All posts tagged Walker Evans

Chris Killip @ the Photographers Gallery

This is one of the most powerful and moving exhibitions I’ve ever been to.

Chris Killip was one of the UK’s most important and influential post-war documentary photographers. He was born in 1946 and died in October 2020. He is best known for his gritty photos of working class life in the north of England in the 1970s and 80s and we really mean ‘gritty’ – portraits of people living in the depths of poverty, immiseration, neglect, illness, marginalisation, scraping a living in grim, depressed, forgotten communities.

Spread over the top two floors at the Photographers’ Gallery, including some 150 black and white photographs as well as a couple of display cases of ephemera (magazines, posters, publicity flyers) works, this exhibition amounts to the most comprehensive survey of Killip’s work ever staged. And dear God, it’s devastating.

Helen and her hula-hoop, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumbria, 1984 © Chris Killip, Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

I’m going to replicate the structure of the exhibition and summarise the wall labels because it’s important to get a good understanding of time and place to really appreciate the work.

Off to London 1964

In 1963, aged 17 and living on the Isle of Man, Killip opened a copy of Paris Match looking for news about the Tour de France and instead came across the famous photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson of the little boy carrying two bottles of wine along the Rue Mouffetard in Paris. On the spot he realised he wanted to be a photographer. He bought a cheap camera and worked that summer as a beach photographer saving up the money to move to London in 1964, just at the start of Swinging London.

Here he found work as an assistant to the commercial photographer Adrian Flowers. They were heady times and he was at the heart of London, arranging commercial photoshoots for magazines, fashion, commercials.

New York 1969

In autumn 1969 he went on a visit to New York which changed his life. He went to see the exhibition of Bill Brandt photos at the Museum of Modern Art but it was the museum’s permanent collection which made his head spin. Here he saw photos by Paul Strand, August Sander, Walker Evans and others like them, documentary photographers who tried to depict the life of the common people in communities often remote from flashy urban living.

He returned to England, quit his job in flash London and returned to his homeland, the Isle of Man, a man with a mission, to photograph his truth, to record the traditional peasant lifestyle of the island before it was eroded and swept away by the very commercialism he had formerly served.

Isle of Man 1970 to 1972

Between 1970 and 1972 Killip photographed the island and its inhabitants during the day and worked at his dad’s pub by night. In 1973 he completed his book, Isle of Man.

This was the first of the long-form or long-term projects which form the basis of his achievement. the next few decades would see him applying the same in-depth approach to capturing marginalised communities on film, living in them, getting to know them, sharing their privations, getting under the skin of their physically and spiritually impoverished lives.

As you would expect, many of the photos of the Isle of man are landscapes but they are not that great, they are not as powerful as, say, Don McCullin’s louring, threatening studies of his adopted region of Somerset. But it’s not the landscapes that matter, it’s the people.

Mr ‘Snooky’ Corkhill and his son © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

My God, what a wonderful, wonderful collection of portraits, warm, humane, detailed, candid but compassionate portraits of the kind of plain-living, rural workers who were dying out as a breed even as he photographed them. You know those lines from Yeats’s poem, Easter 1916:

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in verse:

Invoking that mood of respect, it feels like an act almost of worship to write out the names of the people Killip photographed, the children, teenagers, farmers, wives and widows:

There is no God, no plan and no redemption. But images like this, full of understated dignity and wholeness on the part of the sitters, and respect and humanity on the part of the photographer, make you think maybe human love and compassion does redeem something, save something from the human wreck, raise us above our everyday lives into a higher realm blessed by more than human love.

(Note the way in the list above all the people are given titles, Mr, Mrs, Ms. It’s an old-fashioned mark of respect.)

Mrs Hyslop, Ballachrink Farm, the Braid © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Immersion

He became an immersive photographer, living for months or more among the communities he sought to depict. His mission and his sympathies were not with the well-educated and well-heeled who run the country and write about it, but with ‘those who have had history done to them‘, the proles and chavs and pikeys and white trash who are dismissed by all commentators, make no impact on official culture, live and die in caravans or shitty council houses on sink estates at the arse end of nowhere.

Huddersfield 1972

In 1972 the Arts Council commissioned Killip to do a photo essay comparing and contrasting Huddersfield in Yorkshire with Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk for the exhibition ‘Two Views: Two Cities’. As far as I could see there was just one photo from Bury in the show, a neat-looking shot of some nice castle ruins. By contrast, as you can imagine, the rundown streets of Huddersfield with its mills, tenement housing, crappy high streets, boarded up shops and sad bus shelters grabbed Killip’s sympathies.

Playground in Huddersfield, 1974 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Newcastle 1975 to 1979

In 1975 Killip was commissioned to undertake a British Gas/Northern Arts fellowship. In his spare time from this commission he roved the streets and suburbs and slums of the city and as far afield as Castleford and Workington. My God, the squalor, the neglect, the decline, the decay, the old Victorian slums being demolished and the new cut-price, cheap council estates falling to pieces before your eyes. A landscape of vandalism and graffiti.

Demolished housing, Wallsend, August 1977. © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Killip stayed in Newcastle for years, getting to know the area. For two years, 1977 to 1979, he served as director of a photo gallery, Amber’s Side Gallery. The May 1977 issue of Creative Camera was entirely devoted to Killip’s North East photos (a copy of it is one of the ephemera gathered in the display cases I mentioned earlier).

  • Children and terraced housing
  • Terraced house and coal mine
  • Two men on a bench
  • Looking East on Camp Road, Wallsend, 1975

There is a huge difference between the Manx series and this one. The Manx photos are dominated by large portraits of people who fill the screen, who are at home in their surroundings, their crofts or workshops. They’re big. They fill the photos as they fill their lives, at ease with who they are. They are fully human.

In the North East photos what dominates is the built environment. People are reduced to puppets, physically small against the backdrop of the enormous or decaying buildings. The buildings come in two types, terrible and appalling. The terrible ones are the old brick terraces thrown up in a hurry by the Victorian capitalists who owned the mines and steel works and shipbuilding yards and needed the bare minimum accommodation to keep their workers just about alive – badly built, no insulation, draughty windows, outside toilets and all.

Though Killip didn’t plan it, his time in Newcastle coincided with the wholesale destruction of the old brick terraces and their replacement with something even worse: the concrete high rises with broken lifts reeking of piss, the windswept plazas, dangerous underpasses, and oppressive network of toxic, child-killing urban highways, all the products of 1960s and 70s urban planners and brutalist architects.

