Another Extract From Push Process

Here's another short extract from Push Process, my novel with photographs from Ortac Press:

Arbus said: there’s what you want people to know about you, and what you can’t help people knowing. That’s what a portrait’s about. I say: there’s the thing I want to photograph, and all the things I can’t avoid photographing. I try to see everything in the frame – the grid on the viewfinder, square by square. But it’s impossible. And that’s what the picture’s about. 

This is a seventeen-minute exposure. The car on the right is there for the first eight. The driver changes a baby’s nappy on the hood; he walks over, puts it in the rubbish bin on the left; returns to his car, drives away. All invisible, below the camera’s threshold of attention. 

About the same time the first car leaves, the Mercedes in the middle backs into the frame. The driver gets out and says, Am I spoiling your photograph? Anzi. You’re doing something to it, but you’re definitely not spoiling it. 

All that’s invisible too, and both cars are half there. By which I mean, they’re each there for half the exposure. What the photograph doesn’t register is their direction. Time’s a vector, but it runs both ways. Meets in the middle, and bleeds out both ends. 

A third car in the background. Not visible at all, only a parabolic slash through the gates, which open electronically for a minute, then hum shut. 

All these things exist in the gap that opens up between the camera’s attention and my perception. It’s always there, that gap. What photography’s for: to explore it, to articulate it as precisely as possible. The longer the exposure lasts, the wider it grows.

Short Extract from Push Process

My new novella from Ortac Press, Push Process, is about a photographer in Venice, and is built around a series of short essays on 'his' images. Here's one:

At the bar in an overpriced café. The waiter knows I’m not going to tip him, but he keeps his contempt to himself. Behind me, way back over my right shoulder, framed by curtains, there’s a plate-glass window, which looks onto a colonnade. Because it’s dark outside, a projection of the waiter’s face bounces back off the plate glass into the café interior. All that’s reflected in the mirror behind the bar.

People walking past the window on the street outside always glance in. It’s a reflex; they can’t help it. So if I set the focal point of my lens ‘inside’ the mirror, I can capture someone looking through the glass, from outside the café, at the exact moment they pass the outline of the waiter, projected onto the window from inside the café. A reflection, next to the reflection of a reflection. 

Since I’m left-handed, when I look through the viewfinder, it covers my left eye. I have to press the camera body in tight against my glasses and the bridge of my nose; and then I have to pull it away to flip the film lever forward. Before I release the shutter, I hold my breath, because when the air leaves my lungs, my hands will shake. So each exposure is a single breath, contained, and that makes it a single perception, discrete, with a duration – in this case, one-sixtieth of a second. The slowest I can risk, given the person outside will be in motion. 

This image is a hypothesis in my head before it’s an experiment, and it’s a singular experiment, unrepeatable. I’ll have to bring the camera up fast and shove it in the waiter’s face, no warning. He’ll put up with that, even without the tip, but I won’t get away with it twice. 

When someone outside is about two seconds away from the right location, before they become visible in the mirror, the sound of their footsteps reaches a particular pitch. That’s my cue. Start moving the camera up to my eye when I hear it, before the image is ready, before it presents itself. 

Click.

One-sixtieth of a second is – just, barely – long enough to distinguish the sound of the shutter opening from the sound of its closing. In that interval, I see nothing, I’m conscious of nothing – except duration itself. 

No one ever asks the next question, the obvious question: How did you keep yourself out of the mirror?

Photographic Inspirations: Atget's Seven Albums by Molly Nesbit

Eugène Atget (1857–1927) is the earliest of the photographic influences for Push Process, both in the sense of his place within photographic history and in the sense that my protagonist is first inspired to pick up a camera by Walter Benjamin’s famous aphorism: Not for nothing have Atget’s photographs been likened to the scene of a crime. But is not every square inch of our cities the scene of a crime? Every passer-by a culprit? I’m discussing him last because he never published a photobook, and his reputation is largely posthumous, in large part due to the efforts of the photographer Berenice Abbott, who acquired half of Atget’s archive of glass-plate negatives after his death.

I recently acquired a seminal work on Atget’s professional practice: Molly Nesbit’s Atget’s Seven Albums, published in 1992 by Yale University Press. What follows is a review/discussion of Nesbit's book, and some thoughts inspired by it.

What did Atget photograph? The historical and monumental traces of French and Parisian culture, with priority given to collective and anonymous achievements; also, a great deal of contemporary economic activity, and the culture associated with it (as we'll see below, this might include shop fronts, kiosks and so on, or the dwelling places and places of work for specific categories of worker); also some rural landscapes and natural phenomena (e.g. trees), the last category because of their assumed interest for artists. Much of the historical subject matter was grouped together in the contemporary imagination under the heading of 'Old Paris'. Museums and libraries were interested in records of Old Paris; so were antiquarians and amateur historians. Some of the economic activity Atget photographed also fell within this field: old shop signs, for example, or traditional, itinerant street traders. But even within this larger field, Atget's was a selective vision. Waldemar George noted in 1930 that he 'disdains panoramic views, grand syntheses, and synoptic tableaus' (quoted in Nesbit, 18), and Nesbit expands on this:

Atget's documents put forward a popular Paris, without the high life, without the reveries of an ancien régime, without the bourgeoisie. His Paris was a mass of common detail. ... the small shopkeeper and the worker on the street are given pride of place. (5, 6)

Encountering Atget’s archive unmediated is however a dispiriting experience. For example the MOMA collection (this is where the Abbott material is now held) is available online, and its contents are displayed in strictly chronological order on the MOMA website, beginning roughly in 1898 – Atget was a late starter as a photographer, after previous careers as a merchant seaman and an actor. If this collection feels unedited, containing images of highly variable quality, that’s because it’s really equivalent to looking at Atget’s contact sheets. All the images are in fact literally contact prints: Atget used a large-format 8x10-inch camera and didn’t enlarge any of his images (or at least did so very rarely), but instead created them using printing-out paper exposed by sunlight directly through the negative. But it should also be noted that reviewing the MOMA archive is not like looking at, for example, Robert Frank’s 35mm contact sheets, some of which you can find in Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans. Atget’s large-format camera didn’t allow for the kind of loose, casual experimentation in sequence through multiple exposures that rolls of 35mm film do. And although there are in fact numerous instances of hm taking multiple exposures of the same subject from different angles, or returning to the same spot on different occasions (sometimes years apart), his method was not to work through successive exposures towards the perfect crystallisation of a scene; still less was he in search of a decisive moment in which unstable, fleeting elements were in balance.

Atget was surely aware that some of his plates were more effective pictorial statements than others, but their primary purpose was to be of use to his customers. In other words, while some of them were more successful than others as photographs, few of them were treated as failures by Atget or discarded, because the subjects were more important than his images of them. And so long as they pointed effectively towards those subjects, they were adequate. When presenting prints to potential customers, Atget grouped them in themed albums, but these were not permanent compilations, and were akin to a catalogue, updated regularly. It’s not clear to me if one of the principles of these updates was to supplant inferior views of particular subjects with later, improved iterations, but even if Atget sometimes did this, he didn’t do it systematically.

Atget’s influence has therefore mainly been via selections of his work edited posthumously by others according to their own interpretations of his significance – and written commentary on his work was crucial from the start for determining its wider reception. In the first instance, this meant the book produced by Abbott in 1930: Atget: Photographe de Paris, with (in its French and English editions) an introduction by Pierre MacOrlan. Benjamin’s remarks on Atget, along with some similarly influential commentary by Walker Evans, were based on this book. By contrast, I primarily encountered Atget through the Phaidon 55 on him, published in 2001, edited by and with commentary from Gerry Badger.

