natasha christia

Hellen van Meene

2010-05-13T01:08:00.006+02:00

Tout va disparaître

Tout va disparaître: Everything will disappear. Three words about the eclipse of identity, of the self, of the very means of portraiture. The title of Hellen van Meene’s last monograph presents a challenging statement on the way we can approach and potentially interpret the portraits contained in its pages: a statement of a kind we are not used to, shifting the word from the boundaries of classical portraiture to the dissolution of the subject and its identity in space.

Of course, on the face of current discourse, which is still essentially tied to an argument that focuses on body and an identity politics – in search of revealing something of the subject’s ‘character’ – such an attempt may seem irrelevant. But in practice, when it comes to reading a portrait, today more than ever we are in the position of effortlessly acknowledging that the space – defined here as the field of the photographic frame that remains unoccupied by the body and its actions – becomes another key element in the production of meaning. Space carries an array of external semantic references. Charged with a set of tensions passed on from generation to generation, these references become inscribed not only on the subject but also onto our gaze, and as such they irremediably condition our experience of the subjectivity performed before the camera.

Driving interpretation away from the body can sometimes be as much disillusioning and demystifying as turning on the lights during a film screening. But it can be constructive, since it points out what is not to be missed, namely the constructed nature of all representation. It can also be illuminating, since it shows that the actual possibility of representation can exist outside what supposedly constitutes the chore semantic field of the picture: on the corners of the frame, in the background, in the minds of each one of us. Its potential lies on the ‘dialogue of absence’ it engages. Bodies need to be absent in order for spaces to become fully perceived (the oeuvre of Candida Höfer is an apt example of this), and, vice-versa, self-contained spaces denoting absence, neglect and loss can energise the presence of bodies with an unexpected signification. Cue the work of Hellen van Meene.

Tout va disparaître brings together photographs taken between 2007 and 2008 in the United States, Russia and the Netherlands. The book is replete with portraits in the style van Meene has gained recognition for. Their protagonists are adolescents and children, plucked out from the street and turned into the artist’s subjects. Vulnerable, insecure, but at the same time curious towards the camera, these beings retreat into a world of solitary desires and despairs – their eyes downcast and their young bodies in unnatural poses. This translates into delicately orchestrated compositions insinuating a broader fiction of unsettling psychological connotations. Here, the space is an extra new component in an open dialogue with the model and marks a subtle evolution in Hellen van Meene’s practice. On the verge of decay and disappearance, the slovenly natural ambience of these representations literally crash against the portrayed bodies and their unnerving expressions, underscoring a feeling of ‘otherness’ and alienation. Spaces become fields of lost battles, drawing the vain search for an identity that lies in open discontinuity with the world that surrounds it.

Pool of Tears (2008) features young girls within domestic interiors, related with family intimacy. The featured interiors seem to belong to houses that have been abandoned or locked for a long period of time. These empty corridors, bathrooms and bedrooms come forth literally as emotionally blank constellations wherein identity is the only thing left. As if woken up abruptly in the middle of the night or at dawn, van Meene’s girls appear suspended barefoot in their nightdresses. Their gazes and overall expression float off into a state of awkward ecstasy evoke a mutant state between dream and reality. There is no hint of movement, but a quiet stillness. These compositions are impregnated with an intriguing, cinematic-like mystery and a mood of mature unease, hard to match with the yearnings and the spontaneous responses supposedly expected by their young subjects. Emptiness becomes so repressing that it ends up overloading identity with the burden of a suffocating silence.

The same notions are reworked in St. Petersburg, Russia (2008). Narratives unfold within monumental interiors and shabby exteriors of a broader perspective that carry upon them signs of decadence and desolation. For once more, bodies manifest themselves in a context of emptiness, but the cultural and memory-based narratives these sites bear, are of a far greater importance here. The young girls, the majority of whom are adolescent, are seen wearing elaborate romantic dresses appear to enact a part in the play of history. For once more, their youth becomes incompatible with an ambience that is a sort of a ‘past’ place, a mausoleum for the memory. Identity collapses under the heavy weight of a history and a culture experienced materially. At the same time, an iconography and a strong sense of composition inherited by the Low Countries, Van Meene’s place of origin, bestows upon these scenes an extra painterly quality that intensifies the feeling of ‘elsewhereness’. Ghostly, like the transcription of light onto film, these places consistently invoke the fainting of memory, identity and the portrait photography under the nest of an ambiguity, proper of a Tarkovskian world. America, going my own way home (2007), the last series within the book sequence, is in tune with van Meene’s earlier productions. Similarly to the Japan series (2003), the issue of representation here shifts to an Afro-American setting, that is to say a non-European context. In their majority, the portraits take place outdoors with the use of natural light. Vernacular environs with backgrounds, walls, parks and fences provide the setting and compositional devices for this string of images. In some cases, van Meene distances herself from her standard square pictures and experiments with the panoramic format, a format mostly uncommon in portrait photography, as Jörg M. Colberg remarks in the introducing essay of the monograph. Normally portraits direct the eye towards the centre of observation, which is the subject. Here, the intersection of abundant space at the moment of portraiture, besides generating uncertainty and confusion to the gaze, declares the role of the surface of the photographic image as a topos for the encounter of various discourses. Though classic in their essence – in them, the body constitutes the weight of the composition – van Meene’s panoramic photographs address our attention to the overall semantic field of the picture, reminding us that there is always more to see: Identity is derivative not just of the self but of a whole nest of constructed interrelations.

With her work, van Meene addresses not just isolated fields, but the overall problem of representation. In her portraits, the human body becomes another component of a broader composition. The photographic space exists outside of it, in the same way we, the spectators, exist outside of photography for and despite content. Space is put on view downright as an emotional and psychological landscape onto which the overall spatial awareness of the subject becomes sustained within a broader narrative with unsettling slippages. At the same time, space emerges as an alternative two-dimensional tableau of ‘otherness’ that operates in an inevitable discontinuity with our space, the space of the ‘real’. Either orchestrated by the photographer or allowed to invade the interior of the photographic frame, it underscores both the inherent natural and conceptual disjunctions of visual representation. Having said that, Van Meene’s subjects expose themselves passively to the constraints of the natural contexts that envelop them. The fact that they are teenagers should confer them with more adaptability but it results in consternation and exhaustion, as if the struggle to abolish the invisible actions that model the awareness of the self were in vain. The visual rhetoric of disparition, as established in Hellen van Meene’s work, does not just uncover an alternative space of representation for them, but also fuels portrait photography with an interesting novel scheme for its theorization and full sensorial experience.

Text by Natasha Christia.
All Rights Reserved.

CATERINA BARJAU / JORDI GUAL

2010-05-13T00:52:00.006+02:00

RETRATOS DE FAMILIA

Retratar a la familia significa inevitablemente abrir la puerta al “yo” más íntimo y someter la privacidad de uno a la mirada de los demás. Retratar a la familia es trasladar frente a la cámara nuestras alegrías y penumbras cotidianas, así como trazar de un modo gráfico la cartografía de la cadena de DNA que nos ha traído a esta vida. Desde los primeros álbumes genealógicos del siglo xix y la popularización de la instantánea algunas décadas más tarde, hasta la actual era digital y la recurrente banalización de lo privado en la red y las revistas del corazón, el uso de la fotografía ha estado inextricablemente vinculado a la faceta “doméstica” de nuestra existencia. Si la familia representa supuestamente la “célula madre” de la sociedad, el acto de fotografiarla se convierte, según esta lógica, en una especie de diagnóstico factual acerca de la psicopatología de la época que nos envuelve. Más aún: por lo general, la familia suele ser tan fotosensible como la película, y el hecho de retratarla, de retratar al propio “corpus” familiar, por así decirlo, encarna infinitas posibilidades y complicaciones tanto para el fotógrafo como para los retratados.

Caterina Barjau y Jordi Gual, los dos artistas de la exposición “Retratos de familia” que presenta la galería Tagomago del 4 de febrero al 13 de marzo, han llevado a cabo la delicada tarea de articular alrededor de sus propias familias una propuesta fotográfica auténtica y apta, tanto en términos de realización como en su conceptualización. Aunque abarcan espectros opuestos —Barjau se ocupa de las relaciones, mientras que Gual se centra en una serie de metonimias temporales y materiales—, en conjunto los dos trabajos permiten reconocer la tensión inherente a la hora de facilitar un registro visual de familia, sin dejar de apuntar, no obstante, cierta susceptibilidad frente al impacto persuasivo de toda representación.

Caterina Barjau (Barcelona, 1980) ha dedicado los últimos seis años a retratar personas exitosas del mundo de la cultura y la política para revistas y medios de comunicación de nuestro país. Caracterizadas por un uso sistemático del retoque digital, un amplio abanico de referencias pictóricas y el gran formato, sus obras representan la vertiente más contemporánea en el campo de la fotografía. En “Familia”, un proyecto artístico elaborado expresamente para esta muestra, Barjau ha pretendido trasladar su práctica comercial al terreno del autorretrato familiar, abordando la gran cuestión que tal reto conlleva: ¿Podría llegar a fotografiar a sus parientes, en este caso la familia de su abuela por parte de madre, con el distanciamiento que requeriría el encargo de retratar a una celebridad? El resultado final es una serie de fotografías en gran formato que, vistas en retrospectiva, ofrecen un espécimen visual de la típica familia tradicional catalana poco convencional.

Dotados de una extraordinaria calidad plástica y de un voluptuoso tratamiento a la hora de manejar la iluminación y las texturas, los retratos de Barjau contienen constantes alusiones iconográficas al Renacimiento y al Barroco, junto con una elaborada escenificación de las poses que raya muchas veces en una monumentalidad excéntrica. Las superficies de estas composiciones se plasman como un campo visual minimalista y sus protagonistas aparecen aislados de su entorno habitual (casas y pisos familiares). Barjau ha empleado deliberadamente como marco para sus fotografías el fondo negro de su estudio, tanto para enfatizar la individualidad de sus sujetos como para producir mediante su descontextualización una serie de cautivadoras alteraciones en la imagen final.

Proponerse realizar intensivas sesiones de retratos durante las fiestas de Navidad, la época por excelencia de los sagrados protocolos familiares, ha supuesto para Caterina Barjau una pequeña aventura y, a la vez, una experiencia reveladora que le ha inducido a confrontarse con sus seres queridos fuera del nido familiar. Pero también a experimentar con lo privado, a llevarlo al terreno de lo público y a enmascararlo con el glamour propio de una celebridad, lo que durante las sesiones engendró un interesante diálogo entre la fotógrafa y sus numerosos parientes. La mayoría de ellos, contenidos al principio por estar poco acostumbrados a posar, pronto recobraron su solemnidad y su sentido del humor para desempeñar ante la cámara el papel que se esperaba de ellos, tal como les correspondía por jerarquía, edad o afición.

Todos los retratos de la selección perturban nuestra mirada. Son y no son, muestran y no muestran. En ellos, el personaje es todo pose y artificio, como si Barjau quisiera exponer las arrugas hasta los más mínimos detalles, como si la piel lo fuera todo. En el fondo, los brillantes y opacos ojos de estos individuos no suponen puertas a sus almas, y su identidad real se disuelve en la postura, el gesto y la mímica. Por supuesto, aquí el rostro fotografiado no es más que un caparazón en blanco sobre el que fluctúan perpetuamente modos de ser ya edificados en nuestra cultura visual, mientras que la familia, la más “perdurable y sagrada” de las instituciones, no hace sino diluirse en un río de ficciones bajo los focos de la celebridad.

Jordi Gual (Terrassa, 1964) plantea su serie “Equilibrios inestables” centrando la atención en la dimensión espacial y temporal del espectro familiar. Gual es un solitario artesano en todos los sentidos de la palabra, que vive en medio del bosque. Fabrica sus cámaras y papeles, realiza revelados y positivos en soportes también manuales, y ha desarrollado un método de fotografiar propio, instintivo, que culmina en narrativas “abiertas”, sin principio ni final semántico. En contraste con Caterina Barjau, Gual lleva años fotografiando a su numerosa familia, siempre con su casa y lugares próximos de la naturaleza como escenario. Por tanto, no es de extrañar que en su caso los retratos formen parte de la interacción cotidiana y la cámara sea uno más de la familia.

En su mayor parte, las composiciones de Jordi Gual desafían a la totalidad en favor de la fragmentación de los rostros y los cuerpos. Asimismo, en ellas lo que parece adquirir más importancia es el entorno y los objetos relacionados con los seres retratados. Fotografiar el objeto en lugar del personaje es, según afirma Gual, fotografiar la “palabra perdida”, pero también supone en cierta manera posicionarse con la cámara desde el futuro, como si el presente mismo fuera ya un recuerdo lejano. El hecho de que Gual opte por el sosiego —no llega a realizar ningún encuadre sin haber sentido previamente que ha asimilado su esencia más profunda— engendra en su trabajo una sensación de fugacidad que distorsiona nuestra percepción del tiempo. Impregnados de un calidad poética y de una emotividad extremadamente modestas, sus retratos poseen el aura de un objet perdu y los rostros de sus protagonistas —sus cinco hijjos, sus hermanos, y mujer— llegan a alcanzar a menudo una presencia que parece condensar las vidas de todos sus antepasados.

Como en un relato poético, que permite libertad a la hora de la interpretación, los personajes de Gual, con la ayuda de la luz, dejan sus huellas en la placa o película no por lo que son sino por el sentimiento que representan. En cierto modo, sus cuerpos son constelaciones fantasmales, igual que lo eran las fotografías mismas para Barthes, y su paso ante la cámara cobija silencios introspectivos pero a la vez melódicos, como la emoción en sus altibajos. Sustentados en horizontes plenos que se diluyen en afecto e intimidad, sus retratos transmiten un hálito más universal sobre la familia y la lucha cotidiana para sostener el sentimiento que la une, por y a pesar de todo.

“Ejercicio emocional. Inseguridad. Estado anímico que existe pero que no sabes qué dirección tomará. Quizás solitarios relatos del absurdo.” Así describe Gual este sentimiento. Y continúa: “Asfixiante tensión de algo que nos rodea pero no logramos entender. La inseguridad que nos produce lo desconocido. Quizás todo se resuma en una palabra...: ¡miedo! La confusión nos libera del caos para volver a un mismo inicio. Entonces, todo vuelve a empezar”. Para Gual, llevar una familia y fotografiarla resume el cúmulo de todo lo indecible e inexpresable. Es por ello que a la hora de exponer decide construir sus palimpsestos fotográficos. Aparentemente clásicos y repletos de una expresividad depurada, estos últimos explotan en un lirismo crudo y pletórico que nos da mucho a entender acerca de la fascinante complejidad de la familia, una complejidad fuera del lenguaje y de sus entramados retóricos.

Texto: Natasha Christia

KELLI CONNELL

2010-05-13T00:40:00.006+02:00

Double Life

Since 2001, the American photographer Kelli Connell has been working on “Double Life”, a series that has brought her under the spotlight of international attention. In “Double Life”, Connell explores the way her private experience and observation of relationships can be reconstructed and enacted before the camera, assuming thereby the value of an external codified photographic object. Connell’s images portray the same character enacting two roles in a single scenario. To create this juxtaposition in the final photograph, the artist scans, stitches and then digitally manipulates various medium format negatives in Adobe Photoshop. This allows her to build a chronicle that appears to be documenting the relationship of a fictitious couple of young women consisting essentially of Connell and her alter ego.

Seemingly bred on a documentary-like naturalism, “Double Life” dwells between fiction and veracious enactment. By means of this incessant sliding towards two opposite poles, the “constructed realities” Connell fosters do not solely seek to unveil her own dilemmas as subject matter and artist before the camera, but also address the overall baggage of responses and preconceptions we carry as viewers and as avid consumers of fictions. By taking as its starting point a strong autobiographic hint – the presumable sexual identity of Connell and her own experiences – the series goes further to give way to broader assumptions of identity, projected beliefs and other social clichés, reinforced in today’s visual culture by a vast network of media agents, such as television, film, advertising, not to mention art photography itself.

Kelli Connell’s conceptual core practice bears a marked affinity with Cindy Sherman’s “Film Stills”. Her images lack the dramatic glamour and over-stylization encountered in Sherman’s case. They are, instead, impregnated with a lighter, more natural mood, appropriate to the mundane ethos of our times. Still, as the “Film Stills”, Connell’s staged scenes seem to be similarly derivative of no specific source, of no original. They contain all and nothing at the same time. They constitute texts open to interpretation and envisioning, easy to fit in the delights and burdens of the individual eye. What they ultimately ask from us, the viewers, is to misrecognize them. They ask us to acknowledge them for their misleading nature, namely for what they are not: an autobiography without fiction and a fiction without autobiographical elements. In this sense, Connell’s pictures jettison the key role photographs have traditionally occupied as material testimonies of life in the construction of emotive intimate diaries and in the preservation of the artist’s myth. The statement here is clear: there seems to be no concrete self behind these pictures, but instead various hallucinatory states of a constantly shifting mood. In fact, Connell’s pictures seem to reconfirm the very contribution of photography to this chimera. Rather than documenting, photographs are here rendered mere performative acts, potentially healing, self-revealing and tormenting at the same time, as if a cult was taking place before our eyes for the exorcising of personal ghosts, fears and other private demons. Above all, photography – understood as the act of taking pictures – becomes here a projection not of a “factual” past, but instead, of a so-to-speak believable set of imagined relationships that are not meant to be lived but rather to be contemplated, while coming from the confinement of the mind out to the world – as if, during this ongoing moment, it were not the world itself that matters to both the photographer and the viewers, but instead the experience of its dreamful reflection through the mirrors of the mind.

But let us go back to the physical economy of representation and narration as established in “Double Life”. The photographs of the series claim to describe various moments in the life of a couple. Yet, by watching these pictures closely, by going through their arranged serial sequence that supposedly illustrates the way these two alter egos interact over the years, we are confronted with a paradox. We constantly feel compelled to wonder what exactly these two characters are: twofold derivatives of the same person, or just two completely autonomous beings?

Time, the changing haircuts, styles and expression, the infantile masculine element in certain pictures contrasted with the womanly soap-opera-like emotive touch of others, uncover two doubles, complete and incomplete at the same time, who resist becoming exposed as two solidified beings in reality. As the narrative flows, against our strong temptation, we fail to identify who is the male and who is the female, who is active and who is passive. In each picture, roles and identities switch and the politics of power are reinvented. Connell’s diegesis undergoes various slips, obstructing any identification process, as if the artist’s sole wish were to exclude us from viewing her as an integral whole. The mirror is irremediably broken; or, perhaps, it has never worked in the first place. Human lives and stories have never been static and, insofar fixed identities are chimeras, photographs become nothing but ghostly objects, that is to say, nebulous apparitions of encounters that had never meant to take place anywhere but in the corners of the mind.

Critics have described this schizoid element imbuing “Double Life” as a duality in representation – the duality of the masculine and the feminine, the rational and the irrational, the exterior and the interior, the motivated and the resigned self. But, as it has been shown, this duality in question seems to dissolve into a million pieces. For we carry many facets and faces. Over the years our cellules are renovated and this results to us being materially distinct bodies. If Sherman’s “Film Stills” exposed this multiplicity of the self without any concrete analogue, their very simulacral condition derives from the performance of the artist’s recognisable opaque presence in the picture. We know that beneath Sherman’s disguises, there is a solidified self, besides a solid myth to deconstruct and a historical illusion to twist. By contrast, in Connell’s naturalised tableaux, this very physical self is multiplied, dismembered and finally diffused. Here, the subject matter, namely the body summoning its memory, emerges as an artificial construct, present and absent at the same time. This creates an unstable and unsettling field of representation. All that is seemingly believable and real has never occurred.

For once more, one would logically presume that all is about the woman as this under-exposed ‘Other’ in visual iconography. And yet, to claim this, to place Connell and her work under the scope of a cross-gender discourse or under a reading of human relationships in their universality, would simply be delimitating. In “Double Life”, the act of cancelling the matrix, that is to say the subject-artist in her physicality performing the photographed subject matter, addresses a broader range of questions regarding the processes and the mechanisms of perception in today’s visual culture. Even if there is an original of the self, we, as viewers today, are unable to perceive it. The notions of clones, digital manipulation and the aesthetic of reality-shows condition us irremediably at the moment of perception. Following on this, here the signifier becomes a ghost to our eyes, a replica – an artificial construct in the first place. There is nothing to demystify, neither the story carrier (subject matter - artist) nor its myth (“the questioning of personal dilemmas”). Resembling advertising, the work of Kelli Connell seems to be embedded on an empty message, which exists insofar it becomes the image itself. In the midst of it, photography appears as we know it today –a photography performing its openness as a consternation of bare signifiers…

Text by Natasha Christia

Published in 1000 Words 6/November 2009

ANTHONY GAYTON

2009-12-14T23:46:00.011+01:00

Behold the Man
Spanish Version

Anthony Gayton muestra una predilección especial por relatos que pueden ser contados con palabras y luego interpretados con imágenes fotográficas. A veces Gayton tarda meses o incluso años en llevar a cabo la investigación, la elaboración de los textos y los esbozos, y la visualización de la historia final ante la cámara. Este ha sido el caso en “Angelus” y “Falling Apart”, dos puestas en escena minuciosamente escenificadas que contemplan el papel de los clichés de representación en la erradicación de esquemas ideológicos universales y códigos psicológicos de género. Sin embargo, en el entramado retórico de Gayton existen también otros casos de cuentos que culminan de un modo más espontáneo y natural. Estas últimas narrativas, más cortas en extensión e improvisadas en su contenido, cobijan un espíritu ameno, indulgente y mórbido a la vez, que encuentra su inspiración en referencias tan diversas como la memorabilia, la fotografía victoriana del siglo XIX, los prodigios del vodevil y el porno. La presente exposición, que supone el regreso de Anthony Gayton a MiTO dos inviernos después de su anterior muestra, ofrece una colección de las escenas más significativas de dichas secuencias. Su aspiración principal es introducir en un marco crítico las premisas conceptuales alrededor de las cuales se ha ido desencadenando vigorosamente la producción de Anthony a lo largo de los últimos años.

Mini historias que aluden a fotonovelas y pin-ups con protagonistas encarnados por hombres jóvenes y fornidos y que se erigen como narrativas de un componente sexual descarado, introducen la pasión homoerótica en la mitología universal del amor, del deseo y del crecimiento. Con independencia de que se trate de un cuento autobiográfico sobre la vida de unos hombres jóvenes en los años ochenta, de unas composiciones al estilo de la pintura clásica repletas de desnudos apilados, o de unas escenas de harenes o santos, el juego de Gayton va más allá desafiando y deconstruyendo insaciablemente los motivos más recurrentes de la iconografía dominante, mientras da voz a un juego de representaciones alternativo que pertenece a ese otro desconocido y oprimido. Con todo, Gayton no se limita aquí a cuestionar la orientación sexual de la iconografía dominante, es decir, la exclusión de la audiencia gay y de sus discursos de los contenidos masivos. Al contrario, lejos de rendir simplemente un homenaje al elemento homoerótico inherente en toda representación, sus poemas visuales asumen inesperadamente una fuerte dimensión política, y lo hacen gracias a su voluntad de perseverar precisamente en lo que hoy hace falta: una mirada de reflexión intuitiva pero a la vez sutilmente sofisticada que ilumine el terreno de la ética homosexual. La postura crítica de Gayton se sostiene desde dentro, desde el corpus masculino, por así decirlo, así como desde la exaltación de la carne que este normalmente lleva asociada. Partiendo de esta voluntad, Gayton no duda en demostrar la manera en que la idealización y el narcisismo de categorías sólidas y cánones culturales se hacen presentes también en la iconografía homoerótica perpetuando modelos de discriminación.

Todo aquello que nunca fue visto y documentado, todas aquellas relaciones y aventuras ocultas emergen ante nuestros ojos, como si Gayton estuviera conducido por una necesidad urgente de aportar cuestiones y repuestas concretas. Como maestro en la manipulación de la puesta en escena, Gayton logra todos los efectos estéticos, tipológicos o estilísticos que desea ante la cámara e incluso después, en el momento del retoque. Asimismo, explora sin cesar todas las posibilidades de relatar una historia no sólo con la ayuda de imágenes sino también, como en “Angelus” y “Falling Apart”, con la ayuda de imaginativos cuentos escritos. Enseñar y exponer las grietas semánticas de historias que hasta ahora no han sido contadas, o narrar historias desde un ángulo diferente creando un paisaje drásticamente nuevo para la contemplación del otro, equivalen para él al acto de exponer los trucos y plagios inherentes a la ética humana.

Pero volvamos a la exposición y a los círculos iconográficos que en ella se presentan. Mientras la serie “The Martyrs” destapa las facetas homoeróticas del simbolismo religioso, “The Harem” negocia el deseo por el hombre perfecto, revisando la iconografía ignorada de los secretos harenes masculinos de Asia Central. “Ladslove” parte de un diálogo entre las nociones del arquetipo uranio británico de idolatría y el profesor platónico para llegar a desvelar una serie de relaciones ocultas. Por su lado, “Dead” da un giro inesperado, desplazándose lejos de la presunta veracidad de la muerte documentada para acabar mostrando el cuerpo en su objetificación absoluta. De un modo similar, en “Beautiful Freaks” —una serie de imágenes de seres anormales tanto a nivel mental como físico extraída supuestamente de un libro de medicina—, el paso de la belleza a la aberración atestigua todas las etiquetas de identidad y las denominaciones sociales de una naturaleza restrictiva que operan incluso dentro de la comunidad gay. Distintas en su estilo e inspiradas en la experiencia homoerótica contemporánea, series como “Boys will be Boys”, “Behold the Man”, “Spielen”, “Mid Life Crisis” y “Child’s Play” cobran sentido vistas en un contexto de contemporaneidad expuesto mediante las estéticas del pin-up y del porno.

Todas las historias de Anthony Gayton parecen partir de la ingenuidad. La voz del cuento, autoritativa y simplista, tal como se elabora en “Boys will be Boys”, “Beautiful Freaks” y “Child’s Play”, se impregna de un tono factual y desprovisto de juicio. Aun así, nada es lo que parece a primera vista. Bajo la superficie de estos cuerpos cargados con una belleza que corta la respiración y una sensualidad animal, queda la autoexposición, es decir, la manera en la que el cuerpo se inscribe en la narrativa —no simplemente la narrativa en cuestión, sino cualquier narrativa. Desde “The Harem” hasta “Dead”, la masculinidad gay manifiesta su presencia fuertemente en su exaltación carnal. Sin embargo, si nos tomamos un tiempo para contemplar estas imágenes, descubrimos que el auténtico objeto de interés es el cuerpo per se, el cuerpo en su hibridación y su naturalidad. Gayton reitera un nuevo concepto de identidad, surgido a través y por encima de un corpus que funciona como una masa vibrante de estereotipos tras una piel aparentemente suave. Paradójicamente, dicho cuerpo, el principal portador de prejuicios y quimeras en el transcurso de la historia, se convierte en su mejor defensor, es decir, en el feroz defensor de una mirada escrudiñadora y de un vocabulario reacio y hostil, contra cualquier dicotomía o ambivalencia, cuyo solo objetivo es designar quiénes son los chivos expiatorios y quiénes los privilegiados.

Una vez asimilada dicha reflexión sobre el rol del cuerpo en la diseminación y distorsión de significado, podemos contemplar desde una perspectiva novedosa historias como “Beautiful Freaks” y “Ladslove”. Basadas en premisas como el culto a la carne, estas secuencias intentan una anatomía del cuerpo como un valor de comodidad subordinado a los intereses de diversos agentes, entre ellos la iglesia y, por supuesto, la comunidad gay. Puede ser que el cuerpo, muerto, deformado y grotesco, personifique la manera en que la sexualidad masculina se ha configurado ante los ojos de la sociedad, pero a su vez el cuerpo mismo alude a un vocabulario entero de valores, promocionados hoy por la comunidad gay: el desprecio hacia cualquier polimorfía física, la exigencia de perfección y el culto al icono sexual del gimnasio. Esta es la noción básica en la obra de Gayton: el cuerpo como una materia trivial que ocupa la superficie fotográfica, y la necesidad irrevocable de trascenderlo y de mirar por encima de él. Tal cuerpo, portador de castigo y torturador en sí mismo, se ha convertido hoy tanto en un Dios del Olimpo como en el pretexto para que la comunidad homosexual adopte por sí sola una actitud igual de discriminatoria que sus enemigos más feroces.

Las imágenes de Anthony Gayton representan en este sentido las dos caras opuestas de la misma moneda. Son ídolos y espejos a la vez, y como tales deberían ser contempladas, teniendo siempre en cuenta la función política de la mirada como cómplice de las palabras en la erradicación de cánones y en la subordinación del ego/naturaleza bajo aforismos construidos artificialmente e inhibiciones culturales estrictas. Muchas de estas imágenes son sarcásticas y humoristas en su concepción. A pesar de ello, en su banalidad se convierten en envoltorios de un juego intrínseco entre la atracción y la repulsión para disolverse al final en hostilidad. Tales imágenes resultan ser crudas para nuestros ojos, ya que ponen en evidencia las formas en que nuestro subconsciente ha sido entrenado a leerlas. Algo parecido ocurre especialmente en cuentos menos simbólicos y más cercanos a un registro de la realidad, como “Boys will be Boys” o “Beyond the Man”. Asentadas en una premisa pseudodocumental que proyecta la veracidad del momento fotográfico con sus pros y contras, estas historias trascienden nuestra percepción con sus imágenes y su narración. Su final anula su humor ameno. Nos señalan cómo están las cosas y la manera en que la injusticia se ve tolerada, naturalizada y perpetuada en un sinfín de acciones.

Así es como son las cosas, apunta Gayton, y sus textos, en mayor o menor medida, reafirman dicha suposición como elementos acompañantes de la narración visual. Es significativo que muchos de estos cuentos escritos, como “Beautiful Freaks” o “Boys will be Boys”, parecen ilustrar las imágenes en lugar de que sean las imágenes las que les ilustren. Los textos se convierten en pilares fundamentales para la comprensión de esas historias. A través de esta acción, nos enseñan que la diseminación del sentido final de toda representación se ha visto siempre irremediablemente condicionada por las palabras. Parece como si los finales de estos cuentos fueran impuestos y nada autónomos. Como si una mano invisible moviera los hilos, como si la sexualidad y su destino se transcribieran mediante reglas externas. Las historias son primero escritas y, después, las representaciones se enredan dentro de la trama del guión que marcan los textos. No sería impreciso señalar, por tanto, que en el fondo la obra de Anthony Gayton trata esencialmente sobre el lenguaje y su derivativo más enfermizo: una mirada esquizoide y explotadora que tortura y se tortura. Apelando a una respuesta sensorial, intelectual y emocional por parte del espectador, sus imágenes nos invitan sin miedo a aceptar el reto de superar las barreras del lenguaje, liberándolas de las limitaciones de las palabras.

Behold the Man
English Version

Anthony Gayton has a penchant for writing tales and for interpreting them photographically. It often takes him months or even years to carry out the research, writing, sketching and the final visualisation of the story before the camera. This has been the case with “Angelus” and “Falling Apart”, two exhaustively staged tableaux-vivants wherein Gayton contemplates, by means of a set of iconographical displacements, the role of representational clichés in the eradication of universal ideological schemes and psychological genre codes. There are in turn other cases of tales that culminate rather spontaneously and effortlessly. Shorter in extension and improvised in content, these latter narratives are characterized by a playfully indolent and morbid spirit that draws its inspiration from references as diverse as popular memorabilia, 19^th century Victorian photography, prodigious vaudeville tales and porn. The present show, Anthony’s comeback in MiTO two years after his last exhibit, offers a recollection of some of the most significant scenes of these sequences. Its aspiration is to bring under the focus of critical attention the core conceptual propositions around which his most recent artistic production has strenuously revolved.

Mini stories alluding to photo-novels and pin-ups, with well-built young men as their protagonists, operate as narratives of a blatant sexual component that introduce the homoerotic pathos into the universal tale of love, desire and growing up. Whether it is an autobiographical boys’ tale from the eighties, classical Renaissance-like compositions of bodily clusters, saints or harem scenes, Gayton’s play goes further and further to relentlessly deconstruct the patterns of the dominant iconography, while giving voice to an alternative set of representations that belong to the unseen and oppressed ‘Other’. This time, however, what is at issue is not merely the gender-specific nature of the dominant iconography, namely the exclusion of gay audiences and their respective discourses from the mass-produced visual contents. On the contrary, far from just paying homage to the homoerotic element inherent in all representations, Gayton’s visual poems unexpectedly assume here a strong political dimension, and they do so by providing precisely what is missing today: an intuitive, yet subtly sophisticated, self-reflective gaze that throws light onto the field of homosexual ethics. Gayton’s critical posture is sustained from the inside, from the very male corpus and the exaltation of flesh that is usually associated with it. In doing so, it does not hesitate to show the way in which the idealisation and the narcissism of categories and cultural canons are also present within the homoerotic iconography, perpetuating patterns of discrimination.

All unseen and unrecorded, all secret relationships and affairs, everything rises before our eyes, as if Gayton were driven by an urgent need to pose questions and provide answers. A master in the mise-en-scène manipulation, he accomplishes any aesthetic, typological or stylistic results he wishes either before the camera or afterwards in the process of retouching. Moreover, he incessantly explores all possibilities of telling a story with the help of images, but also, as he did in “Angelus” and “Falling Apart”, with the help of imaginatively written accounts. To show and to expose the semantic lacunas of stories so far untold, or to tell stories from a different angle creating a drastically novel landscape for the contemplation of the ‘Other’, is for him equivalent to exposing the trappings and plagiarisms inherent in human ethics.