May 5, 1981, North Shields, Tyneside © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

This is why I call the architects room at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition the room of shame. Go on a tour of British cities to see for yourself the destruction of historic centres and their replacement with brutal concrete urban highways full of thundering traffic, concrete underpasses tailor made for muggers and rapists, bleak open spaces where the wind blows dust and grit into your eyes, the concrete facias of a thousand tragic shopping precincts and, looming above them, the badly built tower blocks and decaying office blocks. Concrete cancer.

This isn’t an architecture for people, it’s an architecture for articulated lorries. Thus the human beings in Killip’s harrowing photos of these killing precincts are reduced to shambling wrecks, shadows of humanity, scarecrows in raincoats, harassed mums, bored teenagers hanging round on street corners sniffing glue. This is what Killip captures, the death of hope presided over by a thousand architects and town planners who could quote Le Corbusier and Bauhaus till the cows came home and used them to build the most dehumanised environment known to man.

Killingworth new town, 1975 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

As Philip Larkin wrote of young northern mums in their headscarves supervising their unruly children in some suburban playground:

Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.

(from Afternoons by Philip Larkin, 1959)

It’s epitomised by the photo of the silhouette of an old lady sitting in a half vandalised bush shelter in Middlesbrough. She’s wearing a headscarf and slumped forwards because her life, in this gritty, alienated environment, is bereft.

Woman in a bus shelter, Middlesborough, Teeside © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Compare and contrast with the proud, erect, unashamed men and women of the Isle of Man. Pretty much all the humanity has been stolen from the mainlanders.

At some point I realised a lot of these grim Tyneside photos show a disproportionate number of children, children imprisoned in squalid houses, hanging round on derelict streets, trying to play in a crappy playground overshadowed by mines and factories, left outside the crappy, rundown bingo parlour, the cheapest nastiest, knockoff 60s architecture, complete with collapsing concrete canopy. A landscape of blighted lives and stunted childhoods.

Boy outside Prize Bingo Parlour, Newcastle 1976 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

  • Two girls in Grangetown
  • Terraced house and coal mine, Castleford, 1976
  • Terraced housing, County Durham, 1976
  • Children and terraced housing, Byker, Newcastle, 1975
  • Butchers shop, Byker, Tyneside, 1975

Skinningrove 1982 to 1984

Skinningrove is a fishing community on the North Yorkshire coast. Killip had noticed its striking landscape on a drive up the east coast back in 1974 but found it difficult to penetrate the community. In fact locals chased him off the couple of times he tried to photograph them. His way in was through friendship with a young local named Leso, who made Killip feel welcome and reassured locals of his good intentions. Between 1982 and 84 Killip documented the crappy, poor, hard scrabbling lives of Leso and his mates – Blackie, Bever, Toothy, Richard, Whippet – as they fixed nets, repaired boats and hung around bored.

Leso and mates waiting for the tide to turn, Skinningrove, 1986 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

This is an extraordinary, remarkable, amazing portrait of a dead-end community, poverty, low expectations and young people bored off their faces. No wonder they took to sniffing glue and as the 80s moved on and adopted the punk look pioneered down in London to express some kind of sense of identity and worth, rebellion against grey-clad council houses, the grey sky and the unremitting rhythms of the grey, cold, freezing sea.

This section is given tragic force when we learn that Leso, who got Killip his ‘in’ into the community and of whom there are many photos, fixing nets, waiting round for the tide to turn, hanging with his punk mates, walking across a dirty road carrying a rifle, he died tragically during Killips’s stay.

The fishing boat he and some mates were in was overturned at sea and Leso and David were drowned, tubby Bever made it back to shore. In tribute Killip made Leso’s grieving mother an album of three dozen photos of her lost son.

Leso, Blackie, Bever, ?, David, on a bench, Whippet standing, Skinningrove, 1986 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Seacoal Camp 1981 to1984

Killip discovered Lynemouth, Northumberland, in 1976. It had a strange and eerie vibe because there was a massive coalmine not far from the sea and waste coal was expelled into the sea, only to be brought back to shore on the incoming tides.

And a community of travellers or extremely poor people living in caravans and using horse-drawn wagons in and near the sea had sprung up which made a living scavenging this coal, using it to heat their homes, cook food, and to sell to other locals. An entire lifestyle based on coal scavenging.

Once again Killip had trouble penetrating this closed and fiercely protective community. From 1976 when he first came across it he made repeated attempts to photograph the people but was chased away. Only in 1982 was he finally accepted when, on a final visit to the local pub he was recognised by a man who’d given him shelter from a rainstorm at Appleby Horse fair and vouched for his good intentions.

So Killip set about taking photos, delicately tactfully at first. But in winter 1983 he bought a caravan of his own and got permission to park it alongside the community’s ones. Once really embedded he was able to record all the different types of moments experienced by individuals or between people engaged on this tough work, at the mercy of the elements, permanently dirty with coal muck.

Rocker and Rosie Going Home, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, Northumberland, 1984 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

In the unpublished preface to the volume of poems he was working on when he was killed in the last days of the Great War, Wilfred Owen wrote:

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

Same, with modifications, goes for Killip. The poetry, the deep, deep poetry of these photographs, derives from the immense love and compassion they evince, love of suffering humanity, the candour and accuracy of the shots, finding moments of piercing acuity amid the grinding poverty and mental horizons which are hemmed in on every side by slag heaps, metal works and the four walls of a cramped caravan.

Gordon in the water, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, 1983 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Photography and music

Photography is like music. Regarding music you can describe the notes and cadences, the technical manoeuvres and key changes, the invocation of traditions and forms and write at length about the ostensible subject (the Pastoral symphony, the Moonlight sonata etc). But in the end you have to let go of all of that and experience it as music, let the music do its work, what only it can do, triggering emotions, memories, fragments of feelings or thoughts, stirring forgotten moments, making all kinds of neural connections, filling your soul.

Same with these photographs. I’ve described what he was trying to do, bring respect and compassion to people right on the margins of society, the lost, the abandoned, the forgotten. He’s quoted as saying he had no idea he would end up recording the process of de-industralisation, it just happened to be going on as he developed his method and approach as a social photographer. Long essays could be written about class in England, about deindustrialisation and then, of course, about the Thatcher government which supervised the destruction of large swathes of industry and British working class life alongside it.

But at some point you pack all that way and let the photos do their work, which is to lacerate your heart and move you to tears. This is the best our society could offer to God’s children. What shame. What guilt.

Father and son watching a parade, West End of Newcastle, Tyneside, 1980 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

The Miners Strike 1984 to 1985

A friend of mine at school in the Home Counties, his older sister was married to a copper. He told us the Miners Strike was great. They were bussed to Yorkshire, put up in army barracks, paid triple time wages and almost every day there was a fight, which he and his mates always won because they had the plastic shields, big truncheons and if things got really out of control, the cavalry. Killip apparently treated the long strike as another project with a view to producing another long-form series.