All of Atget’s editors were in fact doing something similar to what his original customers did during his lifetime: putting together their own collections of his work according to their own predilections. These customers included artists – he famously described his practice as producing ‘documents for artists’ – illustrators, set designers, craftsmen, builders, architects, antiquarians, and above all several institutional libraries in Paris (also occasionally the V&A in London). For both Atget and his clients, his photographs:

were meant to refer beyond themselves, to be taken up repeatedly, to have several futures, and to exist as a point of detail on the way to one of them. They were meant to be incomplete. (35)

Most of his customers acquired multiple prints, and many of the libraries he sold to bought several hundred over the course of his career, which he or they might bind into albums, though not necessarily labelled with his name; and libraries might also mix his photographs with images on related subjects by others.

Nesbit's book is therefore of particular interest because the title refers to bound collections of images arranged by Atget, six of which he sold as integral albums to the Bibliothèque Nationale, where they were entered in the catalogue under his name as author and editor. Nesbit presents all the images from these albums in their original order, along with a seventh album that Atget also prepared, but failed to sell, and she analyses their contents within Atget’s larger practice and body of work. In doing so, she is concerned with an apparent contradiction: Atget’s description of his work as providing ‘documents for artists’, together with his disclaimer to Man Ray when the Surrealists wanted to use examples of his work as illustrations of the way unconscious energies animated the everyday: ‘Don’t put my name on it. These are simply documents I make.’ In fact, in other contexts Atget was quite happy to receive a named credit when his images were published as illustrations (as they often were), not least because that might increase his future sales, so one assumes he was specifically dubious about being associated with the Surrealists. In any case, how are we to square this with the description on his business card of ‘Author-Editor’ (the latter word can mean publisher as well as editor in French)? Nesbit sets out to explain precisely what it meant for Atget to create documents as an author and publisher: that is, she considers these terms in their contemporary cultural and legal contexts. 

Atget's Seven Albums is clearly based on years of exhaustive research into the photographer’s papers and images, along with supporting investigations in French records and archives. Nesbit is insistent throughout that the key to understanding Atget is not to be found in treating him as an artist, which was not a synonym for author. He did not see himself as an artist, and nor did any of his customers. And that fact does not diminish or belittle his very real achievements.

This insistence has a wider significance for me. I am a photographer, and I prefer the work of other photographers. I mean that I am suspicious of those who situate themselves as artists first and photographers second. To give some specific examples: I prefer Gabriele Basilico to Thomas Struth; Robert Adams to Ed Ruscha; Atget to the Bechers. The primary orientation of photography should be towards the world, not the art market. I don’t need the word ‘artist’ to justify or dignify my work as a photographer, and Atget is the patron saint of this attitude. (This is about the primary orientation of the work: it doesn’t preclude making money from it or showing it in galleries, though I think it does preclude selling NFTs.)

In several cases, Nesbit is able to demonstrate how specific clients of Atget used particular images as references for their paintings and illustrations. She’s also able to show how images were used as illustrations in their own right in published works by others, with or without credit to Atget – though even with credit the photographs are never treated as anything other than transparent depictions of their subjects. However, the primary interest of Nesbit’s book is in presenting a selection of Atget’s work in terms dictated by the man himself, intended for posterity. The titular seven albums represent only a small fragment of the work Atget created, and his choice to present them as integral collections was dictated partly by opportunity, but they nonetheless show his creative intelligence at work as an editor of his own work.

The albums were all created in the years immediately preceding the First World War (the last was actually edited and presented to the library during the War, but the images were taken in 1913). They are on the following subjects:

Art in Old Paris [L’Art dans le Vieux Paris] 

Parisian Interiors / Early Twentieth Century / Artistic / Picturesque & Bourgeois [Intérieurs Parisiens Debut du XXe Siècle Artistiques Pittoresques & Bourgeois] 

Vehicles in Paris [La Voiture à Paris] 

Trades, shops and shop displays of Paris [Métiers, boutiques et étalages de Paris] 

Signboards and old shops of Paris [Enseignes et vieilles boutiques de Paris] 

Inhabitants of the Zone [Zoniers] 

Fortifications of Paris [Fortifications de Paris]

Art in Old Paris: The first album is the least successful, in every respect, but it is the most fully worked up as an object. It was prepared on Atget's instructions by a printer as a maquette with typeset captions, since Atget hoped to have it published as a book. Nesbit explains the likely reasons why he failed: 

L'Art dans le Vieux Paris provided evidence, concrete evidence of Atget's defects, evidence of how habitually he had come to fidget within the regulation forms of the document, angling his perspectives more than necessary, not always aiming for perfect symmetry, making heavy contrast and uneven lighting his trademarks, allowing traces of later historical time to appear. Repeatedly we see doors left open, signs posted, horse manure in the streets.

Atget lost respectability with the Vieux Parisiens because of these kinds of details. He had not distinguished sufficiently between past achievement and modern debasement. No condemnation of the modern signboard, for instance, was made in the captions, no reference to the crashing incomprehension of the modern bourgeois culture that would sacrifice its past in the name of progress and profit. No effort to suppress or retouch the details of common life like carts and brooms and invocations to wipe one's feet please before climbing the stairs. (110)

Indeed, when Atget’s images were used as illustrations in books by others on Old Paris, Nesbit shows how they were retouched and/or cropped to exclude the details she singles out here (people, carts, etc.).

His captions for this maquette were far more detailed than usual, and even offer some anodyne aesthetic judgements ('remarkable', 'very beautiful'), but they were mostly cribbed from a guidebook: Nesbit also shows that they were sometimes erroneous, which would have been fatal for the book’s reception with an antiquarian audience.

‘Art’ in this album is really the work of craftsmen: that is, the decorative arts and architecture, not painting, although the album includes depictions of sculpture. But, although Nesbit identifies a logic of sorts in this presentation, to me it feels like a pretty random compendium of these historical traces, with a little of everything but no systematic account of anything, and it doesn’t really play to Atget’s strengths. Even though this maquette was neither published nor acquired by the Bibliothèque Nationale, that institution signalled it would be receptive to other work presented in a similar format, which Atget duly provided.

Parisian Interiors / Early Twentieth Century / Artistic / Picturesque & Bourgeois: Atget's work is sometimes compared to Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, which I discussed in a previous post, but there’s a lot of crossover with Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project as well. For example, Benjamin discusses the bourgeois interior, of the sort depicted in this album, which is about the relationship between culture and economy. These are unusual images for Atget, for whom negotiating access to interiors was no doubt extra work, which would have necessitated ingratiating himself with the occupants, and again the survey is less systematic than the title implies. For example, Atget’s own home appears three times, attributed each time to a different fictional occupant and occupation. In the first instance, he is ‘un’artiste dramatique’: this is not in fact a lie, since 'actor' remained his official occupation for several years after he began his photographic practice, and he continued in this line of work until c. 1910. In its last phase, his acting work seems to have consisted primarily of recitations of plays for working-class audiences attending night-school classes.

