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 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 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.

Photographic Inspirations: Robert Adams, The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range (1974)

Robert Adams was one of the photographers showcased in the celebrated New Topographics exhibition held at George Eastman House in 1975, which explored the ‘man-altered landscape’. That is, instead of the romantic, picturesque or sublime tradition of landscape photography exemplified in the US by Ansel Adams, the Topographics participants did not try to avoid evidence of human presence or intervention, but instead made this their main subject. And their aesthetic was, in most cases, one of blankness and detachment: certainly there were no romantic, picturesque or sublime images. Much of the emphasis in New Topographics was on suburbia, on the liminal zones around cities that had greatly expanded in the post-war period, an expansion made possible both by the proliferation of cheap, generic housing estates, and by the huge increase in car ownership, along with the concomitant growth of freeways.

Robert Adams, however, was not blank. His approach was more critical. One of the reasons he carried weight for me was that he worked as an English lecturer while creating these images, and he’s an eloquent writer on photography. The New West is not text-heavy, but it does include a short introduction by John Szarkowski, followed by another from Adams, who also wrote brief passages introducing each of the five chapters into which The New West is divided. These move through consecutive ecological zones in Colorado, each characterised by different patterns of human settlement or intervention: ‘Prairie’, ‘Tracts and Mobile Homes’ (i.e. suburbs), ‘The City’, ‘Foothills’, and ‘Mountains’. However, apart from these very brief chapter introductions, we revert to the Evans/Frank model, with no text accompanying the images themselves other than short titles. As with American Photographs, the images are arranged one per spread on the recto, but with the titles on the preceding verso as in The Americans. The titles also follow the same pattern as Frank’s book, with most limited to a statement of location and/or a categorisation of subject (‘Along Interstate 25’, ‘Newly occupied tract homes. Colarado Springs’), with an occasional described detail or indication of context where Adams thinks it might not be sufficiently obvious from the image itself (‘Grazing land with pines. Near Falcone’). 

Szarkowski's foreword sets out the issues at stake succinctly:

As Americans we are scarred by the dream of innocence. In our hearts we still believe that the only truly beautiful landscape is an unpeopled one. …. Now however we are beginning to realize that there is no wilderness left. … a generous and accepting attitude toward nature requires that we learn to share the earth not only with ice, dust, mosquitoes, starlings, coyotes, and chicken hawks, but even with other people. (5)

Adams’s pictures describe with precision and fastidious justice some of the mortal and venial sins that we have committed against our land in recent decades. …. But his pictures also show us that these settlements express human aspirations, and that they are therefore not uninteresting. (8–9)

Though Robert Adams’s book assumes no moral postures, it does have a moral. Its moral is that the landscape is, for us, the place we live. If we have used it badly, we cannot therefore scorn it, without scorning ourselves. If we have abused it, broken its health, and erected upon it memorials to our ignorance, it is still our place, and before we can proceed we must learn to love it. (9)

Adams’s introduction is even more direct:

Many have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract homes and billboards, why picture that? The question sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue—why open our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national parks?

One reason is, of course, that we do not live in parks …. we also need to see the whole geography, natural and man-made, to experience a peace; all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.

The subject of these pictures is, in this sense, not tract homes or freeways but the source of all Form, light. The Front Range is astonishing because it is overspread with light of such richness that banality is impossible. Even subdivisions, which we hate for the speculator’s greed, are at certain times of day transformed to a dry, cold brilliance. (11–12)

I haven’t seen the first edition of The New West, but the Steidl reprint from 2015 is of very high quality – along with the tri-tone reproductions, I suspect that digital pre-print processes and Photoshop have allowed a longer tonal range and greater sharpness relative to the first analogue edition. (I think there was also an earlier reprint in 2008, perhaps by Aperture, which I may in fact have a copy of in a box in a shed in Melbourne, but I'm consulting the 2015 edition for this post). 

