ALICE SPRINGS / aka. JUNE NEWTON

Mirror, mirror on the wall –how am I doing as night-time falls?

There she is once again, posing before the mirror with her small camera in her right hand. It is as if not even a year has passed since 1981, when Helmut shot a portrait of hers in Monte Carlo. Her hands crossed, her body firm, and as always this very same determined gaze, bursting into an unspoken stream of creative strength and experiences.

“Alice Springs” was born at one dinner party with friends when Helmut made it clear that if there were to be one photographer called Newton in the family, this would be him. A name chosen blindfolded, with a pin and a map of Australia became from then onwards the photographic pseudonym of the “King of Kink’s” lifelong partner and creative confidante. This was not Mrs. Newton’s first artistic nickname. Another one had been born out of a different necessity during an audition back in the forties, when June Browne became the actress “June Brunell”. This second time, thirty years later, was for the actress and now painter June to establish herself as an important photographer in her own right. In the years to come she would be assigned commercial commissions for Vogue, Marie Claire and Vanity, while in 1976 she would make her artistic breakthrough dedicating her work to portraits of famous eccentrics, such as William Burroughs, Roy Lichtenstein, Christopher Isherwood and Robert Mapplethorpe. June’s pictures recovered the intimacy and the soul that Helmut’s edgy fashion pin-ups lacked. “I can see the truth and simplicity in the portraits of Alice Springs”, admitted Helmut in the introduction of their common book “Us and Them” in 1997. From her own part, she has always remained unpretentious. “I have no technique –I wing it and sometimes, I get lucky”. But we owe some of the most intimate and truthful portraits of Newton to her. Astoundingly straightforward and insightful at the same time, her lens has penetrated with a breathtaking sincerity the surface showing the man behind him, in the same unmediated way it illustrated the broken humanity of William Burroughs and the fragile woman beneath the actress Charlotte Rambling.

Mrs. Newton’s life is full of many befores and many afters. “There was a glorious middle, but now I’m living my ‘after Helmut’ life. It isn’t easy but I am energetic, have recovered from back surgery, which was performed a few weeks ago, and the creative juices are still flowing”, she comments, quoting Tennessee Williams, “En avant!” She has been a bit of everything; painter, actress, art director, photographer, film-maker, Helmut’s books’ editor, art director and curator for more than three decades, and the moving force behind the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin. “So, I guess”, she laughs, “the old saying “Jack of all trades, master of none”, fits me to a nutshell. Helmut once lovingly said to me, “You’re a jack of all trades, Junie”, kindly omitting the rest of the old saying”.

June has always been faithful to her motto, “Where there’s a will, there’s another way”. Almost four years after Helmut’s death, her life is full of plans for future projects: publishing her complete diaries; some kind of publication of postcards from Helmut sent before the fax was invented; the new exhibition in the Helmut Newton Foundation; and the come back of Alice Springs, who this time turns her camera on herself. “Eyemazing” features a series of self-portraits transmitting a hard to define immediacy and frankness. Beyond posing, beyond exposing one’s semi-nude body with the marks of surgery, beyond any conventional notion of age beauty, these intimate reflections express an awareness beyond time, the awareness of a female soul and of an ever evolving and expanding female artist.

Natasha Christia: How were these self-portraits born?
Alice Springs.: They were never meant to be a project, just a series of reflections of what I saw on the way to bed after dinner at the Chateau Marmont early this year. I never know when I’m going to photograph myself. It mostly happens when I’m cleaning my teeth or taking make-up off my face in front of the mirror before going to bed, or after surgery. In a detail from a print, I am wearing a necklace of a tube of my blood taken on the night following a face-lift. What I regret not having photographed is myself in the bathtub when the water turned bright red. I called for the nurse I’d hired for the night. “I’m haemorrhaging”, I cried. She raced in and said, “No! No! No! It’s just the blood coming from your hair, Madame.”

N.C.: How did your encounter with photography occur?
A.S.: I began to paint when one year Helmut gave me some canvases and a box of paints and brushes for Christmas. I bought books on how to paint from the local department store and boredom was relieved as I filled the canvases until the day when Helmut was unable to leave his bed because of a heavy cold. Someone had to notify the boy model booked for a cigarette advertisement on the Place Vendôme. I had already been working behind the scenes with Helmut for many years. So, I asked him to show me how to read the light meter and how to load the camera and went off and did the job. The model was most cooperative and it was when the cheque arrived in Helmut’s name from the English client that I knew I was in business.

N.C.: What equipment do you usually work with?
A.S.: I usually work with 35 mm cameras and a 50 mm lens “Shoemaker stick to your last”. Digital cameras don’t appeal to me.