But let us now go back to the exhibition and the featured iconographical circles. “The Martyrs” unmasks the homoerotic facets of religious symbolism, “The Harem” negotiates the current desire for the perfect male, taking a peek into the hidden boy harems of Central Asia, and “Ladslove” is steeped on the notions of the British uranian archetype of worshipping versus the platonic relationship with a teacher to unmask a series of hidden affairs. “Dead” takes an unexpected twist: it shifts away from the presumed veracity of death to show the body in its absolute objectification. Likewise, in “Beautiful Freaks”, a series of images of physical or mental deviants from a fictional casebook, the switch from the beautiful to the aberrant points to the identity labels and societal denominations of a restrictive nature in work, even within the gay community. Distinct in style and inspired by the contemporary homoerotic experience, “Boys will be Boys”, “Behold the Man”, “Spielen”, “Mid Life Crisis” and “Child’s Play” proclaim relevance within the contexts of the contemporary pin-up aesthetics and porn.

All the stories Anthony Gayton narrates seem to depart from a naïve element. The voice of the fairy tale, authoritative and simplistic, as elaborated in “Boys will be Boys”, “Beautiful Freaks” and “Child’s Play”, is impregnated with a factual and morally non-judgmental tone. And yet, first appearances are deceptive. Beneath the surface of bodies charged with a breathtaking beauty and an animalistic sensuality, what remains at stake is the issue of self-exposure, namely the very way the body inscribes itself on the narrative – not just the narrative in question but any narrative. From “The Harem” to “Dead”, gay masculinity manifests its presence so aptly in its exaltation of flesh, and yet, if we take some time to contemplate these pictures and mind looking under the hood, we discover that the real object of interest is the body per se, the body in its hybridisation and naturalness. Gayton reinforces a novel concept of identity, emanating through and beyond a corpus that operates as a living mass of stereotypes beneath a seemingly peau douce. Paradoxically, this very body, the main bearer of prejudices and misconceptions over the course of history, becomes also their finest advocator; the advocator of a scrutinising gaze and a vocabulary reluctant and hostile towards any dichotomy or ambivalence whose sole aim is to designate who the scapegoats and who the privileged ones are.

Taking upon us this reflection on the role of the body in the dissemination and distortion of meaning, we can now see anew stories such as “Beautiful Freaks” and “Ladslove”. Based on premises, such as the cult of the flesh, these sequences attempt an anatomy of the body as a commodity value subjected to the interests of diverse agents such as the church and the gay community. The body, ‘dead’, ‘deformed’ and ‘grotesque’, may epitomise the way in which male sexuality was seen in the eyes of society, but, at the same time, it alludes to a whole vocabulary of values as reinforced in the gay community today: the disclaim of any physical utterance, the quest for utter perfection, the cult of the gym-built sex icon. This is the bottom notion in Gayton’s oeuvre: the body as a trivial matter taking up the entire frame of the photographic surface, and the compelling quest to transcend and look beyond it. Such a body, a bearer of punishment and a torturer in itself, emerges today both an Olympian God and an excuse for the homosexual community to become as discriminating as its worst enemies.

Gayton’s pictures represent in this sense the two opposite parts of the same coin. They are reflections and mirrors, and they should be looked at as such, taking always into account the political function of the gaze as an accomplice of words in the eradication of rules and the subordination of the self/nature under artificially constructed sets of aphorisms and tight cultural inhibitions. Many of these images are sarcastic and humorous in their conception. Yet, in their banality, they become the containers of an intrinsic play between attraction and repulsion and eventually dissolve into hostility. They result as cruel to our eyes, for they expose the way our subconscious has been educated to “read” them. This happens especially to the less symbolic and more reality-driven tales, such as, “Boys will be Boys”, or “Beyond the Man”. Based on a pseudo-documentary premise that enacts the veracity of the ongoing photographic momentum with its pros and cons, these stories transcend our perception with their respective images and narration. Their end cancels their light-hearted mood. It capitalises on the way things are and on the way injustice becomes tolerated, naturalised and perpetuated.

This is unfortunately the way things are, Gayton seems to point out, and his texts reaffirm to a lesser or broader extent this assumption as accompanying elements of the story. It is significant that many of these written accounts, such as “Beautiful Freaks” or “Boys will be Boys”, seem to illustrate the pictures, rather than vice versa. They become essential and important for their understanding. By performing this action, they show us how representation has been irremediably conditioned by the written texts in the dissemination of its final meaning. It seems as if the endings of these fairy tales are imposed, as if they are by no means autonomous. There is an invisible hand moving the strings, as if sexuality and its destiny were ascribed to some external rules. Stories are previously written and representations are entangled into the bounds of their storyboard. It would not be inaccurate to argue then that on the bottom line Gayton’s work is all about language and its sickest derivative: an exploitative schizoid gaze that tortures and becomes tortured. By asking for a full sensorial, intellectual and emotional response from our part, his images fearlessly challenge us, the viewers, to exceed the contrivances of the language and liberate them from the constraint of words.

Natasha Christia, November 2009

LILIAN BASSMAN - PAUL HIMMEL

2009-12-14T23:24:00.014+01:00

They were one of the most exceptional couples of the 20^th century. Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel spent 78 years together, in life and in photography. They first met when he was nine and she was six; one decade later, they reencountered each other, fell in love and got married. This was back in 1935. Their common journey was interrupted only last February, when Paul passed away in the age of 95. Now the House of Photography / Deichtorhallen Hamburg is organizing an extensive retrospective of the two artists, the first ever to be held internationally.

Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel still remain relatively unknown to the broad audience. This is of great surprise if one considers that they both spent more than two decades at the cutting edge of the American post-war fashion industry and the New York art scene, their pictures illustrating some of the world’s best magazines, among them Harper’s Bazaar, Junior Bazaar and Vogue. All this lasted until the late sixties, when their style “wore off” to the eyes of the fashion elite of the time. The era of these two grand fashion photographers was over.

It was no earlier than the release of Martin Harrison’s seminal publication “Appearances” in 1991 when Bassman and Himmel came once more into the focus of international attention. The eye of the time detected in them what earlier generations had failed to see: two self-accomplished authors whose work had not merely encompassed the limitations of standard commercial assignments but had revolutionized the fashion industry with its sophistication and experimental character. For Bassman and Himmel were uniquely different. If the era that had bred them celebrated naturalism in its uttering materialistic glamour (Irving Penn) and post-war life in its effusiveness (Richard Avedon), they opted for an atmosphere of evanescence, appearances and disappearances. Regardless whether it was a lingerie editorial or a street shooting, their impressionist-like pictures incessantly transcribed the fleeting interiority of their sitters and of the external urban world that surrounded them.

“The designer intended a column of chiffon and you have given me a butterfly. Lillian, you are not here to make art, you are here to show the buttons and the bows!” In 1949, Lillian Bassman shot the Paris collections for Harper’s Bazaar, but Carmel Snow was at odds with the oblique final results. With the help of a window glass, the transparent Piquet dress had been transformed to a butterfly! This was about as far as Lillian could go! Or perhaps not… The pictures published in the March 1950 issue would reach an unthinkable anti-realism for the time that involved total elimination of every detail. There were no dresses any longer, but painterly masses, light and shadows. Lillian had printed the negatives through a tiny hole by exposing only selected areas, and had erased the outlines by applying parches of colour onto the positive.

Bassman made her breakthrough as a photographer in 1946, while she was running the art direction of Junior’s Bazaar. At first, she would stay during the lunch break at the studio of George Hoyningen-Huene experimenting with the photographs of others. She was looking for something different. Then she would try her own luck. Soon her pictures were published.

Bassman did not imitate the style of her female colleagues – and they were quite a few in the forties. Before the dynamism of Toni Frissel and the photojournalistic view of Louise Dahl-Wold, her women seemed to have little to do with politics, society or household banality. Neither did they carry anything from Avedon’s ethereal monumentality. Hers was an overtly intimate approach. Her lingerie and bathing suit editorials for Harper’s Bazaar expressed a romantic and idiosyncratic femininity. Bassman was renowned for her long sessions and for the rapport she would establish with her models in order to bring out their inner mood and aura. By developing a method of enlarging through tissue, she was able to produce out of focus prints alluding to a sensuous dream world, whereby the models, their faces and garments would literally disappear. For Lillian Bassman understood before anyone else that fashion was all about inner mood, emotion and elegance.

By contrast, Paul Himmel’s gaze seems at first sight to be driven by documentary concerns. Unfortunately, most of his fashion photographs do not survive, but what remains makes it clear: his camera pointed at the street, its dynamism and the fleeting moment of an urban life replete of fragility. Himmel imbued his “decisive moment” with movement that culminated into a poetic, subjective quality. His pictures show a multiplicity of human bodies flirting with the intangible in the rash of the metropolis. Out-of-focus and blurry, they are as much as moody and atmospheric as Lillian’s work, while sometimes preserving an unsettling aura, dissonant with the spirit of his post-war contemporaries.

An autodidact himself, Himmel took up photography as a teenager, much earlier than Bassman, and for many years he combined his hobby with teaching. In 1946 he went on to study graphic journalism under Brodovitch, his mentor, who used to remark: “Among all, Paul is the best in movement.” A few years later, in 1954, Paul would pay homage to the legendary art director and his distinct feel with his book “Ballet in Action”. Constructed on long exposures, the use of grainy film, high contrasts, dance and poetry, Paul Himmel’s ballet stills were celebrated by the famous chorographer George Balanchine. But Himmel soon took his artistic concerns a step further. In his seminal work on nudes published in the sixties, movement is replaced by evanescence. Bodily forms become so elongated and abbreviated that they eventually vanish, in a graphic imitation of Giacometti’s sculptures.

In the fifties and sixties the couple celebrated their consolidation. In 1951 they opened their studio, formed a family, and in 1956 one of Paul’s pictures was included in Steichen’s “Family of Man”. They produced more personal work and experimented in the darkroom. But times were changing. After the negative reception of his “Nudes”, Paul felt discouraged and in the early seventies he dropped photography for psychotherapy. By that time, Lillian’s increasing disenchantment with the fashion’s changing ethics also led her to undertake teaching in Parson’s School and painting. She was to make her professional comeback, shooting for John Galliano, Vogue and New York Times in the nineties, when interest on her work underwent a revival. Since then, the couple has been enjoying their resurgence through exhibitions and books, but even so a comprehensive record of their artistic production in unison has been missing to this day. Now the Hamburg retrospective, compiled by a series of iconic photographs, other still unpublished vintage prints and a documentary film, comes to fill in this gap and let the world know about two of the greatest artistic personalities of all times. “A unique opportunity not to miss”, in the words of Brigitte Woischnik, who has curated the show with Ingo Taubhorn.

Natasha Christia: When and how was the idea for the exhibition born?

Brigitte Woischnik: A long time ago, I was introduced to Lillian, Paul and their amazing work. Lillian has been a famous photographer but nobody in the photography world really knew much about the great Paul Himmel after the late sixties. Nobody had ever been able to see their work in conjunction. Stunned, I realized what an outstanding creative couple they had been. Each of them is unique but, if you look at their photographs, you see their joined life and work. I spoke to them about my idea of an exhibition and they granted me their approval. In 2003, I curated a little show in F 5,6 Gallerie in Munich and went on looking for a museum. Again with F 5,6, we showed some images of Paul Himmel during Paris Photo 2006. F.C. Gundlach, the famous German photographer, collector and founder of the House of Photography / Deichtorhallen Hamburg, came to the booth with Ingo Taubhorn, the museum curator. They looked through Paul Himmel’s images with great interest and I told them that Paul Himmel is Lillian Bassman’s husband. Mr. Gundlach owns some Lillian Bassman prints and included them in the most recent exhibition of his collection. Ingo Taubhorn gave me his card, I visited them in Hamburg a couple of times and when it was decided in October 2007, Ingo told me the good news. I was thrilled! By that time Lillian Bassman was 91 and Paul Himmel 93. We all knew we had to try and do it as fast as possible! But to let Lillian and Paul know that there will be a retrospective of them together filled me with tremendous joy!

NC: So, you had the privilege of working closely with the couple in the selection of the images. How would you describe the idiosyncrasy of each one of them after so many years?

BW: In 2007, I hired a cameraman to tape two interviews with Lillian and Paul. I was so scared of their age and wanted to have a document! The first interview was conducted at their house on Fire Island and the other one in New York. In August 2008, I introduced Ingo Taubhorn to them. We all spent almost a week in New York and discussed how we would work together. Ingo immediately discovered the historic value of their work. During that very week, they were excited, interested, helpful, inspiring, but also extremely calm due to their characters. For Paul and Lillian had shared a life of almost 78 years together. They stayed unique and each of them was able to develop a career on their own. They both shared the same interests and their children. They almost seem symbiotic, though this is not the right word to describe them. To me “each of them fills in the part of what might be missing in the other”. In her most recent book, which has been produced by her son Eric Himmel, there is a remark by Lillian on the last page: “To my husband Paul Himmel who always believed in me!” This statement speaks for itself.

NC: Still, Paul Himmel died last February and you had to continue solely with Lillian Bassman. Could you describe those moments?

BW: We arrived in New York in January 2009, when Paul Himmel had his first stroke and was in hospital. The family was with him 24 hours. Ellen Liebermann, Paul’s assistant for the last three years, guided us through his work. We discovered the most amazing images, negatives, vintage works and much more. Like two moles we worked through them and made the first selection. We visited Paul’s Gallery, Keith De Lillis, and went through all the images there, made a small selection and went down to Kelton Lab, where we found many prints ready for us to take. Every item we selected was photographed, archived and packed. Ingo left after ten days and I did a couple of days later, after they had brought Paul back home. A week later, Paul Himmel died.

NC: To my knowledge, there is very little material of Paul Himmel’s fashion, and Lillian Bassman is said to have jettisoned in the early seventies negatives of years of commercial work! In which state did you encounter the archive of the two photographers? Did you have to resort to the archives of Harper’s Bazaar?

BW: At Hearst there is no archive! Hard to believe, isn’t it? We found more than anyone could possibly imagine at the Bassman / Himmel studio. Paul Himmel had cleaned out his commercial fashion photography in the late sixties but all his great experimental work was still there – ballet, architecture and street scenes, nudes, sports, family and friends, besides solarisations and other experiments, all conducted in the late sixties. Lillian had also cleaned out her commercial pictures, but, luckily, after fifteen years they came by chance across the garbage bag and pretty much most of the material she had overworked.

NC: On which level do you trace the influences between Himmel and Bassman? Though they never photographed in conjunction, they share an extraordinary universe of abstraction, intimacy and formal sensuality …

BW: In many ways they shared their work, but each of them stayed unique. Till his end, Paul was arguing that he had taught Lillian how to take a picture. This was in a sense true. Lillian started later, in the middle of her career as an art director for Junior Bazaar, by working in the lab with other photographers’ negatives. She wanted to get something different out of a negative, and since she was an artist she began from there before she ever took a picture with a camera.

Their oeuvre is totally different but you can see that they had shared a studio. They lived side by side, so they might have discussed different ways to experiment and often helped each other. While Paul was shooting the ballet pictures, Lillian was designing the book for him. In the sixties Paul experimented with the solarisation in colour. As we discovered, Lillian had also tried it in black and white. They both had a crash on black and white; both worked in their own darkroom. Paul was a master in movement, while Lillian created the movement in the lab. To say it in her own words according to an interview she gave in 1951: "Paul is, I feel, a better photographer. His work is virile, it's more direct and he deals with the world as it actually is. Photographically speaking, we're probably as close as you could come to opposites. I'm completely tied up with softness, fragility and the personal problems of a feminine world."

NC: But she was the one who came back to photography in the nineties, whereas Paul didn’t. How do you evaluate her latest works?

BW: We will integrate some of Lillian's latest prints in the show. She started to work again after Martin Harrison, who had edited her last book, incited her to do so. Up to this day, she is working on new projects employing digital manipulation. She is so wonderful! But what a few people know is that in the last years Paul Himmel archived his work with the help of his assistant. He also used Photoshop to experiment with colours and crop pictures to different sizes. Through this technique they both reinvented their work in a new way.

NC: How would you describe la raison d’être of this retrospective? What is the contribution of both photographers to the world of photography?

BW: Their contribution is of a historic value! You can put them side by side with many photographers of their time, like Helen Lewitt, Ilse Bing and many more. To me, Lillian is the most outstanding Fashion Photographer. I have found her artistic quality in no one else! She knew through instinct and her feminine intuition how to show a woman in fashion and beauty and all over. Following on this, the ambition of this show is no other but to honour two of the greatest artists in photography through the world. My true dream is to watch one day the show coming back to New York, to the Whitney Museum. Paul and Lillian used to live just a few blocks away!

Text by Natasha Christia

All images: Lillian Bassman – Paul Himmel

Exhibition:

Lillian Bassman & Paul Himmel. Eine Retrospective

Curators:

Ingo Taubhorn, Haus der Photographie

Brigitte Woischnik, Foto Factory

Exhibition:

November, 27, 2009-February, 21, 2010

Haus der Photographie, Deichtorhallen, Hambur g

Published in Eyemazing 04/2009

ANTHONY GAYTON 2

2009-12-14T23:01:00.004+01:00

Beautiful Freaks

Mirrors that reflect shadows of dismembered existences: The ‘real’ self always seems to be elsewhere, beyond clouds of indolence and imaginative poetry. Representations entangled in their very bounds; raising questions of identity in a world wherein masquerade has become the rule is a dangerous task. Transcending the barriers of the skin and decoding the universal patterns of life in a linear teleological sequence: what is at stake here is providing a space for minorities – this shadowed ‘Other’– to share their story, to tell it loud and clear.

At first glance, we perceive Anthony Gayton’s vivid tableaux-vivant as naïve and playfully charming attempts to introduce the homoerotic pathos into the universal fairy tale of love, desire and growing up. But soon morbid indulgence gives place to reflection. Before our eyes images unfold, which in their syntactical complexity courageously thrive in the act of viewing the self as part of a sexual grammar whose main components, masculinity and femininity, intermingle within a hybrid sensuality. In this big play of humanity, deviants, outcasts and misfits emerge out of Plato’s cave. They all stoically carry on their shoulders their respective category labels. Tiny but inventively acute, these labels are nothing but societal denominations of a restrictive nature, essentially designated to them, the scapegoats of our culture…

For Anthony Gayton the camera and the spoken word go hand in hand. Articulated according to a clear visual diegesis and accompanied by short texts and poems, his narratives scrutinize the way in which axiomatic stories passed on from generation to generation advocate given attitudes towards homosexuality. Still, Gayton’s more recent body of work, consisting of portraits of well-built young men in archetypical postures with a pin-up quality, takes a step further. And it does so by exposing specific cases of iconographic misplacements that unveil hidden iconographies and secret relationships with an unforeseen sexual component: the homoerotic laps of religious symbolism in “Martyrs”, the current desire for the perfect male alongside the cult of the body in “The Harem” and the British uranian archetype of worshipping versus the platonic teacher-student relationship in “Ladslove”.

Entitled as “Beautiful Freaks”, the fourth of these series seems to take this premise to its extreme. The ongoing issue here is the subtle yet apparent association of homosexuality with physical and mental abnormalities, as it derives from a fictional casebook of “deviants” brought to the doctor’s lab. Accompanied by exhaustive reports in German which Gayton expressively commissioned for this purpose, the pictures seem to establish a factual and morally non-judgmental tone appropriate to a medical document. This may be the case on a linguistic level at least. Yet, in visual terms, much more seems to be beneath the surface. The mirror which we look and are looked at through is cracked. It is upon us, as viewers, to restore the unknown ‘Other’ in its deformed members to an integral whole that makes sense. Above all, it is upon us to accept and recognize the essential humanness of this ‘Other’; a humanness imbued by an animal-instinct-driven sensuality that exists outside any preconceived ideals of beauty. Fetishism, voyeurism and desire can have another colour, another taste and odour…

Anthony Gayton lists among his sources of inspiration for “Beautiful Freaks” case studies of deformities as encountered in the medical books of the 19^th century Victorian world, in ethnographic and travel photography, vaudeville prodigies and slideshow cartes-de-visite. To all this, he adds his own distinctive touch. Although it would be easy to go after the mere shock-value of the grotesque, he does not do so. Gayton’s freakish creatures carry an ambiguity, both intriguing and compelling at the same time. They are all decayed Gods and Angels. Their abnormal bodies become the containers of an intrinsic play between attraction and repulsion, radiating an unprecedented sensuality.

Gayton has deliberately reinforced this switching from aberrance to beauty by asking models from a fashion agency to help him deconstruct these archetypical scenes of deformity. Gayton explains how in the before-session mood he discussed the concept behind the story with each of these men and the way he would alter them on the computer afterwards. Following a shooting of long exposures, so as to bring the most natural and naïve expression out of his sitters, he would proceed with digital manipulation, applying nevertheless considerably less than the usual retouching to the skin so as to maintain the aura of a believable deformity, more down-to-earth and less grotesque or idealized. In this sense, the images of “Beautiful Freaks” work as honest medical statements as much as they are the carriers of provocative hints for the eye and the soul. An incessant play between desire and repulsion is taking place here. During the photographic moment, both the imagined subjects and the actual sitters are unexpectedly asked to switch roles; the beasts unexpectedly become the subjects of longing, and apt men in terms of standard appearance become the beasts!

By grounding this ongoing dissonance between the body’s commonness and naturalness and the archetype of the freak as testified through medical cases, films and prodigious circus tales, Anthony Gayton’s photographic representations shift away from any given assumptions concerning beauty and physical attraction. Moreover, they show us that the coin has always had two sides, both on a human and a historical level. To the eyes of society freaks may have always been ‘freaks’, yet many of these tortured creatures have claimed their right to be the exception to the rule. And they have accomplished it. Gayton describes how his working experience with Paralympics medal winners and the paradigm of Frank Lentini – a three-legged man, who in the thirties ended up being from an entertainer to an educator, celebrity and family man – have offered him valuable feedback at the moment of conceptualizing “Beautiful Freaks”. Through the fascinating stories of these people, Gayton was lucky to discover that behind any well-rooted assumption there are the exceptional lives of those men who are both ‘deviants and Gods’. The bottom-line is that what ultimately hurts is the perturbing gaze, the one that labels and discriminates alimented by the scrutiny of the historical moment and its vocabulary; a vocabulary always reluctant and hostile towards any dichotomy or ambivalence.

Following on from this, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that “Beautiful Freaks” essentially is all about language and its sickest derivative: a schizoid gaze that tortures and becomes tortured. The meaning of deviance is relative and the synecdoche here is more than evident. Historically, homosexuals have always been considered ‘freaks’ and in many communities of the world are still confronted with social barriers and suspicion, among them the hypocrisy of the church and other tight cultural inhibitions. But the mirror has two faces, Anthony Gayton seems to point out, and the harm comes from the inside too. As much as the gay community has fought against aphorisms, it has been in need of them in order to conquer self-definition. From this point of view, the aesthetically and formally kinky pictures in “Beautiful Freaks” offer a very-well accomplished oxymoronic questioning of the homoerotic ethics today. The overt aestheticism of the body in these pictures alludes to a whole vocabulary of values as reinforced in the gay community today: the disclaim of any physical utterance, the quest for utter perfection, the cult of the gym-built sex icon... It is precisely this trivialization that can make gay men as much as discriminating, suggests Gayton. Deviants from the norm are rejected within and without a homosexual context. Hypocrisy is everywhere.

“Beautiful Freaks” invite us to look through both sides of the mirror, from the within and from the outside. This ongoing interplay of the image and of language in its atrocities culminates into a new, meta-semiotic context, in which the notion of the abnormal is reworked into a novel cultural whole of ‘alterity’ designed to be contemplated in and out of context. What is left upon us as viewers? We can either buy into the standard values, or we can willingly let ourselves be carried away by this new challenge of multiplicity. In the first case, it would be obvious to think of these beautiful freaks as nothing but regular pin ups; it is easy to see the model before the message, guided by the common denominators of body and sex. In the second case, in turn, a drastically novel set is created for the contemplation of the ‘Other’. The new angles of the mirror lead us to a context somewhere between the real and the imaginary, whereby masquerade falls and the narcissism of categories dissolves into allowance and tolerance.

Anthony Gayton’s work offers a very intuitive, self-reflecting gaze on gay masculinity and perception. His constructed images are medical statements insofar as they are aesthetic assertions. In their quality of pseudo-documentary, they ‘enact’ perception and photography with its pros and cons. But, before all, they expose the contrivances of language and the problematic of liberating the images from the constraint of words. For as Gayton concludes: “Terms as homosexual and heterosexual are by definition labels. They are not character definitions but artificial concepts –convenient, perhaps, but still artificial concepts that entrap people, precisely because they force them to choose sides…

Text by Natasha Christia

©All pictures: Anthony Gayton

Representing gallery:

Galería MiTO, Barcelona

Published in Eyemazing 04/2009

STEVE McCURRY

2009-10-05T09:44:00.002+02:00

The Unguarded Moment

The legendary name of Steve McCurry is the first thing that pops into mind when it comes to photojournalism and travel photography at its best. Encompassing the “decisive moment” of Henri Cartier-Bresson, the tender humanism of Werner Bischoff and the agonizing social compromise of Eugene Smith, McCurry’s photography sheds bright light on a world reigned by absurdity and incongruence, celebrating dignity, endurance, and above all humanity’s extraordinary commonality despite the existent cultural, geographical and religious borders. From the mountains of Afghanistan and the monsoons of India to Cambodia, Philippines and Burma, McCurry’s prolonged journeys and stays at some of the most remote and conflictive zones of this planet have culminated into seminal images that have marked “a before and an after” in our inception of photography and the world.

For three decades, the work of Steve McCurry has been incessantly featured in National Geographic and other prominent magazines worldwide. In all these years, the world has changed. Photography has changed. More concept-driven, it has become ill critical of its proper rhetoric properties. Affect dominates intuition. Still, the way McCurry’s photography speaks to the hearts of millions of people has not been diminished in the least. In recent years, monographs such as “Portraits” (1999) “South Southeast” (2000), “In the Shadow of the Mountains” (2007) and others, all published by Phaidon, have become bestsellers with McCurry one of the Phaidon’s most prolific and well-represented authors. Now a new release entitled “The Unguarded Moment” is summed up as a companion volume to this appealing editorial offer, and especially to “South Southeast”. Of the same size and format with this latter title, the book contains an astonishing range of both recent as much as older work obtained from McCurry’s travelling across Africa, Europe and particularly Southeast Asia.

The notion of the “unguarded moment” has been regularly reappearing in McCurry’s statements over the last years. Comparing with Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”, which seems to make reference to the very instant of image capturing (the subject being unmediated by the lens and the photographer somehow deciding what is to be recorded and “made” into history), the “unguarded moment” alludes more to an energy emanating from the sitter, a so-to-speak sudden revelation of an unaffected core humanness before the camera and despite it. Paraphrasing Fox Talbot’s expression, the camera becomes the pencil of the “inner” nature, and the photographic act an orchestration of situations, which sort of effortlessly seem to happen upon it.

Fishing, herding, praying, sleeping… The vernacular “rhythms” of everyday life provide the stage for an enactment. Common people in their common realities, common needs and routines —the final word belongs to them, and their houses, landscapes, rivers, mountains and lakes become the photographer’s studio. As Steve McCurry recounts, “I have always hoped that I could bring about pictures of my subjects in a natural way. I have always hoped that I could take a glimpse of their humanity and capture their essence without any deliberate attempt to reconstruct a fact or get a pose and a gesture out of them. What I ask from these people is to be themselves. Most of them have wonderful life-stories to narrate, sufficient to make the encounter fascinating”.

It is precisely in these chance encounters between the photographer and his subjects that a metaphysical-like fusion of the signified, the signifier and the punctum takes place. All converge to one by means of a mystic renunciation of the very principle of “being there” that has traditionally constituted the photographic momentum. And still, these pictures are not suggestive of an absence but rather of a sort of “elsewhereness”, of a transposition to that neutral blank moment when the yin and the yang converge and the “instant” —this seemingly insignificant suspension of history— melds into an expanding humanness of a sublime beauty and warmth. “It is the particular moment that counts”, stresses McCurry. “You can achieve amazing things and a wonderful quality by the way you relate to people. When you are before a situation with people talking, moving, gesturing, it is a question of the moment to reveal something interesting and profound of the human condition”. And he goes on to further add: “The amount of time does not necessarily correspond to the quality of the portrait. Trying to know somebody really well is not always the solution”. Neither are the words. “I do not rely much on them. Often, I do not even speak the language of my subjects. There is an interpreter and the encounters are very brief. When I photographed the “Afghan girl” in 1984, I only disposed of two or three minutes”.

Still one would wonder: Today that lens culture has penetrated even the remotest places of this planet, people who believe that the camera steals the soul are becoming less and less. Where is then the clear unmediated gaze to be found among subjects who pose before the camera with the awareness of an actor who is ready to look at you and be looked at? In a certain way, Steve McCurry’s camera unveils remote cultures and people as much as it underlines the potential eclipse of the sacred and the exotic in the twilight of westernization.

Certain pictures in “The Unguarded Moment” leave some clear hints of these changes. “Virgin” sitters confronting the lens appear alongside candid pictures taken from a clear distance or next to images of subjects seemingly absorbed, “hypnotised” by an activity, as for example in the case of the “Buddhist monks playing video games” or the “Geisha in the subway”. In these pictures, there is no direct gaze, but rather a sensation of a hurry, of a so-to-speak old world melting under a fleeting moment, as if the subjects were not aware that they were being photographed or did not care less about it. “I guess the world is changing and you have to record it”, admits McCurry. “I don’t think it makes any difference though! I don’t see any difference between photographing now and thirty years ago! The only differences today are that people want you to send them a picture and that you are shooting with a digital camera. There will always be new people and situations. Insofar as there are new songs to be written, new poems to be told, likewise there will always be a new photograph to be taken!”

Steve McCurry admits, of course, that high expectations may often break down to pieces when a situation becomes materialized. Every person is a world and every moment is uniquely different. Some situations are inevitably more truthful and interesting than others, and likewise some subjects are more manageable than others. As the children for instance, who constitute frequent protagonists in his pictures… “Children tend to be more accessible and easy to work with. They are fascinating! They never say no because they love to be playful”. With adults the situations are more confrontational and complex, but even so, McCurry has discovered the keys to his close-ups: “It is all about instincts, intuition and a bit of the universal language of humour. And trust, of course… Yes, trust!” he remarks with confidence. “It is all about making the person feeling somehow relaxed, not conscious of oneself and non-embarrassed. It is about creating a comfortable, friendly, non-threatening ambience”.

“The Unguarded Moment” constitutes one of Steve McCurry’s more intimate and personal statements. The monograph epitomizes neatly the overall philosophy and restless curiosity of a man who has had one hundred lives; of a man who has recollected the seeds of an amazing trajectory but also paid the price of following a very tough path. His eyes have born testimony to innumerable conflicts. And yet, despite the unbearably irrational cruelty of their surrounding historical circumstances, what these pictures transmit in retrospective is a gaze that has preserved a soul resistant to profound despair and nihilism. The sublime play of light and shadows, and the quasi-mystical energy underlying them are statements of an uncontested faith to humanness and a deeply rooted optimism.

What has helped Steve McCurry sustain his spirit? The passion for wandering and observing, the contact with the Buddhist stoicism, photography…? “No. It is people first and foremost”, he responds without hesitating. “People who get caught up in conflicts; good people who just happen to be in the wrong place; people one cannot help but admire and respect for their capacity to survive, their dignity, kindness and generosity despite losing everything”.

To them —not to the ones who do the fighting, but to civilians and refugees, to women and men and children who, though carrying the burdens of death, loss and refuge, preserve their smile— Steve McCurry has dedicated his inner creative urge. Over all these years, his iconic images have conferred visibility to their human stories, arising international attention and sensibility. They have also contributed in sustaining the non-profit organisation “Imagineasia” that works in collaboration with local community leaders in central Afghanistan to provide fundamental educational and health resources. “Imagineasia consists of sending very simple things such as textbooks, notebooks and pencils to universities and schools”, clarifies McCurry. “We wanted to do something very manageable, where one can actually see the benefits”. When he goes on to describe illustratively the eagerness of these children to learn and to play with the pencils and books they are given, one clearly sees how photography can contribute to a better world.

Steve McCurry is a master of colour, form and ambience. His influence has been more than paramount to the way the rhetoric of travel photography and photojournalism has been constructed over the last three decades, and yet nobody photographs like him! From the Soviet war in Afghanistan to the current Taliban conflict, from Yugoslavia and the Gulf War to mundane everyday scenes, McCurry’s images seem to preserve a life-openness imbued by the wisdom of the oriental mysticism.

Just a short look through the biography of this American-born photographer who gave up his job in a Philadelphia newspaper to make himself “a stranger in a strange land” leaves sufficient clues. For McCurry’s decision to leave back the Western civilization did not just imply wandering across Asia as a nomad with a rucksack and a camera, but, instead, a constant process of confronting and assimilating original raw cultures of a fascinating diversity, despite their geographical proximity. Such is the case of Afghanistan and Tibet. With their striking frictions, these two countries have invigorated him profoundly —Afghanistan as a place of turmoil, and Tibet as an inward, more spiritual, non-violence driven world. However, over his thirty-year career he has personally attested various times how differences in language and culture end up all being superficial when one gets to know people and their yearnings closer. “Deep down human beings are very similar”, McCurry stresses. “Ironically, one of the things that tend to generate division is religion! While spirituality is supposed to be something that should bring people together in a mutual understanding, it does completely the opposite! It often forces people to think: your way is wrong and therefore I will force you to mine”. And he concludes with the most important lesson he has gained in life: “The fundamental problem of this world is the lack of respect. It is astonishing how humans completely disregard humans and other living creatures, how poisonous civilizations can be to nature and animals! It is irrelevant if the roots of the contemporary chaos are in the Middle East or the Tigris river area. It all comes down to the fact that people do not respect each other”.