Nesbit contends that this album demonstrates Atget’s class consciousness by ironically juxtaposing interiors from wealthy occupants with more modest ones, but to me viewing these a century after the images were taken the similarity of the décor is more striking: that is, the more modest interiors seem to aspire to the same aesthetic as the wealthier ones. All the rooms are very cluttered; many have framed prints on the walls. Indeed, Nesbit quotes a contemporary writer, Léon Werth, who also made this point in 1910:

One sees the same furniture everywhere, in the ministries, in the bourgeois homes, in the workers' homes, in the brothels. The salon of le grand 16 resembles the boss's office: the same armchairs, same consoles, same carpets, same Diane de Falguières. An epoch without style? But it all holds together, goes together: stamped furniture from Saint-Antoine and paste jewels from the rue de la Paix. (120)

I know Atget primarily used a wide-angle lens, but I don’t know how wide: my guess would be a 180mm (roughly equal to a 28mm on a 35mm camera). In any case, while this worked fine for external views of architecture, where one usually had the option of taking a step backwards, it wasn’t quite wide enough for some of these views, which sometimes feel a little cramped or awkwardly cropped. I also don’t know if he used flash, but my guess would be no on the basis of the lighting patterns.

Vehicles in Paris: this is an almost comically matter-of-fact survey of carts, carriages and trams, with all the images framed fairly tightly (that is, although there are background details, here they don’t interact in an interesting way with the ostensible subjects). There are no motor cars: these occasionally appear in other Atget images, but, with the possible exception of the trams, everything here is horse-drawn – though the horses themselves are often cropped or absent, since Atget had to photograph stationary examples, so it was more convenient if they were parked. The effect is a little like one of Ed Ruscha’s books of gas stations or parking lots, though Atget's subjects feel closer to the world of the craftsman, simply because most of the vehicles are made of wood. And of course Atget’s intention was quite different to Ruscha's: not to illustrate the idea of taxonomy, but actually to be taxonomic. Ruscha is purposefully useless: Atget always intends to be useful. I wonder for whom these images might still be useful? Set designers for historical dramas perhaps – Atget’s original customers also included such people, though probably not in the case of this album, since they would not have needed to re-create contemporary vehicles. It's a measure of Nesbit's skill as a critic that she's able to identify a coherent vision of society, class and modernity from this unlikely subject matter:

Bicycles and automobiles were not at all involved in Atget's sample: there was a decided lack of pretty or family carriages, the kind of transport most associated with bourgeois life in town. ... Instead the album began with the lower orders of delivery tricks and migrants' trailers, interspersing the occasional taxi-cab but nonetheless remaining at the level of the working class of vehicle through most of its duration. Milk trucks, coal trucks, delivery trucks for Suze, paddy wagons, asphalt mixers, garbage trucks specializing in the kind of waste tactfully called mud. It paid special attention at one point to moving vans, distinguished from one another by the tenant's terme, the quarterly period by which rents were calculated and paid. This was the view of modern transportation. By any account it avoided much of what was considered modern.

Atget cut the voiture from its normal ties to modernity, from the promotional line of the "latest model" and from the concept of traffic. Time was cut off at the present. Traffic had no place. (126)

Trades, shops and shop displays of Paris: As Nesbit points out, the images here are mainly of shop displays, with only a couple of interiors. Some of Atget’s most famous images depict shop windows and mannequins, but most of those date from the 1920s. In all cases, Atget's examples are not artful displays in department stores, which are in fact deliberately excluded. Rather, this album depicts open-air displays, often on tables set up on the pavement in front of shops, or market stalls, many selling food (vegetables, fish). Similarly, there are also plenty of kiosks (for newspapers or flowers). In other words, the featured businesses mostly sell to customers walking past on the street, and they form part of the life of the street. Their goods are not encountered as spectacle, separated from viewers behind glass, but are experienced with other senses besides sight: smell and touch.

Admittedly not everything here fits this pattern. The album also includes a few cabaret or brasserie facades, along with one brothel entrance, and a few interiors: of two different wine merchants, a potter, a bookbinder – and Atget’s own desk advertised as the place of work of a photographer. The inclusion of this last means it’s not fanciful to suggest that Atget identified his own work with the other economic activities depicted here. Certainly he also mainly worked in the street (MacOrlan: 'Atget was a man of the street, an artisan poet of the Paris crossroads').

Nesbit argues convincingly that this album shows Atget constructing his own distinctive vision of Paris, and working against established traditions to do it:

This Paris was neither particularly vieux nor particularly gay. Atget was isolating a third city, a city that wore neither its heart nor its mores on its sleeve, and perhaps because of this it seemed  unsettled, contorted, plagued by a persistent, whistling ostranenie. (132)

We are given to look at these pictures from the ungainly position of the shopper, and even more specifically, the working-class shopper.

The viewer of the album was plunged into the one commcercial world that did not exist for the sole purpose of serving bourgeois need ... (160)

Signboards and old shops of Paris: This is back in Old Paris territory, since many of the shop signs and metal grills shown here were historical (or certainly the names were; many of the signs were likely nineteenth century). But the treatment here is more successful than the first album, even if seemingly quite modest in scope and ambition (Nesbit has more interesting things to say about this album than I have space to summarise here).

Inhabitants of the Zone: The last two albums are the most interesting. The ‘Zone’ was an area outside the city walls of Paris where permanent structures were forbidden. Originally this prohibition was for the purposes of military defence: I imagine to leave clean fields of fire beyond the city’s outlying fortifications. The disastrous outcome of the Franco–Prussian War of 1870–1, during which Paris had been occupied, had revealed the obsolescence of this provision, but it hadn’t been repealed. So although the Zone had many inhabitants, they lived in nominally temporary accommodation. 

This album concentrates on a particular group of Zoniers: the chiffoniers, or rag-pickers, whose activities were an integral part of the daily rubbish disposal and recycling process in Paris, where they had the right to collect and sort certain kinds of material (glass, metal, cloth, etc.). Atget’s photographs show the caravans and shacks where they both lived and worked, along with several depots or intermediate businesses where the sorted rubbish was collected before being fed back into the city’s economy. He doesn’t however provide any detailed captions for any of this, so we are reliant on Nesbit’s commentary for making sense of what we see, and more broadly for understanding the place of the chiffoniers within French culture and the Parisian economy. 

The ragpickers themselves appear intermittently, usually paused from their work, sometimes a little blurred by the long exposure: that is, Atget doesn’t attempt to depict their activities directly for the most part, still less to make candid portraits. But these are fascinating and powerful pictures, which Nesbit convincingly argues have a political subtext. They certainly lack the kind of comforting framing of Paris After Dark, in which the captions assert that everything and everyone has a place, and therefore everything is as it should be.

Fortifications of Paris: This album also depicts the Zone, but here concentrating on the undeveloped scrubland directly abutting the walls and defences. This unstructured space was very different to the urban locations Atget normally photographed, which had been densely settled and occupied and redeveloped over hundreds of years. 

My earlier comparison between the vehicles album and Ed Ruscha was a little facetious, but here the images genuinely do seem to anticipate the New Topographics trend of the 1970s and 80s, and in particular Lewis Baltz’s projects on San Quentin Point and Candlestick Point from the 1980s, which similarly depict degraded semi-rural environments just outside the city limits. Most of Atget’s images in this album do show aspects of the city defences, but often the fortifications are relegated to the background, and the foreground is instead filled with uncultivated brownfields, which are punctuated with semi-official or desire paths trod out by regular city visitors. These compositions often focus on trees as organising features. 

There are also several images of railway tracks and junctions, which exited Paris at several points, or of culverts where polluted water trickled out. Many of the images are quite abstract, for example the one reproduced above, which works as a series of slashing diagonals and v-shapes. In a body of work so obsessed with the accumulated traces of culture and history, these images are quite startlingly different.

