including wills, letters and manuals on ‘how to disappear from Amerika’. One photo was of a ruined wall in a derelict-looking house, peeling plaster etc, and scrawled on it:
I love my Dad – I wish he loved me
Which bathetically echoed the sentiments of the abandoned children in Jim Goldberg and Mary Ellen Mark. By this stage America really has been painted as the country of loss and abandonment.
The final room in the exhibition is devoted to the even bigger colour prints of Teresa Margolles (b.1963). These huge full colour works depict transgender Mexican sex workers, each one portrayed in a very styled and composed way standing amid the ruins of one-time nightclubs. Very very different from the rough and ready, snap and go, catching the moment black and white shots of Japanese bars and American bikers which we started the show with…
Dance floor of the club ‘Arthur’s’, 2016 by Teresa Margolles. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland
Thoughts
Big
It’s big, a very big exhibition. Given that there’s a hefty chunk of text introducing each photographer, and a lot of the pictures themselves tell stories, featuring individuals who themselves require a bit of introduction, plus the films and the survivalist books – it’s a lot of information to take on board. And it gives rise to a tsunami of ideas and impressions.
Categories
In trying to categorise or make sense of it all, I felt I could break the exhibition down into three very broad elements:
rebels by choice – the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s bikers, hippies and Teds
rebels by gender i.e. people who don’t feel at home in the gender roles assigned to them, transvestites, transgender people
abandoned kids, and abandoned adults
Whereas in the 1950s or 1960s teen rebellion was a choice made by kids and young men who had choices, it is quite obvious that the lives of the abused, sexually exploited, drug-addled street kids of Lyon and Goldberg and Mark contain no choices. Their parents abandoned them or were incapable of looking after them. They didn’t choose to be selling sex on the streets at 13.
Transgender
I couldn’t help feeling uneasy about the way the show threw together the issues and life choices facing transvestite and transgender people with the lifestyles of Hell’s Angels or Paris street gangs. The bikers and Japanese gang members and Teds seemed completely different to me. For a start those cultures are aggressively heterosexual and so in many ways confirm and entrench the social pressure which transgender people confront. And somehow it also felt as if those lifestyle choices – being a Russian hippy or an American biker – were in many ways superficial; after all, plenty of hippies ended up cutting their hair, going into business and now run big corporations. Somehow it felt to me as if the life choices the transgender people had to make – in Chile or Mexico or Japan – ran deeper, were more existential, went more to the heart of who they were.
Post-war American invents ‘cool’
Nine of the twenty photographers are American. That phrase about the Paris gangs being ‘in thrall to an idealised version of 1950s American youth culture’ is true of a lot of the other people shown here, too, from the Russian hippies to the London Teds.
After the Second World War America emerged as the most powerful and richest nation the world had ever seen. It pioneered a whole wave of consumer goods – phones, radios, televisions, fridges, washing machines, hoovers – which the whole world wanted. It pioneered and perfected aggressive new marketing techniques associated with thrillingly dynamic images of this new rich automobile lifestyle. And all of this was encapsulated and sold around the world via Hollywood movies featuring rugged-jawed men and the big bosoms of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell.
And accompanying all the products and marketing of post-war industrial capitalism, America also pioneered all the ways a newly affluent generation of young people could rebel against it. The Wild Ones (1953), Rebel without a Cause (1955), On The Road (1957). From the Beat poets through Californian surfer chic on into flower power and Woodstock and then New York glam, American popular culture pioneered all the attitudes, fashions and looks which pissed-off young people around the world could adopt as symbols of their ‘rebellion’. According to the wall label, The Outlaws, the gang Bruce Davidson hung out with, influenced the conception of Easy Rider (1969), which itself went on to inspire a whole new generation of young men.
Somewhere along the way, I don’t know when exactly, this look – scruffy jeans, white t-shirt, fast motorbike – became completely commodified and commercialised. By when – was it sometime in the 1980s, or was it in the 1970s – every street market in the western world was selling ‘rebellion’ in the shape of studded leather jackets or pre-stressed jeans, and a whole universe of logo-ed t-shirts.