N.C.: Why this special preference of yours to portrait photography?
A.S.: The focus on portraits was Helmut’s idea. I’d been working steadily on fashion and publicity assignments, always using the time in between waiting for the hairdresser and make-up experts to finish their work so as for me to take a few shots of the people involved on the shoot. One day Helmut said that these pictures were more interesting than the work I was doing. “But they’ll all end up in a drawer”, I said. However, I got the message and I also got lucky when the magazines Egoiste and Energumène asked me to take some portraits for them. I love taking portraits. I’ve photographed all my friends, their kids, doctors and nurses and I always give them prints.

N.C.: “But, you must have shot other subjects...!
A.S.: Of course! I have taken pictures of flowers that friends have sent and the changing landscape below the terrace of my apartment on the 19th floor. I have pictures of a beautiful pond that existed, before earth-moving equipment filled it in to make space for a great big hotel, which I have also photographed in all its stages of construction. I have a picture of two ducks sitting in it when it was reduced to a tiny puddle. The following morning Helmut called out to me, “Come, Junie, come, come, bring your camera”. The landfill had been completed. The ducks were gone.

N.C.: How difficult was to gain respect for your personal work as a photographer, as a woman and as the partner of a man established in his field?
A. S.: To quote William Shakespeare “To thine own self be true”. We did our own thing. As far as gaining respect as a photographer goes, well, I must be doing something right, otherwise I would not have been invited to contribute to your excellent magazine if I was just Helmut’s wife . My first editorial fashion series was for Dépêche Mode. They wanted Helmut, but he was under contract with Condé Nast. He suggested that they try me and they did with the proviso that they could kill the pictures. They gave me a chance and it worked. You can get one foot in the door as the wife of Helmut, but it can close as quickly as it opens if you can’t deliver the goods.

N.C: You have edited the finest books on Helmut Newton. What do you consider as the elements for a good photography publication?
A.S.: An understanding of the work and good material.

N.C. You have also worked with film-making. In this case too, your projects are visual diaries and portraits. Could you tell us a few words about them?
A.S.: I took Helmut to a camera store in 1994 to buy him a present for Christmas. The salesman presented us with one of the first video cameras. Helmut took one look at it and said, “I’m a photographer, Junie, not a movie man”. So, I bought it for myself and I knew exactly what to do with it – film Helmut at work. I didn’t know the front-end from the back-end of the camera, but I read the instructions carefully and I did a pretty good job, especially as stabilizers had not been installed in the early cameras, which is why the film jumps around a bit. But it reveals the man as much as the photographer. Unlike the special occasions when TV crews would arrive on the set and everyone was aware that they were being filmed, no one took any notice of me. I was part of the team.

N.C. Your life has many “befores” and many “afters”. You have been an actress, a painter, a photographer, a film-maker and an editor. What has been the source of all this creative energy?
A.S.: The source of my creative energy has been Helmut. And this is how it happened: I was in a play, and he had come to see me, and I was acting – we were all playing up – but he took it seriously and made me aware of my responsibility and from then on there was always someone in the dark audience who I had to play for.

N.C.: What has been the best moment in your life?
A. S.: It was when Helmut came through the door of his studio in Melbourne in 1947. I’d been sitting in his tiny little office admiring the photographs on the walls, the like of which I’d never seen before, and suddenly he threw the door open and said, “Come in”.

N.C.: What has photography contributed to your life?
A. S.: Photography is time remembered friends, past and present. Brassai comes to my mind: We had visited him and his wife in Beaulieu-sur-Mer – and we took him to the beach and he fled across the sand and dived into the sea. Helmut raced after him and fished him out. All during this time I had my camera at the ready – as Brassai stepped under the shower, the last words I ever heard from him were, “It was worth it”! I’d already obeyed Gilberte’s instructions “Don’t you dare take photographs!” I should not have listened to her. I should have learnt a lesson from Lartigue when he was sitting on a yacht and I disturbed his reverie to ask if I could take a picture of him. “Never ever ask”, he said, “Take the picture”. Relaxing in the backroom of a restaurant one summer’s day, I once again asked Lartigue if I could photograph him. “Go ahead”, he said, “There is no light”. Another monstre sacré was Joseph Losey. When I asked him to give me a few minutes in his courtyard one winter’s day in Paris, he was most obliging and as I shot away, he kept on repeating, “There’s not enough light, there’s not enough light!” But, I always think: If I can see them, so can my camera.

N.C.: What makes one a good photographer?
A. S.: What makes one a good carpenter, a good printer? What makes one a good surgeon? Many are called, few are chosen. A camera is always present, loaded, ready.

N.C.: Which one do you consider as being the best photograph you have ever taken?
A.S.: Graham Greene, simply because it was the only portrait of mine that Helmut was ever jealous of. But, the most beautiful portrait I’ve ever taken must be the one of Helmut on his deathbed. Who will take me on mine?