Although Nesbit’s book is in many ways an exemplary academic study, it has some issues worth mentioning. As with most humanities writing from the 1990s, you need some tolerance for Foucault, although his The Archaeology of Knowledge is undeniably relevant for a study of a maker of documents for institutional clients. On the whole, this is a well-written book: it's clear and thorough when Nesbit needs to establish a point of fact; it's stylish and sophisticated when advancing an argument. But it does sometimes lapse into academic-ese, and there are a few too many sentences I found impossible to parse even after several readings. It sometimes has the typical academic habit of talking around a crucial point without ever trying to provide a clear definition, as if the question is too profound or complex to address directly. And on a related but different point, it doesn't always define its terms clearly. For example, the idea that Atget's images contain 'technical signs', a phrase that recurs constantly but is never defined. From the context it seems to mean something like 'the ostensible or apparent justification for the image's existence in relation to a particular, technical purpose', e.g. the inclusion of a shop sign in a street scene to enable its sale to an Old Paris specialist. But the clumsiness of this attempted definition itself illustrates the problem here.

It’s instructive to note how a study like this required a great deal of financial support to enable publication, but even with that support, the image reproduction is ... fine. It's good for this kind of book – actually, it's about the same as my book! – but it's inferior to the Steidl editions we've discussed previously, which use duotone or tritone printing. Here the paper seems to be coated, and the content of the images is reproduced accurately, but the printing is likely black ink only with a single pass through the press, which means the images come out a little flat, with thin blacks and crushed highlights. It does however have a huge number of illustrations, including large-scale reproductions of selected Atget images as figures accompanying the text, along with a wide variety of other visual sources for comparison. 

By contrast, the images from the seven albums are presented in appendices, four to a page: that is, much smaller than the actual negatives (and sometimes too small to make out the details mentioned in Nesbit’s commentary). They're also on a different paper stock, with a glossier coating, but the advantage of this is wasted because they're printed darker, which obliterates a lot of the shadow detail. But given how much is included here, and what an enormous labour of compilation and permissions it represents, it’s hard to resent the understandable compromises made in the book's production. Less forgivable is the reluctance to translate key passages from French: sometimes there’s a translation (even if confined to the endnotes), and sometimes there isn’t. People who aren’t fluent in French are interested in reading about Atget too!

This book is now out of print, and second-hand copies are expensive. As an alternative, I’d still recommend the Phaidon 55 on Atget by Gerry Badger, which is much smaller and cheaper second-hand than Atget's Seven Albums – especially since it’s now clear to me how much Badger’s image selection and commentary both draw on Nesbit's work.

As a final point, I'd note that, while I feel I understand Atget's work far better after reading this book, I'm not sure it will have much direct effect on my own photographic practice going forward. Whereas there are half a dozen phrases in Badger's commentary in the Phaidon 55 that I come back to again and again. E.g. 'the sense of space in an Atget image, even one describing an enclosed area, is usually expansive rather than restrictive, offering a choice of ways by which the viewer may enter or leave.' (Badger, 50)

Notes on Photography: The Uncanny Double and Photography

We should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope, or a photographic apparatus, or something of the kind. On that basis, psychical locality will correspond to a place inside the apparatus at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being. 

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams 

Freud compares consciousness to photography several times. And in his essay on the uncanny, he famously analyses ‘The Sandman’, a tale by E. T. A. Hoffman named after a mythical figure who steals children’s eyes. In the story, the character who represents the Sandman has two identities: Coppola and Coppelius. In the former guise, he’s an optician, who also makes eyes for automata; in the latter, an alchemist. In Italian, coppo means ‘eye-socket’, while coppella means ‘assay-crucible’: a white-hot orifice, overflowing with molten light.

Self-knowledge is a prize I pursue through a labyrinth, towards its centre, where I wait for myself. I’m both Oedipus and the sphinx; Theseus and the minotaur. But who lays out the labyrinth? Who carries out the act of repression that banishes an idea to its underworld? In other words, who maps the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious? He’s a censor who controls access to consciousness. He’s an invisible homunculus who watches a screen inside my head at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being. He’s my double, who, in the essay on the uncanny, troubles Freud in the form of mannequins and automata, and is initially identified as an avatar of the id: primordial narcissism, which seeks, in duplication, a defence against annihilation.

As is often the way with Freudian concepts, and the effect is especially appropriate here, the double also stands for its opposite (just as unheimlich may also mean heimlich): having once been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death. In this guise, it doesn’t affirm my existence; it usurps my place. And is thereby revealed as an avatar of the superego, which performs the function of self-observation and self-criticism, and which In the pathological case of delusions of observation ... becomes isolated, split off from the ego, and discernible to the clinician.

The double is the child of both Coppelius and Coppola: alchemy and optics. He’s my shadow, and my reflection. That is to say, the double is the child of photography, which uses alchemy and optics to combine shadows and reflections. Photography is an attempt to conjure and bind this hidden double, the ghost in the machine. I force him to manifest inside the frame, like a genie released from a bottle. He escapes: not out of the image, but into the image. 

Photographic Inspirations: Chris Killip, In Flagrante (1988)

'I'm not interested in being cynical. I'm interested in being implicated.' Chris Killip

Chris Killip was part of the last generation of documentary photographers for whom black-and-white film still seemed like the natural choice for presenting their work. When did that change? Colour photography took over the amateur world of snapshots in the 60s, but the worlds of art photography and documentary lagged behind. In those fields, there were pioneers in the 1970s who worked in colour, but the definitive break was probably the publication of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency – not only for its use of colour, but also for the way it changed the whole conception of the proper relation between photographer and subject. Indeed, Killip himself has used colour for more recent work, but his photographic education was in the 1960s, and his first major project was carried out in isolation on the Isle of Man, before he moved in the mid-70s to NE England, the region that most of the imagery published in In Flagrante depicts. So his habits were formed long before the book's publication, and he has never set out to be an innovator. 

Since the major theme of the book is the consequences of deindustrialisation, there is a certain thematic rightness about its monochrome presentation: a mode associated historically with industrial modernism now used to depict its obsolescence. If that formulation sounds too abstract, we could put it more concretely: the book aims to depict working-class experience in a context where traditional working-class jobs were in decline. It also explores connections between that experience and the wider political culture and discourse (through pictures of robes for civic offices, the Miners' Strike, etc.). As Gerry Badger has observed, the book is concerned with community, but addresses this theme primarily by depicting more or less isolated individuals:

It is about how a sense of community is important, even to those on the edge. Time and again, the pain on the faces of those who have no community of any kind, who have lost their sense of community, or whom community has failed, is all too clear.

If Goldin's approach is a mode of cultural history, then Killip's book is social and economic history.

One of the reasons black and white had remained predominant among professionals through the 1960s was quite simply that newspapers were printed in black-and-white. That also remained the case into the 1980s, but the scope to publish larger documentary projects had narrowed, and insofar as there was a place to publish those in the context of journalism, it was in colour, in weekend newspaper supplements. But for a photographer like Killip, increasingly one had to make one's way in the gallery world, with book publication as the eventual goal. It had taken him several years to produce his first book, on his Isle of Man work.

 
In fact, Killip’s career is remarkable for the extent to which he waited years for the right moment or context to display work. In Flagrante includes images taken throughout Killip’s stay in the North-East, during which he worked on several separate and distinct projects: an investigation into a small, temporary group of people who lived in caravans and attempted to survive by gathering and selling waste coal from a beach; a depiction of a working-class fishing village called Skinningrove; and a series shot in a punk nightclub. But only the first is sampled extensively in the book. There are only two images included from the large body of work on Skinningrove, and another two from the nightclub series (or possibly only one: one of the concert images may have been taken elsewhere). In fact, this is a very tight, punchy edit, including only forty-nine photographs, the lowest total of any of the books we've considered.

