Colin Pantall's Writing

Raghu Rai Interview

2011-09-20T14:54:00.002+01:00

A Smile from the Streets of India

Raghu Rai came to photography by accident. “I was stayingwith my elder brother Paul who was a photographer. We went to a village to takesome pictures and when the film got developed, my brother sent one of my imagesto The Times in London. It was a picture of a baby donkey in the fading sunset.The picture editor there was Norman Hall, who was the editor of the BJP Annualand later editor of Photography Magazine. He saw this picture and published ithalf page in The Times. I was working in Civil Engineering because that waswhat my parents wanted me to do. It was a government job, everyone wanted agovernment job in India in the 1960s, but I hated it. So when this picture waspublished it was like a revelation to me and I thought, that’s it, I’m going tobe a photographer.”

“So I became a photographer in 1965. I worked at the The Statesmanin Calcutta. This was formerly a British newspaper and still had a Britisheditor called Ivan Charlton; he had a wonderful respect for photography. I usedto get lots of space: half pages and photo-features when something bighappened. Then I worked for India Today from 1982-1991, which was a weeklymagazine, I would get 12-14 pages for a story and I was free to chooseassignments that interested me. But that was the last job I did. It’s better tobe a free bird and do what I want to do.”

Throughout his career, the driving force of Rai’s work hasbeen the energy of Indian streetphotography. “A few years ago there was a French-led symposium on StreetPhotography held in Delhi. One of the speakers said street photography is dead.I took him on and said the purpose of street photography, or any photography,is to document the times we live in now. On the one hand this could be documentingthe lives of famous people like Indira Gandhi or Mother Theresa, but for me thereal purpose is to photograph the lives of ordinary people and their dailylives because that is what makes up the soul of this country.”

One of Rai’s earliest and best-know works demonstrates this affectionfor the ordinary Indian. It shows a street scene at Chowri Bazaar in Old Delhi.The image is criss-crossed with energy, as rickshaws, trolleys, carriages andbikes vie with horses, cows, labourers and schoolchildren for possession of theroad. Down the middle of the picture, carriage tracks have left trails throughwhat looks like frost. Bare-footed labourers push pipes down the roadway, whileacross the top of the picture a stream of horse-drawn carriages carrypassengers to their place of work.

It is a photograph that could only have been made in India,but Rai recognizes that, “...photography is a western invention. The influencesin Indian photography are people like Henri Cartier Bresson, Andre Kertesz andRobert Frank. They talk about capturing a space or a moment in time. India hasdifferent environments, religions and people. There is so much going on in onepicture that your picture needs to take in. It has to be multi-layered tocapture the complexity of India. They need not be one decisive moment, butseveral decisive moments. And that’s what I try to capture in my photographs.You have to remember India is not one country or one culture or one time. Youlook at that picture of Delhi and it could have been taken 200 years ago.”

Rai believes that not just anybody can photograph thisworld. “Let me tell you very honestly. India is my own world. It takes all ofyou mentally, physically and spiritually. Almost every photographer in the worldcomes to India at some point because, on the surface, India is a very easycountry to photograph. But India is not something you can just walk into andunderstand as an outsider. I can walk around and sniff around and myphotography is life itself. It’s not a style; it’s a way of being. My contextand connectivity is with a larger space and a larger experience.”

So India may be easy for foreign street photographers. Therewill be colour, chaos and a diverse range of people and places. Thephotographic possibilities are endless, yet the complexity of what is in frontof one’s eyes cannot be underestimated. Nothing is simple here, nothing isstraightforward and everything has a meaning and significance. If you don’tunderstand those meanings, if you can’t read those signs, signs which areengrained into Indian ways of thinking and being, then how can you portray it?And if you don’t portray it in your pictures, if you are missing out all thesevital elements, then how can your pictures or what you are attempting tocommunicate be trusted.

One could say that only locals can truly understand thestreet scenes of somewhere like New York, Paris or Tokyo. However, India issuch a complex, multi-layered society that this applies more than for any othercountry in the world. At the same time, just as different cities have differentstyles of representation, so they have different ways of working; New York hasthe in-your-face style of Bruce Gilden or William Klein, photographers whoisolate the individual and the anxiety, Tokyo the strange anonymity of DaidoMoriyama or Shomei Tomatsu and Paris the romance and nostalgia ofCartier-Bresson, Doisneau and Brassai. ForRai, street photography with Indian characteristics is about joining the flowand being invisible. When Rai photographs, he uses minimal equipment and is asinconspicuous as possible. He is not an outsider in the crowd; he is part ofthe crowd.

While street photography is Rai’s first love, he has alsoworked as a photojournalist covering some of India’s most traumatic events. Theworst of these was undoubtedly Bhopal in 1984: a disaster where a gas leak atthe US-owned Union Carbide plant killed over 8,000 people in the days after theevent and many more in the years that followed. The disaster became synonymous with corporatecriminality and evasion of responsibility that continues to this day. Raghu Raiarrived in Bhopal the day after the leak and took the picture that became thesymbol of the world’s worst industrial disaster. It shows a child being buriedin a rough mix of soil and stone. His body is wrapped in some kind of shroudbut the face is uncovered. A hand brushes his forehead in a gesture of comfort.The eyes of the child are empty, clouded over, as though burnt by the chemicalsof Bhopal, his mouth open in an expression of exhaustion and fatigue. Nobodyknows who he child his, his body was never claimed and for all its sadness thepicture is strangely fatalistic and calm.

Rai returned to Bhopal and worked with Greenpeace, but foundthe tragedy too much to bear. “It’s a never-ending story because people arestill dying there. I made a book and an exhibition and it did make a differenceat one time but when you go into tragic situations like that, it takes a tollon you. I was there from the start and in the first three days the gas wasstill there in the bodies of people and animals, seeping out. Seeing so muchdeath is terrible and going back was also painful because you see all thissuffering and you truly can’t change their lives. You need healing after that.”

For Rai, healing comes with the camera. “The moment you puta camera on your eye, your focus becomes clearer and you start learning aboutwhere you come from. When I take pictures I am exploring the people around me,the streets around me, the world around me.”

One city that Rai is drawn to is the holy city of Varanasi.This is where many Hindus come to burn their dead. The holiest cremation sitein Varanasi is Manikarnika Ghat. Cremation here means instant liberation fromthe burden of life, a release from the endless cycles of reincarnation andsuffering. In recent years, Rai has started using panoramic cameras to take inthe totality of experiences that make up India. In his picture of ManikarnikaGhat, a line of men stand across the image, echoing Rai’s belief that hispictures represent a ‘horizontal experience’ of India with life stretching outin all directions beyond the frame. “There is no exact story I’m telling here.The body language and expressions capture the spirit and energy of the place.My wife gets very angry when she sees this picture because of the man on theright is holding his thing. She sees this and says to me. ‘You Indian men arestupid!’”

Most of Rai’s work is in black and white, but he has alsoshot in colour. “Earlier we used to do all black and white, but then foreignmagazines worked in colour so things began to change. Different subjectsrequire different responses. Sometimes the colours won’t gel. They can dig ahole in the space of the picture. Black and white puts a filter on thesituation. It silences the noises of the colours, because colours have anemotional and physical response. India is a very colourful country but itdoesn’t work for all subjects. I couldn’t have done the work on Mother Teresain colour. My training was in black and white, and because of that it makesmore sense to me. For me the best test of colour is if it can convert to blackand white, it’s a good colour picture.”

Economically, India has changed radically in the 40 yearsthat Rai has been photographing, and this had had effects in the way India isrepresented domestically. “Indian Photography has changed. It is going througha turning. Now everyone has a cell phone and they take a few pictures, thenthey think ‘oh, that looks interesting.’ So they buy a camera and start takingpictures. The tragic thing is we all have computers so we see thousands andthousands of pictures, pictures from all over the world. For example, peoplesee work by Lee Friedlander and they try to copy him. But when Friedlander doessomething it’s new. When somebody else sees Friedlander’s work and tries to dothe same, they are just making an inferior copy. Very little original work getsdone.”

“I am against style. If style emerges from your personallife, from your experiences and your need to photograph then I can understandit. But too often style is just copied, and then you end up with rubbish. As anexample, a few years ago, a very direct, hard flash was popular and we ended upwith lots of pictures of people looking startled and stupid. You need to beresponsive and sensitive, to receive something and not just grab it.”

“Globalisation is happening so fast in India. There is adifference in the energy on the street so you capture these changes in yourimages, but this doesn’t change your photography. As I’ve mentioned, I’m notfond of style. The poet Khalil Gibran said, ‘These children are not my childrenor your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They came through you but not from you and though they are with youyet they belong not to you’. Iwant my image to be ‘the Life’s longing for itself.’”

“If people can connect with my pictures and enjoy them thatis enough for me. It’s like you are walking down the street and you smile atsomeone and they smile back. There is nothing given and nothing taken. It isjust like a little nudge, a recognition of humanity and life. That is whatphotography means to me. It is my profession, it is my religion, it is my karma,it is my life.”

END

A Short Interview with Tim Jeffries of Hamiltons Gallery

2010-11-30T09:56:00.002Z

A short interview with Tim Jeffries of Hamiltons Gallery

When we started Hamiltons in 1984, we decided that to have a fighting chance of getting noticed we needed some heavyweights like Norman Parkinson, David Bailey and Don McCullin. Later we got Robert Maplethorpe and Irving Penn. When we started, late 20th century photography wasn’t collectable. It was early 20th century photographers like Man Ray, Edward Steichen , Stieglitz, Weston and Atget who were selling.

We need to keep an eye on young, developing artists. Often they come to me or are brought to me. They send in their portfolio or a link, but to be honest, the bigger the name of the photographer, the more likely we are going to go for them.

If you’re dealing with someone of Penn’s stature, the price and editioning is done for you. We don’t decide. In the case of a younger photographer, I would have a great hand in the pricing of a work. One needs to know what is going on in the auction world, you need to place the artist in comparable company in terms of price. The big danger is pricing them out of the market, because there is nothing worse than having a show where nothing sells and there’s nothing better than a sellout show. As a golden rule of thumb, if you’re not sure of a price, put it on the low side – because you can always put a price up, but lowering a price always looks really bad.

When I first met Robert Mapplethorpe I was relatively new to the business. I was so excited by being in his presence, I didn’t think of asking the price of his prints. Then I found out they were going for US $1,500. This was in 1987 when our other most expensive prints were US $1,000. I thought I was going to have trouble selling them, but they flew out of the door. It was a turning point because if you have the opportunity to work with a truly international superstar it brings a new market with new collectors and a new inspiration.

We have a solid group of regular collectors. But for me a real collector is almost obsessive – collecting is like a sickness where somebody simply has to have a picture. They have nowhere to put it, but they have to have it. Many people today are not collectors, they are decorators. They have a room with wall space and they need something to fill that space, something that will go with the rest of the room.

Photography is very accessible. We must be aware of how photography has informed our generation. We are all, in some way, visually literate – so there is a less of a barrier between a photograph and, for example, a pickled shark. In the next 50 years, tastes will change. Look at how photography has changed in the last 10 years – now traditional film photography looks backward. So today’s photography has made yesterday’s more valuable. In the same way, the photography of the future will make today's photography more valuable.

A Short Interview with Michael Diemar of Diemar and Noble

2010-11-30T09:55:00.002Z

A Short Interview with Michael Diemar of Diemar and Noble

I opened Diemar and Noble on May 6th 2009 with Laura Noble. We had both been interested in the whole canon of photography as a historical medium, Laura from working in books at The Photographers’ Gallery and myself from collecting, and we felt that there was so much contemporary photography which was too difficult for most galleries to show. Three of our early shows were by Jennie Gunhammar, Maeve Berry and Jonathan Olley and they dealt with illness, death and violence. It was difficult work for some people, but it is work we believe in. The interesting thing is we are connecting with museums and collectors and developing the careers of our photographers through exposure to a wider audience.

When I first became aware of the Castles of Ulster I thought this was one of the great post-war projects. We phoned Jonathan Olley up and asked him to have a show with us and he said yes – nobody had ever done this to him before. Sometimes we contact people, but Laura and I go to university shows, portfolio reviews and art fairs.

On a daily basis we get 3 or 4 calls for representation. But you really have to believe in something to represent it and really feel something is first rate – so it’s difficult because we are constantly saying no to people. It’s not always the immediate commercial element that appeals – we are willing to work at being proactive at getting work in exhibitions or in books (Laura has a lot of experience in publishing). We get together with a photographer we believe in and say how we can build on their work, what we can do next to help them progress.

We show people from the 19th century to the present day, and once people understand what we have brought in from the history of photography, that signals the quality of the contemporary work we have chosen.

With regard to pricing and editioning, it depends on where people come from. If the photographers come from a fine art tradition, like Emily Allchurch and Lisa Holden, low editions of 3 are the thing. For documentary photographers, the edition is more likely to be between 10 and 15. We need to compare the prices to the rest of the market, to see where other comparable work is selling and how much it is selling for. We do have a policy of pricing to sell.

My background is a collector. I started buying Mapplethorpe, the first picture I bought was a Mapplethorpe flower, and gradually I worked myself backwards in time until I was buying 19th century Gustave Le Gray prints. You need a background either as a collector or working in an auction house to have a gallery that deals with the whole of the history of photography. You need a real feel for the photograph as an object.

We get experienced collectors and if you are a collector, you buy no matter what. During the recession of the early 1990s, everything in the art market collapsed except for photography. That was because there was that hard core of collectors. It is the same now. There are changes because from being a strange collecting thing, photography suddenly became a hot medium and as a result, the vintage became scarcer and colour photography came in. When the present recession hit, those who would just drop into a gallery and drop a hideous amount of money have disappeared. The others who have disappeared are lower-end buyers in the £250-£500 market. Work priced at that level is more difficult to sell than it was. But if you think something is good, you stick with it and eventually it will sell either for the name or what the picture is about.

I’m not that keen on running what’s been done before, with running greatest hits shows. So for the George Rodger show I worked with his widow, had access to his papers and diaries and showed new work in a way that showed more than just a greatest hits show.

We have an upcoming show by Lisa Holden. She was adopted as a child, she worked in performance and her work is grounded in these two things and her feelings of alienation. So there is a personal investment in the image-making. It’s not just about getting an idea and photographing it. It’s about being part of the idea and feeling it – and making something people can believe in.

A Short Interview with Ben Burdett of Atlas Gallery

2010-11-30T09:54:00.000Z

A Short Interview with Ben Burdett of Atlas Gallery

I came into photography from antiquarian books 20 years ago – books was where the photography market lived 20 years ago because in the seventies and eighties the market was for 19th century photographs and focused on books and albums. Originally, Atlas dealt in rare books but then about 12 years ago we moved exclusively into photography

We go after people whose work we like – at Atlas we have a relatively consensual way of choosing exhibitions. Some of the artists we show I have directly approached and offered a show to, some approach us or sometimes estates of archives will approach us with bodies of work. Increasingly we are showing more contemporary work from both young and older unrepresented photographers. There are a lot of really talented photographers out there who have no platform.

We do buy work at auctions and in the secondary market – but it’s different because you know exactly what you are buying and how it is going to sell. If you are promoting a photographer as a name, you have to work at getting exhibitions and promoting his career.

We get 20 emails and 5 or 6 envelopes a week. A lot of collectors now are going to degree shows and just buying work directly from students who are in the very early stages of their careers.

I prefer low editions of under 10 depending on what it is and how much work goes into it. For a new photographer you can’t be too self-important and make very small editions with prices too high because people are going to say “Who are you?” and not buy the work. You want photographers to be seen to sell – and if they do sell, you can always put their prices up. Nothing locks a photographer in as much as having a particular price and edition that doesn’t sell. At the same time, there are very successful photographers who do really high editions, but they are the exception rather than the rule. We sell to collectors, corporate collections, museums, photographers, we sell to people who fall for individual images, especially well known images people recognize; they sell most easily because when people see them, they know and love them already. The decision has already been made. They don’t have to learn to like them.

The market has changed. There are far fewer casual buys from people wandering in and buying something because they like it and they have a huge amount of money they have just made from some deal. The people we are buying for and selling to seem to be buying more though . The serious buyers are buying more, partly because it’s a good time to be buying and there are some good deals around.

We have some fairly serious and committed buyers and collectors building a collection with a particular theme or period. That’s the interesting thing about photography; you have a vast time span of years so we sell work from early 19th century to contemporary which is different to most fine art galleries.

A Short Interview with Gemma Barnett of The Photographers Gallery Print Sales

2010-11-30T09:52:00.004Z

A Short Interview with Gemma Barnett of The Photographers Gallery Print Sales

We represent 47 photographers. When I arrived in 2008 we had 77 so it’s slowly reducing. They are split down the middle with half doing black and white work – people like Lartique, Bravo, Bert Hardy and Wolf Suschitsky – and the other half doing contemporary work. Simon Roberts is our best seller. People are buying equally in both traditions but we have a stronger contemporary stock and seem to sell a lot of landscapes.

Before I arrived we were still accepting submissions and it was crazy – we still have a bag behind the door filled with CDs that have been sent in. Now all the curators go to art fairs, graduation shows, we look at our own graduate show, and we go to the MA shows at places like the RCA and LCC - it's very London-centric. I do go to portfolio reviews but it’s difficult to take people on that basis because there is no history of work and I want to know that before I can look after photographers.

Pricing and editioning is done on instinct but the photographers have a lot of say. Jacob Holdt insisted on selling his prints uneditioned. I have to test the market so we start low. Putting prices up too high can put people off. We have sold a lot of Nicholas Huges prints which start at around £300 and he wants to put the price up, but I don’t think they would sell any higher. Edgar Martins recently raised the prices of his prints to £5,000, which is fine except that I haven’t sold a print since doing so. If work is from the art world (as opposed to the photography world), there is a sense that it can command higher prices. So for Indre Serpytyte who has exhibited at Yossi Milo in New York and produces more conceptual work, the prices can be higher.

I am under the impression that the smaller the edition the better – if the edition is 30, it’s too big. I’m trying to encourage people to limit the number in an edition. Steven Vaughan sells well at the gallery and he does five images in 3 sizes – which is not too many.

We have a unique audience here. We have ½ million visitors a year but only 15-20% come to print sales. Often our clients are first time buyers, often couples who have their first home and want some decorative art for the walls and are buying a photograph for the first time. We also have established buyers and I focus most of my attention on corporate sales – where people like Sebastiao Salgado and Guy Tillim have sold very well recently.

If could start again, I would be tempted to sell on personality alone. There are some big egos out there, and it can be a thankless task - no matter how many pictures you sell for somebody, you don’t get a word of thanks. But then you get people like Wolfgang Suschitzky. He’s 95 years old, he never complains, he comes to every opening and he always has a smile on his face. He’s wonderful!

Tony Fouhse: Are you looking for a subject?

2010-11-30T09:44:00.002Z

A short question and answer with Tony Fouhse who is making the very interesting User pictures.

Why did you start the User project?

I was looking to shoot a project, meeting strangers, setting them up into little scenarios and photographing the results. I wanted to shoot this at dusk.

I went to a bunch of spots trying to make this work. Mostly the people I met didn't have the time (or inclination) to participate. In desperation I went to the corner of Cumberland and Murray Streets in Ottawa, where I know crack addicts were always hanging around. In order to do what I do, it's important that the people I shoot have some time on their hands in order to collaborate with me on the shoot.

I was initially met with a certain amount of suspicion (of course) and nothing really happened. I was loading my gear back into the car, to try another spot, when an addict named Archie walked by. He saw the camera and asked me (and this is a quote): "Are you looking for a subject?"

I replied: "Dude, that's exactly what I'm looking for".

He let me take his picture, and after that I shot 2 more setups using different addicts.

If I'd have left a minute earlier, or if Archie had come by a minute later the project would never have happened.

When I saw the results I knew right away that this was what I had been looking for.

A few days later I took prints back to give to the people I'd shot. Other addicts saw the prints and liked them and my approach.

I've been shooting there for going on 4 years with the support and collaboration of the subjects.

What do you hope to achieve with the project?

I say, and I'm sticking by it.....all I'm trying to do is take interesting photographs. I'm a photographer, not a social worker.

I'm just trying to take interesting photos. But I'm also aware of, and have studied, the vibe on the corner and the history of photography. I try to combine all of those things, along with my own aesthetic predilections, when I'm shooting.

Can photography/your work change the way we see people?

I'm kind of cynical when it comes to this. But I'm constantly astounded/surprised by the reactions to USER, by what the people who view these images tell me about how their perceptions of addicts have been changed.

What do your subjects think of the pictures you make of them?

I shoot business leaders, politicians and all kinds of "regular" folks for a living but I've never met a group of people who bring more to the table during a shoot than the addicts I work with on that corner. If you stood behind me as I was working there you would see them arranging their expressions and their posture. You can see them thinking about how they want to portray themselves and their lives. They are using the opportunity to show the "outside" world aspects of their fact that they think are important to see.

Donald Weber's Interrogations

2010-11-30T09:40:00.001Z

Petty Thief

Delinquent and Shop Lifter

Prostitute and Drug Dealer

A few years ago I taught a group of Russians from Moscow. It didn't matter what their politics were, whether they loved Putin or hated him, whether they thought Estonia should be bombed into the stone-age or not; they were all unanimous on one thing - head 50 miles outside of Moscow and you were in a different country where things would only get worse, where alcohol was the only refuge and where hope had deigned to tread since the invention of fire.

I think of their descriptions when I see the pictures of Donald Weber - all rough and bleak, a kind of Winterreise without the lyrical edge, they have the sentiments of what I imagine a Siberian in October must feel with the winter ahead.

Weber's latest series is Interrogations (in the current issue of the BJP). It's portraits of petty criminals confessing in police interrogation rooms - where they don't have the good cop, bad cop routine but the "bad cop, really bad cop" routine. Interrogations is special, a case of the photographer distancing himself from the subjects at hand, and having difficulty doing so. Maybe the project raises questions of complicity - on the part of us, the viewers, Weber and the police and subjects themselves. So with that in mind, I put a few questions to Donald which he was kind enough to answer.

How did you gain access to the interrogation room?

I've known the major of the deparment for five years now. We've worked together since I first started travelling there. Always knew it was a project I wanted to photograph, but also knew it was one of the most difficult places to see, this is about as close as you can get in the police procedure.

What were you photographing? When did you choose to photograph?

Solzhenitsyn talked about the moment of recognition, he always wondered during his execution what he would look at, would he look up at the sky and look for a bird, or would he look down at the ground, head bowed? It's about a moment of recognition, once that flicker of acceptance occurs, things undoubtedly change. So I was looking for these moments, that passage from knowing what was once will never be again.

You have mentioned the "moral communion" you had with your subjects? What was that "moral communion"? Did you ever intervene in the process, were you ever referred to or spoken to in the process?

The process was about a four month struggle to become completely disengaged from all sides - from me as the photographer in the room, from the interrogators to the interrogated. At first I rarely photographed, I discovered the police were actually holding back and behaving themselves; I thought for sure they'd be extra violent. I didn't want to see either of this, but the process itself. I have a very high level of patience, I would just sit there from 9am in the morning to the evening, and just wait. I went days without actually taking pictures. It's a game of chicken, and I always flinch last. In time, the police would just give up on trying to "perform" and just go about their jobs, which allowed me to do mine. It took a few months, but we got it. I saw some very terrible things and was quite disturbed by the whole process, still am, but I believe I am not a judge of their crimes nor of the methods. I am not there to intervene in the process, that would be a betrayal of my years of trust built up with the police. The work formed in this manner because I was not interested in the physical violence, but the psychological violence that we as humans seem to have a special affinity for.

You said you found the process "morally repugnant"? In what ways? How do you reconcile that with the project?

Well watching the methods was not pleasant. Humiliation, violence, degradation. How could you not be repulsed? But the reasons I was there were not for judging them, but was to actually show something very special in the terms of the secrecy of the act. I made a special document precisely because it was about the 'absence of the void,' that it showed humans at their most vulnerable and most cruel. This series could easily be judged along the same lines as a war photographer that constantly gets criticized for not doing anything, for not jumping into the fray. What I saw was a process; we may not enjoy or agree with this process, but it's a process that has a very long history in humanity - confession.

Do you think your documentation made you complicit in the interrogations?

Not at all. In fact the person who is complicit in the interrogations is you, the viewer, and that was the point.

An Interview with Timothy Archibald

2010-11-30T09:38:00.000Z

An Interview with Timothy Archibald

Echolilia, Timothy Archibald's collaboration with his son has been in development for many years and I am a big fan. It shows childhood in a way that resonates with all parents, and captures the worlds that children inhabit physically and emotionally.

Timothy has likened the promotion of Echolilia to pushing a rock up a hill. Well, this autumn, the pushing finally got some rewards when it was featured on a slew of big-name websites. Echolilia has a subtext about autism, but it goes way beyond that - but it was autism that helped sell the project and get the project attention from beyond the photoworld. I think Echolilia still has some way to go before it reaches its rightful peak, so with that in mind, I thought I'd ask a Tim a few questions about the project. There are some really illuminating insights in the answers so read through to the end; this is a basic lesson in how to start, continue and realise a project.

Buy the book here.

How and why did you start the project?

In the fall of 2007 my son Eli was 5 and he really was driving my wife and I crazy. Strange behavior we couldn’t make sense of, massive temper tantrums that would brew like storms and explode all over the house, and complaints and concerns from teachers and day care providers…everything in my life at that point was all about Eli. “What about this? What doctor said that? We read in some book…it sounds like him a little…maybe its this?” All of our time was spent trying to figure out Eli. I couldn’t understand him and his motivations, probably feared him a bit, and time with him wasn’t like….enjoyable. I had always used photography projects as an escape from my real life- I used to like infiltrating subcultures that were different from me and learning about them, photographing them….photography was always an escape from my own life. Here I think I was just at the end of my rope, and started taking photographs of things he created, photographs of him, of the evidence of him and his behavior around our house. I thought maybe I’d see something or get at something. I don’t really know. But in writing they always say “ write what you know “. Here, this domestic chaos was what I knew, so I tried to photograph it.