Adams's images are mostly high-key, i.e. with predominantly bright tones and few shadows. As Tod Papageorge puts it: 

[he] printed his photographs to distill the brilliant Colorado sunlight to a virtually nuclear intensity that, even as it glared down on the poor things it exposed, seemed to envelop and, occasionally, succor them.

This effect is also due to the fact that a significant proportion of the images were shot close to midday, so that the light is coming straight down, and there's little shade. A more conventional photographer would have preferred the warmer, more sculptural side-lighting of late afternoon or early morning (as Evans did, for example).

In some ways, Adams’s approach recalls that of David Goldblatt, shooting in Apartheid-era South Africa, in which deliberate overexposure was used not only to suggest the cutting light of the veldt, but the brutal social realities depicted. There is nowhere to hide in this pitiless light, no escaping the photographer’s clear-eyed judgements. But Adams is careful to retain detail in the highlights. Papageorge relates how the latter used a particularly laborious developing method, because he wanted to make sure that the empty skies retained smooth tones (the skies are bright but never blown-out to pure white in these images). 

It’s also worth noting that the predominant high-key images are occasionally alternated with low-key images shot at dusk, or even at night. The Steidl edition has tritone reproductions, which means each image had three separate passes through the printer with different inks to ensure clear tonal separations. So there’s a high level of visual detail and texture, in both the shadows of the low-key images and the highlights of the high-key ones. In other words, things are described with great care – in all senses of the word.

Papageorge says that Adams used a Rolleiflex for these images – I shot many of my Venice photographs on a version of the same camera. Like the nearly identical camera used by Ed van der Elsken in the 50s, a Rolleiflex creates square negatives approximately 6x6cm, and most models of the camera have a fixed, ‘normal’ lens. If Papageorge is correct, that means that all of the images in The New West likely have the same undramatic angle of view – this seems plausible. (A few are slightly rectangular, but they may just have been cropped. Papageorge says that Adams did not obtain the 6x7 Pentax camera he used for his next project until after finishing The New West.) The square format adds to the sense of detachment, of little visual emphasis being given to any particular element within the frame. Similarly, most of the images maximise depth of field, and most are long shots, surveying landscapes from a considerable distance, sometimes with hundreds of metres or even several kilometres separating the foreground from the background.

Adams had used a large-format view camera for his earlier work on churches. The Rolleiflex allowed much faster operation, but did not permit perspective correction in the way that the larger camera did. This means that, for architectural subjects, you either have to point the camera up and get converging verticals, or stand back and accept that you’ll have a relatively large area of foreground below your main subject in the frame. In some of the landscapes, Adams seems to gone for the former strategy, in particular where there are no real vertical lines. The result is that the sky occupies two-thirds of the frame, to emphasise its enveloping weight. But for the tract houses that form the subject of the longest chapter he keeps the camera alignment level so that the verticals are straight. Many of these images do in fact have a wide strip of foreground: empty, bleached dirt or schist, or sometimes tarmac or pavement. Indeed, these houses and mobile homes are not really shot as architectural subjects, but again from some distance – that is, set within the larger landscape. And Adams uses the foreground to balance – almost seeming to reflect – the blank, or almost blank strip of sky above. In some cases, the houses appear lost between these two empty expanses. In other cases, Adams has obviously sought out an elevated viewpoint, so he was above his main subject, which allows him to create a more synthetic composition, linking houses in the foreground to the larger developments of which they form a part in the background. 

Only in the chapter on ‘The City’ does Adams get closer in, and perhaps not coincidentally, he’s also more explicitly judgemental here: ‘Here no expediency is forbidden. …. Read the eschatological chaos of signs.’ (75) Here Adams seems too bleak – for him, cities offer only 'disgust and nihilism' (11). But in the face of the current gathering climate catastrophe, he's elsewhere too optimistic in his conviction that 'even as we see the harm of our work and determine to correct it, we also see that nothing can, in the last analysis, intrude. Nothing permanently diminishes the affirmation of the sun.' (12) 