The series from the nightclub was eventually published a couple of years ago, and I think other monographs are on the way. Killip also reviews a larger selection from the Skinningrove work in this short documentary from 2013 directed by Michael Almereyda:

 

Killip's commentary for this film makes it clear that there isn't such a large gulf separating him from Goldin. Indeed, he chose Mark Holborn to help him edit and design In Flagrante, precisely because Holborn had done the same job for The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which Killip greatly admired. And certainly his approach to documentary was quite different to that of Walker Evans or Robert Frank – rather, it followed the pioneering example of Danny Lyon, whose The Bikeriders (1968), about the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle club, initiated a way of working in which the photographer depicted 'communities from the inside, making them an integral part of his life for the duration of the project, and even afterwards'. 

Killip was from the same background as the working-class communities he documented – his father owned a pub on the Isle of Man, and Killip was expelled from school at sixteen (even though he was appointed as a professor at Harvard later in life). Instead he learned his craft as an apprentice to a commercial photographer. And like Lyon, he didn’t just visit the communities he depicted: he spent years getting to know them, years working with them, and he remained in contact with his subjects for years or even decades afterwards. For me, the key anecdote in the Skinningrove film is this one about the death of young David by drowning at sea:

At the funeral ... young David's mother asked me did I have any photographs of David? And I actually said no. And then at home in bed late that night, I woke up with a start and realised the woman wasn't asking me, did I have any photographs that I wanted to exhibit? She was asking me, did I have any pictures of her dead son? So I got out of bed and started looking at my contact sheets, and two weeks later, I cam back to the village and gave her an album. I think it had thirty-six photographs of David in it, from when he was thirteen to when he was seventeen.

One photographer reports Killip asking him, ‘Do you ever visit the people you photograph without a camera?’ A question that wouldn’t make much sense either to Walker Evans or to Goldin, although for different reasons. 

Killip's photographs are not only the culmination of a particular tradition: they also represent an extraordinary technical achievement. They were all taken on a 4x5 large-format camera, borrowing a technique from Weegee, in that Killip often used flash, even in daylight. This allowed him to shoot handheld, presumably by presetting the exposure and focal distance to match the flash parameters, and sticking to subjects positioned within that range. Evans – and most other photographers, including myself – usually use large-format cameras to photograph architecture or landscape. Killip instead primarily used it to photograph life in flux: people in the midst of unfolding – and sometimes dynamic – situations. In the 1980s, this self-imposed task must have seemed quixotic, but, as the example of Weegee suggests, it was once the norm for press photographers to shoot handheld on 4x5 cameras, so it was far from unprecedented. Because of the large negatives and the even lighting, the results are extraordinarily rich in detail, and thereby portray the full, intense human presence of the people shown in a way that enlargements from 35mm negatives just can't compete with. If the supposed justification for the roughness of Robert Frank's imagery was that it was an inevitable consequence of the attempt to catch life on the fly, then Killip gives the lie to that claim.

The design of the first edition of In Flagrante is straightforward, so one imagines that Holborn's main contribution was with regard to the selection and sequencing of the images. There is one significant difference to the other books we've been discussing: the majority of spreads feature one image, but most are enlarged over the gutter rather than confined to the recto. These split images are all in landscape format, but some spreads, particular those with an image in portrait format, have two images, one per page (these doubled spreads are all at the end of the book). 

There's a short note from Killip at the beginning, which acknowledges the relatively privileged position from which he worked:

To the people in these photographs I am superfluous, my life does not depend on their struggle, only my hopes. This is a subjective book about my time in England. I take what isn't mine and I covet other peoples lives. The photographs can tell you more about me than about what they describe. The book is a fiction about metaphor.

The last sentence is a curious statement,  which acknowledges the undeniably fictive – that is, constructed, structured – nature of all art, but feels like an attempt to pre-empt then-current postmodern modes of criticism. There are two isolated images in the prelims before the sequence proper begins, one of which shows an amateur painter on a windy beach, as if to acknowledge the common basis of his and Killip's representational projects. It might also be worth noting that a selection of Killip's images was published prior to the book in a 1986 issue of Aperture magazine on the theme of 'Fiction and Metaphor' – an issue that also included excerpts from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. 

One should not read Killip's disclaimer as an admission of outright invention though, as in Love on the Left Bank. In fact, beyond the general opening statement, In Flagrante lays out the photographs with no accompanying text at all – not even captions. At the end of the book, there is an afterword by John Berger and Sylvia Grant, but even that doesn't refer directly to the images. Berger is a fine writer, including on photography, but his and Grant's contribution really doesn't feel essential here, although it does attempt to expand on Killip's opening statement:

Fiction, I think, because it is a story, not just information. About a human tragedy not an accident. Metaphor because it is through metaphor that, at first and last, we seek for meaning.

In 2015, Steidl published a second edition of In Flagrante, with a number of changes requested by Killip. The opening disclaimer/statement was omitted, as was the original afterword, along with one of the introductory photographs. It also removed two other framing photographs at the beginning and end of the sequence proper in which Killip's cast shadow intrudes into images of the same scene, showing a woman seemingly unconscious at a bus stop – images that are not only uncharacteristically brutal, but also uncharacteristically reflexive. Perhaps, like the original disclaimer/statement, they were also included to head off objections that all documentary work is by definition similarly compromised. 

The second edition instead added three other images at various points within the sequence to replace the omissions. At the end of the book, there was a new note stating that it covers a period in which Britain was governed by several named prime ministers (presumably to refute the too easy characterisation of the subject matter as Thatcherite Britain). And finally there was now a list of simple captions with accompanying thumbnail versions of the images.

 

The digital printing in the Steidl edition seems to capture a longer tonal range and have sharper edge definition than the analogue first edition (I suspect this may be the case more generally with digital reprints, e.g. of The New West as well). In addition, the pages are now bound in landscape format instead of portrait, and the images are all presented one per spread on the recto, in the classic American Photographs manner. Interestingly, the few vertical images are now printed rotated on their sides, as in the old-fashioned mode of the first edition of Paris After Dark.  

Doug Dubois regrets the decision not to retain the more active use of the gutter in the first edition, from which he learned that:

You can shift an image wherever you need—left, right, or off-center—so that the gutter bisects the photograph precisely where you want it, not simply where it lands relative to the page border. (While hardly an innovation unique to Killip or this book, this was a revelation for me.) .... I miss the choreography of the first edition; the engagement of the photographs with the gutter contributed to a restless dynamic that carried through the sequence of images. 

Given that Killip was for many years a professor of photography at Harvard, it's unsurprising to discover he was also an eloquent interpreter of other people's photographs: for example, in this short discussion of an image by Walker Evans.

Together with the South African photographer David Goldblatt, with whom he has much in common, Killip is probably the photographer I admire the most. And yet I’d be hard-pressed to point to any picture of mine that demonstrates his influence (unlike Evans, or even Goldin). In large part that’s because my photographs on the streets in Venice are of people I don’t know and never spoke to. Indeed I can’t imagine emulating Killip’s approach in this regard: the idea of approaching strangers more directly, let alone trying to persuade them to let me into their lives on an ongoing basis, fills me with horror. My photographs instead authentically depict my experience of the world at that point: as a potentially hostile place filled with anonymous and inscrutable individuals who it is not possible to know, who can only be observed in passing. And indeed that was and is the nature of contemporary Venice: most of the people present in the city on any given day don’t live there, and won’t be there the following week. On the other hand, I photographed a city whose history I had already spent years researching and writing about. So in that sense I was fully embedded in the world I photographed, which I also depicted over a period of several years.

