Capture the Moment

ROBBIE RYAN’S PHOTOGRAPHY IN ANDREA ARNOLD’S NEW WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Andrea Arnold’s new take on Wuthering Heights took this year’s Cannes Film Festival by storm.  It’s only her third movie and follows Red Road, which won the Cannes Jury Prize in 2006 and Fish Tank which won the same prize in 2009.  Quite a start to a film career. 

Wuthering Heights attracted praise for its earthy, gritty and radical approach to a popular (and much filmed) classic.  There’s none of the sentimentality of many commercial cinema adaptations here: the Earnshaw farm is small, dirty and run-down; the treatment of Heathcliff by Hindley Earnshaw is vividly brutal; rabbits are stabbed, have their necks broken with sickening cracks and dogs are hung up by their necks wire fencing; the moors are cold, misty and dark. The broad dialect dialogue rarely moves beyond short, monosyllabic sentences.  There’s hardly a scene which isn’t gruesome, mucky, brutal or racked by passions. 

The movie has been generally very well reviewed although I wasn’t wholly convinced by it.  I somehow felt is was almost too consciously an anti-film movie, as if Arnold had made a list of all the features of commercial adaptations and resolved to do the opposite (“Sunning ladscapes? OK, ours will be misty, rainy, dank and dark”).  The result was a little lack of subtlety. 

But what do I know.  I just wanted to draw your attention to the work of Robbie Ryan, the film’s photographer.  Photographers don’t often spend time looking at the work of film cameramen - a pity, since they have a lot to teach still camera people. 

Ryan, a former Talking Heads frontman who was born in Ireland and now lives in the US, has a long list of films to his credit including Red Road.  His work in Wuthering Heights is remarkable.  There is a “hide what you want to show” quality about what he has done in this film.  He often chooses to show his subjects in half-light or their faces partially obscured.  In a  key scene in which Kathy tells Heathcliffe she is resolved to marry Linton, he is shown sharply shadowed and she is almost completely veiled.  Many times the subject is out of focus or thrown indistinct by narrow depth of field choice while some foreground subject - normally natural, like trees or grass - retain sharp focus.  Unsteady camera work is also used to follow the protagonist around. 

Many scenes are underexposed, for reasons which should by now be clear, but a few are startlingly overexposed.  When Heathcliff returns after several years to find Catherine (one of the few sunny scenes), the sun blasts the picture into bright white and lingers there for several seconds.  Very powerful. 

Perhaps most remarkable is Ryan’s choice of viewpoint.  Many scenes are filmed from ground level and the view is regularly obscured by foliage.  The effect is not just to ground the movements and actions of the subject in a physical sense but, equally, in a moral sense.  We feel that Heathcliffe, Catherine and certain Hindley rarely rise above the ground in the quality of their thoughts and words.  It is very disconcerting. 

But back to blur. Photographers are obsessed with sharpness.  The reason is probably that accidental blur looks awful.  If you want to use out of focus, you need to plan carefully and make sure the result looks like you meant it.  As most photographers aren’t taught how to take out of focus images, their results are - well, awful.  Making a great out of focus image takes as much skill as a “pin sharp from back to front” image (to quote the competition judge cliche).  And oftentimes much more effective.

 

This still from the movie gives some idea, but take a look at the video trailer at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEttxmXmPYA. 

Go see the film! 

There’s an interview with Robbis Ryan on IMDb at http://www.iftn.ie/news/?act1=record&aid=73&rid=4284447&tpl=archnews&only=1

 

 

 

 

 

SOVIET ART AND ARCHITECTURE: A PHOTOGRAPHER'S PERSPECTIVE

I believe that photography should be situated alongside general artistic practice - a part of it, informed by it and ultimately justified by its artistic merit.  Encouraging photographers to look at their practice in this way is one of the reasons I write these reviews.  

A new exhibition at the Royal Academy - "Building the Revolution: Soviet Art and Architecture 1915-1935" - speaks to these themes on several levels.  It is, most obviously, curated around the interplay between art (particularly painting) and architecture during the heroic period immediately after the 1917 revolution; at this level, it shows how the breaking down of barriers between the two practices is far from new.  On another level, the exhibition is illustrated with contemporary photographs of many of the buildings by the chronicler of Soviet modernist architecture, Richard Pare, many of which show the current state of constructions also illustrated in vintage photographs. 