Durham Miners Gala, 1984 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

But images from the Miners Strike project aren’t treated separately as the other projects are. Instead they’re rolled into the In Flagrante section.

In flagrante 1988

In 1985 the publisher Secker and Warburg told Killip they’d be interested in publishing his next book. This would mean access to a larger audience than previously and Killip was inspired. He worked with editor Mark Holborn and designer Peter Dyer to produce the 1988 book In Flagrante. Unlike all his previous projects which were heavily themed around specific communities and locations, In Flagrante deliberately cut his images adrift from their source projects to create a randomised cross-section of his career (although anyone who’d studied the previous projects has a good idea where each of them come from).

For the bitter bleakness and the unerring accuracy of the images, In Flagrante has been described as ‘the most important book of English photography from the 1980s.’ I was particularly taken by the set of photos of miserable English people from the 70s and 80s on various English beaches, at Whitley Bay, and so on. Narrow lives, no expectations, the quiet misery of the English working classes. They’ve come to the seaside for a break, for a ‘holiday’ and none of them know what to do there. Images of a nation at a loss what to do with the land it finds itself in.

Revolt

Respect goes to the tribes of young people who forged ways of rebelling against the poverty and low to zero expectations of their environment. In Flagrante contains a surprising number of photos of young punks who took the form to baroque extremes long after it was abandoned in London. There are lots of shots of the Angelic Upstarts of all bands, playing sweaty punk gigs in Gateshead. In fact the gallery shop has a music paper-size fanzine-style publication entirely full of shots he did of sweaty punk gigs in the mid-80s. ‘We’re the future, your future.’

The Station, Gateshead, 1985 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

America 1991

What happened to Killip after that? America. I was disappointed to read that in 1991 he was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies in Harvard University. In 1994 he was made a tenured professor and was department chair from 1994 to 1998. He only retired from Harvard in 2017. Well, no doubt taking the Yankee dollar was the right move for him, but it meant the abrupt end of the sequence of breath-taking portfolio projects which had begun in 1970.

Summary

Killip’s oeuvre represents not only an invaluable document of social history 1970 to 1985 and, as such, a blistering indictment of an incompetent, uncaring, bewilderingly lost society – but it is also a testament to love and the redeeming possibilities of art.

The compassion and humanity of his work is embodied in its closeness and intimacy with its subjects, not the fake intimacy of eroticism, but being right there with poor suffering humanity; right up close as the dirty kids play in their abandoned playgrounds, the dispirited losers chain-smoke in a wretched bingo hall, an old lady loses the will to live in a vandalised bus shelter, bored young men sniff glue in a remote fishing town, and lost children spend all day every day clambering over filthy mounds of coal to help their mums and dads scrape a flimsy living The poetry is in the pity.

Youth on wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1975 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Levelling up

In the 50 years since Killip took these photos generations of politicians have come and gone, promising to narrow the North-South Divide and level up the whole country. All bollocks. Life expectancy for babies born in the North-East, like per household income, remain stubbornly below the national average. Pathetic, isn’t it. What a sorry excuse for a country.

Go and see this marvellous, searing, heart-rending exhibition.

The promotional video

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by Simon on February 8, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 8, 2023

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Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Photopoetry @ the Photographers’ Gallery

There are three main exhibition spaces at the Photographers Gallery, on the 2nd, 4th and 5th floors. The second and fourth floors are often used to hold two parts of the same show – they are currently hosting the exhibition of Latin American photography, Urban Impulses, which is split into two parts, while the fifth floor is currently hosting the TPG New Talent 19 show – both of which I’ve reviewed.

After taking in the wealth of images on these three floors it’s easy to miss the other, small, exhibition space in the building, down in the basement, next to the bookshop. This is the Print Sales room and here you can examine or order prints from a variety of photographers who licence their works to be sold via the gallery. But it is also where the gallery hosts temporary exhibitions of original prints by classic and contemporary photographers. The distinctive feature of the small displays in the Print Sales room is that all the work is for sale.

The Print Sales room is currently hosting a selection of rare platinum and silver gelatin prints by the great modernist Mexican photographer, Manuel Álvarez Bravo (1902 to 2002).

Forbidden fruit by Manuel Alvarez Bravo

Forbidden fruit by Manuel Alvarez Bravo © Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo SC

According to the curators:

Initially self-taught, Álvarez Bravo first picked up a camera as a teenager while working at a government job. His early style was influenced by studying international photographic journals particularly looking at the work of European artists such as Edward Weston and Tina Modotti both of whom he later met.

Through them, he was introduced to Mexico’s avant-garde scene, including Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. His work increasingly began to reflect the influence of homegrown movements such as the Mexican Muralists as well as an interest in identity politics. By the mid 1930s, Álvarez Bravo was being exhibited alongside contemporaries Henri-Cartier Bresson and Walker Evans and shown in such seminal group exhibitions as Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1940), and the worldwide tour of Edward Steichen’s Family of Man in 1955.

Note the compulsory reference to ‘identity politics’. That or gender or race had to come into it somewhere. They always do. In Bravo’s case gender and sexuality are most obviously present in several strikingly erotic nude studies (like the one above), which often feature the teasing reveal of a breast or a woman’s loins, while other parts of her body are obscured (by a large parasol, in one case).

But there are at least two other strands in his work. One is his discovery of pattern and significance in the everyday. Lots of the photos capture everyday moments in busy Mexico City, but in a way which isolates the motif and makes it feel full of meaning, creating a kind of latent symbolism.

La hija de los danzantes | The daughter of the dancers (1933) by Manuel Álvarez Bravo © Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo SC

This strand of his work is never quite abstract, but often hints at abstraction. The works take a scene from everyday life but capture it in such a way as to reveal a kind of hidden geometry, hinting at the modernist and constructivist sensibility behind his work.

The other pole of Álvarez Bravo’s work is a conscious social realism. The Mexican Revolution (which I’ve read and written about elsewhere) lasted from roughly 1910 to 1930, and brought about some social change to this backward, peasant country, but not nearly enough, and the 1930s was, of course, the decade of the global depression. Bravo didn’t have to look far to see signs of poverty, and the hard lives of the urban poor – street sellers, performers, vagrants.

Los agachados / The crouched ones (1934) © Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo SC

I think the curators hit the nail on the head when they describe Álvarez Bravo’s

sublimely lyrical, yet unsentimentalised images of his beloved Mexico and its people, and his exceptional ability to transform the rituals of everyday life into something fantastical and monumental.

It’s that monumentality which comes over in these photos. They feel epic. They feel as if they are saying something really profound about the human condition. There are only 15 prints on display but all of them seem more than just photos, but doorways into some deeper truth about the world.