My point is that, although the actual people Danny Lyon and Bruce Davidson and Larry Clarke documented were real, and experienced their non-conformity as real, this look, this style, this approach, this feel, has for generations now been the stuff of international marketing and profitable merchandising. It has become the international stock language of youth ‘rebellion’.
Post-Cold War America pioneers urban collapse
This, I think, explains the difference in vibe between the ground floor and the first floor rooms. On the ground floor are loads of black and white photos which could still feature in an advert for Levi jeans today. That look is totally assimilated into the international style of ‘cool’. It is amusing and thrilling and nostalgic to see all of them, American bikers, Paris gangs, English Teds. Aaaaah, sweet.
Nothing could be more different from the lost children of America on the first floor. This is the world of The Wire and Breaking Bad, depicting a nation which has become really dysfunctional, in which not just a few cool kids drop out to ride bikes or take acid, but scores of millions of families and abandoned individuals live lives of poverty and violence and drug addiction. This is a completely different kind of ‘outsider’, not cool and not by choice they are casualties of a society falling to pieces, a society ravaged by urban unemployment, astonishing levels of street violence, widespread opioid addiction and mass shootings.
Transgender issues
I’m not equipped to say very much about transgender issues except that the exhibition provides striking evidence that it is a universal condition – America, Chile, Mexico and, most surprisingly of all, polite suppressed Japan, all have their transgender communities. It is, quite obviously, another way of being human which should be accepted along with all the other ways and means of being human. And at the end of the bombardment of nearly 300 images, one of my favourite images from the whole show was of Evelyn, the Chilean transvestite, smiling, looking genuinely happy.
Photography on the margins?
I couldn’t quite make sense of the theme or message of the exhibition. Sure all these people are outsiders of sorts, but there is a world of difference between an American motorbike gang member and a Japanese transvestite club entertainer. Isn’t there? And between both and a street kid who’s selling sex aged 12?
Maybe they all are ‘outsiders’, but why stop there? If we’re talking the 70s and 80s (which a lot of the exhibition does) what about Vietnam veterans or the Russian veterans of Afghanistan? Come to that what about the veterans of any war from the last 70 years or so, damaged, alienated, depressed, often institutionalised?
What about the inhabitants of mental institutions, outsiders if there ever were any?
What about immigrants who – so we read in the papers – often feel alienated and threatened and ‘outside’ the host culture? Or refugees, also strangers and outsiders?
What about the disabled, hospitals full of deaf or blind or paraplegic people, who have their own ways of communicating and affirming their identities? They’re outside the ‘conventional’ cultural narratives.
What about old people with dementia, a growing tide of people who are really outside all conventional narratives? (My dad had dementia; it puts you way outside ‘conventional social narratives’.)
And those are just Western groups. Thinking of India makes me think of the Untouchables, the excluded caste, which I’m sure have been the subject of photographic books. Why not them?
In short, as soon as you begin to think for yourself about groups living ‘on the margins’, ‘outsiders’ living beyond conventional narratives of society, you quickly realise there’s no shortage of groups and tribes and sub-cultures in any modern society.
So it’s an exhibition which manages to be both overwhelming in the number of images it presents – very high quality images by some brilliant photographers who have dedicated years and even decades to studying their subjects – but also seems to be oddly narrow, politically correct and ‘cool’, in its subject and themes – 1960s bikers, street kids, transgender heroes (I appreciate the ugly Russian and the hyena men stand completely outside all these generalisations).
You should definitely go, though. It’s full of brilliant photographs in a whole range of styles, and will (probably) introduce you to wonderful photographers you’ve never heard of before. I’ve told my daughter to go and take her friends. She’s 16. She loves taking photos. She wants to get piercings and a tattoo in order to express her individuality. She’s been taught that society oppresses women and alternative sexualities. She wants to change the world. She wants to be a rebel. She’ll absolutely love this show.
The promotional video
Barbican women
Barbican Senior Manager – Katrina Crookall
Barbican Director of Arts – Louise Jeffreys
Barbican Head of Visual Arts – Jane Alison
Exhibition Curator – Alona Pardo
Exhibition Assistant – Charlotte Flint
Books & Boots 