 
I took the photographs featured in Push Process from 2002–5 (with a couple of outliers from 2008). But my research into photographic history stopped at about 1990. Since my project was explicitly a historical one, looking backwards, I didn’t feel the need to engage beyond that cut-off point. So in a sense Killip represented the natural end point of photographic history for me. In other words, while he chose to use black-and-white film because he still saw it as part of a living tradition – indeed, he didn't really choose it at all; it was simply the mode in which one presented serious documentary work – for me that choice was already a conscious and deliberate anachronism.

Hence my posts on the inspirations for Push Process end here – apart from a coda in which I'll return to the 1910s in the form of a review of a seminal book on the work of Eugène Atget.

Photographic Representations of Venice: Giorgio Lotti, Venezia Muore [Venice is Dying], 1970

This image, of the interior of the Misericordia with frescoes by Veronese, c. 1968-70, is from a polemical work by Giorgio Lotti entitled Venice is Dying, which was published in 1970, shortly after the record flood in 1966 had raised awareness of Venice's vulnerability. 

Lotti’s denunciatory rhetoric is emphasised by high-contrast, high-grain printing. I have highlighted this particular image because its subject is consistent with my own interests, but, in the context of Lotti’s book, it is atypical, since he rarely depicts fully defined spaces, whether interior or exterior. Instead, he isolates – one might say he fetishises – details of decaying statues and facades.

There is no sense of a coherent urban space, because Lotti’s intent is to stress fragmentation and disintegration. The only photographs in which people appear - and also the only photographs in which the idea of community is invoked - are the final ones in the book, in which protestors are gathered together in a neutral space that can be depicted as detached from the urban fabric: that is, in boats on the Grand Canal. 

I do not share Lotti’s pessimism, but more importantly, I do not agree with the basis of his critique. The first image above begs a number of questions, to which Lotti does not provide an answer. For example, where should Venetians install basketball courts, if not here? How should they inhabit their city, and make responsible use of it?

Extra Images From Push Process: 5

Following on from Thursday's post on Nan Goldin, here are some of the images I took in Venice on 35mm slide film. None of these really work in black and white:

Photographic Inspirations: Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986)

For Chris Boot, the publication of Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in 1986 represented a watershed moment in the history of photography:

It was like the old values of reportage—of the detached observer, so to speak—were signaled at an end by Nan and her diaryesque work, her snapshot aesthetic, her relationship with her subjects. …. I’m contrasting a scenario where, for a period, it was what photographers photographed that mattered, changing to one where who they were and their photographic attitude was what mattered. And what mattered to them was that value was placed on their work in the gallery, museum, and among collectors, rather than just in the media. It was a major shift. 

For Boot then, the most important quality of the work was the way in which each image explicitly situates the photographer in relation to the subject. In other words, Goldin is an integral part of the world she depicts. It’s the opposite of the kind of attempted self-erasure that’s been a constant theme of the earlier books I’ve discussed. As Goldin puts it in the introduction to the Ballad:

The instant of photographing, instead of creating distance, is a moment of clarity and emotional connection for me. There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I’m not crashing; this is my party.  

In fact, Goldin conceptualises photography in terms of touching as much as looking. From an interview a few years after the Ballad was published:

 
For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody – it’s a caress. I’m looking with a warm eye, not a cold eye. I’m not analyzing what’s going on – I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.

For me this was a revolutionary idea, one that is echoed several times in the text of Push Process.  

There’s an even more obvious difference to the other works we’ve been reviewing. Goldin’s work is in colour: in fact, all the images in the book were taken on 35mm slide film (or almost all – a couple presented in square format may have been shot on medium-format). So not only colour, but vivid, saturated colour. Most of the images were also shot at night or in interior locations, using flash. So they are mostly lit uniformly and frontally, and without any of the variations in the tones of natural light prized by more traditional art and landscape photographers. As Goldin explained:

 
I didn’t have any knowledge of light, consciously – none – … I lived in the dark, I lived by night. I had no idea that light changed in the course of a day. I didn’t spend enough time outside to know that. …. All those pictures, from 1978 to 1988, during those first ten years in New York – were all taken inside. …. in those years I thought available light meant whatever light was available – like whatever light bulb was on, or whatever red light lit an after-hours bar.

 
So everything appears caught in the headlights, exaggerated and isolated from a wider context, part of a private world.

 
Another difference with all the work we’ve considered so far is that most of the images were shot with a wide-angle lens, though in the context of the 70s and 80s (or even the 60s) that is less distinctive. But it means everything’s close in, and the frame always feels full, with subjects plunging towards or away from us.

 
The example of Evans and Frank (reiterated by books like The New West) had suggested that ‘serious’ photobooks presented the work with one image per spread: each image was encountered as an independent statement before one considered its place in the larger whole. But this approach remains relatively unusual in the history of photobooks, not least because it doesn't make efficient use of paper. Goldin instead followed the – more obvious and pragmatic – model of Brassaï (and many other books), with one image per page, and images thus (mostly) arranged in pairs, with the exception that the several individual ‘chapters’ of Goldin’s work are separated by a blank page, so that each commences with a spread with a single image on the recto.

The thematic unity of these chapters is fairly obvious and often quite straightforward: a sequence of images of heterosexual couples, followed by one of women alone, then men alone, men with other men, a short subsequence showing the traumatic consequences of desire, which is followed in the same chapter by images of women with other women; and so on. The relationships between pairs are often equally clear: two facing images of women in bathrooms (each room with a different colour cast), two of women looking at their reflections in mirrors, or two of men lost in contemplation. Usually, the pairings complement or echo each other, rather than contradicting or contrasting – this is perhaps in keeping with Goldin's affirmative goal of celebrating her subjects. 

The larger subject, as this summary suggests, is not just sexuality and desire, but all aspects of the various relations between the sexes, including male-male and female-female friendships. And more broadly still, gender roles and expectations, and the way these are performed, often in destructive or even violent ways. Presenting the images in pairs therefore makes sense in the context of a book about the various forms of sociability and social intercourse. The images don't exist in isolation: they speak to one another.

Although the table of contents does not title the chapters, it splits them into shorter subsections, each named with a song title, which Goldin uses to point to various aspects of this larger theme, which she also writes about in the introduction to the Ballad:

 
As children, we’re programmed into the limitations of gender distinction: little boys to be fighters, little girls to be pretty and nice. But as we grow older, there’s a self-awareness that sees gender as a decision, as something malleable. You can play with the traditional options – dressing up, cruising in cars, the tough posturing – or play against the roles, by displaying your tenderness or toughness to contradict stereotypes. When I was fifteen, the perfect world seemed a place of total androgyny, where you wouldn’t know a person’s gender until you were in bed with him or her. I’ve since realized that gender is much deeper than style. Rather than accept gender distinction, the point is to redefine it.

 
The book’s Wikipedia page defines the milieu as ‘a portion of New York City's No wave music and art scene, the post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the heroin subculture of the Bowery neighborhood, and Goldin's personal family and love life.’ There are occasional excursions away from New York to London and Germany or Boston, the last where Goldin went to art school and began the project before moving to New York. But while the book includes gay and transsexual experience, at this point in Goldin's publishing career the focus is more on heterosexual desire and homosocial friendship.