The New West is a powerful book, but it has a narrower thematic range than American Photographs, and less visual variety. The groupings into chapters are an essential part of the book’s organisation, but within the individual chapters I’m less convinced that the precise sequence of individual images is crucial. Rather, each chapter contains multiple variations on the same idea: the repetition and the standardised approach is part of the critique. Papageorge points out that Adams shares several motifs with Evans (who he claims not to have been influenced by): ‘cars, gas stations, roadways, jerrybuilt working class cottages, modest homes sighted down empty streets, improvised churches’. But for Evans these motifs are placed in the context of an encounter between industrial civilisation and popular culture: the mass-produced is juxtaposed with the handmade, the improvised. And Evans is interested in faces – the bodily correlate to the hand-painted signs and appropriated ephemera he also depicts – whereas the few visible humans in The New West are dwarfed by the landscape, and therefore stripped of personality (apart perhaps from the teenager sitting in the minute shade cast by a mobile home, for even the choice to seek that shelter depicts him as having agency). For Adams then, there does not seem to be any possibility of resistance to the shoddiness and soullessness of the world depicted – except, that is, via the light of his photographs.

I’ve already mentioned in my post on Brassaï that I overexposed my images of Venice: partly with the intention of approaching my subject differently to him, and partly by accident. Adams (and Goldblatt) helped me to think further about the aesthetics of overexposure – which I had to think about, whether I liked it or not, since overexposed images were what I had. I was also influenced by a conversation with Ross Gibson about his work on the historical police archive of crime-scene photographs in Sydney, in which deliberate overexposure was a way to ensure that none of the relevant information would be illegible in the image.

Adams’s compositional strategies weren’t of much use to me, since the kind of distance and/or elevation they rely upon are impossible to obtain in Venice (unless you resort to cliché and go up a belltower or stand on the Accademia bridge). But his broader approach was relevant, even though Venice seems to offer completely different lessons to the Colorado West. From its foundation the history of Venice involved radical interventions in the lagoon landscape, but the city has often been seen as an exemplary instance of equilibrium between human settlement and the environment, since Venice was dependent on the lagoon for its survival: for food, transport, access to the wider world, even sanitation. A photographic project more directly inspired by Adams might instead focus on the industrial hinterland of Porto Marghera on the mainland – and indeed there was such a project around the turn of the millenium, which actually recruited two of the original participants in the New Topographics show, among many other international and Italian photographers.

Adams’s example was nonetheless useful by analogy. Just as landscape photographers like Ansel Adams refused to acknowledge the existence of the man-altered landscape, most attempts to depict Venice refuse to acknowledge the contemporary, or decry its presence. Just as Ansel Adams chose to depict scenes in which the only acknowledged human presence was himself (‘acknowledged’ only insofar as someone had to be taking the photograph), so many visitors to Venice dream of finding an ‘unspoilt’ corner of the city in which they are the only alien presence – the only tourist chosen to enter Shrangi-La. So even though almost every detail in my images is not only ‘man-altered’ but human-made – emphatically historical rather than natural – I wanted to start by acknowledging and insisting upon the absurdity of this dream. There is no wilderness untouched by human culture; there is no unspoilt corner of Venice untouched by the contemporary world.

Extra Images From Push Process: 4

There are very few telephoto compositions in Push Process: of the sixty or so unique images, only four (unless you count the shots taken on 35mm film using a 50mm lens). Here’s two large-format, telephoto images (they’re square because they’re both cropped from the 5x4 originals). 

There’s a small group of images in the book on the theme of restoration and repair. There’s always somewhere in Venice marked off for work of this kind, and while for many visitors this represents a disappointment, to me it was an opportunity to defamiliarise the urban landscape. Often this kind of work involves erecting scaffolding to cover the façade of buildings, and then covering the scaffolding in translucent grey sheets, turning the surfaces of buildings into anonymous masks. But at some point during the period I was photographing in Venice, they instead started printing to-scale representations of the building underneath on the sheeting, to mimimise the visual disruption. Very postmodern! 