All fifteen photos are extremely rare platinum and silver gelatin prints, some of them printed by Álvarez Bravo himself and signed by him. It has, apparently, taken years to get his estate to agree to this exhibition and to their sale, and their rarity explains the stunning cost. Prices vary a little, but all the ones I liked cost £6,500 plus VAT. But then – they are original, hand-printed masterpieces.

Muchacha viendo pájaros (1931) by Manuel Álvarez Bravo © Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo SC

The book

Also at the exhibition you can buy the comprehensive and huge hardback collection of Álvarez Bravo’s photography, Photopoetry, from which this little display draws its title. In this you can find out more about his role in Mexican and Latin American photography, his membership of Mexico City’s avant-garde, and enjoy his photos of close friends Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo – not least a set taken during the strange period when they hosted the world’s most famous revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, at their Mexico City home, with the godfather of Surrealism, André Beton, tagging along.

Álvarez Bravo took photos not only of street people and street scenes, but of Mexico’s leading artists and writers until well into the 1990s, so the book offers not only the biography of a great photographer, and over 360 of his best photos printed on beautiful quality paper – but insight into the intellectual life of the great giant of Central America.

Contact the Photographers’ Gallery Print Sales

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by Simon on July 26, 2019  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 26, 2019

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Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing @ the Barbican Gallery

‘To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, potentially unattainable…’
(Dorothea Lange)

This is a major retrospective of one of the best known documentary photographers of the 20th century, the American Dorothea Lange. It brings together some 300 objects – hundreds of vintage prints and original book publications through to ephemera, field notes, letters, magazines and books in which her photos featured.

It also includes a documentary film interview with her made towards the end of her life in which she explains her ideas and motivations.

Rarely has an artist or photographer been so overshadowed by one work, Lange’s super-famous portrait of a Migrant Mother which has come to symbolise the suffering of America’s Mid-Western farmers in the Great depression of the 1930s – forced to abandon their land due to bank foreclosures and catastrophic environmental collapse.

Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

But the exhibition goes out of its way to present this period of Lange’s work in the broader, and more varied context of her entire career. The show proceeds in straightforward chronological order, from her earliest professional photos of 1919 through to her last project in 1957.

Room 1. Portrait studio

In 1919 Lange set up a portrait studio in San Francisco, which she ran until 1935. The studio became a meeting place for San Francisco’s creative community, including bohemian and artist friends such as Edward Weston, Anne Brigman, Alma Lavenson, Imogen Cunningham, and Willard van Dyke.

There’s a portrait of photographer Roi Partridge, and of painter Maynard Dixon, Lange’s first husband and father of her two sons.

The style and mood are soft focus with plenty of self-consciously artistic poses from artists, writers, poets and musicians – people like the founder of the San Francisco Opera, Gaetano Merola. There’s a misty, soft focus, aesthetic feel to most of them, like the wonderfully romantic Woman in a black hat, and a beautifully caught mother turning away from the camera. The baby is rather rubicund but the mother’s pose has the self-conscious (and slender) grace of a Virginia Woolf.

Mother and child (1928) by Dorothea Lange © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

Mother and child (1928) by Dorothea Lange © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

This is bourgeois, arty Lange – before she was ‘woke’.

Rooms 2, 3 and 4. The Great Depression and the Farm Security Administration

In the early 1930s Lange began to notice homeless men hanging round on the San Francisco streets. Along with everyone else she watched as this trickle turned into a flood of homeless families, farmers uprooted from the Mid-Western states by crop failures caused by drought and over-farming and exacerbated by bank foreclosures by banks who were themselves fighting off bankruptcy. Altogether some 300,000 farmers and their families were forced to head West in the hope of getting work as casual labourers in California.

This, and the accompanying political uproar it caused, woke Lange from her aesthetic slumber and gave her a subject. She took her camera out onto the street and was soon snapping demonstrations, unemployed workers, and breadline queues.

This section of the exhibition displays some hundred photos she took of these subjects, as well as displaying some of the magazines they were shown in, alongside letters and diaries of her travels into the Dustbowl and among the temporary encampments set up by these poverty-stricken migrants all across southern California.

Lange was hired by the Farm Security Administration work (1935–1939) to publicise the problem in a range of government-sponsored publications. By association she was supporting the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to create a New Deal and support the farmers. She worked alongside other notable photographers, including Walker Evans, Ben Shahn and Arthur Rothstein.

White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1933 by Dorothea Lange © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1933 by Dorothea Lange © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

The photos show a wide range of subject matter including:

  • urban poverty in San Francisco
  • tenant farmers driven off the land by dust storms
  • mechanisation in the states of Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas
  • the plight of homeless families on the road in search of better livelihoods in the West
  • the awful conditions of migrant workers and camps across California

Traveling for many months at a time and working in the field, Lange collaborated with a prominent social economist and expert in farm labour, Paul Schuster Taylor, who became her second husband. With him she published the seminal photo book An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in 1939. A copy of the book and associated letters and diaries are on display here.

Room 3. Migrant Mother

There’s an entire room devoted to the iconic Migrant Mother photo, rather as there used to be a room at the National Gallery devoted to Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks. And after all the two images have a lot in common, being images of a mother and baby.

But what justifies giving it a room of its own is the backstory to the photo. Driving along, Lange saw a sign to a pea-picking camp, took a detour to visit it, wandered round, saw this particularly wretched mother and her swarming infants in a truly pitiful make-do shelter, and asked permission to photograph her.

Because the final version is so iconic it’s lost a lot of its power to shock. The photos she took in the run-up to the final version were – to me at any rate – completely unfamiliar and their unfamiliarity recaptures that sense of squalor and abandonment. It’s just a makeshift tent in a crappy bit of scrubland, sheltering children in rags with nothing to eat. There’s nothing epic or artistic about it. It is pure misery.

Migrant Mother alternate takes by Dorothea Lange © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

Migrant Mother alternate takes by Dorothea Lange © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

Architecture

It’s possible to become a little overloaded with Lange’s powerful images of the poor trudging along streets carrying all their earthly possessions in a blanket, or dirty men hanging round street corners begging for work.

The exhibition points out that Lange also had an eye for the stark architecture of the Mid-West. She shot buildings in a classic, square-on way which gives them a striking monumentality.

Dust Bowl, Grain Elevator, Everett, Texas, June 1938 by Dorothea Lange. Library of Congress

Dust Bowl, Grain Elevator, Everett, Texas, June 1938 by Dorothea Lange. Library of Congress

There’s also a section which focuses on Lange’s interest in parts of the body. Photos of people’s arms, or legs, or torsos, capturing the arrangement of limbs in a self-conscious, posed, artistic way. The curators speculate that this may have been something to do with the fact that Lange had polio when she was seven, which left her right leg and foot noticeably weakened.

Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona, 1940 by Dorothea Lange © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona, 1940 by Dorothea Lange © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

Later in life Lange came to think that having to overcome such a physical trauma at such an early age had shaped her personality, her ambition, her refusal to quit.

It was the most important thing that happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me.

Maybe her own personal struggle against illness predisposed her to be interested in the underdog?

Room 6. Japanese American internment

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941, the U.S. Government decided to round up and intern all U.S. citizens of Japanese descent. Even at the time many people thought this was a mistake and it has gone on to become a well-known radical cause célèbre.

Over the next year more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans were rounded up by the War Relocation Authority and housed in makeshift camps. Lange’s series of photos depict not only the Japanese-Americans themselves, but the architecture and infrastructure of the camps. There are bleak signs and posters attacking the Japanese, or in which patriotic Americans announced their loyalty. It is the first time this series of works has been shown outside the US and Canada.

Centerville, California by Dorothea Lange. This evacuee stands by her baggage as she waits for evacuation bus. Evacuees of Japanese ancestry were housed in War Relocation Authority centers for the duration, 1942. Courtesy National Archives

Centerville, California by Dorothea Lange. This evacuee stands by her baggage as she waits for evacuation bus. Evacuees of Japanese ancestry were housed in War Relocation Authority centers for the duration, 1942. Courtesy National Archives

Room 7. California shipyards

As America swung into full wartime production mode, all aspects of agriculture and industry across Lange’s native California were called on to play their part. The shipyards at Richmond, California became an important centre for producing naval vessels. Along with friend and fellow photographer Ansel Adams, Lange documented the war effort in the shipyards for Fortune magazine in 1944.

The town experienced an explosive increase in population numbers and business of the endlessly changing shifts of shipyard workers. To quote the wall label, Lange was ‘drawn to images that transgressed accepted attitudes towards gender and race’ i.e. women and blacks.

Shipyard worker, 1943 by Dorothea Lange © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

Shipyard worker, 1943 by Dorothea Lange © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

After the rooms full of photos of begging farmers, of the wrongfully interned Japanese, and of black and woman shipyard workers, you have got a good feel for the way Lange had made herself a portrayer of the underdog, a chronicler of society’s victims or defiers of conventional values.

She faced a problem, then, after the war, when America headed into a prolonged period of high employment and affluence. The wall label tells us that Lange disapproved of the arrival of mass consumer culture, cheap homes, a radio and then a TV, a fridge and an affordable car for everyone.

To me, it seems that you can’t have it both ways. You can’t produce tear-jerking images of utter poverty and wretchedness, begging the government for something to be done – and then be upset when people finally find work, employment, and can afford somewhere decent to live, a house, a car.

It seemed to me that Lange, by now a familiar figure on the Left, had settled into a posture of permanent opposition, even when Americans had never had it so good.

Room 9. Public defender

This comes over in the project she embarked on in 1955. California had instituted a new system of public defenders to represent the poorest plaintiffs in court, and Lange spent six weeks shadowing one of these new public defenders, Martin Pulich.

From the jaws of the most affluent nation on earth, Lange was able to pull a series of photos which still managed to focus on poverty, bad education and the sorry squalor of the criminal classes.

She has such a great eye. The courtroom shots are all powerfully composed. There are classic shots of a grim-faced judge sitting under an American flag, of Pulich standing next to a sequence of sorry, shame-faced defendants, of the defendants’ wives or girlfriends slumped in anguish in the corridors outside the court. Of prison vans and prison cells.

Public Defender in Court, Oakland, California (1955) by Dorothea Lange © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

Public Defender in Court, Oakland, California, 1955 by Dorothea Lange © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

In the era when more Americans had better paid jobs than ever before, bought their own houses and cars, and their kids were cruising round listening to Elvis on the radio, Lange was exploring the US legal defence system for the poor and disadvantaged through the work of a public defender at the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland.

I guess affluence and happiness are just such boring subjects for artists. There is an in-built bias in modern (post-Great War) art, towards always focusing in on the underdog, the downtrodden, the pitiful and the outcast. The many millions who have great jobs, drive big cars, have barbeques with family at the weekend? Not seen so often in ‘modern’ art, film or photos.

Room 10. Death of a valley

In 1956 Lange heard about a town in California that was going to be destroyed by the construction of a dam.

Death of a Valley (1956–57) was the series of photos she made in collaboration with photographer Pirkle Jones, to document the disappearance of the small rural town of Monticello in California’s Berryessa Valley as a consequence of the damming of the Putah Creek.

The pair set out to capture the traditional rhythms of rural life in spring and summer – and then to document the uprooting of the town, the literal carting away of many of the wooden houses and the digging up of the dead to be reburied elsewhere, before the developers moved in with their giant earth-working machines and the remaining buildings were burnt to the ground.

Her depiction of cowboy hat-wearing old-timers dressed in dungarees in village stores are classic evocations of small-town California life. More vocative shots of rugged, individual people.

What also struck me about this sequence was that Lange was rarely good with pure landscapes. The few shots of the valley, as a whole,, on its own, are flat. Whenever people enter the frame, the photos jump to life.

These photos haven’t, apparently, been displayed or published since the 1960s.

Death of a Valley by Dorothea Lange (1957) © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

Death of a Valley by Dorothea Lange, 1957 © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

Room 11. Ireland

In 1954 Lange made the only trip she ever made outside the USA, to Ireland. She spent six weeks in County Clare in western Ireland, capturing the experience of life in and around the farming town of Ennis. Once again Lange demonstrates her terrific eye for spotting immensely characterful people and capturing them in richly evocative black and white photographs.

Ennistymon fair, County Clare Ireland (1954) by Dorothea Lange © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

Ennistymon fair, County Clare Ireland (1954) by Dorothea Lange © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California

But also, this series clinched for me the feeling that, at some point, Lange stopped portraying the world, the actual world – the big wide world of the Cold War and supersonic jets and colour TVs and cars with big fins pulling into diners where Elvis is blaring out of the jukebox.

Her black-and-white vision of the underdog, forged in the Great Depression, was only a part of American culture, even back then – and became a slenderer, almost endangered vision of outsiderness, as the majority of America headed confidently into an era of unprecedented affluence.

It seems to me wholly characteristic that she had to go abroad, leaving America altogether, to seek out the kind of peasant ‘honesty’ and ‘truthfulness’ and the ‘dignity of labour’ and so on, which she was temperamentally attracted to but was ceasing to exist in the land of I Love Lucy and the drive-in movie.