All images: Alice Springs

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved

Published in Eyemazing. Issue 01-2008

ANTHONY GAYTON


Falling Awake

Vienna-based photographer Anthony Gayton dwells in history through visually complex tales that fearlessly intertwine sacred symbols of mythology, Christian religion, art history iconology and superstition. Accompanied by imaginative, semantically ambiguous poems, Gayton’s stories of gym-shaped male beauties are full of allusions to Baroque and Renaissance paintings with a Victorian melancholic flair and a slight touch of Charleston glamour. Yet, apart from serving as a mere homage to the homoerotic art in history, Gayton’s visual poems challenge, by means of a subtle subversive sophistication, the way in which universal ethics and psychological genre codes have been visually filtered into the consciousness of generations.

It took Gayton more than two decades of apprenticeship to achieve his masterfully composed and highly stylized pictures. At the age of sixteen, he began a two-year art course to become a painter, but instead got blown awake by fashion photography. Back in the family house attic, he would use his sister as a model and then run to his darkroom trying to cut and paste negatives of unicorns… Then college years in London followed, and the first of many-to-come influential journeys to Italy. In 1993, Gayton settled down in Vienna, where he worked as assistant to the acclaimed photographer Andreas H. Bitesnich, learning the technical side of the job and how the industry works. It was not until the late nineties when he went back to a more personal work. After initial experiments with Photoshop cut and bits n dense mythological-like sequences, such as “Bacchanalia” (2003), Gayton’s distinctive style made its breakthrough in “The Angelus” (2004); a series based on poems from the early nineties about a love triangle and a perfect love overcoming social conventions. Now, it is all about “Falling Awake” (2007), where an unorthodox narrative of multiple semantic layers brings together bits of dreams, ghost stories and a castle, unfolding the story of a boy who finds true love in his dreams.

“The original idea came from thoughts I had about the real possibility or impossibility of finding one’s true love during their lifetime”, stresses Gayton. “Everything in life is reduced to chance. Maybe your true love lives in China! Maybe you have just crossed him on the street but nothing else happened!” Luckily, in “Falling Awake”, dreams make up for these reduced probabilities. Using as feedback the uncoded material that pops out of his last dreams in the morning, Gayton has managed to put the strings of his romantic story together, bringing love into the sphere of a ghostly after-death life.

Inspired by sources as diverse as the great masters of the past or early pigment photography, “Falling Awake” hints, more than ever before, towards Gayton’s mystic obsession with relocating religion to a homoerotic context, without actually subverting or changing anything, but revealing, instead, the infinite possibilities of seeing and interpreting. The floating Christ-like figure on the balcony, Bible passages and the eschatological belief in the destiny of the spirit coexist harmoniously with the secret world of English countryside superstitions. An example is the “Whisper” image, where the Mirror and the Apple are employed to transmit a message of self-revelation, according to the legend that claims that if you eat an apple or comb your hair looking in the mirror, you will see your true love over your shoulder.

Gayton explains his “twisted affair” with religion through his personal self-recognition as a brought and raised protestant in a small, conservative English town. “When I was young, I used to go to church. At the age of fifteen I deeply wished to be a Christian. I did a little pilgrimage in Exeter and bought myself a cross. A couple of weeks later I lost it on a school trip to a cave. For me at the time it was as a message from God; ‘I do not want you’ ”.

Being an outcast from God’s world expresses a rather general feeling in Gayton’s life, that of being an outsider. Back in university, in the eighties’ London, his work would simply not fit with the prevailing conformist documentary ethics. “Image manipulation was frowned upon. Our obligation was to recreate reality as it was. I was the only one who just hung pictures on the walls without adding huge amounts of explicatory texts”, explains Gayton. Later his mermaids and centaurs would become too arty for the fashion world and too fashionable for the galleries. The same goes for his work when viewed in homoerotic terms. “Obviously my pictures express a gay perspective but they are not just about a good male six-pack, neither are they exclusively for a gay public. On the contrary, most gay magazines would dismiss them as too romantic”, stresses Gayton.

Classically set and frontal in their majority, Gayton’s compositions create an apparently idyllic narrative space without evident iconological distortions. Still, though his universe could be anytime and anywhere, nothing in it is, as it seems. The archival quality of his large format digital pigment prints would disorientate even the most demanding photopurists as the expression of a frustrated painter. Gayton’s play with analogue and digital processing poses a question about the quest for veracity and authenticity, revealing the capacity of photography to encompass traditional media, creating a space of fake simulations where obvious provocation gives its place to subtle dissonances and multiple layers of ambiguity. According to Gayton, “contemporary photography is just stripping everything down. The more expressive it gets, the more immune the audience becomes”. As a response to this, his becomes an idealistically complex world of illusions, in which a critical posture to the dogmatic system of representations is developed from the inside. Too classical and pictorial to be shocking and offensive at a first sight, Gayton’s work demands full intellectual, censorial and emotional interaction with the spectator. Let us lift the curtains and reveal the silent emotional chaos that has always existed in the established narratives and representations. Gayton’s photography is a means towards unspoken tales and hidden revelations that can only take shape in the dreams of a Dead Romantic. His is -as the critic Edward Lucie-Smith put it down- “a photography for adults.”