The left side of the first image is an example of that: here the reproduction merges more or less seamlessly with the original façade of the palace that now houses the municipal casino. I found the casino seedy during my one visit there, as one of the characters in Push Process suggests: ‘There has to be something at stake for you personally, or it ruins the illusion, and suddenly all you can see are the mouldy curtains, the middle-aged playboys with yellow stains on their fingertips.’ 

I was also tempted to use this because of the ghostly water taxi (the only example of that craft I had on film), and the light trails, which are probably from a vaporetto moving through the space during the exposure. 

The second image is of the railway terminus at Santa Marta – beyond the station itself, where they shunt trains that are not in use. There’s some novelty simply in seeing an image of railway lines in Venice, but if this was an image taken elsewhere, I likely wouldn’t consider it sufficiently interesting on its own terms.

Venice as a Modern City

This piece is adapted from a portion of an academic article I published in 2011, which is based around the photographs that are now included in my novel Push Process. It's therefore a more explicit discussion of some of the themes underlying both the images and the novel's approach to its Venetian setting.

Venice one of the most photographed cities in the world. A study from the early twenty-first century estimated that over a hundred million snaps were taken each year in the city’s historical centre – but this was before the advent of camera phones, which have certainly increased that figure exponentially. Thousands of images of the Bridge of Sighs are created every day, all from exactly the same vantage point. Most of these photographs show a ‘timeless’ landscape of gondolas, fog, and decaying palaces. Of course this is an illusion. Venice is not immune from history. The endless work of conservation is not a battle against time, which would be futile, but an attempt to reach a workable understanding with history as an inevitable process of ageing and change. 

Existing alongside the picturesque city is its less attractive shadow: a postmodern Venice overwhelmed by debased representations of itself. It flourishes despite the fact that, in other respects, Venice’s qualifications for the role of postmodern city seem poor. Venice has no cars, no freeways, no skyscrapers, no industrial parks, no malls, and – perhaps most importantly of all – no suburbs, or at least none physically continuous with the historical centre. Venetian architecture is not composed of anonymous and interchangeable units. On the contrary, its form cannot be understood without reference to its unique history – a history that sometimes seems a crippling burden rather than a rich inheritance, at least to those who are obliged to live there. 

Venice’s principal claim to the title of postmodern city, then, is that its economy depends entirely on mass tourism. The current registered resident population is about 51,000, while the approximate number of tourists who visit the city annually was – again, at the beginning of the twenty-first century – 14,000,000. On the peak weekend of Carnival in 2002 alone, about 270,000 people passed through. Venice has four times as many visitors annually as Florence does and the vast majority are funnelled into the area around Piazza San Marco. Every day during summer, the number of tourists and temporary visitors comes close to or surpasses the number of residents – a situation that surely makes Venice unique among the major cities of the world, as much as its situation and architecture do. 

Through camera phones and the viewfinders of camcorders, most visitors see not a living community, or a complex history, but rather a series of isolated motifs filtered or chosen in advance. In short, it is almost impossible to see a real gondola without thinking of it as a superior version of a plastic one. During Carnival, a tradition with a long history, but one that was artificially resurrected in 1979 and was until recently sponsored by Volkswagen, it is always possible to find a number of people with elaborate costumes wandering around near Piazza San Marco – my strong suspicion is that they are employed by the Commune to dress up and pose. But if you want to take a snap of them, you will literally have to elbow your way through the scrum. There are three or four photographers for every masker. 

There is no local tradition of mask making predating the resurrected Carnival.3 Nonetheless, the mask shops multiplied in the 1980s and 1990s, as did the fast-food outlets. By 2000, ‘Venice could claim the dubious distinction of having more pizzerias than Naples and the highest density of ice-cream shops of any city in Europe’. The two developments are obviously related. Why, then, do the many photo books dedicated to Carnival never show anyone eating a slice of pizza? The answer is obvious: the rules of ‘Carnival photography’ were established almost as quickly after 1979 as the spurious tradition of mask making, and those rules preclude images in which maskers do everyday things like eating (or dropping litter, an activity to which they are also prone). Immaculate costumes, frozen postures, saturated colours, and spaces cleared of spectators – these are the norm in a vision at once idealised and supremely kitsch.