Lange’s politics

Jane Alison, Head of Visual Arts, Barbican, says:

Dorothea Lange is undoubtedly one of the great photographers of the twentieth century and the issues raised through her work have powerful resonance with issues we’re facing in society today.

Well, yes and no. There isn’t currently, in 2018, a great collapse in American agriculture forcing hundreds of thousands of farmers to migrate to the coast. There isn’t a world war in which people from the enemy nation are being interned in mass camps. Ireland is no longer a nation of sturdy peasants riding carts to market, but of financial over-reach and Catholic paedophilia.

If Alison means that Lange depicted poverty, well, when in human history hasn’t there been grinding poverty somewhere in the world? And when haven’t there been moralists, from Goya to Dickens, who have felt it their duty to record poverty and squalor?

1. This is a major overview of a really important photographer, showing how she brought an acute eye for the human, for human character, for the pathos of the human condition, to a wide range of embattled situations.

2. But it also made this visitor, at any rate, think about the nature of oppositional artists who thrive by focusing on the downtrodden, on society’s losers. It made me ponder whether this choice of subject matter represents a political act – in the sense that setting up a political party, making speeches, writing manifestos and hammering out party platforms is a political act – or whether it is more of a temperamental and artistic choice, a preferred subject matter – the subject matter which brings out the best in an artist and which they therefore learn to focus on it, as Stubbs specialised in horses or Bacon on screaming popes.

In other words, whether what Alison describes as ‘politics’ isn’t really, in fact, just a type of style.

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by Simon on August 24, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 24, 2018

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Killed Negatives @ the Whitechapel Gallery

The Farm Security Administration Photography Program

The Great Depression of the 1930s wreaked havoc on America’s farmers. Collapse in demand coincided with several years of drought-like conditions to turn a lot of the mid-West into what contemporaries described as the ‘dustbowl’.

President Roosevelt instituted a broad set of economic policies designed to stimulate the whole U.S. economy, referred to as the New Deal. To help and support farmers struggling in real poverty, often close to the starvation line, Roosevelt set up the Resettlement Administration (1935 to 1937) which was succeeded by the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

Among numerous other strands of activity, the FSA commissioned a photography program which ran from 1935 to 1944. The aims were to send America’s best photographers to the poorest parts of the country to expose and document the terrible extent of American rural poverty. The shots were used in government publications to justify government spending and were widely distributed to newspapers and magazines to alert urban readers to the terrible conditions in the countryside.

Installation view of Killed Negatives at the Whitechapel Gallery

Installation view of Killed Negatives at the Whitechapel Gallery

In total the FSA photography programme generated some 175,000 photographs, amounting to a vast pictorial record of rural American life between 1935 and 1944.

The photography programme was headed for most of its existence by Roy E. Stryker, in his capacity as head of the Information Division of the FSA. He launched the photography program in 1935 and continued to oversee it after it underwent various administrative mutations, through until 1944.

Roy Stryker, head of the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression

Roy Stryker, head of the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression

The programme clinched the reputations of some of the great photojournalists including Walker Evans (1903 to 1975), Dorothea Lange (1895 to 1965) and Russell Lee (1903 to 1986), who produced heart-rending images of rural life which have also come to be seen as great art. Books were compiled from the photos to such as the influential Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) which had an elegiac text by writer James Agee and photographs by Walker Evans. Original prints of the more famous shots now command large sums at auction. (N.B. An exhibition of Dorothea Lange’s photos is just about to open at the Barbican.)

So far, so well known. But there is a little-told aspect of the whole programme which this exhibition is designed to bring to a wider audience.

Strict control and killed negatives

For what is not often mentioned is the iron control which Stryker exerted over the photographers and their work.

Stryker personally selected the photographers and gave them detailed briefs or ‘shooting scripts’ to work from. He kept in close touch with ‘his’ photographers, via letters and telegrams sending his responses to the photographers’ work and giving detailed suggestions on how they could improve, which locations they should be going to, what they should be snapping – always cajoling and instructing them on how to take the kind of images which the Administration needed to support and validate its work.

Most harshly of all, Stryker developed a ruthless method of editing work he didn’t like. He examined every roll of film by every photographer, as they were posted back to, and developed at, the Administration’s Washington headquarters.

And if he didn’t like it, if it wasn’t good enough quality, or was off subject, then Stryker personally mutilated the negative with a hole puncher. Any prints made of these rejected images would be definitively unusable because of the big black dot plonked right in the middle by Stryker’s hole puncher.

Untitled photo by Russell Lee, possibly related to Mr. Tronson, farmer near Wheelock, North Dakota, August 1937

Untitled photo by Russell Lee, possibly related to Mr. Tronson, farmer near Wheelock, North Dakota, August 1937

And so thousands of negatives by American photographers were systematically destroyed in the 1930s, these irreparable images becoming known as ‘killed negatives’.

The exhibition

This one-room free exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery display presents about 70 prints made from some of the thousands of negatives rejected and mutilated by Stryker, shedding a fascinating sidelight on this well-known period and its photographic output.

Some photos you can see straight away aren’t that powerful and not good enough to be included in a book or magazine article. But quite a few others have the potential to be really powerful.

Untitled photo by Arthur Rothstein, possibly related to Sharecropper's wife and children, Arkansas August 1935

Untitled photo by Arthur Rothstein, possibly related to Sharecropper’s wife and children, Arkansas August 1935

The 70 or so prints are hung in a great cluster across two walls of the gallery. Nearby are display cases showing original correspondence from Styker to his snappers, demonstrating just how much detail he went into when critiquing the work of his photographers. The cases include examples of the typed-out shooting scripts which the photographers were given, alongside a selection of the photographers’ personal and administrative records. Both the letters and the shooting scripts give a really candid insight into the tone of voice used among these professional men, and into the day-to-day practicalities of selecting destinations, finding likely subjects, hiring cars, arranging hotels and so on.

Censorship to surrealism

So far, so interesting and so much a contribution to a little-known aspect of a well-known part of photography history.

But bringing all these killed negatives together like this has the odd effect of creating a distinct aesthetic. Having a big black circle added to them somehow lends quite a few of these images a strange surreal beauty.

Untitled photo by Paul Carter, possibly related to Tobacco fields devastated by the Connecticut River near Northampton, Massachusetts, March 1936

Untitled photo by Paul Carter, possibly related to Tobacco fields devastated by the Connecticut River near Northampton, Massachusetts, March 1936

Viewed from our modern perspective, eighty years later, and taken together, as a collection, the effect of the ‘black spot’ stamped harshly onto faces, buildings and landscapes is to transform old images into something weird, extra and beguiling.