In their wisdom —a wisdom culminated by long hours of witnessing and observing the world with the camera as a “passport”— Steve McCurry’s “unguarded moments” become exceptionally universal. Though many of these visions are set against landscapes ravaged by disaster and death, they bespeak a profound appreciation of life and its wonders. By appealing to an essential humanness, the supposed “Other” becomes us. The individual gazes of these children, men and women —vulnerable and attentive, careless and warm at the same time— transcend language and culture. They reveal the remarkable range of beauty bridging the unknown and the familiar. Frontiers break and one cannot help but get carried away by the grand river of life which flows on endlessly. “We long to maintain the here-and-now but it is continually disappearing, changing, evolving”, stresses McCurry, his words reminding us of Heraclitus.

Yes, indeed, everything is in a state of flux. But, Steven McCurry has managed to suspend the moment with his camera. What remains is stillness and photography —photography articulating with humility the possibility of a new life of unguarded dignity and hope; a new life of a human kind replete of light and shadows, waters and skies.

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.

All pictures: Steve McCurry
Imagine Asia Foundation

Publication:
Steve McCurry, “The Unguarded Moment”.
Published by Phaidon Press, May 2009
Hardback, 156 pp
75 colour illustrations
Price: 59,95 €
ISBN 978 0 71484664 4

THERESIA VISKA

2009-10-05T09:37:00.004+02:00

La Danse Française

There are spirits and they can be photographed. In an uncanny, almost magical act of conjuring up the eye with the semblance of shadows, the “photographic momentum” has attested to this novel envisioning of the body enduring time. Old forgotten lives and presences have eloquently been fossilized in emulsion. The dialectics of reason have been reconciled with the metaphysics of religion, and the tangible with the intangible. To the eyes of people from all walks of life, photographs arise as the ubiquitous remains of what is deemed to evaporate and ultimately vanish with the flow of time. Be they real spirits or apparitions observed or preserved photographically, photographs are anchored between the realms of the visible and the invisible. They become, in Roland Barthes’ words, “the lexicon of each person’s idiolect”, and as such abolish any distinction between the luminous translucent flesh and the immaterial essence underlying it.

And yet, there are photographers such as Theresia Viska, who choose to cut themselves loose from this melancholy-drained envisioning of the photographic subject as an objet perdu. Viska’s overall engagement with photography shifts from representation to a performative enactment of the very “absence” the photographic speech is supposedly about. By exploiting the structural and materialist properties of the camera apparatus to their fullest, Viska’s practice proposes performing the “ghostliness” sustained by the discarnate part each one of us carries within. It is precisely this daring experiencing of the ethereal interlace between the past and the present, family genealogies and personal visions that unburdens and at the same time relieves the gaze from the “culture of trauma” photography carries on its shoulders.

Long exposures, flash, and blurriness in suspended motion… Just with a shutter release, the “here-and-now” of the photographic act becomes everything. As a living presence, it punctuates solemnity at the moment of creation. As a quintessential ingredient of perception, it bridges temporal and spatial dichotomies while conferring continuity to life. Photography ultimately becomes the container of an expanding self-openness and a medium of personal healing. The words of Theresia Viska below will attest how the miracle is produced during the photographic momentum, how the omnipresent identity beneath the skin flourishes as the image surfaces on paper…

Back in 2006, Theresia Viska debuted in these very same pages with “Stable Girls”, a series of black and white photographs in which abstract conceptualism is linked with intuitive images of infantile femininity at the crossroads of representation. Now it is not young riders but “La Danse Française”, Theresia Viska’s most recent project, where this very feel of a rhythmical drifting in dreamful suspension bursts out in the form of dancing figures that dissolve into space and time. It could be real people dancing on a backdrop of a military academy at a castle in Stockholm. It could be Viska’s ancestors –knights and warriors, fathers and mothers. It could be here and now, there and then. What counts, after all, is the mood and the liberation of senses photography proposes.

The words to follow will be about the past and the present, about an ever-expanding self alimented by photography, a book, and an exhibition of ghosts, and once more about photography encompassing time, film, ceramics. At the outset of her new project, “La Danse Française”, Theresia Viska is sharing her reflections with Eyemazing.

Natasha Christia: To begin with, could you describe to us how “La Danse Française” was born?

Theresia Viska: After the release of my first book “Stable Girls” in 2006, I had high expectations of what could happen, but they all sort of failed. At that time I was not aware that it takes much more than a couple of exhibitions to establish oneself. I got depressed and had no clue how to proceed with my photography. I began taking random, subject-unspecific pictures. After a couple of months, I went through the first rolls and realized that it was really something about my family and self. Then an opportunity came up out of the blue. While I was shooting a freelance assignment at the Military Academy of Stockholm, it occurred to me that I could try making photography within this context. My family has been in the army for over three hundred years. So, I solicited for permission to go back and take pictures of a personal character this time. The Academy responded affirmatively and suggested I attended their annual winter ball where the young cadets dance La Dance Française. This was an interesting idea. Both my parents and grandparents have been attending these balls. Yes that was it: I was going to take pictures of my father, mother and of all my old ancestors!

NC: When you embarked on this project were you aware that the final result would turn out to be this peculiar ghost story?

TV: I did know that some “wrong” images would come out. At the time I was shooting my random pictures, everything around me was melting —shapes and colours. All of my photographs were beautifully staged and yet, there was always something wrong about them. On the other hand, I was conscious that producing sharp images of the beautiful guests would be really dull. It would be too perfect, too neatly done. So, when I began, I would have the camera in long-shot shuttle and small flash just to obtain rather blurry images. Another factor of paramount importance was that for the “Stable Girls” book project I had spent one whole year wandering in the stables. Now, for “La Danse Française”, I just had at my disposal two or four opportunities in a year, and in each occasion, just a couple of hours. Therefore, before the ball I needed to be very clear on how to obtain images that would work and during the event be overly concentrated. Despite this, various complications arose on my way. Two of my cameras broke down and I ended up using my pocket camera. But, in the end, it all went pretty well!

NC: The way you have chosen to represent your ancestors is quite spooky. To the eyes of many people, it could even be regarded unflattering and most certainly ambivalent and grotesque. Does the project express an underlying demythologizing attitude towards the past and the notion of tradition?

TV: No, not at all. “La Danse Française” does not constitute any critical statement. It is about ghosts basically. The whole series is impregnated by the mood resembling the atmosphere of “Twin Peaks” or that movie sequence from “The Shining”, when Jack Nicholson wakes up in the middle of the night and all of a sudden there is a big party. I wanted my pictures to feel similar. I wanted the viewers to “enter” a house where they hear sounds without actually seeing something. I wanted them to feel watched by ghosts –creatures that are not necessarily mean but not normal either. Ghosts have been undoubtedly dead for a long time or since last year, which makes it normal for them to look sometimes beautiful and sometimes a little scary!

NC: I am curious to know what kind of reactions to this ghost and monster photo-tale you got from the military academy. Did they approve of your peculiar style?

TV: They were aware of my style since the beginning. I had explained my intentions clearly: I was not going to take pictures of the guests, but would work in artistic terms. When they saw the work, they thought it was fantastic. I asked them if they would like to be mentioned in the book to be released —it would be totally understandable if they did not wish to be represented like this. But they did! They are proud to be within the project! Judging from their profile—the Stockholm military academy is based at the Castle of Karlberg, a 16th century castle full of mural paintings—you would expect them to be strict and old-fashioned but this is not their case at all. They embrace contemporary culture.

NC: In comparison to your first artistic project, “Stable Girls”, which negotiates female representation in alternative spaces, “La Danse Française” is more intuitive and imagination-driven, as if the very illusory metaphysics of representation were at stake here. Form and content is diluted in movement…

TV: That was also my purpose in “Stable Girls”: Formulating a proposition in memory with less-specific images instead of a fact-based documentary practice. But here it got more intense. I let loose, wore a really nice dress, went to the ball and had a great time with my camera, this is what happened in “La Danse Française”. I may work as a press photographer on a daily basis, but no one can take my ghost images away from me!
Now, as far as blurriness is concerned, already in “Stable Girls” I was expressing my frustration with the “pure image”. My stance towards this clean aesthetic, which is so popular today in the inception of photography as an intellectual exercise, is the following: If the image is too close to your reality, with perfect colours and thorough veracity at the time of representation, photography is unnecessary. You should better exhibit the object instead. Half of the job is to make the image, and the other half “to paint” on it. You have to put your signature on the photograph when you work on it!

NC: Does this last commentary stand for as an explanation for the presence of so many autobiographical elements in your work? It is as if you regarded necessary for photography to establish a link with your life in order to obtain a sense...

TV: According to my point of view, if you make a photo-story about something you do not relate to, it can be up to 99% perfect. Still, if you have an emotion about it, there is a little more percentage added to this, and this little bit makes the difference. It costs so much money, effort and time to bring a project ahead, so a strong inner motivation is essential in order to keep going!

NC: And photography? What input has photography had in your life?

TV: I was always having a really hard time at school. I had no idea what to do with my life. I was trying out different kind of jobs —working at a restaurant, taking care of the elderly—or was just traveling around. When I met my husband about eight years ago, we decided, why not take a photography course, travel around taking pictures and selling them? So, in 2001, I enrolled to a one-year photography course. For the first assignment, whose theme was “contact”, I went back to my old stable and took pictures of the girls. When I came out of the darkroom and showed the images to my teacher, he was impressed. That was it. Magic! It had always been so difficult to express myself with words and finally somebody had understood me thanks to photography. The camera helped me canalise my high energy and express myself, and this was such a relief. At last, I could concentrate. Nothing was actually wrong with me! Paradoxically I don’t travel that much anymore. When I make photography, it is more like travelling to my own world. I stay more at home now; I feel more at home now!

C: So, do you feel even closer to yourself after completing this series?

TV: I feel relieved. I reached my comfort zone and hopefully it will be different afterwards. I like the grotesque. I like to surprise people, to make the beautiful vulgar. Hopefully I will continue though I have no idea about the future!

NC: But you must have some plans for “La Danse Française”!

TV: Yes, definitively! In November, when it gets darker, a ghost exhibition opens at the KG52 gallery in Stockholm. I am currently working with an art director in an artist’s book similar to “Stable Girls” to accompany the exhibit. I have also asked a history teacher to have a look through the diary my grandfather wrote when he was soldier in the Finish winter war in the 1940s. He will contribute additional text inspired from this source…

NC: This is an interesting element. It provides another dimension to the non-site specific, timeless images of the series.

TV: The series becomes more reality-based, I guess. There will be real whispers from ghosts in my images, although my grandfather managed to survive this war!

NC: What about the movement and blurriness present in your pictures? Are they suggestive of an interest in shifting to film in the near future?

TV: Actually, yes! I will accompany “La Danse Française” series with a video that consists of a close-up portrait of a small girl, my 11 year-old niece, sleeping on water. The video will be projected at the narrow gallery corridor and will be the first thing the visitor will see when entering from the street. The main show will be featured at the gallery’s main space, which is hosted at the cellar below.

NC: This all sounds like a dream-state regression to your childhood…

TV: Well, the film is not a direct hint to my early years. It rather alludes to the fever dreams of ice and water I used to have as a child, while expressing the feeling I have chosen for the whole series to breathe—a watery and greyish feeling similar to the aspect of my ghost images. But, besides film, I am also experimenting with other type of media as well, which will attribute multiple modes of experiencing to the whole series. There will be, for example, a wall with different ceramic masks of faces forced onto the ghosts. These masks allude to the face we assume when partying around with people, when, for instance, we are laughing at something when it is not funny.

NC: As I can understand then, you do not draw inspiration solely from photography…

TV: Very little, to be honest. I am rather inspired from excellently written books, the movies or the theatre. I love culture! I try to see as much as non photography-related art as possible. Today there are so many people taking pictures with a camera, and that is good, but unfortunately, there is too so much bad photography as well.

NC: What is bad photography for you?

TV: When you are not using the camera 100% but just 50%. Everyone can take a picture but, you know, this is simply just not enough…

NC: As if there were too much concept, at the expense of photography?

TV: Exactly. As if the concept was good but the rest needless. This is why I find it more challenging to get a grip on other genres of art. I think nowadays we, photographers, do not take on challenges with our proper apparatus. A photograph can be so extremely good but overly boring as well. My only wish is to see more experiment with the camera and the photograph!

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.

Published in Eyemazing 03/2009

JEN DAVIS

2009-10-05T09:30:00.004+02:00

Self-portraits

If we were to attempt a contextual reading of this contemporary photographic representation, it would most certainly be in the area of the self-portrait where all the issues at stake are to be found. Since Cindy Sherman and her Untitled Film Stills, self-portraiture has become the field where the aesthetics and the politics of representation converge into a subversive whole that dynamises the coherence of orthodox representation. Self-portraiture has provided the stage for the enactment of a friction inherent in all representation: the friction between reality and fiction, inner and collective self.

In this expression of photography’s existential concerns, the lens does not unveil the subject but, contrary to what is expected, masks it. The outcome is a photographic surface that obscures vision and blurs the frontiers between what is represented and what is not, jeopardizing the very metaphysical envisioning of photography as the potential “mirror of the soul”. In a schematic paraphrase of the Lacanian discussion of the gaze, the mirror breaks and the lens becomes a vehicle of transportation to an “elsewhereness”, whence what is projected is not the physical idol of the self but the self after the image. In this “elsewhereness”— not in the absence of the subject, but in its distortion and resurrection as the embodiment of otherness — the fluidity of representation cancels what the retina longs to see. A window opens and speech is conferred to the “Other”. This unfamiliar and uncanny “Other”, in aesthetic, political or gender terms, does not simply aliment the overall practice of portraiture today but provides it with its raison d’être.

The portfolio of the photographer Jen Davis is an exemplary case of this tendency. In her Self-Portraits, a series, which she has been methodically building up since 2002, Davis directs her gaze and content to herself as an overweight American woman subjected to the pressures and expectations of the outside world. By displaying and thus defeating her insecurities about body image, Davis lends her own “otherness” a space of representation. Formulated as a voluntary conceptual statement addressed to a generic matrix of gender categories, her oeuvre acquires a broader symbolic value, while instructing perception and interpretation into a complex, yet very precise network of gender, politic and aesthetic relations.
The pictures show Davis in her domestic settings and surroundings. Associated with food, many of these moments provide visual testimony for a personal documentary of obesity tinged with loneliness and culpability. We often see Davis in mundane everyday-life scenarios —watering plants in her garden, hanging her knickers on a clothesline, or on the beach in the company of friends— yet we cannot help but feel her presence as the subtle intrusion of an outsider carrying the burden of a body that inhibits social interaction.

Davis scarcely confronts the camera and the viewers. More often than not, she seems to direct her gaze towards a vantage point outside the picture. From a distance, we observe her in moments of self-absorption, watching the external world through her window. Walls, pillars, door frames and other architectural elements rise between Davis and us, break our field of vision into pieces, and obstruct our act of looking at her. As such, they punctuate the uneasiness of our perception and its potentially conditioning force in the misconception of her being and life.
In this confinement of flesh and perception, the house becomes the “wrapper” of the self but also an off-limits space. The house seals, conveys and protects, as much as it allows for spontaneous moments of personal recognition to take place. In the intimacy of her bedroom, Davis is gradually able to overcome the oppressive external gaze and perform her sensuality and self. The body is the undisputed protagonist in these sequences of close-ups — body, flesh and silky skin unfolding restlessly beneath the shower towel, expanding playfully all over the frame, constituting the main volume of the photographic surface. We can feel, sense the odour and touch this “Other”. The distance between our eye and the photographic reality becomes dissolved like never before.

By eliminating this distance, Davis’ self-directed gaze unavoidably strikes us. Overweight women may have been at their best in Baroque art, but with this exception, fashion photography and television have done much excluded them and worshipped the thin silhouette instead. Alongside the queerness of Diane Arbus, and the plethoric dominant women of Federico Fellini, Jen Davis proposes an alternative set of representations that “naturalise” the female body, with its abundant curves and sensuality. And yet, it does not end there.

From the tense scrutiny of her first images, seeking to heal the victimised self, Davis goes on further to conduct a wide-ranging exploration of this unseen “Other” femininity. Moreover, she veils this femininity anew with a masquerade of sensuality and eroticism that still allows a view of her chapped legs. For, she has finally come to terms with herself. As a result, she is free to appropriate and critically rework the stereotypical patterns of female representation. Her self-perception dominates our perception as viewers and validates her actions before our eyes. She has finally taken control.

This latter element becomes particularly evident in Davis’ more recent series of men in I ask in Exchange, which stages a hypothetical and fictional relationship between the artist-subject and her half-dressed male companions. Here, an inner and powerful female gaze materializing sexual fantasies in a commodity world substitutes the external gaze of her earlier self-portraits. The unmediated eroticism and sensuality of these pictures put into effect an extreme objectification of a body suppressed by its “to-be-looked-at-ness”. It is as if the mere enactment of a role before the camera were sufficient for Davis to become that “Other” she has long yearned for in these pictures since she becomes both a protagonist and a symbol of attraction, both a bearer and a maker of meaning.

It is precisely this clash between the objectified body and its striking otherness that produces uneasiness when contemplating Jen Davis’ photographs. We feel compelled to question the actual possibility of this really happening. We are tempted to think in terms of a staged narrative progress, longing for a resolution. We expect the body to transform into something else as the series evolves. But resolution never comes.
Over these recent months, Jen Davis’ work has obtained an unexpected parallel, the fairytale ascension and descent of Susan Boyle in Britain’s Got Talent. The tension of our gaze tagging Davis with admiration, as an “emerging twenty-something overweight female photographer”, in a way revives the collective euphoria of the program’s audience towards a woman whose looks absurdly excluded the possibility of her having a decent voice. At first glance, even Davis’ artist statement seeks to render her Self-Portraits effective in this sense; it is so politically correct that is hard to resist. But it is worth doing so. It is precisely when we decide not to consume the “myth” of the photographic surface but rather see beyond its raison d’être on the level of perception that paradoxically Jen Davis’ photographs become effective. They become effective and meaningful to the extent they impart us with the awareness of the narrowness of preconceptions about beauty. The disjunction between the gaze and photography’s stillness calls for an energising of our consciousness. Insofar as the body succumbs to the lens, it becomes nothing but a masquerade and nothing but an image; no less than a copy without an original and no more than a body after an image.

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.

Published in 1000 Words 5/July 2009

MIROSLAV TICHY

2009-06-19T13:14:00.001+02:00

The Forbidden Gaze

There are photographs that easily find their way into books, galleries and the academic community. They are deemed by fate to comprise another chapter in the history of photography. But there are many others whose path to light becomes constantly hindered by obstacles. Scattered within trashy studios, dusty thrift shops and forgotten family albums they call out for attention as hidden treasures ready to confide their secrets to us. Even if faded and in bad shape, the encounter with these old photographs produces tremendous joy. In our excavation-like attempt, we feel like archaeologists digging into the past. What the journey will bring is rarely certain, but, before a handful of photographs literally “stained” by years of adventures within boxes soaked by damp, everything comes into place. We can feel the shutter of the camera, not to say the aura of lives, stories and shared emotions. We can feel what Roland Barthes once described as the dreamful transportation of the “then” into the “now”–the past reviving into an eternal present.
Travelling through bits and pieces, our gaze is after the unseen, the unknown, the non-appreciated. We are longing for this magic revelation of the invisible to take place before our eyes. It is precisely this “unfinished business”—the “to-be-unfolded” fate of thousands of photographs—that renders the whole thing so enchanting to us. This is what photography is clearly all about: a story without an end. Throughout its history pretty much has happened, much more is to be discovered and, what's more, there are infinite ways to tell the same story. In this respect, photographs, when contemplated in different eras and contexts, become “reactivated” as distinct beings, embellished with novel visual properties. In doing so, not only they but also the human eye behind the camera is conferred, even if late, the posthumous glory it deserves on the shelves of history.

Miroslav Tichý: the man with the trimmed suit, a Diogenes-like figure, emerging out of oblivion… For over fifty years he lived in total reclusion in Kyjov, a small Moravian town. Unknown to most, he assumed the role of the misfit. For decades, neighbours avoided him, while the Communist regime's police paid him frequent visits. In his non-conformist way, Tichý embodied the opposite of the Socialist Man—a reactionary dissident, an Eastern-block hippy who was constantly turning his back on the political and social system that surrounded him. If others worked, Tichý would spend his day on the roof of his mother's house enjoying the sun. If others claimed their ideological integrity, he would simply not care. Yet, despite appearances, Tichý has never been just another lost soul. On the contrary, he has meticulously “carved” his path in life. Choices and decisions were aptly adopted a long time ago.
Born in 1926, Miroslav Tichý studied in the Academy of Arts in Prague, but after the Communist takeover in 1948, he sensed that the way things had turned was simply not for him. He retreated to his hometown, pursuing a solitary, poor existence away from public lights, exhibitions and the espionage paranoia of the Stalinist era. In the fifties, Tichý led a relatively normal, quiet life at his parents' house: he kept working on his modernist figural paintings and even participated in a group show in 1958, the only one ever; but in between, intervals for psychiatric treatment in clinics were beginning to become a routine. Then, in the early 1960s, the final rupture took place. Tichý progressively started neglecting his appearance and disregarding any rule of personal hygiene—he, the son of a tailor, would let his hair and beard grow and dress in a ragged black suit. As the chasm between him and the world grew bigger, so too did the repression exercised upon him by local authorities.
Miroslav Tichý spent a total of eight years in jail and suffered all kinds of persecutions just for being different. However, nothing would put his artistic spirit down. By the time of his eviction from his studio in 1972, Tichý had already dropped “painting” for “painting with light”. With the help of old, recycled cameras and lenses adapted with Plexiglas and tins he began photographing the leitmotif of his economical figure drawings: women! The yard of the family home provided the space for a laboratory and darkroom. Every day Tichý would walk for hours pressing the button whenever the lens asked him to. The streets became his studio. By nightfall he would be back home, developing his rolls of film. If essential photographic equipment and chemicals were missing, he looked for them among disregarded materials. The rest was fabricated out of paper tubes, plastic drain-pipes and cardboard. That was daily routine from the late 1960s until 1985, when Tichý gave up any involvement with photography for good.
The photographic oeuvre of Miroslav Tichý became the focus of international attention thanks to Roman Bauxbaum. Back in the sixties, when Bauxbaum was still a young child, he used to share much of his time with his peculiar neighbour. The Bauxbaum family was something of a patron for Tichý. Roman's uncle was a university friend and psychiatrist of Tichý, while his grandfather rented him the family attic room as a studio. It was there where Tichý would show young Roman how to fabricate pinhole cameras out of shoeboxes. Shortly after the Prague Spring, the Bauxbaum family emigrated to Switzerland and contact was lost with Tichý. Then in 1981, Roman—now a psychiatrist and artist with a Swiss passport—came back for a visit, the first of many to follow during which he befriended Tichý, spending hours going through his photographs and negatives.
Acknowledging the artistic integrity of the man and his work, Bauxbaum decided to take the task upon his shoulders and to let the art world know about it. In 2004 the Foundation Tichý Ocean was created. Since then, a series of publications and exhibitions in Seville, Arles, Zurich, London, alongside last summer's retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and this winter's show, “The essence of Forbidden Photography”, at the recently launched venue of Ivory Press Art+Books in Madrid, have caused sensation, and Miroslav Tichý is now considered to be one of the most significant discoveries of the last few years. In the meantime, life goes by peacefully in the small provincial town of Kyjov. Tichý has not come out of his village for the last fifty years nor does he plan to, less so when it comes to attending his own shows. He prefers to be “a prophet of decay and a pioneer of chaos” at home.

Women everywhere: at the bus stop, at the square of the church, in the pool; young girls and women walking, chatting, sun-bathing. Scenes from everyday life without any special charm obtain an exceptionally lyrical dimension through the camera of Miroslav Tichý. With their dreamful, ghostly quality they are diluted in the atmosphere, erasing dullness and ugliness in a way only words are capable of. It is impossible, given the era (1960s-1985) during which the whole of Tichý's photographic work was produced, not to connect these pictures with the prevailing historical circumstances. It is impossible, when watching time inscribing its stains on their texture, not to think of Tichý's fellow Czech and near-contemporary Milan Kundera, who, better than anyone else, captured the emotional alienation of the individual in Communist Czechoslovakia.
Semi-obsessive individuals on the fringes of resignation, mechanically executing their duties… Kundera's characters have a lot in common indeed with the female figures emerging subtly from the weary surface of Tichý's prints. These photographs are uneasy to read. Sensual and human, banal and profound at the same time, they carry with them an “unbearable lightness of being”. Should their interpretation lack an historical and political value, this is purely because Tichý has always been very far from the expressly political. Likewise, within Tichý's gaze there is no pleasure principle at work. Here again, voyeurism and desire become another mere excuse to define the bars of the cage that has always irremediably separated Tichý from reality, while taking on the dimensions of a much more generic argument specific to his era: the fundamental alienation among the human being and its historical present.
A sort of inevitable misperception of the external world imbues these pictures in their formal defects. Female bodies behind fences and silhouettes evoking the nurses of the balnearies who appear in the novels of Milan Kundera; the act of surrendering oneself to boredom and triviality; wrong people in wrong places who, deemed to suffer a misrecognition and displacement of their roles, choose trivial stories, trivial loves, and trivial endings as substitutes for life. Sensual women, aged and young, skinny and plump, aware and unaware of being gazed at—what difference does it make when the very gaze is damaged? Deviating to a non-consumed voyeurism, facing oneself with a desire that even if it were to be consumed, it would be as to discover the absence of desire behind the desire: “A woman, for me, is a motif. Nothing else interests me”, says Tichý. Far away from the fetish of the “éternel féminine”, this is all about women of Socialist Realism—women comrades. Tichý's wistful look abides them: “The erotic is just a dream anyway. The world is only an illusion, our illusion”. And so are ideologies. The horror before the mechanization of human consciousness and emotions is what finally clashes with these very images of bodies lying about Tichý's studio—rats and mice eating away their material relics. For the artist this is the fate that all his work should encounter, the challenge of surviving the waste-paper basket the same way he does. What is left now from all this past of fear are just these “small objects of obsession”. In the memory of Miroslav Tichý there is nothing else left save a tangible nothingness.

Tichý is looking at us through the fence. Even today when the old enemies are gone—among them, the policemen who on Communist holidays would knock on his door and take him to the asylum for “provisional normalization”—even today when international recognition has been achieved, the eighty-year old Tichý still opts for maintaining a safe distance, and, from this distance, he mocks us sardonically for paying homage to the artist and his work. “I am a star! A big star!” he laughs. And he is right to. Before a contemporary art panorama ruled by the aphorisms of market-strategists and pseudo-intellectuals, such a posture of activism and subversion becomes more current than ever.
Is Miroslav Tichý a photographer? Is he a painter? His art does not obey any strict categorization. It is not mere photography, painting or drawing, but rather a life-long performance: a kind of bio-philosophical approach, an exhibition of self-constructing madness and personal obsession, far more compromised, consistent and original than that of many others. Tichý has been done with photography since 1985. One day, he was through with it in the same way he had been with painting back in the late sixties. He was already on his way to the final touch, he had finally solved the mystery: the actual piece of work is himself!
Blurry pictures versus rotten frontiers and identities: their uncanny effect brings to our mind the out-of-focus visual universe of Bill Jacobson, the Pictorialists, even the screaming agony expressed in the self-lived diaries of Antoine d'Agata. The blurry images of Miroslav Tichý are not derivatives of a programmatic production. Under-developed and full of technical and formal shortcomings, they are the result of pure impulse, neglectful handling and a primitive photographic technology. And yet, their uniqueness resides precisely in their strikingly unusual formal properties. Maybe, after all, sharpness is all worn out; maybe this has always been the lens of the world—a lens made out of tins, eaten out by mice and silverfish, disrupting vision with its filthiness. Paradoxically, when we find ourselves looking at the surviving old photographs of Tichý, which show him as a perfectly normal young man enjoying the company of his fellows in the university years, their clearness scares us. An uncanny displacement of topos takes place, as if the world was heading irremediably towards the opposite direction.

One of the first solo shows dedicated to Tichý suggested a kinship between him and Jacques Henri Lartigue. Gaze and women do admittedly link the two artists, yet each one is positioned in opposite poles within the social hierarchy. The gaze as joy of life, this is Lartigue. What by contrast, predominates in Tichý is an obsessive self-confinement in one's mind. There is no way out, no space for feelings or any emotional expression whatsoever. Tichý definitively does not belong to the world he captures with his camera the way Lartigue did. His is a constant struggle to bridge the gap, to produce an order of elementary likeness so that an elementary communication can take place between us and his pictures. “Look for the closest thing to reality”, this is what Tichý is looking out for.
Bikinis and shorts, female bodies and then the hand which improves contours with a pencil, or which uses hand-made mats and frames as a way of putting things together. Even in the chaos there is a need for order! Blurs, spots, errors... “The worse the technique, the better the art!” That is the secret of Miroslav Tichý. “And for that, you need a bad camera. If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you’re doing worse than anyone else in the whole world!” argues Tichý, but should we believe him? Rather than “defect”, maybe the secret of his work could well be this frenetic self-exile, whereby the artist's life lies at the mercy of Art. Hence the artist as a living piece invalidating life; hence, the hermit life of Tichý. The key is silence and self-withdrawal in order to trap the song of this world. Let us suspend thought for a moment and wonder: how many artists are able to take this compromise so far today?

It is difficult to place ourselves honestly before the artistic artifacts of Tichý. We like these pictures because they come out of the other world. Old photographs in their hand-made mats and hand-decorated wooden frames, these are the objects we carry with us, the ones we treasure. We like them as specimens of a reality that provides space for reflection and imagination. We face them with relief precisely because we know that it is us here and him there. Desire, disclosure, a pleasant suffocation; art keeps its treasures for a few. The frontier that separates us grows bigger. At the end of the day there is nothing left. Tichý becomes lost in the depth of the horizon…

All pictures: © Miroslav Tichý / Foundation Tichý Ocean

Represented by:
Foundation Tichý Ocean

Text by Natasha Christia

Published in Eyemazing 02/09

VLADIMIR ŽIDLICKY

2009-06-19T13:04:00.004+02:00

Beneath the Skin

One of the most significant editorial revelations of the last Month of Photography in Bratislava has been a beautifully compiled monograph that encompasses the trajectory of one of the most prominent presences in contemporary Czech fine-art photography. The man behind the book, which has been chosen from among some 160 publications as the best to have appeared in Central and Eastern Europe in the last two years, is none other than Vladimir Židlický (Hodonín, 1945). Židlický was singled out by the international jury for his highly personal and intuitive photographic language that seems to uncover the secrets of an incorruptibly intangible world beneath skin-deep appearances. His elaborate photographic tableaux of nymph-like figures, whose naked bodies become diluted and/or disrupted through movement, culminate in a hybrid amalgam of pictorial and symbolic references that negotiate corporeality and the humanness of the soul from an existentialist point of view.

In the early seventies Židlický quit painting to make his breakthrough in photography but it was not until the eighties that he attracted international attention. Since then, his work has been featured in galleries and museums, forming part of public and private collections all over the world. Despite this, Židlický's disinterest in self-promotion has worked against the accessibility of his oeuvre to the broader public. “My concern is to fulfil my creative ambitions to the fullest and convey to the world what I want”, he explains. “Life is too short and I don’t wish to waste it on marketing my work”.

Židlický's medium of expression is analogue photography. Beautifully processed, toned gelatine-silver prints—and following recent experiments, coloured—his photos point to a state of dreamful deconstruction. The parts of the nude female bodies that emerge subtly out of the perforated and stained surfaces evoke the misty works of Jöel-Peter Witkin. Though the two artists have never so much as communicated or coincided geographically, they appear to share specific concerns and fugitive encounters of coincidence that considerably reinforce their perpetual association. Back in the early eighties, a curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art came up with an idea for a show with a particular ambition. There would be, on the one hand, the provocative and intransigent Witkin with his outcasts, freaks and dead corpses; and, on the other, the pure, ethereal, yet deeply dramatic and passionate Židlický—the overall theme being bodily deconstruction in its post-modern uncanniness. Although this exhibition was never carried out, another show drawing upon the very same principle was held some years later at the Robert Koch Gallery, this time featuring Vladimir Židlický and Judy Coleman. The idea of the Western versus the Eastern gaze was still intact, and this is precisely what is of interest here, namely the envisioning of Vladimir Židlický on the Eastern (European) side of the track in terms of origin, aesthetic approach and conceptual sensibility. The juxtaposition in question provides us with a solid base for reflection when attempting to come to terms with the nature of Židlický's oeuvre.

If Jöel-Peter Witkin's bodies of misfits jar against the walls of post-modern nihilism, encountering beneath the contemporary peau douce what Slavoj Žižek once described as an interior gnawed away by worms, Vladimir Židlický admittedly seems to follow a rather Classical, not to say Romantic ideal of beauty that does not seemingly allow too much space for provocation. Židlický's beautifully arranged torsos and dynamically arranged compositions of bodily clusters draw their fundamental iconological references from Symbolism and the Renaissance pictorial tradition, whilst being imbued by a strict sense of geometrical composition, formal abstraction and meticulously calculated anarchy that owes a lot to the Czech photographic legacy of the nude. Židlický has never denied neither the deep ties with his fine arts background, nor the influence that the symbolically exalted iconography of his near-contemporary group Epos might have exercised on him during his early years in Brno. Still, this apparently ongoing conformism with tradition is quickly compensated. A sort of existential divine-driven drama throws the protagonists of these pictures onto the verge of immateriality. A romantic melancholy impregnates these bodies. Form drifts aside, giving its place to the mysticism of the being. While the earthliness of Witkin's bodies resonates in an American-Indian bio-philosophy, Židlický's ethereal gaze heads up towards the sky in search of an Orient-inspired metaphysics of the body. In a similar way to his antecedent Frantisek Drtikol, he is looking for a wistful body beyond the constraints of material infatuations—not despite but after life and death.

