Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style

While in the lavatory on a domestic flight in March 2010, I spontaneously put a tissue paper toilet cover seat cover over my head and took a picture in the mirror. The image evoked 15th-century Flemish portraiture. I decided to add more images made in this mode and planned to take advantage of a long-haul flight from San Francisco to Auckland, guessing that there were likely to be long periods of time when no one was using the lavatory on the 14-hour flight. I made several forays to the bathroom from my aisle seat, and by the time we landed I had a large group of new photographs entitled Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style.

Nina Katchadourian is an artistic opportunist, to be sure.

Armed with nothing other than a couple of scarves, a beret, the airline seat pillow, a few artfully arranged tissues, and a face that could rank alongside Maria Falconetti's in expressiveness, she reaches toward the sublime while balanced above the toilet bowl on a long-haul flight. I am awestruck with admiration.

Black and Weird

From Black and WTF, "A photoblog of really strange black & white photos".

Guard of honour

Staff of the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Centre let the chimps watch the burial of Dorothy, an elderly chimpanzee, so they could come to terms with her loss.

From Times Online.

Shorpy

Michael Leddy coined the wonderful expression 'dowdy world' to describe glimpses of bygone times that occasionally pop up in old movies, television shows, or anywhere at all. His definition: “modern American culture as it was before certain forms of technology redefined everyday life”.

Well, ‘Shorpy’ is the dowdy world on rollerskates.

It is one of the handful of websites I can't live a week without visiting at least once, and I love it with an ardent passion.

My favourites are the bizarre pics from from the archive called the National Library...


...and the breathtakingly detailed images of turn of the century city architecture, like this one of the Philadelphia Post Office in 1900.


The site describes itself: "Shorpy.com: History in HD is a vintage photography blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago."

It appears to be a shared site where a very select number of contributors upload images in very high definition. They appear to have been scanned from the original negatives. This is astounding because the site has a large collection of truly classic images, including many pictures by the greats Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine.

Most of these pictures are not the recogniseable classics from photographic history, but the now vast collection is a more comprehensive picture of each photographers’ working practice than would be possible in even the biggest survey exhibition. In the case of Lewis Hine in particular, I've had to reassess my view of his significance to the medium.

When I was taught photography, the conventional view of Lewis Hine I intuited was that he was a great documentarian but whose credentials as an artist were somewhat in question. A view was that the haunting quality his pictures so often had was more to do with the heartbreaking subject matter of child labour and exploitation that he did so much to reveal than any completely conscious and expressed aesthetic intention.

Certainly the subject matter is compelling (and there is art in that), but there’s clearly more here than just the handprint of a great documentary photographer. Very frequently, too frequently to be an accident, he invests an apparently utilitarian image with the grace and insight of a true portrait.


The achievement becomes all the more awe-inspiring when we consider the circumstances under which many of the images were taken. His period of greatest activity in the social documentary field was the first decade of the century, when he worked for social activist magazines and for social documentary projects like the Pittsburgh Survey. He also worked for the National Child Labour Committee for eight years and published two books of his pictures, 'Child Labour in the Carolinas' (1909) and 'Day Laborers Before Their Time' (1909).

Taking these images often involved working under great pressure. To gain access Hine sometimes hid his camera and posed as a fire inspector.

In 1916 Congress eventually agreed to pass legislation to protect children. Owen Lovejoy, Chairman of the National Child Labour Committee, wrote that: "the work Hine did for this reform was more responsible than all other efforts in bringing the need to public attention."

Hine had great difficulty earning money from his photography. In January 1940, he lost his home after failing to keep up repayments. Lewis Wickes Hine died in extreme poverty eleven months later on 3rd November, 1940.

Here’s to Shorpy Higginbotham and to Lewis Hine, who sought to record his existence, reflect his experience, change the conditions under which he worked and to create art.

Michael Lusk's disciplined eye

Originally uploaded by finsmal...Low & Slow.

A quality I sincerely admire in photographers is something I call "a disciplined eye".

I suppose I mean an ability to seek out and find pictures in the world, even in the most unremarkable and apparently chaotic places. By 'pictures' I don't just mean images, since anyone with a finger can make an image. I mean something with structure, whose features amount to an aesthetic argument of some kind, the evidence of a discriminating consciousness.

It's a quality that is so easy to miss in others, since our landscape is saturated in images so that we come to think that such things are part of nature. But they're not. They have be constructed from educated sensation. If you don't think it's difficult, just try it.

I found this person (photographer Michael Lusk) somewhere in the photographic dumpster that is Flickr.

Phineas Gage: wonders are always fascinating

A daguerreotype made public last week is believed to be the only known image of Phineas Gage (1823-1860).

Gage was a 25-year-old foreman, fit and well-regarded. His crew were digging a railroad bed near Cavendish, Vt. Late on the afternoon of Sept. 13, 1848, he wielded a specially made iron - it measured 3 feet 7 inches long and weighed 13 pounds - to pack blasting powder into rock.