Such images, together with the fog-shrouded gondolas of innumerable coffee-table books, are only the latest manifestations of a long tradition. Venice was the first city to be packaged and prepared for consumption in the form of visual souvenirs. In the eighteenth century, the ‘view’ paintings of Canaletto were mainly sold to British aristocrats, and the painter’s early career was (not coincidentally) sponsored and overseen by the man who later became British consul to the city. Locals did not buy Canaletto paintings. They rather looked down upon the whole view genre. 

The tradition begun by Canaletto and his contemporaries was taken up by early studio photographers in the mid-nineteenth century. Painters had already initiated a process whereby customers could choose from a set of prototypical views, versions of which would then be knocked up in the studio and finished by a team of assistants, but production became more mechanical and industrialised at the same time as modern, industrialised means of transport increased the volume of tourist traffic and changed its character sociologically. A railway bridge to Venice was opened in the 1840s, just as the first photographs of the city appeared. If Canaletto painted for aristocrats, then the new medium was available to the middle classes, but just as locals had not bought the paintings of Canaletto, so they did not buy photographic albums and prints either. A Venetian economist noted in 1870 that the booming ‘sale of photographic work is … in direct proportion to the number of foreigners who come to Venice’.

In the period before the advent of cheap, efficient photo-reproduction, studios still managed to extend massively the process by which production was segmented and depersonalised. They used a complex division of labour to churn out souvenir albums, into which twenty or so individual prints were pasted. Thus the studio owner, whose name was nominally appended to the album, did not necessarily operate the camera; nor did he print the negatives. A large staff of technicians and assistants contributed. The most prestigious of these were not the camera operators, but rather the retouchers, whose manipulations were thought to bring the images closer to the realm of art. The retouchers sometimes worked directly on negatives, but they also hand-coloured, tinted, or otherwise altered prints – for example, to give the impression of a moonlit scene, an effect that was much in demand at the time. Albums produced by different studios are not readily distinguishable from each other or easy to date with precision. This is because the layout, subjects, and points of view were all highly standardised; and particular images were often recycled or even pirated. Most also appear to have been taken at the same time of day: early in the morning, to exclude tourists and other bystanders. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the industry was further transformed by the introduction of the postcard, an object even more inextricably linked with the tourist experience. 

At the same time as the conditions necessary to create the postmodern city were developing, the definitive version of the anti-modern, timeless city came into being. Foreign visitors were also crucial here. As Venetian art and architecture were increasingly consumed by an international audience in the later nineteenth century (partly through photographic reproductions), Venice began to be seen as a city that belonged to the world. It was part of the shared artistic and cultural patrimony that is now called ‘Western civilisation’. As such it needed to be protected from the barbarians who would destroy it, as well as from the elements that threatened to engulf it. These barbarians sometimes included the tourist hordes, from whose grasp a more exclusive or authentic experience of the city had to be snatched. According to John Pemble, in the nineteenth century ‘the idea of a dying city became one of the most potent obsessions of the European and American imagination’, but at the same time ‘a passionate battle was fought and won to fabricate for Venice the illusion of immortality’. The city was in imminent danger of destruction, from decay and flooding; but the city was also inspirational, and somehow above everyday realities and concerns. 

The most representative and influential figure in promoting these ideas was the Englishman John Ruskin, who was one of the first to celebrate the city’s medieval architecture in The Stones of Venice, first published in 1851–3. Although Ruskin strongly opposed restoration projects that removed later additions and weathering in a misguided search for ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ forms, he nonetheless bemoaned the introduction of anything modern into the cityscape. For Ruskin, indeed, industrialisation was the source of all evil, and medieval Venice represented an alternative, superior civilisation. So, in 1845, he complained to his father about the new railway bridge and the recently installed gas lighting:

 

We turned the corner of the bastion, where Venice once appeared, & behold – the Greenwich railway, only with less arches and more dead wall, entirely cutting off the whole open sea & half the city, which now looks as nearly as possible like Liverpool at the end of the dockyard wall. … Imagine the new style of serenades – by gas light. 

