Scale and scope

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.

• Diane Arbus circus photos

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.

Untitled XVI, Stavropol Krai, USSR, 1977 from the series The Enchanted Wanderer (1977) by Igor Palmin. Courtesy of the artist © Igor Palmin

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.

Untitled from Carlo Joh, 1973 by Walter Pfeiffer. Courtesy Fotomuseum Winterthur © Walter Pfeiffer

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.

Susanna at Casa Susanna, 1964 to 1969 attributed to Andrea Susan, from the Casa Susanna Collection © Art Gallery of Ontario

The last room on the ground floor showcases black and white photos by Chris Steele-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.

• Tongue-Tied Danny’s Wedding

The photographers 2. Upstairs

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.

Lillie with her rag doll. Seattle, Washington from the series Streetwise, 1983 by Mary Ellen Mark © Mary Ellen Mark. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery New York

Then again – Putin’s Russia :).

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.

Evelyn, Santiago from the series La Manzana de Adán (Adam’s Apple), 1983 by Paz Errázuriz © Paz Errázuriz / Courtesy of the artist

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?

• Google images of The Hyena Men

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.

Anonymous, Modesto, CA, 2010 by Katy Grannan from the series The Ninety Nine © Katy Grannan, courtesy the artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

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

Related links

• Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins continues at the Barbican until 27 May 2018
• Interview with exhibition curator Alona Pardo 

Other Barbican reviews

• All my other Barbican reviews on the Art and Exhibitions page

More photography reviews

• All my photography reviews