An explosion erupted. “And we think the tamping iron went all the way through the skull - like a missile,’’ said Dr. Ion-Florin Talos, a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

A close examination of the object clutched by the man in the picture shows an inscription matching the engraving on the tamping iron, which reads in part, “This is the bar that was shot through the head of Mr. Phineas P. Gage.’’

He has had enduring fame as the index case of an individual who suffered major personality changes after brain trauma. As such, he is a legend in the annals of neurology, which is largely based on the study of brain-damaged patients.

“It’s kind of a wonder,’’ Dr. Talos said, “and wonders are always fascinating.’’


From the Boston Globe.

Another fascinating account of the case appears at Neurophilosophy.

Awkward family classics

Sometimes, words just aren't enough.


There's plenty of room on the couch.

From the joyous awkwardfamilyphotos.com.

Daily Telegraph story on Awkward Family Photos.

Never take a bad picture again!

Something about the more things change? George Eastman pitched the first small portable camera to the world in 1888 with the slogan "you press the button, we do the rest". It was given the onomatopoeic name 'Kodak'.

Samsung are trying the same message, taken to the most extreme, unbelievable lengths with their latest lines of digital cameras. We are informed that the NV100HD contains a feature called 'Beauty Shot':

Make every photo perfect. Improve the way you look - without surgery. The quick and easy way for a better-looking you. The Beauty Shot feature is like having your own make-up artist-right in your camera. It automatically identifies imperfections such as blemishes and dark spots on the face, and retouches them so that faces appear brighter and smooth. And with different level settings, you can control the amount of retouching that takes place - it's that simple!

History according to Life

"Soldier holding tattered flag of the Eighth PA Infantry, during Civil War, 1864."

An enormous archive of Life magazine photographs has gone online at a certain famous search engine. They are available to view by decade, but I couldn't go past the 1860s; surely the most remarkable decade in the history of the United States.

We are told that the collection contains images dating back to the 1750s. I suppose they would be drawings and etchings, since the invention of photography was only announced to the world in 1839.

Andrew Curtis, nocturnal emissions

Andrew is best known for his figuratively and literally dark images of the industrial landscape and its antique vestiges. At first glance, his new show ‘Cell’ at Christine Abrahams Gallery is a departure, but despite appearances these new pictures are recognisably the products (emissions?) of the same hand.

They recall Andrew’s earliest works, of industrial hulks and ageing bits of machine effluvia shot at night with long exposures, caressed by a soft hand-held light source that gave many of them an unearthly glow, collapsing notions of scale or context in the process and energising them with life. These new pictures have that same sense of discreet action illuminated by pools of hot light, a palette of primary colour against blackness.

Young women out on the town, in their natural habitat, stare longingly into the screens of their little electronic avatars, while they are watched, apparently without unease but without the slightest sense of obligation, by us, the impotent observer.


‘Katie’ reminds me in a strange way of Toulouse-Lautrec’s ‘At The Moulin-Rouge’. They have a similar wide view of a nightclub scene and they evoke the same lonely disconnection that can come upon us in a crowded night club, a feeling of desolation, that I could only ever be a voyeur in such a space, a watcher and never a participant.


Andrew’s pictures capture that sense perfectly.

There is no mistaking these for the work of a woman, or not a heterosexual woman at any rate. These young women are palpably desired. There is no equivocating about the ‘male gaze’ here, they unapologetically embody it. But the smiles that play about these glossy mouths are not for the middle-aged bloke behind the camera, no matter how cool he might think himself to be (and Andrew is very cool). That boat has sailed, as it does for all of us, even if the most we ever did was gaze longingly from the pier. Desire, such as it might be, is for the love object on the other end of the text message, or for the device itself.

Greg Neville observed that the experience in the gallery was "like looking at tropical fish in an aquarium", a perfect analogy. It captures the exotic nature of its subjects to the observer, but more importantly the sense that we are somehow separated from the world we observe, like gapers on one side of a sheet of glass.

I have a feeling that the subtext of specifically masculine desire might be a problem for some; I have already heard some critical voices along these lines. However, the pictures themselves are more subtle than such dismissal often allows. Several of them hint that the relationship between observer and observed is more ambiguous than a casual glance might suggest. Sometimes the picture contains other silent watchers within the frame, a blurred hand of indeterminate gender holding a lit cigarette, a shadowy profile in the foreground, one photo taken from the car's passenger seat looking back at a woman in the back, implying the presence of at least three people. The expressions of the women themselves are ambivalent about the presence of an observer, and I suspect there are many potential readings of those expressions possible.

I love the ambiguity of the word ‘Cell’. It is most obviously the name for the object of desire itself, the cell-phone. But it is also a prison cell – of the single consciousness, at a remove from all that might be going on around it while that thin line is still connected.

A single frame of cinema film is also called a ‘cell’, and these images are certainly cinematic, in that they each have a highly constructed mise-en-scene complete with character actors and background extras. A single frame of cine-film is only a one-twenty fourth section of an unfolding event but these pictures are in another category. They are complete in their stillness, there is no sense that anything significant has proceeded either before or after the action.