The interplay between artistic practices might have been completed had the RA included period Soviet photography (one thinks particularly about Rodchenko's work), but that's a quibble about a really fascinating exhibition for art and architecture fans as well as photographers.

 Whatever you may think of the Russian communist system, there’s no doubt that from 1917 to the late-20s the Soviet Union witnessed an eruption of avant-garde and experimental art which many of its practitioners saw as being in the service of the new society. Soviet Architects were part of this upsurge, and they fused engineering and city planning with communal ideals. Alexander Vesnin, Vladimir Shukhov, Moisel Ginsberg, Ilya Golosov, Yakov Chernikhov, Konstantinos Melnikovand many others all laboured to this end, designing and building workers' clubs, sports facilities, offices, theatres, factories, communal apartment blocks, cooperative kitchens, collectivist living spaces and much more - all designed with a classless future in mind. It didn't last long and, by the late-1920s, had succumbed to the dead hand of Salin's Soviet Realism.  

But during these years, constructivist and supremacist artists, like Malevich, Popova, El Lissitsky and Rodchenko, and architects sought out new forms in the service of the Communist ideals.  Drawing on European Modernism, but with occasional references to classical traditions, Soviet artists and architects created constructivist paintings and buildings whose utilitarian lines and formal language seemed to resonate with the society being created.  The almost complete fusion between painting and architecture is seen clearly in a series in the exhibition from around 1919-29 by Liubov Popova called "Painterly Architectonics" and "Spatial Force Construction"; spurred by the new thinking about tectonics, they are effectively artiststic constructions.  Another well-known supremacist from the period, Kasimir Malevich, stopped painting between 1919-29 to concentrate on making white architectural maquettes which he called Architectonics, exploring how two dimensional art could be translated into three dimensional constructions. 

Connections like these are traced in this exhibition through industrial, residential, state and governmental,  communications and health service buildings and show how This innovative period created a new visual language which linked art and architecture.   This language employed pure geometric shapes, banded horizontal windows, flat roofs,mall often raised on pilotis or pared down columns.  The functions of many buildings were redefined in the process - housing became communal, factories were reconfigured to accommodate mass production techniques and startling new forms such as radio towers grew upwards from the ground. 

Examples of these remarkable buildings include Melnikov's. Rusakov Workers' Club in Moscow, a construction topped off with striking angled boxes.  Golosov's Zuev Workers Club is an interpretation of modernism, comprising a large glazed cylinder grafted onto rigorously rectilinear building.  The huge Gasprom building designed in 1929 for the new city of Kharkov in the Ukraine is monumental in scale and reflects the vast ambition of the bureaucracy it was built to house. 

Photographers should be captivated by the use of line, shape and form by these artists and architects and should find here many ideas.  If this were not enough, the contemporary photographs of Richard Pare are outstanding.  Richard Pare was born in England in 1948. In his early years he was a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral. Later he studied photography and graphic design in Winchester and at Ravensbourne College of Art before moving to the United States in 1971. In 1973 he graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and since then he has beenworking as a photographer with a particular affinity for architecture.  

Pare's images are beautiful examples of architected photography, capturing the lines and shapes of these remarkable buildings in a straightforward way.  Some of the images, such as the panorama of the industrial scale bakery designed by Marsakov and the interior of the Red Banner Textile Factory in St. Petersburg, are huge in scale.

His almost-monochromatic study of the  Shabolovka radio tower is now a well-known image.  His image of the Moges power plant in Moscow features the striking angular glass bays which sit alongside the classical facade.  

Other images by Pare are more abstract, capturing the sweep and line of the modernist language - the curved ramp in the Tsentrosoyuz building, the remarkable spiral staircase in a Checkist housing scheme and the beautifully curved balcony and windows in the Pishchevik Club.  

Many recreate vintage photograph from the period, from which one cannot but be struck by the physical deterioration of many buildings.  Pare's images are themselves a kind of interplay between architectural, record and documentary forms and will fascinate any serious photographer.

Many of these Soviet artists and architects shared the rather elitist bossiness of their European modernist counterparts (one thinks of Le Corbusier here and, interestingly, he was directly involved in the design of some of the Soviet buildings in the period).  Herding families into communal living, designing better quality housing for the Party elite, seeking to change the soul of man through their work, these and similar aims lead us to question the motivations behind much of this work. Politically dubious it may have been; creatively inspired it certainly was.  