How did it evolve - what were the key moments of realization?

The project was so wrapped up in our every day life it didn’t seem to have a moment of clarity, when it all seemed to be mapped out and we knew how to make it good. Almost the opposite of that happened…its almost like it was best when we were all in the dark and just exploring.

One point that gave it power was when it started to feel like something we both were contributing to, rather than me just photographing him. That was early on…he really didn’t have interest in just being the subject, he needed to be involved.

Looking backward, it seems the best images were created when he and I were the most desperate, we were trying to make images amidst the most trying times, the times when his behavior was the worst, or was the hardest to make sense of. It’s like there was a bubble when we were making images, he was giving input on the shots and the poses but neither he nor I was too self conscious about what we were doing. That window seemed to yield the strongest images. As the project evolved, he and I became more in sync, more of a collective creative brain, and then its almost like we had to fight from repeating ourselves or fight to find new things….we had to work harder, we had to fail more, throw more images away. But when the project started, in the more desperate times, the good images were emotionally darker…more grim, not really positive, just really feral. So I think they are the better images, but I think as the project evolved the emotions got to be more positive, more universal, more maybe about childhood, what its like to be a child, rather than about my struggle with my kid…so I think the project evolved to be about a spectrum of emotions. Now that its done and is getting a lot of attention, I think these images that were less grim have allowed the project to be more accessible to people, they allowed it to kind of speak to more people and be more about “everything”, rather than just about one thing. A friend had always said to me “ the more personal you make it, the more universal it will become”. I never really knew how to go about that, but I think it may have worked out that way here.
How did the role of autism play in the project?

Autism…it always was the love / hate part of the project. When I started shooting it we didn’t know Eli was on the Autistic Spectrum, we just knew he was different and there was a mystery, a conflict, a question I was trying to figure out. What was the question? I guess it was “What is up with my kid?” or “How do I relate to this kid?” or something like that. So that was the fuel that really powered the project. It gave us something to figure out, something to make pictures about. After we got the diagnosis of ASD, I was pretty determined not to use the term to introduce the images. Either I was uncomfortable with it, or I didn’t want it to limit the project to being like “concerned photography” or something like that. Which it isn’t. I don’t really care about Autism. I care about relationships, individuals, personal connections, you know? So…showing the photographs to other photographers I’d use the term. But in public, I’d never use the term. I didn’t want it to be thought of as something only of interest to a small audience interested in this medical thing. But I did find that when it came time to give the book/series “the elevator pitch”, the quick sentence that would get a viewer or editor interested in the project, whenever I used the word it seemed to connect with people. It just answered all their questions and allowed them into the images with a little bit of necessary knowledge.

Do you think that made a difference to how Echolilia was received?

Yeah, for sure. I think that photography people would engage with the project simply as an intriguing collection of photographs. I think that the wider non photographic audience really could only engage with the work once the word Autism was used. And really, for things like Time, NYT’s, and Discover Magazine to grab on to the project, they needed a science hook that allows the pictures to speak to others, not just us, the photo nerds out there. A lot of this early attention and public use of the term “Autism” made me cringe. I’ve always tried to make it clear that Eli has a big vocabulary, goes to public school, and is just on a different channel. And the media have gone out of their way to acknowledge that in these stories as well, but I think I’ve always been trying to dodge it a bit. But now, really, after all of this attention, you do a Google search on “Autism” + “Photographs” and some mention of the project surfaces…so the cat is out of the bag.

You mention that making and promoting the work was like pushing a rock up a hill - how did you motivate yourself to continue doing this?

You know, I did say that…and I forgot what I meant by that. Because really, the project had some magnetic qualities that people seemed to grab on to in a surprising way, so now it kinda feels like a ball rolling down a hill. But its been 3 years of shooting and then a year of trying to do the book and by then you are sick of all of your photographs but no one has seen them yet in the book form so you push thru, trying to get that done. Then you have a garage full of books ( in our case, self published ) and you need to convince people to look at it or buy it or throw you a bone of sorts and by that time it is easy to want to give up and just start a new project. That is when you really feel like you are pushing a rock up a hill. I did have a friend who said when I was hiring a designer for the book and wrestling with that “ You know, really its all about making motion videos now. You be better off if you ditched this book thing and put your energy into making a movie”. And commercially, he probably was correct. My answer at the time was “Oh, just let me give this thing it’s due, let me finish it, you know?” There is something to be said about following the arc of anything- a project, a relationship. If you don’t follow it to its end, it may haunt you. So, this I wanted to finish and follow the arc of. And getting this one in front of the public changed it immensely…or changed the way I thought of it, and others did too.

You suddenly got a huge audience outside the photoworld - how did this happen and what was the difference between the non-photographic audiences and the photographic audiences?

It was kind of a series of co-incidences. TIME called and wanted Eli and I to do a series of photographs to illustrate a story on childhood mental health and they wanted it to look like ECHOLILIA.. Their idea was to get us to do those photographs for the magazine, and then they would do an online book excerpt from ECHOLILIA. It was a smart pairing that they pulled of well. NYT’s LENS had been interested in it and agreed to do it differently, as a story written by Jane Gross, a writer who wrote extensively on Autism. Somehow both media monoliths agreed to do it…they each had their own spin on it. That got it in front of the masses.

Getting the body of work in front of the non photo audience was really eye opening and changed everything.. It was the story in the New York Times LENS blog that gave the project it’s other life….it really changed the way I viewed the project because there we got to hear from the viewers, the masses had a voice.

When you are working on something, its always hard to judge your motivations, hard to figure out what is driving the project. I’ve always had an interest in photographers who made “weird” photographs. Les Krims, Arthur Tress, Roger Ballen, Joel Peter Witkin, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, all of these photographers who’d fall under some similar umbrella of “weird”. This is the work I always had a soft spot for, even though my work didn’t really look like that. With ECHOLILIA, I thought that my interest in those photographers work was pretty evident in my images…this project kind of paid homage to that type of work, and I didn’t really know if I was driving it in that direction, or if the subject matter pushing it in that direction….I just didn’t know. When the work got in front of other parents with kids on the Spectrum, I was kind of preparing myself for the worst. I just didn’t think others would relate to the work. What I got was letters from around the world, privately and on the LENS blog, of parents saying that they are seeing their own kids in my photographs of Eli. They were saying essentially that these scribbled notes, these body movements, these curious stares, were things they see every day going on in their homes. A few parents sent me photographs, casual snapshots they took of their kids that looked like they could be stuck right into the ECHOLILIA book and fit in without anyone noticing! One mom had photographed notes her kid wrote and hung around the house, her son laying naked on a bookshelf, he son hiding behind a clear plastic tube….I mean it was all the same data. I hope to be able to share the stuff on my blog, but need to respect the parents’ privacy for now.

Has the input you have received from viewers of Echolilia changed the way you see it (could be good, could be bad, is probably a bit of both)?

Oh, the input has been great…I mean knowledge is power, right? But it has been good and bad. The one thing that it made me realize is that I really may not have done anything special with this project at all. I think that I really just operated a camera and a scanner in a rather elegant manner capturing things that parents of kids on the spectrum are seeing every day! I just happened to be the dad, there in the house, running the camera.

But the sense of familiarity that people are seeing looking at the images seems to be creating some sort of good vibe out in the world. People relate to the images, feel like it acknowledges what they are living but in a poetic way, there always is good that comes when people relate to the stuff. I have done projects that didn’t inspire such benevolence….but in this case it caught me by surprise. I always thought these were just images of my reality, not anyone elses’ reality.

One thing someone did mention on the NYT’s letter section was that people shouldn’t romanticize the images. The story of a dad building an emotional bridge to his Autistic son is a very attractive one, but the reality of the relationship, how challenging it is on a daily basis, how it can still drive me crazy, is something I wish the project acknowledged a little more. The other week things were really challenging at home with Eli, and I found myself telling my wife that I wanted it to be more like the photographs were: dreamy, romantic, quiet, poetic, organic, this whole inner emotional journey where I was in control and he and I were equals.. She laughed and reminded me that it never really was like that. That was a fiction made out of the conflict….and it made some intriguing photographs. But the reality was always harder and messier.

So who is your publisher Echo Press?

Oh, there is no publisher. Echo Press is just me and Eli. We hired a designer, hired an ad agency copy writer, layed out the book and took it to a printer to crank out 20 copies. That is our publishing deal! It also explains why the book is so expensive. But this is something that seems do-able these days….so we wanted to try it. In 2005 I was promoting my first book ( Sex Machines : Photographs and Interviews , Process 2005 ) which had a mainstream publisher, I realized how hard it was to sell photography books. We’d do these big events- exhibitions in NYC, slideshow lectures at bookstores around the country, and still it was so very hard to sell any books. The events were a great cultural experience and were well attended, but as far as moving the books…it almost seemed unrelated! I recall flying to Chicago for a lecture, had a good audience had a great time, and the bookstore sold 3 books. I felt sorry for these wonderful people who chose to publish the book! So with this, I figured I’d just try it myself, keep it small, and every sale would mean something. My son would be involved signing the books, making a buck off of each one…it would just be different by design. So here we are. We just printed 30 more. But still the sales are tiny compared with any book published by a real publisher.

So what are you going to do next? Working on anything now?

Yes! The next project is called “Commercial Photography” and it essentially means I’m going to try to figure out how to make a living again with photography. These personal projects always take over and become this creative tidal wave I get happily absorbed in. After all this internal digging, I’m looking forward to the simple pleasures of working for a living as a photographer, making the pictures people tell me to make. And truth be told, these personal projects for me need to bubble to the surface…I just can’t execute them, and for now nothing has surfaced. But I’m waiting….

NYT Link:

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/son-and-father-pierce-autisms-veil/?preview=true&preview

The Lux Effect - Introduction

2009-04-28T10:37:00.002+01:00

The Lux Effect: Real or Imaginary

by Colin Pantall

Introduction: Real or Imaginary?

Chapter 1: The Landscape of the Romantic Child

Chapter 2: Clothing the Innocent Child

Chapter 3: The Look of the Knowing Child

Chapter 4: Constructed Childhoods

Conclusion: Real and Imaginary

Introduction - Real or Imaginary?

The Rose Garden (figure 1) is a typical Loretta Lux picture and the photographer’s personal favourite. A four-year-old English girl called Emily stands on a path in a garden of pale pink roses. The garden is walled, with two

Figure 1: The Rose Garden

open gateways on either side of the girl. Above the garden, in the top half of the picture is a lightly overcast sky of grey-bottomed clouds. The girl stands in the centre of this garden and we see all of her from her ankles up. She stands with her right leg in front of her left. Her hands are held behind her back and she looks slightly up and to the left of the viewer with an unfocussed, but thoughtful, expression. Her cheeks are freckled and rounded, her lips cherubic. At first glance, everything seems beautiful, so beautiful that the work at times seems “strangely unmoored in place or time” (Aletti, 2004).

Look closer and signs of imperfection in the picture appear. Starting with the landscape, the rose bushes are not verdant and flourishing, but are ground-covering (except by the gateways) and seem almost strangled by their own overgrowth. At the edges of the path the wildness is halfheartedly tamed. Here attempts at trimming have been made and flattened rose tendrils reach out over a thin-looking soil. The flowers are not pristine either, but rather wilting, their petals slightly frayed and tattered, the leaves a sickly pale green that contrasts with the emerald of the girl’s dress. Some of the briars spill over onto the pathway which is uneven and still wet from the rain. All of these landscape elements have been digitally added to the picture by Lux, who says she stills thinks as a painter, but with a mouse, keyboard and screen as her tools instead of brushes, palette and canvas (Salter, 2004).

The otherworldly nature of The Rose Garden is accentuated by the clothes the girl is wearing. Lux selects the clothes her models wear, often dressing them in outfits from her own youth (Aletti, 2004). Emily wears a short, emerald green skirt with an A-shaped pleat running down its middle. This joins at a high waistband that is fastened with an over-sized gold buckle. She also wears a short-sleeved, pink shirt with a waved, green trim that matches her dress. Down the centre of the shirt is a floral, art-noveau design that continues to the rounded collar that is buttoned to the top of her neck. The clothes seem new and are flat from ironing, but at the edges creases and crumples appear - where the shirt tucks into the skirt, where the collar sits against the neck, where the arms slide behind the back.

Emily, though young and a picture of health, is not flawless. There is a bruise on her leg, she has pale shadows under her eyes and her auburn hair is unkempt and tousled, a stray strand falling across her eyes and nose. There is also an asymmetry to her pose - her stance is both casual and awkward, her legs join up too sweetly, the head tilts too gently and the proportions all seem the tiniest touch out of kilter. Similarly with the gaze. She looks out of the picture with a look of intention that is that has a cold knowingness about it. Her look is not that of a child, but rather one of an adult. Yet at the same time, it is unfocussed as though she is attending to something that only she, or children as a breed apart, can see. In true phenomenological fashion she is looking at something and nothing simultaneously.

The Rose Garden is an immensely contradictory picture. It has what Vince Aletti calls “the sublime sheen of reality perfected, telling imperfection and all” (Aletti, 2004) .The landscape is perfect, but flawed, the clothes new but old. The girl is perfect, but somehow blemished and her look and stance mark her both as an adult and a child. Repeatedly in this picture, the idealised world of the imaginary Innocent Child is contrasted with the blemished real world of the Knowing Child. These contrasts are what give Lux’s photography the power to elicit such contradictory responses from viewers. They reference a wide range of both traditional and contemporary western portrayals of childhood beauty in painting, photography and illustration and create an ambiguity that make her images readable in a multitude of opposing ways. So while Lux describes her pictures as “ imaginary portraits” ( Stoll, 2004), she also says she uses children as her subject because they are “very genuine” ( Salter, 2004). Are her children “as hollow and idealized as automatons” ( Aletti, 2004) or are they “fixed in a childhood as real as any, as real as it gets”? (Stoll, 2004). Is the work of Loretta Lux real or imaginary? This is the question this dissertation will seek to answer.

The Lux Effect: Chapter 1: The Landscape of the Romantic Child

2009-04-28T10:36:00.001+01:00

Introduction: Real or Imaginary?

Chapter 1: The Landscape of the Romantic Child

Chapter 2: Clothing the Innocent Child

Chapter 3: The Look of the Knowing Child

Chapter 4: Constructed Childhoods

Conclusion: Real and Imaginary

Loretta Lux began working with photography in 1999, while studying at Munich’s Akademie der Bildenden Künste. Feeling unable to compete in the historical arena of classical painting where painters like Velasquez or Caspar David Friedrich overwhelmed her burgeoning but, in her eyes, modest talents, Lux decided to “...approach painting through photography” and establish a niche of her own as an artist who uses photography (Pantall, 2005). Freed from another of her artistic phobias - the messiness of painting - Lux could focus on her art through the new, clean and relatively uncluttered medium of digital photography

Lux had always been influenced by art as a child when works like Velasquez’s Margarita, Infanta Teresa and Prince Baltasar Dressed as a Hunter or Runge’s Aulfendorf children hung on the walls of her home. “Maybe they are the reason I became an artist,” she says (Pantall, 2005).

In addition to being a recurrent theme in Lux’s personal history, art and its history has had a major influence on the representation of childhood in photography. This is evident in Lux’s use of landscape, dress, pose and expression, with The Rose Garden being a prime example of a meeting point for contemporary and historical representations of children.

Portrayals of the child in painting developed beyond representations of the Christ-child and related religious or classical imagery with the development of the cult of childhood innocence in the 18th century. This development has been traced back to social and economic changes in the 17th century that led to children becoming more central figures in family life (Aries, 1996). These changes led to the creation of early versions of the modern ‘nuclear family’ (Stone, 1990) in which the child was transformed from a mini-adult that should be cajoled to the path of adult righteousness to an object of parental adoration and love. Exactly when these changes happened is contested (Higonnet, 1998), though there is no doubt that this social transformation did occur and led to transformations in attitudes to child-rearing, education and play (Postle, 2005). These transformations were in turn represented in the world of art by British painters such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and Francis Cotes. In the 18th century, these artists began to use art historical elements to create a new vision of childhood - what Anne Higonnet calls ‘Romantic Childhood’ According to Higonnet, the Romantic Child is has no class, gender or thoughts. The Romantic Child is “Socially, sexually and psychically innnocent” (Higonnet, 1998 p.24).

The Age of Innocence (dated to 1788) by Sir Joshua Reynolds (figure 2) is one of the paintings most commonly referenced as an example of this ‘Romantic Childhood’.

Figure 2: The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence portrays a young girl, Offy, in a white dress sitting in
profile to the viewer. The landscape (which I will focus on in this chapter) looms behind her, allowing the child to gain prominence, yet at the same time seem “reassuringly small” (Higonnet, 1998 p.15). The landscape emphasises the girl’s childhood and innocence. She may be the major figure in the painting, yet at the same time the lack of detail in the background, the undifferentiated, almost impressionistic trees and foliage, envelop and surround her. To the left of the viewer the trunk of a silver birch reaches up, its branches overhanging and almost merging with her ribboned hair. In the background stand more distant trees on a gentle slope, above which stands a cloud-dappled blue sky.

Offy is alone in a world of which she is not really part, a world that is both threatening and somehow alien, a world that, given infant mortality rates of the time, Higonnet believes is redolent with death (Higonnet, 1998 p.29). In keeping with Rousseau’s ideas of childhood freedom, the girl is protected from the harmful experience of the adult world by her childlike innocence (Steward, 1995). So the Romantic Child may be a break from previous incarnations of childhood - the Christ-Child in particular - yet at the same time it shares in their allusions to sacrifice and death (Higonnet, 1998 p.30).

The landscape is much more striking in The Rose Garden. As described earlier, it is clearly defined and the use of a medium wide-angle setting (Lux photographs using a Leica Digilux with a 28-90mm lens) for the garden makes it recede into the background. With Emily shot from a low angle at a longer focal length, she seems to dominate the landscape. Unlike Offy, Emily rises above and, with her feet out of frame, is partially detached from her environment. While Offy is surrounded by the harshness of life and not in control of the world she is already part of, Emily has an independence and control over her environment. As a child, she exists in her imaginary childhood world, though at some point she will have to turn around and follow the path that she is implicitly already on. Emily is also given a choice as to her future, while Offy is not. Instead, Offy is already part of a dark and foreboding world in which innocence is only a temporary defence against the inevitable corruption of adulthood(Steward, 1995). The Rose Garden, in contrast, offers options. Emily can choose when to join the world behind her, which gateway to take, and though there are symbols of imperfection and decay, The Rose Garden offers a much brighter world than that of The Age of Innocence.

These are two very different views of childhood. Offy may be innocent, but she exists in an adult world. She does not understand this world, cannot see this world (as an adult would) and has no control over it. And this is where her innocence comes from - an innocence of corruption, death and, by implication, her own mortality. Innocence for Reynolds, as it was for Jacques Rousseau (Steward, 1995) or indeed Eve in the Garden of Eden, is a bubble of unknowingness. Emily, by contrast, does not live in a bubble, but has her own (imaginary or real?) world - a world that is separate from that of the adult - and even that of other children. She is unknowing of the adult world, but why shouldn’t she be? She is not part of the adult world, just as adults (who are equally unknowing of Offy’s world of childhood innocence) are not part of the child’s world. Lux has created a democracy of ignorance. And in contrast to Offy, Emily controls the choices she has to make to join the adult world. Offy can be seized at any time by her surroundings, Emily cannot. It is a supremely individualistic view of childhood that conforms to Aletti’s view of Lux’s children as independent “creatures” who “suffer alone” (Aletti, 2004). It is also a very democratic view in which the life, mind and world of a child is put on an equal footing with that of the adult.

Lewis Cage, (‘The Young Cricketer’) by Francis Cotes (figure 3) shares more similarities to Lux’s use of landscape. Painted in 1768, it shows a young boy standing on an illuminated cricket wicket. A ball lies in front of improvised bails, while the boy stands with his left foot facing forward, the sock slightly unrolled. His left hand is on his hip, his right hand holds a elegantly curved cricket bat. The boy is set in a rural landscape , all the better for the trend towards “...the evocation of sensibility” (Postle, 2005) and the low viewpoint and full framing of the boy give him “... a heroic quality” (Postle, 2005 p.48).

Figure 3: Lewis Cage (‘The Young Cricketer’)

The boy’s firm placing in a natural environment was influenced by the publication of Rousseau’s Emile in 1763 (Postle, 2005). In this book, Rousseau “...rejected conventional academic learning in favour of a simple, outdoor upbringing” (Postle, 2005 p.48). So we see Lewis Cage standing on his light-cast wicket. Like the girl in The Rose Garden, he is in control of the environment that surrounds him. But that environment is limited to the wicket on which he stands - a wicket that symbolises childhood. He is detached from the adult world by a large cast of shadow - symbolising adolescence perhaps - and the world beyond is natural and, compared to the landscape in The Age of Innocence, welcoming - part of a romanticised trend to portray the English countryside as “an innocent, idyllic environment in which to grow up” (Steward, 1995). There are trees, meadow and a bright blue sky dotted with clouds lit up by the setting sun. Lewis Cage has control over his world and, like Emily’s, it is one separated from that of the adult world. The difference is that though Cage is separated from the adult world, he is also part of it - his is not an imaginary world, but a corner of adulthood over which he has control. He knows what he will join and what the future will hold. It is all there in the landscape behind him and once he has manouevred through the darkness of adolescence, he will be part of it. He even knows that the future is bright. In the right hand corner a pathway leads over a hill to a horizon filled with golden light.

It’s a supremely optimistic picture and one that is closer in its use of landscape to Lux than Reynolds. It also shares commonalities with contemporary work of a gloomier nature, in particular Rineke Dijkstra’s Beach Portraits. In her Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, USA June 24 1992 (figure 4), a girl in an apricot bikini stands awkwardly on a South Carolina Beach against a drab grey background of beach, sea and sky. As in The Young Cricketer, the foreground is lit. The young woman has her own territory and stands on her little patch of sand. Dijkstra photographs the girl with sympathy, typical of work that Mary Warner Marien calls “..lush, informative and loving” (Marien, 2002 p.477). However, despite this sympathetic portrayal, Dijkstra believes “...it is essential to understand that everybody is alone” (Grundberg, 1997) - not because people are lonely, but in the sense that everybody is unique, a one-off. An outsider cannot fully “crawl under somebody else’s skin” (Grundberg, 1997). And that somebody else might not be able to crawl fully under their own skin, to fully be herself/himself. So, unlike the confident pre-pubescent Lewis Cage, the girl in the apricot bikini is uncertain of where she is and who she is. Half adult, half child, she exists in the adolescent zone of darkness Cotes so perceptively painted behind his five-year-old boy. In her uncertain adolescence, the future is a series of stratas of greyness,

from the beach to the sea and, punctuated only by the turbulence of rolling waves,

Figure 4: Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, USA June 24 1992

a sky of overwhelming greyness (this dark background was accidentally created by Dijkstra’s miscalculations with the Strobe (Dijkstra, 2003)). Time has been stretched to fit the weltanschaung of the young adolescent. The possibilities that exist in the childhood world of The Rose Garden have been stripped bare by the insularity and isolation of adolescence. But at the same time the Hilton Head landscape is the landscape that potentially lies outside The Rose Garden, when the red-headed girl advances beyond her tender years and possibilities might recede into drudgery, routine and uncertainty. The girl in the apricot bikini suffers alone just as (as Aletti believes) Emily does. The only difference is the age and world of which they are part.

Perhaps the photographer that Lux most resembles in her use of landscape is Sally Mann. In Immediate Family, Mann poses her children repeatedly against Mann’s supremely lyrical and arcadian vision of the landscape of America’s Deep South.

In her foreward to Immediate Family, Mann writes about the timelessness of her home in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, of a landscape that is unchanged from that captured on a 19th-century glass-plate negative Mann found (Mann, 1992). Majestic and eternal, the landscape for Mann was a foil against which her imagination could run free. As a child, she ran naked, a feral being who became “...an Indian, a cliff-dweller, a green spirit” (Mann, 1992.) in the 30 acres of forest and mountain that surrounded her childhood, and adult, home. For Mann, childhood is impermanent, but contained within that impermanence are the “vexing opportunities” of a child’s future life.

This is similar to the view of Lux as portrayed in The Rose Garden where Emily lives in her own world, yet the future of adulthood is ripe with possibility. In The Alligator’s Approach (figure 5), Virginia sits against a sun-lounger on hardwood decking. Behind her a forested cliff-side rises above a narrow lake. On the shores of a lake sits a plastic alligator, the trail of its approach marked in the waters behind. The layered complexity of The Alligator’s Approach points to what Higonnet means when she says “Mann’s work is not easy to look at” (Higonnet, 1998 p.203).

If The Rose Garden presents a world contained by walls, The Alligator’s Approach shows a world enclosed by the natural environment of Virginia’s home - cliffs, water and trees. This environment has become her playground, a place where the child is free to be themself, where the surroundings are defined by the child and not vice-versa, a perspective that has roots in Mann’s own childhood in the same surroundings. “I don’t remember much about my childhood basically because it was so ordinary,” says Mann (Woolcock, 1992). “It just went away, it happened, it passed. But there’s a quality of living in the country, this wild, naked freedom that I had as a child that I think they had at least for the period of time that I photographed them.”
As in Lux’s work, this is not a unwavering idyllic environment such as Francis Cotes painted. Within the freedom presented by the sumptuous landscape comes something darker - the fact that “childhood can be painful” (Woolcock, 1992) a

Figure 5: The Alligator’s Approach

feeling mirrored by Lux who believes that while children are beautiful, childhood isn’t (Pantall, 2005). The darkness in Mann’s portrait is shown in the threat of the alligator that is approaching. And as it approaches, Virgina sleeps on, unaware of the danger that lies beneath the deck. Here the alligator is just a toy, but it also hints at what lies beyond childhood, as the gates do in The Rose Garden or the shadows in The Age of Innocence, when the threat will be
something more real than that of a plastic alligator, when life and the landscape might turn and one’s being become as bleak as that presented in Dijkstra’s Hilton Head portrait. Real or Imaginary, beautiful or bleak, like Lux, the use of landscape in Mann’s work is deliberately contradictory - a theme that Lux continues to pursue in her use of pose and gaze to suggest both innocence and knowingness in her subjects.