My only criticism is that the presentation doesn’t really add anything that is not already there in the images on the gallery website. The hanging is a bit crowded and unnecessarily traditional with big prints under glass. Such furtive, nocturnal subject matter could have done with low lighting, on darkly painted walls.

Andrew’s elegant website contains the whole current series as well as examples of former works both commercial and otherwise

Bill Henson: Let’s have ourselves a hangin’!

"WHEN the forces of public order march into art galleries and walk off with exhibits deemed to be offensive, two things are certain: one, that images which the vast majority would never have seen or wanted to see will be made famous and will be looked up on the internet by slavering hordes, and, two, a great deal of nonsense will be talked by a great many people."

- Germaine Greer

My first reaction to the latest artistic moral panic was sadness and disappointment. Disappointment because the abduction of several Henson works by police was an extreme overreaction to a complaint, and sadness because I knew that when confronted all parties would scurry to occupy mutually hostile sides of the argument, neither side engaging with the valid arguments of the other. This has proved to be the case.

I have extremely mixed feelings about this latest episode in the intellectual life of the nation. Firstly because I dislike Bill Henson’s work. Unlike Sebastian Smee who published a defence in The Australian last week, I find it unconvincing, empty and pretentious, the very definition of mannerism.

I remember as a photography student reading a profile of Henson in a weekend magazine. This is probably unfair to him, but the thing that struck me the most at the time were the terms in which he chose to describe and discuss his work: parallels with classical music were evoked, with romantic poets of the past. I thought, oh dear…

This was an impression that only solidified with Henson’s career retrospective at the Victorian National Gallery I saw a few years ago. So much depended upon the massive scale, the all-enshrouding darkness of the photographs, with bits of pale flesh peeking out here and there from the gloom; large slabs of torn black photographic paper to no apparent purpose other than superficial visual effect, and most irritating of all, the generalised aura of sweaty ennui.

I came away with the feeling that what I had just seen was a contemporary equivalent of a Royal Academy exhibition of the 1880s; grand, very large, but equally cut-off from the currents of artistic history that really matter. We have seen this sort of thing before. Henson’s work echoes some of the most cloying and sentimental Victorian Academy painting, especially that which dealt with the ‘fallen woman’ and the sanctimonious claptrap of Victorian sexual hypocrisy.

Secondly I feel uneasy about this because I am a parent to a daughter and I find the assumptions his work appears to be based on extremely questionable. As images, they seem to me to belong to a rather unsavoury history of adult men musing at their leisure about the sexuality of adolescent or pre-adolescent children. At best, this mode of image-making is self-indulgent and at worst a kind of exploitation based on fantasy that at its extreme margins includes sexual assault.

That’s not to make the category mistake of saying that all art belonging to this history is itself a form of assault. It may be exploitative or it may not. Germaine Greer was admirably precise in unpacking the assumptions of gender and the (sometimes) unconscious habit of making allowances for no other reason than that something was painted and not photographed, coming with the patina of art-historical credibility, when its intention was sometimes literally pornographic.

In my opinion Henson’s work is not and could not be seriously confused for actual pornography. Not by either its dictionary definition or by the widest practical use of that word. To call it pornography is simply wrong in fact. However, it is, at least in my view, exploitative.

I have mixed feelings thirdly because I defend Henson’s right, and the right of artists generally, to explore difficult or contentious territory. In fact, I think artists have a moral responsibility to do so.

But since we’re talking about morality, I think artists have the same duty to operate morally in the world as everyone else does. That is, I do not think art occupies a special zone exempt from the moral precepts that bind the rest of society together.

This is an important point to make because many who dispute Henson’s right to operate in such an ethically complex territory (like, I suspect, the Prime Minister), apparently apply a burden of proof that doesn’t seem to apply to everyone. I mean that we accept different kinds of images in different contexts, without dispute. Society doesn’t seem to have a problem with sexually explicit imagery per se (we have censorship categories to deal especially with it) but we would not accept that imagery in all places at all times.


Henson’s work operates in special contexts. The first most important is that it is ‘art’. It is usually encountered in a gallery where people have to make a special effort to attend. It is a certain size, has certain characteristics, etc. That is, even though they are photographs and are reproducible, the artwork itself is the print, not the reproduction of the print. By endlessly reproducing the work or part of the work on websites, television screens and so on, the work is stripped of its qualifying contexts and presented as something else. This has important effects on what it is that we are arguing about. When the Prime Minister is presented on a morning TV interview where the discussion has strayed onto child pornography and the media’s creeping sexualisation of children, he responds that it is ‘disgusting’. It is entirely predictable that he would do so, no matter how much we might like him to be aware of its special contexts. The context has changed, and the man who is anxious to be seen to represent the population as a whole, reacts as the population as a whole reacts when such an image is seen in a new context. He might have responded very differently if he had been standing in a gallery before the work itself.

