Tag Archives: John Stezaker

W.G.Sebald – Not so Great with Pictures

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On 14 November 1997, W.G.Sebald, in a beautiful but curiously frustrating interview with Christian Scholz, answered a question put to him as follows:

WGS:  Strange things happen when you aimlessly wander through the world, when you go somewhere and then just want to see what happens next.  Then things happen that no-one is going to believe later. And what comes next is very important: it is necessary to somehow capture and document these things.  Of course, you can do this through writing, but the written word is not a true document, after all.  The photograph is the true document par excellence. People let themselves be convinced by a photograph.

He went on to describe a particular night at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam:

WGS: I have actually found myself in this situation on several occasions. Again and again there are situations where you think that this is impossible, that it cannot be, [situations] where you would really have to take this snapshot. For example, it happened to me recently at the Amsterdam airport; when I had to sleep there overnight because the entire airport was fogged in and none of the planes could take off, after midnight everyone was stretched out horizontally on these sofas on the upper floor of the departure lounge. They were covered with the kind of thin blue blankets provided to the campers by KLM. An extremely ghostly scenario – human beings that, laid out like the dead, were lying curled up on their side or very rigidly on their back. And outside, through the windowpane, was the mirror-image of the interior.

From such constellations arise possibilities about which you can then reflect. And they can be verified only through an image that was taken. Otherwise, you think , oh well, that’s yet another extravagance of this writer, who came up with it,  who extends the line of what  happens in reality in order to get something out of a work with a certain meaningfulness or symbolic value. But these images are actually there.

Elsewhere in the same interview, Christian Scholz asked him:

CS: Does that mean that you see the image only as a fragment of narrative?

WGS:  Yes. It can be a landscape, a person, an interior. But that’s something that drives me to look more carefully into these things. For me it has an effect that is familiar from my childhood: there were these ‘Viewmasters’ into which you could look. You had the feeling that with the body you are still in your normal bourgeois reality. With the eyes, however, you are already in an entirely different place: in Rio de Janeiro or at the passion plays in Oberammergau or whatever else could be seen at that moment. I always have the feeling with photographs that they exert a pull on the viewer and in this entirely amazing (ungeheure) manner draw him out, so to speak, from the real world into an unreal world, that is the world of which one doesn’t exactly know how it is constituted but of which one senses that it is there.

CS: Or at least that it was there.

 WGS: Correct.  But the fact remains: each image interrogates us, speaks to us, calls to us.

 So he went on, meandering around and saying these oddly banal things. Yes, sometimes you see things that one wouldn’t quite believe without a photograph to confirm them.  It’s a cliché that witnesses to exceptional happenings frequently fall back on “It was like a picture” or it was “like a film” to underline the exceptionality of what they saw. Yes, a picture can set off a train of thought.  Yes, of course, a picture can transport one in imagination….Sebald said some mildly interesting things about Kafka and pictures, and he said one really very odd thing about how the grey areas in pictures, neither black nor white, represented purgatory, this vast no-man’s-land where people “were permanently wandering around and where one did not know how long one had to stay there,  whether this was a purgatory in the Christian sense or just a kind of desert that one had to traverse before one reached the other side.”

Apart from that outburst, it was banal.  And yet.  In that interview (which I have only just read) Sebald confirmed something that I had long noticed in his books, but never quite put my finger on.  Sebald’s use of photographs in his texts seems so exciting, when you discover that the poorly reproduced, apparently captionless picture you’ve been wondering about has in fact been captioned by several pages of text. But Sebald had consistently removed authorship from photographs.  Pictures were either his own (as several are acknowledged to be in his books) or they were just grist.  No matter what the provenance, no matter that the author (or a probable author, a near-identified author) was actually known, Sebald preferred his pictures anonymous and would strip an author away from them if they weren’t.

Look again at the various passages I’ve quoted above (I’m sorry they’re so long).  They’re amazingly, stultifyingly, conventional.  It’s a revelation.  Sebald, who in his writing with radical grace blurred the distinctions between novel and memoir, history, travel writing and journalism, that Sebald, the insouciant funambulist between fact and fiction, could be, when it came to photographs, a plodding bore.

The interview is in a dense and intermittently interesting book[i] whose subtitle is Photography after W.G.Sebald.  It’s a given. Sebald was a wizard with words so it stands to reason:  he must have changed the way we deal with photographs, too.  Only it’s false.  He did nothing of the sort.  He’d read his Barthes and that’s about it.  He used pictures as unattributable gobbets of fact upon which to hang the whirling tangos of his written allusions.  The very idea that a photographer might himself have been able to make metaphors escaped him completely.  Because in the end, even for a writer as free as W. G. Sebald, the superiority of the writer over other artists is inalienable and needs no proof.