The Lux Effect - Chapter 2: Clothing the Innocent Child

2009-04-28T10:35:00.002+01:00

Introduction: Real or Imaginary?

Chapter 1: The Landscape of the Romantic Child

Chapter 2: Clothing the Innocent Child

Chapter 3: The Look of the Knowing Child

Chapter 4: Constructed Childhoods

Conclusion: Real and Imaginary

In the previous chapter, we saw how landscape is used to create an imaginary world of childhood, as well as point towards the adult world that lies beyond. The selection of clothes worn by her subjects is another means by which the dichotomies between child and adult, innocent and knowing, real and imaginary are reinforced by Loretta Lux.

There is nothing accidental about the clothes Lux selects for her models. As noted previously, she sometimes dresses them in clothes she wore as a child (Aletti, 2004) in the former East Germany. More frequently, she dresses them in clothes that she has bought at markets or vintage clothes shops (Pantall, 2005) in Germany and other parts of Europe. The clothes tend to be cheap, of a simple cut with bright patterns and bold colours. They never have pictures, logos or brand names on. Indeed, Lux says she could never photograph a child who was wearing branded clothes (Pantall, 2005). Dressing them in labelled clothes would firmly put them into a particular time or era and bring with it consumer connotations that Lux wants to avoid.

The clothes Lux uses are best defined by what they are not. They are not redolent of the Romantic child or the Innocent child, they are not cute or kitsch, they are not adult and they are not ‘dressing-up’ clothes. They are not especially functional clothes, nor are they expressly decorative. Instead, they are vintage clothes that are neither defined by their expense nor form part of either a class or national consciousness. They are clothes that never quite wormed their way into the affections of either parents or child.

Loretta Lux chooses clothes that deliberately evoke the otherworldliness of her own childhood. She was brought up under the constraints of East German communism, where consumer choice was strictly limited. As she grew up, Lux became aware of the limitations of this system, and how everything around her seemed to lag behind the outside world. “I began to realise I was trapped in the DDR when I was 10 or 11,” she says. “We did see films where more desirable places were shown, like France and Italy, or West Germany, but it all seemed out of reach” (Pantall, 2006). The 1970s in Dresden felt like the 1950s in Hamburg, and the clothes she wore as a child mirrored this experience (Pantall, 2005).

So the clothes Lux chooses for her children are a costume, a costume that evokes both the consumer vacuum and an associated timelessness of Eastern Europe under Communism, and the attitude towards childhood that existed in the DDR in the 1970s, during Lux’s own childhood. In essence, the East German child was valued by the state not as a child, but as a potential adult. Childhood in East Germany, says Lux, was about growing up to become “workers and LPG-farmers and provide for the future of their communist homeland” (Pantall, 2006). To this end, child care was used as a means to allow the mother to return to work rather than something to educate the child, “In contrast to West Germany, where the increase in public day care in the 1970s was motivated by a desire to educate pre-school children, public day care in East Germany aimed particularly at serving the needs of working mothers” (Kreyenfeld and Karsten, 2000).

Figure 6: Propaganda Image celebrating 30 years of the German Democratic Republic

Similarly, the well-documented use of children as informers against potential dissidents shows how children were employed to serve the state (Funder, 2004). The child was a burden on the parent (the mother in particular) and the state until such a time as it could serve the state. Propaganda images (figure 6) reinforce this idea as do Young Pioneer Songs such as ‘Mother Goes To Work In The Morning’ and the pledge children took upon subsequently joining the Thalmann Pioneers. Thalmann Pioneers would promise to “defend our workers' and farmers' state, which is a firm part of the socialist community of nations”,”prepare for life and work in socialist society” and be “friends of the Soviet Union and protect peace while hating the warmongers” (Bytwerk, 1998). These propaganda images and songs also hint at why Lux’s models strike such independent and at times lonely figures. It’s a view confirmed by Lux. "I deeply resent the fact of having grown up there," she says. "Being forced to pretend to be a little Communist was demeaning” (Salter, 2005).

In Lux’s work, “the sartorial elegance of her sitters owes something to the 1970s” (Fletcher, 2005). More specifically, in The Rose Garden, the starched formality of Emily’s shirt, its flesh-coloured fabric and ornate design running down the front typical of very conservative, adult dress are the costume of the old East Germany. The skirt is an attractive, but very chemical green, its harsh tones matching the stiff fabric of the synthetic skirt.

However, there are also nods to childhood in the clothes Emily wears. Her tightly buttoned shirt comes complete with short sleeves that signify childhood. Her skirt is short, but loose and flared in a way that is childlike and sexless and beneath it her legs stretch out, the right in front of the other. The pose is very considered, like that of a model, and with her hands clasped behind her back and her head tilted slightly to one side, the effect is of a very sober and thoughtful child - a child existing in an unchildlike shell, conforming to the communist vision of childhood where the child was simply a repository for a future member of the state-serving proletariat.

This clash between portraying the adult and child simultaneously in her pictures is another example of Lux’s effective exploitation of a view of childhood that oscillates between opposing views of childhood - that of the adult and that of the child (as remembered by Lux). However, this use of mixed messages to deliver sophisticated, though opposing, messages can be seen in the work of other photographers and artists, and so can the use of costume and clothing from an earlier age.

Before the advent of the Romantic Child, children were seen as mini-adults (Heywood, 2001). Before the mid 18th century, children were portrayed as adults in paintings and were dressed accordingly. In George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham and Lord Francis Villiers (figure 7), the young George and Francis are dressed as wealthy adults, their poses signifying young confidence and continuity of the power and wealth enjoyed by the family line (Higonnet, 1996 p. 17). The child is not distinguished from the adult world by dress.Instead, their clothing defines them as part of the adult world, albeit a marginalised part.

Figure 7: George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham and Lord Francis Villiers

Even with the advent of the Romantic Child, dress was still adult in nature. Lewis Cage, who was five years old when his portrait was painted, is wearing green trousers and a green waistcoat over a white shirt and white stockings (see figure 3). On his feet he wears elegant black buckled shoes. Cotes “borrows poses from Van Dyck” ( Postle, 2005 p.48) to give his child a heroic feel, but then contrasts this with the casual nature of his unbuttoned waistcoat and unrolled stockings. The boy’s dress is made to look natural and spontaneous in keeping with his interest in cricket and the healthy outdoors, but in all other ways the boy is dressed as an adult. His body is portrayed as that of an adult in pose - his left foot is held forward, almost resting on the ball, his right hand is holding the very long and very elegant cricket bat, while his left is firmly fixed to his hip as he looks intently into the distance - where the cricket ball would be coming from if it weren’t at his feet. No puppy fat adorns his youthful frame and his trousers and stockings cling to his muscular legs in a manner that hints at a strength and power beyond his five years. He is a boy who is poised for action, who is ready to take on the world and all its challenges, a point affirmed by the parts of his body that Cotes has emphasised in the picture - his feet legs, hips and hands, which almost seem to burst out of their dress such is the latent energy Cotes instils in the boy. The romantic boy is one who, in his free and natural state is given a superiority over the adult man (Heywood, 2001 p.24). He is innocent, with the emphasis on an innocence uncorrupted by “prejudices, authority... all the social institutions in which we find ourselves submerged,” at an age where “..everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author, everything degenerates in the hands of man” (Rousseau, 1993).

Reynolds portrays Offy, the great-niece who was his model for The Age of Innocence, differently (figure 2). While Lewis Cage is made muscular and heroic by Cotes’ pose, Offy, as Higonnet notes, is diminished (Higonnet, 1998). She has soft cheeks and chubby arms, pudgy fingers that rest on an equally podgy hand. She wears a flowing white dress that is loose and flowing. It drifts over her body passively, concealing her “adult erogenous zones” (Higonnet, 1998 p.15). Even her feet are a passive part of nature, “...as the picture insists by pointing her tiny toes right at us” (Higonnet, 1998 p.15).

The difference in dress is not due to age. Lewis Cage was 5 when he was painted by Cotes (Postle, 2005), Offy was almost 6 (Higonnet, 1998). However, from the way they are portrayed, Lewis could be anywhere up to 10 or 11 and Offy seems barely out of babyhood. One possibility is the difference in representations of girls compared to boys in portraiture. Boys were expected to become men faster, while girls remained girls - pure, innocent and malleable - for much longer (Higonnet, 1998). Here there is a different idea of innocence at work, one of sexual innocence.

In The Age of Innocence, sexual innocence is portrayed through the use of costume. In contrast to Lewis Cage, who is dressed much as an adult would be dressed, Offy is ‘dressed up’. She has been made a child, and her sexuality has been denied, by the use of costume. These are not clothes that an adult would wear, they have been created to foster the impression of innocence that Reynolds is so eager for his viewers to see. The use of costume developed hand in hand as the cult of the Romantic Child was transformed to that of the Innocent Child - a child who existed in a timeless state of innocence, a child “clothed in signs both of not being like an adult and not belonging to adult time” (Higonnet, 1998 p.49). The use of costume differentiated the world of the child from that of the adult. It also, as in the case of The Age of Innocence, differentiated the body of the child from that of the adult (Higonnet, 1997).

Once the child has been detached from the adult world, and their sexuality denied, then the wearing of adult clothes is no longer a mimicking of adulthood, a signifier of the world of which they are (because they will be) part as is the case with George Villiers. Instead the adult clothes become a costume (Higonnet, 1998 p.28). The clothes do not serve any function outside the realm of ‘dressing up’. This is not ‘dressing up’ where the child has control, but ‘dressing up’ which is performed by adults for the creation of a piece of art. The child becomes a clothes horse for the picture, the discrepancy between the adult nature of the clothing and the size or age of the child a humorous point for the adult viewer to wonder at. Higonnet uses the example of Reynolds’s portrait of Penelope Boothby (Higonnet, 1998 p. 28) to show how inappropriate costume on the child almost becomes something to mock, albeit in an endearing way.

Of course the child is not expected to be aware of this cute-making mockery (though Annette Kuhn’s painful memories of her childhood fancy dress outfits (Kuhn, 1995) shows children are both emotionally and socially aware of the costumes they are paraded in). They have been transformed, both by costume and by wider culture (Heywood, 2001), from the Rousseauesque Romantic Child, at one with nature and yet to be corrupted, into the Innocent Child - a child who, though yet to be corrupted, is defined by his/her unknowingness and abstraction from the temporal adult world. We can laugh at the child because they don’t know they are being laughed at. Where the Romantic Child is empowered by its childhood, the Innocent Child is disempowered by its childhood. They are incapable beings who, due to the virtual disability of their childhood, are subject to the control of adults. Making a subject childlike to disempower them has other precedents. Andy Grundberg mentions how National Geographic portrays non-Western peoples as ‘Childlike’ (Grundberg, 1990) while in Victorian times, French and British photographic records of colonised people’s often showed them as childlike and innocent (Parr and Badger, 2005 p.47), in the process justifying imperial rule as a benevolent and responsible form of subjugation.

This use of costume intensified the cultural shift towards the Innocent child. Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and the illustrations of Kate Greenaway all show the transition from the natural innocence of the Romantic Child to the timeless, and innate, innocence of the Innocent Child (Higonnet, 1998 p.49).

The idea of the Innocent child was pre-eminent in the Victorian era, especially in the work of Julia Margaret Cameron, Lady Clementina Hawarden and Charles Dodgson. Most interesting, and certainly most controversial is the work of Charles Dodgson. Dodgson’s best-known photograph is The Beggar Maid (see figure 8). It shows Alice Liddell, the Alice of Dodgson’s (aka Lewis Carroll) Alice in Wonderland books, leaning against a worn stone wall. She wears a dress of pale rags. Her left hand is on her hip, her right palm cupped open in front of her as though holding something. One shoulder is bare, and the sleeves of her dress hang loose over her arms while below her legs stand apart, one stretched forward the other supporting her against the wall as she looks just to one side of the viewer, her head tilted.

According to Higonnet, this is a picture that in its time was as innocent as an image like Millais’s Cherry Ripe - an image that, because it portrayed natural innocence, was naturally innocent itself (Higonnet, 1998). This view is also asserted by Morton Cohen who said Dodgson inherited a romantic view of childhood that “assumed the child came into this world innocent and pure” (Cohen, 1999). However, The Beggar Maid was made in a society that had “the Victorian fear of the animal in women,” (Mavor, 1996 p.18) where government legislated on child prostitution, sexually transmitted diseases and age of consent formed “some of the greatest debates over the female body” (Mavor, 1996 p.19). So although the idea of the sexually innocent child was prevalent at the time, this idea was accompanied by Christian ideas of the child necessarily corrupted by Original Sin. It should be remembered that many members of the Evangelical Movement, which came to prominence in the late 18th century, considered, “All Children are by nature evil” (Heywood, 2001 p.26).

As we have seen, the use of costume aided the transition to innocence. Yet just as costume could help desexualise childhood, as in the case of Reynolds’ Age of Innocence, so it could sexualise it, and also recontextualise it. This is what Dodgson did with his photography of children, and with The Beggar Maid in particular. The Beggar Maid shows Alice Liddell, a young middle-class girl, and (by virtue of Victorian ideas of age and class) a non-sexual being. “Immoral sexuality...” was “...always concerned with the lower classes” says Mavor(Mavor, 1996 p.38). If Alice is middle-class and therefore asexual, the only way to sexualise her is by changing her class or her age. So Dodgson

Figure 8: The Beggar Maid

sexualised her in a controlled way that creates a space of “difference” ((Mavor, 1996 p.39) for Dodgson to inhabit where sexuality is apparent in the visual world created by his photograph, but controlled by the reality of his subject’s age and class.

Not everybody believes Dodgson’s images portray sexuality. Morten Cohen, among others, denies there is anything sexual portrayed in Dodgson’s images (Cohen, 1999). Mavor believes this is due to that writer’s repression and reluctance to “acknowledge the sexuality of children...” and the taboos that accompany this acknowledgement (Mavor, 1996 p.11). Denial of child sexuality can be seen as another element in the disempowering of the child - something that is central to the idea of the Innocent Child.

So to label Dodgson and his photography “innocent and pure” is as “improbable and senseless” (if we accept Freud’s views that children have a sexuality that predates their adolescence) as saying child sexuality is something that suddenly pops out of nowhere at the age of 12 or 13 (Mavor, 1996 p.10).

This creation of a “zone of difference” was a device Dodgson repeated in his use of costume to orientalize, and so signify sexual availability in his picture of Xie Kitchin in Chinese dress (Cohen, 1996 p.66). Similarly Agnes Weld as Little Red Riding Hood (Cohen, 1999) uses costume to portray the young Agnes as the main character from a story that is implicitly about the dangers of burgeoning female sexuality. Most obvious of all is the use of ‘costume’ in his nude photograph of Evelyn Hatch where the orientalized ‘pig-girl’ (Mavor, 1996 p.12) is made both available (and unavailable) through her costume of odalisque, nudity and make up.

This dualism of the real and the unreal, the sexual and the non-sexual is something reinforced by the asymmetry and intentional flaws of the photograph - what Higonnet calls the “artlessness” of The Beggar Maid ( Higonnet, 1998 p.110). This artlessness undermines the work as a work of art, but at the same time reinforces it by emphasing just how natural, spontaneous and innocent the work is, as natural, spontaneous and innocent as the child it portrays.

Both the use of costume and a certain artlessness are mirrored in The Rose Garden. As mentioned in the introduction, unkempt hair, bruises and shadows under her eyes show that Emily, though young, is not flawless. Just as with Alice Liddell, there is an asymmetry to Emily’s pose and her proportions have a slightly skewed perspective. This is no accident. Loretta Lux is a perfectionist who spends months touching up and teasing her photographs over a period of months (Aletti, 2004). As with Dodgson, the effect is to emphasise the spontaneity and imperfection of the child. This, together with the low camera angle creates a world for the child to dominate and inhabit. Emily’s dress points to a culture-specific (that of East Germany in the 1970s) use of costume as well as referencing the use of dress to reflect historic conceptions of childhood from medieval times through to that of Germany’s Communist era.

Through the use of both landscape and costume, Lux refers both to adult worlds and a carefully manicured vision of childhood. The conflict between these two opposing worlds is what gives The Rose Garden its striking power. The question is how much, if any, input there is from Emily. Is The Rose Garden just a figment of Lux’s German imagination or does it represent something of the world as lived in by Emily? Is she a free and wild Romantic child as indicated by the landscape, or an Innocent, manipulated child whose self is denied, like Reynolds’ Offy, by Lux’s portrayal? Or perhaps she is something else, a Knowing Child whose world is recognized and described by Lux’s imagination and creative control.

The Lux Effect - Chapter 3: The Look of the Knowing Child

2009-04-28T10:33:00.001+01:00

Introduction: Real or Imaginary?

Chapter 1: The Landscape of the Romantic Child

Chapter 2: Clothing the Innocent Child

Chapter 3: The Look of the Knowing Child

Chapter 4: Constructed Childhoods

Conclusion: Real and Imaginary

In The Rose Garden, Lux controls landscape, costume and colour. As we have already seen, the picture references historical representations of childhood as well as referring to Communist ideas of childhood from her own upbringing in the former East Germany. So much has been put into the picture by Lux, it would seem there is little room left for the girl herself. However, despite all of Lux’s interventions, Emily still dominates the image, rising above the Romantic, the Innocent and the Communist Child to have integrity within herself.

So although Lux creates parallel worlds for the girl to inhabit, the girl inhabits a world that is not controlled by Lux. The power of the picture lies in the girl herself, and something she portrays. This ability to portray the child is connected to Lux’s working practice and also the idea of the Knowing Child, of which the girl in the Rose Garden is a prime example. To examine why she is a Knowing Child, it is necessary to look at the work of photographers who have broken with the idea of the Innocent Child to create a more sophisticated, child-centred vision of childhood.

Foremost among these photographers is Sally Mann. In The New Mothers (figure 9), Mann portrays her two daughters dressed up as new mothers. To the left of frame a doll sits in a pram, while mid-frame Jessie holds one of the pram’s handles. In the other hand she holds a candy cigarette. Virginia wears heart-shaped glasses and stands with one hand on her hips, the other clutching a baby. Both girls are barefoot, their bodies tilted slightly to the left. They wear creased summer dresses and stare in a desultory manner that confronts and accuses. They smoke, go barefoot and in true southern style appear to frankly not give a damn. If the pretence were continued we’d find they drink, do drugs and go on one-night stands with strangers they meet at roadhouse rib-nights. These new mothers are Bad Mothers.

Figure 9: The New Mothers

The New Mothers is a typical example of Sally Mann’s work. It is a picture which upsets “cherished conventions of idyllic childhood” (Higonnet, 1998 p.103) and is “not easy to look at”. Here, the costumes the children wear portray mothermood. Yet, unlike the portrait of George and Francis Villiers they do not show the adult mothers the girls will become, nor are they a costume of disguise as worn by Offy in The Age of Innocence. And though the picture may have been set up by Mann, it features clothes that were originally chosen by the girls. So when Higonnet writes that the picture shows Mann “ripping at old fantasies of a naturally ideal innocence” (Higonnet, 1998 p.204), it might be more accurate to say that the picture shows the girls ripping at those fantasies. Rather than showing Sally Mann’s view of motherhood, it shows us how Jessie and Virginia see motherhood - and carelessly-dressed, smoking mothers might not be ten-a-penny on Sally Mann’s country home, but in the wilder world of West Virginia, they certainly are.

So Virginia and Jessie stare out at us, their gazes manufactured both out of their games-playing and out of their quoted boredom at repeated posing for their mother’s picture taking (Woolcock, 1992). Virginia’s eyes look out at us, dark and with bags under them, the fatigue of childhood melding with that of her imagined white-trash motherhood. Their dress and pouts present a child’s eye view of the adult world and in so doing it also shows us the child’s world. Jessie and Virginia are mimicking what they have seen and bringing it into their children’s dressing-up game. There is no romantic oneness with nature in this image, no fabricated innocence or imaginary idylls.

Higonnet writes about the “primal origins” of motherhood and the violent emotions of caring, loving and always separating from a being that was once part of her (Higonnet, 1998). Similarly, Katherine Tanko writes of the emotional roller coaster of motherhood, the primitive urges of looking after a child whose emotional life reveals “her struggle with that violent and beautiful thing called the human condition” (Tanko, 2005). So just as motherhood is founded on dark and primal forces, so it is apparent in childhood, whether it be in the death, sex and violence preoccupations of Higonnet’s childhood (Higonnet, 1998 p.205) or the childhood fantasies of Sally Mann’s Immediate Family. In The New Mothers, we are presented with children who live in their own world - a child’s world where the dark shadows of sex, violence and death are ever-present in a form more primal and subsconscious than that experienced in the adult world. All Mann’s work does is show us the child’s world is as dark and complex as that of the adult.

The darkness and complexity of this world is not conveyed through the costume of Mann’s children, nor by anything mediated by Mann. Rather it is conveyed by the cold look of Virginia (Jessie is very much a follower in this picture). World-weary fatigue combines with a barely concealed exasperation to create an image of a child’s ennui with her photographer mother. Mann may have directed much of this picture, but this gaze belongs to Virginia alone. Mann’s repeated retaking of pictures was a tiresome procedure for her children ( Woolcock, 1992), but it was a retaking that had a purpose. By taking the same picture again and again, it created a gap for the children to inhabit - a gap where the children are not acting but instead are expressing themselves. Their emotions may be negative - those of impatience, irritation, ennui and even callousness and contempt, but those are emotions that children experience more deeply and widely than adults. So Mann replaces the inauthenticity of the staged photograph with the reality of childhoods that are replete with the emotions of the non-innocent. The New Mothers rips at two fantasies and that is what makes it so difficult for some people to look at. It rips at the idea of the selfless mother figure as well as that of the Innocent Child. Just as mothers are portrayed taking forbidden pleasures, so children are portrayed having forbidden knowledge. The Innocent Child has become The Knowing Child. As Higonnet says, “These Knowing Children have bodies and passions of their own. They are also often aware of adult bodies and passions, whether as mimics or only witnesses” (Higonnet, 1998 p.207).

Rineke Dijkstra employs a different strategy to reveal the subjects of her Beach Portraits. In her Hilton Head Portrait, she portrays the girl in the apricot bikini standing alone against the bleak background described in Chapter One. The landscape is stripped and the girl is stripped “as a means of identification” (Grundberg, 1997). Dijkstra “wants to awaken definite sympathies for the person I have photographed” (Grundberg, 1997). She does this by creating a vacuum for the person to fill. “Her camera is not an instrument of intrusion”, says Grundberg (Grundberg, 1997). However, it is an instrument of expectation. Having a camera pointed at you brings expectations of how to behave. Should one smile, be serious or aloof? Even once it has been established that the photographer does not expect something of the subject, there is still a tendency for the subject to act, to conceal herself/himself in some way. The girl in the apricot bikini could conceal herself by goofing around or acting like the glamorous adult she will become (and she has made herself up as an adult), but she does not. With Dijkstra’s passive but all-seeing lens directed at her, the girl in the apricot bikini knows something is expected of her but (under Dijkstra’s neutral direction) she is confused and unsure of what she is expected to do or who she is expected to be.

Unlike the majority of Dijkstra’s Beach Portraits subjects, the girl asked to be photographed. However, as it was getting dark, Dijkstra asked her to return the next day. In Dijkstra’s Beach Portraits monologue, Carol Ehlers says, “The girl returned, wearing make-up and jewellery, probably expecting to be directed as in a fashion shoot” (Dijkstra, 2003). The girl in the apricot bikini wants to please but she is unsure about what to do. She is stuck between two of Barthes four image-repertoires (Barthes, 1993 p.13) as she oscillates between the self she thinks she is and the self she wants others to think she is. The fashion shoot illusions have evaporated and “she looks frightened and a bit confused” (Dijkstra, 2003). The conflict between expectation and uncertainty reflects the uncertainty of her adolescence and the necessity to please that is such a mark of contemporary American womanhood (Faludi, S. 1991). There is a gap between expectation and action, and in this gap the doubt and uncertainty of the girl’s life crystallize before her and she reveals herself by gazing through the camera with a look that reveals a confused and anxious self-awareness. Despite the jewellery and make-up, she does not pretend to be somebody else, or adopt a persona determined by social expectation. Instead, she incidentally pleases the photographer by breaking through Barthes image-repertoires and being herself - an adolescent girl riddled with all the neurosis and anxiety American Culture can throw at her. This revelation of self is what is expected of her, though of course for Dijkstra to get her subjects to reveal themselves she cannot say this explicitly. And because Dijkstra does not know the girl intimately, she does not know the self that is to be revealed. Dijkstra only knows what she wants the girl to do when the girl does it. Such is the double-think of photography. Like Virginia, the girl in the apricot bikini is a Knowing Child. Her look acknowledges what the future holds and, as with Jessie, this future has bleak and tawdry elements.

The strategies employed by both Mann and Dijkstra are very similar. Their photographs are extremely controlled in terms of lighting, composition, landscape and costume. However, there is the element of the unexpected, that human element that is left to chance. Garry Winogrand said, “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed” (Dyer, 2006 p.199) and both Mann and Dijkstra could say the same thing. They photograph people to see what they look like photographed.

In the same way, Lux creates a vacuum for her children to fill. The way she does this is almost incidental, a direct result of her working practice. Her photographic sessions take place in a simple studio or outdoors, with a basic lighting set up that uses two softboxes and flash. She breaks her shooting schedule into two sessions - one that concentrates on the face, the other that concentrates on posture and pose (Pantall, 2005). In each of these sessions the child is subjected to a relentless barrage of snapping as Lux moves around her subjects. She is warm and friendly with the children but very much focussed on the job at hand. These sessions, with breaks for snacks, lunch or dinner, may last as long as 5 hours (Pantall, 2005), during which time any distraction for the child comes from their parent or guardian. In such circumstances, children inevitably get bored and distracted. Their minds wander, their imaginations take hold and they are transported into another world, a world that is reflected through their gaze.