All images: Anthony Gayton
Representing Gallery: MITO Barcelona

Text by Natasha Christia.
All Rights Reserved.

Published in Eyemazing, Issue 01-2008

BRIAN DETTMER

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books



Brian Dettmer crea piezas de arte, alterando la forma física de objets trouvés que contienen un valor funcional y simbólico predeterminado. En sus manos, libros, mapas, discos y casetes antiguos -vestigios sagrados de la cultura popular cuyo contenido y formato han quedado obsoletos con el paso del tiempo y el avance de la tecnología-, se convierten en configuraciones plásticas con valor y vida propia.

Aunque Dettmer incorpora en su trabajo elementos que aluden a la tradición del readymade y los juegos semánticos del arte conceptual, a la hora de plasmar sus piezas emplea un proceso más bien físico que intangible volviendo a la materia misma: al papel de los libros, al vinilo de los discos, a las cajas plásticas y la cinta magnética de los casetes. Se trata de un retorno al objeto en sí, a aquel objeto desconocido, consumido en la iconografía postmoderna del pastiche como un fantasma en la sombra de significados y de símbolos; a aquel mismo objeto, tan encasillado hoy en operaciones de revalorización y resignificación estética. Dettmer opta, pues, por recuperar la funcionalidad perdida y los matices inherentes que se esconden debajo las texturas y las formas, y es precisamente entre los intersticios de este nexo natural donde se encuentra desplazado el contenido codificado del objeto, con el fin de crear una nueva dialéctica entre forma y contenido.

Diccionarios, guías médicas, libros de historia, de mecánica, de geografía y cómics, constituyen la “materia prima” para el artista en “Altered Books”. Sin tener constancia previa del contenido exacto de estos libros, Dettmer “excava” y “esculpe” la superficie de sus lomos sellados hacia el interior, con la ayuda de bisturís, tijeras y herramientas médicas. Debajo de las portadas se revela un collage estratográfico; imágenes y restos de textos fragmentados “se reactivan” y derivan en nuevos significados que otorgan a tomos de enciclopedias polvorientas, condenadas a quedarse en el olvido, una función más allá de lo que se supone que es un libro. Como almas que respiran, los libros de Brian Dettmer y sus contenidos se transforman no solo en simples objetos escultóricos tridimensionales, sino en cuerpos orgánicos vivos que plantean un cuestionamiento integral de los procesos de producción y recepción de las narrativas momificadas de la historia y de la ciencia.

En “Altered Maps”, Dettmer lleva un paso más allá la intersección de materia y lenguaje, inscribiendo el subcontexto geográfico en el contexto del gran mapa orgánico de la vida. Avenidas de mapas antiguos se plasman como venas del cuerpo humano, emulando la manera en la que las ideas del viaje y del espacio circulan en nuestro cerebro. Descontextualizadas y vaciadas de significado, las topografías de estos nuevos paisajes plásticos subrayan irónicamente –y en disonancia con títulos como West Indies, reminiscentes de un pasado colonialista- la ignorancia de la política occidental. Asimismo proponen una relectura de la geografía mundial como un proceso de apropiación cultural, de control y de posesión material.

Otras series distintivas en la obra de Dettmer son “Altered Cassete Tapes” y “Altered Video Tapes”. El artista funde el plástico de casetes de música para producir restos antropológicos particulares, como cráneos humanos y reliquias de animales, mientras con cintas VHS de películas de gangsters crea adornos florales funerarios. A partir de un juego irónico con leyendas populares, que han propiciado la asociación fetichista entre la música, la muerte y los esqueletos, Dettmer cuestiona fenómenos como la sobreproducción y el consumismo de bienes culturales, y la manera en la que los contenidos supuestamente pluralistas de éstos últimos se desvían hoy en forma de olas magnéticas hacia caminos desconectados. Si bien es cierto que “viejas formas mueren y nuevas nacen”, según comenta el artista, parece que todo lo que el arte genera hoy no emula sino manipula la naturaleza como reflexión aberrante de una realidad torcida y siniestra. Lo que se revela debajo de la superficie son huesos desarticulados con eco a imágenes, sonidos y memorias. Tal vez se trate de los huesos de los últimos exploradores. La expedición hacia el conocimiento siempre conlleva el riesgo de trampas letales ...