Go see!

MYSTERY AT DEVIL'S GARDEN

Devil's Garden is located in a remote area of central Utah, about 15 miles from the town of Escalante. It is an area of weird rock formations, created by uneven weathering of rocks of different hardness so that small towers, hodoos and chimneys are the result.  Surrounded by an arid landscape, desert plants and, at this time of year, dried- up creeks, it is a strange and fascinating environment.  

The unique structures of Devils Garden owe their existence to a difference in the erosional rate of the different rock strata. A harder cup layer, like a helmet, sits on top of the softer layer of rock underneath, creating the knobby mushroom shape of many of the pinnacles. The structures of Devils Garden are fragile and rare.  

When I was there last week, the scene was full of colour.  The rock formations mix reds, oranges and yellows, the sand is a light yellow and the sky was deep blue.  Look on the internet and virtually all the images you'll see capture this colour.  But I decided to ignore the colours and shoot the area in mono thinking that I might capture some of the mystery that led to the name Devil's Garden in the first place. By shooting at the height of the sun and metering for highlights, I managed to create a few images which looked like moonlight scenes. 

Overall, I think the images convey something of the mystery of the place. 

 

LESSONS FROM A MASTER PHOTOJOURNALIST

The Utah Museum of Fine Arts has an current exhibition of the remarkable photojournalism of David Burnett, spanning much of his 40 year plus  career.  I visited this exhibition on Sunday.

David Burnett is a photojournalist with more than four decades of work covering the news, the people, and visual tempo of our age. He is co-founder of Contact Press Images,the New York based photojournalism agency, now entering its 36th year.  He has covered virtually every war during this period as well as the important events of the time.  In a recent issue of American Photo magazine Burnett was named one of the "100 Most Important People in Photography."  He has been a contract photographer for TIME since 2003,  a position he held for 15 years in the 1970s and 80s.   His  kit includes  a 60 year old Speed Graphic press camera, and a plastic $30 HOLGA.  Each has a place along  side his digital cameras, each camera a tool to find the right look for the right moment.   

The exhibition is called "too close" - a deliberately inverting reference Robert Capa's famous remark that if there's something wrong with an image then the photographer was not close enough.  The premise is that you can get too close and, by stepping back, DB is able to bring a sense of context and historical environment into the momentous events he is capturing.

The exhibition at UMFA covers Burnett's wide-ranging images of Vietnam, American Presidential election campaigns back to the 1960 s, the Iranian revolution, President Nixon's resignation, Congressional hearings, Papal tours, the funeral of Princess Diana and the last shuttle flight.  While many are small group images, a significant number include large crowds or confused military or other scenes containing many elements, movement and activity.

The key skill which DB brings to these images is the ability to impose order on these busy scenes through an amazing compositional skill.  Look, for example, at his image of Jimmy Carter speaking from a barn during the 1976 primaries.  The photograph was taken from the back of the crowd and  Carter is just a speck in the distance.  But the crowd sweeps round to form a point atleading the eye to the spot where we know the is.

In other images, such as the crowds mourning Princess Diana, Burnett can always find a focal point - in one case, a woman standing amid the sitting mourners, clutching flowers, in another a man standing, seemingly directing the gaze of the rest of the crowd.

 

Yet other images show how order and focus can be brought to a large crowd scene.  The women mobbing Khomeni after the 1970 revolution in Iran, in which thousands seem to lean and point towards the Aytollah, a tiny figure standing at a window; the crowd at a Bobby Kennedy rally, where the politician is picked out by the light; a crowd of photographers create a pathway through which we see Secretary of State Condolezza Rice testifying at a Congressional hearing.

How Burnett managed to bring this sense of composition to crowded and chaotic scenes is a testament to his innate skills.  Photographers who find this difficult would benefit from studying his images.  A book of the images is available at reasonable cost from the UMFA.

 

More information at http://umfa.utah.edu/

Anti-capitalism demonstrations

I visited the "Occupy Salt Lake City" camp last week.  These anti- capitalist demonstrations, which started in and around Wall Street and have spread around the world, are interesting in the way in which they take on local concerns within the broad ambit of a grass roots protest movement aimed at the perceived ills of the free market.

These images below are from the demonstrations in Salt Lake City.  But London and SLC could not be more different and this is reflected in the nature of the camps established there.