 
In any case, the drama is heightened by taking place in the context of a defined subculture. Luc (now Lucy) Sante, a fellow member of this world, described its dynamics:

 
One took drugs for fun, or maybe to stop up grief or despair, but most often to build a personality that could be taken out into the night. People who in other times and places were bookish or mousy or invisible could fleetingly become stars, if only in their own minds. Drugs were an inner makeup. …. [Nan] valued emotional honesty, pursuing it way beyond many people’s limits …. To hang around with Nan was to enter a state of continuous emergency, to be witness if not party to unremittingly intense confidences, confrontations, negotiations, catharses of all sizes.

 
This is also the longest book we’ve encountered. It includes 127 images. Compared, for example, with eighty-seven in American Photographs or sixty-two in Paris After Dark. The body of work of which the book is one iteration originally began as a much longer slide show, accompanied by a homemade soundtrack compilation. So not only do the images depict people attempting to create an authentic performance of the self, the presentation of the work was initially a performance too, presented in bars, clubs or galleries as opportunities arose. The slideshow was constantly evolving: no single presentation was definitive, just as there is no definitive or final truth in the images. Goldin explained:

 
It’s just like a film, really. In a way, the Ballad is a book of film. The slide show is really the original work. Having the narrative voice of the soundtrack gives it larger context than just pictures of my friends. That’s where the relationships between the personal and the universal come in, where I can make more political points about sexual politics, about gender, about relationships. That comes from the juxtaposition of images with narrative, with lyrics. That’s what I’m frustrated about with single images. It’s a way of owning and clarifying my voice and of directing the images, so the viewer can see the images.

 
The unending succession of images in the book, page after page, mimics the experience of the slideshows, and makes it feel very immersive. For the book’s duration, you’re part of this enclosed, largely nocturnal existence with the characters. 

 
Goldin says her early influences, before she was much aware of photographic history, were all from cinema and fashion photography – the latter also concerned with dramatised self-presentation. But one can also place the Ballad in a photographic tradition including Brassaï’s demi-monde imagery, Weegee, Diane Arbus, Larry Clark’s Tulsa, and, above all (at least from my point of view), Ed van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank. One might also add the compulsive self-documentation of Warhol’s Factory by various photographers. As with Warhol's work, one reason for the lasting influence of the Ballad is the way it seems to anticipate Instagram culture. 

This is the cover image from the Ballad, 'Nan and Brian in bed, New York City, 1983'. It is a self-portrait, but it is also a portrait of a relationship. Behind Nan on the wall is another photograph of Brian, which shows him in a similar pose to the one he adopts in the foreground here. It was probably taken on the same bed. The version of Brian who looks out from the print is the only figure who appears to meet the camera's gaze, which has here been separated from the gaze of its operator, just as Brian's gaze has been separated from that of his image within the scene. The ‘real’ Brian stares off to one side, also failing to meet Nan’s gaze.

Here, then, the different layers of representation clearly play off each other, but all affirm the coherence of an identity or persona, which is made up precisely of the play between these various layers, and realised in the context of the relationship with another, even if that relationship seems to be defined by a series of unanswered questions: that is, of unreturned gazes (even the image of Brian on the wall only appears to be looking at us).

All this sounds – and is – completely different to the monochrome images in Push Process, which take their cue from the tradition of Evans. But in fact I spent quite a lot of time in-between working on my black-and-white images in Venice also shooting a parallel, sometimes overlapping project on 35mm colour slide film (a technology that was just as obsolete in 2003 as black-and-white negative film). Many of these images were of people I knew; many were also shot outside Venice – in Sydney, Glasgow, Liverpool, Cambridge – while I was travelling, returning to old haunts. As usual, I shot mainly at night, but unlike Goldin, I didn’t use flash, and since the fastest slide films were/are ISO400, the results were often blurred, out of focus and/or marked by lurid colour casts from artificial light sources (flash is balanced to appear neutral on film, so generally eliminates these).

 
Overall, I’d say this project was a failure, in part because it was so obviously derivative – but also because I didn’t have access to the kind of relationships or context that give Goldin’s work its force. But here’s a couple of the stronger images:

So although I tried to assimiliate the example of Goldin into my practice in the early 2000s, none of that work is included in Push Process. Goldin is nonetheless alluded to as an implicit point of comparison for my protagonist, in that a second photographer character in the novel, Merlo, takes images of her friends in Venice, and refers to Goldin (and Ed van der Elsken) as her inspirations. I therefore used the descriptions of Merlo's behaviour to model a different way of thinking about photography.

Photographic Representations of Venice: Fulvio Roiter

One man almost single-handedly defined the photographic image of Venice in the late twentieth century: Fulvio Roiter (1926–2016). His output during a long career was prolific and varied, but he repeatedly returned to Venice, on which he published an astonishing fourteen books (I surveyed his publications up to 2002 – there are probably several others by now).[1]

Over the years, his approach remained consistently simple and direct. He used 35mm film and worked without flash or other non-ambient lighting. From his third book on Venice onwards, he worked exclusively in colour, using slide film to increase contrast and saturation. Since these films are slow and therefore difficult to use in low light, and Roiter usually shot handheld, most of his colour images have shallow depth-of-field (that is, a narrow area in focus), an effect that Roiter skilfully uses to isolate subjects from the background or to create unexpected emphases.

Roiter was strongly influenced by the humanist photojournalism of the 1950s, the period in which his career began. From his first book about Venice and throughout his work, cats are content, children are playful, and tourists are for the most part respectful, appreciative and enthusiastic.[2] In an interview towards the end of his life, he underlined his continuing hostility towards ‘critical’ photography, referring specifically to Oliviero Toscani, who was commissioned in 1999 to draw attention to the problems created in Venice by mass tourism.

[Y]ou do not see Venice in his advertising campaign. There are two dogs mating, sewer rats ... New York too has dogs mating and sewer rats ... They say it’s “a way of drawing attention to problems” … “Problems” is a word for intellectuals that is fashionable nowadays. I don't photograph them.

Jean-Michel Folon describes Roiter's philosophy on the dust jacket of Living Venice:  

He has not taken pictures of TV antennae or of automobile wreckage; he has not taken pictures of war. The 20th century does not exist for Fulvio. He moves across the world and doesn’t see its folly. From Umbria to Brazil he goes on his way in search of a lost secret, in search of a light, in search of a warm human touch, in search of an eye in whose glance one may read – innocence newly found. 

Roiter’s attitude is also revealed in his comments on technique, which recall the programmatic statements of Henri Cartier-Bresson – for example:

To photograph a wonderful masker from up close …  is not difficult; on the contrary, it is all too easy. The difficult thing, in fact the true task … [is to obtain in fleeting circumstances] images of immediate and rigorous visual force. … The eyes and the camera are [held] in a state of constant readiness [from the unpaginated afterword to Carnevale a Venezia: tra maschera e ragione]. 

Roiter produced no less than four publications on Carnival, and unfortunately, many of the images contained therein fail his own criterion of judgement. But since these books are – pace Roiter – exemplary of certain 'problems' in the representation of Venice, I have chosen them as case studies. They are: Carnevale a Venezia: tra maschera e ragione (Carnival in Venice: between the mask and reason, 1981); Carnevale (1985); Magic Venice in Carnival (1987); and Venezia in Maschera (Venice Masked, 1995).

The first problem is that these books usually contain introductions and/or commentary written by others – as indeed is the case for all Roiter's books on Venice. The text may refer to the image content in the sense of identifying particular buildings featured in the photographs, but it frequently ignores Roiter’s visual emphases: i.e. the text draws attention to features that Roiter has placed out of focus. In the later books, the introductory texts do not refer to Roiter at all.[3] Instead, the writers present cursory reviews of Venetian history and/or the history of Carnival, with scattered quotations, purple prose and incompetent translations in French, English and/or German.[4] Certainly none of the writers make any attempt to review the history of photographic representations of the city, or to place Roiter in it, although a few make casual references to famous painters.[5] The nadir is reached in Magic Venice in Carnival, in which the text is by Carlo della Corte and a translator who wisely chooses to remain anonymous.

