Tag Archives: Irving Penn

Not Finding Wiltshire – David Bailey in Papua in 1974

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Wigwoman of Wabag District, © David Bailey

A Lady Dressed To Kill, © David Bailey

Highland Boy, © David Bailey

Untitled, © David Bailey

Kukukuku Man with Bow,© David Bailey

Say what you like about David Bailey (and he attracts mixed opinions), he does get a very great deal of stuff done. He’s several times been quoted noting wryly how many more prizes he’s won as a commercials director than as a photographer. He’s a sculptor, too, and seems to have an ever-more-frequent publishing programme. He has often worked in collaborations, notably with Damien Hirst. I still regard it as very strange that he has had so few shows in public spaces — one big one at the Barbican, as I mentioned in a previous piece on this blog a while ago, and nothing else major. Isn’t that inadequate for a photographer of such enormous talent? A show is in the works for the National Portrait Gallery, but it’s still a meagre haul for such a publicly visible photographer, and one so widely admired. Coming after his eye-opening retrospective in the Docks recently, this present show adds another little facet to a reputation which most of us still quite lazily limit to a few good portraits in an Avedonic manner: dark suit, white shirt, black tie, plain cove background…

There was an element of disingenuousness in the announcement of the exhibition of a group of Polaroids by David Bailey from Papua New Guinea at the Daniel Blau Gallery in London. The press release calls them “hidden from view ever since” (they were made in 1974). The pictures weren’t hidden: they were published in a perfectly commercial book soon after (David Bailey. Another Image : Papua New Guinea. Matthews, Miller & Dunbar, London, 1975). The fact that the book wasn’t all that successful doesn’t make them hidden. As I write a dozen copies are available on Abebooks. The book is a pleasantly anecdotal — if relatively slight — presentation of what these pictures are. The prints (a very different thing, of course) have been boxed and now appear, nicely unfaded, on a gallery wall for the first time. David Bailey spoke about them at the gallery the other day, in conversation with Anthony Meyer.

Irving Penn. Three Asaro Mud Men, 1970. © The Estate of Irving Penn

To start with, what on Earth was Bailey doing taking anthropological portraits in the first place? I think the answer is not far to seek: Irving Penn. As senior photographer at Vogue America when Bailey was making his name (also at Vogue), Bailey had no choice but to follow Penn in detail. And he had been making famous ethnographic portraits. Penn’s Dahomey studies are dated 1967, his New Guinea studies (including a very famous photograph, Three Mud Men of Asaro) are dated 1970; his Moroccan portraits 1971. In the face of that, it is easy to see that Bailey had something to follow. Perhaps he regarded it as another way in which photography could open out, get him beyond the world of fashion which even then he found limited and limiting.

As he describes it, the trip itself was hard. He didn’t like the people that he had contact with in New Guinea, finding the men very aggressive and the women shy. He had little or no communication, apart from just about managing to convey the idea of the pose. He asked nobody to dress for the pictures, and the painted masks are the ones they were already wearing on the day. He downplays the idea that they were cannibals, saying that they played violent war games in which nobody was supposed really to get hurt, but that if one were accidentally killed there might be a certain sharing of body parts among the rest. Nevertheless, he slept with a Bowie knife when he had to accept hospitality in a longhouse among them. His most striking anthropological or ethnographic note is a memory that for some reason the women breast-fed their pigs. “I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 12,” he says drily, “so that didn’t bother me.”

Bailey describes the reaction of tribesmen to the pictures as disappointment: they treated them as broken mirrors, he says several times, turning the Polaroids here and there, puzzled as to how the picture stayed put and failed move as a mirror would. Polaroid SX-70 was very new at the time, and one can see that Bailey (who was always interested in the technology of photography and good at it) would have leapt at the chance to try out something light, fast, and one-off . Interestingly, he is scathing about those photographers who “chase the Polaroid”. He explains that he means those who use a Polaroid back before a shoot, and then spend the rest of the session trying to recreate the effect they obtained. He uses Polaroid backs himself, he says, but only at the end, to check that the cameras are working properly.

Polaroid did not pay for his Papua trip (he paid for that himself), but they equipped him generously with cameras and film. He took a blanket and a sheet to act as field backdrops (a trick he learnt from John French, whose own ex-army blanket was once lovingly restored by the V&A textiles department before appearing in a French retrospective exhibition). Another recurring backdrop is corrugated iron, which Bailey enthuses about. It’s one of the things he likes about Australia. I’ve never been to Australia, but Country Life once published a serious piece of research about the nineteenth century British firms which sent flat packed corrugated iron buildings, complete, for colonial use. You could buy a scout hut or a villa appropriate to a district officer or even a complete church. I imagine the Tin Tabernacle, just off the Kilburn High Road, in London, is one surviving example among many, although I don’t know which company made that particular one. Corrugated sheeting is an interesting choice for Bailey to have made as his background. It speaks (as do the occasional Christian crosses worn around Papuan necks) of a degree of Westernization, willing or forced, in stark contrast to the un-colonised appearance of the sitters themselves.