It is not pornography but unfortunately Henson’s work may still meet a legal definition of an offence at some point in the future. I have heard various legal authorities over the last few days make the point that he could be legally vulnerable if one of his models retrospectively decided to lodge a complaint. This seems to me to be credible and Henson is also morally vulnerable on this point. To what degree can a child give consent to participate in the making of an image that will have a life of its own forever afterwards? Henson’s work is freely reproduced without reference to anyone but him. This has been demonstrated to an almost ridiculous degree as the contentious images are endlessly reproduced on every newspaper website, the hypocrites claiming that the issue is one of ‘child welfare’.

It strikes me that there is an absence at the heart of artistic debate in this country, at least regarding the visual arts, and that is the artists themselves. I totally respect Henson’s decision to remain out of the controversy while he is burned in effigy by talk-back callers and tabloid TV (I think of what the 1943 Archibald Prize controversy did to the health and peace of mind of William Dobell). However, I can’t help but yearn for a visual artist at least as publicly articulate as so many of our writers. Celebrity is the language of the mass media, and while the subjects of the discussion remain absent, the wolves will go on playing with the corpse of their reputations. Artists don’t have to be celebrities to regard themselves as public intellectuals, just as writers so often do, with a role to play in informing and educating the public and fostering discussion. The result is that artists are regarded as little better than perverts and kiddie-fiddlers.

Believe me that I agree with John McDonald when he fumes that the Prime Minister should be aware of the name of one of his country’s premier visual artists. Where we diverge is that I think that visual artists are at least partly to blame. Visual artists (unless they are populists like a Ken Done or Pro Hart) will always be marginal with reference to the mainstream of popular culture, just as classical musicians are. The responsibility is not with the popular mainstream to understand how special we are and to respect our priorities; if we want acceptance, the responsibility is on us to explain, interpret and participate in cultural discourse in something other than a precious, resentful, condescending way.

Many of the defenders reveal their bad faith when, like John McDonald in the Sydney Morning Herald, they deny that ordinary people don’t have the right to an opinion at all. He said:

"It is no secret that rank populism is now a fact of life in Australian politics. But in an age when every message is refined and spin-doctored to avoid offending anyone's delicate sensibilities, it appears to be OK to pronounce judgments on unseen works of art in the name of public morality."

I can’t say whether he finds it worse that people can have an opinion about works of art in the name of public morality, or that they can have an opinion when the work is unseen. At any rate, the Prime Miniser was looking at an image when he gave an opinion (not, I add, the work but an image of the work), and he prefaced his remark with the words “I think…” My point is that he has every right to have an opinion, just as every talkback caller has the right to an opinion. They are not informed opinions, but then whose fault is that?

Most defensive discussion of the work has largely avoided facing the fact that while we so often denounce ‘corporate paedophilia’ and the creeping sexualisation of children in the media, the onus is on those who defend Bill Henson’s work to explain how or why it does not belong on this continuum.

A few things need stating, that despite the special art-context and all that that implies:

1. The images frequently depict children, and

2. The images are frequently sexualised.

These are almost statements of fact, rather than interpretation. The images are ‘about’ sexuality in a sense that includes adolescent sexuality. That is why they are so edgy. It is part of their power as images, it is also why so many find them disturbing, including some that were so disturbed they took their complaint to the police. For curators and the general art mafia is disallow this as part of the conversation is irresponsible and intellectually dishonest. This is why I find so much of the defence of the works unconvincing.

I find other artists and photographers don’t often have much to say about Henson’s work apart from noting his obvious technical mastery. Those that crow the loudest in his favour tend to be curators and the sort of people who get done for tax evasion. You would be mistaken if you thought that Bill gets down to the seedier parts of Darlinghurst to look for models, even though that’s just how he makes them up. Oh no. These are private school boys and girls, their parents the art equivalent of wealthy stage-mothers, lining up to pimp their kids for the social cache of being part of a ‘Bill Henson’. These parents have Henson’s work on their walls anyway – they can afford it. If you had any doubt, the Shadow Treasurer and wealthiest person in the federal Parliament Malcolm Turnbull had to ‘fess up the other day and admit that he quite liked Bill Henson’s work and in fact he had some on his walls at home. Was he hounded in the parliament as a pornographer? Of course not, he’s a Liberal and a toff and we expect that sort of thing from people like him, but woe betide any Labor politician who evinces any sympathy for the arts. Latte sippers! Elitists! Witness the abuse heaped on Kevin Rudd for the expressions of support directed his way by the ‘Creative Australia’ segment of the 2020 Summit.

I have heard talkback callers state simply that to photograph a child in any context without clothes is wrong. I can sympathise with those who hold this view without agreeing with it. This would include any image that is taken of an unclothed child for any reason whatsoever. It would also sexualise images that are in no way sexual, imposing such an interpretation on any image regardless of the context. We should avoid this extremism no matter how shrill public moralists like ‘Bravehearts’ may get.

To simply say that art can never intrude upon some aspect of life is a principle that we should never embrace. It is a statement like “No comedian should ever tell a joke about cancer, because cancer is never funny.” That statement is wrong not because cancer is funny, but because it remains to be seen whether a joke about cancer is funny. That is, we need to hear the joke first.