I have a paperback of John Berger’s The Shape of a Pocket.  It’s a collection of essays, not quite Berger’s finest, but containing – as you’d expect – a lot of very good stuff.  The cover (it was published by Bloomsbury in 2002) shows a picture by Peter Marlow.  I did a little double-take when I saw it: it’s cropped, and clumsily.  You expect that from publishers.  They treat pictures, as Sebald does, as grist.  But to crop this one, here, that takes some doing.

I’m not a blind fan of Magnum, an institution whose glorious left-wing shirt is getting threadbare.  Magnum now is not so exceptional, a commercial picture agency with a rich archive, but all the same… Whatever the corporate failings, it still does have more than a few photographers who know their arse from their elbow, and Marlow is one of them.  Marlow has been President of Magnum more than once.  He’s a craftsman and an artist and a man who has found ways of saying important things in photographs. For a commercial designer at Bloomsbury simply to crop one of his pictures badly is one thing:  it must have happened to Marlow before, and it will happen to him again.  But on the cover of a book by Berger?  That same John Berger who in dozens of essays has honoured photographs as so much more worthy of reflection than his generation had realised?

Peter Marlow, Eclipse, Primrose Hill, London 1999.

The picture is called The Eclipse, and it was made on Primrose Hill, in London, in 1999 when there was a full eclipse of the sun. The same Primrose Hill that nearly saw an eclipse in 1963 when Bill Brandt had Francis Bacon walking down it, when the three little park lights could only just hold their own against one of Brandt’s darkest skies

The Berger book contains eight details culled from Marlow’s photograph, scattered as ‘frontispieces’ to various essays in the text.  Again, the cuts are made with a kind of numbness that slightly beggars belief.  I hope – I really hope – that neither Marlow nor Berger made them.  But I can’t believe that either could have done.  Not all essays get one. There seems very little direct reference when they do. None carries a caption;  you have to search in the boring ‘legal details’ at the front of the book for a tiny credit that covers them all.  None necessarily refers to – let alone illustrates – the text it accompanies.  This is “photography after Sebald” with a vengeance.  The pictures, made not by a photographer but by a designer using him only as a supply of raw material, are allusive, but only ponderously so.  A very largely white crowd, obviously waiting, with odd episodes of blurred movement or interesting collisions if you look closely. Opposite a page entitled Michelangelo is a blurred figure more obviously connected to Francis Bacon than anything Michelangelo ever did.  A dullard in a black tee-shirt videos him. The faces, and sometimes the bodies, are turned in various directions.  This is the kind of incidental interest you get if you look with attention at any busy photograph, perhaps a little more closely than usual, or perhaps with a lens.

Peter Marlow, Eclipse, London, 1999, Detail – 1

Peter Marlow, Eclipse, London, 1999, Detail – 2

Peter Marlow, Eclipse, London, 1999, Detail – 3

Peter Marlow, Eclipse, London, 1999, Detail – 4

Peter Marlow, Eclipse, London, 1999, Detail – 5

Peter Marlow, Eclipse, London, 1999, Detail – 6

Peter Marlow, Eclipse, London, 1999, Detail – 7

Peter Marlow, Eclipse, London, 1999, Detail – 8

They are nice enough, these slices taken from the larger picture. It’s a good crowd scene, no doubt about it, well made and well seen at a time of cross-tensions and cross-purposes. It’s never a bad thing to look more carefully at a good photograph. This one reminds me a bit of that other crowd-scene, also on a hill, that Robert Doisneau made in 1947, Cyclo-Cross at Gentilly. The skyline is made of the same human palisade.

Robert Doisneau. Cyclo-Cross at Gentilly, 1947.

But you know what?  They wouldn’t have used Marlow’s (again and again in the same book) if it had been called ‘Crowd waiting for the off at the Derby’ or ‘Crowd waiting for the anti-Blair, anti-Iraq war demonstration’.  They wouldn’t have used the Doisneau, come to that. It is pathetic, but there is something about the cheap ‘cosmic’ meaning of an eclipse which is supposed to add a little pepper to the Berger book. As a matter of fact, you can’t tell by looking at it that it was made before an eclipse. Marlow’s title, The Eclipse, is never given in Berger’s paperback.  But the smell of the eclipse is purported to linger on it. The whole crew of designer, editor, publisher, and perhaps author, who all knew the title, felt its magic still. That’s the legacy of Sebald, if you like. It is so reactionary it’s appalling:  it’s a photograph being chopped up and used not for its (very interesting and skilfully achieved) visual content but for the cheap scent of its title lingering on. Blimey, Mr. Berger.  How ever did that little demonstration of contempt for photography go out over your name?

