PINNING THE BRITS DOWN

Photo Exhibition: Strange and familiar: The Barbican

I saw this exhibition at the Barbican last year and since I was flagging by the end then I thought I would pop into Manchester Art Gallery and have a look at the second half again.  The exhibition is curated by Martin Parr and is about the way the UK has been portrayed by foreign photographers (twenty-two in all) over the past seven decades or so.  The first half is mostly what you would expect: telephone boxes, British bobbies, milk bottles on doorsteps, bowler hats and so on.  It plays to a certain view of the UK in the fifties and sixties.  What is interesting about the more modern work though is that the instant recognisability has gone and what emerges is a process of homogenisation.  The Rinejke Dijkstra portraits of clubbing girls, the Bruce Gilden close-ups, the Hans van der Meer football landscapes and the Axel Hutte housing estates could all have been taken more or less anywhere in western Europe.  There is very little that is recognisably British.  The Hans Eijkelboom slideshow really drives the point home. 

That poses quite a difficult curatorial problem.  You choose photographers because they have something to say and say it well but then what emerges when you put them all together is something else.  So you are caught between the ethnographical and the artistic/documentary.  What you put on the wall as a picture has become data. This is one of the most fascinating characteristics of the photograph.  Just when you have decided what you are looking at it becomes something else.  You just can’t pin a photograph down.

WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR

Tame Wildlife?

There is a certain kind of photograph where you feel, having looked at it closely, that you know the photographer a little.  I have visited several WPOTY exhibitions now and the photographs leave me with exactly the opposite feeling.  The photographers have obviously put a lot into them: time, effort,  equipment, travel, patience, persistence and ingenuity.  But there is nothing personal about the result.  With a small number of exceptions, they are technically superb yet clinical to the point of monotone.

I wonder why the text panels always tell you exactly what kit was used for each shot (including strobes, drones, speedlights and more this year – including a powered paraglider).  I wonder about the environmental impact of flying half way across the world to take these photos, as some photographers do.  I wonder why all but a handful of the photographers are from developed countries.  I wonder about the exhibition’s ambient music and the little dramatised texts that go with each shot. I think about colonial-era photography and the way that another kind of wild was pinned down by that.

The visitors’ book is a litany of superlatives.  This is a truly popular exhibition but to me it is not so much a celebration of nature as of technology.

MY JIGSAW PUZZLE OF PHOTOGRAPHS

I review my photos constantly to see what I may find.  Sometimes it can be like assembling a jigsaw puzzle where I don't have the box lid as a guide but I can make as many pieces as I like - if that helps.  I don't know whether those pieces are needed for the big picture and I don't know whether they even fit together.  Maybe I will have to discard some of my favourites.  So it is painstaking work.  Maybe I am working on several puzzles at once and the pieces are mixed together.  I just don't know at this stage.  Laying the pieces out, surveying and arranging and sorting and coding them, pushing some together then pulling them apart, grouping and regrouping until finally some sort of design emerges and I convince myself that I have glimpsed an order of sorts.  I sit back, temporarily reassured.  Next day though, I'm back there again.  More pictures, more pieces, more frustration.  

ERNST HAAS (1)

I've just been looking at 'Color Correction' - a volume of the non-commercial colour photography of Ernst Haas.  He says somewhere: "For me, photography became a language with which I have learnt to write both prose and poetry."

That is a very interesting idea - that photography can be divided into the equivalent of verse and prose.  Perhaps he meant that his commercial work was the prose side, some kind of linear process which marched relentlessly to a predictable conclusion. The poetry would then be something more abstract and affective:  images which made their way by association or allusion.  It is these latter which make up the volume I have been looking at.

Maybe there is something in the distinction.  On the other hand, prose can be just as allusive as poetry and rum-ti-tum poetry can be just as predictable as some prose.  All photographs both depict and allude and that is less true of words which tend to direct one's thoughts rather more firmly.    In the end EH's distinction can go only so far.  The potency of the photograph will always set it apart from words.

PETER GALASSI

The One Place To Stand

"....the challenge of finding the one place to stand from which the world, compressed into two dimensions within the picture's frame, makes sense of itself."

(Peter Galassi in his monograph for Andreas Gursky's 2001 MoMA exhibition.)

For me, this quote cuts through all the the tangled thickets to a clear space.  What else do you hope for, when you peer through the viewfinder, than that the world for a split second will make sense of itself? 

Here is another quote from the same source.  This time he is talking about looking at a photograph rather than taking one.

"The world can seem richer and more generous in disclosing its meanings when we are freed from its pressing fullness to contemplate its fixed, flattened image on a piece of paper."

I read this as meaning that a photograph is a distillation.  Like a good whisky it is the result of a process and so becomes something more than a mixture of its ingredients.

ERNST GOMBRICH

Adding And Taking Away

"Anybody who has ever tried to arrange a bunch of flowers, to shuffle and shift the colours, to add a little here and take away there, has experienced this strange sensation of balancing forms and colours without being able to tell exactly what kind of harmony it is he is trying to achieve..........   In every such case, however trivial, we may feel that a shade too much or too little upsets the balance and that there is only one relationship which is as it should be."  (Ernst Gombrich: The History of Art)

As ever Gombrich manages to nail a fundamental idea in simple words.  What else are we doing when we squint through the viewfinder at the world out there, than looking for 'that one relationship which is as it should be'?  While there might be a good deal of dispute about what that relationship consists of, would anybody deny that it exists?   It  seems to be some kind of subconscious template that has infinite variety in the world of form.

PETER MITCHELL: PLANET YORKSHIRE

I just caught the tail end of the Peter Mitchell show at Impressions Gallery - Planet Yorkshire - before Christmas.  PM himself was there so I had a chat with him.  He's a very pleasant chap.  He told me that his house is jammed full of all his work from previous exhibitions. He is still photographing now, totally analogue, using medium format. I find his approach very appealing: a kind of vocation without ambition.   He's had the same printer for forty years.  The prints are pretty huge and often darkish so that you are squinting a bit.  He's going for an overall look.

Given the range of his work over the years an exhibition  giving a flavour of it all is bound to be a bit episodic, as this was, but the lost world of the seventies does look like another planet now and these photos seem not just to portray it but also to embody it.  Lovely show and great to get to chat to him.