Similarly, art about adolescent sexuality may be smut or it may say something original, something affecting, something worth saying about that aspect of life. The point is, we need to see and judge the art first. Does Bill Henson’s art say something original about sexuality? In my opinion it doesn’t. This doesn’t preclude the possibility that it might say a few interesting things about adolescence, for example, and I have no doubt about Henson’s seriousness of purpose. Certainly he thinks it does and many people (Sebastian Smee, for one) believe he does. That should be enough for any community to tolerate its existence.

Henson’s work must also be seen in the context of his reputation, even though it doesn’t insulate him from criticism. He has represented his country at the Venice Biennale. His bibliography is several pages long and the list of institutions that own his work includes many of the premier art institutions in the world and in Australia. By anyone’s estimation, he is one of the nation’s most senior visual artists in any medium.

I have no doubt that the courts will find against the complaint. Henson’s work is plainly not ‘obscene’ in either the legal or the usual sense. More explicit images of adolescents can be seen on many newsstands and on television. This makes the whole affair potentially embarrassing for any politician or other public figure who may still have something even more inflammatory to say about the work, sensing that there is now a competition on about who can denounce pornography the loudest.

What we are left with is a sense of sadness that the climate of intellectual debate in this country is the loser. Bill Henson is a loser. Kevin Rudd is a loser. The only winners are those like commercial talkback radio, tabloid current affairs television, morals crusaders and media proprietors whose economic interests are served by a good old witch-burning.

Wikipedia on Wolfgang Sievers

Just as, several years ago, I started hearing about Google and quickly began using it on a daily basis, the word about Wikipedia has spread in a similar way. Like Google, it is now ubiquitous. I recently warned Bec, who is teaching Orwell’s 1984 this year, to carefully read the Wikipedia entry, as she would undoubtedly come across the very same words in students’ essays. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s sure to.

The viral nature of Wiki is fascinating, and it deserves an entry all to itself. I read an impressive article a while ago – I don’t remember where – about the evolution of the definition of ‘abortion’. By virtue of the ‘hive mind’ approach, and despite my immediate suspicion that it would have been a mess, what came out of the process was a very good, clear article.

I was impressed with founder Jimmy Wales on his recent appearance in Australia. The tabloids (both print and otherwise) attempted to catch him out with several gotcha stories. Ellen Fanning’s was the most transparent, when she demanded to know why Wikipedia had her as (Powderfinger singer) Bernard Fanning’s sister. Wales patiently explained to her how Wikipedia works and the error was corrected in minutes. She ended up looking self-promoting and a bit of a goose.

Even though the accuracy of Wikipedia is often defended by its contributors, I note that this is in regard to science and technical articles only. Even a quick review of humanities articles reveals that the quality is often less than ideal. I think those of us with some knowledge or expertise in the area should make it a conscious priority to contribute where we can, especially since Wikipedia is fast becoming the first port of call for information by students.

Lately I’ve been amusing myself editing and substantially expanding the article on photographer Wolfgang Sievers. I just barely know what I’m doing as far as the html code goes, but I’m finding that some nice person is watching the article and fixing up some of my errors as I go.

In the early nineties I lived with my uncle who was the photography critic for The Age at the time. He reviewed the major retrospective of Sievers’ work at the NGV, and Wolfgang made contact with him. Presently, we were asked over to his house in Sandringham for breakfast and to give our opinion of a new ABC TV documentary that Wolfgang was a little anxious about. Already in awe, I was astonished into silence when he mentioned that his very good friends Helmut Newton and June (known as ‘Alice Springs’) had been round the previous week for tea.

At the end of our amazing morning, Wolfgang mentioned that he was about to go into the darkroom to print some of his old negatives, and would Greg like to choose one for himself? We were in his attic studio and we were looking at a whole wall of folders containing carefully filed proofs of almost every negative he had ever exposed.

In an act of generosity I still find hard to credit, Wolfgang asked if I (a very lowly photography student) would like to choose one for myself? The floor opened up under me and for the rest of our time there, I found it difficult to concentrate.

The photograph has hung on my wall ever since, surviving even a burglary, when they cleared off with almost everything else I owned.

So writing an article on this great man was an honour for me, and I hope I have the details of his life correct. As more comes to hand, I will add more. I especially want to see some of his extraordinary images up there, as soon as I come to grips with how it all works.

To my surprise, I opened The Age on Saturday, to see a large photograph of Wolfgang, now in his nineties, and the news that an archive of several hundred photographs, worth up to AUS$1 million, will be sold to raise money for justice and civil liberties causes.

He said:

"There's a funny little word called compassion. It's the sort of thing that the present Government hasn't heard about, but that is what drives me on, because I had a most fortunate and wonderful life and I think it's bloody well my job to pay back for that."

Sulphuric acid plant, Electrolytic Industries, Risdon, Hobart, 1959

Playing the Guitar, 1910-15

Wandering about this morning and this image stopped me in my tracks.


This is from a little online exhibition called “Real Photo Postcards: African Americans”.

One would guess from the period that he is a blues man, but I suppose this is just an assumption. He appears to be playing in an open tuning, which was common in the blues.