The undisputable protagonist of these images is the “éternel féminine”, namely, woman as the embodiment of fertility and as the mysterious intangible “other”. Possessed by a deep symbolic value, female nudity becomes the material expression of an Eden-like paradisiacal state of being, irremediably bound to the subconscious. “For me, the female body is an absolute symbol, the sole irreplaceable symbol, and I don’t know anything that would match it”, Židlický points out. “It represents the ultimate bearer of sexuality, the fundamental building block, the motor without which we wouldn’t exist. It intrigues me; it is perpetually mysterious and exciting, a permanent source of inspiration”. Yet, despite the sensual nakedness prevailing these pictures, sexuality, as we know it today, is absent from Vladimir Židlický's gaze. His work stands in a striking opposition to the erotically charged, self-claiming feminine identity that dominates the contemporary patterns of representation both in commercial and in fine art photography. In his eyes, artifice and masquerade relegate femininity to a sterile construct, lacking sexual purity, sensuality and animal warmth. His whole set of representations defies any materialist view of the world for a rather purist approach, whereby flesh becomes the ground for psyche and spirit.

Židlický's work may clearly depart from a stylistic formal point of view, aesthetically allied with traditional fine-art photography, but takes an unexpected turn by producing a dislocation of roles on a material level. There is drama emanating not just from the surface of the print but also from the very negative itself. There is an esoteric need pushing Židlický to increase immediacy at any cost. This is the reason he once left aside his brushes for photography. If this new medium were providing infinite possibilities for a closer relation with the external world, Židlický would make the best out of it.

Negative and positive: the original and the copy; the original and the imitation; the mirror and its reflection… Back in the 1920s, the Czech avant-garde propagated the superiority of the purely material qualities of the medium over form and content. To artists such as Jaromír Funke, direct photography epitomized an exceptionally illusory bond with tangible reality as much as hyper-reality, while others such as Jarosalv Rössler elevated the negative and the positive to material surfaces with autonomous properties whereupon the artist's willingness could be projected. The work of Vladimir Židlický, despite being created decades later and developed within a distinct cultural milieu, undoubtedly owes much to this legacy. Židlický 's photographs are above all physical objects: they may allude, in part, to the so-called “photographic momentum”, but the final, decisive touch comes always by means of a manipulation that the negative—the material matrix of the photographic event—suffers. Židlický describes this practice in terms of an “animalistic” need to manipulate, to reach the essence, to affect the original image, to literally cancel the surface in order to bring forward what lies behind, as if the negative were the soul which carried the body, as if everything to be found were there. “I felt that without my additional interventions my intention wasn’t formulated precisely enough, as if the whole truth wasn’t expressed and the message was only on the surface”, he explains. And he continues, providing a full account of his dynamic, intense interventions, “I manipulated the emulsion of the negative mechanically in different ways, even to the point of making holes in them, I painted on the negatives using a paintbrush as well as other means, I laid the negatives over each other to layer them, I worked with inversions of the negative; I exploited all thinkable means that could leave traces on the original image”. This is how his haunting photographic enlargements have been generated over the last four decades.

Manipulation acquires paramount importance in the oeuvre of Vladimir Židlický in the sense that it reinforces the ontological validity of his photographs as artefacts in progress. There are cases in which ten years pass between the birth of a negative and the final image. This is where the factor of time enters. Through mechanical interventions onto the image, deprivations and disappearances take place, as if an unidentifiable time accelerator were at work giving birth to both a temporal and a spatial dislocation. In this respect, these pictures are here and there, memory and present, finished and unfinished at the same time: they are three-dimensional “ready-mades” with infinite conceptual possibilities, travelling through time. What is more, they question themselves from within as much as from without. This is the fundamental premise around which Židlický's commitment with photography has revolved since its very first steps. This has always been the path and the challenge: to build upon the advantage of photography over painting, upon its fleeting dialogue with reality, and complement the whole with an effort to reveal the truth hidden beneath the surface—that intangible truth for which material bodies eventually become dust.

Abstract settings, blurry images—always intelligible and devoid of logic—conquered by motion; emotional maps and the human body itself as battlefield; all in all, drawings of light. This is the way these emotional landscapes of the absurd arise before our eyes. Vladimír Židlický has a lot to say about the existentialist reflection underlying the vibrating iconological ambience of his works, “There is no doubt that my work has been influenced by existential philosophy, which resonated profoundly in the situation we experienced when we were young in the late sixties”, he explains. His generation discovered Sartre, Camus and Dostoyevsky after the “Prague Spring”. “At that time, there was a sense of living in a world, which we did indeed shape ourselves but which at the same time was shaped as a hostile environment”.

Following on from this, Židlický's photographs are concerned with the investigation of the existential essence of “being here”: When it comes to individual figures, “the pros and cons of their existence” are addressed, whereas, in the case of “human clusters”, what is at stake are “the roots of the solidarity of the crowd which often proves fictive in the end”. “Existence precedes essence”, Sartre once stated, and indeed, in our struggle of beating down uncertainty and of imposing our law on reality even momentarily, the body becomes the principal vehicle of expression of the disorientation and confusion which existence throws up. Single bodies fragmented, perforated and stained from the inside, or alternatively, groups of bodies against each other become bits and pieces of human experience fusing sexuality and concrete identity into time and space. An unexpected turn towards a continuous choreography of drama takes place. Here too, as in the Sartrean universe, this uneasy coexistence with the “other”—in terms of flesh accumulation—takes on particular relevance as a hostile sign of our reflective consciousness. An uneasiness regarding human nature resonates within these pictures in the face of an apparently meaningless and absurd world. Is there any way out of this existential nihilism, and if so, where?

Two parallel tempos, two parallel sets of forces, at the heart of which constitutes the original unmediated result of the “mechanical reproduction”: the vigour of the spirit behind the artwork versus its material realization, and movement on the surface versus movement beneath. Not surprisingly for Vladimír Židlický movement is everything. Nothing else matters, neither fixed narrative nor literal iconological references. The image is literally “melting” before our eyes. Time and space flow and bodies become diluted in motion generating a synesthesia effect that has parallels in dance and music. This is precisely the way Židlický would like us to perceive his works: as cosmic visualizations of musical scores transcribed onto light; scores which appeal to the viewer's straightforward perception distanced from any phenomenal observation. Should music, in Schopenhauer's words, represent the only art that does not copy ideas, should it embody the energy motor of this world in itself—“das Willen”—then Židlický's envisioning suggests a similar reading. Here in turn, it is artistic expression as an aesthetic proposition which assumes the role of the purest will. Photography is rendered a synecdoche in the struggle for the ever-elusive balance between the external world, art, and the body in its feminine–ultimately symbolic— dimension as the envelope of soul. With it the circle closes and nothingness gives place to light.

Text by Natasha Christia

All Pictures: Vladimír Židlický
www.zidlickyvladimir.eu

Published in Eyemazing, o2/2009

CZECH PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

2009-06-19T13:00:00.003+02:00

Art and exhibition Hall at the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn
An interview with exhibition curator Vladimír Birgus

A comprehensive retrospective about the history of Czech photography in the 20th century will be on view at the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn until the 26th of July. Curated by photography professor Vladimír Birgus and by Jan Mlčoch, curator of the Photography Collection of the Museum of Decorative Arts, Prague, the show provides an exhaustive insight to 100 years of photographic creation by means of a gigantesque narrative that features a total of 197 artists—179 male and 18 female photographers.

The exhibition responds to the fundamental premise of “re-inscribing” the Czech production within the panorama of international photography while propagating its significance as one of the richest photographic legacies in Europe. And it does so by full right. For Czech photography remains to our days relatively unknown to the wider audience and underrated within the art market. There are, of course, specific names such as Frantisek Drtikol, Josef Sudek or Jan Saudek, who have attracted considerable international attention, but, in any case, they are regarded as exceptional cases, not in the least indicative of any broader fine art photography milieu, as if this latter had never existed.

On the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; on the periphery of the Paris and Berlin avant-gardes as a young democracy in the years between the two world wars; on the periphery of the world during the four decades of Communist protectionism: when it comes to the Bohemian Lands and their contribution to modern culture, all that seems to remain is the term “periphery”, mainly referring to a “second-class” quality. The existent photography theory has failed to unveil that, what lies behind the names of Drtikol, Sudek, Saudek, Koudelka, Funke and many others, is if not the richest certainly the most versatile, idiosyncratic and vibrant photographic tradition in Central and Eastern Europe —all this despite all the sufferings and shortcomings that have marked its historical fate.

From Pictorialism to Poetism and abstract photography, from social reportage to imaginative surreal photography and collage, from symbolist female portraits to the staged tableaux of nudes, Czech photography has always preserved at its core an alliance with experimentation, an autonomy of voice and above all, a tender relation with its apparatus, as if thinking, feeling and seeing “photographically” derived from its heart. Contrary to what one might expect from autodidactic photographers wandering in the Bohemian hills and family studios, capturing the quiet everyday life in remote provincial towns, Czech photography has never been a passive receptor of external influences, dictated eloquently by the world's avant-gardes. It has rather been a melting pot of inventiveness, reworking through the camera lens its material and ideological self-confinement into what constitutes the allegorical par excellence function of the photographic sign. One can tell that it is the Bohemian gaze behind the special aura the pictures of the Czech masters possess, and not any other. From the conventional portrait-studio to the most singular fine-art photographers, the elements in common are the lyricism of the gaze, the faith to the device, and a melancholic self-awareness.

As photographic writing proliferates, Czech photography emerges out of the shadow into the spotlight of attention, recompensing for the broken opportunities of the past. This exhibition offers the unique opportunity to recover photographers from oblivion, discover new talents, and above all pose new questions from a fresh perspective. Just a few days before the opening of the retrospective, Eyemazing had the opportunity of going through these issues with curator Vladimír Birgus. In the aftermath of this utterly stimulating conversation that follows below, it is left upon the show and its images to inspire…

Natasha Christia: 450 original prints and 197 photographers! Is this the first time such an extensive retrospective show on Czech photography takes place abroad or is it my impression?

Vladimír Birgus: Indeed, during the forty years of the Communist regime, little Czech photography appeared internationally. During the past two decades, however, a number of large exhibitions of Czech photography have been held in important galleries and museums, and at various festivals. Czech photography became the centre of attention particularly just before the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989. As early as 1990 Miroslav Vojtěchovský and I managed to organize the exhibition “Czechoslovak Photography of the Present”, which premiered in Cologne, before moving on to eight more European and two American cities. In the same year, Czech photography also predominated at the festivals in Arles and Houston. Still, the world’s interest in Central and Eastern European art was, with the exception of Russia, only short-lived, although various periods of Czech photography managed to get displayed at several exhibitions, the largest of them being “The Czech Photographic Avant-garde, 1918–1948”, held in Barcelona, Paris, Lausanne, Prague, and Munich. None of them, however, had yet taken in the whole twentieth century.

NC: How was the idea for this project then born? How did you eventually end up working together with Jan Mlčoch? What has either one of you contributed to the show?

VB: Mlčoch and I began to organise an exhibition on the history of Czech photography in Prague six years ago. When its three parts premiered simultaneously at three different exhibition halls in Prague in 2005, we presented about 1,300 photographs, including all the main trends and photographers from the Bohemian Lands between 1900 and 2000. We worked as a team in the organisation of the whole exhibition, going through many public and private collections and archives, and visiting dozens of photographers. We made the final selection together too—after many discussions of course—and wrote the articles for the panels and the exhibition guide. Now the exhibition is being shown again in the Art and Exhibition Hall of the German Federal Republic, Bonn. Even though the number of the exhibited photos has considerably been reduced, this is so far the largest foreign exhibition of Czech photography…

NC: The show is unquestionably impressively extensive… To my understanding, it attempts a chronological journey through various historical phases and movements of the Czech photography. Could you describe, in a few words, its highlights and the criteria you have applied at the moment of constructing its narrative?

VB: During the selection process we put the emphasis on works that are important in the international context. That’s why a great deal of space at the exhibition is devoted to the classics of modern Czech photography and the documentary photographs of Josef Koudelka, Jindřich Štreit, and Antonín Kratochvíl. We wanted, however, to also show some chapters of the history of photography in the Bohemian Lands, which had received little attention till now. Among them, for instance, is the work of German photographers from the Bohemian Lands. Did you know that more than three million Germans lived in Czechoslovakia between the two world wars, either born or sought asylum there from Hitler’s regime? It was during his five years in Czechoslovakia, for example, that John Heartfield made his most important political photomontages and worked for a number of Czech periodicals and publishing houses. Another chapter is the fabricated propagandistic photographs in the style of Socialist Realism from the worst years of the Communist regime in the early 1950s.

NC: Czech photography is then much more heterogeneous than expected! It is striking though that any reference to this diversity is still absent from photo-books related with the Czech legacy. What I mean here is that when referring to the 20th century avant-gardes, most books place Prague and Czech photography on the periphery of the artistic metropolises of Paris and Berlin, while also excluding them from the post-war context. Still, the argument of this show seems to revolve around the idea that the Czech photography’s influence on German and American photography has been profound. What does this position imply: A new writing of history?

VB: Not at all! This would be a misunderstanding of our claims. In no case do we mean to suggest here that the works of the Czech Avant-garde photographers Jaroslav Rössler, Jaromír Funke, or Václav Zykmund had a decisive impact on German or American photography. What my colleagues and I wish to show instead is that in many cases Czech photographers did not merely copy French, German, or Russian models, but were amongst those involved in the forward-looking trends on a worldwide scale. Take, for instance, Jaroslav Rössler. He was making abstract and Constructivist photographs as early as 1923, at a time when, for example, Rodchenko was not even taking photographs yet. Or Zykmund, who was making art nudes as early as the second half of the 1930s, anticipating many of the elements of later happenings, performance and body art. The fact that we do not find their works—or even the works of František Drtikol and Josef Sudek—mentioned in earlier American or west European histories of photography is mainly due to the isolation of Czechoslovakia during the forty years of the Communist regime. During that time it was forgotten that Prague was not on the periphery of the arts but a centre of Cubism and Surrealism.

NC: With more or less 200 participating photographers, should we then expect this exhibition to provide the opportunity of discovering old and new names, and if so, can you give us a short account of interesting cases?

VB: We would be delighted if the exhibition and the 360-page German catalogue, which will later be published in English as well, helped towards that! Simply the fact that the Art and Exhibition Hall of the German Federal Republic, Bonn, one of the most attended institutions of its kind in Europe, included our exhibition in its program together with a Modigliani retrospective or exhibitions of modern art masters from the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, is a great success! As far as old and new discoveries are concerned, it is significant that whereas the Czech Avant-garde and, partly, contemporary photography are gradually managing to make their way onto the international scene, Czech documentary photography of the 1940s or 1960s remains almost unknown.

NC: Even so, it has become more than evident that photography is deeply rooted in the Bohemian Lands. What is the cause for it? Why does any analogous tradition not exist, for example, in neighbouring countries such as Poland or Hungary?

VB: Well, to be fair, Hungary can boast a number of important photographers, who achieved fame in exile —like André Kertész, Martin Munkácsi, Brassaï, and Robert Capa. Little is known today about the other excellent photographers who remained in their native land. That’s mainly because there are few books about Hungarian photography in English, German, or French. On the other hand, with the exception of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Poland had no important photographers in the 1920s and 1930s, yet a number of high-quality photomontages were made there. Fortunately, the world is discovering them —though, very slowly.

NC: Judging from the title of the show, “Czech photography in the 20th century”, you have chosen to expand your research chronologically until 2000. Why is the 19th century excluded?

VB: From the beginning of the project, we counted on it comprising works from the 20th century only. The fact that Czech photography in the 19th century had no photographers on a par with Nadar or Cameron also played a role. The first Czech photographer of international importance was Drtikol. Still, to consider all the important trends of a hundred years is quite enough.

NC: Coming to the present, how would you describe the generation of contemporary Czech photographers? What links them with the past? How do they position themselves within the international photography arena?

VB: Contemporary Czech photography does not have any one dominant trend. Rather, it comprises a number of coexisting trends ranging from a distinctly subjective conception of the new documentary photography to the inventive use of digital manipulation. Photography has left its ghetto to become an important part of the visual arts. An increasing number of artists are devoting themselves to it, and it is now part of many important institutions. Whereas during the Communist regime Czech photographers worked in definite isolation, today’s young photographers are reacting quickly to current trends of the international art scene. Fortunately, many of them have their own styles and a good deal of imagination. It remains hard for them, however, to break into the international scene. In the Czech Republic the institutional support for photography is far less than, say, in the Netherlands, France, or Germany. Also art from the post-Communist countries of central Europe is not exactly at the centre of international interest right now, which is evident, for example, from the programs of the Mois de la Photo, Paris, and the Rencontres d’Arles, where it appears as if Czech photography had no one but Koudelka. Recently, however, some young Czech photographers have enjoyed considerable success, like Dita Pepe and also Tereza Vlčková, who won this year’s Prix BMW at the “Lyon Septembre de la photographie”. Last year, Jitka Hanzlová, a Czech photographer living in Germany, won the 2007 BMW Paris Photo Prize.

NC: How strong is the presence of photography in the Czech society in general? Is it still easy today to encounter small “photographic treasures” in flea markets?

VB: Photography has a far stronger position in Czech art today than it ever had. Courses are offered at six universities and art schools. But many institutions —including the National Gallery in Prague—, which do not have a specialized collection of photography, still continue to underestimate photography. On the other hand, I regret to inform you that the chance of finding a rare Drtikol or Sudek photograph at a flea market today is quite small! They long ago ended up in various museums or private collections, and when they do show up for auction in Prague, they are sometimes more expensive than in New York!

NC: Yes, but apart from the Drtikols and the Sudeks, many exceptionally wonderful vintage prints from the fifties and sixties are still auctioned in very accessible prices! Being on the front line of the promotion of Czech photography since the early nineties, you must have seen many changes taking place before your eyes, mainly as far as its inception by collectors and the market is concerned. What have the greatest achievements been and what is left to do according to your point of view?

VB: Czech photography is enjoying incomparably greater renown today than two decades ago. That is evinced not only in its being part of the collections of leading museums, but also in the prices it fetches on the market. You are right! While some of Drtikol's nudes or Sudek's still lifes are now being sold for tens of thousands of euros or dollars (one small Drtikol nude recently fetched more than $300,000 at Sotheby’s, New York), vintage prints by many good but still internationally unknown Czech photographers from the 1950s and 1960s can still be obtained for a couple of hundred euros! And histories of world photography that fail to mention even Sudek are still being published! Czech photography still has a long way to go before it achieves full international recognition.

Text by Natasha Christia

Czech Photography in the 20th Century

Exhibition through July 26
Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn
Curators: Dr. phil. Vladimír Birgus and Jan Mlčoch

Published in Eyemazing 02/2009

IZIMA KAORU

2009-04-14T22:17:00.005+02:00

Landscapes with a Corpse

Can death be ‘grasped’ from this side of the river? Are we in a position to thrust ourselves into death through the eyes of life? What’s more, can any visual representation, recreation or even allegory of the outer world bring us closer to experiencing, both physically and emotionally, the nature of Thanatos? What do Izima Kaoru’s corpses mean to our hypertrophic gaze, with all this weight of visual references we carry on our backs?

Landscapes with a Corpse: Japanese and Western urban dwellings intermingle with sunflower fields, turbulent rivers, forests and restrooms. These are familiar landscapes. Corpses are familiar too, though referring to a distinct moment. We are here but the moment is elsewhere. There is an illogical spatial and temporal conjuring, alluding to the Barthesian ‘here-and-there’ and ‘now-and-then’, inherent in all photographic representation. As such, the dislocation in question opens up the photographic momentum to the dimension of the ‘elsewhere’. Once the gate of life is shut, the journey is irreversible. There is literally no coming back home. Yet, Kaoru's ongoing series misleads us with its serial character, as if death could be rehearsed, performed, apprehended.

Let us take a closer look at the three elements that comprise Izima Kaoru’s visual argument: death, corpses of beautiful young actresses posing as models and, last but not least, photography. Any attempt to deconstruct the rhetoric core of the image by detaching any of its ingredients, may well pave a way for a partially critical approach, alimented by the avidity of contemporary art theory for the Neoteric, but certainly fails to capture the way the artwork reaches out to our senses. This more or less happens when it comes to the research that has intended to shed light on the oeuvre of Izima Kaoru. Even if meticulously elaborated, existent writing has always tended to take just a part of it, never the whole. It is as if the pictures had to be dismantled in order to gain full power.

When attempting to trace the secret of Kaoru's art, scholars paradoxically build their approach upon a modernist-like conviction revolving around “what the artist has to say”, on a so-to-speak programmatic declaration of ideological claims capable of filling the pages of exhibition catalogues and justifying the allowance of the artwork into the institutional and academic communities. The aim here is to look for a novel envisioning of death, the ultimate taboo, as much for the Japanese as for progressive Western society; this is what Kaoru is after. But how Neoteric can an approach to death be, even if legitimized by sacred claims, when the image has the last word and this last word does not buy into the myth? Where does transgression lie, when any credible – in terms of its illusory potential – transportation to the other side is cancelled by the literariness of life and when the photographic momentum in itself becomes irremediably conditioned by a gaze already predetermined by the way others have seen and responded? What is at stake here is the impossibility of facing death with innocent eyes. Death in the eyes of the living can only be a metaphorical cathartic experience and its representation nothing but a deictically performing allegory from the living spectator and the artist’s privileged remoteness.

Photography and the written word. Without their corresponding explicatory captions, Kaoru’s precisely conceived photo shoots might still retain some of their illusory force as cinematic tableaux of prototypic life-endings. But the sort of staging Kaoru consciously and emphatically attempts, by employing exclusively Japanese actresses as his models, by asking them to stage the death of their dreams and through all these eponymous designers clothes with which these ‘fashion victims’ enthusiastically decide to ‘dress’ their death, condition our perception of his photographs. It would be pointless to speak solely about death within this very specific nest of visual references. The attention of the gaze shifts rapidly from the gesture to an easily predicted stylized drama of mannequin-like oriental beauties. Rather than death alone, the association of death and fashion is more explicit here than ever. Cinematic fiction and woman become accomplices to a narrative engaged with the materialist banality of the contemporary culture in a quite banal mode.

Far from performing an alien identity, the models of Landscape with a Corpse end up performing their own public masquerade for the sake of the camera. They are given the license to ‘die’ in a Louis Vuitton dress. Kaoru does not take any critical distance but rather celebrates the perception of his work on the grounds of this performing me, allowing for no sliding of meaning to take place. In this “simple act of personal journalism”, the subjects decide the final posture and take, and photography unveils itself as a participatory, pseudo-democratic process, in which aestheticising has the last word. Death has to have a reason and a name; death has to be a part of a cause-and-effect process. By means of a mechanical commemoration (the camera), we are led straight to immortality. As opposed to experiencing death, we end up experiencing a cathartic awareness of life, whereas the sincere neo-romantic aspiration of Kaoru is gobbled up by this contemporary consumption of death.

It would be easy to build an interpretation of Landscape with a Corpse based on the Barthes or Sontag line of thought, according to which all photographic stills become reminiscent of the moment that flew away once and for all. Yet it would be interesting to negotiate an alternative relation with Kaoru's ongoing series. Today, that “questioning” expresses our discontent with photography, the issue is to become engaged with analytical propositions not just for theory's sake, but rather to come back to the basics, to ask ourselves and wonder how unpretentious our attitude is, when dealing with these images. Do they speak to our hearts? Do they help us reconsider our attitude to death? Do they contribute to a better understanding of life and of photography?

Twenty years ago these very same pictures might have exercised a distinct impact on us. Twenty years ago they would have of course been produced differently. Today, amidst everything done and seen, the rules of reception and technology are set up against an inflated cultural theory. Death allows us liberty as a free-of-conventions space where anything fits in. No one has been there. Following this, Landscape with a Corpse, with its female corpses in a mort regidis posture, might equally work well for those who wish to map out how exoticism still applies to western audiences in terms of female fetishism and voyeurism, as much as for those who put their emphasis on signifiers such as the fashion system and otherwise. Did it all start with Duchamp’s Readymade or is “the original” to be found in the eccentricities of Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton thirty years ago?

Unmoved, we lie here before the glass. We feel the intrinsic need not just to ask questions, but ask new questions. Still, as Derrida once said, “death is in another place” and these corpses are nothing but empty bodies. Wide-open, their eyes express a profound, vain detachment from the world. Once again, we return to Plato’s cave, while Kaoru’s camera becomes, in the words of Yuko Hasegawa, a “conveyer of mode”, a lyric signified of the trivial contemporary mode.

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.

Published in 1000 Words 4/April, 2009

MARTIN PARR

2009-04-14T22:00:00.004+02:00

Mexico

The day Martin Parr “departed” with his camera from Great Britain, our view of Mexico changed forever. An international photography celebrity himself, Parr pulled Mexico into the post-modern iconography of global consumer culture. With their touch of banality, irony and ambiguity, his pictures negotiate for themselves a novel status as critical apparatuses of mutual contemplation among “us” and the “other”, “photography” and “meta-photography”.

Photography and the invention of “seeing”… Today we do not “see” the way we did some decades ago. This is an uncontested fact. The visual baggage we carry on our backs conditions our sight. We see the world through inherited eyes. We consult our visual archives' repertory, in order to disseminate meaning. And so do photographers –all of them– regardless of age, time and status. Rather than ineffably de facto statements, photographs today represent the “aftermath” of other photographs. They are rarely, properly speaking, representations of the outer reality, but rather “deictic” depictions of pre-existent representations. They are tools that both “open” and “shut” our eyes.

Andreas Gursky, Spencer Tunick, Martin Parr and others… All of these grand stars of the contemporary photography arena have had their share of Mexico. All of them have exercised a profound influence on the way we envision the imagery of a land in which Northern-American, Latin and indigenous cultures, colour and violence, modernity and past, cohere into an explosive surreal whole. All of them have “reinvented” Mexico, not just in terms of subject but, mostly, in terms of mode of representation. Although, when it comes to the passionate fascination with the populist trivialities of Mexican everyday material culture, Martin Parr has certainly gone further than anyone else. Ironic and subversively bitter, Parr's gaze has well called out to the cultural hybridism of a society where dichotomies collapse: it has, properly speaking, stolen into the heart of Mexican reality, so as to denaturalize and convert it at one and the same time into an “uncanny else” –a particular schizoid tourist artifice.

“Mexico” was released in 2007, following a dozen of books in which Martin Parr had already put his finger into leisure culture and its material and aesthetic derivatives. If the photographer had been at home documenting Britain's decadent beach sets, junk food and bad fashion, his avid passion for the recollection of uncanny iconological banalities was to find its most perfect expression in the plethora of postcards, souvenirs and objects collapsing Mexico's tourist market. Not surprisingly, Parr's close-ups, isolating exhaustively details of both Mexican and American imported modes and all sorts of eccentricities, bring about a holistic, yet not simplistic at all, vision of the surrounding tourist panorama.

These pictures of fried chickens, lollipops, multi-coloured saints and indigenous faces alone, would probably be expected not to do any better than any random picture coming out of the scrapbook of any sun-burnt British tourist, keen on encountering a pub on his way. Still, they certainly stand pretty well together in the sequence and the juxtaposition of formal elements as established in the book. Half-way between the colour of the American south (New Mexico, Texas and Eggleston are not so far away) and an irradiating neo-kitsch folklore aesthetic which loans many of its elements from Pop Latino, Parr's work slides from the area of the anthropological folkloric survey to a representational set of memorabilia which rather than demonstrating the idiosyncrasy of the place depicted and the people who inhabit it, point to globalization as miracle and burden.

Martin Parr always makes sure to maintain a safeguarding distance from his pictures. He is a tourist wherever he goes and takes photographs as a tourist. In various occasions he has described himself as an outsider, a so-to-say “colonialist eye”, emphasizing his unpretentious relation with his camera’s shutter. But even so, there is much more for us to look for under the hood. Behind a supposedly unmediated response, Parr's images operate in their interiority less than consumers/mythographers and more as criticizers/demystifiers of the interpellant visual argument, which at first glance seems to set the rule for his whole photographic production. What we initially get as an overwhelming colourful effect embedded on the common awareness collapses under its proper weight. We are before the contemporary myth of Mexico, but will this mountainous whole be easy to digest?

There is a before and an after in Parr's vision, which makes it hard for us not to think of his Mexico, when looking at the souvenirs, photographs and books on the same subject produced decades ago. Still it is all there, in the sliding of signifiers, where a new hybrid meaning, deprived from any solid definition, arises amidst past and present representations. Parr's saints both are and are not Bob Schalkwijck's saints published forty years ago, in the same way that his Mexico is authentic and fake at the same time. It is pointless searching for an original in these pictures. In their very simulacra condition, they embody remakes without an original; reflections of a phantasmal imagery in which identity is played out for materialist tourist consumption. An iconological speech is constructed and Parr is the primary consumer. In such a subversive enactment, Mexico sustains a counter-cultural discourse whereby culture is the sum of consecutive speculations. Reinvented, recreated and irrupted, there emerges before our eyes a Mexico miles away from the land which once provided fertile soil for come of Buñuel's more surreal cinematic envisions. The corruption of aesthetic forms generated by today’s globalization renders the distance unavoidable and damages our sight, making it impossible for us not to wear these new glasses at the moment of seeing.

If Parr were not a photographer, he could perfectly afford to be a magician. His gaze seems to hypnotize his human subjects, be they Mexican or foreigners. There is a subversive suspension in these images that emanates from their interior rather than the exterior, and in doing so it conditions irremediably our generic gaze. In its face, a transition takes place to the world of meta-photography, whereby any attempt of viewing becomes reactivated in a novel context, as if pictures had to go through a sort of comparative demystification, earthly objectification and mirroring in order to obtain their full meaning. Shadows and memories, old family pictures, reproductions on souvenirs, bits and pieces scattered across the vastness of our visual lexicon and Martin Parr’s camera, are playfully challenging us. Still, on the other side of the mirror it is always us. By reworking/rethinking the very “performing of seeing”, we have a slight change of getting a bit closer to the heart of Mexican culture. If not, we can at least hope establishing a fuller “contemplative” relation with photography…

Mexico
Published by Chris Boot, 2007
ISBN: 0-954689488

htp://www.martinparr.com
http://www.magnumphotos.com

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.

Published in Photoicon MEXICO issue 10/2009

VIRGILIO FERREIRA

2009-03-24T13:16:00.002+01:00

Daily Pilgrims

Mystic, poetic and introspective, the photography of Virgilio Ferreira (Porto, 1970) transgresses the borders between reality and dream, affinity and remoteness, earthy corporeality and sublimity. Though inextricably linked with the “battlefield” of everyday life through travels to geographically identifiable places and encounters with local “anthropologies”, Ferreira’s work goes as a whole beyond any plain documentary approach. It transmits the “aura” of a “palpable” human truth blurred by globalization and multiculturalism.

Ferreira has recently completed “Daily Pilgrims”. The project was born in early 2007 thanks to a one-month trip to Macao granted to the photographer by the Foundação do Oriente. This initial trip evolved in a three-month “observation” of daily life in some of the main Asian metropolises like Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai and Bangkok, its objective being—according to Ferreira’s own words— “to stimulate the questioning of a human reality in its habitat and to reflect on the Zeitgeist”.

The immense socio-economical and cultural transformations taking place in Eastern Asia are a familiar topic in contemporary photography, but Ferreira prefers to remain an “outsider”. His out-of-focus images of anonymous human figures and bubbling city lights are miles away from the predominant tendency to examine whatever happening on the coasts of the Pacific these days as a symptomatic phenomenon of growing globalization and explosive capitalistic communism. Unarguably, “Daily Pilgrims” offers an approach unwilling to reiterate neither the cold serial formalism of the manufactured industrial landscapes of Edward Burtynsky nor the humanistic documentary gaze of authors obsessively looking for the ghost of Mao in every corner of Shanghai. “I am not engaged in collecting influences and in allowing them to operate on my work”, stresses the photographer. “My images suggest rather than show. I prefer the detail and the unobvious.”

“Today we experience the modern anguishes of the search for identity. This is the contemporary myth”, wrote once Jean Claude Kaufmann. Ferreira’s abstract symbolic universe, as constructed in “Daily Pilgrims”, seems to be fully in tune with this viewpoint. Replete with visual distortions, the series exposes critically the way in which our need as viewers for a “prefabricated” reading of pictures is stimulated by, what Ferreira describes as “a social demand for representation and invention of the several possible -ness”. By means of an unconventional perspective and of a striking insistence on fragmentation, colour formalism and blurring, Ferreira’s images operate literally as an obstacle fence for the eye. We are never able to figure out what is out there: between us and their subjects, there is no room for any identifiable “Other” or for any spatial contextualization in socio-political terms. Cities and humans become a generic fluid body of forms and colours, creating a sense of timeless sociology.

Ferreira feels as if drifting in history without knowing much about why and how things happen. “There are moments of lucidity and certainty, but the flow of life shows that we are a sum of trial-and-error attempts and of collages”, he affirms with conviction and so does his whole working method, which consists of a mix of technical rigor together with spontaneity and the capacity to find room for the unpredictable in the utmost staged images.

Let us take as an example of this the unusual angles and blurring—all typical street photography tricks, which operate in favour of a peculiar snapshot quality in the “Daily Pilgrims” series. Although there is no candid camera, when we look through these pictures, an accentuated sensation of inaccessibility and deliberate invisibility conquers us. Even the photographer himself seems trapped in this feeling. In a half-oblivious voyeuristic attitude, he disregards the possibility of actually “being there”, conscious of the fact that the cultural memory we inherit and take on as our “mother and stepmother” operates as the absolute deforming force upon our gaze, obstructing us from viewing the world in its pro-verbal and non-cultural essence.