The London camp seemed to me to be more ideological and motivated by political activism.  Alongside the obvious and widespread opprobrium dished out to bankers and the financial system in general, every systemic prescription to current ills under the sun seems to be offered by the London demonstrators, from vegetarianism to a "resource-based economy" (whatever that means), socialism to communism and anarchism, rationalism to spiritualism was being offered as a solution to the problem.

 Confused though they may be, everyone in London seemed to have a different  answer to the problem (although I'm not sure everyone would agree on the probel to start with).  And, being strategically camped outside St Paul's Cathedral, the protest has become a focus of national debate.

The "Occupy Salt Lake City" camp was smaller than London and located well away from the main thoroughfares such that you might easily miss it.  On the day I took these pictures, the demonstrators were preparing for a march on Salt Lake City Hall.  The first thing I noticed was that many of the demonstrators seemed to be members of the homeless rather than political activists and few of these people actually joinerd in the march.  In fact, they stayed in their tents and didn't seem to be overinterested in the camp as a whole.

One of the Salt Lake City movement leaders gave a rather confused talk about international financial institutions before the march, in which only a small number of the demonstrators (perhaps 15-20) showed any interest.  It was significant that a few of the   the homeless people with whom I spoke were actually opposed to the demonstration and not many of them joined in the march.

The london demonstration seems then to be much more of a political movement while that in SLC much more concerned with raw economic issues.  

 

 

Conceptualist photography - The Fourth Height and Urs Bigler

As part of a current exhibition on women artists, the  Salt Lake City Arts Centre has included some fascinating images from The Crown, a recent series of photographic works by The Fourth Height.  This project was made in collaboration with the established Swiss photographer Urs Bigler and is his first working experience with an art group from Russia.

The Fourth Height (FH) is a group of three Russian artists, Dina Kim, Katya Kameneva and Gala Smirnskaya, founded in 1992 and whose work is part of the conceptualist movement in Moscow. I understand that these artists live and work in different countries and co-operate only occasionally. Their best-known series are The Deed, The Taste of Victory and Gene Pool, manyl of which are displayed in museums and galleries in Russia and in private collections abroad.

The FH artists have a great name for their work, which they call “multicultural trash-dreaming” as it reflects mass culture through irony and fantasy.  They aim to address post-Cold War and feminist issues through the aesthetics of fashion and the iconography of sex and femininity.

The Crown is a mythical project of love and heroism between three main characters Russia, Europe and Asia-Panda. The starting point seems to me to be the way in which idealised women have often represented countries - think, for example, of Marianne in France, but FH obviously pick up on and reinterpret the heroism often associated with these female icons.  I have not been able to ascertain whether the artists of FH are themselves the characters in the images.  

It seems that the images are firmly based on Russian and western folklore, in which the battle between Good and Evil is set in the middle of Russia. In Russian culture, the rebellion of the “Three Knights”  is a well-know folk story and the FH artists bring a critical and playful eye to this traditional epic resulting in a new interpretation for the nature of heroism.  In these images, the three knights become Russia, Europe and Asia - a kind of three-headed dragon and the new superheroes of the planet. 

These images really are fantastic in my view.  They show how photography is such an effective medium for conveying ideas, concepts and meaning. You could see the work of FH as being  part of post-modernist photography, but I feel it goes well beyond this in the way in which codes and entendres are incorporated - the very subject of the SLC exhibition.  I intend to research the previous work of FH.

 

Throw away photography. It's postmodern!

Here’s a photography exhibition in which you can wander round the images as you wish, in any order you like.  Flit from one end of the room to the other without losing the thread.  You don’t have to worry about theme or chronology.  You needn’t bother about a curator anxious to guide you on some chronological or thematic journey.  

That’s Post-Modernism for you. 

“Signs of a Struggle: photography in the wake of postmodernism” is the exhibition currently being presented by the V&A alongside it's blockbuster show of the same name.  And why so free and easy?  Because post-modernism (PoMo in the trade) is in reality an eclectic tapas of themes, ideas, styles, techniques which are at once open- ended, enigmatic, ambiguous, questioning and slippery.  If PoMo does anything, it defies order.  And there's something here for all photographers to think about.

That said, you can, pick out broad themes which run through the work of the PoMo photographers selected here.   