Inside the Whirlpool of the Carnival of Venice rather than tiring oneself one is brought to life, if only artificially, by the thousands of visitors. These visitors, perhaps in a confused way, continue to imagine the carnival as handed down to us by Gentile Bellini with his processional train ablaze with colours, or through Carpaccio’s image of gondolas coloured like dodgem cars. The world-wide success of Venice was due to this incredible coup d’oeil, this sea of colours arriving in St Mark’s Square like a whirlwind and then spreading everywhere, impregnating water and walls.

This city was, perhaps, the most colourful in the world, and the whole world wanted it this way, rushing there, forever prolonging the moment when, like a demiurge, the carnival filled it with the most dazzling of colours.

History is invoked, but in an indiscriminate and perfunctory manner, and only insofar as it underwrites the writer’s overinsistent evocation of a ‘whirlwind’ of colour. A diligent reader might note that anyone whose image of Carnival derives from the work of Bellini and Carpaccio would indeed be ‘confused’, since the paintings referred to depict religious processions – the polar opposite of the Carnival experience. Clearly such niceties are both beyond the grasp of the author and besides the point here.

With few exceptions, Roiter’s Carnival books concentrate on isolated human subjects or small groups of subjects, mostly young adults, who almost invariably wear a costume or a mask. The few attempts to render crowds are impressionistic and show them as homogeneous masses of indistinguishable individuals. There is no literal overlap of images, but thematically the Carnival books are monotonous. Every new photograph asserts the same thing, over and over again. There is no evolution or inflection.

Ivo Prandin, author of the introduction to Venice Masked, urges us not to seek:  

the real Masks in the tumultuous carnival crowd in St. Mark’s square: you may not find them in the multitude. Instead, we should look in remote calli, silent and shady banks, little bridges under which a gondola slowly slides away, like human life wandering in the city maize [sic] [p. 8]. 

The problem with this argument is that thirty-five of the forty-six images in Venice Masked are identifiably located in and around Piazza San Marco. Similarly, in Carnevale a Venezia: tra maschera e ragione, if we exclude the sixteen plates of theatrical performances, twenty-seven of the remaining thirty-seven images appear to have been taken in San Marco or its immediate environs. Of the other ten, six are obviously staged compositions, which were probably set in quieter areas because it would have been impossible to keep the background clear elsewhere. Another two (not by Roiter) are shots of boats, taken from a distance on telephoto lenses.  

It would be foolish to object to Carnival images on the basis that they are posed, since posing is the whole point. What matters is the quality of the direction and the acting, the complexity of the role assumed, and the intensity of the connection between photographer and subject – as in Ed van der Elsken's Love on the Left Bank, or Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Roiter’s technical prowess has never been in doubt, but in these works his script and direction are simplistic. The drama rarely amounts to more than empty affirmation (‘Look at me!’) and Roiter does not actively engage his subjects.[6] To be more precise, he never challenges the adequacy or credibility of their performance. Nor do they challenge him. In Roiter’s Carnival, no-one is ugly, tired, drunk, miserable, hostile, uncooperative or even indifferent. Worse, for the most part Roiter is not interested in the backstage aspects of the experience; that is, in how the illusion is created and sustained.[7] 

The extent of the lost opportunity is suggested by the few images of children, which stand out precisely because the subjects have not yet learnt how they are supposed to respond to a camera.[8] Some of the shots of professional theatrical performances are also impressive, but for the opposite reason: that is, they show people capable of fully immersing themselves in their roles. 

Everyone has to make a living, and Roiter’s Carnival books probably tell us more about the relationship between the publishing and tourism industries than they do about his individual photographic vision. I remain hopeful that an intelligently edited retrospective of his larger career will reveal an artist who understood both the nature of his own talent and the history of the city he loved.[9]

[1] Venise à fleur d’eau (1954); Venezia Viva (Venice is Alive, 1973); Essere Venezia (Living Venice, 1977); La Laguna (The Lagoon, 1978); L’Oriente di Venezia (The Venetian Orient, 1980); Carnevale a Venezia: tra maschera e ragione (Carnival in Venice: between the mask and reason, 1981); Carnevale (1985); Magic Venice in Carnival (1987); La Mia Venezia (My Venice, 1994); Venezia in Maschera (Venice Masked, 1995); Il Palazzo Ducale (The Ducal Palace, 1997); Venezia 1891–2001 (2000); Il Lido (with Lou Embo, 2001); Burano: Isola del merletto e del colore (Burano: Island of Lace and Colour, 2002). There are likely other publications – I doubt that Roiter himself could have recited them all from memory.  

[2] With the partial exception of the second book, Venezia Viva, which may have been intended by the publisher and editorial team as a riposte to Giorgio Lotti’s Venezia Muore [Venice is Dying, 1970]. Venezia Viva has extensive commentary, and the images touch upon themes of pollution, conservation and restoration, but the best are informal portraits of gondoliers, labourers and children playing.  

[3] Venezia 1891–2001 is an exception to this rule among the other titles. It contains an illuminating introduction by Italo Zannier, who is an expert on the history of photography in Venice (and whose various publications were crucial aids to my own research). Venezia Viva and Carnevale a Venezia: tra maschera e ragione also contain brief, general descriptions of collaboration between Roiter and the writer(s). Also, Roiter’s two most successful books on Venice, Essere Venezia and La Mia Venezia, are at least graced with texts by competent writers. 

[4] Roiter often contributes a brief preface or afterword to his books, and/or provides a table of technical information, which lists lenses, exposures and films used for each shot, along with locations (although not dates - significantly, since I suspect the later books recycle earlier images from his archives). 

[5] Again, the notable exception to this rule among Roiter's other publications is Italo Zanier's text for Venezia 1891–2001.

[6] His reliance on telephoto lenses is telling, since they allow him to photograph at a safe distance from his subjects. Since Roiter helpfully supplies technical information on each shot, it is possible to calculate the proportion of images taken on such a lens in the four books on Carnival. Taking the books in chronological order, this figure is 70%, 80%, 50% and 66% respectively. (Perhaps I am being a little unfair here, since, for the purposes of this calculation, I count a 50mm lens as a moderate telephoto, but many shots were taken on significantly longer lenses.)  

[7] There are only two images that show ‘technical support staff’: a theatre wardrobe assistant in plate 32 of Carnevale a Venezia: tra maschera e ragione, and a maskseller in plate 27 of Carneval. In addition, there are a couple of images showing subjects applying make-up, but in both cases they are adding final touches and are thus already fully ‘in character’.  

[8] For example, the child distracted by a firework in plate 47 of Carnevale a Venezia: tra maschera e ragione, which Roiter’s afterword also identifies as a crucial image. 

[9] I did not have the opportunity to see the exhibition ‘Fulvio Roiter, Fotografie 1948–1978’, which toured Northern Italy c. 2003, but among the non-Venetian published work I would certainly recommend Ombrie: Terre de Saint François, which deservedly won the Prix Nadar, and remains one of the highpoints of Roiter’s career. In this book, texts written by or about Francis of Assisi are juxtaposed with images of rural Umbria in the 1950s. The insistence on ‘timelessness’ is no less aggressive than in the books on Carnival, but it is deployed to much better effect than in Venice, partly because (as in Roiter’s work on Spain in the 1950s) the relationship between text and image is more interesting.