As a matter of fact, many of these Polaroids, perhaps the majority, are not terribly appealing pictures. They’re all very interesting, though. Choose the right one, and things start to leap out of these little frames with a startling energy. But many of them are flat, very dark, a little weary. He gets very close to the sitters, but can’t get them to break into an expression. They stare, dourly. They hardly move. The word I’d use is depressed. These are slightly depressed pictures. And that’s not a word I’ve seen associated with David Bailey before.

Penn’s ethnographic studies had turned the subjects into stylish clothes-wearers, (or stylish wearers of the absence of clothes) and they make me uncomfortable with a degree of condescension. I imagine Diana Vreeland, the purveyor of dismissive bons mots who is more responsible than anyone for the lasting association of Vogue with unthinking and mildly contemptuous snobbery, would have loved them. When Penn puts Truman Capote against a plain background, I understand that Capote was savvy enough to look after his own ‘image’, and the pictures are to some extent a collaboration. But when Penn made the Asaro mud men caper about like the chorus of some tribal Broadway musical, I’m less easy. Much earlier, in Cuzco, in Peru, Penn had made pictures of his hosts as he travelled which are not patronizing. But by the time he went to New Guinea, I’m not sure he knew how not to be. Bailey’s Papua pictures, small and intimate and relatively quick to make, are an obvious counter to that. I suspect, from looking at them, that he himself felt a certain discomfort at what Penn had made. I asked him, and he sort of huffed and said Penn wasn’t him and he wasn’t Penn and each to his own and so on. Take that for a mild ‘yes’.

So what is one to make of these small studies of Bailey’s? First and foremost, I think they are consciously not Penn. They are non-snobbish, non-colonial. Bailey produced a wonderful line in the gallery when he said “You know, once you’ve travelled a bit, everywhere looks like Wiltshire.” I translated that as meaning that Bailey had found nothing of the sublime in Papua, either of the people or of the landscape. Yet Bailey is a substantial collector of Oceanic and African art. “I like the crap as much as the good stuff. Anything that looks like Picasso, I suppose, “ he says with mock modesty. He even bought some pieces on the trip then. So it wasn’t that he was closed to Papua. But somehow, it didn’t really fire him up. No doubt, it was a hard trip. No doubt, too, he found that his egalitarian, hail-fellow-well-met 1960s attitudes met no answering spark. And perhaps there were personal and professional worries of which we know nothing which simply meant that he was off form at the time. It happens, why not?

I have another suspicion, which I cannot prove. I suspect that Bailey really didn’t get along with the Polaroid. At his recent show in Newham we were reminded just how brilliantly he could get the best out of any camera. If anyone could get magic out of the equipment, Bailey could. Large and medium format studio camera, 6×6 and 6×7, more recently lighter digital equipment, he’s tamed it all. He’s like a string player who could make decent music on a fiddle or a cello or even a viola if he had to. But in the Polaroid SX-70, Bailey seems to have found his ukulele. It just didn’t give him enough control, didn’t allow him enough options.

They’re not bad pictures, far from it. Any collector could easily choose a good one. It’s a very intriguing show, revealing as it does a new light on an artist we thought we knew. It’s odd, though. I can’t get away from the thought that it’s a brave show, too. It’s the first time I’ve seen a photographer come so very near to publicly acknowledging that maybe he picked the wrong tool for the job.

Ottolenghi’s Plenty, by Jonathan Lovekin

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Nobody thinks of those profusely illustrated mid-lavish recipe books as photobooks.  Yet perhaps we should. They contain as many pictures reproduced just as prominently as many a photographer’s monograph. Here’s one: Plenty, by Yotam Ottolenghi. Published by Ebury Press in 2010 at £25.00.  Not only a hardback, but a hardback padded in squidgy white plastic, intended I think to be kitchen proof, and also to carry the overtones of a precious album. It makes me think rather the other way, I must say, of a catalogue of swatches of motorcar upholstery, perhaps, or a mid-market range of bathroom fittings: horribly tasteless pursuit of ‘good taste’.  But, hey, sales figures don’t lie in the modern publishing world, and this thing has sold gazillions.