And so, quite unexpectedly, something which ought to be a dry historical footnote has been turned, by selective curating, into a kind of work of art in itself.

Untitled photo by Carl Mydans, possibly related to Transients clearing land. Prince George's County, Maryland, November 1935

Untitled photo by Carl Mydans, possibly related to Transients clearing land. Prince George’s County, Maryland, November 1935

Contemporary responses

So much so, that the collection has prompted responses to the killed negatives from contemporary artists, some of which are included here.

Etienne Chambaud (b. 1980) responds to a Walker Evans ‘killed negative’ by attempting to fill the hole. William E. Jones’ (b.1962) work Punctured is itself created from a sequence of ‘killed negatives’. Bill McDowell’s (b. 1956) art book Ground takes ‘killed negatives’ as its subject. Lisa Oppenheim (b. 1975) is interested in the space obscured by the hole; her print After Walker Evans fills in the hole in a photo of wooden shacks with colour detail, while blacking out the rest of the image.

Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans (Untitled) by Lisa Oppenheim (2015) © Lisa Oppenheim. Courtesy The Approach, London

Killed Negatives, After Walker Evans (Untitled) by Lisa Oppenheim (2015) © Lisa Oppenheim. Courtesy The Approach, London

Interesting and creative, aren’t they? But can’t really compete with the originals’ peculiar combination of black and white nostalgia for a time of terrible poverty with this strangely modernist feature of the random black dots lifting them into Marcel Duchamp territory. Fascinating and eerie.

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by Simon on June 13, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 13, 2018

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The Radical Eye @ Tate Modern

In 1990 Sir Elton John went into rehab and completely dried out, abandoning all intoxicants and stimulants. He began to look for a new hobby or activity to focus his, now completely sober, energies on. He’d always liked fashion photographs and had himself been snapped by some of the most famous fashion and music photographers of the 1960s and 70s – but a chance encounter with a collector of older works opened his eyes to the dazzling world of classic Modernist photos from earlier in the twentieth century.

He bought some examples, read up on the subject, and soon he was hooked. Over the past 27 years, Elton has built up one of the greatest collections of modern photographs anywhere in the world, which stretches from the start of the twentieth century right up to the present day, including colour and digital photography.

Elton’s collection now exceeds 8,000 prints. He and the curator of what is now known as the Sir Elton John Photography Collection – Newell Harbin – and his photography consultant and first director of the collection – Jane Jackson – worked with Tate to select some 170 images for this show. They are all from the heyday of ‘Modernist’ photography, around 1920 to 1945.

The result is this wonderfully enjoyable and thought-provoking exhibition.

Themes

The exhibition is pure delight. It is divided into seven themed sections – portraits, bodies, experiments, objects, perspectives, abstractions, documents.

The sudden burst of creativity at the end of the Great War partly reflected the collapse of old traditional values in every sphere of life, but especially in art, which abandoned 19th century realism for an explosive diversity of new ways of seeing. It also reflected new technologies, such as the arrival of the Leica camera in 1927 which could contain a whole roll of film and so allowed a sequence of shots of the same object, thus allowing the taking of much more documentary or narrative photographs. At the same time many of the blurrings or odd effects created by photography which had been rejected by the Victorian forebears as aberrations from decorous realism now became actively sought after as striking visual experiments.

Above all, 20th century photography pioneered a revolution in seeing, an entirely new way of valuing the visual impact of all sorts of objects previously overlooked. If shot properly the stamens of a flower or a cluster of pots can look like objects from outer space. If made-up and shot crisply, the human face can have the other worldly clarity of a god.

Portraits

On the one hand improved cameras enabled portraits to be created with a dazzling crispness and focus; on the other, modern art had liberated artists to find new ways to crop, angle and compose the human face, bringing out the geometry of lines and shapes buried in it, or creating new and challenging moods.

There’s a wall devoted to a sequence the photographer Irving Penn made in his studio in 1948 when he stumbled across the idea of pushing two background flats together to make a very acute angle for the sitters to pose in. To his surprise, instead of feeling cramped and stressed, many of the sitters felt comfortable and secure and visibly relaxed.

Bodies

Unconventional composition and framing, experiments with lighting and focus are just some of the novel techniques used to show the human body in a completely new light, part machine, part god, part zoomorphic architecture.

  • Movement study by Rudolf Koppitz A shot like this demonstrates the way almost all the modernist affects are based on the notion of bringing out the geometric substructure in objects or people (although, as in Art Deco generally, background women here form a kind of curved geometry. The stylisation of their hair and eyes made me think of Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s willowy women – for example, The Golden Stairs (1880) – but the differences highlight the way the interest has shifted from feminine ‘delicacy’ in the Victorian image, to an entirely new aesthetic which emphasises lithe muscularity. The naked woman is sensual, yes – but like a panther!)
  • Nude by Edward Weston (1936) The tendency of the age, of the Art deco 1920s and 30s to seek out the geometric in the organic is particularly obvious in this stunning photo. 1) The female body is turned into an almost abstract shape. Compare and contrast Matisse’s blue nude cutouts from 20 years later. 2) As with so many of these images, the closer you look, the more you see, including the hair on her leg, the sharpness of the toenails, loose threads from the rug.

Experiments

shows various photographers playing with collage, distortion, montage, colouring some but not all of the image. The standout is probably:

Objects

Includes stunning still lifes, converting everyday objects into vibrantly sharp and vivid images.

Documents

A million miles away from the Hollywood glamour of Gloria Swanson, the New York stylishness of Duke Ellington or the fashion magazine styling of Norman Parkinson, is the section devoted to the socially conscious photos of the 1930s Depression in America. The most famous photographers form this era are:

  • Migrant mother (1936) by Dorothea Lange Super famous image of the 1930s Depression, but in the flesh it has much more immediacy than any reproduction can convey.
  • Floyd Burroughs by Walker Evans (1936) Ditto. Both Evans and Lange were employed by the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration which was set up in 1935 to combat rural poverty. The administrator, Roy Stryker, in a much-quoted phrase, aimed to ‘show America to Americans.’ A laudable aim but these images are now 80 years old, from the year when Nazi Germany reoccupied the Rhineland. Are they documentary resources, liberal propaganda, publicity stills, historical records, works of art? Apparently, some 200,000 photos were taking during the existence of the Administration: are they all works of art?
  • New York by Helen Levitt (1940) She took many snaps of street life in her native New York City.

Abstraction and perspective

I found some of the documentary photos a little sentimental and a little patronising. A bit uncomfortable about the image of a homeless, impoverished, desperate migrant mother being converted into an object to be owned by a multi-millionaire, displayed in London’s most popular tourist attraction, for a paying audience of well-heeled visitors, to swoon and feel sorry about.