Ferreira literally captures with his camera lens captures emotions, memories and desires. This is precisely what renders his images so attractive and imbues them with a Benjaminian-like aura. But Ferreira prefers to resort to a more down-to earth interpretation. When it comes to the “Daily Pilgrims” formal qualities, an interpretation related with rush, the main external factor, conditions his effort to catch the decisive moment”. As he remarks, “In these cities everybody is extremely busy and their first response is always negative. When you manage to get people’s permission for a picture, you have to shoot within a few seconds, while nobody bothers striking a pose for you”.

Yet, despite urban high-tech velocity, Ferreira achieves the picture that captures the magic with the help of his Rolleiflex medium-format camera. He still prefers to use a 6x6 slide film, avoiding any sort of digital manipulation, post-production or laboratory intervention. What is of paramount importance in the emotive dreamlike style of his traditionally processed prints is his “colour metaphysics”. “I identify with colour. I see the world in this way”, he says. On the other hand, illumination techniques vary. “Daily Pilgrims” implied working on the street with heavy equipment and no assistant, so Ferreira had to dispense with artificial light sources. Nonetheless, as he remarks, “the city lights worked perfectly for the final result”.

“Daily Pilgrims” is the most challenging work in the trajectory of Virgilio Ferreira. Articulated by many visual layers of presences and absences, it resists all given representations of identity. Assuming the role of a “pseudo-ethnographer”, Ferreira has built his approach not upon the exotic and the unfamiliar but upon what bridges our differences. “The answer to everything I do is people”, he emphasizes. By describing life as a harmonious conjunction of alchemy, sociology and spirituality, he takes us in the realm of a universal abstract sublimity, reminding us that even if places change, people will always keep fluctuating on the globalization roads. As Ferreira concludes, “All of us are pilgrims; maybe not in typical religious terms as the pilgrims of Santiago de Compostela, but we are, in an existential and pragmatic way. All of us have a unique mission to accomplish, looking for our path in the ritual of life”.

Text by Natasha Christia
May 2007

All Rights Reserved

© All pictures Virgilio Ferreira
www.virgilioferreira.com

ENRIQUE MUÑOZ-GARCÍA

2009-03-24T13:02:00.004+01:00

Claude

Within the four walls, a story unfolds. “Claude”, an audiovisual installation by Enrique Muñoz García, reveals a different intimacy. Beyond anguish and pain, beyond the generic tendency of contemporary photography to project the body as a degenerate artificial construct in constant mutation, García leads our gaze to assailed territories of the human existence. By employing what at first glance appears to be an empathetic ad hoc observational practice, he allows for his protagonist to “breathe” and freely “perform” his state of being. As such, “Claude” produces the effect of an unseen, unique instant. Familiar yet so foreign, its intimacy perturbs our vision; close yet so far away, its ambient ultimately makes us wonder where the margins of this infinite world end up…

Our story starts in 2003, when Enrique Muñoz García, a Chilean photographer living in Switzerland, and Claude, a chronic heroine addict, became neighbours. Their encounter gave birth to the idea for the project, at least in García’s mind. It took some months, in the absence of cameras, for a mutual relationship of respect to develop before Claude agreed to be photographed. The rest is history.

Bathroom, living room and bedroom… The interior of Claude’s house provided the background of the project. “Bearing witness to life indoors became of paramount importance, given that Claude spends most of his time in his apartment, inhabiting it in the way he inhabits his own body”, explains García.

Of all the spaces, the bathroom reflects his universe in its fullest essence. The sequence of the daily cleaning ritual works as a metaphor for a personal process of corporeal purification after thirty years of addiction. Garcia’s approach looks neither for suffering nor for morbidity in all this process. On the contrary, he maintains distances, by rendering Claude’s body into a plastic element that appropriates its domestic surroundings as if they were his natural extension, -an ark heading towards the depths of human soul.

Still, the bathroom sequence is for strong nerves. Witnessing an over-exploited body that proudly carries the marks of its adventures provokes inevitably a sense of uneasiness. Diluted like blood and bodily fluids in the hot bath water, the white-tiled walls of the room carry the chilling aura of what could be viewed as a surgery room or, in a more literal approach, as a butcher’s shop. There is an ambiguity in the way Claude interacts with his own body that tempts us think that something -horrible- might happen from one moment to the next. At this point, the orchestration of the whole scene by García deliberately puts into evidence the confinement of our awareness within the codified norms of spectatorship. It reveals how we are actually predisposed to a response of suspense. It demonstrates the eruption between what “we are shown” and what we actually “see”, confirming for once more, in García’s words, the fact that “we see only what we wish to see”.

On a creative level, the project opened a door to challenge and experimentation. It obliged García to shift from his older practice of instantaneous black and white photography towards a more hybrid and complex lens-based language that transgresses the rigid forms of the classic social reportage in favour of a solid pseudo-documentary style based on the fusion between acting and spontaneity. As he recalls: “After many sessions with my Leica M6, I felt that there was something missing. I started working with a digital camera and a Hasselblad. Colour gave a new force to the whole theme”. And he continues: “Then in 2005, video came, at a moment when I was feeling limited by photography. There were many details I could not display through still images. So, I did a first test with an old movie camera, that worked pretty well because Claude forgot that the camera was there and went on with his daily ritual”. The final result of these incursions has been a video without cuts and interventions, conserving the original sound. There were also some further helpful additions, such as the decision to exhibit the stills separately, as part of a quadraphonic installation by the electronic band strøm, which is comprised of fragments of an interview with Claude and ambient sounds. Displayed in light boxes as if they were radiographies, the photographs generate a bathroom-like illumination in the room.

So far, “Claude” has been shown in the Biele Fototage of 2006 and in the Photomonth Festival of Cracow (2007). There has been very good press coverage and the project became a nominee among the best works of 2007 in Switzerland. In the meantime, García prepares to embark on a second part with material coming from the other two rooms of the house. He also plans launching the project in other international venues.

Looking back, García confesses: “These last five years have been very intense. They have taught me to relativise things and problems, to understand and not to be prejudiced”. As a result, the whole project is imbued with this openness of vision. It emerges as a highly intimate work, the fruit of a profound respect and admiration towards Claude, “a very intelligent and spiritual person who opted for the way of drugs since the age of sixteen and who does not question this option”, as García explains. In fact, Claude's life is much more than a drug theme: Son of one of the richest men in the region, he is a professor of Waldorf pedagogy who speaks five languages fluently and who has has envisioned, among others, projects such as the Schlossmatt Foundation for young handicapped people.

But more than anything else, Claude is the other half of a deeply collaborative project and the conversation inevitably has to end at this point. “Currently, Claude is in a healing process”, says García. “Of course, he still has his ups and downs, but he is very happy that there is recognition and acknowledgement. He has been an active part to this. After all, everything has been his own decision. It has been his choice letting me enter his life”.

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved
May 2008-unpublished

www.claude-projekt.ch
www.emgphoto.net

GERARDO AND FERNANDO MONTIEL KLINT

2009-03-24T12:41:00.004+01:00

Matehuala

It was Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” (1958), with its legendary opening shot, the film which first opened the eyes of the broader audience to the imaginary of the Mexican underworld. For once more, the cinema surpassed the books in terms of visual inventiveness. The location, where all the conspiracies, crimes and murders of this complex scenario unfold, is “Los Robles”, a seedy Mexican-American border town, literally drowned in corruption; a town seemingly reserved only for striptease bars, brothels, occasional gambling enterprises and gangs. At least the plot comes with a “man of Law”, i.e. Charlton Heston, featuring a Mexican drug-enforcement official, who is forced, due to uneasy circumstances, to interrupt his honeymoon with his newlywed girlfriend Janet Leigh, in order to take action against the villains and the self-abusing sheriff Hank Quinlan (featured by Orson Welles).

When it comes to Matehuala, the small Mexican town photographers Gerardo and Fernando Montiel Klint have employed as the subject of their homonymous brand new series, things seem to be less uncontrollable. To put it more accurately, everything in Matehuala points to a tricky silence proper to a no man’s land. Even so, the suspense and mystery condensed in the pictures of the Montiel brothers, alongside the undergoing rumours about the terrifying present of the city and its connections with drug trafficking and illegal business, make it hard for any subconscious mind, bred within all the dramatic tension of the Wellesian plots, not to think, view and feel Matehuala as the contemporary version of “Los Robles”.

Of course, to anyone familiar with the Latino culture, the name “Montiel” resonates for another simple reason. It alludes to female actress-singer “Sara Montiel”, who was to become in Franco’s Spain of the fifties the loyally Catholic, yet still not an any less sexually avid version of Ava Gardner, the first international star of the local film industry and the indisputable queen of legendary and linguistically inventive –at least, in terms of their respective titles– dramas. Admittedly, at first sight, any connection to Sara Montiel seems totally irrelevant and absurd in the context of Matehuala, but just take a closer look and you will come across an underlying parallelism that brings you a step forward when establishing the conceptual thread of the Matehuala project. For, similarly to Sara Montiel’s birth out of the deeper layers of the social imagery, the practice, the iconographical resources and the framework of Gerardo and Fernando Montiel are inextricably tied up to such a deeply rooted popular consciousness and culture, hard to imagine in any other place on earth than Mexico. Needless to say, by contemplating Mexico as such, one does so in terms of an unforeseen heterogeneity and an astounding cultural syncretism; the so-to-speak “Mexicanization of everything”, as Fernando and Gerardo Montiel like to refer to it.

To put it in another way: What happens when the visual conceptualism of the Düsseldorf School is introduced into the cultural and social context of a country so replete of colours, odours and sounds as Mexico? Well, it inevitably then fosters an envisioned “magic realism”, wherein raised walls are demolished, any presumed distance between the photographers and their subjects is cancelled and myriads of sudden, vivid and nothing less than surrealist encounters unfold in the middle of the desert.

Fernando and Gerardo Montiel Klint could go on talking for hours about the stories behind each of these apparently still pictures of Matehuala, all taken after the sunset. They recall camping with their equipment in front of a peculiar tiny house called “Restaurante Base Tomada”. In the middle of the night, to their surprise, lights went suddenly on and a bunch of girls in mini-skirts jumped out, asking them to disappear right away following the owner’s demand. The restaurant had turned out to be a brothel; clients were attended in a small deck room. They recall another scene that took place during the session of “El Rey del Taco”, when they were almost run over by the wife of the owner who thought they were a serious threat. They remember various risky occasions in which they were finally asked to immediately abandon the location with all their equipment. The mafia has full control not just on the earnings of these establishments but also on the people who hang around; above all, on people who pop up at two or four o’clock in the night. But, there is also a hilarious, absurdist side in all these adventures with unexpected endings. Like, for instance, the encounter the Montiels had with a painter in the middle of a deserted village. The man turned out to be a profound admirer of Ansel Adams and thought them to be too. Thrilled for having chanced upon two photographers in the middle of nowhere, he would fiercely insist on them immortalising with their camera the monumental landscape they were sharing! Likewise, another shooting initially planned to take place before an abandoned hotel, ended-up being a large photo session of a group of relatives. Unless they had taken portraits of the whole family, the Montiels would not have gained their permission for the final image!

“A photographer from Mexico can in no case be like a German or an American descendant of the Becher School taking pictures of warehouses, water towers or gas stations”, affirms laughingly Fernando Montiel and, amidst everything narrated above, he seems more than right. Here, in the middle of the desert, the “take the picture and go” attitude is replaced by a more interactive practice that asks for an interference with the subjects, the places and the people who inhabit them. At the same time, and inversely, these very same pictures reflect the fears, inhibitions and constraints imposed by the laws of the local bands and clans, the so-to-say highly complex social reality of these places. Each image contains thousand of stories, as a condenser of the “time before” – of all, properly speaking, coffees and drinks the Montiels had to share, in order to gain the confidence of the local people! It is perhaps for this reason why the two artists decided to dispense with the digital equipment and work with a large-format analogue camera instead. In this way, they could allow for time to intervene between the shutter and the human gaze, recovering the lost primitive immediacy of the photographic image. Far away from the technique of the snapshot, they were looking for a camera obscura effect, guiding the eye through the camera in natural time. As a result, the images of Matehuala are, indeed, “products of a photographic contemplation that dilates the vision in time”, as Gerardo Montiel stresses. What’s more, they are visual containers replete of voices, presences and absences; they are culminations and reflections of hidden stories and rotten façades.

Likewise, the suspension and tension imbuing these pictures is not played out as in a David Lynch film, but is a rather naturally inherent element of the Matehuala ambience. The night with its lights glooming in the darkness speaks for a town of abandoned hotels and old American-type neon panels, rooted next to the highway; the ghost town of a road movie, where in a silent, subtle complicity, many events happen. Almost as much, or even more, as during the ninety-five minutes of “Touch of Evil”. Plain and neutral, the photographic envisioning of Gerardo and Fernando Montiel plays with the façades of old buildings and trolley tracks, transmitting an unbearable sensation of loneliness and witting isolation. The gaze never retreats into the interior of these façades, never gets too close. For Matehuala is a town that safeguards its secrets.

“Matehuala is an ugly town, a town on the verge of nothingness. There is nothing to do in it, nothing more than taking a short break from long trips”, argues Fernando Montiel. “But when coming back from days in the deserts, days one has spent without proper food, drink and shower, then Matehuala can be a real oasis. It transforms into a place where one can have a shower and get some rest between warm sheets”.

Matehuala is a place of transit. Of less than zero interest to Mexicans, it is a small ghost town situated within driving distance, in the middle between Mexico DF and the States. It becomes a necessary stop for American and Canadian travellers and merchandisers. Many of these passers-by are attracted to it because of its local traditions and the cult of peyote, a small spineless cactus with a long history of ritual and medicinal use by the indigenous people. Under its effect, this stop can obtain a supernatural character; hallucinations help the traveller come in deep contact with a land sacred over the centuries for the shamans of the area, whose long ritual processions last for days and nights. But, in full light, the Americanized character of the town contrasts harshly with this mystic background, which still throws its midst on old walls. As if the dark and the bright side of life coexisted harmoniously, the Matehuala people carry on their backs a past and a present steeped in deep ambivalence. They know how to. Those “whose future is all used up”, in the words of the fortune telling madame played by Marlene Dietrich in “Touch of Evil”, know how to carry this ambivalence with dignity …

Fernando and Gerardo Montiel have chosen Matehuala precisely because, with its apparent nothingness, it encapsulates perfectly the “other side” of Mexico, far away from the typical tourist clichés. What’s more, Matehuala has been the starting point of the artistic synergy between the two brothers. Apart from their systematic collaboration on commercial assignments in the fields of fashion and advertising (the Montiels are founding members of Klintandstudio), this is the first time they collaborate on an artistic project. On a personal level, both brothers have gained notoriety and awards for their respective work in fine-art photography and are represented by international galleries. Fernando’s tableaux-vivants of domestic middle-class interiors in destruction and characters in nirvana, question with a handful of irony and sarcasm the “hallucinogenic” effects of contemporary popular myths, consumerism and collective obsessions. On the other hand, Gerardo Montiel introduces into his staged indoor or outdoor settings a much more denouncing documentary-type visual content. His photographic series –all of them the fruit of experiences and reflections recollected during journeys– hover over increasingly common social issues, such as violence and sexual abuse.

Fernando and Gerardo Montiel Klint like to emphasize the way in which the making of the “Matehuala” series not only opened new creative ways, but also enhanced the personal and artistic comprehension and complicity between them. During the process, the Montiels responded successfully to the challenge of attempting a different approach than the one they were used to, heading back to a more direct and archaic photographic practice. Still, they did put a lot of themselves into the project, such as the landscape element of Gerardo, the subtle irony of Fernando, and something of their taste for staging, though not in the literal sense of the word. Within the “Matehuala” series, there are pictures in which the two photographers make their appearance, together or separately, as two mere elements of the surrounding landscape and the human ambience. Their gazes always point somewhere and the spaces that surround them are always related to the states of transit or observation. In an attitude of intuitive contemplation and self-reflection, theses image testify a lot to the creative process; they actually intensify the complicity and the attachment of the photographer to his subject, adding up to the conceptualism of modern landscape photography an enriching entropic flavour. But for the Montiels, these pictures obtain, above all, an autobiographical significance as the celebration of their brotherhood. They are “decisive moments” caught up in time; small pearls of an introspective emotive journey; “petite souvenirs of a family trip, which instead of taking place before the Eiffel Tower, unfolds in the most absurd place of the earth!”, concludes with humour Fernando Montiel.

Matehuala has been just the first page in the diary of this artistic companionship. The Montiels are happy with the results and plan to carry on their projects in many other cities alike, illustrating an aspect of this Mexican double-faceted reality and idiosyncrasy many people still ignore. Now they have started, they do not have the least intention to stop. How could they, anyway? Fernando and Gerardo Montiel Klint are nothing less but two highly inventive “photographic animals”, breathing and living through photography!

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved

All Pictures: Gerardo and Fernando Montiel Klint

Published in Eyemazing 01/2009

GONZALO BÉNARD

2009-03-24T12:32:00.006+01:00

The Awakening of the Self

The encounter with Portuguese photographer Gonzalo Bénard brings to mind the ephemeral, yet deeply mystic moment of “epiphany” that accompanies any artistic creation. Contrary to what one wants to believe, being an artist does not merely involve aesthetic assertions and compositional skills. It actually goes far beyond this, as a double-faceted integral state –a blessing and a curse at the same time– that brings the collective consciousness closer to what Kant once described as the feeling of a universal aesthetic. Being an artist is all about an inventive gathering of impossibilities. Lyricism and poetry spring out of blood and suffering, and, miraculously, ideas flourish under the storm. Even if confined within the four walls of a house – their hands and legs paralyzed, their spirits and souls tormented – all artists are capable of making their way towards the sensorial, as long as they can aliment their ultimate need for self-expression. Nothing else matters; neither risks, nor deep waters. When the world seems to fall apart, artists rise out of their ashes and articulate their discourse. The unique ability of switching between death and rebirth seems to be exclusively reserved for them.

Hybridization, deconstruction and regeneration… Gonzalo Bénard belongs to a very special category of humans; those whose lives are comprised by many storylines. “Reborn” in various occasions, Bénard has been, properly speaking, a bit of everything in life: beginning as an art history, fine arts and computer science student in the late eighties, he went to pursue the career of publications´coordinator in the cultural Centre of Belen in Lisbon, gained notoriety as the coordinator of the Pavilion of Portugal in the 1995 Venice Biennale, left everything for a three-year residence in the painting school of a Tibetan monastery, came back, became a painter, finally ending up an emerging photographer. In his convoluted biography, everything assumes the dimension of a seemingly unreal, yet so extraordinary revelation, whereby the natural and the organic give shape to a body made of clay, earth soil and light.

Bénard’s encounter with photography could not have been more sudden and intense. Likewise, the amount and quality of the body of work the artist has produced within an extremely short period of time, could easily make many of today’s alleged fine art photographers burst with envy. For Bénard is nothing less than a genius, and as such he can be all and nothing at the same time; human and God, significant and insignificant, tangible and intangible. His eyes lie wide open as two gates to the mystery of life and his story contains all the elements of an epic-like narrative in which a deeply rooted humanness is intermingled with a constant challenging of obstacles. Facts do not simply happen to Bénard; they rather happen as to provide the stage where his artistic play can unfold, prescribed by a mysterious destiny.

An “intruder”, still unknown to the photography world; this is how one could describe Gonzalo Bénard. Apart from a prize he won as a 13 year-old child for his work with an automatic camera, his interference with photography remained scarce until the age of 37. Within him, there had been absolutely no longing for photography. During his three-year reclusion in a Tibetan monastery, the only contact he had with a camera was a light box. He was there to train as a painter rather to take pictures! But the right moment was about to arrive…

The shutter of the camera opened for Gonzalo Bénard the day other doors seemed to have been shut forever. One morning, Bénard woke up blind, due to an allergic reaction to a cat. Two highly complex operations helped him recover his vision fully, but, in the meantime, his health had been for once more under serious threat because of a motorcycle accident that left him with a serious rupture of the spine. Six months of physiotherapy were to follow. Being in intolerable physical pain, Bénard was forced, during this period of time, to suspend all his upcoming shows, adjust his needs to those of a disabled person, and most importantly, reinvent his whole artistic practice. “It became impossible for me to paint because my vision was lacking depth and volume”, explains Bénard –his voice calm while he brings the story from memory to words. “Still, I would die if I did not create. I had to create”. So, he resorted to the camera he had been using before, to document his paintings. From then on, photography was rendered the catalyst through which he could canalize the stream of his everyday emotions. It became “therapy” and “energy”, accompanying him throughout the whole healing process and conferring voice to a very personal and intimate universe. Since then, two years have passed, two sole years that have been enough for Bénard to generate a masterfully arranged set of work of an astonishing quality, as if he were always in photography, as if the “photographic” were always a part of him.

In terms of references, Bénard’s photographic practice resides on the knowledge and the maturity he has inherited from his years as a painter. Yet, although one could easily attribute his accomplishments to his fine-arts background, neither the subject of his photographs nor their style approximate in the least the surreal paintings hanging on his living-room walls. Whereas the dreamful mood of these artworks makes a clear allusion to the human subconscious and to a world compiled by infantile reminiscences of the past, Bénard’s photography turns to the real world of the present and the flesh. Following a very intense period of his life, his photographs speak of the “now”; what’s more, they reflect a process in which personal demons are exorcised and a creative liberation takes place.

Black and white has become the means of expression in Gonzalo Bénard’s photographic practice. Bénard avoids the exuberance of colour and prefers to limit his vocabulary to the basics. The path towards personal truth is always ascetic and so is his photography. Juxtaposed with earth symbols and animals and deprived of any clothes, the body is introduced to a nexus of complex symbolic connotations, alluding to myths and pagan legends. Bénard’s vision emanates from a nature outside the context of western culture. His spiritual journeys have brought him close to tribes and cultures as much diverse as the aboriginal voodoo and Las Madres del Santo in Brazil. In this search for the intangible, the body and the soul proclaim relevance as vehicles of a non-verbal entropic narrative that resides outside the margins of history. In this respect, Bénard’s self-portraits defy any notion of the ego. They operate as non-portraits, within which the artist is a rendered part of the form and the medium. His inexistent corporeal ego becomes subordinated to the soil of the land, the way rocks and animals do. In its primordial essence, this very same body, in all its plastic qualities, breathes an unforeseen sensuality, which, however, can in no case be described in terms of a cultural eroticism, incited by the voyeuristic gaze. On the contrary, Bénard’s images point to a natural sensuality beyond conventions, stereotypes, cultural canons and behaviour schemes. Following this, it is upon the viewer to come out of the social constructs, recognizing himself as part of an unmediated nature.

A body, a room, and plenty of natural Mediterranean light coming through the windows… For those who are after the secret of Bénard’s technical perfection, there is no more to this. Depleted of lights and sets, Bénard’s studio is his own house, accommodating the whole world. Comparing to Diane Arbus and her fragile marginal creatures showing us the “other” side of life, Bénard speaks through his personal intimacy for the dignity of the body and the soul, as if the truth of the whole universe resided not far away but right there, beneath the skin. Such a universe defies any notion of beauty or ugliness. By enacting its own corporeality, the body becomes the key of exaltation and revelation for all objective and universal truths; it becomes the ultimate incarnation of spirit.

Growing therein as a remarkably broad and sustained body of work, Bénard’s photographic oeuvre assumes a novel dimension. It is not just a mere conceptual proposition, but, first and foremost, a work connected to the heart. Bénard always takes his self-portraits in the morning, while the body is still connected with the unconscious. “There are good and bad nights”, as Bénard likes to emphasize, but what remains is the body, the very same body, coming out of the world of dreams. The wrinkles of the sheets drawn on the skin, the self before the camera, a black sheet as a backdrop, no furniture or mise-en-scène. Just some abstract sketches on the wall; a primordial vocabulary unfolded within an uncanny universe of personal exorcism and truth; an immediate forceful act of self-awareness. It is impossible not to be honest at the moment of waking up!

And the creative river bursts on with such rage, making up for the years of silence and the creative repression experienced during childhood. Bénard recalls himself as a ten-year-old child back home. He was brought up and raised as a strict Catholic by a bourgeois Lisbon family who would dream any career for him, but that of an artist. He remembers drawings being torn –he should be a doctor, not a painter! He remembers his footsteps sealed –a man should walk, not dance! He recalls his lust for the two pianos of the house –pianos are meant for ladies, not men! Sheets of paper forever torn and non-played scores pilled up on the big traumas of a childhood… Nowadays there is no uneasiness left for all this repression; solely the need from time to time to shut the curtains and dance in the darkness under the sound of the piano. Yes. In Bénard’s studio, there is always a piano playing; a piano embracing the day-to-day creative process; a piano recompensing for the loss of time. Over the years, Bénard would leave behind all unnecessary burdens and track his own path: he would switch from cultural management to painting, then from his hometown Lisbon to Barcelona, and finally, just two years ago, from Catholicism to Buddhism –he is the only renegade of the Catholic Church of Portugal. There was no need for a revolution within someone who had been carrying his authentic self in his toolbox from the very beginning, but the need to cut the ropes off …

“A father and a mother of myself”, this is what Gonzalo Bénard claims to be. Protector yet solitary and profoundly independent at the same time, he encounters his ultimate spiritual companion in the figure of the eternally nurturing wolf. His eyes exalt a lust for creation, the lust of a highly sensitive as well as dynamic creator, intensely committed to authenticity, who has managed to transform a parenthesis in his life into a unique relentless journey towards self-recognition. When referring to this aspect of his work, Bénard rightfully identifies himself with the introspective universe of US based photographer Misha Gordin, who he feels a profound admiration for. Both artists experienced a creative explosion through photography. Photography was what finally gave them a push -on the one hand Gordin, a Lithuanian émigré after the Second World War, and on the other Bénard, an artist many years in creative exile - to cut their roots and reinvent themselves.

Bénard has conquered photography. Now he dreams of the convergence of his three big passions; photography, painting and poetry. In the meantime, a new genre gradually manifests itself within his artistic practice: video. Paradoxically, Bénard’s videos are less movement and more stills, driven by an insatiable desire to capture the moment and to investigate the density in suspension persisting these portraits. Time helps the body to unfold its secrets and the underlying spirit to emerge. In the aftermath, it is for the lyricism of the written word to come in the form of verses, sealing a universe of complicity. For Gonzalo Bénard is a poet as well! An intransigent romantic poet of the 21st century, who is there to remind us that Art is a gift and a reason to fight for, fight well, fight honestly…

All images: ©Gonzalo Bénard

Text: Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved

Published in Eyemazing 01/09

La Visión del Otro. La modernidad y el rostro fotografiado

2009-03-24T12:26:00.005+01:00

Text edited for the show The Vision of the Other. Modernity and the Photographed Face, at KOWASA gallery (March, 2009)

Spanish Version_
KOWASA gallery presenta “La Visión del Otro: la modernidad y el rostro fotografiado”, una exposición colectiva que indaga en la construcción discursiva del rostro fotografiado antes de que éste fuera abatido por su anulación postmoderna. La muestra propone, en primer lugar, un recorrido por la historia del retrato con el fin de vislumbrar la manera en que éste pasó de ser una mera “extensión del cuerpo pintado” al género fotográfico por excelencia y, por otro lado, ilustra la manera en que evolucionó la percepción estética y conceptual del retrato, dejando atrás el Pictorialismo a favor de la experimentación y subjetividad modernista.
La exposición reúne más de 70 fotografías en blanco y negro cuyos protagonistas son personajes como Coco Chanel, Ernest Hemingway, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Dalí, Josep Pla, Andy Warhol, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Jean-Paul Sartre y Marilyn Monroe. Entre los más de 50 fotógrafos presentados aquí, figuran los internacionales Nadar, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Horst P. Horst, Edward Steichen, Josef Sudek, Arnold Newman, Man Ray, y los nacionales Joan Colom, Francesc Català-Roca, Xavier Miserachs y Alberto Schommer.
A propósito de la muestra, ATELIERETAGUARDIA realizará sesiones de retratos empleando el colodión húmedo, una de las técnicas fotográficas más emblemáticas del siglo XIX. ATELIERETAGUARDIA heliografía contemporánea es una plataforma de trabajo para el estudio y el ejercicio del procedimiento fotográfico que centra su interés en los orígenes de la fotografía y su evolución en el siglo XIX.

La llegada de la fotografía contribuyó a la revalorización del retrato como una propuesta más apta que la pintura –un “Rembrandt perfeccionado”, en palabras de Samuel Morse. Realizados con procedimientos que requerían un largo tiempo de exposición, los primeros retratos conllevaban varias imperfecciones y un resultado final que suponía a menudo un ataque a la vanidad de las personas retratadas. Así, pronto se puso en marcha la maestría del retoque y un ejército de retratistas entró al servicio de las demandas estéticas de la época. Si en el siglo XIX reinaba la convicción de que la fotografía “robaba el alma”, en el siglo XX la fotografía misma pasaría a ser su “espejo”. A partir de esta idea profundamente arraigada en la imaginación popular, la misión del retrato se dirigió a captar con sofisticación el “aura” histórica, y los estereotipos sociales y culturales predominantes.
Las poses de introspección, la sobreactuación, los fetiches burgueses y la representación armoniosa de todas las partes del cuerpo conforman algunos de los rasgos visuales de la retórica ortodoxa del retrato. Si la toma fotográfica directa proporcionaba los datos suficientes para reconocer a alguien, el retrato –la supuesta puerta al alma–, al ostentar la pertenencia del ego a una clase social, terminaba paradójicamente por violar este principio.
El Pictorialismo (finales del siglo XIX–principios del XX), pese a su carácter progresivo y reivindicativo, no hizo sino fortalecer esta ideología con sus himnos a la interioridad y constante flirteo con la pintura. Aunque ahora el estatus del individuo como representante de una clase social se desdibujaba a favor de una reflexión visual que proyectaba los rasgos emocionales y espirituales de la persona, los Pictorialistas en ningún caso infringían las reglas del juego, el pacto, es decir, entre lo socialmente imaginario y lo finalmente representado. El concepto pictorialista quedará arraigado en el retrato fotográfico a lo largo del siglo XX a pesar de las rupturas y los cambios. Incluso cuando los logros de la modernidad y los planteamientos críticos de las vanguardias europeas lleguen a popularizarse a partir de los años treinta y en la posguerra, será para enriquecer el lenguaje visual del retrato convencional y para construir un discurso persuasivo más dinámico con variantes iconológicas que alimentarán la mitología y las narrativas populares. Uno de los casos más característicos es la fotografía de celebridades y de actrices, en la que se plasman el rostro y el cuerpo conforme al mito. Por otro lado, los retratos de personalidades de la política y la cultura se recubren a través de poses obsequiosas que les asocian de manera irrevocable con sus nombres. Aquí, más que nunca, el rostro se convierte en asunto público.

Mientras tanto, la naturalidad en las poses y la cultura de la instantánea fueron ganando peso a medida que las pequeñas cámaras democratizaban la práctica fotográfica. A partir de los años veinte, las vanguardias denunciaron toda aspiración mística por descubrir qué había debajo del rostro, para adentrarse en el campo de la experimentación estética. Esta nueva mirada, según la que, en palabras de László Moholy-Nagy, “cada poro, arruga o peca tenía su importancia”, se proclamó con voluntad resolutiva: había llegado el momento de divorciarse definitivamente de la pintura, de celebrar las propiedades inherentes a la fotografía (la cámara-ojo, el negativo y el positivo), y de prescindir de una puesta en escena clasista, para centrarse en una representación del mundo exterior más abstracta y geométrica. La experimentación con el medio fotográfico, las sobre-exposiciones, el formalismo, los ángulos especiales, el primer plano, así como el fotomontaje, son algunas de las prácticas concurrentes en aquella etapa.
Otro elemento significativo fue la inserción del psicoanálisis y de las teorías freudianas en el discurso de representación. Si el retrato tradicional propagaba la unidad de la identidad, estas teorías, adoptadas en primer lugar por los surrealistas y círculos artísticos afines a ellos, reinventaban el rostro como algo superficial, poniendo en evidencia la dualidad de la “persona” y la máscara que ésta construye para aparecer ante los demás, la polarización, por así decirlo, entre el “ego interior”, el “super-ego” y la imagen social enraizada.

Por su parte, la “fotografía directa” expresaba su escepticismo frente al sujeto bajo la influencia de las teorías marxistas, que propagaban la consciencia de un ser social. Después de la segunda guerra mundial, este debate se intensificó y se vio dominado por la sinécdoque documental. La fotografía de retrato salió del estudio para capturar los personajes en su ambiente natural –el artista en su taller, el compositor con su instrumento, el escritor con sus libros y, sobre todo, el fotógrafo con su cámara. Rostros captados en momentos de descuido desmitificaban el sistema y las imágenes sociales establecidas. La instantánea y la fotografía cándida de la calle rompieron la complicidad entre sujeto y fotógrafo y dinamizaron la concepción tradicional del retrato. La problemática se trasladó entonces a lo que Barthes describió como la batalla de dos identidades con dominios discursivos distintos: por un lado, el fotógrafo-voyeur y su visión, y, por otro lado, el sujeto fotografiado que elabora su máscara social con el fin de respaldar su imagen. En esta última etapa, los retratos, en lugar de ser “espejos del alma”, llegaron a reflejar más bien la personalidad del fotógrafo. El discurso de la mirada y la ruptura del retrato como unidad permitieron ambigüedad y humor a la hora de la representación. Aún así, seguía en pie la fe en el mito que esta vez le tocaba al autor encarnar. Poco faltaba para la “ruptura definitiva del espejo” que se impondría, a partir de los años setenta, sobre la percepción de lo humano, y que daría paso a la abolición del “rostro” de ambas partes implicadas, tanto del sujeto como del “auteur” detrás la camera.