One thing is certain though, with his highly dignified air and sartorial authority, he is no penny-a-time street singer. No Robert Johnson, in other words, with his natty threads and cigarette dangling insolently from his pursed lip.

The guitar, for one thing, is in good condition. It would have been an inexpensive model, the sort of thing that could be ordered through the mail. Without it, he could have passed for a Minister or mid-level businessman.

A curious detail is the date, given as 1910-15. This was a good five years before jazz and blues began to be commercially recorded, though plenty of men and women who looked like this (and a good deal worse) could be found all over the southern United States plying their trade by this time. It’s interesting, but portraits of musicians look almost identical to this right up until about 1940.

Face out of time

"Slave Boy Brought to Waterbury from Bucks Hill by Aunt Ella Johnson's Second Husband (Whelan)"

Ninth-plate ambrotype, circa 1855

I found this image quite by chance at an online archive. We're told that the identification was from a pencil inscription found behind the picture. A community named Bucks Hill is located in Pennsylvania, where this ambrotype was found. The inscription suggests this boy might have been freed and brought North, perhaps by abolitionists in Pennsylvania or Connecticut.

Documented photographs of slaves are very rare. Because ambrotypes are each made individually in the camera, this photograph is unique. It has never been published.

Because of the long exposure times, the faces in photographs of this vintage don't often have this subtlety of expression. His jaw is firm and possibly proud or even resentful, but the eyes are more ambivalent and suggest vulnerability. This is a great portrait in any time, and considering the technical limitations of the medium in 1855, it is remarkable.

His is a face out of time, timeless.

A city before cars

Last night watching a DVD of Alan Bennett’s series ‘Telling Tales’, in which he simply sits in a chair and tells a meandering tale of his childhood in Leeds, I was struck by a comment he made about the streets of this provincial city in the 1930s.

He was talking about how most children carried around a mental map of their neighbourhood in their heads, especially containing all the hazards a child may encounter on the streets, like aggressive dogs, neighbourhood bullies, tramps and so on. He pointed out that one thing no child had to be concerned about were cars, as there weren’t any.

This immediately reminded me of looking at the catalogue I bought in Sydney recently, ‘City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912-1948’, in which the streets of this now congested city are completely barren of traffic. I always wondered why that might be. I thought it might have been the time of day the pictures were taken, or the length of the exposure. Now I realise it was that there weren’t any cars because no ordinary person owned one.

This flashed through my mind this morning while reading Michael Leddy’s post about his town and the sad state of footpaths there. He conjures up a place which is mainly given over to the automobile, with pedestrians a rare sight. Exactly the opposite of the city scene which would have greeted a visitor to Leeds or Sydney in 1938, or I imagine, a provincial orange-growing and movie-making community like Hollywood.

City of Shadows

A couple of years ago, Greg Neville and I went along to the forbidding sandstone buildings off Circular Quay which were the Sydney law courts, Water Police and lock-up cells from the 1850s. It is now the Justice and Police Museum and I found it absolutely fascinating; one of those experiences that burn into the visual memory and you can never quite shake it off.

At the time, there was a large exhibition of Police forensic and crime scene photographs from the early 20th Century. I forget the name of the exhibition, but it had that flash-blown, grimy quality that real images of this kind can have, but without the artistic ambition of a Weegee, which made it strangely even more powerful. The pictures had that profound weirdness that utilitarian or amateur photos can have when their context is stripped away.

The photographs were part of a very large archive of long-forgotten forensic negatives that were discovered in the late 1980s, but which had only begun to be looked at and catalogued years later. The project is still not complete. Unfortunately (or not, depending on your point of view), the paper records that accompanied the pictures were lost in a flood many years ago, and most of the faces, events and places have only been identified by painstaking comparison with the scandal sheet newspapers of the day and Police Gazette. Most of the pictures remain unidentified, which only increases their peculiar power and mystery.

This, for example, is pure Surrealism:


The current exhibition, called City of Shadows: Inner City Crime & Mayhem 1912-1948, is almost as ambitious as the first one I saw and just as powerful. The only barrier for me was that this is not my city and so I didn’t have that immediate shock of recognising familiar places in an unfamiliar time.

The most striking part of the show for me is the collection of mugshots, taken across the whole period in question. When I say mugshots, I simply mean images of arrested persons brought in to the city Police Station. In this period, it was only prison inductees who were photographed in the familiar front and side-on poses beloved of correction officials the world over.

People brought in and charged with various offences were simply asked to stand or sit in the natural light of the watch-house yard. Fortunately for us, the light was beautiful. Most of the time, they were not even asked to remove their hats. Many were just shot were they stood in a half frame exposure, with the other half sometimes taken with a close-up of the face. These pictures might be unique in the world. Certainly I’ve never seen anything like them before.


The selection of images here, painstakingly collected by crime writer Peter Doyle, display all of the emotion expressed (deliberately or not) by people in these circumstances. Some are frankly fearful, some resentful or outraged, some smile boastfully, some look like they would cut your throat rather than have to ask you for a light.