In The Rose Garden, this gaze can run off beyond the camera, suggesting something “dreamy” and “vacant” or “determined” and “forward-looking” (Lutz, C. and Collins, J. 1991). It is the gaze that Bryson describes as “prolonged and contemplative, yet regarding the field of vision with a certain aloofness and disengagement” (Bryson, N. 1983).

This use of the gaze is what provides Lux’s images with their power. It gives us entry into the child’s world by showing us something that lies outside the control of the photographer. It is interesting to contrast this use of the gaze with images that deliberately disallow the gaze of the child.

Documentary photography and photojournalism are two areas where children have been denied by removing their gaze. Children started to be shown as part of a harsher world than that portrayed by Dodgson and Cameron in the late 19th century. Jacob Riis photographed the horrendous living conditions experienced by immigrant communities in New York’s Lower East Side. In How the Other Half Lives, (Riis, 1890) Riis constructed images to have the greatest impact possible on his middle class audience by using the ideals of the Victorian Innocent Child as a foil against which his used children, or ‘Street Arabs’ as he called them, would underline the deprivation he witnessed.

In Street Arabs in Sleeping Quarters (Figure 10), we see a cluster of 3 small children huddled over a grate. They appear to be homeless, but whether this is the case we don’t know - Riis would pay children to enact scenes of crime and deprivation for him and these children are, though probably homeless, almost certainly pretending to be sleeping for the camera.

The children lie stretched out on their grate, one in the corner, his right hand resting uncomfortably on his right ankle, another snuggled into his shoulder and the third crunched up against a wall, his profile in the camera’s view. These children sit in uncomfortable poses. Their clothes are grubby and ill-fitting, their ‘home’ cold and unforgiving, and the overall sentiment is that of the feral. But of the children themselves, we know nothing. Although it is daytime, their eyes (probably under Riis’s instructions) are shut. Their gaze has been rendered void by Riis’ posing and we can only catch an idea of the world they live in through that which Riis allows us to see. Everything is in his control. We know nothing about the children because Riis shows us nothing (outside his agenda of using photography as a tool of social control).

Figure 10: Street Arabs in Sleeping Quarters

This use of control was entirely in keeping with Riis’s aim, which was to make hard-hitting photographs that would horrify his privileged viewers. Riis’s message was that poverty must be eradicated, not for the sake of the poor, but for the preservation of order in society. Abigail Solomon-Godeau points out Riis’s photography was “...part of the larger enterprise of surveillance, containment and social control, and the imperatives of ‘Americanisation’” (Solomon-Godeau, 1991 p.171).

The denial of the inner world of these children helped to simultaneously present and undermine preconceived ideas of childhood. In Riis’s photographs, poverty was not just an economic fall, but a moral one too. The children were essentially innocent, but corrupted by their poverty. Riis implies that, in the right class and with the right upbringing, those children would thrive in a state of clean and wholesome innocence. The children’s fall, like the poverty in which they lived, was the fault of the (immigrant) communities which Riis photographed. In Riis’s work, children exist in a state of denied innocence and this innocence is the constant referent which gives his images of children their particular power, yet which also renders those same children absolutely impotent by denying them their own consciousness, gaze and psychological space. If Lux and Mann show examples of the Knowing Child, The Street Arabs are examples of a new category, the Unknowing Child.

Another example in which the denied, Unknowing Child features heavily is Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, which was made under the auspices of The Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographic project. The FSA was set up to move poor farmers into more profitable areas of work and under the leadership of Roy Stryker, the photographic division was devised “...to gather photographic evidence of the agency’s good works and transmit these images to the press” (Marien, 2002, p. 282).

“When Dorothea took that picture, that was the ultimate,” Roy Stryker, the head of the photo section of the FSA said in 1972 of Migrant Mother. “To me, it was the picture of the FSA... You can see anything you want in her. She is immortal.” (Stryker and Wood, 1973).

Lange’s Migrant Mother (Figure 11) is defined both by her children and the title of the photograph. Two of her children crouch around her, their faces concealed by their hands, while in her lap lies her sleeping baby. She is weighed down by her children, by her failure to provide for them, to care for them and to protect them from the rigours of depression-era America. Florence Thompson, the Migrant Mother, may be poor and Cherokee, but really she is just a mother - a mother without a name whose photographic identity is determined by her children.

Yet while the children determine her identity as a mother, they have none themselves. The baby aside, we do not see their faces. Instead they are turned away. In the picture we are given to believe it is because of their poverty and the subsequent suffering it causes their mother, but rather it is because Lange posed the photo that way. The child’s suffering is used, in effect, to provoke sympathy

Figure 11: Migrant Mother

for the mother, but the children do not have their own identity - even their experience of their situation is given to us through the mother - whose own identity is only resolved through her children (including the absence of one older child who was not included in the picture). And because she is a mother who is defined by children who have no identity, she in effect loses all her identity outside the socially accepted ideas of what it is to be a mother. You can, as Stryker says, see anything you want in her because almost nothing is shown of her. Migrant Mother is a photographic hall of mirrors in which the identity of the mother is determined by the children and vice versa. You cannot look at one, without looking at the other.
In 1972, Florence Thompson, said, “That’s my picture hanging all over the world, and I can’t get a penny out of it.” (Rosler, 1981). The problem is it’s not really her picture at all - it’s Dorothea Lange’s vision of a generically impoverished migrant mother, a constructed image that denies both childhood and adulthood through the absence of gaze.

The portraits of Florence Holder that were produced for Dr Barnado’s are an example in which childhood is exploited for philanthropic gain. Here the child is not denied through absence of gaze, but denied through a redefinition of their childhood. In the picture of the girls taken when they were put into Barnado’s care by their mother, Florence is shown with her sister Eliza (figure 12). Her arm is protectively placed over Eliza’s shoulder and her expression is one of a caring fortitude. Her hair is combed, her dress, though dirty, is straight and she is

Figure 12

Figure 13

wearing a pair of boots. She is “poorly, but decently clad” (Mavor, 1996 p.39). However, the picture ‘artistically’ used to illustrate Florence before (figure 13) she came into Barnado’s care portrays her with unkempt hair, a rumpled dress and without boots. She has a distressed expression and is holding a newspaper as though she had been selling newpapers on the street. What Barnado called “artistic fiction” (Mavor, 1996 p.38) has been used to make images designed to elicit pity. In this picture, the posing has made Florence Holder betray herself and, through the absence of her mother and sister and the fabricated implications of maternal neglect, her emotional, social and family life. Florence Holder is clearly unhappy in the artistic fiction. This is good for Barnado - after all, she is supposed to be the unhappy, Unknowing Child that only Barnado’s can save. However, this unhappiness might also be an unconstructed response of Florence to the inauthenticity of the photograph and the message it seeks to convey. In that case, Florence has inadvertently transcended the Unknowing Child Barnado has sought to create. The reality of Barnado’s photographic practice has slipped through the gaps and transformed the Unknowing Florence Holder into a child who knows exactly what is happening.

The examples of the work of Riis, Lange and Barnado show how constructed photography can present children as Unknowing. The following chapter will examine other constructed images of childhood and question whether authenticity can occur in such constructed images and, if a picture is to be considered an authentic representation of childhood, what makes that representation authentic.

The Lux Effect - Chapter 4: Constructed Childhoods.

2009-04-28T10:31:00.002+01:00

Introduction: Real or Imaginary?

Chapter 1: The Landscape of the Romantic Child

Chapter 2: Clothing the Innocent Child

Chapter 3: The Look of the Knowing Child

Chapter 4: Constructed Childhoods

Conclusion: Real and Imaginary

Lux’s photography is manipulated work that creates an image out of disparate elements. This chapter will examine photographic manipulations through a range of constructed images from Victorian times to the present. It will also look at the differences between adult preconceptions of childhood portrayed in the photograph and images that reflect the child’s world without seeking recourse to adult views of what childhood is. This point will be reinforced by briefly examining the question of the way children’s sexuality can be portrayed in the photograph from a child’s point of view or from a perspective imposed by the adult. Ploughing down a well worn, and almost barren furrow, it will also look at the idea of truth and authenticity in manipulated photography through some of the artists mentioned above and place Lux’s photography in relation to this work.

In the previous chapter, we saw how the use of gaze created the Knowing Child. Higonnet ties this idea of the Knowing Child to sexuality, referring especially to Sally Mann’s Immediate Family work to show how Mann turns her maternity into a broad-based vehicle of desire to “flaunt” the physical beauty of her children, her status as a mother and her creative power as an artist (Higonnet, 1998). This merges the personal and the professional in a way that has caused controversy and raised the question of whether Mann exploited her children for personal profit (Higonnet, 1998 p.196). It also raises the question of whether Mann’s type of constructed image does provide an authentic vision of childhood or merely presents an adult preconception of that childhood.

Much of the controversy raised by Mann’s work relies on the intimacy of her photographs, an intimacy that is based on her being the mother of Virginia, Jessie and Emmett. As Higonnet notes, this is what shocked people. Mann stepped outside the accepted bounds of motherhood by involving her children in a creative, artistic and (whisper it quietly) commercial enterprise. She stepped outside the caring mother role to photograph her children - and her children, wanting to please their mother, obliged her by posing. Mann combined two roles in a synthesis where the photographer was the mother and the mother was the photographer. As Fletcher points out, for some critics this combining of roles compromised their idealised view of a single-visioned motherhood (Fletcher, 1998). Just as the idealised mother shouldn’t drink, smoke, swear, have sex or bear occasional feelings of ill-will towards their offspring, so they shouldn’t photograph in the commercial manner that Mann did. Of course, the bounds of this idealised motherhood are as limiting as the bounds of the innocent child - both are synthetic concepts that have a barely concealed subtext of disempowerment and subjugation. So Mann is a transgressor both for having a professional non-maternal life and for portraying her children outside the realms of accepted innocence (Fletcher, 1998).

However, Mann’s images of her children are intensely physical and open to different readings. Higonnet writes about how Mann’s Last Light can be read as a Madonna and Child Image, a throttling image or a sickness or tattoo image (Higonnet, 1998). Fletcher also points out this ambiguity. In works like Virginia in the Sun and Wet Bed, although “...you know her children must be alive...” there is also a feeling that they could be dead (Fletcher, 2006).

Higonnet says Mann’s images are “erotically beautiful”. She also says that anybody who already sees children as creatures for their sexual gratification will see Mann’s work as pictures that will satisfy their carnal desires, though this was not Mann’s intention. In other words, one can see Mann’s work as art or one can see it as pornography depending on one’s particular predilections and hang-ups. This point indicates a gap between intention and affect - a gap that finds an echo in different interpretations of child sexuality and also different interpretations of what it is to be a child.

Mann’s work conveys “two conflicting messages: childhood innocence and adult sexuality” (Higonnet, p.195). However, these are concepts that are imposed on the child by the adult world. As we have seen in previous chapters, the Innocent Child is a construct created in the 19th century that still has an effect on how we see children today. Certainly Mann refers to and exploits that idealised innocence but at the same time she undermines it. Her children are Knowing Children that have a world view and inner life of their own.

And though we can impose adult sexuality on these children and so read Mann’s photographs in particular ways, this is not what Mann intended. In Vile Bodies, Mann says that child sexuality is an “oxymoron” (Woolcock, 1992). Here Mann has a self-defined view of what constitutes child sexuality. This makes sense if we think of this “child sexuality” as an adult concept imposed from an adult world where links between sex, religion, art theory, psychoanalytic theory and paedophilia predominate, where sexuality, as Goldstein notes (Goldstein, 1998), is seen in the coital sense. In this case, “child sexuality” is an oxymoron in the sense that this view of sexuality is something imposed on the child. However, if we see child sexuality as something that refers to the unconscious physicality of the child and the way they interact with themselves, others and the world around them, then it is not an oxymoron, but is a way of understanding childhood that allows the child to inhabit a world that is of their own making. This is what Mann does. Her pictures do portray child sexuality, but it is a sexuality of their own making, a sexuality that, viewed from an adult perspective, combines the Romantic Child, the Knowing Child and the Innocent Child (Fletcher, 1998). This sexuality is created by the gaps Mann allows for her children in her constructions. And it is these gaps of gaze, pose and being that make her photographs authentic records of what it is to be a child.

A contrasting view of childhood sexuality is provided by Lewis Cage. Here sexuality is imposed on the young cricketer, albeit through symbols rather than gaze and pose. The oversized bat the boy holds is a phallic symbol of the sexualised adulthood he will enter - adult sexuality was overwhelmingly a male sexuality - while the labial folds on his breeches indicate his feminine side and a childhood innocence - childhood innocence was a predominantly female trait - of which he is still part. The sexual symbolism of the ball at the opening of the wickets also affirm this dual sexual identity. Male and female, adult and child, the five-year-old Lewis Cage exists in several different worlds simultaneously. The right leg exposed by what seems to be an intentionally undone stocking, the undone flap on his breeches also suggest an available sexuality, that someone has been rummaging around where they shouldn’t. And by the grip he has on his cricket bat, the positioning of his left hand on his stomach, and his knowing smile suggest that someone could be Lewis Cage himself. Perhaps the landscape he is romantically part of includes his own body. This use of symbols serves to emphasise that Cage is separated from the adult world but also part of it. The Romantic Child has become a Knowing Child but, inasmuch as the symbols used by Cotes are those of childhood, this is a sexuality that is imposed sympathetically and in parentheses to the child himself. This is a sexuality that is constructed but, because the symbols of that sexuality are portrayed outside Lewis Cotes, is almost not part of the child himself.

In contrast to this sympathetically projected view of childhood is John Everett Millais’s portrait of young girlhood, Cherry Ripe (figure 14). In this picture the girl is caught “before the contamination of adolescence” (Mavor, 1996 p.14) in a way that she reads as “sexualised but not sexual” ( Mavor, 1996 p.42). The girl is dressed in a costume of an oversized bonnet and a white dress with a pink sash and matching pink slippers. The costume covers her body and is something the girl has been passively dressed in. As was noted in the chapter on the Innocent Child, this has the effect of making the girl a ‘child’ to be seen by adults. The dressing up of the girl has transformed the girl into someone subjugated by the adult world. She has become the classic Victorian Innocent Child, a being who has neither a self nor a sexuality that comes from within.

However, Cherry Ripe is intensely sexual in a way that imposes sexuality on the girl from obvious adult perspectives. The title is a sexual invitation (by the artist, not the girl) for a start. The girl is likened to a cherry, ripe for picking - just like the plucked cherries in the basket by her side. The oversized head with its doe-like eyes, pouting lips and red cheeks looks out at us like a child’s doll.

Figure 14: Cherry Ripe

Beneath the voluminous dress, her legs are open slightly and her hands are held together to form an open vulva shape, with a clitoral thumb at the top. Her hands are wearing black gloves which seem tied, bondage-like, across the palm.
(Higonnet, 1998 p.132). Cherry Ripe then is a picture made by adults for other adults. It portrays concepts of both innocence and sexuality, but these are concepts applied from above, from an adult perspective. Of the Knowing Child portrayed by Mann and others, there is almost nothing.

Apparently the picture is an adult view of childhood, a view that combines the saccharine and the sexual in equal parts. It proposes innocence and then undermines it in a way that would have been entirely understandable in Victorian Britain (Mavor, 1996) where mixed messages and the saying of one thing and doing another were second nature. The cliche of Victorian hypocrisy did not arise out of a vacuum.

Cherry Ripe’s popularity - it sold over 600,000 copies as a magazine centrefold
(Higonnet, 1998 p.51) - is based on the picture’s mix of the sexual and the innocent. Though there is nothing of the Knowing Child about the girl, the sexuality that is imposed on her is one that is not merely subjugated. Her smile, her lips, her cheeks and her open-handed gesture also attribute a receptive pleasure to her sexuality. So, perhaps Millais was acknowledging an essential element of his the girl’s life that goes beyond the accepted the norms of the time and indeed predated Freudian theories of infant sexuality by many years. Like Mavor, he was blasphemous and acknowledged “the sexuality of children and of the Victorian child at that” (Mavor, 1996, p.11).

Garry Gross’s image of Brooke Shields, Sugar and Spice, imposes sexuality on

Figure 15: By Richard Prince, A Photograph of Brooke Shields by Garry Gross

its subject in a much more exploitative manner. After the picture was taken, the
image was appropriated by Richard Prince who exhibited it as By Richard Prince, A Photograph of Brooke Shields by Garry Gross (figure 15). Prince was taken by the layers of meaning in the photograph and also the court case over ownership of the image between Gross and Brooke Shields’ mother. “Terrie, Brooke Shields' mother recognizes what this picture could possibly suggest, (not about Brooke, but about her). In a word: "pimp". When the picture was taken, Brooke was ten years old but Gary Gross made her head up to look like an older woman. Then he went to the trouble of oiling her body to heighten and refract the presence of her "he-she" adolescence. Now we've got a body with two different sexes, maybe more, and a head that looks like it's got a different birthday” ( Prince, 2005).

This imposition of sexuality on Brooke Shields through make-up, oil and lighting is of a completely different nature to that found in Cherry Ripe. It is an exploitative image that sells Shields, or the image of Shields, as a sexual being (though Shields insists she never felt exploited in her early portrayals as a sex symbol (Higonnet, 1998 p.151)). No gap is left for Shields to fill as herself. Instead, as Prince suggests, she has been “pimped” by both her mother and the photographer, as a sexual fantasy figure whose identity has been defined by the crude sexualising symbols of oil and make-up. And while Prince sees her being sold as a two-sexed being, she is actually being sold as a two-aged being - a girl and a woman, both of whom are sexually available (for a price), both of whom have a sexuality that is directed outwards towards the satisfaction of the viewer with no reference to the child’s world or the inner life of Brooke Shields herself.
“Brooke is both her and it at the same time... . And as an it, is in a sense the subject of an impersonal verb that expresses a condition without referring to an agent. The condition that's expressed is an objective resemblance of Brooke that could never be guaranteed in daily life. This is what photographs can do... I felt I was in partnership which the picture.There didn't seem to be any interruption between what was imagined by the picture and what was imagined by me...” (Prince, 2005).

The welding of adult sexuality onto a child’s body, together with the transformation of Shields into a pimped ‘it’, makes Sugar and Spice paedophilic in nature. Another photographer often accused of producing paedophilic images is Charles Dodgson. However, Dodgson’s images do not produce the externally sexualised ‘it’ that Gross’s glamour photography makes, but instead relies on the personality of his young girl subjects themselves.

Dodgson’s most famous photographer is probably his portrait of Alice Liddell (the Alice of Alice in Wonderland) as The Beggar Maid (figure 9). With its connotative title, The Beggar Maid operates in a similar way to Cherry Ripe. Dodgson portrays different visions of childhood and complicates the mix with the title of the photography and his own attitudes to children and social class. The title in itself refers to the myth of Cophetua, a king who only found love when a bare-footed beggar maid came into his court. The Beggar Maid captured the imaginations of Victorian Britain and “reflected a common subject among the Pre-Raphaelite artists and photographers of the time” (Alexander J.,2004). Edward Burne Jones painted it, Julia Margaret Cameron photographed it and Alfred, Lord Tennyson (who describes Dodgson’s picture as “the most beautiful picture ever” (Higonnet, 1998 p.125)) wrote about it in his poem, The Beggar Maid?( Tennyson, 1833).

Her arms across her breast she laid;
She was more fair than words can say:
Bare-footed came the beggar maid
Before the king Cophetua.
In robe and crown the king stept down,
To meet and greet her on her way;
'It is no wonder,' said the lords,
'She is more beautiful than day.'

As shines the moon in clouded skies,
She in her poor attire was seen:
One praised her ankles, one her eyes,
One her dark hair and lovesome mien.
So sweet a face, such angel grace,
In all that land had never been:
Cophetua sware a royal oath:
'This beggar maid shall be my queen!' (Tennyson, 1833)

The poem reinforces the idea of Alice Liddell, the girl who ‘plays’ the Beggar Maid being rendered sexually available through a transformation of her class. It is an idea that can be summed up in the Graham Greene’s idea of The Cophetua Complex (Greene, 2004) - a desire for lower-class women. So Alice is transformed both by her dress, as described in chapter 2, and by reference to the myth of Cophetua, with Dodgson in the role of King Cophetua. Just as in Cherry Ripe, The Beggar Maid has been sexualised by external factors. However, in contrast to Cherry Ripe, these external factors are not transparent symbols of childhood sexuality but personal and cultural references that place Alice Liddell in the space of “difference” that Carol Mavor refers to. This space situates Alice in an imagined world that sits between three opposing poles - the adult/child, the lower class/upper class and the sexual/non-sexual.

The Beggar Maid is constructed, but the question is “Are we seeing the real Alice Liddell, Alice Liddell as Dodgson wanted to project her, or Alice Liddell as she wished to project herself - to us or to the photographer?” (Alexander,2004). The answer is we probably see all three. Alexander notes that Dodgson was adept at capturing his subjects as “a living sentient being, warm, whole, feeling, at one within her own person - far from the wooden figures of “pre-adults found in artistic portraits of the time” (Alexander, 2004). So though we do see the Alice that Dodgson wants to project, we also see an Alice that is at one with herself. Dodgson might be directing us to look at certain elements within the picture through the narratives imbued by costume and the photograph’s title, but at the same time, he is not in total control. Dodgson recognises the power of the young girl and allows her an autonomy to express herself in the photograph. The girl looks out at Dodgson (and us) with a mischievous look that assesses, challenges and plays with our conceptions of what it is to be a child. Dodgson has, like Mann or Dijkstra, created a gap in which Alice Liddell can be herself, the constructed nature of the work notwithstanding. This is a gap that was deliberately created in Dodgson’s working practice where he would chat, play, and tell stories to his young models (Cohen, 1999). As a result he created an atmosphere where the child could be herself. This portrayal of the young girl does not involve an adult imposition of innocence on the child, nor inflicts an adult preconception of what it is to be a child. Rather Alice emanates an idea of what it is to be a child - an idea that is in

Figure 16: Reverend Thomas Childe Barker and his daughter, May

conflict with many of the Victorian assumptions of what middle-class childhood should be - intelligent, perceptive, socially and physically self-aware. Dodgson’s unorthodox vision of childhood can also be seen in other photographs. In Dodgson’s portraits of Reverend Thomas Childe Barker and his daughter, May (figure 16), the traditional Victorian father sits on a bench and is dominated by his young daughter who looks down on him from above. The girl is the master in this image and her father the helpless servant. The patriarchal order of Victorian Britain has been overturned by Dodgson in much the same way that the Innocent Child is undermined in The Beggar Maid, both by Dodgson and by Alice herself.

If Dodgson allows his subjects into his photographs, Wendy Ewald actively encourages children to reveal themself through photography. While working on her first extended project in the Appalachian Mountains, she decided “to make a document of my new community, but the camera seemed to get in the way” (Ewald, 2000 p.7). Weinberg notes that Ewald believed “she might better manage her project by removing herself as the exclusive author and providing her students with tools and skills to document their own lives” (Ewald, 2000 p.7). The purpose of this was not just to provide children with the ability to shoot, develop and print film but also to challenge the divisions between “art and documentary photography, between photographer and subject, child and adult” (Ewald, 2000 p.8).

Ewald began this process when she gave cameras to children in isolated communities in North America and taught them to capture the harsh realities of their daily lives from their own perspective. However, in her challenge to the “hierarchical and exclusively adult vision of our common humanity” (Ewald, 2000 p.17) Ewald had to learn what the children were seeing and so reinterprate her own vision of the child’s world from their perspective.

In Allen Shepherd’s I dreamt I killed my best friend, Ricky Dixon (figure 17) we see Ricky Dixon lying dead in the forked trunk of a tree. His arms are
outstretched, his mouth open wide and his eyes closed. The photograph is a visualisation of Shepherd’s dream and an example of how Ewald brings children’s unconscious into photography through use of dreams and fantasies and also root that unconscious in the reality of the social, psychological and cultural environments they inhabit. Allen Shepherd’s image emerges from a fight (and a subsequent dream) he had with Ricky Dixon, while race, religion, family and death are themes that recur in Ewald’s projects across the world.

Figure 17: I dreamt I killed my best friend, Ricky Dixon

As Weinberg says, the “sometimes menacing images produced by Ewald and her students” (Ewald, 2000 p.7) show us that we can’t assume there are experiences children do not know about. By showing us the extent of children’s understanding and their unconscious world, Weinberg believes Ewald is set apart from other photographers, like Hine, Mann and Levitt, who show images of children directed at grown-up sensibilities.

However, though some of Mann’s work is directed at adult sensibilities
- Popsicle Drips with its referencing of Edward Weston’s Neil compositions is a good example (Higonnet, 1998 p.136) - it also reveals children’s sensibilities. An image like New Mothers emerges out of her children’s games and is reflective of the sensibilites that played those games. Ewald projects adult concepts of what is important onto her children and encourages children “to explore their dreams and fantasies as well as the day-to-dayness of their sometimes troubled existence” (Ewald, 2000 p.8) She places a value on the unconscious which directs an adult sensibility onto the children she works with. Similarly, when the children produce work, she also has to teach them that their roughly made pictures are good (Ewald, 2000 p.37), and possibly also that black and white polaroids are good. Ewald doesn’t construct the pictures themselves, but she does construct a framework of values that direct children’s work towards adult sensibilities in both the content and form of the images produced. Within this framework, she leaves space for the children to project their world-view onto the pictures. Though the pictures have been shaped by Ewald in some ways, Ewald’s own vision of childhood has been shaped by the children she has worked with (Ewald, 2000 p.8). So though there is an adult perspective involved, the pictures Ewald’s children produce show us authentic perspectives that portray childhoods which are rooted in the complex environments they inhabit. The children do not show themselves as Romantic, Innocent or Knowing but rather as individuals existing in worlds where the worlds of the child and the adult interact and overlap. Ewald breaks down the boundaries between adult and child to reveal childhood as part of a process where all adults were once children and all children ( if death, a common theme in Ewald’s work, does not interrupt) will become adults. Children are, as in the pre-romantic era, mini-adults, but adults are also maxi-children.