De alguna manera, Dettmer comparte la visión distópica de artistas plásticos contemporáneos como Ron Mueck, Patricia Piccini y Robert Gligorov. Sin embargo, a Dettmer no le hace falta un imaginario desgarrador sino encuentra los elementos para sus creaciones plásticas únicas en la proximidad. Si las esculturas zoomórficas de los casetes confirman la condición cultural contemporánea como el consumo arduo del wild thing,“Altered Maps” y “Altered Books” funcionan como una metáfora similar. Esculpir agujeros dentro de los contenedores sagrados del conocimiento humano equivale a un acto de activismo político. En una sociedad en la que los libros están en peligro de extinción debido a los microchips y en la que las estrategias de comunicación han sustituido plenamente el contenido, Brian Dettmer, emprende, como los últimos exploradores, un viaje hacia los orígenes. En una actitud de escepticismo, su obra sitúa el espectador frente a la manipulación violenta del lenguaje y del conocimiento. Y, a la vez, no cesa de propiciar una actitud de “relectura” del aprendizaje edificado, a través de la reinvención de la relación entre forma y contenido.

“Cada vez que un libro cambia de manos, cada vez que alguien desliza la mirada por sus páginas, su espíritu crece y se hace fuerte”, escribió Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Dettmer entra a las galerías hexagonales de la “Biblioteca” de Borges en busca de este reto. En efecto, y pese a todo, el “cementerio de los libros olvidados” sigue ahí a la espera de futuros lectores. Siempre lo seguirá. Eso, sí: hay que tener en cuenta el peligro que uno corre de perderse en el laberinto …

Text by Natasha Christia. All Rights Reserved.

Published as the introduction of Brian Dettmer. The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. MITO Gallery - Barcelona, Exhibition Catalogue, January, 2008.

BIEL CAPLLONCH

Imaginative and intuitive, Biel Capllonch is quite reluctant when asked to provide specific answers about his leitmotif. “Justifying my pictures through continuous conceptualizations in order to find a place in the art market is not my thing”, he emphasizes. In contrast with the majority of his colleagues, who pursue a career in fine art photography, Capllonch still preserves the mentality of an unconventional loner who finds it much more challenging dealing with the ups and downs of commercial assignments than frequenting gallery venues.

Born in Mallorca in 1964 and currently based in Barcelona, Capllonch obtained a Fine Arts Degree before dedicating his crafts to advertising and fashion photography. Needless to say, practice attracted him more than theory. Since then, he has produced some of the most successful campaigns for brands and magazines both in his native country and abroad, alongside a great amount of personal work for art shows.

Whether commercial or personal, the highly complex universe that Capllonch recreates with his camera has little to do with a down-to-earth reality. Covering distinct genres and registers, from luxurious domestic and urban-like landscapes to fashionable tableau vivants, his theatrically orchestrated sets reconstruct a hermetic world imbued with the aura of a restrained eroticism.

Yet, there is a very disquieting effect in this apparently perfect reality of luxurious nightlife sensuality. As if they were derivatives of artificial cloning, Capllonch´s models delve, by means of a subtle digital treatment, into a plastic expressiveness deprived of any dramatic tension. Women in glamorous dresses and men in caramelized bodies appear floating in a suspended material high-class world, where limits between truth and falsehood become blurred.

These bodies become for Capllonch the field, where all ambivalent configurations take place. His pictures deconstruct the way we perceive masculinity and femininity, leading to a new “who is who” iconography. Viewed within a traditional system of representations, women gain a fixed role in the composition as alluring beauty beasts. Contrarily to them, men are not clearly defined as such. Charged with fragility and with an hybrid homoerotic sexuality, they work as destabilizing elements, calling for genre and identity transgression.

Natasha Christia: Your concern with hybrid identities and duality tricks resonates to a project that marked your commercial breakthrough in Spain. I am referring to the official marketing promotion created for the Sonar Festival of Electronic Music and Multimedia in 2000. In an intriguing game of unresolved mystery, the series displayed two couples of twin women with paranormal powers in postures of self-recognition, establishing mysticism and genre perplexity as the core of your oeuvre to come. How did your “play” with the morphology of the body start?
Biel Capllonch: When we did the Sonar campaign with Sergio Caballero, I was engaged with very similar issues regarding the duality of images and the attitude of the body towards its environment. I was taking photos of inhabited spaces in the absence of people. My aim was to touch upon the notion of absence as abandonment or as presence of no-people. In the meantime, I was also doing a series of nude figures in levitation. Thanks to this, I connected directly with the paranormal element that formed the base of the whole campaign. It was a happy coincidence and a project with an excellent script and mise en scene.