Let’s see inside…  Not all but most spreads conform to the pattern: text on the left, full-size picture bled to edges of the paper on the right. Double-page pictures, bled to the edges all around, punctuate that rhythm.  Smaller pictures are occasionally used, one, two or three to a page.  Text is surrounded by acres of white space and is obviously tied to each picture.  If the pictures haven’t sold this thing on their own, they’ve certainly carried their share. This is self-evidently a book of photographs.  Yet we are somehow invited not to think so.  To call such a book a photobook is a sin against marketing. I don’t see why.

Let’s keep going. The pictures also conform to a series of types.  Most are direct plunging views straight down, either onto pans purportedly ready for serving, or onto plates of food purporting to be just served and ready to eat.  These are given a stylistic identity of a sort by a recurring trick that I might call acceptable grubbiness.  A number of them are photographed on a background representing a Country Kitchen Table (or is it an Inner Urban Regenerated Industrial District Kitchen Table?) which has spots of paint on it.

These spots are important.  They speak of energetic creativity, of people so concerned with the eternal verities of ingredients each more achingly authentic than the next that a little errant paint is neither here nor there. The vine leaf, herb and yogurt pie is shown on a lightly chipped plate itself on a surface of lightly chipped paint. There are carefully indicative minor spillages in many pictures (designed to convey the artistic and creative nature of a process not entirely controllable to the last degree). Utensils have a degree of visible wear. This is photography by allusion. Comfortable use is to be applauded; shining newness is just ever so slightly…nouveau.

Acceptable grubbiness is an art of innuendo and sometimes the photographer has overplayed his hand. (Acceptable grubbiness was perfected by Irving Penn, by the way, in the food pictures he made for Vogue, who deployed it with a touch which ran more to a few genteel crumbs and the occasional joke mouse: a far lighter sprinkling than this out-and-out mugging). Ottolenghi’s ‘smoky frittata’ is shown in a pan that has clearly been allowed to accumulate highly carcinogenic carbonized deposits for a number of years.  A dishcloth (with an oily stain) is artfully disposed to protect the imaginary hand of the imaginary cook from the imaginary heat of the pan which was no doubt stone cold by the time the picture came to be taken. And beyond all of that?  A surface, which might conceivably be Corian or some similar fancy worktop, but which I suspect of being a roll of wallpaper lining paper disposed for its neutral texture and colour, shows oily stains of its own.

The picture has been open at my elbow for the two or three minutes it has taken to write these words, and let me tell you, I would no more eat the depicted smoky frittata than I would lick the linoleum in my local A&E.  I have seen cleaner burger vans in lay-bys on the long slow drive down to Cornwall.  This is grubbiness pushed too far.  On the double spread pp.118-119 (in a section entitled without hint of either irony or wit The Mighty Aubergine) is a picture which looks at first sight, and at second, and at third, exactly like a horrified, peering, too-close-for-comfort view of road kill.  It is actually an aubergine.

And then there’s the oil.  My god !  The oil !  I am told that Plenty is quite a good cookbook.  But there is a chasm between cooking food and photographing it.  Pictures which glisten and gleam and shine are attractive in a porny way.  These certainly have the wet thing going on. I can’t believe that the food stylists and the photographer followed the recipes with due restraint when it came to the oil.  Or if they did, the food is simply inedible.

The pictures in this book are competent in a dreary sort of way.  The man who made them is a craftsman, of considerable standing in his speciality. They do a job.  But as illustrations of a light modern imaginative new style of multicultural cooking, they simply aren’t credible.  It’s as though the publishers failed to see that they were using Rubens to illustrate a Pilates manual.

Yet this is not a hopeless outfit well down the Isthmian League.  This sold as one of the great exemplars of words and pictures working together.  And nobody seems to have minded that the photography is of a standard only just above poor.  It’s an endless accumulation of coded ‘lifestyle’ hints masquerading as an attempt to communicate enthusiasm for the subject.  The pictures are full of dotty non-sequiturs, of which the acceptable grubbiness is only an example.  On page 45, a dish (of black pepper tofu) looks for all the world like a grisly something Susan Meiselas might have uncovered in Nicaragua.  It’s dished up on a table which has inscribed plainly upon it, and plainly left there for us to read, the single word ‘JURY’.  What on earth this means, I have no idea at all.  Was this revolting-looking dish served up in some contest, to be judged?  It cannot have been.  Was it adduced in evidence in a war crimes’ tribunal?  It looks like it ought to have been.  What kind of demented picture editor allows the single word JURY to make a mad mystery out of a perfectly simple picture, even of tofu?  What on earth possessed the photographer to allow such a thing to go forward?