I bought the catalogue, City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912-1948, which is an excellent distillation of the exhibition together with incisive essays by Peter Doyle and academic Caleb Williams. I spent the four hour train ride from Sydney to Canberra absolutely transfixed by this book, trying to read it without outraging my fellow passengers with the scenes of casual murder and mayhem spread across its pages.

Audio files can be accessed here, as well as more photographs from the show.

Ingar Krauss

I happened across the work of German photographer Ingar Krauss at Lens Culture, one of the many fine online photography magazines around.

He works mainly in portraiture, which he approaches with an intensity strongly reminiscent of August Sander.

This project is a collection of pictures made in orphanages, juvenile prisons and camps. The faces of children he found there possess a disquieting sense of loss, looking back at us with a maturity quite beyond their obvious age.

There is a feature at Lens Culture, together with a revealing interview. Astonishingly, some of them were among his first attempts at serious photography.


Untitled, Juvenile Prison Alexin, Russia 2003

Are these twins or is this a double exposure?


Untitled, Arkhangelsk, Russia 2004

'American Beauty'

I was at the National Gallery of Victoria the other weekend and stumbled across 'American Beauty: Photographs of the American Social Landscape 1930s-1970s, which is a nice demonstration of how much photography can say about the social world in a small space. It was also a welcome reminder of how much I love the medium.

Despite the grand title, it's a very safe little show, not one to light the curatorial world a'fire, and it's hung in that hideous little nothing space at the top of the escalator. Still, the show is a nice demonstration of how loaded the act of selection can be, both as a curatorial device and as a legitimation of photography as a fine art.

Stepping sideways down the selection of images can be a full lurch into another way of seeing and thus of life, from hot to cool, from the subjective to the apparently objective, though in the case of photography, objectivity is merely an appearance of distance and subjectivity merely a collection of aesthetic strategies. Which is why, I suppose, it was the medium of choice for postmodernists, but I digress.


I started with Walker Evans, a stately figure. An aesthetic Protestant if ever there was one. His pictures have the rigor of a Shaker chair. The prints are not his own but they are crisp and bright. My favourite is the astonishing 'Billboards and Frame Houses, Atlanta' (1936). Devastating in its matter-of-fact contrasts, it manages to say a great deal about the Great Depression, both its economic reality and its state of mind. Media vs real life, the hope of glamour and the reality of poverty. The houses look elegant until you notice the missing boards and the grime. Carole Lombard the seductive movie star sports a black eye, like a play-acted version of what might be going on in the houses behind. It's a political image, but one that avoids propaganda, and all the more powerful for that.


By contrast, Lee Friedlander is cool and dryly funny. Far more subjective, and hip where Evans is earnest. Urban life broken into fragments, experienced in parcels of space and time, suggesting the states of mind of the people who inhabit this world. People face into void spaces, into walls, or breaks in the continuity of the picture plane. Under 'Hillcrest, New York' (1970) is a quote from Friedlander in 1996 which made me smile. It summarizes his irony and humour, an irony without distance:

I only wanted Uncle Vern standing by his new car (a Hudson) on a clear day. I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary's laundry and Bean Jack the dog peeing on a fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and 78 trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more. It's a generous medium, photography.

The show also features some of Robert Frank's groundbreaking work from the 50s, and pictures I don't think I've seen before from Jose Lopez and Luis Medina. They are a welcome shot of colour and heat. America the grotesque, the outsize, all-you-can-eat America, primary coloured and perverse. Where Friedlander implicates himself in the reality he presents, these photographers are distant appraisers of a foreign culture. The picture's frame standing in for the car window.

Russian ghost towns

This came via GoodShit, which I've been reluctant to place as a link here, only because it usually contains some adult-ish content, but things like this make him worthy of commendation.

GoodShit is actually quite a weird site, putting links to articles about arts, sciences and history next to girlie pictures. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

He seems to have a thing for abandoned places, since this is merely the latest in a whole series. It appeared as a link to a Russian website. I can't tell you what it's called, since I can't read Russian, nor even who the photographer is, which is a pity since many of the pictures are extremely strange, sad and beautiful. I couldn't help but think of Pompeii.


I'm not even really sure where this is, though as an educated guess I'd say it's in the Ukraine, somewhere in the vicinity of Chernobyl.

Let's talk about nuclear power as a viable, safe and sustainable energy source, shall we?

Phantasm

This is shamelessly self-serving, but an extremely interesting exhibition will open soon at Lab X Gallery in St Kilda, entitled 'Phantasm'.

It's self-serving not because I am in it - I'm not - but I have written the catalogue introduction at the invitation of the exhibitors who I have known for many years. Greg Wayn and Greg Neville had the dubious pleasure of teaching me, and George Alamidis was also strongly associated with the school where I studied photography, ACPAC, whose star burned brightly in Melbourne for a few years in the eighties and nineties.

The theme of the show is the human face - not as it is in itself, nor as conventionally reflected in portraiture, but as it occupies the mind, whether in memory, in hallucination, or in the darker spaces of consciousness. The faces in 'Phantasm' bridge the apparent contradiction between our belief in the dependibility of faces on the one hand, and the more fragile residence they may take up in recollection.