Where does Emily of The Rose Garden stand in relation to these conflicting views of childhood? The construction of Loretta Lux does bring in the child’s perspective of childhood, but it is very different to that allowed by Ewald, Dodgson or Mann. At the same time, however, it also shares some common themes. Where Ewald frames her children’s pictures through ideas (the idea of the unconscious, the religious and the dreamworld) that she accentuates through her workshops, Lux visually creates that framework through her digital imposition of psychologically loaded landscapes onto her pictures. Ewald gives her children the freedom to choose their landscape, Lux projects it onto her children. However, this projection of landscape onto the child is not something arbitrary, nor is it something pre-determined. The landscape is chosen in response to the child and the pose and gaze they come up with in their studio session.

The pose the child comes up with is something that is to a large extent determined by Lux. She tries to direct the children into particular poses that she can use later with separate looks. However, the gaze of the child is largely undetermined by Lux. Instead the child, though directed where to look or how wide to open her/his eyes, is not told how to look. The look, as was noted in the previous chapter, emerges as the session progresses and the child draws into himself/herself through boredom or bafflement. The look is one that reflects the internal world of the child - because that is the space that Lux photographs. By not engaging with Emily, Lux reveals aspects of Emily in exactly the same way that Dodgson reveals aspects of Alice Liddell by engaging with her. Lux photographs a child turned in on herself, Dodgson photographs Alice turned out on the world (with Dodgson acting as a medium through which Alice can project herself).

As Jane Fletcher points out, many writers and critics have compared Lux’s work to that of Dodgson (Fletcher, 2006), though Fletcher herself believes Lux’s photographs are “more pertinent to the original illustrations of ‘Alice’ by John Tenniel...” where Alice’s features are stretched and shrunk (Fletcher, 2006 p.4) in a similar way to the alterations Lux makes to the dimensions of her subjects through digital manipulation. “Boy or girl, the head is too big for the body, the eyes are too big for the face” (Fletcher 2006 p.4). However, in The Rose Garden (and other Lux images ) though the head is too big for the body - it has been pasted in from a separate image after all - the eyes are not too big for the body. Photographed at a wider angle than the body, the eyes do seem to stick out, giving rise to the widespread characterisation of Lux’s work as “bug-eyed children” (Pantall, 2006), but this is possibly due to the tricks of perspective made by having a larger head shot on a wider angle than the body and background - a trick of perspective that helps create the “grim and ambiguous” feeling of the German world of fairy tales (Fletcher, 2006 p.4).

Instead of merely creating bug-eyed children, Lux photographs a space that, through the child’s eyes, draws us into the child’s world. Lux then uses either a previously prepared background, or creates a new one, for the child to inhabit (Fletcher, 2006 p.4). This background/landscape then brings out certain elements of the child and their childhood as revealed by the child/imagined by the viewer in their gaze. Of course Lux determines what we see and where we look and, with her background in art, she exploits the art historical to reference concepts of childhood that include the child as a mini-adult, the Innocent Child and the Knowing Child.

Sexual meaning may be added to the picture either deliberately or unconsciously. As we have seen, in the Rose Garden, the fecundity of the garden, the creeping nature of the rose tendrils and the open doorways of the walled space reference the girl’s burgeoning and barely concealed sexuality. However, this sexuality is something that lies external to Emily. Her sexuality is externalised in the same way in which Lewis Cage’s is externalised, although the symbolism of the Young Cricketer is more transparent.

Though the look is very different, Lux’s work is close to Mann’s in terms of working practice. Where Mann responds to her children’s games and movement around her West Virginia farm (Woolcock, 1992) and builds an image around those by restaging the game or activity, Lux responds to her children’s gazes and poses and builds a framework of meaning around those. Both use control in their image but provide a space for their children to inhabit, and for both of these photographers that space is provided by ennui at the photographic process. The nature of this ennui is different for due to the different relationships Mann and Lux have with their subjects. The ennui of Mann’s children is more intimate and has an ease of movement and expression about it that engages the children with the world around them and the games and activities they are supposed to be playing. The ennui of Lux’s children is less familiar and with the sparseness of the surroundings they are photographed in and the lack of a relationship with Lux herself, the space the children move into is an internal one.

The Lux Effect - Conclusion: Real and Imaginary

2009-04-28T10:29:00.001+01:00

Introduction: Real or Imaginary?

Chapter 1: The Landscape of the Romantic Child

Chapter 2: Clothing the Innocent Child

Chapter 3: The Look of the Knowing Child

Chapter 4: Constructed Childhoods

Conclusion: Real and Imaginary

The Rose Garden is a constructed picture that is composed of several different elements. Landscape, dress, the look and pose all contribute to the power of the image, and these elements reinforce each other through their digitally manipulated juxtaposition.

Lux’s use of landscape references Romantic visions of childhood where the child is portrayed as a privileged part of nature. At the same time, her use of landscape sexualises Emily and draws a distinction between the world of the child and that of the adult. Emily’s costume references the Innocent Child of Victorian England as well as Lux’s own childhood, but again sexualises the girl and blurs the distinction between adult and child. The blankness of gaze and awkward pose also create a contradictory message which draws us into Emily’s world while at the same time placing her in the world created for her by Lux.

With all these elements in place, the original question of whether The Rose Garden is real or imaginary needs to be asked once again. The Rose Garden is both real and imaginary. As we saw in the previous chapter, the way Lux constructs her pictures around the gaze of the child after the fact shows there is a direct relationship with the child’s world. We, like Lux before us, are drawn into the child’s world through her gaze and through the elements of this world that are accentuated by Lux.

It is worth looking at similar images, examples of what Cowgill calls “the Lux Effect” (Cowgill, 2004), that try to do the same thing as Lux but fail to incorporate this reality principle. The work of Achim Lippoth, Julia Blackmon and Simen Johan are examples of this. Like Lux, Johan manipulates different elements of landscape, dress, look and light to create a striking image where the child is the centre. His Untitled 35 from his Evidence of Things Unseen series shows a girl dressed in a fur hat and clutching a plastic camera (figure 18). It is snowing and she is standing outside a law office. However the picture does not engage with the child and, instead of referencing the child’s world, Johan creates an otherworldly atmosphere where night, snow, costume, camera, background, weird lighting and weirder eyes conjure up an image that is more alien than childlike. It is an interesting image but it is entirely imaginary. The girl is, like Gross’s picture of Brooke Shields, both “her and it” (Prince, 2005) at the same time - and the “it” is an alien “it” not a human or child “it”. And though Johan claims his pictures have an emotional depth (Aperture, 2003), any emotion that is expressed by the girl is overwhelmed by the melodramatic and intrusive nature of his constructions.

Figure 18: Untitled 35

Lux in contrast fuses the real and imaginary in a way that undermines the false dichotomy between the two. The real is made up of the imaginary and the imaginary has elements of the real. Religion and the history of art is built on this premise, as are pychoanalytic theories of dreams, the Uncanny and the unconscious (Freud, 2006). Even highly real things like the invasion of Iraq resulted from a confusion between real and imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The imagined conflict between the real and imaginary is something that Lux uses to full effect in her pictures. She understands that two apparently opposing elements can sit together in a picture and simultaneously reinforce and undermine each other. When we see that Emily shows signs of being both an Innocent Child and a Knowing Child, the picture presents a puzzle to us. We want a simple answer where black is black and white is white. However, as Fletcher (and Cixous before her) points out things aren’t that simple either in photography or life (Fletcher, 1998) - there are shades of grey and this is where Emily sits, happily straddling the middle ground between the overlapping categories of Innocent/Knowing, Child/Adult and Asexual/Sexual being. It is a strategy repeatedly used in photography and art, especially where the representation of children is concerned. Francis Cotes did it with Lewis Cage, presenting him as an child in an externally sexualised body, Dodgson does the same in The Beggar Maid where Alice Liddell is transformed by title, costume and look to become the ultimate Upper Class/Working Class, Unavailable/Available, Pure/Sullied, Innocent/Knowing Child. The most direct example of this portrayal of contradictory elements is Rineke Dijkstra’s Hilton Head portrait where the girl in the apricot bikini is portrayed on the cusp of two worlds and, most interestingly, is shown knowing she is on the cusp of two worlds.

The Rose Garden is both real and imaginary. It exploits the false (imaginary) division between the Innocent and the Knowing child and the associated dichotomies mentioned above, divisions that are typical of the binary thought that Cixous believes typifies Western cultural thought (Cixous, 1996). Lux befuddles us by forcing us to make choices between values that linguistically and culturally seem to be opposed, but in both the real worlds which children inhabit and the imaginary worlds of their (and our) unconscious are not opposed at all.

This juxtaposition of values is aided by digital manipulation - the placing of Emily against the garden background brings out elements of the romantic, the sexual and creates both divisions and connections between the worlds of the adult and the child. This manipulation doesn’t compromise the authenticity of the image though or childhood world that Emily inhabits. In a sentiment that predated postmodernism by around 100 years, Oscar Wilde said that “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter” (Wilde, 2006). A similar thing could be said about photography where the more skilful the photographer, the more manipulated the image becomes and the less is left to chance or the whimsy of the sitter. However, despite the manipulated composition, costume and pose, Lux does leave things outside her control. Like Dodgson, Dijkstra and Mann, she leaves a gap for her subject, Emily to fill. The image has been manipulated, but Emily hasn’t. The Rose Garden is both beautiful and disturbing, a picture that combines the real and imaginary and presents a vision of a childhood we all once inhabited and we all still inhabit, a vision of childhood that is as real and imaginary as it gets.

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NGO Photography - 2008

2009-03-27T12:45:00.001Z

Spreading the Web

Tim Hetherington has worked in West Africa for 8 years, his medium format colour images providing a complex insight into a region where the boundaries of political and military power are continually shifting. Hetherington’s West African odyssey began in 1999. “I heard about this Liberian football team called the Millennium Stars. They were supported by an non-governmental organisation ( NGO ) and were touring the UK,” says Hetherington. “I went to the NGO and I said, I can get a great story connecting Liberia to the UK through football. I want to be on their tour bus. The NGO said yes, sure, if you can get the story into a magazine. The story was published in the Independent and the NGO said they needed a photographer and a cameraman in Africa. They flew me out to Liberia and paid for accommodation, film and processing. That’s how I started to work in Liberia.”

Hetherington’s use of an NGO to gain initial access to Liberia typifies the increasingly important role NGOs play in funding and providing opportunities for photographers around the world.

“The first time I started working with NGOs was in the late 90s in Sierra Leone,” says Marcus Bleasdale, whose work in Congo has won international acclaim. “Initially I used them to gain access and information, but as your experience grows you have more to offer and you can get more in payment or compensation. This compensation may come in terms of exhibitions, books published, access or simply a place to sleep for a night. In the work I do at Human Rights Watch, I get paid very little, but my relationship with the organisation gets me grants and funding from elsewhere that helps my work be shown and allows me to have a more powerful voice.”

Security and information are two key issues for Bath based photographer, Matt Shonfeld. “I work for Orbis who have operations all over the world. I’ve worked with them in places like Bangladesh where gaining access to places like state run hospitals would be difficult. I also work with MSF and Unicef so I can cover stories which would take years of research. They also provide accommodation and security. Working with NGOs gives you the ability to work freely and safely and that is very important.”

Though Delhi based photographer Stuart Freedman has traded access for images on occasions, he also feels that reasonable payment is essential. “Photographers have to act in a professional way. We are all, regrettably in a market place. Selling your photography for a pittance for exposure or 'jam tomorrow' has landed us all in the position of negotiating from weakness. It's not that NGOs by and large are taking advantage. We as photographers have to accept some responsibility for taking bad deals.”

An NGO can be everything from a local toy library to the United Nations, and each NGO has different visual needs. “There are lots of NGOs,” says Tim Hetherington, “and different organisations have different agendas. In Chad, I worked for Human Rights Watch. They exist to expose abuse. They don’t need funding, they don’t need to provide images for marketing, they need photographs for evidence, so there is no editorial guidance.”

In contrast to the evidential documentary needs of Human Rights Watch, Greenpeace uses images for marketing that tie in with their campaigning agenda.
“We don’t have to look for people. They come to us,” says Daphne Christelis, Greenpeace UK’s photo-editor. “I’ll ask for a link to a website and then ask the photographer to come in and show their portfolio. I’m interested in people with a background in press photography, people who are committed to what Greenpeace are trying to do.”

“Some people do come thinking that they are going to photograph dolphins, but our work is very fast-paced. When you are shooting on an inflatable for example, you have to be able to think and work very quickly, and because a lot of our work involves trespass, photographers can get arrested and get into trouble.”

“We pay the same as standard press rates. Sometimes we’ll pay more. It depends on the skills of the photographer. We do a long edit of about 30 pictures which we have exclusive use of for 90 days. After that photographers can use these pictures for their own projects.”

Laurence Watts, photo-editor at Action Aid, has a line of wannabe NGO photographers queuing outside his door, but he says NGOs increasingly work with photographers in the field. “A photographer I know will give me their mobile number and say I will be in this place at this time. If an emergency or disaster situation arises or a project pops up, then we might get in touch. We need shots which show our work and the challenging situation of poor people in a variety of situations. And the people who shoot this work are increasingly locally based photographers.”

“Editorial is also marketing,” says Watts. “We do have a visual identity, but it is important that we try to avoid clichés, that we try to make people engage with the issues. We can do this by using intelligent photographers who have an understanding of development, politics and history, who can tell stories and show people as people, not as victims.”

Given the nature of assignments, avoiding clichés is not always an easy thing. “A bog standard NGO assignment is pretty boring,” says Adrian Evans, director of Panos Pictures. “You go there and shoot wells, clinics or primary schools being opened and once a photographer has done that ten times, you know what needs to be done.”

“NGOs are stuck. On the one hand they say they have gone away from the pleading image of the big-eyed child, but they have to work with marketing and fund-raising and raise awareness of particular issues and what the NGO does. And then the images they use are the same ones because that’s what people respond to.”

This is a problem Tim Hetherington, who was the only photographer to work with the LURD rebels in Liberia and has broken news stories like the spread of the Darfur War to Chad, believes is especially apparent in Africa. “I don’t disagree with working with NGOs, but it’s problematic to look at Africa only through NGO and news lenses. The problem with Africa is about more than just debt and money. The problem with Africa is how Africa is perceived and represented as a basket case.”

“The NGOs have a problem. They have been railroaded into stereotypical images. They know they need to counter these images, but at the same time they know these images work. There is also an emphasis on victims. In my more recent work, I want to identify the aggressors, who did this, who is responsible for this. That’s why I like Human Rights Watch.”

If making new types of images is important, so is showing that work to new audiences. “I did an exhibition at UBS in Switzerland highlighting the illegal export of gold from eastern Congo by European, especially Swiss, companies,” says Marcus Bleasdale. “We invited UBS shareholders and companies who were implicated in the import of the gold. It was a naming and shaming exercise where we provided visual evidence of what was happening. You know that if the US$80 million that is buying the gold does not go into Congo, the war will stop because that is the money that is buying the guns. We managed to prevent Swiss companies from importing gold from eastern Congo. More and more photographers are trying to work in this way.”

This new way of exhibiting work is typical of the innovative work photographers must do to show their work and make a living in a rapidly changing market.

“If you talk to older photographers, they say everything is going down the pan but they are confusing change with a dying part of the industry. The industry is shifting from newspapers and magazines to other forms of funding,” says Adrian Evans.

Stuart Freedman agrees. “I think there are less major commissions now than ever. NGOs are a small part of an increasingly complex process to generate income that comprises grants, magazines, self finance and often just plain luck. The NGO market has got bigger and the media market smaller. But ask around and you soon discover that the most successful photographers are those who spread their web as far as possible in search of income.” So in Delhi, Freedman is doing written, film and photographic work for The Guardian, Action Aid and corporate clients. From Bath, Matt Shonfeld combines photography and work for the Digital Railroad online archive, Marcus Bleasdale’s Congo work is getting shown to the unconverted thanks to a series of grants and awards he has been awarded. And Tim Hetherington? He’s taking a year out from photography to monitor security issues for the United Nations Security Council. Nobody, it seems, is be just a photographer anymore.

End

Alec Soth: Niagara - 2006

2009-03-27T12:41:00.001Z

Falling In Love Again

Alec Soth’s first book, Sleeping in the Mississippi, was so sweeping in its epic statements, it seemed that Soth had nothing left to photograph. What could he do next?

The answer is Niagara, a portrayal of the town that has traditionally been the romance capital of North America. In Niagara, Soth sets out to capture the grand passion of life, to do for love and marriage what Sleeping in the Mississippi does for the American Midwest.

“Niagara is part of American mythology. It’s a place of romance, where people go to get married,” says Soth. “But when I got there my view of the place totally changed. The American side is economically devastated. It’s bleak.”

While the American side is bleak, the Canadian side is tacky. Cheesy motels, tacky tourist sites and a plethora of fast-food outlets make the town, the Falls notwithstanding, more Blackpool or Clacton than Paris or Rome.

As Soth began photographing, he also discovered the people of Southern Ontario and New York State are a tad more distrusting and a mite more suspicious than the easygoing folk of the Mississippi states. “The longer I spent there, the darker it got,” he says. “Part of that is down to me and my nature, part of it is down to the place itself. But I also find a real beauty in that darkness.”

It is a darkness evident in Soth’s portraits which form the soul of Niagara. In Aleisha and Joe, Aleisha has a hard-edged awareness etched into her face. Joe is more feral, his face a picture of opportunism gone awry. And for all their young love, he holds her in an alleyway where fencing, cables and a coal hole are the backdrop. Similarly Michelle and Pedro are portrayed against the drabbest of surroundings. Michelle, like many of Soth’s subjects, has a fragile quality to her, something so delicate and tender it makes her vulnerable, a vulnerability Pedro, in his cone-shaped party hat, looks ill-equipped to cater for.

Melissa poses outside the Flamingo Inn. She is a big bride in a big dress and looks lovely - but the taffeta white of her wedding gown against the barren walls of her motel talks of how her dreams will fade into a reality beyond her control.

This reality hits hardest with Rebecca. Clutching a young baby, she looks worn-out and bedraggled, her hunched shoulders and darkened eyes betraying a life of lost hope and sleepless nights. Her passion spent, she stands on cracked tarmac, a rock to one side, an ugly flat-roofed building behind.

It is not all bleakness though. Occasionally the love shines through, especially when Soth asks his subjects to pose naked to make his images more intimate. So we see Michelle and James, both naked and both on their second marriage, their large bodies emanating a tender comfort and confidence in each other’s company that transcends the blandness of their motel surroundings.

Inevitably, asking people to pose naked brought trouble to Soth. On one occasion he asked a young man he met if he could photograph him and his girlfriend naked. “He said he’d do it, then I saw her and she was only 16 and too young, so I decided to photograph them outside on the grass,” says Soth. “But while I was doing this, someone saw us and called the police saying I was a paedophile, and this cop came running up to us and I had to explain what I was doing.”

The ugly architecture of Niagara is a running theme throughout the book, the regulated functionality of the town’s motels an allusion to hidden passion played out behind closed doors. At the Seneca, blue and green bucket chairs stand under stone cladding. Beneath hastily-drawn curtains, oil stained pavements are streaked with skid marks leading directly to the door - hinting at the urge of love, Niagara style.

Symbols of romance recur through all the motels but they seem fraudulent and shallow. The heart-shaped bath (and is that Soth we see in the mirror there?) and towels folded into kissing swans are overwhelmed by the brutality of the everyday - cracked tarmac, empty car parks and grey skies that hint at what lies beneath the surface of our transitory passion.

If anyone hasn’t quite got the message that love and marriage might not be all it’s cracked up to be, the love letters Soth collected should put them right. “To gather the love letters I would ask people I met in bars or donut shops if they had any old love letters I could have,” says Soth. “If you’re in a donut shop and you ask someone at the next table for their old love letters, they are going to look at you like you’re a freak and mock you. But every once in a while, someone would have them and be happy to share them.”

The most extreme letters take you straight to the point where love slides into hate. “I love you but you’ve become a piece of shit,” begins one. Others are more telling in their banalities, whether it be the woman who bemoans her partner’s lack of hygiene, or the cliche-ridden missive that reads like a track listing of a greatest ever love songs CD. “You take my breath away..., You give me hope when I am down...,” and “I can’t live if living is without you.”

“A lot of the pictures are of the aftermath of passion and love. You see couples and their love letters and then you see the aftermath and the Falls could be a metaphor for the crashing passion,” says Soth. The Falls appear throughout the book, the images gathering pace to their tumultuous conclusion. So to end the book, we see the Niagara river heading inexorably to its fate, the river collapsing into the maelstrom of the whirlpool below. First comes love, then comes the fall. Niagara is beautiful, claustrophobic and dark, an intensely poetic and thoughtful work on the disappointment of broken dreams, a work rooted in one place but universal to all.

END

Alec Soth: Sleeping by the Mississippi - 2004

2009-03-27T12:40:00.001Z

Mississippi Dreaming

by Colin Pantall

Alec Soth has had a fantastic year. In March, the thirty-five-year-old photographer’s pictures of life on the Mississippi were the hit of the Whitney Biennial in New York. In June his book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published to widespread acclaim, while in the same month he joined Magnum Photos as a nominee.

Sleeping by the Mississippi has been ranked with great representations of his country such as Walker Evans pictures of depression-era America, Robert Frank’s harsh vision of America in the 1950s and, more recently, the colour work of Soth’s former teacher, Joel Sternfeld.

Shot over a period of 5 years, Sleeping by the Mississippi is a trip along America’s ‘Forgotten Coast’, the neglected banks of the country’s longest river. In 46 immaculately composed colour images, Soth travels from the frozen northern reaches of the river to the fecund squalor of the Mississippi Delta.

Along the way, Soth shows landscapes, interiors and portraits, most of which have a dreamlike and drained feel to them. He alludes to religion, race, crime, sex and death, showing the lost hope, loneliness and unrealised dreams of the people he meets.

“I live near the beginning of the Mississippi and I have always felt a pull to it,” says Soth. “I used to run away when I was 5 or 6 - I’d pack a suitcase with books and run away from home - I’d only get a few blocks but it was the whole Huck Finn process,” where, “...the north is home and the south symbolises the exotic.”

“In the beginning the project had nothing to do with the Mississippi. It evolved from a project called From Here to there in which one picture leads to another, connected by an idea or a theme. In the process, I travelled down the Mississippi, but I got to thinking that the idea was too gimmicky, so I shifted to the idea of the Mississippi being a link between the pictures.”

But Sleeping by the Mississippi is not really about the river, but about the spirit of wandering and about the dreams people have. Throughout the project, Soth asked his subjects to write down their dreams. The first image in the book is of Peter’s houseboat in Winona, Minnesota. These are the northern reaches of the river, where the exotic has not yet taken hold. It’s winter and the banks are covered in snow. The houseboat is a ramshackle affair, adorned with bones from old hunting trips. A string of washing hangs from a clothes line - children’s clothes and, incongruously, a tie. “I dream of running water”, writes Peter.

For others, dreams mean ambition, fantasy and faith. Throughout the book, religion forces itself into the project. Sheila from Leech Lake Indian Reservation stands with her arms outstretched. Behind her is a bible and a picture of Christ on the cross. She wears a sweatshirt covered with hand-written biblical quotes, all written in a remarkably similar hand, key words heavily underlined.

Sheila only agreed to be photographed if Soth accompanied the picture with the following text. “If you don’t have Jesus in your life, you are truly missing out on a blessing. He will set you free. Accept him today.”

If Sheila preaches the love of Christ, Bonnie finds consolation in the tortures of hell. It’s a place, she tells Soth, where “...the fearful, and unbelieving and abominable..” amongst others, “...shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone...” (Revelations 21:8).

Soth photographs Bonnie on her sofa. Her face has an edge to it beneath the beehive hairdo and in her hands she holds a gilt-framed photograph of a cloud in the shape of an angel.

Other religious images include Jesus-clad interiors, street preachers, convicts at a crucifix, Frankie (the sad-looking sister of TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart) and a Memphis apartment decorated with two scratched and torn photographs of Martin Luther King - a picture of the betrayal of America’s greatest dream.

The driving force behind such images, says Soth, is curiosity. This is especially true of his commercially tinted images of sex where Soth was forced to overcome his natural shyness. “The first picture relating directly to sex was of Sunshine, who was a prostitute working in this motel - which so obviously was being used for sex. I was terrified to go into this motel, but I was so curious that I had to go and have a look.”

Soth shows a scantily-clad Sunshine lying on a motel bed in Memphis. Her real name is Monique. She is twenty-one years old and writes Soth, “...she had run away from home at fourteen after the birth of her son, whom she had left with her parents. She has been Sunshine ever since.”

In a brothel in Davenport, Iowa, Soth shoots a mother and daughter together. They stare at the camera, legs crossed, both wearing silk negligees. The daughter dreams of becoming a nurse, but the mother gave up dreaming a long time ago. Despite the hardness of the picture, Soth believes there is a lightness about the place - a sentiment quite at odds with traditional portrayals of prostitution.

Indeed, one of the strengths of Soth’s work is his openness to people and ideas. He portrays people who are often at the fringes of society, people who could be considered freaks or oddballs. But Soth captures the ordinariness of people, thanks to the dynamics of the large-format camera he carried.

“The technology of the large-format camera changes the whole relationship between the photographer and subject. I normally don’t have a camera with me when I approach somebody , so immediately it’s less threatening. Then people ask me about the project and then they see the camera. It’s big and old-fashioned and my head being covered by a dark cloth changes things. They can’t see my face and so it becomes more relaxed. Because it takes so long, you have a conversation with them and the result shows.”