This is visual Muzak.  It’s using the barest bones of Marlow’s work – an expectant crowd – to offer a gentle pause between the supposedly arduous heights of Berger’s sensitivity.  At the very most, it makes some oblique claim that all of us, every member of every crowd, are implied or addressed in Berger’s critique of the visual. Dozens of people have reworked photographs with more zest and sparkle than this.  At the high end, look only to Gerhard Richter or Thomas Demand or John Stezaker or Maurizio Anzeri or Julie Cockburn.  Or look on any teenager’s bedroom door.  Pictures do get another life when found, graffitied, snipped, decorated, jammed up against unlikely neighbours.  Even W. G. Sebald admitted as much.  But they don’t get that life simply because the title alludes to something which might have rich metaphorical content.  Pictures are pictures, not shorthand for words.

 

 

[i] ‘But the Written Word is not a True Document’. A conversation with W.G. Sebald on Literature and Photography, by Christian Scholtz, translated by Markus Zisselsberger.

Published in Searching for Sebald : photography after W.G. Sebald. Edited by Lise Patt, with Christel Dillbohner, Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles , 2007.

Eva Stenram – among other ‘Discoveries’ from Arles 2012

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The way the Prix Découverte at Arles is set up is that a group of photography worthies are invited to select less-known artists for a solo exhibition promoted and visited within the context of the festival. The potential boost to the careers of those chosen is obvious. This year, in keeping with the theme of the Rencontres, centred around photographic education and one school in particular, the worthies were all distinguished teachers. It was disappointing that so many of their selections were of their own pupils or former pupils: it looked sleazy even when it wasn’t.

Nevertheless, five selectors managed to choose fifteen artists for exhibition. The sponsorship of the LUMA Foundation made sure that they were each given a full-scale show. Management of British photography festival the Brighton Biennial, which has in the past been satisfied with digital files all printed in Brighton and the resulting unframed cheap digital prints pinned directly to the walls, should mark and learn what full-scale sponsorship allows. I won’t list all the good exhibitions within the Découverte framework this year; I found no more than four or five out of fifteen to be unremarkable, and the standard among those that remain to be closer to excellent than merely interesting.

The searing journalistic report called Intended Consequences, by Jonathan Torgovnik, on the use of rape as an instrument of policy in Rwanda, will be a big experience for everyone who sees it. The plain gentle humanity of the portraits of the victim women and the children of the violence done to them contrasts most horribly with the accounts they struggled to give to Torgovnik’s recorder. An odd thing about this series is that a particular blue, mainly on various T-shirts depicted, resonates much more strongly than other colours. It’s Murillo’s blue, the colour he gave most often to saints.

Jonathan Torgovnik, from Intended Consequences

At least two artists were familiar to me from my involvement with the Pictet Prize, which continues to act as a locomotive, pulling the interest of photographers and editors and curators and eventually viewers and policy-makers towards questions of the environment and of sustainable development. Landscape itself, once all-but abandoned as a manner of photographic activity to camera clubs and other disparaged arrière-garde groups, is making a fast and important come-back. Not all of that is down to the Prix Pictet. Not even most of it. One thinks of the long term interests of artists such as Elger Esser, long before the Prize existed, to see that the Pictet Prize cannot claim to have initiated the turn. But all the same, landscape, and pictures that treat generally of the way man interacts with the environment are much more prevalent now than they were ten or twelve years ago, and the Prix Pictet takes a modest part in that shift. Sammy Baloji’s report on the Kowelzi mines took a deserved share of the attention among the other Découvertes.

Chu Ha Chung, From A Pleasant Day

Chu Ha Chung’s series A Pleasant Day did, too, a brilliant account of Koreans going about their daily lives, often on vacation, with nuclear reactors always in the background. The photographer uses the phrase ‘blinded fear’ to describe the permanent knot in the stomach Koreans have from living on the nuclear edge. His photographs have all the force of a political campaign, without any of the blinkeredness. Korean economic growth needed power. Korean leaders chose nuclear, and Koreans have benefited from that – until it all goes wrong. But see people bathing in a visibly steaming sea, and those recognizable shapes of generators in the distance take on a menacing quality of foreboding. We have all seen pictures of Chernobyl and of Fukushima. We all see palimpsests of those beneath every new picture of a nuclear reactor.