Update: The website for the show is no longer operational, so in lieu, here is the text, for posteriy's sake, of the catalogue introduction:


PHANTASM

There is a strange double aspect to the human face. On the one hand, it is the most certain, the most concrete of visual forms; a form to which our brains give priority above all others.

Indeed, we seem to have an innate ability to recognise faces, since the face is a form to which infants only nine minutes old, who have never seen one, give special attention [Goren, 1975]. Brain imaging studies show heightened activity in an area of the temporal lobe called the fusiform gyrus when we look at faces, a feature of brain function that is evident by two months of age [Nelson, 2001].

On the other hand, faces have a fragile residence in the mind. The longer we consider them, especially in memory, the less substantial they become. Despite the assumptions of the criminal law, eyewitnesses often prove unreliable, so willing are we to confabulate past experience through the filters of desire and unconscious motivation.

Faces are like this, simultaneously concrete and yet often at the edge of perception and account, for which we struggle to find appropriate metaphor.

The faces in Phantasm bridge this apparent contradiction, appearing not as they are in themselves (whatever that might be), but as they occupy the mind, whether in consciousness, in memory, in hallucination, or in the dark places.

Greg Neville’s faces can be categorised by simple emotions: angry, happy, surprised, frightened; like characters from children’s books, with emotions more powerful for their simplicity. Looming out of a psychically impenetrable murk, radically simplified like tribal masks, whose animistic and magical qualities they suggest, his images emerge out of a longheld interest in collective and institutional images of identity, in this case, children’s toys possessing hyper-inflated masculinity.

Toys are a societal spirit-level, and often reflect our most obscure motivations in extreme form; never more so than when toys are overtly gendered. Like miniaturised classical statuary, absurdly stylised renditions of terrible physical power, they manifest the fears and desires of society in cheap plastic, a society seemingly obsessed with physical force even on the international stage. By simplifying masculine images for children, we universalise and distil and refine what was unnameable before, reflecting ourselves back in caricature. An artifact of public spectacle is here transformed by an accident of digital photographic process into an image from a private nightmare, and presented back to us as an entirely different kind of spectacle.

The brain sees a mouth and eyes where there is only a line with two circles. We are face-builders, neurologically set for the task. We come into the world seemingly knowing what faces look like, prepared to see them in everything from the moon to cheese sandwiches that look like Jesus. Greg Wayn sees faces where none exist. His pictures operate just above the neurological threshold for facial recognition, lighting up the inanimate world with consciousness. We see eyes where there are holes, mouths in smiling bedsprings, broken skin in the peeling paint of a car’s fender. We look, and a seemingly conscious object, animus mundi, stares back. We attribute agency and fellow feeling to junk, not simply because we are superstitious, but because we emerge ready to attribute mind to whatever looks like it has one, which is perhaps the source of empathy. In the rot and the rust, everything is alive, looking back at us, animated by our willingness to recognise it.

George Alamidis strips his faces of their institutional particulars, the singularity that underpins their uniqueness. They become universal, subverting the sole condition of their usefulness to institutions, governments and tyrants.

I say ‘his faces’ because they are all George’s face at some remove, having their origin in his elaborate self-portrait project; a portrait of the artist as an immigrant, a transgressor of institutional boundaries, whether of national and cultural borders, age, gender, class. A universal humanising gesture, which soaks up to the surface of an official document as if from some psychic depth. These faces are vessels, transistors of memory and common cultural experience, and vessels too because they come to us from the across the ocean, the universal boundary and the symbol of the loss of home.

Like no other object, faces indicate the contents of the soul and character. They guide us and shape our futures. They are showcases for the self, containers of social and sexual data which we recognise in the fraction of a second, the most important thing in our embodied universe. No wonder they haunt us.

We have only to consider the face of someone we have lost to become aware of the face’s double aspect. It seems simple enough at first, the image rising up in us with reassuring familiarity, as if they were still here, until we try to name the particulars: the shape and colour of the eyes, the angle of a chin, the distinctive slope of a nose. A whole album of sense memory can be within easy reach, smells, the sound of a voice, but the specifics hover in front of us like a name we can’t quite remember until we almost doubt that we ever knew them at all. The harder we look, the faster the remembered face atomises and fades away. We calm ourselves with the certainty of photographs until the face comes again, effortlessly, in dreams.

For the poet Ezra Pound, the memory of faces emerging from a Metro station was like an apparition, a ghostly image from the unconscious, “petals on a wet, black bough” [Pound, 1972]. There is no more symbolically potent, metaphorically fertile or more infinitely possible thing for us than a face conjured in the mind.


References

Goren, Sarty & Wu (1975) Visual following and pattern discrimination of face-like stimuli by newborn infants, Pediatrics, v. 40, no. 4, p. 547.

Nelson, C. A. (2001) The development and neural bases of face recognition, Infant and Child Development, 10. p. 3-18

Pound, Ezra (1972) In a Station of the Metro, Imagist Poetry, ed. Peter Jones. London: Penguin Books, p. 95.