For one, irony, parody and humour are everywhere in these images, often starting with the appropriation of another piece of art and ending up by poking fun at the practice of photography itself.  In his image of a Lake District waterfall, at first glance a typical romantic landscape, John Pfahl  has neatly subverted the eighteenth century picturesque tradition by oversaturating and pixilating the scene.  Ann Jones overlarge Hairclip and Tweezers pokes fun at museum pretensions by presenting the images in a stuffy mock vitrine; and Karen Knox's reference to Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the age of mechanical reproduction is another wry look at classical artefacts in a museum setting. 

PoMo photography freely references art works and usually ends up in subversion.  Peter Kennard's Haywain with Cruise Missiles turns Constable's rural idyll on its head to make a point about the siting of US missiles in this country.   

 

Marcel Broodthaers packs numerous references in La Soupe de Daguerre.  Small images of vegetables, fruit and fish neatly in a row could be a comment on the photographic practice Daguerre helped initiate, or about French cuisine, or perhaps what we eat and why.  You choose.  

Olivier Richon has a photograph incorporating diagrams from Tristram Shandy, itself sometimes described as a kind of PoMo novel of it's time. The humour of PoMo photographers often turns to absurdism.  A photography by David Shrigley shows a pack of carrots growing in a plot.  This is not a carrot. 

A number of PoMo photographers have used elaborately constructed studio scenes to make a point.  I loved The Dining Room by Sarah Jones, in which virtually life sized mother and daughter in a elegant traditional room look enigmatically at the tureen in the centre of the table.   

You begin to think about the stultifying atmosphere of the haute bourgeoisie and imagining what the subjects might be thinking until noticing the almost disembodied head of hair on the left.  What's all this about?

 Anne Hardy’s constructed after-party scene - a mess of balloons, spilled drinks and streamers - is chaotic but carefully constructed, an over-exaggerated scene created in the studio that existed only for the purposes the the photograph.  The image becomes as transient as the party itself was.  Jeff Wall's The Outburst shows a sweatshop worker being harangued by his boss.  The messages flow thick and fast. 

Some of these constructed scenes self-consciously mix nature and artifice.  David Hockey's brilliant photography is dead long live painting combines a photograph of the flowers with a photograph of a painting of the flowers as a get well card.  James Casere’s illuminated boxed Golden Apples are monochrome subversions of nature - natural yet unnatural. Keith Arnatt’s Canned Sunset makes a glorious sunset out of a discarded floating drink can - beauty, the traditional photographic subject, challenged by the detritus of mass consumption.

Indeed, photography as artistic practice in the age of photography as the prop of mass culture is a recurring theme.  Richard Prince takes parts of advertising images ( Marlborough man) to make the point; Tim Head's Toxic Lagoon focuses on the throw aways of modern consumer culture, a fetid pool floating with shit colourful enough to jump out of the frame. 

A series of images by Clare Strand complete the exhibition.  Presented as old scene of crime- type images, they are dark, ambiguous and teasing. Appearing to be police or forensic images designed to help solve crimes, their labels and writings confuse the viewer.  The exhibition takes it's names from this series - Signs of a Struggle. 

And so we go on and on.  PoMo is not subtle, often gaudy, but always returning to the nature of the photographic image itself.  Whatever artistic status photography might have had has been stripped away by it's complicity role in mass culture.  The PoMo photographer is therefore left with an ambiguous medium.  So why not use the medium to express this angst?  Cindy Sherman's images, always questioning (her own) identity, are the best examples.

 

Diane Arbus, Tate Modern (Level 3), May 2011-31 March 2012

Tate Modern is currently offering the opportunity to view over 40 of Diane Arbus’ black and white images spanning the period from the 1950s to the ‘70s.  Containing some of her best known images, the collection is owned by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland and is one of the largest Arbus collection in existence. 

Diane Arbus (1923–71) is widely acknowledged as one of the finest modern photographers through her startling and perceptive images of contemporary American life.  Arbus started as a fashion-photographer but moved towards personal projects recording  ‘things which nobody would see unless I photographed them’. She is known for her portraits of people whose appearance or lifestyle position them on the margins of “conventional” society - although the very notion of conventionality is repeatedly challenged in her work.

So we see in this collection Arbus’ portraits, always centred in a square frame and usually lit theatrically with flash, a miscellany of social misfits - a human pincushion, heavily tatooed men and women, a sword swallower, midgets, suburban nudists, Jewish giants and dwarves, even a (apparently) headless man and woman.  Arbus often befriended her subjects and the intimacy which this generated comes through; she brought a humane and intensely personal approach to her often unconventional subjects, redefining documentary photography with a new aethestic purpose. 