James Osamu Nakagawa, from Banta

Another very strong landscape series was Osamu James Nakagawa’s on the cliffs and caves of Okinawa, at the very southernmost end of the Japanese chain of islands, where thousands of civilians died in 1945. Several photographers lately have taken to examining for remaining signs of trauma land which had been the site of violence in years gone by. One could think of Jo Ratcliffe’s work on Angola in particular, Jonathan Olley’s on the unexploded ordnance that still litters the area around Verdun, Paola de Pietri’s remarkable exploration of the trenches high in the Alps between Italy and Austria…. And it is not always warfare that has left the scars: Deborah Luster’s Tooth for an Eye started out as a mapping of the places where homicides had happened in New Orleans. It ends up as much more, a moving photographic bestiary of the ghosts of evil, heir of such photographic oddities as Wisconsin Death Trip and one of the very few successful modern uses of photographs made in circular form. All of this begins to appear something of a trending fashion, but it has always been the privilege of photography to seek out auras of the past where the naked eye can perhaps not see them. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that almost every picture Fay Godwin ever made (apart from the portraits) was an examination of places which had at some time been more important to people than they were when she got there. Into this good company stepped Osamu James Nakagawa at Arles, with his series which makes it impossible not to feel the evil which once poisoned places of grandeur and beauty.

This is already a lot of good stuff for one large former railway repair shed.

Nadege Meriau, Au Centre de la Terre I

I very much like Nadège Mériau’s beautifully made close-ups of plain foods lit so that they are only just readable as food. She can make the doughy inside of a loaf of bread into a night sky or an underground cavern or a flow of lava. This is a big contrast to the work of those examining land for traces of what went before. Mériau does the other thing photography has always been able to do, to look at something which meant nothing at all, and invite us to give it meaning.

It is arguable that this one collection of fifteen individual exhibitions is reason enough to plan and make a journey to Arles this summer. Average quality, very high. Not all artists unknown, by any means, but all fully deserving of precisely the wider circulation that this exposure will get them. Among them, one in particular had me thinking.

Eva Stenram is an artist in her mid-thirties who was born in Sweden and has made her career in England. She studied at the Slade and at the Royal College of Art in London. She has a substantial back-catalogue of interesting work behind her, and an honourable number of pieces in distinguished collections, but she is hardly running a stellar career yet. She seems to survive by taking a succession of teaching posts in the UK, which is the modern equivalent of living on public grants, as artists used to be able to do.

Her latest series is at Arles. It’s called Drape, and it is pleasingly straightforward in conception, like so many good ideas. Stenram went looking for a particular kind of imagery, oldish pin-up photographs (I suppose that most are from the 1960s, but it doesn’t much matter) which had been made in domestic interiors, or — if offering a slightly more adventurous fantasy to their original buyers — in offices. The important thing was that they should be made in rooms which included curtains. But of course many of them did: if you were going to make pornographic or even mildly erotic pictures, you’d very likely make them with the curtains drawn. All Stenram then did was to extend the curtains. She did it digitally, of course, and she made no pretence of doing so with the digital retoucher’s customary discretion. She quite simply drew the curtains away from the backgrounds, to wrap and clothe the models.

Eva Stenram, Drape I

Eva Stenram Drape VIII

Eva Stenram Drape VII

It is simple. But it is also very effective. In the first place, the pictures are funny. Far too many artists think that wit undermines their stuff. It doesn’t. To have taken suggestive, titillating nudity and wrapped it up and made it ‘decent’ is charming. “Oh, do put it away, love.”

It’s also gently feminist, as if it were an attempt many years later to undo the presumed exploitation of the models. Yet, at the same time, we can see that these pictures replace one kind of teasing by another: we can’t quite see, we want to peer. We want, in effect, to peek under the newly enlarged curtains a bit.

Formally, there is something quite intriguing in the transplanting of the curtains from background to foreground. It is unsettling, it gives some of the pictures a lurch in perspective which is quite unexpected; and yet it is also entirely in keeping with the lurch of expectation from ‘salvaged pin-up’ to ‘sociological enquiry’.

The treatment is not entirely new. John Stezaker, continuing his late assault on the summits of high visiblity, is currently among the four nominees for the Deutsche Börse Prize. Some of what Stenram is doing is derived from things that Stezaker has been doing for years: re-using older photographs, manipulating them in highly visible ways and by doing so asking questions about what they originally meant and how that has changed through time. Stenram’s erotic photographs are altered and made into new things; but they are also old things salvaged. They’re still an archive. I like them. They are small pleasant intelligent pieces full of sensible reminders that photography represents a big broad culture which easily encompasses everything from grubbiness to wit.