“Sometimes I ask if I can go into people’s homes and take their pictures there. Some of the interiors in the book started with pictures of people, but then I found their homes were more interesting so I shot that instead. Obviously you can’t just ask people to go into their homes and take their pictures.”

Once inside, Soth rearranged interiors in his quest for the perfect composition. It’s an approach that makes his images sometimes too perfect and too contrived, giving his photographs the feel of installations at times.

It’s a criticism Soth recognises. “I think the weak point of the book is the lack of in-between pictures. It’s too bam-bam-bam, too many iconic images following a previous iconic image. There are no softer pictures. But at the same time, for me it’s really important to keep the number of images low. I want to remember the book in my head”.

Personal circumstances also had an influence on the work Soth produced. “My mother-in-law lived with me and my wife for years while she was ill with cancer and during a leave of absence she got very, very ill. I was at her death bed and it changed my work. I became more courageous and the death theme emerged very strongly.”

Death is everywhere in Soth’s work. There are cemeteries, gravestones, memorial murals and a landscape of the cobbled banks of the Mississippi where the singer Jeff Buckley swam to his death. An old hospital bed in a deserted farmhouse echoes the time Soth spent at his mother-in-law’s death bed, while a sad portrait shows Lenny, a muscle bound construction worker and erotic masseur whose teenage son had recently died in a traffic accident. “My dream,” wrote Lenny, “is to live to be 100 and still look the way I do now”.

Soth’s dream was to make a great book. “I produced an ink jet book and made 50 of them in Spring 2003. I gave them away and people responded to them very quickly and soon publishers were interested. I approached Steidl and the book came out. It was like a dream come true”.

Since then, Soth’s dream has entered the realms of fantasy. Rejecting the imprecations of the art world, he joined Magnum as a nominee.

“I chose Magnum because I’m in love with that whole tradition. I always remember what Capa said to Cartier-Bresson “Don't keep the label of a surrealist photographer. Be a photojournalist. If not you will fall into mannerism. Keep surrealism in your little heart, my dear.” I do have the capacity to be self-indulgent and I can be over-poetic, so it’s really healthy to do assignments.”

Soth’s latest project is on newly-weds honeymooning at Niagara Falls but with Sleeping by the Mississippi, Soth has already created a classic. With its focus on universally recognisable themes, it transcends its American roots to become a book that is accessible to people everywhere - the first work from a man who has the charm, vision and intelligence to become one of the truly great photographers.

--END--

George Georgiou

2009-01-22T10:55:00.001Z

‘Happy is he who calls himself a Turk’

“When you first arrive in a place, you are so informed by images you have already seen that it is a burden you have to lose,” says George Georgiou, the London-based photographer who has recently returned from 8 years working in Turkey, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. “The next thing you do is look for difference, which is something else you need time to get over. Once you have done that, you start to look at what is familiar and then, and only, then can you appreciate what is different - because only then can you appreciate that it is really different.”

The differences of Turkey became apparent to Georgiou from the start of his four year residency in the country. Whilst working on a feature on where Europe ends and Asia begins. Georgiou quickly discovered the diversity of a country where the secular and religious, the military and the civil, the traditional and the modern coexist in an uneasy harmony. “To start to understand a place, you need to stay a long time,” says Georgiou. “So I started working on this idea of Turkey being the meeting point of east and west.”

The result of that work is Fault Lines, a book (to be published later in the year) that reveals the complexities of a country that is struggling to reconcile its multiple personalities. Taking centre stage in that work is the Turkish landscape. “We are used to seeing Istanbul or the Mediterranean resorts,” says Georgiou, “but most of Turkey is on a huge plateau above 1,000 m. I wanted to get this non-romantic version of Turkey where the landscape represents the harshness of its geography and its topographical place in the east.”

So we see snow-capped mountains standing as a backdrop to brightly coloured flats. Mount Ararat, the mountain where Noah’s Ark landed, edges into the background of an image of a woman standing on her front porch. A dusty road, a tree in bloom and a line of telephone cables complete the image. Big mountains and big skies with lots of clouds are everywhere in Fault Lines, the raw beauty of nature overwhelming the humanity which inhabits it.

And beneath the mountains Georgiou shows newly built tower blocks, their modernity a symbol of the oppositions that Turkey must reconcile. “Fault Lines is about the idea of what east and west is, but it’s also about the idea of home. You look at different countries and you see where people have moved from the more traditional to the more modern. It happened in British cities in the 1950s and 1960s. There was the appealing element of moving from old tenements into clean new homes with indoor toilets and hot running water, but there was also the element of dislocation from their neighbours and loss of community. The buildings are also fragile, they are often badly built and will quickly lose their good looks. In Turkey, a lot of life, especially for men, is lived on the street. With these new tower blocks a lot of that will disappear and that is something that will be missed.”

The Turks who live in these tower blocks are overwhelmed both by the physical environment Georgiou shows us, and by the political environment they inhabit. Modern Turkey was established in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the nationalist leader who tried to transform the nation into a secular, western-looking democracy. “Being Turkish was narrowly defined by Ataturk,” says Georgiou. “He came up with the saying, ‘Happy is he who calls himself a Turk‘, which reduces Turkishness to something very simple. But Turkey is so ethnically diverse. People will say their grandmother was Serbian, Albanian, Tatar or Armenian, and you’ll see their ancestry in their body or in their faces. But people don’t like to talk about it because everyone gets bogged down in the divisions and oppositions of Turkey. Turkey should celebrate its differences and not see them as a threat.”

The threat is apparent in his pictures of the Gallipoli celebrations, a huge event where political and military leaders gather to celebrate the Turkish victory. Georgiou photographs security guards standing on guard before a newly-turfed embankment. Turkish flags dominate the background, a canvas awning bearing the austere face of Ataturk staring into the camera.

There is also something threatening about the new architecture that dominates the book. The tower blocks seem a little off-kilter and out of step with their surroundings, the new roads and power lines forced and artificial. It’s as if everything has been built by central planning, by somebody trying to portray a certain vision of what it is to be modern and European. It is the same with Georgiou‘s portraits. He captures the diversity of the nation, but also the split in its identity, the split between the urban and the rural, the traditional and the modern.

Capturing these contradictions on film was both time and cash intensive for Georgiou. Fault Lines was a self-financed project, and funding the work was always a problem. “I always start work off my own back. Once I get out there, I let people know and people will commission me. Then I sell work through my agencies in the UK, France and Italy. I keep work back and wait for the right time for it to be published. I don’t especially like working for the media. That frees you up in the visuals you make and the stories you do because you are not beholden to your editors and you‘re not desperate. And not being desperate really helps because people can see you have something you really care about - and they have to ask for it.”

“I’m hugely in debt and have made huge financial sacrifices. But as I don’t own anything, I have no fear for the future. Also, I’m optimistic that everything will come out right in the end. 7 or 8 years ago we sold a flat to fund a great adventure but we don’t regret it because we are both enthused about making work and having new ideas. If we had stayed in England we might have just ended up chasing the pound. You have to make money just to live so you end up doing more commercial work and the more commercial work you do the more you neglect your personal projects and in the end you can’t remember why you started in photography in the first place. The rewards will come in time, but we’ll probably be pensioners when they do.”

END

Elaine Duigenan

2008-11-24T12:48:00.001Z

Hairnets and Nylons

“I started doing photograms through pure experimentation,” says Elaine Duigenan. “The first thing I scanned was an old hairnet and it felt like I had discovered something new and exciting, something that lent itself well to the work that I was doing.”

These early experiments by the London-based photographer led to more detailed photograms of archaic woman’s wear, work that will be on show in Duigenan’s Intimate Archaeology exhibition at Klompching Gallery in New York from July 10th to August 29th.

“After I scanned the hairnet, I did the Nylons series,” says Duigenan. “I began collecting them, starting with vintage stocking by Dior going through to more recent stockings. Collecting and discovering nylons in unlikely places was part of my passion for the process.”

“It’s like finding treasure in unlikely places because nylons are objects of beauty and oddness. They are functional, but they are also flirty, sexy things and they are fetish objects. I was interested in the delicacy of the stockings, the way you could see individual threads pulling away. The nylons are both there and not there, fragile items that are incredibly intricate and can unravel so easily, but with a texture that has an almost sculptural quality. They connect on many levels, so people react in different ways and bring their own connections to them.”

After completing her Nylons series, Duigenan returned to photographing hairnets, partly because she also wanted to collect them. Drawn by the oddity of the items, and the fact that some older hairnets are made of human hair, Duigenan found her curiosity piqued.

She also found that the organic nature of the hairnets revealed a darker, forensic side that found a resonance with some of her earlier work.

“I had worked at the Royal College of Surgeons photographing 200 year old animal specimens. For me there was a dark edge, a sensibility that for all the beauty on the surface, there is something dark lurking underneath, a mystery to do with things that are unseen. On the surface, an old animal specimen might be beautiful, but it got me musing about what’s beneath the surface. What’s inside a 200 year old horse foetus?”

This darkness carried over to Duigenan’s hairnets, where the mystery was compounded by her arrangements of the nets on the scanner, arrangements that, given the hairnets’ flexible nature, are only partial at best. Indeed Duigenan’s hairnets almost take on a life of their own. They spring back from their orderly arrangements and weave shapes that emerge from their organic architecture. Look at them long enough and they become a photographic Rorshach test - one image depicts a seahorse, another a pair of knickers or a jellyfish, or whatever the depths of the viewers psyche decides it to be.

How the images are photographed is no great mystery. “The photograms are made with an ordinary, domestic scanner,” explains Duigenan, who still works with the same Epson flatbed scanner she started with 4 years ago. “You can do it with the lid down or with the lid up. You can work in a darkroom and push the limits with experimentation - there’s a lot of latitude.”

“The real work goes into the prints which are very rich with a black that is exceptionally rich and velvety. The prints have a wonderful seductive, linear quality that draws the viewer in.”

The luxuriant quality of the prints, and finding opportunities to show them to gallerists and publishers has played a large part in Duigenan’s burgeoning career. For Duigenan, the most effective places to show work and network are review events, especially Rhubarb Rhubarb, where she met both Debra Klomp Ching and Darren Ching (owners of the Klompching Gallery). “The first time I met them, they gave engaging and constructive reviews and both talked about buying a print, but that didn’t happen. In fact, nothing happened for a while, because I didn’t hear from them for a few years. But review events are not about getting immediate results. They are about finding people who are there for the long term, who can produce consistent, quality work over a period of time and show commitment to their ideas and their art.”

“So I didn’t hear from them for years, then I had a 3 line email from Debra last year asking if I would like representation and I said yes and now I have my first New York show, which I am obviously delighted with.”

The importance of taking a long term perspective is something Debra Klomp Ching is also keen to emphasise, as is the importance for reviewers of seeing photographers whose work matches their specific needs.

“One of the things that I like about Rhubarb Rhubarb is that photographers can do their own bookings,” says Klomp Ching. “I’m a gallerist, so I’m not really interested in editorial work for magazines. That’s very important because I know how much photographers are paying, so it’s important they see the reviewers who are going to be most interested in their work.”

In addition to Duigenan, Klomp Ching has picked up Lisa Robinson, Sarah Lynch and Simon Roberts through Rhubarb Rhubarb events. “We met Simon Roberts when he showed Motherland to Darren Ching straight after he got back from Russia. The work was raw because he was in the process of editing and getting a book deal, but the quality was obviously there and he was photographing in a way that clearly showed his intent and engagement with the medium.”

Rhubarb Rhubarb ( together with Houston Fotofest and Review Santa Fe) is one of an international programme of portfolio review events which are an increasingly important, albeit expensive, opportunity for photographers to show their work.

“Different festivals have different approaches. Rhubarb Rhubarb is for people who have resolved bodies of work ready for publication as a book or for exhibition. At Rhubarb Rhubarb we’ll see 36 photographers and 3 or 4 will be memorable. There might not be an immediate fit - there wasn’t with Elaine - but it could come later.”

While Rhubarb Rhubarb and Santa Fe have a narrow range of photographers who generally have well-developed work, Houston has photographers ranging from those starting out and are simply seeking feedback to those who are mid-career and looking for specific opportunities, something that makes the range of reviewing something of a diplomatic tightrope.

“The problem of a lot of festivals is you’re not aware of who is attending. One advantage of Santa Fe is they have a list of photographers attending so you can check out who you are seeing. It’s really tough work to review 12 photographers in a day. You want to be fresh for the people you have booked, so you need to take breaks. But if someone comes up to me and says I wanted to book you but you were full and gives me their details and where I can see their work, I will always take a look.”

Another way for photographers to show their work to reviewers is through portfolio walk-throughs, where photographers lay out there work for all to see. “Portfolio walk throughs are great,” says Klomp Ching. “If somebody recommends a photographer, you can see their work anonymously by taking a quiet look and following up later.”

And the things that will attract the reviewer’s eye? “I look for a number of things in an artist: an integrity of intent and an engagement with the medium. There should also be a constant flow of ideas and a strong focus in the work, a strong conceptual flow. Elaine’s bringing the photogram up to the 21st century. Her work has a focus on female appareil and you can appreciate it on many levels, for the structural form of the nylons as well as the sexual and social connotations they have.”

The photographer should also be able to express those ideas in an engaging manner. “If there isn’t an energetic or active dialogue it might not be a fit. People need to be able to talk about their work and be personable. For her upcoming show, Elaine will have to talk to the press, give interviews and lectures. We don’t consider anyone for our gallery until we’ve met them and it works in the other direction as well. We need a professional but personable relationship. We’re an establishing gallery working with a lot of emerging photographers so we’re taking a lot of chances with them, but at the same time we’re looking to have a long term relationship with them.

These are the elements that helped make Rhubarb Rhubarb a success for Duigenan, but there are other reasons for her success. “It’s a benefit being a little bit older and having a confidence and belief in your work. You have a lot more experience of life under your belt and so different elements come out. That’s important because one thing about review events is you get conflicting opinions and advice. You need to have your own voice and have confidence and self belief.”

END

Robbie Cooper

2008-11-20T10:57:00.002Z

Don’t Think About the Future

In his photographic portrait, Lucas Shaw is an obese 22 year old from Texas. In his digital portrait, he is Povar, a monster-killing ‘Barbarian berserker’ in the online game, Everquest. “I just wanted to win respect from people in the game,” says Shaw. “But it cost me. Everything else in my life started to suffer - my social life, my school work, even my health. You can even order pizza from within the game.”

Lucas Shaw is one of the 60 people photographed for Robbie Cooper’s new book, Alter Ego: Avatars and their creators, a series of diptychs of gamers and their digital portraits (or avatars) that go beyond the merely photographic to give an insight into the diverse world of online gaming.

“I used to play Pong, then Space Invaders and Asteroids,” says Cooper, “so I have always been interested in video games. A few years ago, I was doing a corporate shoot and the head of the company was getting divorced and didn’t have good access to his kids. A lot of his contact with them came through a virtual reality game. The talked online about the game, but also about everyday things like school and homework. I was fascinated by that interaction between the real and fantasy life.”

Inspired by this chance meeting, Cooper began photographing gamers in 2003. “It was something new,” he says. “ I was doing work for clients like Marie Claire and G.Q. but this was the first thing I’d found that worked as a long-term project.”

The project was global and Cooper travelled to Europe, America and Asia to photograph gamers he found through online call outs and overseas fixers - all part in an industry that has over 10 million players world-wide, and in which games range from the virtual world of Second Life to the fantasy dress up of World of Warcraft and Star Wars Galaxies.

“I was absolutely blown away by how big it was in Asia. It’s so mainstream. The internet cafes in China are massive and everyone is playing these games. In Korea people play together more and they’ll be shouting at each other or texting while they play. Sometimes one group will be fighting another group in a game and the fight will spill over into real life. They also have tournaments and the top gamers are massive celebrities. People download the tournament games onto mobiles and watch speeded up grabs on their phones, so the mobile companies use gamers for marketing.”

The use of gaming for business purposes is also evident in China where 18-year-old Lui Da does 12 hour shifts “levelling up” other people’s characters. “Your eyes hurt, your wrists hurt and the money isn’t very good,” he says. And after work? “I go to the internet cafe to play my character... I don’t do anything else. I don’t really have any other hobbies... I don’t think about the future and it doesn’t bother me. The way I see it, you have to keep going and not think too much.”

If Lui Da is bottom of the gaming food chain, other portraits show the top feeders. Tini Sun is a PC game model, Kimberly Rufer Bach runs a company that develops interactive content for the Second Life platform, while Jon Jacobs, who got married online, makes his (real life) money from interactive game real estate.

Cooper believes the upsurge in gaming has arisen because of the increased fluidity of society. “Gender, class and national identity are becoming weaker, so young people have to look for ways to experiment with roles. These games have clearly defined roles and they have a task-reward pattern built in. This can be very attractive and build people’s self confidence.”

April Hatch is an example of this. Before becoming a gamer she suffered from low self-esteem. “I think gaming has helped me become who I am today, but the irony is that the more confident I get, the less I play. I’ll still play during the winter though. There just isn’t much else to do.”

Jason Rowe is another example. He uses the game to break free from his physical disabilities. “The computer screen is my window to the world. Online it doesn’t matter what you look like. In the real world. people can be uncomfortable around me until they get to know me and realise that, apart from my outer experience, I’m just like them.”

Cooper’s selection of portraits for the book reveals the complexity of motivations for online gaming. Lucas Shaw may be the stereotype of the dysfunctional male gamer, but other Cooper diptychs reveal people who use gaming for musical, religious and military purposes. One urban Chinese player even uses it as a way to experience nature.

“Jean Baudrillard wanted to write the introduction to the book, but he was very ill and died,” says Cooper. “He once wrote an essay about Disneyland. He said that Disneyland and all the theme parks around Los Angeles feed the city with reality energy. For Baudrillard, L.A. is not a real place. It’s an ungrounded place that is about movement. The idea is that people go to places of extreme fantasy to feel real about their lives.”

Perhaps the world’s gamers go online to feel real about their lives, or perhaps most go online for the same mundane reasons as Lee Taek Soo and Mun. “For us there’s a clear boundary between the game and real life. Neither of us is deeply invested in our character. We play just for fun.”

END

by Colin Pantall

Lux Control

2008-10-13T20:52:00.000+01:00

Lux Control

by Colin Pantall

Pale children stare out of empty landscapes, their young bodies clothed in strangely patterned tweed and wool. Half adult, half child, they are the invention of Loretta Lux, a photographer whose digital sorcery has created a magical world that sits somewhere between fantasy and reality.

Born in Dresden in 1969 and now based in Monaco, Lux’s work is partly inspired by her early childhood in East Germany.

“My life as a child in the DDR was very dull, but at the weekends my grandparents would take me to museums. The pictures I could most connect with were those with children in them.”

Inspired by Old Masters and German romantic artists of the 19th century, Lux initially studied painting but, she says, “...it was too messy - all those paints and the turpentine. So one reason I took up photography is because it isn’t messy.

“Another reason is painting has a long history and there are painters like Velasquez and Caspar David Friedrich and you can’t compete with them. Instead I thought I would approach painting through photography.”

So in 1999, Lux ( she chose her name a year later on the eve of her first group show). started taking photographs “Children are a fascinating subject for me, so I started taking pictures of children. At first, I only wanted to make good pictures. I didn’t theorise about the pictures. That came later.”

“I started with my nephew because he was available. I’m not the kind of person who is happy approaching people on the street,” says Lux, who has no children of her own. She continued to photograph the children of friends and relatives, rejecting commissions to focus on children that she found visually fascinating.

And that is Lux’s real gift. She recognises the power of children and chooses her models accordingly. Maria, perhaps her favourite model, radiates a wisdom beyond her years, the girl with a fish has an all-knowing self-awareness and the red-haired girl in the Rose Garden possesses a distant gaze that takes us into a world we can only imagine.

“In my work, I combine photography, painting and digital technology. I spend a great deal of time arranging the photograph in a way that is very similar to what a painter does on the canvas.”

“I start with a mental image, with a particular idea, which I then try to portray. I carefully select the clothes, the models and the backdrop (which is often painted by Lux), I have a few photo-sessions with the children and pick the best pictures. I then spend a great deal of time manipulating the image into what I want. It takes me 3 months to come up with a final image that I can get printed, but most of the time I don’t get that far.”

“I started with a digital camera right away because for me conventional photography was never a viable option. I want more control than simply depending on what’s in front of the camera.”

“I don’t like to say what equipment I use. I don’t get paid to advertise cameras, so why should I drop names,” she says before letting slip that she uses a Leica - a Digilux in other words. The cheque, one suspects, is not in the post. Not that Lux needs it. She’s sold almost US $5 million worth of prints in the last year.

What makes Lux’s work so fascinating is the otherworldliness of the images she creates. Partly this is due to the intensity of the children and the mystical emptiness of her backgrounds, but also because of the clothes she selects - clothes with colours, patterns and materials that, though very recognisable, have an almost alien quality.

“I have them wearing these clothes because they suit the image,” explains Lux. “I couldn’t do a picture of a child wearing Adidas clothes for example. I was born in Dresden in the DDR and they are the kind of clothes I would wear when I was a child in the 1970s. And because in the DDR we were always 10 years behind everywhere else, they look like clothes from the 1960s.”

So the Study of a Girl features a short sleeveless dress in a diagonal check of white, orange and sludgy green, a two-buttoned pocket on the chest. The Boy wears a flesh coloured shirt and a pair of shorts that make you itch just looking at them. Best of all is Megumi, who wears a short-sleeved knitted top in baby blue under a matching sleeveless pocketed dress.

Despite the subject matter Lux says, “The work is not about children. The images are a metaphor for childhood, innocence and the lost paradise of childhood.”

“There are also things to do with my own childhood. Like all Germans I grew up with stories by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. I think they had a strong impact on my imagination. Also, things like the teddy bear (in Girl with a Teddy Bear) is mine, so the pictures do have a lot to do with memory - with visual memory. The work is not autobiographical but I get inspiration from my memories of my own childhood.”

Lux’s children seem embedded half in childhood and half in the adult world. They don’t live in a Victorian-style state of innocence, but as mini-adults in their own right. “In a child you can already see hints of the person he is to become and in the grown up you will find traces of the child he used to be,” explains Lux.

This view is something Lux accentuates with her careful arrangements of props and hands. One girl holds a loaf of bread, another ( digitally manipulated into gripping the slippery creature) a fish. The Bride clasps her hands together, a girl in a tango-hued top has her arms crossed, while the red-haired girl in the green buckled dress hides them behind her back as she stands in her magical walled Rose Garden.

Sometimes, Lux changes the hand or head size, transforming posture and pose into something very strange. Particularly striking is The Walk. This features 2 girls in buckled shoes, their heads a shade too big for their shrunken bodies, their shoulders too sloping as they stand, one foot in front of the other on a barren path. The children gaze, all-knowing and all-seeing at the camera, against a backdrop that is both harsh and unforgiving - perhaps like childhood itself.

“I wouldn’t like to be a child again and have to depend on other people,” says Lux. “There are no perfect parents and it’s better to be in control of yourself I think. Children are beautiful, but childhood isn’t,”

END

Agent Orange: Philip Jones Griffiths

2008-10-06T14:48:00.002+01:00

Agent Provocateur (From the Far Eastern Economic Review: 2004, Vol 167(5))

Welsh photographer Philip Jones Griffiths first heard about the dangers of Agent Orange (the highly toxic herbicide used as a defoliant during the Vietnam War) in Saigon in 1967. "During the war there were these rumours that babies were being born without eyes and it became a quest to find them," says Griffiths. "I visited as many catholic orphanages as I could, but I was barred entry from most of them and I became convinced that the Americans had put the word out - don't let any press in."

Griffiths, now aged 67, worked as a freelance during the Vietnam War, but though an associate member of Magnum, he had little financial success. It was only with the publication of Vietnam Inc. (Griffiths' book on the failings of the American war machine) in 1971, that his photography reached a wider audience. But the critical tone of Vietnam Inc. meant Griffiths was banned from re-entering Vietnam. He didn't return until 1980, when he met victims of Agent Orange for the first time. Over the next 20 years, he would photograph some of Vietnam's estimated 1 million victims, building a body of work now published as Agent Orange, a harsh and uncompromising examination of the legacy left by US chemical spraying of the Vietnamese landscape.

Griffiths first encounter with Agent Orange victims happened almost by chance. "We were travelling by road from Hanoi to Saigon and we started talking about Agent Orange. The driver said, well there's this family with two blind daughters - we'll probably see them tomorrow." "It was very emotional. The husband had been a truck driver on the Ho Chi Minh Trail (transporting supplies to the Vietcong in the South) and he was very proud of what he did - and there was a strange ambivalence between the pride of the family and this disaster that had struck them. Those two blind girls were the first ones I ever saw."

Agent Orange was one of a series of colour-coded agents known as the Rainbow herbicides. They were first sprayed on crops as part of a "Food Denial Program" designed to force reluctant villagers into 'strategic hamlets'. When this proved ineffective, defoliation was used in Operation Ranch Hand to deny enemy forces jungle and forest cover.

Spraying increased in intensity throughout the 1960s, to become what Yale University botany Professor, Arthur Galston called "the largest chemical warfare operation in history." But even though Vietnam's forests and hilltops were laid bare, spraying was widely recognised as both militarily and psychologically ineffective.

As the Americans continued spraying, indications of the toxicity of Agent Orange and its deadly contaminant of dioxin became evident. "I think the earliest indications that Agent Orange was harmful were when people came down with chloracne at some of the companies who were making it," says Griffiths. By 1969, "...tests revealed that as little as two parts of dioxin per trillion in the bloodstream was sufficient to cause deaths and abnormal births in laboratory animals."

A by-product of chlorine production, dioxin works as an "environmental hormone." It causes disastrous changes at a hormonal and genetic level - causing diseases and deformities ranging from Hodgkins disease and diabetes to spina bifida and leukaemia. Because these diseases also occur naturally, and because there is reluctance on the part of chemical companies and the US government to admit liability, there is no universally recognised causative link between dioxin and many of its associated diseases.