A few days later, he added bitterly that the ‘moment you begin to feel, some gaspipe business forces itself on the eye, and you are thrust into the nineteenth century, until you dream … that your very gondola has become a steamer’. 

Under the influence of foreigners like Ruskin, and also local patriots who idealised the Venetian past, an attitude toward the city developed in which it was increasingly treated as an archaeological site, which had to be preserved whole. While unobtrusive improvements to housing and sanitation were welcomed, anything that drastically altered the city’s form or ‘clashed’ with its pre-modern architecture was violently opposed. This attitude reached definitive expression in the so-called ‘Special Law’ of 1973, which forbade demolition or new building in Venice’s historical centre. 

The growing influence of Ruskin’s idea of Venice can be demonstrated by the removal of some nineteenth-century additions to the cityscape. For example, numerous cast-iron bridges were installed by the Austrians, who ruled Venice until 1866. Many of these bridges were built by the English firm of Neville, which had a foundry in the city and was a major local employer of the period. At the time of their installation, such modernisations were a source of civic pride, and the Neville bridges included two over the Grand Canal: one at Accademia, and one near the new railway station. Cast iron, like photography, was a symbol of modern technology that made possible new architectural forms like the Parisian arcades. Thus the Accademia Bridge was praised by the Illustrated London News as a ‘handsome structure’ with ‘elegance of form’. By the early twentieth century, attitudes had changed, and the two Neville bridges were demolished and replaced in the early 1930s by more ‘traditional’ designs. Explicitly modern architecture was henceforth confined to peripheral areas like the Lido, which after 1900 was developed as a holiday resort, where the new craze for sea bathing could be indulged in modern hotels. 

The prevailing attitude was summed up at the time of the collapse of the Campanile, or belltower, in Piazza San Marco in 1902. The original was completely destroyed, and some architects proposed rebuilding in an Art Deco style, but in the end the Campanile was rebuilt dov’era, com’era, ‘where it was, as it was’, as the motto adopted at the time put it. Hence the current belltower is a facsimile, as indeed are many other objects in Piazza San Marco, including the famous horses on the façade of the Basilica and some of the statues on the columns of the Ducal Palace. All have been replaced for conservation reasons. 

This dyad of conservation and conservatism exasperated some people, notably Filippo Marinetti, leader of the Futurists, who visited Venice in 1910 to drop a batch of polemical leaflets from the top of the newly reconstructed belltower. In Marinetti’s philosophy, the future could only realise itself by repudiating the past. Hence the Futurists championed industry and speed, and enjoined the destruction of ‘museums, libraries, academies of every kind’, that is, repositories or tradition and received wisdom. To Marinetti, Venice was one of these stagnant repositories – hence his famous injunction to ‘burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for Cretins’. 

In a way, Marinetti shared Ruskin’s conception of the city, but interpreted it in the light of radically different values, and thus proposed an opposite course of action. However, most people wished to preserve Venice ‘where it was, as it was’. Hence the gondola, which is now used solely for pleasure rides by tourists (apart from the traghetti: ferries, which journey between fixed points on opposite sides of the Grand Canal), nonetheless retains its symbolic power as a fetish of Venetianness for locals and visitors alike. The anti-modern Venice and the postmodern Venice are thus not so far apart, as the facsimiles dotted around Piazza San Marco suggest. Indeed, the idea of the city as museum and the idea of the city as kitsch fantasy are actually symbiotic. For most visitors the entire panorama of Venetian history is part of the same homogenous pastness. Both versions of the city deny change. Both present the city as spectacle, and separate from lived reality. 

The photographs in Push Process are concerned with the connections between the timeless and postmodern versions of the city, along with another, neglected Venice – a place that attempted to come to terms with modernisation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and was an important industrial centre before the creation of Porto Marghera on the mainland. Venetian architects, planners and politicians have long been occupied by the problem of what to do with the city’s past and how to face its future.The places that interest me are those where the response to this question has been most pro-active – for example, the vaporetto stops, elements in the ferry system which is Venice’s typically peculiar attempt to construct a modern transportation network. 