But the range is wider than these well-known subjects.  Many address the theme of gender identity and Arbus often photographed transvestites and transsexuals (for instance, Two female impersonators backstage, N.Y.C 1961; A young man in curlers at home on West 20th Street, N.Y.C. 1966); sub-groups like ethnic minorities (Puerto Rican women with a beauty mark, N.Y.C. 1965); nudists (Retired man and his wife at home in a nudist camp one morning, N.J. 1963); wealthy socialites (Mrs. T. Charlton Henry in an evening gown, Philadelphia, Pa. 1965; Four people at a gallery opening, N.Y.C. 1968); and the residents of mental institutions, whose faces are often hidden behind ghoulish masks (in a series of Untitled images).

This collection shows how Arbus brought the same insights into her images of “ordinary” people. Photographing people in the parks of New York, on the streets or at home, the images seem to be “conventional”.  But look beneath the surface.  

 A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y.C 1966, made for the Sunday Times Magazine, is a searing indictment of suburban consumerist life. Xmastree in a Living Room in Levittown 1963 is as stark and bare as the life we don’t see in the image.  Teenage couple on Hudson street NYC is disturbing, the not-quire-children dressed in adult clothes and appearing like midgets.  Young political activists and patriotic youths with the flag seem deranged and other subjects roll their eyes in a disconcerting fashion.  Even the sole landscape in the collection - a house on a hill, dark and brooding - suggests something sinister behind the shutters.

This collection is an fantastic overview of Arbus’ remarkable work. 

 

Landscape photography as theft!

 

Oooh!  Lovely!  The sounds you hear when images like Charlie Waite’s briliiant image above are shown to an audience. 

People love this kind of picture and landscape photography is probably the most popular genre for amateur photographers.  Professional landscape photography is also widely read and bought; practioners like Waite and Joe Cornish attract large audiences when they speak and their books are among the most successful commercial photography books available.   

But I find most landscape photographs unengaging - and some of it very boring. So  I probably upset many members of a camera club recently when I said that I couldn’t see why anyone would willingly want take landscapes.  I’ve been thinking more about the subject since.

 I start by accepting that there is some brilliant landscape photography around.  A particularly creative photographer like Eddie Soloway (see examples below) can bring a radical new perspective to the subject.  

 

 

 

By searching all the time for a different and engaging perspective, photographers like this will always find something new to say about the landscape, however familiar it may be.  But most amateur and much professional landscape photography is not like this: it is  nearly always representational, trying to capture the beauty of the scene as it appears to the eye, generally enhancing the image with attractive lighting and composition.  I do not deny the amazing skill of many photographers in this field nor the quality of their output, I just find it unengaging.  But why? 

In part, it’s because the landscape is essentially static. Still photography of an unchanging subject seems pointless.  If you enjoy a view, you can go back and see it tomorrow, or the day after.  Its never going to go away, so why do you need to record it?  Of course, lighting conditions can and do change, and some are more attractive than others.  But so what?  There’s a sunset everyday. 

You could object that such images are record shots for people who cannot go back tomorrow, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  But the value of landscape record shots is now much less than it was when few people travelled.  We've all pretty well seen everything now - or so it seems at times.  In fact, photographers now complain that they are running out of places in the world that haven’t already been photographed extensively! 

This leads to the next part of the answer: beauty without depth is superficial.  Much of the landscape is indeed beautiful, and you can understand why so many people are impelled to photograph it.  But in most images I can find no story, no message, no moral.  It is beauty for its own sake.  A speaker I heard recently said that most photographers and purchasers of photographic images can’t see beyond something to put up on the wall.  It’s a rather snooty way of putting it, but its probably true. 

The roots of this go back a long way.  Early nineteenth century romanticism - particularly in England and Germany - valued the meaning of the natural world as a thing in itself.  But in the twenty first century meaning has been stripped out of the world, which is why it is so important that all forms of art - including photography - seek to imbue meaning into their subject. 

But there is probably a more important process at work here.  In his book The Art of Travel Alan de Botton explores why tourists are driven to photograph ceaselessly popular sights en masse and asks why - particularly in connection with natural beauty - this should be.  If one million shots of the same image have probably already been taken, the next one doesn’t stand much chance of being particularly original.  His answer is that the viewer, exposed to something attractive for the first and possibly last time, wants to own it.  Photography becomes a way of possessing the beauty of the scene and the simple act of taking the photograph - rather than necessarily viewing it afterwards - is the driving force.  And, of course, we know how few travel images are actually viewed after the event. 