“The connection between Agent Orange exposure and associated diseases is accepted by the majority of scientists who work in the field,” says Dr Arnold Schechter, a professor at the University of Texas who is researching the health effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, “but there is resistance to connecting Agent Orange to some diseases when litigation is involved. Industry groups will try to minimise the health damage.”

It’s a view confirmed by Dr Steven Stellman of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. “Unquestionably there has been a tremendous amount of resistance to recognising diseases caused by Agent Orange. The US federal governement has resisted for years, and it has been very difficult to get studies going and very little research has been funded.”

Another problem is put forward by Dr Wayne Dwernychuk of Hatfield Consultants. “Western epidemiologists do not feel that the scientific rigour of the Vietnamese studies meet western criteria in terms of experimental design and analysis. Dr. Phuong, Director of the Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City has witnessed first hand the birth defects issue as it pertains to highly exposed populations. She has followed this for over 30 years and is absolutely convinced the relationship is there. The US government's position has been that no unequivocal evidence exists which proves a firm link between exposure and expression of birth defects and health issues in Vietnam. However, the US Dept. of Veteran's Affairs provides financial compensation to US Vietnam veterans for certain diseases if they can show they were exposed to Agent Orange during their tours of duty. Spina Bifida, a birth defect in children of US Vietnam veterans, is covered by Veteran's Affairs ... but not for victims in Vietnam.”

Griffiths began documenting the full horrors of the genetic effects of Agent Orange at Tu Du Hospital in Saigon. "I went in and it was this dark room filled with all these deformed foetuses." Griffiths photographed conjoined twins, collapsed skulls and twisted spines, yet somehow he photographed these dead babies with a gentle tenderness. "I tried to give them some humanity," he explains. "Some are hugging or embracing. I didn't want to turn it into a freak show.”

As Griffiths continued to photograph, the full scale of Vietnam's tragedy became apparent to him. In 1998 he visited Cam Nghia, a village where 10% of children were born with serious deformities. "Cam Nghia had the highest number of abnormalities in Vietnam, but what you're not told is that in the majority of cases the foetus doesn't even develop. And then there are miscarriages and live births dying within 48 hours."

In 1971, the use of Agent Orange officially ceased in Vietnam, but its contaminant of dioxin is still claiming fresh victims today. "The toxicity is so great that once it is in your body, you can't get rid of it. The exception of course is lactating mothers who can pass it out through their milk to their children. Now they're finding concentrations of dioxin in the sediment of this fishpond where the levels are the highest they have recorded in the world, and yet the people are still eating the fish from there. Anywhere else in the world people would be moved out and the earth would be put into plastic bags taken away and buried".

Griffiths believes Vietnam presents a unique, and missed, opportunity to study what happens to victims of dioxin. "You've got people who are culturally and ethnically identical living around Vietnam. Only the south was sprayed - the north wasn't sprayed, so you've got your control group there and it gives a wonderful opportunity. But almost the only company that are doing major research are Hatfield Consultants of Canada who are doing a lot of good work." Research undertaken by Hatfield includes an assessment of dioxin residues on parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the correlation between continuing birth defects in villages and their proximity to former US Special Forces bases with high levels of dioxin contamination.

American veterans are still suffering from Agent Orange exposure, and are seeking compensation above and beyond the 1984 settlement of US $180 million (though no admission of liability) won from chemical companies that produced Agent Orange.

The Vietnamese have never received any compensation for the chemical warfare visited upon them. Instead they have an inheritance of death and deformity. Philip Jones Griffiths' Agent Orange is a devastating record of these victims of chemical warfare.

Agent Orange - Philip Jones Griffiths

2008-03-19T18:52:00.002Z

Agent Orange

Welsh photographer Philip Jones Griffiths first heard about the dangers of Agent Orange (the highly toxic herbicide used as a defoliant during the Vietnam War) in Saigon in 1967. "During the war there were these rumours that babies were being born without eyes and it became a quest to find them," says Griffiths. "I visited as many catholic orphanages as I could, but I was barred entry from most of them and I became convinced that the Americans had put the word out - don't let any press in."

Griffiths, now aged 67, worked as a freelance during the Vietnam War, but though an associate member of Magnum, he had little financial success. It was only with the publication of Vietnam Inc. (Griffiths' book on the failings of the American war machine) in 1971, that his photography reached a wider audience. But the critical tone of Vietnam Inc. meant Griffiths was banned from re-entering Vietnam. He didn't return until 1980, when he met victims of Agent Orange for the first time. Over the next 20 years, he would photograph some of Vietnam's estimated 1 million victims, building a body of work now published as Agent Orange, a harsh and uncompromising examination of the legacy left by US chemical spraying of the Vietnamese landscape.

Griffiths first encounter with Agent Orange victims happened almost by chance. "We were travelling by road from Hanoi to Saigon and we started talking about Agent Orange. The driver said, well there's this family with two blind daughters - we'll probably see them tomorrow." "It was very emotional. The husband had been a truck driver on the Ho Chi Minh Trail (transporting supplies to the Vietcong in the South) and he was very proud of what he did - and there was a strange ambivalence between the pride of the family and this disaster that had struck them. Those two blind girls were the first ones I ever saw."

Agent Orange was one of a series of colour-coded agents known as the Rainbow herbicides. They were first sprayed on crops as part of a "Food Denial Program" designed to force reluctant villagers into 'strategic hamlets'. When this proved ineffective, defoliation was used in Operation Ranch Hand to deny enemy forces jungle and forest cover.

Spraying increased in intensity throughout the 1960s, to become what Yale University botany Professor, Arthur Galston called "the largest chemical warfare operation in history." But even though Vietnam's forests and hilltops were laid bare, spraying was widely recognised as both militarily and psychologically ineffective.

As the Americans continued spraying, indications of the toxicity of Agent Orange and its deadly contaminant of dioxin became evident. "I think the earliest indications that Agent Orange was harmful were when people came down with chloracne at some of the companies who were making it," says Griffiths. By 1969, "...tests revealed that as little as two parts of dioxin per trillion in the bloodstream was sufficient to cause deaths and abnormal births in laboratory animals."

A by-product of chlorine production, dioxin works as an "environmental hormone." It causes disastrous changes at a hormonal and genetic level - causing diseases and deformities ranging from Hodgkins disease and diabetes to spina bifida and leukaemia. Because these diseases also occur naturally, and because there is reluctance on the part of chemical companies and the US government to admit liability, there is no universally recognised causative link between dioxin and many of its associated diseases.

“The connection between Agent Orange exposure and associated diseases is accepted by the majority of scientists who work in the field,” says Dr Arnold Schechter, a professor at the University of Texas who is researching the health effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, “but there is resistance to connecting Agent Orange to some diseases when litigation is involved. Industry groups will try to minimise the health damage.”

It’s a view confirmed by Dr Steven Stellman of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. “Unquestionably there has been a tremendous amount of resistance to recognising diseases caused by Agent Orange. The US federal governement has resisted for years, and it has been very difficult to get studies going and very little research has been funded.”

Another problem is put forward by Dr Wayne Dwernychuk of Hatfield Consultants. “Western epidemiologists do not feel that the scientific rigour of the Vietnamese studies meet western criteria in terms of experimental design and analysis. Dr. Phuong, Director of the Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City has witnessed first hand the birth defects issue as it pertains to highly exposed populations. She has followed this for over 30 years and is absolutely convinced the relationship is there. The US government's position has been that no unequivocal evidence exists which proves a firm link between exposure and expression of birth defects and health issues in Vietnam. However, the US Dept. of Veteran's Affairs provides financial compensation to US Vietnam veterans for certain diseases if they can show they were exposed to Agent Orange during their tours of duty. Spina Bifida, a birth defect in children of US Vietnam veterans, is covered by Veteran's Affairs ... but not for victims in Vietnam.”

Griffiths began documenting the full horrors of the genetic effects of Agent Orange at Tu Du Hospital in Saigon. "I went in and it was this dark room filled with all these deformed foetuses." Griffiths photographed conjoined twins, collapsed skulls and twisted spines, yet somehow he photographed these dead babies with a gentle tenderness. "I tried to give them some humanity," he explains. "Some are hugging or embracing. I didn't want to turn it into a freak show.”

As Griffiths continued to photograph, the full scale of Vietnam's tragedy became apparent to him. In 1998 he visited Cam Nghia, a village where 10% of children were born with serious deformities. "Cam Nghia had the highest number of abnormalities in Vietnam, but what you're not told is that in the majority of cases the foetus doesn't even develop. And then there are miscarriages and live births dying within 48 hours."

In 1971, the use of Agent Orange officially ceased in Vietnam, but its contaminant of dioxin is still claiming fresh victims today. "The toxicity is so great that once it is in your body, you can't get rid of it. The exception of course is lactating mothers who can pass it out through their milk to their children. Now they're finding concentrations of dioxin in the sediment of this fishpond where the levels are the highest they have recorded in the world, and yet the people are still eating the fish from there. Anywhere else in the world people would be moved out and the earth would be put into plastic bags taken away and buried".

Griffiths believes Vietnam presents a unique, and missed, opportunity to study what happens to victims of dioxin. "You've got people who are culturally and ethnically identical living around Vietnam. Only the south was sprayed - the north wasn't sprayed, so you've got your control group there and it gives a wonderful opportunity. But almost the only company that are doing major research are Hatfield Consultants of Canada who are doing a lot of good work." Research undertaken by Hatfield includes an assessment of dioxin residues on parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the correlation between continuing birth defects in villages and their proximity to former US Special Forces bases with high levels of dioxin contamination.

American veterans are still suffering from Agent Orange exposure, and are seeking compensation above and beyond the 1984 settlement of US $180 million (though no admission of liability) won from chemical companies that produced Agent Orange.

The Vietnamese have never received any compensation for the chemical warfare visited upon them. Instead they have an inheritance of death and deformity. Philip Jones Griffiths' Agent Orange is a devastating record of these victims of chemical warfare.

--End --

Pablo Escobar

2008-01-28T22:19:00.001Z

A Myth in His Own Making

“As a child, he loved nature and animals,” says Dona Hermilda, the mother of Columbian drug dealer, Pablo Escobar. “He loved trees from a very early age. He nearly cried when his father had to chop them down.”

Pablo Escobar was not so sensitive when it came to people. His rise from small-time gangster to the world’s biggest drug dealer was accompanied by a level of violence that brought Colombia to a state verging on civil war. He was responsible for killing half the nation’s Supreme Court and blowing an airliner out of the sky, he murdered politicians, journalists and police at will and transformed his home town of Medellin into the world’s most dangerous city. In 1991, he walked out of a prison he had built for himself and spent the next 2 years on the run. He escaped over 14,000 police raids before his death in 1993, shot by Colombian police on the rooftop of a safe house in Medellin.

James Mollison’s latest work, Pablo Escobar, is a visual examination of the life and times of Escobar. Tying in images from a variety of archives with a text, the book provides a visual overview of a man who was once America’s Public Enemy Number One.

“I was in Colombia and I was doing this Narcotecture project,” says Mollison. “I got excited about it because of the idea and name. People would tell me about buildings made from drug money which had swimming pools instead of balconies, but then I got there and there would be nothing interesting to photograph. The buildings were boring.”

“I was depressed about it, but I was photographing in Medellin and was in the process of going to an old Escobar office block called Edifacio Monaco - which only confirmed that the project didn’t work. The building was occupied by Columbia’s public prosecution service, I was apprehended by security and had my camera confiscated. I was taken to meet the boss whose office was in Escobar’s old bedroom. He was so excited by this and brought out this whole book of photographs. Seeing this record really threw me because other books on Pablo Escobar have a US perspective but the images I saw were gritty and not glamorous. I wanted to know how Escobar had got into this position.”

Mollison returned to Columbia 6 months later and set about searching for visual records of Escobar’s life, not an easy task considering many pictures had disappeared or been destroyed - Escobar paid the police to destroy their files and the mass media were not much help either. Most journalists who were brave enough to tell the truth about Escobar were killed. Escobar closed down Colombia’s second biggest daily, El Espectador, by killing its editor, bombing its offices and forcing advertisers to withdraw their patronage. However, the bravery of El Espectador’s journalists shows in the archive they held on the activities of Escobar and his associates.

The El Espectador archive forms the heart of Mollison’s book, its black and white images detailing the height of Escobar’s sociopathic terror against Colombian society.

“One thing I came to understand was Pablo was obsessed with power,” says Mollison. “He was a classic gangster. He wasn’t really a drug smuggler, but he was born in the right place at the right time and there was an opportunity for him to do what he did.”

Images show the rise of Colombia’s cocaine industry in the early 1980s, a time when Escobar’s exports to the United States were earning him tens of millions of dollars a month. In 1982, Escobar’s obsession with power caused him to make the mistake that would ultimately lead to his downfall - he entered Colombian politics. Disturbed by the open influence of drug money on Colombian society, government minister Lara Bonilla attacked Escobar in congress. “The violence started at that time,” says Colombian congressman, Alberto Villamizar. “Lara Bonilla was fighting them and they killed him and until Escobar was dead it was just a war.”

The El Espectador archive shows this war - the bombs, the killings, the mayhem and the continuing fight to extradite drug dealers to the United States. Police archives show the slow victory of the authorities - one shocking image shows the corpse of Gacha, a kingpin in the Medellin Cartel, his skull blown off, one eye staring to the heavens above. Other images show the victims of the death squads who operated against Escobar and his supporters, while colour pictures of Escobar’s death in 1993 come from the personal album of Hugo Martinez, the police officer who hunted him down.

“Escobar’s story is surrounded by so much myth,” says Mollison, “so we decided to let the people speak and tell their own story.”

So we see pictures of his rise to power in the late 70s, informal snaps taken by his personal photographer, El Chino, and Mollison’s own pictures of the landscapes and people who survived Escobar’s war on Colombia.

These images provide a different perspective on Escobar and together with the interviews with those close to him - his family, his minders, his hit men - they provided a more three-dimensional view of a man who was mythologized to a point where he was America’s Top International Bogeyman - a position since occupied by Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

Most interesting are El Chino’s photographs. These show Escobar the family man. One series of images shows him at his daughter’s 12th birthday party, just after Escobar had become number one on the FBI’s most wanted list. He’s on the run, but we see him dancing and drinking and presenting his daughter with a white horse. The final image shows him sitting deep in thought, a bizarre cocktail of dry ice and cordial foaming in front of him. “That is my favourite photograph of him,” says El Chino, “because in the middle of the party he is left thinking and that is him... He was not a happy man.”

We see Escobar’s country retreat, Hacienda Napoles, resplendent with its own private zoo, and the prison Escobar built for himself (and walked out of) as part of a surrender deal to avoid extradition. Rough colour shots show the sex toys found in the prison and the football pitch where Columbia’s most successful team played Escobar’s prison side. Escobar’s side won.

Mollison’s provides the images for the aftermath of Escobar’s life. There are interiors of homes built by Escobar for the poor of Medellin - their ramshackle but immaculate interiors decorated by images of Jesus, Mary and Pablo Escobar. A portrait of Escobar’s mother shows eyes that perhaps saw, heard and spoke more evil than she would have us believe, while a searing portrait of Popeye, one of Escobar’s most trusted lieutenants, shows a face that seems almost incapable of showing any remorse or pity or pain.

The artwork of German Arrubla recreates Escobar as a kitsch Jesus/Che figure, complete with camouflage robes and a bleeding heart, while the personal album of US DEA agent, Javier Pena, shows Pena ( a Borat-lookalike with crimpy hair and big tash) posing with the guns, gold and drugs seized by the police on raids on the Medellin Cartel’s properties.

Mollison was only able to research Escobar because he has become a mythic figure. “He’s become someone you can talk about because he’s the bad guy,” says Mollison. “If I had asked about the people controlling the drug trade today, that would have been different. The new guys have learnt from Escobar not to be so flamboyant, to be more low key. In Escobar’s time, if somebody got killed they would be dumped on the street. Now they get buried instead, but it’s not that different.”

Mollison’s Pablo Escobar is both a simple and a complex character. Simple, because he was essentially a gangster, complex because his violence was on such a grand, almost legendary, scale. Mollison’s text draws a picture of Escobar that acts as a primer on the politics of the drugs trade and how money, power and law influence each other both domestically and internationally. Mollison doesn’t make any solid conclusions about anything. Instead, he poses questions that remain unanswered, and lie awake in one’s mind long after one has read the engaging and accessible text. The effect is compounded by the images ( and the wide range of sources they come from) that contradict and undermine each other and add to the idea of Pablo Escobar as a myth in his own, and many other people’s making.

“He was just like any other bandit,” says Hugo Martinez, the police chief ultimately responsible for Escobar’s death. “I have always put a lot of the blame on the gringos - the agencies, the press that built him up on the world stage as a Mafioso who was very important... They fanned the flames. He thought that he was very important and started believing that he had the right to kill presidential candidates - to do anything he wanted.”

Li Zhensheng

2008-01-17T09:12:00.000Z

Bringing the Revolution Home

When Li Zhensheng, now 63, began working as a photographer at the Heilongjiang Daily in 1963, his job was simple - to capture glowing images of the party, peasantry and workers of China’s most northerly province.

Then came the Cultural Revolution. Purges of “class enemies” and “capitalist roaders”, the overthrow of “counter-revolutionary” communist party leaders and internecine fighting between rival groups of Red Guards claimed millions of lives and brought the People’s Republic to the brink of collapse.

There to record it all was Li Zhensheng. Acting outside his brief of presenting only the positive side of proletarian China, he captured the violence and chaos in an archive of incredible images that constitutes arguably the most important body of Chinese photojournalism ever created.

Li’s inspiration to record history started at Changchun Film School in the early 1960s. “Wu Ying Xian, the famous Chinese photographer told me, “Photographers are not only witnesses. They are recorders as well.” It made me realise that when we record history, we have to record it completely - the negative as well as the positive,” explains Li.

As the Cultural Revolution gathered pace, negatives there were aplenty. Li recorded the desecration of a Buddhist Monastery, and the humiliation of monks, forced to stand holding a banner that reads “To hell with Buddhist Scriptures. They are full of dog farts.”

Then there is the political persecution. In one incredible sequence, Li shows Heilongjiang’s Provincial Governor, Li Fanwu, being denounced. Head bowed, and standing on a chair, his head is shaved by zealous Red Guards, their eyes full of ideological fury.

Ren Zhongyi, the provincial party secretary, is shown with his face daubed with ink and wearing a dunce’s gap. In 1966, Ren was accused of being a “Black Gang Element” and “capitalist-roader”. Surviving the traumas of over 2,000 criticism sessions, Ren became the Party Secretary of Guangdong Province in the 1980s - and can count the establishment of the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen amongst his reforming achievements.

Other photographs from the Cultural Revolution do exist, but what makes Li’s unique is they are the only ones that portray the period with such journalistic and historical integrity and purpose.

“When I took these images,” explains Li, “photographers from other newspapers just stood there. They said - “what’s the use of taking these photos - you will be criticised for wasting film” - and would only shoot the positive propaganda images.” Li, in contrast, would shoot pictures for publication, then concentrate on capturing the negative images - the violence and psychodrama of Red Guard rallies and criticism sessions.

To get better access to political events, Li noticed that “...people wearing a Red Guard armband could take photographs freely...” So Li got his rebel armband and “...whenever I wore it I could take all the photographs I wanted, and nobody ever bothered me.”

As a Red Guard, Li soon became the target of rival groups - as did his growing archive of politically suspect negatives. “Before I realised it was risky to take these photos,” he says, “I only put the negatives away so my colleagues wouldn’t see them. In 1968, when our rebel group was about to be criticised, I realised I had to do something about the negative images. I transferred all the negative images from my office to my home. Had they been found, they would have been burnt. I witnessed many negatives being burnt.”

Li’s images became even grimmer as the Cultural Revolution descended into chaos. He shows us factional fighting between rival groups and, in some powerful portraits, the resulting injuries and deaths.

Most moving are a series of images of 8 people being executed. One of the condemned is a “counterrevolutionary” technician. As he is taken to the place of execution he closes his eyes for the last time and cries out, “This world is too dark!” Then he is led away to be shot, his eyes closed tight against the world he will never see again.

Li also suffered personal tragedies. His first girlfriend left him after her father was denounced as a “dog landlord”, his father-in-law killed himself, and Li himself was criticised and spent 2 years at a “rectification” school near the Chinese-Soviet border.

But Li survived and so did his negatives - wrapped in oilskin cloth and hidden under the floorboards of his one-room home.

Normality slowly returned to China, and Li returned to the Heilongjiang Daily where he photographed Harbin’s commemoration of the death of Mao in 1976 and the celebrations that met the fall of the Gang of Four and the historic end of the Cultural Revolution.

Li’s photographs were not made public until 1988 - when 20 were shown, and won first prize, in an exhibition in Beijing. These images were so powerful that they attracted the attention of Robert Pledge, cofounder and director of Contact Press Images, who met with Li and agreed to edit and publish the book. The Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989 delayed work on the book which only began in 1996.

First, the negatives had to be taken to New York. “The first time I went to New York, I didn’t dare to bring negatives for fear they would be confiscated. The next time, I carried a small amount of negatives each time, which I hid in my wife’s feminine products. After 2 times, there had been no problem, so I became bolder and carried more.”

Li carried over 30,000 negatives to New York, which were edited down to 285 featured in the book, all of which are shown uncropped and in chronological order, as a true historical record of the Cultural Revolution.

Li’s aim is for Red-Color News Soldier to be published in mainland China. “It will be published in China,” he says, “but it’s a question of time.”

It’s also a question of politics, and whether the Chinese Communist Party leadership are willing to address the tragedies of 20th century Chinese history and the role the party played in them.

If they are, then the true historical value of Li’s photography will be realised, and Li’s ultimate goal met - “I hope this book will show what happened in that period, in order that this tragedy wil never happen again.”

trent parke

2008-01-16T19:12:00.000Z

Australian Passion

“I love taking pictures,” says Trent Parke, “and I love Australia. It’s the only place I want to photograph.” Parke’s dual passions have resulted in a body of work that portrays Australia in a revelatory light, a light that is as revealing of Parke’s own psyche as it is of Australia itself.

“My mum died when I was 10 and it changed everything about me,” says Parke. “It made me question everything around me.” Soon after his mother’s death, Parke began taking photographs with an old Pentax, and his questioning became visual. “Photography is a discovery of life which makes you look at things you’ve never looked at before. It’s about discovering yourself and your place in the world.”

Parke’s discovery of the world around him include The Seventh Wave ( shot by Parke and his partner, Narelle Autio), a portrayal of the insignificance of man set against the raw power of Australia’s seas. The theme of isolation and alienation is developed in his black and white exploration of Sydney, Dream/Life, a work where Parke combined extreme lighting and long exposures to create a street photography that reveals the fragile facades of any urban existence.

With Dream/Life under his belt, Parke was looking for inspiration to re-examine the state of the Australian nation. He found it when he saw an article saying that Australia had lost its innocence, that the Bali bombings, environmental disaster and a beleaguered indigenous population had made the Lucky Country not so lucky any more. This supposed loss of Australian innocence, Parke decided, would be the subject of his next project.

“I went on a giant road trip where me and Narelle travelled around for 2 years living in a 2-man tent. I’d shoot my film on the road and because I wanted to stay in that sense of being on a road trip, I’d process it on the road, hanging the negatives up to dry on a clothesline. I had a laptop, so every time we got to a caravan park I could scan the pictures in, print up little postcards and see what was happening.”

With the pictures shot, Parke made the exhibition (now showing in Australia) and is currently editing the book version. “The book is almost a fiction where I’m creating a story from these documentary pictures. It’s basically making a statement that the world’s going crazy,” says Parke. In three parts, Minutes to Midnight puts Australia on a visual journey where the nation approaches the apocalypse, meets the apocalypse and finally finds redemption and rebirth.

It is a raw work that combines the energy of street photography with Parke’s penchant for weird lighting. In one street shot from Sydney, a line of people stand across the road, small figures lit by late sunlight. They are surrounded by a strip of white light against which giant shadows rise. It’s a haunting image that is simply baffling until Parke reveals it was a three second exposure. “It is a bus going through an intersection and this is the shadow of people on this side of the intersection on the bus. But for me, it reminds me of Hiroshima where people’s shadows were burnt onto the wall.”

Next comes the post-apocalyptic aftermath. Plagues of flying foxes flit across the sky, the road kill body of a kangaroo foetus lies on the tarmac and a barren landscape of scorched tree stumps from a firestorm in Canberra are just a few of the images that spell doom Australian style. It’s a signifier of how, beyond the beach and barbie facade of the Australian Dream, a harsh and unforgiving environment beckons, a world where death and despair are, and always have been, part of the landscape.

For a reborn Australia, Parke shows a New Year Bachelor and Spinster Ball in the depths of the Outback. As New Year approaches, a water truck sprays the revellers with water to keep them cool. Another image shows flying foxes tracing a sperm-like pattern in the sky, while Parke’s images of his heavily pregnant partner coiled up like a foetus in a billabong adds an autobiographical touch to the story, as does the beautiful image of his son being born.

With Minutes To Midnight done, if not quite dusted, Parke was looking for a new challenge. “The Minutes to Midnight pictures were lyrical and timeless, but there was nothing that really identifies Australia in a physical sense, so I wanted to do something that looked at urban Australia, that used signs and advertisement that would date the country in a particular time. I wanted more detail so people can read signs. That was why I had to go up from 35 mm to medium format. At the same time, I started going through our family albums and I found all these old kodachromes and I was amazed by the colour. That was the main catalyst for going into colour.”

So Parke went from shooting black and white on a Leica to medium format colour on a Mamiya 7. As the project began, Parke’s street-shooting style became more considered. “I wanted to have this quietness, this stillness to the images. I’d have five spots in my day where I shoot from and I know that at say, 7 o’clock in the morning the light will be in a certain place and I can shoot there for ten minutes, then I move back to another spot where the light will be in a different place and I’ll shoot there. With this work, I’ll go back to a place again and again and again until something happens. I shoot a lot of pictures, up to 40 rolls a day. It costs me a fortune in film.”