NC: The hermetic fictionalized character of your universe finds its parallel in the invisible fissures seen in Jeff Wall´s work. How much do you acknowledge Jeff´s influence on your pictures?
BC: When Jeff Wall was shooting “Morning Cleaning” at the Pabellon Mies Van de Rohe in Barcelona I was asked to become his assistant. I was, in some way, familiar with his work through books, but just the basics. I took the job of course. In the twenty days we worked together, we talked less about photography and more about banal stuff such as tortilla, siesta or even the American Methodists. I guess that, rather than from him, I have drawn my fascination with this “normal abnormality” from others, in their majority, filmmakers. I also learnt to appreciate it at the moment of staging a scene, project it on camera and make it work…

NC: Mentioning film, the atmosphere of sophisticated mystery and darkness in your images carries with it a film noir aura, but it completely lacks irony and obvious humour. Why?
BC: Even if the whole creative process is charged with irony and sarcasm because it simply amuses me to do so, I do not like to see this reflected in the resulting image. I am not fond of pictures that make opposing statements to what they supposedly have to say. I prefer it much better when not everything is fully expressed. Therefore, the scenes I stage are closer to ellipsis and metaphor than to deliberate irony. However, my work is in no way linked with film noir. Mystery in my photos is created by not revealing all that I know about an image. You can find parallels with my practice in movies, such as “The Exterminating Angel” by Buñuel or “Lost Highway” by David Lynch. These films are a mystery per se, without resolving anything. Their structure does not correspond to any established film noir narratives. What they do is appropriate intrigue, mystery and enigma you can find in a film noir film, blending it with a strange perversity that fascinates me. In a very similar way, I avoid creating a meaningless visual space in terms of the real world. I opt, instead, for a credible abnormality, in which aberrations have to be more subtle through the maintenance of the equilibrium between the representation of reality and the use of poetic means.

NC: Apart from mystery, there is another important representational parameter in your work: the contrast of femininity and masculinity. Women carry the well-known femme fatal aura while in the case of men you opt for a rather alternative representation of a hybrid masculinity distanced from the prototype of the straight macho. In most cases, men are displayed as grown children of an undefined sexuality. In their boxer shorts, their bodies transmit a plastic naivety. What is the reason for this obsession of yours with underwear?
BC: The way I wish to represent masculinity and femininity is not so obvious even for me. Perhaps things are more evident with the female body, since it is situated on a more distinct representational level than masculinity. Call it Venus, Luna, Maria or whatever, it is closer to traditional culture and to human logic, so it becomes easier for me to mould it. On the other hand, I loose myself when it comes to masculinity. In any case, my representation of men goes far away from heroes or myths. This is why my men are an accumulation of innocence, anti-macho posture, certain disorientation and basic sexuality. The decency of nudity is highly important to me, since it forms part of a more devoid representation of masculinity. Whoever strips oneself completely has things clearer, but my subjects do not. There is always a sort of disconnection and a lack of communication among my characters that delves into a natural tension between a confined desire and a crude reality. It is impossible for me to show things in a different way.

NC: How easy is to adjust this very personal vision of yours to commercial assignments for fashion or advertising photography?
BC: I struggle so that my ideas do not fall within the established patrons of these fields. Sometimes I find solutions to my projects by crossing over to the opposite field. Transgression is part of a photographer´s job. In fashion, there is a sort of frontier you cannot cross. There are some rules. Everything has to be surrounded by finery and styling as if ugliness did not exist. In order to overcome this aestheticism, I opted, in some cases, for a certain photographic pictorialism grounded in iconography from the history of art since it renders pictures much easier to assimilate. In other cases, I employ deliberately aesthetic and theatrical scenery, with not so satisfactory personal results, to be honest. This is why, in general terms, I prefer to work with a mise en scene on the basis of what you encounter in situ than with a setting. Advertising is different. The entire framework asks for less sophisticated connotations, leaving beauty to one side and focusing more on message and concept. Even so, the final result of an advertising assignment depends on the collaboration between the photographer and his creative team. With a little help, sometimes the final result works as a mixture of fine art and propaganda with a great dose of subversion, and this is what makes the product unique.

NC: How does it feel working in Spain and abroad?
BC: If the script does not ask for it, I don´t need to take photos of Eskimos in a redwood forest. Working in Barcelona for international assignments is perfect. Even if, according to William Bowles, “Spain is full of monkeys and Catholics”, all these in a clever combination can bring spectacular results. As far as Spanish media assignments are concerned, things are quite different. You have to be moral, positive, aesthetic, in most cases, with no content. Everything has to be good, nice and cheap. Unfortunately, that is the law.

NC: Have you ever drawn inspiration for a project from a dream?
BC: When I wake up I never remember what I dreamt. And if I do, my dreams are concerned with everyday things, like having a picnic or doing cross stitch. A dreamlike image never comes out of the memory of a dream. I have never fully understood all this insistence by the Surrealists on physical dreams. I only create on the basis of what I consciously think or imagine.

NC: If dreams are not the sources of inspiration, do you encounter it in the work of other artists?
BC: Listing a number of names might help grasp what has served to me as a reference for a specific project, but it would certainly not highlight what has influenced my vision as a whole. There are two small books of Jan Kaplicky that illustrate very well what can be understood as inspiration today (“creativity is everywhere”). I collect a handful of images with which I feel identified. My decision is determined by a trivial detail, such as the color of a dress. Let´s say that I have a primitive taste for artworks by Buñuel, Picabia, Platt-Lynes, Delvaux, George Lucas, Adolf Loos, Antonioni, Lynch, John Holmes, Goya, or Ludwig Van Beethoven ...