English Version_
KOWASA gallery presents “The Vision of the Other: Modernity and the Photographed Face”, a group show which attempts to define the way in which the human face was photographically constructed before its abolition by Postmodernism. The exhibition primarily offers a thorough insight into the history of portrait photography with a special emphasis on the shift of the portrait from being a mere “extension of the painted body” to being the photographic genre par excellence. At the same time it highlights the aesthetic and conceptual evolution of early portraiture from Pictorialism towards a modernist experimentation and subjectivity.
The exhibition gathers more than 70 black and white prints whose protagonists are Coco Chanel, Ernest Heminway, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Dalí, Josep Pla, Andy Warhol, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marilyn Monroe and others. Among the more than 50 participant photographers appear such internationally renowned names as Nadar, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Horst P. Horst, Edward Steichen, Josef Sudek, Arnold Newman, Man Ray; national photographers include Joan Colom, Francesc Català-Roca, Xavier Miserachs and Alberto Schommer.
Throughout the exhibition ATELIERETAGUARDIA will be organizing portrait sessions using the technique of wet-plate collodion, one of the most emblematic photographic processes of the 19th century. ATELIERETAGUARDIA heliografía contemporánea is a platform for the study and practice of 19th century photographic technology.

The advent of photography contributed to the re-evaluation of portrait art in regard to painting as, in the words of Samuel Morse, an “improved Rembrandt”. Obtained through processes which required a long exposure and which resulted in many imperfections, the first portraits in the 19th century often suggested an attack on the vanity of their subjects. Following this, it is hardly surprising that the increasing aesthetic demands of the time very soon resulted in an army of portraits-makers at the service of retouching mastery. If the conviction that photography “robbed” the soul reigned in the 19th century, in the 20th century photography would become the soul's mirror. Under the impact of this idea which made a deep impression on the popular imagination, portrait photography was conferred the mission of capturing with sophistication the historic aura, whilst reflecting in its discourse the predominant social and cultural stereotypes.
The poses of introspection, the overacting of the bourgeois fetishes and a harmonious representation of all the parts of the body constitute to some of the visual characteristics of this orthodox rhetoric of the portrait. Whereas the direct photographic take was supposed to provide sufficient data for recognizing oneself, the portrait –the supposed door to the soul– paradoxically ended up violating this principle by prioritizing a visual vocabulary that flaunted the pertinence of the individual into a social class.
Pictorialism (late 19th century-early 20th) came to embody this ideology with its hymn to the inner being and its constant flirt with painting. Even if the status of the individual as agent of a social hierarchy was now fading in favour of a spiritual reflection that projected the emotional qualities of the person depicted, this did not mean to say that the Pictorialists were infringing upon the rules of the game –to the contrary, the deal between the socially imagined and the final representation was still preserved. This pictorialist concept remained firmly rooted in fine-art photography portraiture throughout the 20th century despite its ongoing ruptures and changes. Even the critical accomplishments of the European avant-gardes, which were widely popularized during the thirties and the post-war era, were adopted by portrait photography so as to construct a much more dynamic, persuasive discourse whose variants continued to fortify the mythologies and popular narratives of the time. Among the most characteristic cases is the portraiture of celebrities and actresses, whereby face and body were shaped in accordance to the myth. Likewise, the portraits of public personalities –politicians and artists–are enveloped by means of obsequious poses that associate them irrevocably with their respective names. Here, more than ever, the face turns into a public affair.

In the meantime, with the introduction of hand-held cameras, the naturalization of poses and snapshot culture were gaining terrain. In the twenties, the avant-gardes denounced the mystic ambition of discovering what lay behind the face, and instead began to pursue aesthetic experimentation. In this new way of looking, according to which, in the words of László Moholy-Nagy, “each pore, wrinkle or freckle has its importance”, the goals were quite distinct: the time had arrived to become definitively divorced from painting, to celebrate the inherent properties of photography –the camera eye, the negative and the positive. It was time to push aside the classist mise-en-scène and focus on a much more abstract and geometric representation of the external world. This experimentation with the photographic medium included over-exposures, formalism, special angles, close-up, and photomontage.
Another important element of modernist portraiture in its most mature phase is the insertion of psychoanalysis and Freudian theories in its visual discourse. If the orthodox portrait propagated the unity of identity, these theories, first adopted by the Surrealists and the artistic circles linked to them, reinvented the face as something superficial, planting evidence for the duality between the person and their “persona”, namely the masquerade one constructs for others –that is to say the polarization between the ego, the super-ego and the eradicated social image.

For its part, direct photography was expressing its scepticism before the subject, under the decisive influence of the Marxist theories which advocated the consciousness of a social being. The debate became intensified after the second-world war. Portrait photography came out of the studio for good, capturing its subjects in poses of apparent informality within their natural environments –the artist in his studio, the composer beside his piano, the writer among his books, and above all, the photographer with his camera. Faces captured with carelessness demystified the system and the established social imagery by establishing an iconology of social synecdoche. Snapshot and candid street photography broke the complicity among the sitter and the photographer, and dynamized the traditional conception of the portrait. The problem now shifted to what Barthes has described as the battle of two identities with distinct domains: on the one hand, there is the photographer-voyeur, and on the other the photographed subject which elaborates its social masquerade to back up its image. In this new age, rather than being the “mirrors of the soul” of the sitters, portraits reflected the personality of the photographer. This ongoing rupture of the portrait as a unity accepted ambiguity and humour at the time of representation. The modernist faith concerning myth still persisted, although, at this time it was not projected by the external world but instead, by the author and his camera. It would not be long before the gaze turned its back on it. In the early seventies, the definitive “rupture of the mirror” would cause the final abolition of both implicated parts, the sitter and the “auteur” behind the camera.

#E13 DANA POPA

2009-01-14T13:03:00.003+01:00

The missing

While Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” still preserves its status among photography theoreticians intact, the attention of documentary photography is gradually shifting towards the effects of facts on time and memory. In a visual culture bombarded by mass media reportage, still images are no longer events but rather the remains of the historical torments that once took place. They become, in the words of Stephen Bull, “traces of the traces”, the carriers of what is left from the “aura” of the photographed object.

In a dialogue with their own nature, photographs bridge the dichotomies between the past and the present, the still and the moving image. They break Bresson’s “decisive moment” in a million of “befores” and “afters”, restoring what Hollis Frampton once described as the “infinite virgin filmic space” that pre-existed the inception of still photography. This eternal back and forth in time and vice-versa, this condensation of myriad moments and spaces in one single picture, this constant action of “writing memory” by means of infinite narratives, marks the transition from site and time-specific pictures towards pictures which “invite us to think photography”. As such, documentary photographs today work as suggestive recollections of impressions and feelings, encouraging a metaphorical and symbolical reading. It is upon the viewer to imagine and finally interpret the reality behind them.

The presence of the “photographic as a raising concern in late documentary” is encapsulated neatly in the practice of the Romanian photographer Dana Popa. Popa’s work has been exploring since 2006 cases of human sex trafficking in Moldova, one of Eastern Europe’s poorest countries. In a subversive play with spaces and memory, it bears witness to the devastating psychological sequels of this cruel phenomenon for thousands of young women and girls caught up in prostitution, and for their families.
“Not Natasha” (2006), the first photographic circle of the project, featured specific portraits of former sex slaves in Moldova. Following on from this, a more recent research has given birth to “The Missing”, a more abstract, yet intuitive and metaphorical work of presences and absences, in which Popa captures the traces of hundreds of missing women by going back to both their homes and the rooms they crossed during their hours of labour.

A cup left on the table since the day she went to school, the bed made since the morning she went away for two months, old family photos and dried flowers... She could finally have a passport in her hands; she could hang on the hope for a better life in a foreign country; she had to take the risk. But she never returned.
Popa retreated with her camera into the world of remote Moldovan villages, encountering locked doors and empty rooms. Though abandoned for years, paradoxically these spaces remain warm and familiar. One can still feel the presence of those who are no longer there. In silence, old mothers and children face years of absence but still keep the hope alive.
In the meanwhile, far away, behind the fancy facades of the cosmopolitan capitals of Europe hundreds of rooms assume significance as exile spaces for myriads of bodies objectified for the male fantasy. While most of them are squalid and cold, many others may even appear familiar and warm. Mirrors, red lights, posters and the list of services on the bedside -all these little attempts of humanizing these rooms, of rendering them a kind of homeplace, speak for these girls’ need to survive.
If for Popa access has been the most frustrating part of the story, how can the least encounter with these empty spaces speak a thousand words? Why does all this absence result in being so unbearable? Spaces enhance but at the same time devour memory and still images become filmstrips of an absurd proximity, the turmoil of a painful journey to nowhere.

In their open-ended muteness, the pictures of Dana Popa refuse to be tied up to any police-oriented approach of the sex trafficking story in search of concrete testimonies and proofs. Instead, they invite us to reflect on what human beings are capable of doing to other human beings. The accumulation of traces gives shape to a psychological project, in which the “decisive moment” is reworked as a dramatic past in a painful constant repetition. At the end of the day, all becomes reduced to the same single story of people caught, traumatized, flown back. It is a story we can choose to narrate from many different perspectives, but Popa urges us to keep it as simple as possible, keep it to the subject, keep it close to our heart.

Dana Popa (artist’s bio)
Born in Romania in 1977, Dana Popa completed her master's degree in Documentary Photography and Photojournalism at the London College of Communication. Popa is based in London, specialising in contemporary social issues with a particular emphasis on human rights. Her series on sex trafficking received the Jury Prize in the Days Japan International Photojournalism Awards 2007 and the Jerwood Photography Award 2007.

Text: Natasha Christia
All Pictures: Dana Popa
All Rights Reserved

Published in Next Level Magazine, 04/2008

ORIOL MASPONS

2009-01-14T12:56:00.005+01:00

Text edited for the show ORIOL MASPONS. un fotógrafo insólito, at KOWASA gallery (December, 2008)

Spanish version_

KOWASA gallery tiene el placer de presentar una exposición monográfica dedicada al fotógrafo barcelonés Oriol Maspons. Bajo el título Oriol Maspons: un fotógrafo insólito, la muestra pretende poner de relieve las facetas más transversales de un autor que ha sabido ir siempre por delante de su tiempo, plasmando un universo visual que respira singularidad, atrevimiento y frescura. Contemporáneo de Ramon Masats, Francesc Català-Roca, Xavier Miserachs, Colita y Leopoldo Pomés, Oriol Maspons ha estado desde sus comienzos en primera línea de la modernidad.

La exposición Oriol Maspons: un fotógrafo insólito (Fotografías 1950-1970) consiste en una selección exclusiva de más de setenta fotografías en blanco y negro, mayoritariamente tirajes de época procedentes todos ellos del archivo personal del autor. Desde las barracas del Carmelo, las Hurdes y la Mancha hasta los momentos apoteósicos de la Gauche Divine barcelonesa, el hippismo de Ibiza y las niñas de sus particulares pin-ups, desnudas o vestidas por Paco Rabanne, las fotografías de Oriol Maspons no constituyen tan sólo una auténtica crónica del ambiente alternativo y contracultural de la Barcelona de los años sesenta y setenta, sino que son testimonios de una actitud, es decir, de lo que fue y de lo que sigue siendo Oriol Maspons: un creador insólito con la ingenuidad de un Woody Allen y la actitud provocativa pero a la vez amena de un Andy Warhol.

Nacido en 1928 en el seno de una familia burguesa, Oriol Maspons se decanta pronto por la cultura fotográfica, pero no es hasta bien entrados los años cincuenta, durante su estancia en París, adonde supuestamente se ha trasladado con el fin de realizar un stage de 18 meses para la compañía de seguros en la que trabaja, cuando decide lanzarse como fotógrafo freelance. París, con sus clubes de fotografía frecuentados por grandes maestros del género (Robert Doisneau, Brassai y Henri Cartier-Bresson) y jóvenes promesas (Guy Bourdin), representa una escuela para Maspons. Allí no sólo refina sus gustos con respecto a lo fotográfico, sino que también amplía sus horizontes, introduciéndose con afán en la vida nocturna de los clubes, el cine y las mujeres —su gran afición, que cultiva apasionadamente hasta nuestros días. No es de extrañar, pues, que cuando Maspons «aterriza» en la Barcelona de 1956 con aires de modernidad caiga literalmente como una bomba. Sus ideas mundanas, que rechazan de plano el academicismo y la fotografía costumbrista, revolucionan las aguas de la Agrupació Fotogràfica, de la que acabará siendo expulsado en 1958. Pero a Maspons no le cuesta encontrar nuevos caminos: realiza encargos comerciales y escribe ocasionalmente artículos de crítica para Gaceta Ilustrada, organiza exposiciones, colabora con Esther y Óscar Tusquets de la editorial Lumen en la colección «Palabra e Imagen», descubre a jóvenes talentos (entre ellos, Joan Colom), se afilia a AFAL y gana varios premios.

Quizá el evento más significativo de esta etapa sea el encuentro profesional de Oriol Maspons con Julio Ubiña, una colaboración que se inicia en 1956 y durará más de 14 años. El estudio Maspons+Ubiña realizará a lo largo de la década siguiente varios encargos de publicidad y moda, así como las portadas de la colección «Biblioteca Breve» de la editorial Seix Barral. Otros de sus trabajos seminales son el libro Toreo de salón, con texto de Camilo José Cela (1963), y extensos reportajes fotográficos, como Las Hurdes (1960) y La Mancha (1961). Porque, en contra de lo que se esperaría de un burgués, Maspons siente al estar detrás de la cámara una cierta atracción por documentar lo marginal. Las barracas de Somorrostro y personajes del mundo flamenco como La Chunga encuentran un lugar en su universo fotográfico. Asimismo, su mirada de fotoperiodista y su intuición natural para saber cuál es el momento de disparar le llevan a captar escenas que reflejan la apertura de una España rural, sometida al peso del franquismo, hacia la modernidad y los beneficios del turismo.

Sin embargo, Oriol Maspons es sobre todo un gran cronista del ambiente humano y cultural de Barcelona, Cadaqués y París. Ante su cámara desfilan personajes como Dalí y Gala, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tàpies, Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn y Elsa Peretti, entre muchos otros. En los años sesenta y setenta, Maspons dará rienda suelta a sus pasiones personales. Formará parte de la Gauche Divine, la vanguardia barcelonesa, y frecuentará el Boccaccio, el club de moda de la época, junto con otros artistas e intelectuales. Más provocativo que nunca, registrará con su cámara desde el primer momento las fiestas y los avatares del movimiento hippy en Ibiza, y comenzará a realizar su colección particular de pin-ups, así como trabajos de publicidad espontáneos y atrevidos en los que jugará con el humor, la inocencia y la sexualidad.

Oriol Maspons ocupa un lugar excepcional en la historia de la fotografía española. Desafiando cualquier categorización, pues detesta que le llamen «artista», Maspons supo reírse y burlarse de la fotografía décadas antes de que el discurso posmodernista invadiera el arte. Al contemplar sus fotografías, uno debe tener en cuenta que no sólo se trata de un fotógrafo en el sentido convencional de la palabra, sino más bien de un grand connaisseur de la capacidad de transmitir contenido que tiene una imagen. Pero, ante todo, Oriol Maspons es un hombre que siempre ha tenido las ideas claras, aunque aparentemente nunca se haya planteado cuestiones ideológicas y políticas en su trabajo. Así pues, no es de extrañar que un día se le ocurriera, junto a su socio Julio Ubiña, felicitar a sus amigos y clientes con unas postales navideñas en las que el dúo aparecía con poses cómicas y ambiguas. En esta serie, los denominados Christmas de Maspons, está más presente que nunca el carácter expansivo e innovador del lenguaje visual que establece el autor, un lenguaje que lleva el género del autorretrato a un nivel de reflexión inesperado para la época, desprovisto de cualquier miedo a la ridiculización y a lo burlesco.

Las fotografías de Oriol Maspons forman parte del fondo de varias colecciones públicas y privadas: el MNAC (Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya), la Fundación Foto Colectania (Barcelona), el MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, Nueva York) y la Bibliothèque Nationale de París.

English version_

KOWASA gallery has the enormous pleasure of featuring a one-man show dedicated to the Spanish photographer Oriol Maspons. Under the title Oriol Maspons: an unusual photographer, the show´s aim is to highlight the more transversal aspects of an author who has always positioned himself ahead of his time and whose visual universe radiates singularity, dare and freshness. A contemporary of Ramón Masats, Francesc Català-Roca, Xavier Miserachs, Colita and Leopoldo Pomés, Oriol Maspons has risen since his very first steps to the front of modernity.

The exhibition Oriol Maspons: an unusual photographer (Photographs 1950-1970) consists of a unique selection of more than seventy B&W prints, vintage in their majority, all coming from Oriol Maspons´ personal archive. From the Carmelo barracks, Las Hurdes and La Mancha to the moments of apotheosis of the Barcelonese Gauche Divine, the hippies of Ibiza and in the particular pin-ups of his girls dressed in Paco Rabanne, Oriol Maspons´ photographs do not merely comprise an authentic chronicle of the alternative and countercultural ambience of Barcelona in the sixties and seventies, but are actual testimonies of an attitude, of what, properly speaking, has been and still is Oriol Maspons: an unusual creator with the ingenuity of a Woody Allen and the provocative yet still entertaining attitude of an Andy Warhol.

Born in 1928 into a bourgeois Catalan family, Oriol Maspons is soon to be enchanted by the photographic culture, but it is not until the mid fifties, while residing in Paris, where he has supposedly moved in order to serve as an intern at the central office of the insurance company he works for, when he decides to launch himself as a freelance photographer. Paris, with its photography clubs, frequented by the big masters (Robert Doisneau, Brassai and Henri Cartier-Bresson), and the young promises of the genre (Guy Bourdin), is a school for Maspons. There, he will not just refine his taste in regard to photography, but will also expand his social horizons, introducing himself with devotion to nightlife, cinema and women -his great passion up to date. It is not surprising that when Maspons lands with his flair of modernity on Barcelona of 1956, he literally drops like a bomb. His mundane ideas, which openly reject the academism of traditional photography, revolutionize the waters of the Catalan Photographic Group (Agrupació), from where Maspons will be finally expulsed in 1958. But Maspons does not lose his time: he undertakes commercial assignments and occasionally writes on photography for the most important Spanish magazine of the time, Gaceta Ilustrada; he organizes shows, collaborates with Esther and Oscar Tusquets (Lumen Publishers) in the book series "Palabra e Imagen", discovers young talents (among them, Joan Colom), becomes member of the AFAL avant-garde photographic association and wins various awards.

Perhaps, the most significant event of this time is Maspons� professional encounter with photographer Julio Ubiña. Their collaboration starts in 1956 and will last for more than 14 years. The Maspons+Ubiña Studio will undertake various assignments in advertising and fashion, and will provide the images for the covers of the Collection "Biblioteca Breve", published by Seix & Barral. Other works of paramount importance are the book "Torreo de Salón", with text by the renowned author Camilo José Cela (1963), and extensive photographic reportages, such as "Las Hurdes" (1960) and "La Mancha". Contrarily to what is expected by an author of bourgeois origins, when behind the camera Maspons feels a certain attraction for documenting the marginal. The backstreets of Somorrostro (where the Olympic Beach of Barcelona lies today) and personalities of the flamenco world, such as La Chunga, discover their place within his photographic universe. Likewise, his photojournalistic gaze and natural intuition that makes him recognise when it is time to press the shutter, help him capture scenes which reflect the aperture of a rural Spain, still subjugated to Franquism, towards modernity and tourism.

But above all, Oriol Maspons is principally a big chronographer of the human and cultural ambience of Barcelona, Cadaqués and Paris. Personalities such as Dalí and Gala, Marcel Duchamp, Antoni Tapies, Garry Cooper, Audrey Hepburn, Elsa Peretti and many others pass in front of his camera. In the sixties and seventies, Maspons will overcome his last inhibitions, by freeing his personal passions. He will become one of the leading members of La Gauche Divine, the main Barcelona avant-garde movement of the time, frequenting with other artists and intellectuals "Boccaccio", the trendiest club in the city. More provocative than ever, he will register with his camera, from the very first moment, the parties of the hippies in the discos of Ibiza. At the same time, he will initiate his particular photographic collection of spontaneous and daring pin-ups and advertising assignments, in which he will play with humour, innocence and sexuality.

Oriol Maspons occupies an exceptional role in the history of Spanish photography. Challenging any categorization, he detests being called an artist. Maspons knew how to make a joke out of photography, decades before the post-modernist discourse invaded the arts. When contemplating his photographs, one has to bear in mind that Maspons is not just a photographer in the conventional sense of the word, but rather a grand connoisseur of the capacity pictures have of transmitting content. But, above all, Oriol Maspons is a man who has always had clear ideas, though apparently his work has never been explicitly engaged with ideological and political issues. Following this, it is of bi surprise how, one day, a peculiar idea sprang into his mind. He would wish to friends and clients on Christmas with a series of postcards, which would show his partner Ubi�a and himself in comic postures and roles (as bull-fighters or gymnasts), thus bringing into the genre of self-portraiture an unforeseen for his time reflection, without any prejudice against the ridiculous and the burlesque.

The photographs of Oriol Maspons can be found in many international private and public collections. Among the most significant ones, are: MNAC (Museu National d�Art de Catalunya), Fundaci�n Foto Colectania (Barcelona), MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Biblioth�que Nationale de Paris.

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TRINIDAD CARRILLO

2009-01-14T12:39:00.004+01:00

Conversation with Trinidad Carrillo published in the second issue of 1000 words magazine (November 2008).

Naini and the Sea of Wolves

I recall myself attending a dance school for children. There was a door, always locked, with the word “photography” on it. One day I knocked, I was let in and never came out.

Somewhere between Lima and Göteborg, Trinidad Carrillo’s “diaries of dreams” entail a wonderful, quasi-mystical moment, in which the chasm between the past, the present and the future collapses, and life unexpectedly assumes a significance beyond everyday reality.
It is the moment when word becomes image.

Natasha Christia: In “Naini and the Sea of Wolves” the intersection of pictures and text produce an open “fairy tale” sequence beyond any determined image or word. What is the meaning of this special synergy for you? How do the poems of Sara Hallström complement your work?
Trinidad Carrillo: While working on a project, besides the images, I usually have an invisible title in my head that progressively takes shape. I feel a bit like a director cutting a film. Then Sara’s texts bring a totally new dimension to my work. Her lyrics operate like images. Rather than focusing on the documentary element of my sequences, she interprets and turns them into her own, walks from one picture to another, watches closely and becomes familiar with all the characters. In this sense, both images and text in my work are immensely poetic –something pretty much like a song.

NC: How did this particular collaboration with Sara begin?
TC: As a teacher, Sara had been looking for pictures her students could write about but failed to find anything interesting until she by coincidence came across a show of mine in 2005. When I first read her texts, I felt like someone had understood my work in a very beautiful way. So we started cooperating. This is the third text she writes for me.

NC: Your book revolves around a highly self-referential subject matter, your daughter. How much did this help you gain personal awareness and build a relationship with your characters?
TC: I have difficulty separating my work from my personal life. They have been intertwined for a long time. When we decided with my publisher that the book should be about my daughter, I began thinking what she meant to me. How would I put my love in a little book of 32 pages? My work did not start with Naini’s birth, but back in 1997 or probably earlier! Beyond it, there is a bigger story going on about the braiding of time, realities, people and places. In all these years, there have been new people coming in, children born, friends and family passing away. All of them are very close to me. They are my actors, my accomplices. A friend recently wrote that she loves to be my doll, to obey as I tell her to do this and that. It is as if I were playing. My daughter knows that. We even had a conversation when I explained to her that taking pictures is mum’s favourite game. And she’s totally in for it. Apart from a mother and daughter relationship, we are building a relationship through photography. She even became involved in choosing the pictures for the book! She has her favourites that HAD to be in it!

NC: How much of reality and fiction is there in your work, then?
TC: Some of my images are staged, some are not, some are half way, difficult to remember. But, what does it matter when in the end everything turns into a memory? My photographic representations might be fictional, but so are dreams. My first memories derive from dreams I had when I was three, a period I am not supposed to remember.

NC: Indeed, your work is primarily concerned with time. Still, rather than taking upon the notion of a frozen moment, both the portraits and the blurry transitional stills in-between your sequences produce a peculiar effect: the condensation of the past, the present and the future in the form of “presence” and “absence”. Your subjects seem to live in many parallel times through a constant flow back and forth…
TC: You know, I moved afar from my mother and Peru when I was 12. Due to this, there is a natural constant longing within me to be in two places at once or in some other dimension where all is there. Being conscious of time, thinking about what happens next, preserving the best of the present… Sometimes my pictures unveil actual facts of the past. But, there are moments when they enable me to “play” with my blurry childhood –reviving the memory of preoccupations, feelings or thoughts that once concerned me.

NC: Is perhaps this notion of childhood as awareness what renders children in your work such complex personalities in their own right? Look at Naini! By being closer to birth, she seems to be closer to what we adults struggle to recover. She carries all the mystery and magic of life in her gaze!
TC: To me, a person is all his ages at the same time. Therefore, I do not approach children any differently than adults. I try to see in them something I recognize. They are mirrors, many of which are totally new and unknown to me.

NC: What about the mirroring of the future then? When looking at your work, I can’t help contemplating a moment after many years when Naini will come back and see herself projected in these images.
TC: Who knows what happens! Maybe one day Naini herself will pick up a camera and turn it towards me. I constantly ask myself if it is right to expose her. I had recently a conversation with another artist who used to photograph her daughter but stopped. When the girl grew up, she asked her mother, "Why did you stop? I loved to play with you". I believe this is how it’s going to turn out with me and Naini. The only difference is that I won’t stop!

NC: Trinidad, where does the name Naini come from?
TC: It came a long time ago out of a dream. After some research, I discovered that “Naini” is a Hindu Goddess. According to the legend, she fell in love, was rejected and was thrown down to earth giving birth to a lake. I was expecting somebody to carry this name, even if not necessarily my daughter. But it turned out to be her! When I first held Naini, my first thought was “Souls exist. You have been somewhere before." Then, I fell in love forever!

Naini and the Sea of Wolves
By Trinidad Carrillo
Poem by Sara Holström

Farewell Books
First edition published in 2008
Winner of the Swedish Photobook Award 2008

All Pictures: Trinidad Carrillo

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.

IXONE SÁDABA

2008-11-19T22:11:00.006+01:00

Poètique de la Desaparition

Tortured, repressed, violated and manipulated all over this conflictive planet, the body irrefutably becomes transformed from a mere object to an everlasting bearer of speech. The very “speech of speech” urges us to speak instead of speaking about it, speak right up and out loud, speak against it, speak for it, let it speak. This is how French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes the sensorial and expressive omnipotence of the body in its interference with the external world, and this is how the body emerges in the work of Ixone Sábada, a young visual artist, performer and photographer based in Bilbao, Spain.

Sábada first gained notoriety in 2003 with “Ciceron”, a series of site-specific twin apparitions of herself. Further notable projects were to come in the following years. “Leviathan” (2007) suggested life’s conspicuousness in its absence from the devastated hurricane landscapes of the American West, and “Expulsion from Paradise” (2006) established duality as one of the artist’s recurrent motifs. Contrariwise, “Poètique de la Desaparition” shifts away from the clear filmic narrative construction of her previous series, in favour of a markedly abstract and introspective approach that pushes the whole work to its limits, both formally and conceptually. To use Sábada’s own words, “my new series does so much more than just bringing up a more complex, mature and tough vision of the body. It pushes the very same photographic image and all the meanings it carries towards full deconstruction”.

In the series, Sádaba, the ever performer, recurs once more to her own body to negotiate the idea of a naked body that is and is not. Somewhere before the final departure, the self and its alter ego, present or implicit in many of her previous oeuvres, are fused into one. A fading “me” emerges before our eyes, under the most tense and dramatic physical conditions. Multiple exposures and a body which cries, laughs, begs, enjoys -one and all at once- on the verge of hysteria and collapse…

Alarming and discomforting, Sádaba’s posture arguably serves as a metaphor for the condition of total expropriation, destruction and nihilism the body is subjected to today, as much as it brings into the foreground the existential right of not to be, in terms of placing oneself -in this case, Sádaba and her female being- within an alternative non-space that lies beyond codified language, politics and culture.

Sádaba’s discourse displays great affinities with the Lacanian view of femininity as a state of negativity existing outside the hermetically constructed male world. Such an interpretation allows a feminist reading of her work that the artist herself fully welcomes. “I am not a feminist in the strict sense of the term”, she explains, “but I happen to be a woman who works in a very close relationship with her body. In various occasions, I have had to reflect on how this is to be represented and where I place myself at the time of representation”.

“We perceive our bodies as the most common thing in the world, but has it ever occurred to us how socially limited the margins outside exhibitionism for a sustained engagement with the body are?” wonders Sádaba. For her, exposing one’s own body and self, speaking volumes through it, implies a fundamental political attitude as the most unmediated way to express identity. In her own words, “I try to explain that my body is face and hands, but it is also butt and vagina. I do not tend to show it off if I do not consider it essential, but if I reflect exactly on this -the body, its representation and signs- I am sorry but I just have to do it”.

“Poètique de la Desaparition” was originally performed before the camera as an unpremeditated response of personal exorcism. Yet, it could not have resulted less political. Just the presence of a suffering naked female body between the sheets of a double bed makes up for the absence of the politically and socially charged landscapes of Sádaba’s previous oeuvres. The political statement running through all this self-exposure is too explicit…

Somewhere between the material and spiritual realms, being becomes no-being, and so does representation. In Sádaba’s visceral response, movement, feeling and time are employed as tools for a wide-ranging critical analysis and formal deconstruction of the granted space that defines the photographic frame, rendering obsolete devices such as the unique still image, the representation space and the frozen time. Why all this? Is something wrong with photography, as we knew it? “To my point of view”, she explains, “the slavish dependency of photography on documentary has kept it aloof from art for such a long time that it has wasted too many of its possibilities on a conceptual level”. There is still too much purism left, there is still too much of this vain discourse of representation going on and it is a pity and it is unfair. Is there actually anything that is not representation?”

Ixone Sádaba brings an extraordinary fresh approach to the notion of time and the transcendence of the photographic medium. One of the most interesting elements in her work is the way she incessantly integrates movement, real time and performance into the still frame, as if she wished to show the movement and perturbation constantly present below the skin. Repetition, rhythm and eclipse… So many bodies, so many expressive possibilities; as if time were dilated into many parallel moments; as if time were comprised not from a unique moment but from millions of afters and befores within an eternal present in an infinite emotional and conceptual expansion.

“I have to say I don’t like Cartier Bresson. I don’t believe in the instant”, Sádaba once declared. “But I do believe in an event’s capacity to generate a different tempo, in which our perception contracts and expands”. What does narrative matter then, when everything is here, in the veins that enclose our blood, in the flesh that echoes the palpitations of our heart? Within one single frame, the manipulation of time creates a bridge between material and spiritual means, a spiral emanation of life in all its million possibilities.

An uncanny, magical process helps the body finally come to terms with itself. Body moving, body protesting, body breathing in La Poètique de la Desaparition…

© All Pictures: Ixone Sádaba

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved

Representing Gallery:
Witzenhausen Gallery, Amsterdam

Published in Eyemazing 04/2008

MARCOS LÓPEZ

2008-11-19T22:04:00.002+01:00

Sub-realismo criollo

An upside-down world, where everything has a slight tendency to fall off… This may be the case if you live on the northern hemisphere of this planet and mind taking a look down there. Yet, if you are raised in the underdeveloped south, you acquire a different awareness of gravity, balance and cultural resistance.

Everything is quite different in the south. Down here, right here, in Argentina, a place that could rightfully be the centre of the whole universe, Marcos López once “grasped the camera as an orphan child would grasp his nun’s skirt”. Since then and for more than two decades, a story has been unfolding about the unexpected things that occur when the south tries to get a little closer to the north and to its dream industry of hypes and prosperity formulas.

For López, the experience of living in Argentina is equivalent to inhabiting the other side of a broken mirror:

As an outcast confined in a cell, you look through the broken glass. You need to, precisely because you are the reflection. But then, your gaze comes back to the north and slaps our faces as if it were a degenerated, threatening monster, willing to devour us all for the years of post-colonial, capitalist deprivation it carries on its back.

Made out of photographs, poems and writings, the complex visual universe of Marcos López is formulated as a concise observational meta-commentary on this particular “mirror effect”, produced within a global senseless community. His glamorously kitsch aesthetic was born in the mid-nineties. Since then a series of projects and publications have appeared; among them “Urban Scenes” (1999), “Pop Latino” (2000), “The Player” (2006) or “Sub-realismo criollo”, his most recent work, in progress since 2005, all of which Lopez has won international acclaim for as one of the leading figures of Argentinean contemporary photography.

It is noon and the barrio throws over you the shadow of its old depressing walls. Not a soul in the streets. A waiter comes and asks to add your name in the reservation list. His green fluorescent T-shirt matches perfectly the turquoise walls, while the radio is on, playing the latest hits of resentment. Boredom, some bottles of Santa Fe beer left in front of a huge Coca-Cola advertising panel, the marks of red lipstick on your cup, a world swamped with traditional popular symbols and imported modernity… López could go on telling stories forever.

Highly orchestrated soap operas full of saturated colours, exaggerated gestures, bad actors and ugly settings, all imbued with a strong dose of a self-taught Argentinean surrealism. In Marcos López’s universe everything is purposely tagged as sub, under- or hyper-, in the same way that everything becomes a question of lack and excess in the absurd world that surrounds him.

What happens when the modality of “formal” bad taste, as seen, for instance, in Martin Parr´s popular iconography of burger restaurants and tourist leisure parks, is introduced in foreign cultural settings? What happens when kitsch in all its plethora is reflected onto the broken mirror? Well, then it becomes a signifying meta-kitch, i.e. an even more eloquent performative simulacrum of the original, as Marcos López suggests.