One Sydney image shows a boy staring straight at the camera as he is held by his brother. Behind him his diminutive mother talks on a mobile, pram in hand, while to one side a tall man in a blue shirt talks to a woman in pink. All are bathed in a reflected light, but around them pools of black lap over other passers-by, granting them the kind of anonymity we associate with the city.

Parke’s hunger for seeing and photographing in new ways have made him Australia’s most visionary photographer, a man who has made the documentation of Australia his life’s work. Despite the creative energy, enthusiasm and passion, he remains down-to-earth, his philosophy as deceptively simple as his pictures are complex. “You shoot a lot of shit and you’re bound to come up with a few good ones.”

Jacob Aue Sobol

2008-01-15T19:10:00.000Z

Second That Emotion

“When I was a child, my father gave me a book called The Diary of a Hunter. It showed Greenland and the changes that were taking place there. I finally visited Greenland when I was a student. I wanted to show the culture clash between the traditional and the modern. I went to Tiniteqilaaq, a settlement with 150 people. I had 2 rules while I was out there - no pictures of icebergs or empty beer bottles.

After 5 weeks, I got home, developed my film and realised I had only photographed the clichés of Greenland, so I went again and stayed with a priest called Hans. I went hunting with him and on one trip, I saw a seal - the rule is that if you see an animal first, you kill it. Hans gave me the gun and I shot the seal. It was the first animal I had ever killed and it changed my relationship with Greenland forever.

Then I fell in love with Sabine and started living with her and her family. Now, instead of coming home with exposed film, I wanted to come home with fish or fur. I started using my compact camera to record my emotions with Sabine. I was fascinated by the spontaneous way she expressed her joy, her fear, her sorrow and I tried to capture that in my photographs.

I stayed for 6 months then we came to Denmark to earn money. It was the first time Sabine had seen streets and trees and she got very homesick. For 2 and a half years we lived between Denmark and Greenland. On the last trip we broke up and I came back to Denmark.

I was so depressed in my flat in Copenhagen. I started looking through my photographs as a way of being with Greenland. At first I struggled, but then I realised the pictures that really hit me in the stomach were all about Sabine, and that the book had to be about her. I was in love. Sabine is a love story.

I didn’t photograph for 2 years after Sabine. Then I went to Guatemala to make a film with my brother about a girl who sees the sea for the first time. I went back to stay with this family - I wanted to get to know the people I was photographing. Photography is a kind of mirror that can show you things that aren’t visible to the eye. It can be very concrete and immediate but I tell fragments of things, and people have to look inside themselves to put those fragments together.

Now I am in Tokyo. When I started the project here I didn’t know what I was doing but now I do. In Japan you have this photographic tradition of telling personal things in diary form, and this project is part of that tradition.

In Japan there’s a clash between generations and collective and individual cultures. I photograph the collective culture from a distance and the individuals from closer. I don’t have much relationship to the people I meet. Instead I use animals to make a connection, especially the wild cats you see everywhere - they can give you a closeness you can’t get with people in that environment.

It’s about an emotion. Anders Petersen always told me to photograph with the stomach, not the mind. It’s about asking questions. I photograph daily life but it’s always an attempt to leave something for the viewer to interpret.”

Daido Moriyama - Memories of a Dog

2008-01-14T10:24:00.000Z

Blurred, Dark and Grainy

by: Colin Pantall

Daido Moriyama was seven years old when America dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The post-war years he grew up in were the bleakest time in Japanese history. Living amid scenes of destruction and occupied by the Americans, the Japanese people were dislocated from their past. Having effectively lost their identity, they turned inwards and dedicated themselves to the rebuilding of their country. Economically, it was a hugely successful venture. Culturally and psychologically, it was a time of darkness, depression and spiritual emptiness.

This was the environment Daido Moriyama grew up in, and the atmosphere and mood of this environment is what he photographed. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, he shot the world around him - the streets and alleyways around his Shinjuku home, the roads on which he travelled, the television which he watched. He photographed his own disturbed, inner state, and in doing so captured the troubled soul of post-war Japan.

Moriyama’s photographs from this time are some of the most distinctive images ever made. Blurred, dark and grainy, they are also completely at odds with traditional ideas of what a good photograph is supposed to be.

“Daido’s work is difficult,” says Michael Hoppen, whose Michael Hoppen contemporary Gallery represents Moriyama in the UK. “Sometimes people see it and think, ‘Why would anyone want to buy Daido’s work? It looks like he doesn’t know what he is doing. So when you see his work, you have to forget everything you know about photography. Instead you need to know something about his background and what he’s trying to do.”

“Daido Moriyama is a true visionary,” says Martin Parr. “He has a very distinctive language that he’s made his own. There are only 5 or 6 truly great photographers in the world and he’s one of them.”

Memories of a Dog (published by Nazraeli Press) is the first English translation of a collection of Moriyama’s writing from the 1980s. Printed in parallel with his photography, it is a true classic - a work of immense poetry in which Moriyama connects photography, memory, longing and despair.

“Memories of a Dog shows he is thinking about what he does,” says Michael Hoppen. “It shows us the meaning in his work and the emotional turmoil that he went through as a photographer and an artist to reach the level he has reached. He has been through some torrid times and has a dark vision of the world. Moriyama’s work is about despondency, depression and despair.”

In one chapter, Moriyama longs for the freedoms of a sentimentalised childhood spent foraging around old US bases. He visits one and writes how, “On every street corner, a sense of weariness and vulgarity pervades, like a dusty sun-bleached painting in primary colors.” The streets are deserted, the landscape is faded and filled with abandonment and despair.

Another chapter finds Moriyama seeking to escape himself through an endless cycle of travelling and shooting. He attempts to capture on film the gentle consolations of life, “...the faint white profile of a woman that grazed a corner of the windshield... the gaze of a boy standing still in a field are like images once seen on a screen that are burned vividly into my mind’s eye...,” yet, “...no matter how much I shoot most of what I want simply flows away like water spilling through a net, and always what remains are only vague, elusive fragments of images...”

Then there are those images, those ‘fragments’ of half-forgotten memories - the darkness of the night and the emptiness of the road, seascapes that stretch out into unrelenting darkness, streets and alleyways where humanity flits, half-concealed and ghoul-like, between extremes of shadow and light.

Although Moriyama uses photography to understand himself and the world around him, he does so very much on his own terms. “In a way the camera is his divining rod,” says Hoppen. “It has it’s own energy and impetus and makes him take the photograph, rather than the other way round. His photography is, like all good photography, a search for truth.”

Moriyama’s search for truth really began in 1959 when he saw William Klein’s ground-breaking photography of New York for the first time. Freely shot in high-contrast tabloid style, Klein’s radically cropped images captured the dark energy of the city and its people.

“I learned from his photographs real experiences,” Moriyama has said of Klein’s New York. “Klein’s images, which were rough, simple and even violent at a glance, made me realise the limitless freedom, beauty, and tenderness of photographic art.”
This openness to new and different ideas is another clue to Moriyama’s success. He cites Western influences as varied as Weegee, Warhol, Atget and Frank, as well as writers like Proust, Kerouac and Kafka, all adding up to a visual perspective that makes his work accessible on a global scale.

But Moriyama was also influenced by Japan’s greatest photographers - people like Shomei Tomatsu and Eikoh Hosoe. Inspired by them, he made famous images that help define post-war Japan. Look at his images of Japanese soldiers in a coffee shop, his Computer Age workers, his Tokyo Housing Development couple or his high-kicking marching band, and you are taken directly into the claustrophobic world of 1960s Japan.

But as the 1960s progressed, Moriyama looked increasingly inwards. While other photographers were shooting the Vietnam War or the transformation of Japan into an economic superpower, Moriyama became divorced from the time. Instead he engaged with the margins of society, prowling the streets for images to reproduce in Moriyama’s favoured form - the book.

“His work is designed for the book - not a magazine or gallery,” says Michael Hoppen. “In a traditional photo-essay, there is an easy-to-read narrative. Daido’s narrative is about irrationality - of life and trying to make sense of what is going on around us.”

The most irrational of Moriyama’s books are The Hunter and Bye-bye Photography - both published in 1972. Images from The Hunter in Daido Moriyama include his mournful nudes, threatening landscapes and Moriyama’s famous picture of a barefoot prostitute fleeing down a rubble-strewn alleyway.

During this time, Moriyama also worked for Provoke - a magazine whose influence far outlasted its 5 issues. “Provoke challenged the preconceptions of photography,” says Parr, “and tried to make it more about how you feel about the world, rather than how to describe the world.”

How Moriyama felt about the world was evident from Bye-bye Photography. “Daido was on the verge of giving up photography totally,” says Parr, “and then exploded with this book of scratched, blurred and dark images of posters, newspapers and televisions.”

It wasn’t well-received at the time, and many people feel that its subject matter is not really worth recording. “He makes pictures of newspapers or television and people say, ‘oh , that’s easy - it’s just a picture of a newspaper or advertisement’. But why is that any less valid or worthwhile than a picture of a field or a landscape,” says Michael Hoppen.

“The trouble is people see his work and think it’s easy. But actually it’s very hard to do, because he’s photographing things he knows in a very truthful way - a very emotional way. In terms of technique, you can see what he does, and how he does it, but that isn’t what makes a Moriyama image. There are plenty of people who try to copy him, but ultimately they fail because there is always something missing.”

More recently, Moriyama’s photography has become calmer, perhaps mirroring his more stable psychological state - he has left the depression, insomnia and addictions of the past behind him. Yet still there is that truthfulness in his work, that search for the ultimate reality. “When you see his photography,” says Martin Parr, “you know it’s his work. He can make iconography out of virtually nothing.”

But Moriyama’s iconic figures of dogs, cats, roses and hats have another element - a certain sadness, and it is Moriyama’s ability to capture the melancholy and darkness of life that really makes him unique. His camera captures a world that is becoming increasingly violent, turbulent and full of uncertainty. It is the world Moriyama grew up in and is the world we all inhabit. Perhaps that is why his pictures have such a visceral effect.

In Memories of a Dog, Moriyama remembers an anti-American riot in 1960s Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, and the transformation of the innocuous and unthreatening into the dark and violent. He considers the changes since that time and writes, “The times look quiet at first glance. But I think they are actually more brutal. That dark night in Shinjuku was nothing but a trial run. And to me, as always, the coming of the night is frightening.”

Lise Sarfati

2007-12-31T19:10:00.001Z

Madonna and Child

by Colin Pantall

Four years ago, Lise Sarfati was travelling across America to photograph teenagers for her New Life series. One of Sarfati’s most successful New Life subjects was Sloane, a chameleon-like teenager from Berkeley, California. Inspired by her New Life series, Sarfati returned to the United States to focus on the relationship between Sloane and her mother.

One image from the series (titled Mother and Daughter ) shows Sloane outside a suburban house. She looks down, away from the camera, her heavily made-up face further disguised by the veil of hair that surrounds her. Sloane is the daughter, but what kind of daughter is she - her face is a mask that expresses no emotion and reveals nothing except a slightly eerie suburbanised beauty. The effect is compounded by other images - Sloane in big glasses in a frilly necked red dress, Sloane by a book shelf, her face a picture of disinterest and boredom, and Sloane in her bedroom wearing the kind of dress that Loretta Lux’s otherworldly children would die for. Sloane almost struggles under the weight of wigs, cosmetics and costumes she wears.

This lack of expression and emotion is deliberate, says Sarfati. “There is little emotion because I think that people do not express their emotion anymore,” says Sarfati. “They keep their emotions locked up and sometimes they have no relationship with their physical environment. Instead they wear make up. It is like a mask. Everything is inside and they can’t communicate. Their relationship is with their complexion, with their appearance, with their clothes, with fashion.”

Clothes are also a key to the mother daughter relationship. The coat Sloane wears is borrowed from her mother, part of Sloane’s attempts to create an individuality through dress.

Sarfati reprises this obsession with clothes in her portraits of Christine, Sloane’s mother. Shot from below, Christine is photographed in a sleeveless dress, her black hair cascading over her shoulders, her heavily tattooed arms held by her side. She looks down as sun-dappled trees reach over her. In another image she wears a wedding dress, a sad-eyed bride awaiting her fate, while another shows her standing in the black dress, her hand holding her stomach in a posture of grief and regret.

Sarfati is interested in the similarity and differences mothers and daughters show. So we see Christine wearing standing in the yard wearing a dressing gown clutching a child’s bicycle, one Sloane used to ride perhaps. Is Christine mournful of the childhood that Sloane once had but has now lost, or of the child Christine herself used to be? Similarly, the image of Sloane crawling on a bed evokes something both of the physicality of childhood and also impending adulthood and a transition into the mother that she may one day become.

Gloom and doom pervades these Mother and Daughter images (the first in a series that is to be continued) but that is perhaps a reflection of Sarfati as much as it is of Christine and Sloane or American culture. “They look melancholy and depressed,” says Sarfati. “They look like me. Everybody is depressed.”

But though Sarfati believes that what she shows is brutal and a result of her control, her suggestive mix of costume, props and gaze also portray something that lies outside that control. “People think photography is reality. This is a misunderstanding. Photography is just pictures, a representation of something. Whatever you photograph, it is never what it is.”

Mark Cohen - Grim Street

2007-12-19T09:25:00.000Z

It’s Grim Up North

By day, Mark Cohen shoots catalogues, portraits and children at his studio in Wilkes Barre, a Pennsylvanian mining town 3 hours drive from New York City. At dusk, he transforms into a predatory street photographer, his flash and Leica ready to catch the people of Wilkes Barre unaware.

His most famous pictures - his girl blowing bubble gum for example - became iconic images that earned Cohen a series of shows both in New York and overseas (including New York’s MoMa in 1973 and the Photographers’ Gallery in 1981). Now his work is published in Grim Street, an outstanding collection of Cohen’s skewed perspectives of Wilkes Barre from the 1960s to the present day.

Inspired by Cartier Bresson, Cohen started to photograph in the 1960s. Leica in hand, he went out to capture his own Decisive Moments on the humble streets of his home town.

The influence of Cartier Bresson is evident in the first few pages of Grim Street. But as the book progresses, his work becomes harsher as Cohen develops his no-questions asked, in-your-face technique. “I’d shoot and walk away quick - I’d never talk to the people. To people who were watching what I was doing it looked like inappropriate behaviour,” says Cohen. All over the city, it seems there are people trying to avoid Cohen’s lens as he pokes it into their faces. On the streets, in their cars and even on their own doorsteps, people throw their hands up in defence at Cohen’s snap-and-grab photographic style.

There are more faceless pictures with Cohen’s decapitation shots - heads cropped out of the picture. They start with the first image in the book, of a headless horseman, another of Cohen’s iconic images. More follow: a girl in a sailor dress holding an ice-lolly or the woman in her white ribbed shirt, her hand half raised in apparent defence.

“A lot of the pictures are headless because I didn’t want to identify the people and need a release,” says Cohen, “but the reason is more often because it’s less of a violation to take a picture of people’s knees than their face.”

Cohen laces the anonymity of his subjects with hints of detail - a wisp of hair or cotton-clad breasts. He lingers on the clothes his subjects wear showing the textures and patterns of their dresses and coats and the rips and tears they have suffered.

The key element in Cohen’s photography is his radical use of flash. “At first I used a tiny little flash that would only work up to 5 feet so I’d move closer and closer and people would hide,” he says. “The flash makes this zone of 1-2 feet I could work very quickly in. With a wide-angle lens, I didn’t have to think about focus or aperture. I would hold the camera in one hand, the flash in the other without looking through the viewfinder and then bang - the flash would give lots of detail in the foreground and all this ambient light and the buildings in the background, especially around dusk.”

Cohen’s Jump Rope picture is a prime example of this. A girl skips in the middle of a Wilkes Barre street - a tree, fence, house and car stand almost obscured in the background as the headless girl jumps, the detail on her high-necked patterned dress standing out above her grubby socks and skinny legs.

Skinny legs and torsos are a theme running throughout the book. Bare-chested boys appear again and again, their bellies streaked with dirt and grime and popsicle stains. Some flex their muscles, others hold props and some, like the boys tying the puppy to a tree, betray the cruel realities of young boys and the games they play.

The people of Wilkes Barre didn’t always appreciate being flashed from close up by the hermetic Cohen, or having their children snapped as they played. People could get hostile, as shown in Cohen’s Fearful Mom - a picture of a woman staring direct into his camera, her gaze probing and questioning both Cohen and his camera.

“The antagonism got worse as time went by,” says Cohen. “It looked like I was up to some suspicious activity - they’d say why are you taking pictures. People would call the police - if that happened I could give an explanation. But people who didn’t call the police were worse. Because I had no explanation or credentials, people would demand an explanation and ask me why I was taking a picture of their house, their yard, their wife.”

“Sometimes people would take my licence plate number and find out where I lived,” says Cohen. “People like William Klein who worked in big crowds in New York were relatively anonymous, but in small towns like Wilkes Barre, taking pictures looks suspicious to some people - especially since 9/11.” So much so that every time Cohen took a picture, “...there would be an altercation, I now use a 50 mm - I had to back away.”

The lens may have changed over the years, but the format hasn’t. “I like regular 35 mm street photography. Things happen with 35 mm that don’t happen with other formats. It’s fast and it deals with chance. I’ve tried 5x4, Hasselblads, the lot, but they just don’t work for me.”

“The fist in the face shot is an example. The man was in a moving car and I used a 28 mm, my favourite lens, set at f22 at 1/1000 sec. I had no idea at the time that I had made that. I work with chance and sometimes I get lucky, but I don’t know what I’m going to get until I get to the darkroom.”

Cohen continues to make new work on the streets of Wilkes Barre, and is looking to exhibit his work in the UK and Europe, though he admits he is not sure who the audience for his work is, or what it is about.

“I showed in galleries and sold my work, but they aren’t necessarily the kind of pictures you want hanging on your living room wall. A collector bought the headless horseman picture and took it home. He brought it back the next day - his wife found it too frightening. The pictures I make are private and difficult pictures. They aren’t seascapes.”

That’s for sure - Cohen’s photographs show fear, mistrust and Cohen’s own invasions into otherwise private worlds. They are invasive yet at the same time they have an energy and (albeit very strange) beauty that goes beyond the merely intrusive.

“They are a long series of pictures that are very unconsciously driven. They are more psychological than anything else,” he says. “They are also autobiographical in some ways. My work is about fear and approaching this fear and a lot of it may be to do with my own way of thinking. Maybe that’s why some of the pictures work. There’s something I do that I don’t even understand now - that’s why they have this mystery.”

paul graham

2007-01-08T21:03:00.000Z

A Shiver of Possibility

There are 12 volumes to Paul Graham’s A Shimmer of Possibility and nothing much happens in any of them. A man smokes a cigarette, a woman eats a meal and a couple walk home from the supermarket. The themes are humdrum and so are the pictures. There is no spectacular light, no fancy angles and no in-your-face portraits. Everything is direct, to-the-point and supremely quiet. Yet somehow, add it all up and you have a work that brings together the great movements of American photography in a seemingly effortless swoop that redefines what a photo book can be.

The first volume sets the scene. Two sets of sequences are spliced together to provide a gentle rhythm for the American dream to unfold against. In the first of 9 images, an African-American man mows grass above a roadway in Pittsburgh. In the background, tree covered hills are bathed in a hazy sunlight and everything seems somehow idyllic. The next shots are wider and Graham reveals more of the surrounding landscape - gas station signs, telegraph poles and fast food restaurants enter the image. The grass the man is mowing is by a car park, it’s flecked with brown and is arid. This is no rural idyll, and the mowing work is no walk in the park either. It’s labour and it’s hard. The man wipes his face and trudges back and forth, and back again, his brown van waiting for him to finish the day. And when the day is done, he can eat and wash and replenish himself. Graham hints at the food the man will consume, splicing the mowing sequence with images from a convenience store, its shelves lined with processed food that is a pale an imitation of what food should be.

This build up of images is typical for Graham. Over the last 20 years, he has excelled at the quiet image, books like Troubled Land and New Europe revealing the fractured nature of what we take for granted in life. “As a photographer, I’ve always been attracted to the less spectacular side of life,” he says. “I’ve never been an ambulance chaser. I want to capture the tiny little eddies, the rivulets of everyday life. For A Shimmer of Possibility, I was trying to make sequences (someone waiting for a bus or lighting a cigarette) and then I wondered how you can give those moments dignity. In a gallery, you can give those moments wall space that isolates them, but in a book they can get lost in a mass of images.”

The dilemma for Graham was how to separate each sequence. Inspired by the short stories of Chekhov, he began to think of how he could make each sequence unique in itself. “Chekhov told very anonymous stories in Russia. One story is of a schoolteacher walking how and meeting a landowner and talking to him in his carriage - nothing much happens but the story gives you a perfect idea of what life was like in 19th century Russia that is utterly revealing and fascinating.”

Graham decided that separate volumes was the best way to present his photographic short stories, the unnumbered volumes providing something for people to get hold of and mull over separately. “The physical side of the 12 books is different. It’s very modest and slightly disconcerting having so many of them. I had them in a domestic situation at my parents’ home - 2 of them were on the sofa, 5 on the table and my parents and I were all looking at them. That’s why they aren’t in a slipcase - so people can have them scattered around. They aren’t numbered either. I don’t want to proscribe things, but want to show the flow of life. I want it to be like watering the garden, not by throwing buckets of water over it, but by having the river flow through it - so the stories build up and resonate in a quiet way.”

The stories build up through osmosis - subsequent volumes reinforcing and building on those that came before. One volume mixes a man shooting up outside a fast food restaurant with a girl playing on the pavement on the side of the street. Both have the detritus of their everyday life scattered around them, both are oblivious to the denuded landscape that surrounds them. Another volume shows a couple carrying a case of Pepsi down the street, walking into the anonymous distance of a suburban Texas street.

The sequences and mixing of sequences have a rhythm that captures the viewer, something that is quite deliberate on Graham’s part. “There are 4 sets of individuals in sequences, 2 sequences which have two intertwining sets of pictures, and then there are books which have 4 sets of intertwining pictures,” says Graham. “Then I started doing things that relate to a particular time - one book is a series of images from a four-hour walk I took down a street in Boston.
The biggest book is of New Orleans. All the images were shot at one intersection - that’s about one geographical point.”

In New Orleans, Graham shows us people standing on street corners, crossing the road and simply passing by. An African-American with orange dyed hair eats orange food, then smokes a cigarette, her toothless cheeks sucking towards her gums as she inhales, a hint at a back story of violence, drugs and hardship. Street signs, cars and tarmac dominate, while the organic detritus of New Orleans pre-Katrina, a flurry of spilled red berries, provides just a little relief from an abused landscape built without even a passing thought for the people who would inhabit it.

Not that A Shimmer of Possibility is all doom and gloom. “There is joy in some of them,” says Graham. “The butterfly flying in the sky is joyous, the pregnant lady is joyous. The people you see in the book are the less privileged, but that’s the same anywhere. If you take a walk through London, you don’t meet the wealthy people.”

Indeed, the most extreme of Graham’s poor people are almost marginal in the book - just as they are marginal in society. More prominent are those who carry on with their daily lives, reading the paper, or buying their food at shops like the local Meat Market. The thing everyone has in common is they live in a world that is dominated by tarmac and commercial typography, a world that shows debasement of life through the constructed environment. It’s the same for the wealthy. Their homes might be grand, but the attempts to control and order the natural environment still begin to scar the landscapes they inhabit.

Graham is very aware of where his work comes from. “There were 2 great shows in the most important decade in American photographic history - The New Documents in 1967 showed the work of Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus, and the New Topographics in 1975 featured Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz. They were spectacular shows and, together with work like William Eggleston’s colour photographs, reflected American society and landscape at a particular point in time.”

Graham’s work combines key street and topographic elements, so much so that it almost seems like a condensed history of American photography, right down to the interminable cloudscapes that pepper the book. It is street photography that is both difficult in its complexity, but also simple in the extreme. Graham points and shoots and that is all. This simplicity is problematic for some people. “What the art world likes is where you can see what the artist (Jeff wall or Gregory Crewdson for example) is doing,” says Graham. “They’re composing their picture, they’re lighting it, they’re staging it. Compare that to Garry Winogrand who some people in the art world thinks just makes snapshots. But other people, and I am one of them, do appreciate that his achievement is equal to or greater than that of an artist like Wall.”

Like Winogrand, Graham photographs what he sees. Unlike Winogrand, the photographs in A Shimmer of Possibility are (with the odd exception, such as Graham’s intersection picture where 10 things seem to be happening in every direction - a nod to Winogrand if ever there was one) so unassuming that they almost fall into the page. This quietness, together with the sequencing of pictures forces you to look at the pictures, to wonder what the photograph, and the book, is about. As soon as you are drawn into the book, the little things come to the fore - the postures, the expressions, the symbols of love and hope and despair. In fact virtually all the great themes of documentary photography appear in the 12 books, but in such a way that the visual cliches of drugs, race and poverty, and America itself, are left behind.

Where the Shimmer of Possibility lies, I’m not sure. It’s not in the mutilated tree that looks like a hand with the fingertips cut off, nor is it in the man scratching and losing on a street side garbage bin. Perhaps it’s in the people who Graham photographs, who are ordinary but have an existence that goes beyond Graham’s demythologised America. Or perhaps it’s in the last book, where the sun sets over a suburban street and a boy and girl play basketball as dusk falls, their youthful energy set against the down-at-heel homes. The book ends with a sequence of pop-arty images from a gas station. There are pickup trucks, petrol pumps and a flat roof rising against a blue and pink sky, a half moon dangling mid-centre, its glow dampened by the light from America below. There are possibilities there, but they do not exactly shimmer. A world dominated by oil, tarmac and steel, a world of lives sullied by mutilated landscapes. It seems to be more of A Shiver of Possibility that Graham shows?