NC: Which words would you use to describe your universe as an epilogue to this interview?
BC: There are three things in life: health, money and love. Whoever owns all three has to thank God, because if God fails, everything becomes bad, ugly and expensive…

©All pictures: Biel Capplonch
Represented by: DORA JOKER, Barcelona

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved
Published in Eyemazing Issue 04/2007

JOHN WOOD

Endurance and Suffering. Narratives of Disease in the 19th century



Imagination, the longing of a life to be, the bursting of stories that were never meant to unfold in the places we inhabit and in the paths we cross… Our lives are a journey in time, as are photographs and our act looking at them. As if they were whispers, photographic threads lead us to unknown territories of human history. Deeply affected by the recent loss of his mother, Roland Barthes described the photographic lens as the safe-keeper of a mutilated nostalgia. Yet, time heals wounds; scars become testimonies of gained beauty and out of traumatic remembrances of “dead” moments, old photographs emerge as documents of flesh and spirit. Viewed as an awakening of life, photography takes on a new force, transforming death and disease into life and revealing the world as the corpse of constant mutations.

In a wonderfully composed recollection of clinical photography, poetry and science, “Endurance and Suffering. Narratives of Disease in the 19th century” offers the best example of how photography regains a distinctly plastic and emotive value with the passage of time. Edited in four versions by Edition Galerie Vevais, the book goes beyond any traditional formulae of photopoetry. Distinguished price-winner, poet and photographic critic John Wood has produced a moving series of poems of astonishing sweetness, elegance and candour. His poems draw their inspiration from the first clinical testimonies of venereal diseases conducted during the 1870s-1880s by Dr. George Henry Fox, one of the most important American pioneers in dermatology, with the assistance of: medical photographer O. G. Mason.

Elephantiasis, syphilis and leprosy. Suffering and endurance at the sight of imminent death alongside photography in its first steps. It would be easy to close your eyes and deny the horryfying sensation these images provoked at the moment of their creation. Yet, the passage of time works better for photographs than for ghosts. Feel the flesh and blood behind these skins, “lift their veil” and recognize the person behind the anonymous body. In a revisionist attitude towards any established notions of suffering and sorrow, hatred and beauty, life and eternity, the book challenges us to confront an indulging unknown humanity wrapped among broken limbs, grafted breasts and failing flesh. Eyemazing has shared some thoughts on photography as such an embrace of life, on poetry and on humanism with John Wood, the creative force behind this groundbreaking work.

Natasha Christia: Endurance and Suffering. Narratives of Disease in the 19th Century works as a boiler of contradictions. Poems of beauty are dedicated to subjects which are far from beautiful, science becomes mystified and poetry invades photographic images. Is this the way you describe this new “disease narrative" the book wishes to establish?
John Wood: Actually, you have probably put it better than I can: a poetic remake of scientific materials; a boiler of contradictions; beautiful language dedicated to bodies most people would find horrific; and stories about real people that never really happened. I like the fact that you said I mystified science. I wanted to take these clinical photographs and case studies and infuse them with the humanity the lives of these people deserved. None of them could have had easy lives—especially the poor girl with Elephantiasis. What could it have been like living in that body? That’s what I wanted to know—not the science of her life but its mystery. We look at her distorted body and want to turn away in revulsion, but after looking at her and thinking about her for months and months, I think I realized some of that mystery - that she was beautiful, that she was a part of the eternal woman, and that we should not turn away but should embrace her. So I suppose I would say that this is a book of embraces...

NC: Taking up this notion of embraces, poems such as “Elephantiasis” - which seems dedicated to a prehistoric Goddess of fertility - strike us with their revisionist view. Rather than deformed, their protagonists are naturally shaped human beings that deserve not just our compassion but even our passion!
JW: That is exactly what I was trying to suggest. She is Gaia, our living, breathing planet, the Earth Mother, Earth Wife, and Earth Daughter, and if we look more deeply into others, even those who might repel us because of the way they look—or vote, have sex, pray or not pray—I think we might see similar miraculous transformations.

NC: If beauty is under constant transformation, to what ideal of beauty are we led to nowadays?
JW: The beauty we are led to today, I fear, comes primarily from the look of movie stars. That’s what the last chapter of Umberto Eco’s History of Beauty is about, “The Beauty of the Media,” the last section of which is frighteningly entitled “The Beauty of Consumption.” Americans are probably the worst. I think we have the narrowest and most restricted sense of beauty, of what makes a beautiful face or a beautiful body. And it’s not just American women that have become addicted to being surgically altered; it’s becoming popular with men, too. Those who most mistrust and fear individuality are those who most want to look just like everyone else. This book is, by the way, a good example of what I’m talking about. My books of poetry have sold well and so have my critical books on photography, but no American publisher would touch this book. One publishing house well-known for the strong sexual and violent content of their books said it is “too hard-edged for our readership.” It is as if we are allowed to be offensive towards anything except society’s stereotypical notions of beauty.