“Could resorting to jokes, masks and bright colours be just a way of distancing oneself, of not being too serious, of avoiding the intense feel of direct contact, body to body, soul to soul?”, wonders the artist. Back in the early nineties, he recalls himself passing gloriously from his black and white psychological portraits to colour. Ecstatic, he used to drink toasting to photography as a natural heir of Mexican mural art. But soon, the phantoms of the old comrades would disappear, second thoughts would take over and eventually habits would change. Marcos has learned the lesson: he hardly drinks alcohol in public gatherings of more than three people! What survives from his “revolutionary” past, are the seeds of a growing irony and scepticism towards both the ethics of underdevelopment and the medium of photography.

“The attempt to promote an illusory belief that life is worth it, is useless. The only secret for a good portrait is to create an atmosphere that can show this desolation, this nothingness”. In López’s theatrically staged pictures, the apparent shift from the real into the realm of myth -be it religion, as in “Roast in Mendiolaza” (2001), or pure flesh fiction as in “Dressing Room” (2004)- operates, paradoxically, as an ironic and painful metaphor of the mutilation of dreams. It produces a sudden landing to reality and it transforms blood, flesh and myth to enacted paraphernalia of a homeland that hurts, reminding us that the real world is the one made of annihilated hopes.

Though clearly “fabricated in Argentina” and for Argentineans, López’s psychological penetration of the grotesque transgresses universal territories. His underdeveloped, deformed Warhol aesthetics is charged with the bittersweet flavour that inevitably any critical observation produced in the south inherits. Namely, this “curse” and “blessing” of belonging in the so-called “periphery” is what attributes to his sseemingly hilarious and hyperbolic imagery a documentary aura that captures the spirit of his reality. Down here, on the other side of the mirror, photography becomes an “autopsy of failure”, exposing in all its glory the act of “performing” stuffed illusions and slippery identities, just before the lights faint, just before identity surrenders to nothingness…

Pessimist, nihilist, more sceptical than ever? Lopez’s whole artistic practice critically questions the paramount role of imitation and repetition within the contemporary context of the imported cultural and consumerism models. “It is not necessary to take two hundred portraits in the American South, as Richard Avedon once did, in order to say what is left to be said”, reflects the artist in his writings. After more than two decades of commitment to his medium, he confesses being a bit overwhelmed by digital excess and by the pressure implied when belonging to the contemporary art “set”. “To tell the truth, I feel like it is time to retire, the way boxers do. I would like to go towards religion. I would like to have more faith…”

©All pictures: Marcos López

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved

Published in Eyemazing 04/2008

CHAMBLISS GIOBBI

2008-11-11T00:28:00.006+01:00

Catalogue texts published in the event of the solo exhibition of Chambliss Giobbi at the MiTO gallery, Barcrelona (20/11/2008)

original version_ Spanish (scroll down for the English version)
Los collages sonoros de Chambliss Giobbi

Al contemplar los fotocollages de Chambliss Giobbi, uno no puede evitar establecer una especie de paralelismo con el universo decadente, grotesco y emocionalmente turbulento de artistas como George Grosz, Francis Bacon y Lucian Freud. Hay algo desolador en todos esos cuerpos ásperos y fragmentados en mil piezas y ángulos, algo que lleva en sí toda la locura cotidiana y el frenesí mediático, como si se tratase de una recolección al azar de aquellas imágenes procedentes del ciberespacio con las que Joan Fontcuberta construye sus “Googlegramas”. Sin embargo, no sería ni mucho menos preciso describir a Chambliss Giobbi como fotógrafo o pintor en el sentido convencional de la palabra. Tanto las múltiples capas de sus composiciones como las cualidades pictóricas de sus personajes delatan nuestros ojos. El hibridismo de sus imágenes es lo que nos lleva un paso más allá de lo que se supone que es lo figurativo, la fotografía y la representación en sí.

Puede ser que todo haya tenido su raíz en aquel instante decisivo de 1998 que produjo la repentina rendición a las artes visuales de quien fue durante años un distinguido compositor de música clásica. Todo sucedió rápidamente: el encuentro con aquel grueso libro que yacía olvidado y polvoriento en el rincón de la librería de Manhattan, la vuelta al estudio, la necesidad obsesiva de recortar, pegar y plasmar minuciosamente nuevos personajes a partir de centenares de rostros en blanco y negro, y, después, la fuga definitiva hacia la fotografía, hacia exhaustivas y largas sesiones con el fin de recopilar más rostros y más ángulos. Rompiendo a trozos y encolando fotografías, dando luz a mutaciones antropomórficas errantes, tapando las fisuras de estos nuevos cuerpos con cera, observando cómo esta última se diluye generando masas y ríos de color… A medio camino entre lo analógico y lo digital, la obra de Chambliss Giobbi vuelve a los orígenes recuperando el collage en sus propiedades más físicas y artesanas.

Si bien han sido muchos los impulsos que han guiado este desfile orgiástico, uno de ellos es especialmente destacable: en la obra de Chambliss Giobbi no hay nada en manos de la suerte. Es más, cada uno de estos retratos está sustentado en un proceso de diálogo e interacción entre el artista y sus modelos. Algunos de ellos son familiares, amigos, incluso Giobbi mismo. Otros (Fisher Stevens, Gina De Palma, Indian Larry, Enigma) son actores, performers, leyendas urbanas de la escena underground de Nueva York, encarnaciones de mitos fabricados por la cultura mediática. Ya sean una cosa u otra, al posar ante su cámara, todos estos seres se revelan como personificaciones de identidad escenificada, puros espectáculos en movimiento. El cruce entre la emotividad y la paranoia mediática convierte el proceso de fotografiar estos personajes —un proceso invisible tal vez para el espectador, pero absolutamente fundamental para la concepción de la composición final— en un estado de éxtasis dionisíaco. Desde luego, la extrema variedad de poses y de ángulos satisface la obsesión insaciable del fotógrafo-voyeur por el cuerpo ajeno, pero también incita al exhibicionismo entre los retratados. De ahí que no sería incorrecto afirmar que el resultado final, la pieza acabada, proporciona el marco para la interpretación performativa de dicha frustración y tensión. Es el artista quien finalmente se ve sometido a la ávida necesidad que tienen estos personajes de exponerse bajo los focos del estrellato.

Como un palimpsesto meticulosamente compuesto al borde de una fragmentación convulsiva, así son las piezas de Giobbi. En ellas, una sola cara o vagina nunca es suficiente. Sin embargo, frente a un cuerpo multiplicado y clonado, los ojos parecen preservar su protagonismo como el elemento permanente y estático de la composición —los ojos en su papel histórico por excelencia como las puertas del alma—, junto a una carne pletórica y sepultada a la vez. Si fuera posible captar el flujo de la sangre en las venas, el pálpito del corazón y los destinos de los párpados, todo esto se hallaría en las imágenes de Giobbi. Tal es su fuerza psicológica. Si el cubismo aspiraba a atestiguar una realidad polifacética con miles de posibilidades, si el futurismo de Boccioni pretendía enseñar un mundo en movimiento y evolución perpetuos, los fotocollages de Giobbi hacen referencia a un universo que ya está irreversiblemente desmembrado y mutilado, a un mundo incapaz de adquirir significado como un todo. Las ideologías están muertas y, con ellas, las partes y el todo. Sólo quedan reflejos y residuos visuales, miles de voces incongruentes y una Babel por descubrir: la Babel que llevamos dentro de nosotros.

Aunque son escasos los elementos en común entre los collages analógicos de Giobbi y el legado de John Heartfield —uno de los pioneros del fotocollage—, un estudio comparativo de los dos artistas estimula un nuevo punto de reflexión crítica sobre el trabajo de Giobbi. Heartfield, en diálogo con George Grosz, fue célebre por sus fotocollages de carácter activista a través de los cuales denunciaba la degeneración individual y colectiva en la época de Weimar, anticipando el inicio de la decadencia y del caos en la Europa de entreguerras. En un contexto similar, la obra de Giobbi, lejos de ser explícitamente política, no deja de estar aferrada a los tiempos que corren y, con ello, resulta algo más que un mero planteamiento de angustia individual. No sólo introduce la problemática del cuerpo humano como un campo de batalla para la identidad y la representación, sino que “somatiza” la frustración, la recesión y la crisis de representación en una ciudad y un mundo tras el 11-S. Como si fueran productos de una peculiar mutación biogenética, los cuerpos de Chambliss Giobbi llevan los síntomas de una enfermedad difícil de diagnosticar pero presente en nuestras vidas. Aunque, a su vez, esos mismos cuerpos dilatados en el espacio y el tiempo, fundidos dentro de su propia matriz, dan lugar a un expresionismo psicológico, albergado en la universalidad de la naturaleza humana.

Así pues, es en la dilatación de un tiempo y un espacio en forma de emociones viscerales donde se encuentra el eje de la sinestesia universal de la que Giobbi viene ocupándose desde sus años de compositor. Y es en una de sus series más recientes (Head of Fisher Stevens, 2007) donde el artista parece alcanzar más claramente su meta. Con la ayuda del “magic sculpt”, un material de plástico, los miembros de sus figuras emergen de la superficie plana como piezas plásticas autónomas a la conquista del espacio. Asimismo, la presencia de una puesta en escena más elaborada complementa la búsqueda de un principio estético más orgánico, capaz de transmitir una realidad en la que lo global y lo natural se funden con lo autorreferencial y lo artificial.

Afán por la simultaneidad y la tridimensionalidad, desafío ante categorizaciones estéticas rígidas y reinvención de la técnica; anulación, transgresión y flujo: la experiencia de la vida. Si antes lo fueron el ritmo y la melodía, ahora para Giobbi lo es la fotografía. Igual que la música fluye en una simultaneidad condensada sin necesidad de ser concebida como un todo, nuestra mirada viaja sin obstáculos por las composiciones del artista neoyorquino. En nuestro camino, nos encontramos con una sinfonía de cuerpos y rostros, proyecciones gráficas de una partitura universal inscrita en el tiempo y en el espacio. Así llegamos a descubrir las piezas de Giobbi en su esencia más absoluta, como estudios psicológicos profundos y turbulentos, como mapas de emotividad y expresividad contenida. Son la totalidad y sus partes colapsándose y naciendo a su vez, son reflejos del mundo que nos rodea, un mundo en constante transmutación. Son collages sonoros perpetuos que fluctúan rítmicamente entre el presente y el pasado, el tú y el yo, la vida y el arte…
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The Sonorous Collages of Chambliss Giobbi

When contemplating the photocollages of Chambliss Giobbi, we cannot help being drawn back to the decadent, grotesque and emotionally turbulent world of artists such as George Grosz, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. There is something so devastating in all these mutilated and cut into a thousand pieces and angles bodies; something that carries within it all the everyday madness and mediatic frenzy, as if a random recollection of visual bits were taking place in the manner of Joan Fontcuberta’s “Googlegramas”. Nevertheless, it would be far from accurate to describe Chambliss Giobbi as a painter or a photographer in the classical sense of the term. Both the multiple layers of his compositions and the pictorial quality of his characters deceive our eyes. It is rather the hybridism of his images that takes a step ahead of what is strictly supposed to be figuration, photography and representation in itself.

Perhaps it all started in that decisive moment back in 1998 when he, who had for years been a distinguished composer of classical music, suddenly surrendered to the visual arts. It all happened fast: The encounter with that forgotten and dusty thick book at a corner of a Manhattan bookstore; the return to the studio; the obsessive need to cut, copy and make new characters out of hundreds of black and white faces; and, finally, the definitive fleeing to photography, to exhaustive photo-sessions recompiling more faces and angles for hours on end. Tearing and gluing prints, giving birth to errant anthropomorphic mutations, applying onto their fissures bees’ wax and watching how this dissolves into new masses and rivers of colour... Half analogue, half digital, the collages of Chambliss Giobbi take us with their physicality back to the origins, to collage in its more primitive essence.

If there have been many impulses for this orgiastic parade, one thing is certain: In the work of Chambliss Giobbi nothing is left to coincidence. What’s more, each one of these portraits is based on a process of interaction and dialogue established between the artist and his models. Some of them are family and friends or even Giobbi himself. Others (Fisher Stevens, Gina De Palma, Indian Larry, Enigma) are actors, performers, urban legends of the NY underground scene, incarnations of myths fabricated by popular culture. Be that as it may, once in front of his camera, all of Giobbi’s subjects are rendered personifications of staged identities, pure spectacles in movement. The crossing of emotion and mediatic paranoia turns the process of photographing these people —a process which may be invisible to the spectator, but so fundamental for the conception of the final composition— into a state of Dionysian ecstasy. The extreme variety of poses and angles obtained by hundreds of shots satisfies the insatiable obsession of the photographer-voyeur for the body of other, but it also incites exhibitionism on behalf of the subject. Following this, it would not be wrong to affirm that the final art piece provides the aesthetic frame for the performative interpretation of such a frustration and tension. It is the artist who becomes subjected to these characters’ avid need for self-exposure under the lights of stardom.

A meticulously composed palimpsest on the verge of a convulsive fragmentation, this is what Giobbi’s pieces are. Within them, a single head or vagina is never enough. Still, opposite a cloned body, the eyes seem to preserve their protagonism as the permanent and static element of the composition; the eyes in their per excellence role as the gates to the soul, alongside a plethoric flesh. If it were possible to capture the blood flow in the veins, the heartbeat and the destiny of each blink, all would be found in Giobbi’s images. Such is their psychological power. If Cubism aspired to bearing testimony to the multifaceted reality of thousands of possibilities, if Boccioni’s Futurism pretended showing the world in movement and perpetual evolution, Giobbi’s photocollages make reference to a universe irreversibly dismembered and mutilated, to a world incapable of assuming significance as a total. Ideologies are dead, and with them the part and the whole. What remains is a handful of visual reflections and residues, thousands of incongruous voices and a Babel to discover; the Babel each of us carries inside.

Although there is little in common between Giobbi’s analogue collages and the legacy of John Heartfield —one of the pioneers of photocollage— a comparative study of both artists propels an interesting, newly formed critical viewpoint for Giobbi’s work. Heartfield, being in a constant intellectual dialogue with George Grosz, is well known for his activist photocollages through which he denounced the individual and collective degeneration of the Weimar period, thus anticipating the beginning of decadence and chaos in the interwar Europe. In a similar way, Giobbi’s work, though far from being explicitly political, is a product of the current times and as such, it results to something more than a plain expression of individual anguish. It does not merely introduce the problematic of the human body as a battlefield for identity and representation. It actually “somatises” all the frustration, recession and crisis of representation as experienced in a city (New York) and a world after 9/11. Subjected into a peculiar biogenetically-like mutation, the bodies of Chambliss Giobbi seem to carry the symptoms of a disease hard to diagnose but present in our lives. At the same time, these very bodies, dilated into space and time, fused in their own raw material, give birth to a profound psychological expressionism, sheltered on the universality of human nature.

It is in the dilatation of a time and a space in the shape of visceral emotions where the core of the universal synaesthesia Giobbi has been dealing with since his time as a composer lies. And it is in his most recent collages, which escape from the flat aluminium panels, emerging as autonomous sculptural elements, where the artist seems to be clearly approaching his goal. Likewise, the presence of a more elaborate mise-en-scene in other recent works, such as Portrait of Fisher Stevens II, 1997, complement his search for a more organic space; a space capable of transmitting a reality in which the global and the natural is fused with the self-referential and the artificial.

Longing for simultaneity and three-dimensionality, challenging rigid aesthetic categorizations, reinventing technique. Transgression and flow: the experience of life. If melody and rhythm meant everything to Giobbi before, now it is photography. In the same way that the music flows without any need to be conceived as a total in a condensed simultaneity, our gaze travels through Giobbi’s compositions without any obstacles. In our way, we encounter ourselves with a symphony of bodies and faces, graphic projections of a universal score inscribed on time and space. We thus reach to discover Giobbi’s artworks on their most absolute essence: as profound turbulent psychological studies, as maps of condensed emotiveness and expressiveness. They are the whole and its parts, collapsing and rising to birth at the same time. They are the mirrors of the world that surrounds us, a world in a constant transmutation. They are perpetual sonorous collages fluctuating between the past and the present, individual and collective self, life and art…

LES RENCONTRES D´ARLES PHOTOGRAPHY 2008

2008-10-14T10:15:00.059+02:00

Christian Lacroix et ses invités

Con Christian Lacroix como director artístico invitado, la última edición de Les Rencontres d´Arles, celebrada entre el 8 de julio el 14 de septiembre, se dejó seducir por la moda, llegando a competir por una sola vez con Hyères y sus excentridades. Dar carte blanche a un creador como Lacroix tiene resultados inesperados pero nunca indiferentes, especialmente cuando éste convierte un festival consagrado en el “jardín de sus delicias”.

Este año, Arles lo fue toda moda. Del Cloitre San Trophine hasta el Parque de les Ateliers, del Espace Van Gogh a la Eglise des Trinitaires. Y la moda a su vez lo fue todo, una moda democrática y generosa que rompió con la dicotomia entre lo artístico y lo comercial, lo efímero y lo eterno, el diseño y lo kitsch. Sí, la moda se vistió de pueblo y, cuando empleamos la palabra “pueblo” en el caso de Arles, es en toda su gloria. Dentro del casco viejo, no hay prácticamente ni un rastro de HM o Zara. Más bien abundan tiendecitas con los souvenirs taurinos y los mantelitos típicos de la zona cuando no se trata con iglesias reformadas en bodegas, y petites patisseries...

...como esta!

En Arles este año, la moda fue moda en el sentido más agrio de la palabra, una moda modesta adaptada a los tiempos de crisis que corren. Nada de pretensiones resacosas, nada de divas como Lachapelle o Steven Klein. Solo hubo algo de los grandes, Richard Avedon, Paolo Roversi y Peter Lindbergh, algo de esa mirada onírica y neorrealista de los ochenta moribundos que lamentaban con el champagne en la mano el fin inminente del glamour, algo de este ideal súblime y decadente que hacía a Ava Gardner temblar en las corridas de toros, algo de esa belleza barroca y chic siempre con fondo un Waterloo, como le gusta a Lacroix. Nada podría ser más actual,¿no os parece?

De ahí la fotografía ligada a la moda. De ahí una serie de exposiciones de lo más interesante este verano en Arles, exposiciones basadas en la inserción de la moda en la vida cotidiana, con una predilección marcada por las bodas y los deslices de la haute couture en la calle. Fotografías de bodas arlesianas, remontadas en los sesenta y setenta, y álbumes de marriage por Jean-Christian Bourcart....

¡Qué bonita es la moda vista en sus aberraciones cotidianas! ¿Así no es como se completa el círculo vicioso de las tendencias? Del mercado a la calle, de la calle a la basura, y a empezar de nuevo...
Merecería la pena plantearse una boda sólo por este tipo de experimentación estética!

En Arles sumergió una moda que más que con vestidos pretende conectar con la realidad; una moda que delata involuntariamente el ser y el cuerpo propio; una moda que plantea cuestiones relacionadas con la identidad, su representación y comunicación; una moda sintomática de la antropología actual que dicta que ser moderno es proyectar tu esencia conceptual, disponer de una biblioteca, saber apreciar los vestigios del pasado, el encanto del kitsch y la acumulación... De ahi, Pictures from the Street una exposición en la que Joachim Schmid ha reunido algunas de las miles de fotos de la calle que lleva coleccionando desde el 1982.

La acumulación en toda su gloria...

De ahí también la moda como postura política de rebeldía y reivindicación sexual en los primeros retratos fotográficos. ¿Qué fácilmente inspirados se podrían ver Vivienne Westwood o Jean Paul Gaultier en las fotos de las cortesanas del siglo IXX, tal como éstas fueron registradas por la policía parisina? La moda en su estado más puro, en su momento de nacimiento: los retratos de las grandes damas y las reínas sexuales de la época delatan involuntariamente que la consciencia de estilo llegó a existir antes de Coco Chanel. Todo apunta a una de ellas que no estuvo en Arles pero merece ser merecida: es la Marquesa de Castiglione , que escenificaba sus autorretratos para pintar luego los detalles de sus vestidos.

Lo mejor: Entre famosas cortesanas y policías, una exposición sobre el copyright en la moda trataba sobre la manera en la que los diseñadores registraban para evitar plagios sus creaciones en books repletos de marravillosos looks de los años veinte y treinta.

Si esto no es estilo, me pregunto, ¿qué lo es?

Otro highlight del Festival: Clothes in Motion: History of the Fashion Video, una muestra acerca los diversos lenguajes y canales de proyección de la moda. Allí nos encontramos con noticiarios franceses de moda de los 30s y 40s (algo más o menos de este estilo), con las incursiones de fotógrafos de moda como Peter Knapp y Jeanloup Sieff en el cine, con fragmentos de varios programas televisivos de moda realizados en los años sesenta, como Dim Dam Dom (1965-1971), y con toda una serie de vídeos que Jean Paul Gaultier generó junto con creadores como Jean Baptiste Mondino en los ochenta y noventa para la promoción de sus colecciones. Pero también descubrimos que creadores como Jean-Luc Godard y William Klein habían flirteado con el mundo de la moda. El último con su sarcástico Qui-etes vous Polly Magoo en 1966 (la escena del desfile es formidable!) y con Mode en France en 1985.

Es una pena que no lo podemos reproducir todo lo que han visto nuestros ojos pero, para recompensar, ahí están unas imágenes de las fotos de desfiles de Guy Marineau y varias fotos tomadas en el apartado dedicado en las publicaciones y los medios de difusión impresa de la moda, en la que aparecían todos los dípticos promocionales de la Maison Margiela. Tampoco han faltado los blogs. La exposición terminaba con un apartado especial dedicado a los fashion bloggers, las promesas del futuro!

La moda es vanguardia, la moda sale de los bajos y los almacenes... Es lógico ir olfateando los nuevos talentos. Sin embargo, el apartado de los fotógrafos nominados nos resultó un pelín decepcionante. No por la calidad de los trabajos sino por los registros y los estilos. ¿Hemos chocado tal vez hoy contra la pared a nivel creativo? Hoy, la fotografía de moda sigue encasillada en la intimidad y la instantaneidad, en un registro de representación que ya se ha visto más que lo suficiente desde los tiempos de Corinne Day y la época dorada de las revistas de tendencias en los noventa.
La única diferencia hoy es que a todo esto se le ha añadido el minimalismo y la nitidez nórdica y esto es algo que hacen muy bien gente como Daniel Riera, Jamie Isaia, Cameron Smith , todos presentes en Arles.

Casos de locura imaginativa como él de Tim Walker siempre llevan un precedente como Cecil Beaton.

Pero casi que nos ha convencido más Grègoire Alexandre.

Han pasado 18 años desde el 1991. ¿No es el momento de tirar adelante?

¿Es tal vez por la sequía creativa actual que la programación de Arles este año ha apuntado a un concepto de fotografía de moda más sofisticado e híbrido interpolado con proyectos fotográficos procedentes del arte o del documental que llevan la representación un poco más allá? Puede ser. Más que en el esteticismo y la historia de la indumentaria, los diseñadores hoy se inspiran en lo social y lo humano para crear sus colecciones -mejor ejemplo que las colecciones de la última temporada no podría haber.

Uno de los autores en esta línea es Sanuel Fosso, artista de origen africano, quien traslada en sus autorretratos símbolos y elementos de la iconografía de la moda, demostrando que los límites de la representación y de la reinvención pueden ser infinitos.

Pero también la figura, el vestido, el uniforme, el estilo mismo se configura no sólo dentro de las redes de mercado, sino también en el seno de sistemas con fines exclusivamente políticos e ideológicos pese a apropriarse lo comercial. De ahí, las niñas de Vanessa Winship, colegiadas Kurdas de Anatolia con sus uniformes, y los testimonios de las mujeres de Achinto Bhadra, todas víctimas de abusos y violencia que transforman su dolor en fuerza, escenficando su propio cuerpo a través de vestidos y maquillaje. Imágenes que nos dicen mucho sobre la complejidad de la moda, del vestido y de sus creadores…

Todo esto fue sólo una pequeña parte de lo que pudimos ver... aparte de las fiestas taurinas y los platos de taureau que desgraciadamente nos acompañaron a lo largo de nuestra estancia.:-(

Transcendiendo medios, transcendiendo representaciones y filosofías, la programación de Arles ha puesto en manifiesto, por una vez más, que la moda puede ser un tema mucho más versátil y mucho menos purista de lo que normalmente se espera -gracias a la fotografía!
Lacroix ha aprobado el examen con buena nota.

Todas las imágenes: copyright ge+n.

Natasha Christia trabaja en el ámbito de la fotografía. Escribe, comisaría exposiciones, edita libros e imparte seminarios. En la actualidad, está a punto de producir su primera pieza audiovisual sobre el fotógrafo alemán Andréas Lang para 1000 Words Photography Magazine.

RAMÓN MASATS

2008-09-01T13:54:00.021+02:00

La Nueva Mirada_Ramón Masats
Fotografías inéditas 1950-1960

_Castellano

Si bien fueron muchos aquellos fotógrafos españoles innovadores que en los años cincuenta aspiraron a romper con el oficialismo edificado de la posguerra, con el fin de dar paso a un nuevo discurso fotográfico que estuviera vinculado a los movimientos de la vanguardia internacional, nadie llegó a ocupar el lugar excepcional de Ramón Masats. Nacida de forma casual y temprana, su mirada singular dio luz a una radical modernidad que marcó profundamente el rumbo que tomaría el arte fotográfico en este país, siempre al margen de conformismos y de ideologías endogámicas.

Kowasa Gallery dedica a Ramón Masats una exposición y un libro de más que setenta fotografías de época, en su mayoría poco conocidas e inéditas, que pretenden dar en gran parte un énfasis especial a la etapa de los años 1953-1957, cuando el jovencísimo amateur de Terrassa iniciaba su recorrido por el mundo de la fotografía en busca de un lenguaje propio. Nuestro objetivo es doble: en primer lugar, destacar en qué consiste la particularidad del “fenómeno” Masats y, por otro lado, impulsar una reflexión revisionista que desafíe la necesidad de inscribir y de encasillar su fotografía en las corrientes estéticas internacionales de la época (la Nueva Subjetividad de Otto Steinert, la visión documentalista difundida por la exposición del MoMA, “The Family of Man”, en 1955, y las diferentes manifestaciones del Realismo Humanista en Francia y en Italia). Ya en sus primeras incursiones en el campo de la fotografía, la práctica de Masats parece desobedecer un estilo concreto. Sobria pero a la vez irónica, seca y realista pero a la vez imaginativa y sarcástica, la suya es una visión rotundamente personal, impregnada por la naturaleza con un instinto intuitivo extraordinario para detectar “la humanidad del momento”.

Al igual que el resto de los fotógrafos de su generación, Masats está condicionado por su época y, en este sentido, sus recursos iconográficos se ven delimitados en un registro costumbrista tradicional, en el que abundan los ancianos, los niños y los campesinos. Lejos de cualquier necesidad de serenar y de depurar, lejos de adornos superfluos, su abanico creativo se enlaza con el reportaje como encarnación absoluta de los valores de la modernidad humanista, de la cual, sin embargo, acaba haciendo su propia versión. Porque más que mostrar, a Masats le gusta sugerir. En sus espesos encuadres no-figurativos de los primeros años, que él califica como ejercitaciones en los trucos de composición, su intuición le lleva a construir su propia arquitectura visual. La precisión compositiva, el diálogo entre la materia y el cuerpo, el especial tratamiento de la luz y el profundo entendimiento de la forma mediante un revelado contrastado le permiten generar en sus imágenes yuxtaposiciones inesperadas, mediante las cuales la vida de la calle y sus personajes respiran nuevos significados. Masats juega con el valor simbólico establecido de los objetos y de sus sujetos: fragmenta, altera, descontextualiza y desplaza los signos torciendo con ironía y humor los grandes tópicos y los mitos colectivos de la cultura que los envuelve.

De un modo similar, la selección del material y la paginación de este catálogo se rigen de un criterio subjetivo y atemporal que, al priorizar las asociaciones formales, pretende dar visibilidad a la estructura mental de Masats y a su registro de imágenes -un registro imaginario, plasmado además en una etapa temprana, antes de que el autor estableciera su concepción cultural de la fotografía. La selección no ha sido fácil. Kowasa Gallery conserva en sus cajones la mayor parte del archivo de esa primera etapa (1953-1964). Se trata de alrededor de unos 200 tirajes de época. Poca importancia les cede Ramón Masats, que ha vivido siempre intensamente su presente creativo sin dar demasiada importancia al pasado. Sin embargo, sacar a la luz este material ayuda a evidenciar constantes presentes en su trayectoria desde sus primeros pasos hasta la actualidad. Al embarcar en la aventura de la fotografía en los años cincuenta, Masats se alimentó de un lenguaje basado en la contraposición de formas y de connotaciones para generar su geometría en blanco y negro, y, al regresar de nuevo a la fotografía en los ochenta, retomó los mismos recursos para sus geometrías cromáticas. Hay algo más que una mera casualidad en todo este camino.

Escribía Oriol Maspons a Carlos Pérez Siquier a finales de 1957: “Apunta ahora un nombre. Ramón Masats, el fotógrafo aficionado español más completo. Es una bomba. Ahora se va a París a hablar con Ernst Haas y Cartier-Bresson para ver si se mete en Magnum”[1]. Puede ser que Masats finalmente no haya llegado a formar parte de Magnum. Sin embargo, vista desde la perspectiva de hoy, su temprana obra constituye prioritariamente un testimonio histórico.

De las escenas y los personajes “casposos” de Las Ramblas al milagro turístico del “Typical Spanish luncheons”, Ramón Masats fue capaz de percibir lo que se estaba cociendo debajo de la superficie en una época sordomuda lastrada por el legado de conservadurismo. Premonitoria de la apertura de la modernidad que conmemoraría Miserachs, otro grande de la época, en su libro “Costa Brava Show” (1966), la “Nueva Mirada” de Masats fue destinada a destapar una realidad que estaba a punto de desvanecerse por una vez y para siempre…

[1] “Maspons a Pérez Siquier – 21/03/57”. Frase citada en Laura Terré Alonso, Historia del Grupo Fotográfico AFAL 1956/1963. Sevilla: Photovision, 2006, pág. 411, p.f. 984.

_English

There were many innovative Spanish photographers in the fifties who aspired to break from the dominating post-war formality and who aimed to bring forward a new photographic discourse related to the movements of the international avant-garde. However, none among them was destined to occupy such an exceptional position as Ramón Masats. Born early and in a casual form, his singular vision ushered in a radical modernity, profoundly marking the course that Spanish photographic art would take, always on the margin of conformities and endogamic ideologies.

Kowasa Gallery dedicates an exhibition to Ramón Masats with a catalogue of more than seventy vintage prints, the majority of which are little known and have never before been published. Special emphasis has been placed upon the years 1953-1957, when the young amateur from Terrasa was making his own way through the world of photography in search of a personal language. Our aim is twofold: firstly to underline the uniqueness of Ramón Masats, and on the other hand to stimulate a revisionist reflexion that challenges the existing need to inscribe and to pigeonhole his photographic practice in the international aesthetic movements of the era (the New Subjectivity of Otto Steinert, the documentary vision spread by “The Family of Man” show at the MoMA in 1955, and the different manifestations of the Humanist Realism in France and in Italy). It is clear that since his very first incursions into photography, the practice of Masats disobeys any concrete style. Sober but at the same time ironic, dry and realistic, yet imaginative and sarcastic, his vision is fully personal, impregnated by nature with an extraordinary intuitive instinct for detecting the “humanity of the moment”.

Like the rest of the photographers of his generation, Masats is conditioned by his time. In this sense, his iconographic resources are delimitated by a traditional register, in which old men, children and farmers abound. Distancing itself from a necessity to serenade or purify, or from superfluous adornments, his creative range is related to reportage as an absolute incarnation of the values of humanist modernity. However, Masats ends up making his own version out of all this: rather than showing, he likes to suggest. In the dense non-figurative images of the early years, which he himself has qualified on various occasions as exercises in the tricks of composition, his intuition leads him to construct his own visual architecture. The precision of composition, the dialogue between material and body, the special treatment of light and the profound understanding of form revealed through a contrasted developing process of his prints, all these elements allow him to generate unexpected juxtapositions within his frames, through which life on the street and the characters found therein obtain new meanings. Masats plays with the established symbolic value of his subjects: he fragments, alters, decontextualizes and displaces these signs, and with great ironic humour subverts the big themes and collective myths of the era in which he lives.

In a similar way, the selection of the material and the layout of this catalogue are imbued with a subjective and timeless criteria, which employs formal associations in order to give visibility to Masats’ compositional structure and imaginative register, captured in a time before the author had established his own cultural conception of photography. The selection has not been easy. Kowasa Gallery preserves the major part of the archive of this very first period (1953-1964), about 200 vintage prints. Ramon Masats, who has always lived his creative present in an intense way without conferring too much importance on the past, finds little importance in them. However, by bringing into light this body of work, the binding elements of his trajectory from his first steps until our days are made clear. When Masats first embarked on his adventure of photography in the fifties, he developed a style based on the positioning of forms and their connotations, generating a black and white geometric language. In the eighties, when he came back to photography, he put these very same resources at the service of his colour geometries. There is something more than mere coincidence in this story.

In a letter to Carlos Pérez Siquier in late 1957, Oriol Maspons commented, “Take a note of a name. Ramón Masats, the most complete Spanish photographic enthusiast. He´s ace. He is going to Paris to talk with Ernst Haas and Cartier-Bresson to see if he can get into Magnum”[1]. Whilst it may be true that Masats has not become a member of the agency after all, in the eyes of today his early work constitutes an extraordinary historic testimony.