This is one of the top-selling picture books of this year or last.  The photographs (all plunging and oily as they are) are an essential component of that success. It is a hugely successful photobook. It begs to be judged as a book of pictures. Yet nobody has applied even the slightest suggestion of informed thought to the pictures, either during the production process or since.  The chef-author is feted as a poet in tofu, but the photographer is just a good name in the trade.  I have not seen more than a word of serious criticism of these pictures since the book came out (and that word has, more often than not,  been ‘luscious’).  It seems the pictures are assumed to be OK because they couldn’t be expected to be better than OK. No wonder photography is still treated as marginal.

The photographer, in fact, is Jonathan Lovekin, who has been the photographic servant of a food writer, Nigel Slater, established longer than Yotam Ottolenghi. Slater particularly asked for Lovekin when Slater was working for Marie Claire, and Lovekin had some stuff published in Elle Deco.  Observer, Observer Food Monthly, Appetite, Real Food…Where Slater has gone, Lovekin has followed, can of oil always at the ready, like an Indian railway man or a San Fernando Valley deputy assistant director in the adult film business.  Success breeding success as it does, it must have been obvious that Lovekin was the right man for the Ottolenghi job.  The publisher probably didn’t even ask if the imagery was appropriate in feeling, or tone or skill.  Just get the guy to do the gig.  If it’s good enough for Slater….

Lovekin has on his website a showreel (he makes food films, too) which is beyond parody. Spermy liquids and metaphorically exhausted foodstuffs (such as figs), all soused in a soundtrack of Alison Goldfrapp shouting about sex in Ooh La La.  There are several separate credibility gaps here.  Jonathan Lovekin’s film clients include Bird’s Eye and Macdonald’s.  Blow the genteel multicultural sensibilities of the Tel Aviv beaches as lauded by Ottolenghi.  It’s just a job. It’s far from clear that even the photographer takes his pictures seriously.

The big appreciation of food has become a substitute for culture.  Who needs to read books or even newspapers about complicated places abroad when all you need to do is go shopping more sensitively than your neighbours?  Who needs to think through complex matrices of history and economy to understand elsewhere, at least as messy as home?  So much easier to enjoy the one-upmanship of food.  Bet you don’t know what Shakshuka is.  I do, now. Ottolenghi, Plenty, p. 87 (illustrated on a double page following).  It’s a North African dish with many variations, of course; I’m surprised you’d forgotten.  “In a tiny alley in old Jaffa there’s a little restaurant serving food to customers sitting outside at shared shabby tables….”  Abroad, safely wrapped up.  The pretension of culture with none of the work, the risks, or the long slow accumulation. That packaging of culture calls for a particular kind of photography, apparently.

Photography in some of its forms has a long tradition of showing things as they really are.  In other forms it has a long tradition of showing what somebody wants us to buy. Either way, it used to be the very minimum that the words and pictures worked harmoniously, pulling the reader in the same direction.  This food stuff seems to have been put together by people who don’t even consider that pictures carry complex meanings.  They can’t be bothered.  They use photography as the lowest kind of space filler, capable of bright colours and that awful gloopy sheen and nothing remotely more subtle than that. We need perhaps to sharpen our eyes as readers.  If the most successful food book of the moment can get away with pictures which are craftsmanlike but nothing more than that, it is because in that market we have come to accept that we need not really look at the pictures at all.  All that glistens isn’t gold.  It really isn’t. As viewers we are entitled to pictures which reward careful seeing, whatever the work they are doing.  We shouldn’t have to run to “photobooks” to see proper photography. We shouldn’t be fed on slop, even in a cookbook.

Sir Cecil Beaton – Earning a Royalty

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The Victoria and Albert Museum has put on a show of Sir Cecil Beaton’s royal portraits as a contribution to the diamond jubilee celebration of HM the Queen, and it has been met with predictable enthusiasm.  Lots of crowns!  Lots of gowns!

It’s actually a disappointment. Although he was almost crippled by snobbery, Beaton was capable of technical skill and imagination.  He was a charming (if slight) draughtsman, a fine designer (notably of stage sets) and his writing is shrewd as well as waspish, and often gracefully put together, too. He was a sufficiently versatile photographer. Fashion, of course, he took to as the natural milieu of the visually oriented queen, but his best portraits of artists drip with a kind of jealous scrutiny and his war photographs were by no means negligible.  One can see how the jubilee demanded a certain kind of treatment, but this is a fawning exhibition which does no favours at all to a photographer who might be more interesting than the one-dimensional view of him presented here.