There’s much in this argument.  When I ask landscape photographers why they took a particular image, the answer is that is was so beautiful.  It probably was.  But do they share my view that - to misquote Proudhon - landscape photography is theft?  I suspect not.

 

 

 

 

Boris Mikhailov - using colour to make a point

If you are near Tate Modern, take the opportunity to look at the powerful exhibition by Boris Mihailov.  It covers just two walls of a small room but in other respects the number of images on one of the walls and the scope of the objective may lead to the conclusion that this exhibition is far from small.

 Boris Mikhailov was born in Ukraine in the former Soviet Union in 1938.  He trained as an engineer before turning to photography and is today one of the most successful and well-known photographers from the Soviet era.  His work very much in the tradition of of Concept-Art and social documentary photography. 

Mikhailov used photography for over 40 years to record and try to understand everyday life in the Soviet Union.  Over this period, his work has help bring to life the realities of work and living in a repressive system and, latterly, the decline and aftermath of that system.  Much of this portrait is intimate, focusing on his own life as an artist in an unsympathetic environment, his family and friends.  Mikhailov has sometimes taken inspiration from the Soviet regime itself: at one time, he took to hand-colouring his images, referencing (as well as providing an antidote to) the way Soviet propaganda tried to brighten the dreary life of its subjects.  On one image, he handwrote, “Everything here is so gray in gray that there isn’t even anything to colour.”

After the fall of the USSR, Mikhailov has attempted to explain photographically the complex transition to new freedoms.  Ironically, although he escaped censure during the Soviet years, he was attacked for his portrayal of the homeless in the late 1990s “after” the Soviets. In this project of more than 500 images, he systematically took pictures of homeless people and soon gained their trust. He described it as a critique of the “Mask of beauty” of the post-Soviet era. 

 His most famous early work was the "Red Serie", in which he mainly used the colour red, to picture people, groups and city-life, and this is the first part of the exhibition at the Tate currently.  Mihailov's objective is ambitious: he sets up a contrast between the images on the two Walls to illustrate the pervading atmospshere of the communist and post-communist periods primarily by the use of colour imagery.  For photographers, this is a distinctive approach: the use of colour as the the most important among a number of organising elements in making a political statement.

 The communist period collection comprises around 70 images hung as a huge rectangle on sone wall and in which the pervading colour in these images is red.  No surprise there, perhaps, as red was the colour ubiquitously adopted by the communist regime.  But one is immediately struck by the sheer extent to which red pervaded communist society.  So throughout these images of all aspects of everyday life under an oppressive regime, we see bright red swimsuits, lipstick, sheets, blood, signs, typography and signs,  These images show how virtually all important aspects of life was dominated by this colour symbol of the pervading regime and how the regime seeped into life and the way it was lived.  They also point to the contrast between the bright colours and the dull reality of everyday life.

 Of course, colour is often considered as superficial and this is Mikhailov's point.  The regime attempted to control all aspects of life and the most visible symbol of this was the colour red.  Yet we see how this was surface while the essence of life continued much as it does elsewhere.

 The post-communist images (titled “At Dusk”) are much smaller in scale and completely different.  Taken at dusk in his home city of Kharkov following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he uses twilight to record a society in transition and to evoke childhood memories. These are dark, brooding images, mostly from what appears to be a low angle and predominantly blue or toned or hand coloured blue.  It is difficult to make out the subject in many of these images.

 Mikhailov proposes a monochrome visual language to deal with this new social reality. The photographs are tinted blue, both to make them appear 'old' and to refer to the 'blue hour' of twilight.  At dusk also refers to Ukraine's deprivation during the Second World War, which the artist experienced as a child. Few photographic records survive from this period, so Mikhailov has constructed his own history as a substitute.  At Dusk is both documentary and a conceptual project.

So this exhibition has set up a clear visual contract between the regime and post-regime period.  While red was stamped on life under communism, it was superficial and life continued with some degree of certainty - not that everyone liked the certainty.  Mikhailov's vision of post-communist society is bleak and uncertain.  Ultimately, we are forced to see the continuities as well as contrasts between these two historical periods.