From the out-dated scenes and characters of Las Ramblas to the touristic miracle of “Typical Spanish Luncheons”, Ramón Masats was able to conceive what was going on below the surface in a deaf-mute era burdened by the legacy of conservatism. Premonitory to the advent of sixties modernity, commemorated by another big photographer of the time, Xavier Miserachs in his book “Costa Brava Show” (1966), the “Novel Gaze” of Ramón Masats was destined to reveal a reality that was ready to fade once and for all.

[1] “Maspons to Pérez Siquier – 21/03/57”. Citation in Historia del Grupo Fotográfico AFAL 1956/1963, by Laura Terré Alonso. Photovision: Sevilla, 2006, pg. 411, footnote 984.

KOWASA gallery, Barcelona
Exposición fotográfica del 27 de junio al 2 de agosto de 2008
Portada: ©Ramón Masats, Barcelona 1955 (tiraje de época)
Texto: ©Natasha Christia
Maqueta: Gabriel Espí

LALLA A. ESSAYDI

2008-09-01T13:20:00.010+02:00

Les Femmes du Maroc

In “Les Femmes du Maroc” Lalla Essaydi addresses the complex issue of female identity from her adult Arab and Western perspectives. Originally from Morocco, but currently living and working in Boston, the artist sets her arresting, large-scale colour photographs within an uninhabited family-owned house, where she spent weeks during her girlhood in punishment for transgressing the rules of gender conduct. Against this very same setting, she places her femmes; old women, brides and young girls, covering their bodies with waves of hand-applied henna calligraphy that extends onto the surrounding walls and floor. Through the combination of calligraphy, an Islamic sacred art-form reserved solely for men, and of henna, an adornment practice traditionally relegated to women, Essaydi crosses a prohibited threshold, foregrounding thereby an intimate female body beyond the encoded patriarchal structures and the stereotypical cultural patterns of the Islamic society.

Though abundant in words, the series reinforces a discontinuity between presence and absence, volume and vacuum; and it does so by means of a subversive minimalist aesthetic of crème nuances, which cancels all existing fissures and spatial boundaries. A cloud of a transparent spatiality revolves around bodies, white robes and veils, rendering them all into a one-dimensional blank surface. White and ethereal, Essaydi’s woman becomes plain decoration. Constrained not just merely between walls, but also within the tangled layers of a pre-existing iconography as a licensed symbol of fertility and purity, she is fated to visibility exclusively in the transitory moments of marriage, birth and puberty, alongside eggshells, sugar and virginal flowers. As such, the female identity is seen possessing no outlet for expression within a house, whose bounding walls project nothing but perpetual silence. However, it is in this confined domesticity, in this non-language and no-man environment, where fundamental distortions and rebellious actions of expression can be conveyed…

If, annihilated within the patriarchal hierarchy, the woman is designated a performative voicelessness, this lack of regulative expression certainly allows for her occupying a space outside the margins of given interpretations. Following the Lacanian “Pas-tout”, Essaydi’s female bodies, always in fluidity, arise as corporeal expressions of a semi-ghostly womanliness. But, whereas they might assert that “le femme n’existe pas”, at the same time, as bearers of flowing no-essence they generate oppositional alternative spaces of undiscovered meanings.

Beyond challenging femininity and Islamic tradition, Essaydi creates, both as a woman and an artist, an open contextual space, where the engagement with self-expression goes through the denial of a preconceived identity. In this respect, “Les femmes du Maroc” suggest a territory beyond representation, where femininity is less femininity than a topos, where the Orient is less a place than a topos, where aesthetics in itself is revealed as a congeries of references originating from a quotation or from an amalgam of some previous imaging. Caught somewhere in between identities, Essaydi’s mysterious white spatiality underscores all this as much as it becomes an efficient, wide-ranging tool towards the articulation of a visual language which speaks from this impermissible hidden universe.

Text: Natasha Christia
All Pictures: Lalla A. Essaydi
All Rights Reserved

Published in Next Level Magazine, 02/2008

PHE08: Towards New Topographies

2008-09-01T13:09:00.012+02:00

Meeting with Sérgio Mah, PHE08 new art director

PHotoEspaña, Madrid’s International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts, opens its gates on June, 4. Eleven years have already passed since 1998, when la Fábrica, a cultural management entity, launched what was to become one of the most prominent cultural events in the world. The programme of this upcoming edition consists of fifty exhibitions in museums, public institutions and art galleries. From the beginning of June till the end of July, two-hundred image makers from all over the world will present their works during this big “fiesta” of photography which will literally place Madrid once more at the heart of international attention.

Faithful to its main commitment, PHotoEspaña has served all these years as a fresh and solid platform for international photography beyond frontiers, strict policy strategies and narrow-minded public interests. Encompassing various subjects and genres -from pure documentary bias to arty, conceptual approaches and from human drama to lyricism and humour- the Festival has maintained a balance between tradition and innovation. During PHotoEspaña, both prestigious artists and promising young talents can have their own share of Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame. At the same time, the Festival boosts the spirits of a country with a relatively poor photography panorama, at least as much as institutional support, infrastructures and art market dynamics are concerned, demonstrating that things are not always what they appear to be. By supporting an extraordinary feedback from the local creative industry and the international contemporary photography scene, it seduces more and more visitors each year. Numbers speak for themselves: in 2007 they were more than half a million; this year the numbers are expected to increase. With all rights then, PHotoEspaña has set its reputation on stone beyond dispute, if not as “the most important photography festival in the world”, as the French newspaper Le Monde has put it, certainly as an ambitious cultural event in full expansion.

The Festival has always adopted alternative approaches to photography, leaving full liberty to its various artistic directors to undertake different conceptual paths. Each edition is dedicated to a specific topic developed in the Official Section, which includes shows hosted in major museums and institutions. After a short break -PHE07 lacked a concrete subject- the new edition comes back to its roots, directing its spotlight on the notion of “Place” approached, according to the festival’s central statement, “as a physical and concrete reality but also as a concept which refers to mental, virtual and mythical territories”.

Does it not all sound a little familiar, however? Engaged with topics such as “City” and “Nature”, the previous editions of 2005 and 2006 respectively contained a great deal of “topography” and “geography” as their inherent elements. In what sense does the new edition mark a novel direction? The Portuguese curator Sérgio Mah, who has been appointed artistic director of PHotoEspaña over the next three years, does not deny the interconnection of this present edition with its predecessors. “Unarguably, the notion of place encompasses meanings such as the city or nature”, he admits. But then he goes further to assert that the very same notion embraces much more than spatiality, since it can obtain both physical and emotional dimensions. “Actually, “place” has always been a big issue in photography and still is today”, explains Mah. “Artists finding themselves in specific geographic contexts offer their own dimension of the world. Place is precisely what sustains the connection between the photographer and the subject he photographs. It provides him with the framework for a consistent statement about a reality he knows better and the ground for a further sustained critique based on attitudes and local ethics. Therefore, photography gains a paramount importance in the way we understand places and the social and geographic meanings we attribute to them”.

Effectively, photography occupies a key role in our understanding of the world, and, invertedly, the awareness of finding oneself belonging somewhere is a very crucial element in photography. Let us take as an example the fact that many of the great masters of the medium have been inextricably related to specific places: Atget and Brassai with Paris, Walker Evans with the American South, Bill Brandt with London. All these creators are somehow responsible for what these “toponyms” are in the popular consciousness today. But there is more to this, which brings us to the deep political dimension of the issue. As Mah rightfully remarks, “photographers find themselves in supposedly unimportant locations but the way they decide to take pictures confers on “non-places” new meanings and connections. The social and political parameters of this posture become extremely important today, especially if one considers that due to the abrupt change of international economy, places everywhere tend to all look the same”.

Globalization versus history, memory and symbolic values… In response to all this, PHotoEspaña’s statement brings to the foreground the mission of contemporary photography, which is to encourage heightened awareness. According to Sérgio Mah, “place becomes the tool through which the contemporary photo-lens can explore the world, adapting territorial perspectives that counteract the predominating post-modernist and capitalist perspective”. Enclosing a more global vision, “place” also becomes the “leitmotif” of a clear curatorial proposal that slide-steps fancy conceptual worrying: “As a huge democratic event appealing to thousands of people in a metropolis such as Madrid, PHotoEspaña is more in need of a main motif that clarifies different perspectives and aspects of photography as a practice within visual arts, than of a specific theme”.

Following these guidelines, the exhibitions of the official section are dedicated to international creators as diverse in their practice and philosophy as Bill Brandt, Robert Smithson, Roni Horn, Florian Maier-Aichen, Henryk Ross, Minerva Cuevas, Cristina Garcia Rodero and Harri Pälviranta, alongside young talents. Among the most significant presences in this year’s statement are also photographers of the calibre of Eugene Smith, Thomas Demand and Javier Vallhonrat. Each belonging to a different generation, country and artistic string, these three creators stand as rigorous examples of the distinct ideological and conceptual formulas, through which photography has integrated the notion of place in its visual discourse.

El Centro Cultural de la Villa/Fundación Santander presents a retrospective exhibition on Eugene Smith (1918-1978), one of the greatest documentary photographers of all times. Smith passed on to become part of the pantheon of the classics of photography for his incessant, uncompromising personality; he would not hesitate to resign from all big magazines of the time, such as Newsweek and Life, once they raised obstacles to his work. In the forties, Smith gained acknowledgement for his brutally vivid World War II photographs and from the fifties onwards, he undertook his famous photo essays that established empathy to specific places and their inhabitants’ human spirit. Two of his most emblematic projects are the incomplete Pittsburgh photo essay, envisioned as an epic approach of the city as a living entity, which Smith started in 1955 after joining Magnum and Minamata (1971), a long-term project on the effects of mercury poisoning in a Japanese fishing village. Eugene Smith’s lifelong commitment to the documentation of the immediate relation of places and their people with history, reflects a crucial moment in the history of photography, during which the quest for veracity attributed to the photographic document a decisive role in the ethical projection of minorities and non-places.

The pseudo-documentary images of German photographer Thomas Demand (Munich, 1964), which will be on display at the Fundación Telefónica in Madrid, highlight a totally distinct spatial awareness. After making his first steps as a sculptor, Demand turned to photography as a way to record his ephemeral paper constructions. Then photography took over, becoming the model in itself. Employing as his point of inspiration pre-existing images released in the press, Demand meticulously reconstructs life-sized exteriors and interiors with coloured paper and cardboard. Demand’s seemingly inoffensive and ordinary ambiences start to make sense as sceneries of controversial public relevance coming to our awareness through media coverage. In this way, a simple domestic setting, like a kitchen, is transformed into the Kitchen in Sadam Hussein’s Hideaway in Tikrit, and a regular building becomes the embassy of Nigeria in Rome where the Yellowcake story unfolded in 2003. Of course, in the same way that the assumption about the uranium supposedly linking Iraq to the mass production of weapons was a forged hypothesis that scrutinized our perception of reality, Demand’s facsimiles of natural environments and architectural spaces create a false illusion of realness pushing the medium of photography towards uncharted territories. Things enter reality through photographs to such an extent that places themselves are transformed into stylized paradigm simulations of prefabricated media news and key facts of contemporary history. A surveillance camera is always there to record all experienced reality, which seems to start and end within a screen…

Entangled with photography and video-installations, the work of Spanish photographer Javier Vallhonrat (1953), which will be shown at Canal de Isabel II, conveys the capacity of photography to uncover the emotional and psychological potential of the places we inhabit. In their majority, Vallhonrat’s ambiences consist of an attempt to “humanize” natural spaces, by domesticating them through the construction of a fictionalized reality. But, humanizing in Vallhonrat’s language is equivalent to imbuing settings with a complex emotional temperature, in which the unpredicted but always poetic nuances of human feelings generate unexpected exposures and contradictions.

The three artist cases reviewed above give only a fragmented idea of the various approaches to be manifested in June. PHotoEspaña is in constant growth, establishing a nexus of further contributors; among them the galleries and art venues participating in the Off Section, and a foreign country as satellite guest. If last year’s collaboration with French institutions in Paris and Arles marked the first experiment towards an international expansion of the Festival, this year’s edition involves a synergy with Portugal. A wide range of cultural projects in Lisbon and the Algavre, organized by the Portuguese Ministry of Economy and Innovation, will provide an excellent opportunity for a thorough insight into the panorama of Portuguese photography, which still remains relatively unknown.

The PHotoEspaña programme also fosters a strong theoretical and pedagogical framework, through a series of debates (Encuentros PHE), workshops, seminars and master classes with leading photography masters at the Campus PHE in Aranjuez, and the portfolio review Descubrimientos PHE, one of the festival’s main activities designed to promote up-and-coming photographers. Last but not least, the Festival includes a roster of awards that recognize the work of achievements of artists and professionals dedicated to photography, and various events, such as film screenings.

The philosophy of PHotoEspaña is a compendium of different activities, which do not wish to offer exclusively one perspective in the notion of place or photography, but instead, pretend to show the range of attitudes, behaviours and methods in the visual arts. “There are several entrances to access the culture of the photographic”, stresses Mah. “In PHotoEspaña, our principal aim is to mingle photography with other media and disciplines, as well as to impulse a reflection on the idea of the photographic experience rather than on photography itself”. Indeed, the photographic experience as such is not confined within a sectarian world of cameras, but can also be encountered in painting, film and video. In the same way that the theatrical practice does not merely exist within the theatre, one cannot establish strict frontiers of what is -or, more accurately- what has to be photography and its strategies. And that is where a must-attended event such as PhotoEspaña enters the game, providing us with a unique opportunity to discover new aspects of the medium and its creators.
We are looking forward to it!

PhotoEspaña 08, Madrid, June, 4-July, 27, 2008
Thomas Demand
Javier Vallhonrat
Eugene Smith

Published in Eyemazing 02/2008

JÖEL-PETER WITKIN

2008-09-01T12:56:00.009+02:00

Human Kind (Original title: Jöel-Peter Witkin and his unresolved paradoxes)

Loved, hated, but, above all, famous for pushing photographic representation to its limits through his tableaux vivants of all kinds of sufferers and social outcasts, such as giants, dwarfs, fetishists, hermaphrodites or even dead corpses, Jöel-Peter Witkin has been at the focus of major controversy among critics over the last three decades. Viewed as products of aberrant perversion and nihilism, his “obscene” nude saints, stuffed animals, leather straps and skull pieces have raised waves of fury and revulsion among neoconservatives and the Christian coalition in the States. In the meantime, on the other side of the Atlantic, European intellectuals and critics celebrate Witkin’s oeuvre as a major expression of the vast complexities of the human soul and as unconditional worship of the Other, beyond suffering and death. Unquestionably, one thing is certain: Witkin leaves nobody indifferent...

Jöel- Jöel-Peter Witkin’s resume transgresses distinct eras, styles and tendencies. Back in the sixties, while enlisted in the army, he would draw inspiration for his assignments of military accidents from Weegee and Diane Arbus. The seventies brought a new life full of reflection and introspection. After obtaining his degree in sculpture in 1974, Witkin left New York and went on to pursue his graduate and postgraduate work in the theory of photography at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The fruit of his studies was “Revolt against the Mystical” (1976); a thesis that encapsulated his personal commitment to the medium. The time had come to put theory into practice. In the early eighties, his earlier series of Christ, the “incarnation of the absolute creator”, and Woman as “source of all human life” had already transformed into a newly elaborate, aesthetically and conceptually, body of work, which literally set out to demonstrate the corruption of flesh by mortality, allowing for mutation to become the binding evidence of an apocalyptic corpse iconography. It was also in the eighties when Witkin found his way to galleries and museums at the same time when Andres Serrano was provoking with his “Piss Christ”. Verberating with the extreme conditions of life and death, his breathtaking work gained him international critical acclaim, notoriety and a handful of grants and awards.

Many years have passed since the roaring eighties, but Witkin’s universe has lost neither its relevance nor its capacity for constant reinvention. Especially today, when provocation, apocalyptic visions, flesh disorders and biogenetic mutations have become such hype in contemporary photography, Witkin might even be considered a classic! Still, though his practice comes to terms with the predominant dislocation of the established photographic representations, Witkin covers an alternative space and, surprisingly, he does so by employing as his point of departure, rather than Photoshop tricks, the long rooted quest for veracity in the photographic medium. Challenging imagination through veracity takes much more work than creating 3D artificial worlds, but Witkin’s effort has paid off. His modus operandi is the crippled flesh of life with his masters and slaves and his sole aim is this: revealing before our eyes a reality we deny to face; awakening consciousness by paying tribute to an unknown and unseen Mankind, so unbelievably real…

Depraved human beings or their mutilated fragments in obscure poses and symbolic gestures… Literally “anyone bearing the wounds of Christ” is transformed into a subject of appraisal in Witkin’s pantheon, providing la raison d´être for his romantic, quasi, mystical conviction about the purifying mission of the artist. In an interview, Witkin once confessed his kinship with his models, emphasizing that his oeuvre derives from the need to love, though through darkness. The way to paradise usually goes through hell. “The art that does not point towards some idea beyond the senses is not art at all!” Everybody deserves to be praised, but this democratic sanctification may only be accomplished through a creation of atrocity, thus an aesthetic against the senses. Since the beginning of his particular journey, Witkin has remained faithful to his particular vision, constantly entering regions feared by the majority of artists. In recent works, such as “The Beginning of Fashion in Paris”, “Bad Student” and “Oedipus and Iocasta” (2007), decapitated bodies, heads, arms or penises become part of new fictional narratives or elegant still-lives. All these are pictures with a tremendous emotional impact, but for Witkin mental or physical anomaly is no less respectable than normality. The formless and the deformed are brought back into light. Disgust, horror and cruelty in their extremity are removed from their negative connotations, becoming parts of a new cognitive experience, where the notions of physical beauty and aestheticism obtain transcendental dimensions.

Witkin´s impulse to make photographs like “Retablo de Mexico” (2007) begins with preliminary sketches with diverse references that encompass the history of art, mythology and photography. The big masters of the past, Giotto, Hieronymous Bosch, Goya, Velázquez or Picasso, provide the formal and spiritual “high-art” framework for an unkindly matched religious-like iconography, in which fetishized nude bodies of an ambiguous sexuality are transformed into eternal beings in the context of a disturbing and ineffable present. What nourishes Witkin’s practice is not God but rather the mystic sublime elevation and pathos, encountered in any religious and artistic experience. “A One and Present Time” (2007) is imbued with this kind of extreme autoerotic ecstasy provoked in the midst of a divine appearance. Sensitive to eroticism, be it female of male, childish or adult, Witkin does not hesitate to express his appreciation of a rather universal form of beauty. Images like this may entail a great dose of lust but also gain a dimension as indirect metaphors of madness, disease, and, above all, loss. It may be the loss of a limb or even the loss of a big passion… Placed in the fringes of human ethics, Witkin’s baroque desire is inevitably anchored in irrationality and absurdity. Yet, this mood per se is not a surreal-like exploration of the sphere of the unconscious and the dreams, but rather culminates from the author’s strife “to create experiences that no one has seen or felt before”. Witkin manages to go where the Surrealists did not have the courage to. In a similar but much more extreme way than 19th century photographers, such as Holland Day or Louis Darget, he uses the camera eye to reveal a Mankind whose existence lies beyond nature and experience, calling into question our limited perception of reality.

Besides mysticism and anguish, Witkin’s world is also tainted with irony, humour and a rather down-to-earth vision. “The Beginning of Fashion in Paris” and “Sailor Jim in the luxury of war” are a very good example of this. Despite the fact that both of these staged tableaux vivants do not depart from the realm of myth, their titles hint towards rather down-to-earth connotations. Witkin lives in 2008 and has the need to place himself within and respond to the events that have marked our lives in the last years. In a hieratic, comical posture, his Querelle-like “Sailor Jim” may be viewed as a Roman warrior coming out of a napoleonian victory with his SM paraphernalia. The whole image definitely works as an ironic commentary and as an explicit parallelism of the contemporary political status quo of fear and aggression today with a sadomasochistic game.

Is Witkin a genius or a pervert? Many scholars have often attempted to label him in these terms. Some have looked for possible answers in his supposedly sinister present (his marriage to a tattoo artist!), while others go back to his childhood of religious duality, as the son of an Ukrainian Jewish father and an Italian Catholic mother who did not manage to conciliate their religious differences in Brooklyn of the forties. From his own side, Witkin loves to warm the spirits. He often recalls that as a small child he witnessed a terrible car accident in front of his house, in which the decapitated head of a small girl rolled to his feet, her dead eyes staring upward. Ocassionally, he has also referred to the recurring symbolic retrievals of his lost twin sister in pre-natal or infant cadavers in his work. All this has definitely fuelled a quite intriguing myth for all those who allude to Freud and Lacan for their interpretations.

Regardless all ethical or moral issues inherent in the work of an artist whose common practice includes finding his models through newspaper advertisements, the internet, in medical schools, morgues and insane asylums around the world, Witkin’s art deserves our attention for the awareness it arouses. It calls for a sort of aesthetic response to universality in the Kantian sense of the term. It calls for a reading of Life and Death and Art after Art. Coming or not out of his personal experiences, frustration or repressed wishes, or just from Rimbaud’s illusory verse “I did not exist, I was different”, Witkin’s artistic posture is one that embraces game, death and risk alongside eroticism and baroque passion.

The very process of creation entails exposure and risk, not only for the artist himself but also for his prints. Having photographed, Wiktin spends hours in the darkroom scratching and piercing his negatives, in order to achieve the blurry texture and the artificial look his copies are famous for. But mission is more important than vertigo. “My work expresses the reaction of my consciousness”, once stated Witkin, pointing to the possibility of an aesthetic healing through a state of artistic confusion based on revelation. Incompatible with the artificial world of blind conformists, intransigent towards social pressures, beyond the limits of representation, in the fringes of life and death, Witkin’s entire universe of paradoxes borrows something from Georges Baitalle. If in the Bataillian universe eroticism has a lot in common with death, violence and dark instincts as an extreme state of bridging the physical discontinuity of the human beings, Witkin overcomes the boundaries of ugliness and beauty, morality and morbidity. In order to bridge the discontinuity of the field of vision, he brings before his lens in an extreme form of multiculturalism all those who are drastically foreign to us, “the unloved, the damaged and the outcasts”.

It is precisely this exploration of unknown territories, what attributes to Witkin’s haunting silver antique-quality prints their Benjamian “aura” of the first photographs. As signs of a hidden, mystic world, specimens of an unknown humanity emerge out of them. In the same way that in the early daguerrotypes the procedure of long exposure imbued the models with living and growing within the instant, in Witkin’s yellowish fading photographs everything is predisposed to endure, abolishing the ephemeral. His deformed protagonists look at us. Their gaze carries the sharpness of what is seen for the first time. It penetrates our visual camp, resisting the process of any expected spectatorial identification. Unaffected, these accidental actors play their roles in the distance. In their “halo of silence”, they are transformed into a sacred synecdoche of the suffering anchored in the heart of human life.

The unknown enters timelessness and timelessness is compressed in the stillness of a single photograph. Effectively, Jöel-Peter Witkin has conferred on these beings their right to form part of the theatre of life…

All images: Jöel-Peter Witkin
Text: Natasha Christia.
All Rights Reserved

Representing Gallery: Baudoin Lebon, Paris

Published in Eyemazing 02/2008.

KATHERINE DI TURI

2008-09-01T12:25:00.023+02:00

Glamorous Day Dream

/spanish version

En Glamorous Day-Dream, Katherine Di Turi “disectiza” el interior de revistas de moda para producir a partir de cortes y yuxtaposiciones directas, collages particulares, en los que la iconografía mediática de modelos, telas, accesorios de lujo y joyas, se desdobla en múltiples contextos y significados. Aún así, Di Turi no se conforma con la mera recopilación y alteración de imágenes preexistentes, sino –igual que en sus series anteriores Mountain Traces (2006) y Finca La Serrana (2007)- desplaza sus piezas a la esfera de la fotografía. Como tales, los collages de Glamorous Day-Dream se convierten en reproducciones fotográficas, y operan tanto como documentos y “simulacros” de obras plásticas efímeras, así como productos artísticos autónomos. Fabricadas a partir de experiencias visuales mediadas, estas nuevas configuraciones desafían, en la tradición del readymade post-Duchamp, las nociones heredadas de “autoría” y “original”.

Deconstrucción, fragmentación y síntesis hacia mutaciones inesperadas… Volúmenes y masas geométricas desproporcionadas destacan, en lugar de afinar, las fisuras de un entramado de cuerpos, texturas y colores. Lejos de cualquier voluntad de proyectar una entidad orgánica, Di Turi conserva en sus fotografías esos rasgos, constando que toda belleza equivale, en cierta manera, a una construcción artificial. Cargados con su parafernalia de texturas y objetos de lujo, los cuerpos femeninos de Glamorous Day-Dream son contemplados como herramientas vacías de dominación visual y como íconos exóticos degradados de unas estructuras de mercantilización condenadas a quedarse obsoletas. En la cultura de la belleza y de las tendencias hay siempre una fecha de caducidad…

Sin embargo, cabe señalar aquí que el posicionamiento de Di Turi hacia la moda no implica el rechazo de esa última. Al contrario, hay un elemento onírico, casi hiperrealista, en la convivencia de fragmentos tan diversos en el mismo encuadre. Efectivamente, ¿no está fabricado el mundo de las ilusiones lujosas a partir del imaginario de las emociones? Pero, también hay casos en los que la artista se permite a sí misma el desliz hacia una trasgresión extrema. En sus trípticos de blanco y negro, la forma toma posesión del contenido y un mestizaje conflictivo lleva a cabo mutaciones inesperadas. Fragmentos descontextualizados plasman algunas de las composiciones más abstractas y complejas de toda la serie, que frustran pero a la vez activan la imaginación. Una armonía perturbada se establece y, al hacerlo, pone en evidencia la falta eterna de reconciliación entre los cuerpos. Envuelto y revuelto simultáneamente, el cuerpo femenino opera como continuum casual de la violencia inherente en cada intento de conquistar la belleza y como metáfora sobre la imposibilidad de representación.

Pero, más allá de quedarse inscrita en discursos femenistas, la obra de Di Turi ofrece un planteamiento integral de los cánones de representación y de la naturaleza de los objetos de arte. Fiel a la línea de sus trabajos anteriores, la artista juega con nociones como el objet trouvée, la perpetuación infinita de los medios, y sobre todo, la ambigüedad inherente en cada representación. En Glamorous Day-Dream, lo que aparenta ser un collage, es su “reproducción” fotográfica. A través de lo que supuestamente es su “imagen”, el objeto original pasa a ser “otro” y se reivindica como un presente artístico autónomo. Como si fuera una de las sombras en la caverna de Platón, una sola toma fotográfica envuelve algo de una creación pasada: símbolos, significados y contextos distintos…

No pretende, pues, Di Turi instaurar los valores de “autenticidad” y “originalidad”, sino centrar su atención en la resignificación/apropiación ante la cual se encuentra cualquier producto artístico hoy, cuando la experiencia se ve plasmada más a partir de una “dada representación visual de la realidad” que a partir de la “realidad” misma. Pero, al “encerrar” cada una de sus piezas dentro del encuadre de una sola imagen, Di Turi las vincula con las cuestiones ontológicas del dispositivo fotográfico: el pasado versus el presente, la recuperación versus la pérdida, el olvido versus la memoria… Por ello, no es de extrañar que su método de trabajo consista en un proceso parecido de “trasgresión vertical”. Los fotocollages de la serie se desvelan literalmente como “estratografías” de fotografías enterradas en los lomos de revistas olvidadas, que remiten a instantes, tendencias y modas pasadas. En su proceso de excavación, la artista juega con lo arbitrario, lo casual y lo inesperado, e incita a la construcción de un espacio de reflexión alternativo. ¡Todo merece la pena ser contemplado! Pero, son tantas las capas que nos deniegan el acceso. Igual que en el mundo actual de saturación mediática, el universo de Di Turi es significante de una visión fragmentada y desarticulada.

Sostenía Maurice Blanchot que la imagen tiene que sufrir necesariamente una serie de muertes para recobrar su visibilidad y autonomía. En la línea conceptual de artistas visuales como Joachim Schmidt y John Stezaker, Katherine Di Turi elabora una práctica de reciclaje y recuperación, con el fin de reactivar un nexo visual tan sepultado por las relaciones normativizadas de representación, como es la iconografía de la moda. Y, lo logra. No hace falta subrayar que en la era digital, una actitud semejante equivale a una postura política que contrarresta el espíritu universalista de sobreproducción y de consumismo visual. Pero, -y, retomando el tema-, si la acumulación de imágenes sirve para evidenciar el cuerpo como un anacronismo obsoleto, el afán de alterarlas, conduce inevitablemente a una mutación de la carne y del espíritu fuera de los márgenes establecidos. Vista desde dicho prisma, la serie Glamorous Day-Dream puede ser designada como una “arqueología revisionista” de la vida y del estilo moderno. Es en la vida de las fotografías después de su propia “muerte” donde cobra sentido una vida más allá de la fotografía…

/english version

In Glamorous Day-Dream, Katherine Di Turi dissects the interior of fashion magazines in order to produce –out of cuttings and direct juxtapositions- a series of particular collages, in which the mediatic iconography of models, textiles, luxurious accessories and jewellery unfolds into multiple contexts and meanings. Di Turi does not simply conform to a sole recompilation and alteration of preexisting images, but –in an analogous way as in her previous series Mountain Traces (2006) and Finca La Serana (2007)- she shifts her work to the area of photography. Thus, by becoming photographic reproductions, the collages of Glamorous Day-Dream operate not only as documentation and simulacrum of ephemerous plastic works, but also as autonomous artistic products. Produced from mediated visual experiences, these new configurations challenge the inherited notions of “authorship” and “original” in the tradition of the post-Duchamp readymade.

Deconstruction, fragmentation and synthesis towards unexpected mutations; disproportionated volumes and geometrical masses emphasize, instead of smoothing, the fissures of a knot of bodies, textures and colours. Far from any intention of projecting an organic entity, Di Turi conserves these features in her photographs, so as to underline the fact that all beauty is equivalent, in a way, to an artificial construction. Charged with a paraphernalia of textures and luxurious objects, the feminine bodies of Glamorous Day-Dream are contemplated as empty tools of visual domination and as exotic icons, belonging to a mercantile system condemned to become obsolete. There is always an expiry date within the culture of beauty and trend.

However, it is important to emphasize here that the stance Di Turi takes against fashion does not imply any rejection. On the contrary, there is a suggestion of a dreamlike,quasi hyperrealist- element to the coexistence of such diverse fragments within the same frame, which has its roots in the emotional imagery of fashion. However, in some cases, the artist allows herself to slip towards an extreme type of transgression. In her black and white series, form takes over content, and a conflictive crossbreeding throws up unexpected mutations. Descontextualized fragments shape some of the most abstract and complex compositions in the whole series, causing a frustrating but at the same time active impact on the imagination. A disturbed harmony is established and, as such, gives evidence of the eternal lack of reconciliation among the bodies. Wrapped and stirred at the same time, the feminine body here operates both as a casual continuum of the violence inherent in any attempt to conquer beauty, and as metaphor for the impossibility of representation.

Still, much more than reducing itself exclusively to a feminist discourse, the work of Di Turi offers an integral questioning of the canons of representation and the nature of art objects. Faithful to the guidelines of her previous projects, the artist plays with notions such as the objet trouvée, the infinite perpetuation of media, and above all, with the ambiguity found within any representation. In Glamorous Day-Dream what appears to be a collage is actually its photographic reproduction. Through what is supposed to be its visual mirror, the original object becomes “another”, claiming for itself an artistic autonomous present. Here a sole photographic take embraces something belonging to a past creation - different symbols, meanings and contexts, as if it were one of the shadows in Plato´s cave.

Clearly, Di Turi is not attempting to restore the values of “authenticity” and originality, but rather focuses her attention on borrowing and giving new meaning to processes that operate on any artistic products today, when experience is based more on “a given visual representation of reality” than on “reality itself”. But, by “shutting” each one of her art pieces within the frame of a sole image, Di Turi connects it with the ontological questions of the photographic device: past against present, recuperation against loss, oblivion versus memory. It is not surprising then that her very own methodology loans elements from a similar process of vertical transgression. The photocollages of the Day-Dream series emerge, in literal terms, as the layering of photographs buried in the spines of forgotten magazines, which allude to instants, trends and past fashions. In her process of excavation, the artist plays with the arbitrary, casual and unexpected, providing a field for alternative reflection. Everything deserves to be contemplated! But, there are so many layers obstructing us from access to all this “everything” as a whole. Exactly as occurs in the contemporary world of mediatic saturation, Di Turi´s universe presents itself under the full possession of a fragmented and disarticulated vision.

According to Maurice Blanchot, the image must necessarily suffer a series of deaths in order to recover its visibility and autonomy. In the conceptual line of visual artists like Joachim Schmidt and John Stezaker, Katherine Di Turi elaborates a practice of recycling and recuperation, with the aim of reactivating a visual nexus entombed by the regulations of representation, as found in fashion iconography. And she manages it. Here it is unnecessary to underline that in the digital age, Di Turi´s attitude is equivalent to a political posture which counteracts the universalist spirit of over-poduction and visual consumerism. But, coming back to the issue, if the accumulation of images results in the body becoming an obsolete anachronism, their alteration drives inevitably toward a mutation of flesh and spirit outside of all established margins. Viewed under this prism, the series Glamorous Day-Dream can be described as a revisionist archeology of modern life and style. It is in the life after the “death” of a photograph where a life beyond photography gains meaning.
Exhibition Text : Katherine di Turi, “Glamorous Day-Dream”

Square Studio, Barcelona, April, 17-28, 2008

All images: Katherine di Turi

Text by Natasha Christia.
All Rights Reserved.

ALICE SPRINGS / aka. JUNE NEWTON

2008-02-29T13:10:00.016+01:00

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

2008-02-29T12:50:00.016+01:00

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

2008-02-26T23:14:00.018+01:00

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.