I preferred the anonymous power of many of the abstractions, and especially the place where the human and the abstract meet – in photos of amazing works of architecture and engineering converted, by characteristically modernist perspective and the use of highly focused black-and-white, into works of stunning abstract beauty.

I grew up in a gas station amid the smell of petrol and tyres. I’ve always loved industrial art. I’ve always preferred the rainbow sheen of oil on dirty puddles to vases of flowers in nice front rooms.

The Ullberg was hanging next to a street scene by English photographer, Norman Parkinson.

This is good, but I much preferred the Ullberg. Although it has the components of a modernist photo, Parkinson’s shot lacks the precision and intensity. The puddles are a bit blurry. Fine. But compare and contrast with the super-clarity of the Ullberg, which is sharp enough to cut you, and also presents a far richer depth of information for the eye and mind.

Both reminded me that, at the wonderful 2011 Royal Academy exhibition of Hungarian photography I learned that to make a classic Modernist street photo you need to do just three things: it must be in black and white – take it from above – and have diagonals in it – lines of paving, tramlines, people marching, or just one person at an angle. Voila!

The curator commentary

The audioguide is worth buying as much for its occasional descent into art bollocks as for its information and insights. How the heart sinks when you see some photos depicting models with masks – you know the curator will be unable to resist talking about the usual antonyms of ‘appearance and reality’, ‘art and artifice’, ‘identity and anonymity’, and so on. Photos of the naked human body will trigger a torrent of verbiage about artists exploring ‘issues’ of sexuality. Worst of all, any female photographer will prompt the usual vapourings about ‘subverting’ gender stereotypes and the pain of being a pioneer in a male-dominated blah blah.

It’s not that these thoughts are particularly wrong, it’s just that they’re so bleeding obvious, and so thumpingly predictable. Almost every exhibition I’ve ever been to sooner or later reveals that the artist was ‘exploring issues of sexuality’ or ‘subverting gender stereotypes’.

It’s a constant source of wry humour that the very art critics and curators who are so keen to talk about art being ‘revolutionary’ and ‘radical’ and ‘subverting’, ‘transgressing’, ‘confronting’ and ‘interrogating’ this, that or the other social convention, are themselves so staggeringly limited in the way they think about art, so repetitive and predictable, are such tame conformists to the narrow and well-trodden themes of ‘radical theory’.

Elton John as critic

All of which highlights the biggest single revelation of the exhibition, which is: What an extraordinarily sensitive, insightful, thoughtful and articulate man Sir Elton John is! Every photo singled out for an audioguide commentary by the curators also features some words from Sir Elton – and Elton’s thoughts are consistently more informative, insightful and memorable than the scholarly version.

This, you can’t help feeling, is because they are born out of love. Elton’s deep and genuine passion for modern photography shows in everything he says about it. Sometimes it’s just putting into words an impression which was hovering in the viewer’s mind, such as when he points out that the more you look at Edward Weston’s White door the more pregnant with meaning it becomes, the more ominous and mysterious, the more you want to know what’s through the door. It could be the start of a novel or a movie.

For me his most insightful comment was how classic photographs bear looking at again and again and again, each time noticing something new. These works are hung all around his Atlanta apartment so that he passes by them all day long. And each time he looks and pays attention to one of his photographs, he sees something new in it.

I know this could also be said of painting, drawings, a lot of other forms – but, being here, you can see what he’s driving at because photography, almost by definition, contains more information than any other art form. In a photograph nothing is left blank: the entire visual field is capturing whatever was there in front of the camera. Even the white spaces are recording a reality which often, when you look closer, has something in it. Whereas the white space in a painting might just be white.

Having visited the enormous David Hockney exhibition last week led me naturally to compare these classic photos with the painter’s works.

For a start almost all Hockney’s paintings are ginormous, wall-size, whereas all the works here are small, most are the size of an A4 sheet of paper or smaller.

But to return to Elton’s point, whereas the closer you looked at many of, say, Hockney’s later paintings of the Yorkshire landscape, the less detail there is to see in these enormous broad-brush swathes of paint – here, in these small and exquisite classic photographs, the closer you look, the more there is to see.

Take Man Ray’s photo of an ostrich an egg. Seen at the distance of a few yards, it looks round and smooth with a nice reflected shine on the surface to give a sense of depth and curvature. But the closer you get, the more you can see the fine pores pitting the surface of the egg, which are brought out by the little patch of reflected light; until only a foot from the image, you realise the surface is completely pocked with holes, almost like a miniature moonscape. And then there’s the detail of the wooden surface it’s on: the closer you get, the more you can see the grain of the wood and the straightness of those lines plays off against the curvature of the egg. And so on.

A lot of this detail doesn’t really come over in any reproductions you see, even in the catalogue of the exhibition itself, which is printed on matt paper and nowhere nearly as attractive as the originals.

None of the reproductions are as grippingly dynamic as the real prints. Only in the flesh can you look closer and closer and closer and see more and more detail. Only in the flesh do you start to get really hooked and really start to see what Elton is on about.

Another example is Dorothea Lange’s famous image of the Migrant woman. It was only looking at the print really close up that I realised that she is holding an infant child whose white corpse-like face is almost hidden by the tree or vertical line on the right hand side of the photo. I thought I knew this image inside out, but seeing a print this close up made me realise I was wrong.

Lots of the photos are like this, revealing depths and then further depths.

This also makes sense of another of Elton’s comments – that photographs tell the truth, whereas paintings lie. There are all kind of political and aesthetic objections to that statement and yet, like everything else the man says, it is persuasive because it carries the conviction of his obvious love and care for these marvellous images.

After all, there is an extraordinary power and depth and truthfulness to these photos. Maybe it’s something to do with their brightly-lit clarity – and that this crisp clarity of image results in a greater density of information per square inch. There is just more going on in a good photo than in most paintings of a comparable size. Subconsciously the mind is registering a whole host of detail, the kind of extraneous detail which most painters consciously leave out, but which are often here to distract and illuminate and shed new perspective. I keep thinking about the woman’s toenails in Edward Weston’s fabulous nude. Or Duke Ellington’s shirt cuffs.

It’s the sheer amount of visual information which a camera captures which both explains why they really do repay repeated viewings, and why so many of them give the impression of flooding and gratifying the eye and the viewing mind.

What great photographs! What a great exhibition! What a great guy!

Glass Tears (Les Larmes) (1932) by Man Ray. Collection Elton John © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016

Glass Tears (Les Larmes) (1932) by Man Ray. Collection Elton John © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016

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by Simon on March 4, 2017  •  Permalink
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