NC: You have worked as a poet and photography critic for over two decades, so, should I suppose that you see a link between poetry and photography? Does the ambiguity of the image find its best partner in the openness of the poetic text?
JW: That’s a wonderful question. I could talk for hours about being both a poet and a photographic historian. As a poet I would say “yes, of course”; but as a photohistorian I’d say “no, of course not.” An artist sees the possibility of anything being appropriated for his or her purposes and turned into art, but the scholar has to respect the original context of the work, why it was made, what it was about. The artist needs only to indulge and delight in that ambiguity you speak of, while the scholar needs to explain it. In other words, this is my schizophrenic book. I let the pictures themselves dictate the style. The little boy with leprosy seemed to call for a form similar to what Blake used in his Songs of Innocence; the beautiful girl with scabies covering her breasts suggested English Renaissance poetry and its forms; the man with horns coming out of his mouth demanded the free verse of a furious 19th century American preacher. The individuals made the choices for me, and it’s the most stylistically mixed of any of my books of poetry.

NC: How did your encounter with O. G. Mason and George Henry Fox happen, and how was the idea for the project born?
JW: As a photographic historian, I’d long known their work but really couldn’t stand to look at it. However, two of the photographs haunted me—the girl with elephantiasis and the man with syphilis who has his hand on his forehead in a look of desperation. I’d find myself thinking about them or sometimes going back to look at them just as I might go back to look at any other great image. And eventually a poem began to shape itself about her, and then one about him. Then the little boy with leprosy. Eventually over time I knew all these people and I began to imagine their lives. As I say in the Introduction, all of the poems are certainly not about the nobility of suffering. Some are filled with hatred and cruelty because suffering just as often brings out the worst in us as it does the best.

NC: Your work allows for a novel approach to the early history of the photographic medium, pointing out to us there is still much more to discover.
JW: Oh yes, you are so right. New discoveries are occurring all the time. It is a history that has not yet been written. And to some extent that has always been my passion, though my books of the last decade have all been devoted to contemporary photographers— González Palma, Witkin, Saudek, Garduño, Hosoe, Deruytter, ParkeHarrison, and others; but earlier I did four books on the daguerreotype, a book on the autochrome, and a book on a mixture of early processes.

NC: What makes a great photographic image: the way it is or the way we choose to look at it?
JW: That’s a very tough question. It’s easier to say what can’t make a great photo. A photographer can have the most extraordinary craft and technique, but * can fail to make great art. The most perfect of subjects or scenes can be bungled if the photographer doesn’t have the craft to reveal it. Then there is that aspect of je ne sais quoi—maybe it’s Vision, sometimes it’s certainly luck, occasionally it’s an accident—or so several great photographers have told me—and sometimes it’s simply us, the Zeitgeist, the moment, a confluence of destinies.

NC: You have contributed to a novel photography criticism based on the openness of the photographic image and its fusion with other genres. Is this precisely what contemporary photography criticism still lacks today?
JW: It would be nice to flatter myself and say, “Oh yes,” but in truth there’s a lot of extremely fine and diverse writing about photography today, and some of the best of it doesn’t even come from people with a photographic background but from novelists, poets, philosophers, and social critics. Photography is the great visual art of our time. In some form or another it is omnipresent in the lives of almost everyone, and so anyone who has thought about culture, ideas, or art can bring their varied backgrounds to the subject of photographs and photography and say interesting and insightful things.

NC: Coming back to the book: From the poems it is more than evident that you developed a very intimate imaginative relationship with every image…JW: Thank you; I do hope I’ve developed an intimacy with them. Apart from those images I’ve already mentioned, the one that most haunts me is Onychia, that black hand holding that black bar with a rag around it and resting on top of that box. It is simply an astounding photograph, a great photograph. If one disengages it from the discourse of disease and medicine, it is simply one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of surreal photographs. It is in a class like that of Atget's image of all the people looking up into the sky.

NC: How would you describe Endurance and Suffering in a few words?
JW: My good friend John Stauffer, one of Harvard’s great scholars, says “History is the activist’s muse.” This is precisely what this little book of histories is: a work of protest. It begs us not to forget these lives because they might appear ugly to us, and it protests against limited, constricting notions of beauty…

Endurance and Suffering. Narratives of Disease in the 19th Century. Poems by John Wood. With photographs by O. G. Mason and case studies by Georgr Henry Fox. Cabinet of Art and Medicine. Journal 2007.

©All pictures: O. G. Mason

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.


Published in Eyemazing 03/07