Beaton was born in 1904, in the same year as Bill Brandt, and it is not absurd to compare them. Peter Conrad did just that (The Observer, Sunday 25th January 2004) at the time of their mutual centenary, when two shows allowed him to think of them side by side.  Conrad picked up on Beaton’s ‘lofty responsibility’. His job, as he put it, was ‘to stage an apotheosis’. With its ‘silvery magic’, the camera bestowed ‘a glorious halo’ on the people it portrayed.  Never mind that some of that halo, when its address was Buckingham Palace, conveniently reflected on the photographer.  It is too easy to think of Brandt as a dark European intellectual to Beaton’s childish British vampery – too easy but not inaccurate.

Brandt was born to considerable privilege, secretive and shy, interested in the poor and the dispossessed (a socialist in his photographs, even if his politics in life were less plain than that), not much appreciated in his lifetime.  Beaton came from a modest background of which he was embarrassed, was a moth, attracted to Hollywood and country house parties and all that glistered – including, it goes without saying, the royal family.  He was certainly a Tory in his photographs although he, too, was more complicated than that. He was absolutely obsessed with being appreciated.  Beaton’s natural tone was absurd: think Kenneth Williams from the Carry On films.  In a little snippet of a documentary David Bailey made on him which is screened in the V&A show, he is asked what he says to people while photographing them: “I coo like a bloody dove,” he says, camp as a row of tents.

This exhibition is designed to make a serious point, that Beaton’s pictures were one element in the campaign to modernize and stabilize the monarchy in the Windsor mould: a family business, hard at work in the service of the nation, certainly not swanning around ankle-deep in privilege.  Fair enough.  The present Queen has overseen a steadying of the monarchy at a time when it is much easier to make a name twitchily demanding change of any kind than working for stability in the long term.  Part of that steadying was to supply a steady image. Beaton contributed to that, and was happy to do so.  “ Today”, he wrote in 1953, “ members of the Royal Family realise that, the demands from the public and the Press becoming ever more voracious, being photographed is one of the serious obligations to which they must submit at increasingly frequent intervals.” It is on record that Beaton was not pleased when Anthony Armstrong-Jones became what Beaton felt he had the right to be, the senior photographer-courtier, and was ennobled in the process.

Every regime puts out official pictures, and we in Britain are luckier than some in that we don’t feel obliged to have them over every official desk in the land. Pumping out a number of reassuring pictures of Windsors at work and if necessary at home has hardly been a shocking abuse of power, and we could easily have left it at that.  The show reveals a large number of prosperous people leaning on heavy furniture in interiors with very high ceilings.  It is feeble to try to illustrate a story of the monarchy being modernised with such very conventional photography.  But still… No surprise, no  great insight, no problem.

Too much is made of Beaton’s inventiveness.  He once put the Queen in an Admiral’s cloak, for statuesque simplicity. It looks rather coarsely borrowed from Rodin’s Balzac, as though he’d found it in a book the day before the shoot. He made some ‘contemporary’ and ‘relaxed’ portraits from time to time, notably of the royal children.  There are some small signs of a photographer tying to do his best, including a charming seized moment of Princess Anne walking on ermine during a pause in the Coronation sittings, and one or two attempts to strip out background.  But this is ‘contemporary’ in the same way that any routine wedding photography business can offer you Contemporary as opposed to Traditional, just another set of rules to apply for a predictable outcome.

Many of the best pictures are a small selection of portraits of Beaton by others – patently added to flesh out a show in sore need of a lift.  Curtis Moffat, Paul Tanqueray, Erich Salomon, Irving Penn and a hilariously stagey rendition by David Bailey: this is quite a nice show within a show.  There are also some interesting mounted series of pictures approved by the Palace.  It is thin gruel, though, for a major exhibition at the V&A, far too thin.  The V&A holds some 18,000 royal pictures by Beaton. There are about a hundred in the exhibition.  If these really are the strongest we could have seen, then the holdings are a disaster.

There floats in the background a question. Beaton’s archive is somewhat messy, and there is lack of clarity about who owns exactly what copyright. Beaton worked a great deal for Vogue, and many of his pictures have a Condé Nast copyright. Condé Nast pushes out a steady stream of books on Beaton to exploit that fact. Sotheby’s also commercializes a holding of Beaton material, not very effectively, sometimes in co-production with Condé Nast and sometimes independently.  But the royal archive was a specific gift to the V&A, and the V&A benefits materially from the reproduction of every royal Beaton, although not of Beaton’s images on other subjects. Is it possible that one of the motives for this really quite poor exhibition was simply that the increased circulation of royal Beaton imagery could make a windfall for a museum which (like every other) struggles to finance its operations?