Here’s a short introduction to some of the photographs from Push Process, which highlights the themes broached in this piece: 

 

Select Bibliography 

Robert C. Davis and Garry P. Marvin, Venice, the Tourist Maze: A Cultural Critique of the World’s Most Touristed City, University of California Press, 2004. 

John Pemble, Venice Rediscovered, Oxford University Press, 1996.

 

Margaret Plant, Venice: Fragile City, 1797–1997, Yale University Press, 2002. 

Sarah Quill with Alan Windsor, Ruskin’s Venice: The Stones Reconsidered, Lund Humphries, 2003.

Extra Images From Push Process: 2

These two large-format images were in the concluding photosequence for Push Process until the last minute, both of them near the beginning in the section dealing with looking and the commodification of spectacle. (For this theme, see the video at the end of the post.) 

The first was taken at the exact position from which everyone photographs the Bridge of Sighs, but with the camera turned about seventy-five degrees to the left: this decision was itself a kind of joke. The sculpture that is the focus of the composition depicts the Drunkenness of Noah: the Biblical patriarch (foreshortened on the left side) is making a spectacle of himself after overindulging, and his sons respond differently. One highlights his father’s shame: ‘Look at this disgusting old man!’ The other averts his eyes in filial piety and makes to cover Noah’s nakedness. 

It’s also an unusual example of a high-key, low-contrast night scene. Still, it felt a bit too conventional, and I was trying to minimise the number of conventional images of the city. 

The second image is of a fairground ride with a Wild West theme: the triangular object in the centre is supposed to be a wigwam. This kind of grossly simplistic historical representation is only possible: a) because it’s a ride for children; and b) because we are a long way from any context in which anyone has an ongoing stake in the terms of this presentation. But in its crude way it’s still a spectacular commodification of history, and moreover an interactive one – and it therefore serves to emphasise how the current iteration of Carnival does much the same thing with Venetian history. But I'm not entirely convinced by it as an image. 

Also: the fact that both these images require a lengthy explanation to justify their possible inclusion worked against them.

 

Extra Images from Push Process: 1

This is one of a few posts where I’ll review some of the images that didn’t make it into Push Process. 

The book has a lot of scenes set in bars. Several of these have accompanying photographs – but fewer than you might expect. Shooting in bars without flash, and with an all-manual film camera, was/is very difficult! Nowadays, assuming I was in a bar to begin with, which I very rarely am any more, and assuming I had the chutzpah to photograph strangers, which I don’t any more – I would use an automated digital camera and possibly flash as well. The failure rate for this kind of photography is high enough to begin with – deliberately making it higher now seems a pointless affectation. 

Anyway, here’s three that work fine, but don’t quite have the exemplary qualities I was hoping for. All shot on Delta 3200 pushed to either 6400 or 12,500. The first is from Da Baffo, a bar that doesn’t feature in the novel, but is mentioned in my first book, Pistols! Treason! Murder!; the second is from the bar fictionalised as ‘Da Enzo’ in the novel; the third is Florian in Piazza San Marco, but from outside.

Photographic Representations of Venice: Views of the Forts of Venice (1866)

 

There ‘is now no ‘lonely isle’ in all the lagoons of Venice. Wherever you go, where once there were quiet little gardens among ruins of island churches, there is now a Sentinel and a powder magazine, and there is no piece of unbroken character to be found anywhere. There is not a single shore, far or near, which has not in some part of it the look of fortification, or violent dismantling or renewing, for military purposes of some kind or another. - John Ruskin writing to his father, 16 November 1851[1] 

During the Austrian occupation of Venice, fortifications were built on many of the outlying islands of the lagoon. The two photographs above are from an album of prints created just before the Austrians withdrew in 1866 in preparation for the city’s annexation to the newly created Kingdom of Italy. The album’s provenance is uncertain, but it was obviously made with the army’s cooperation, and may have been an official commission. With the troops about to depart, someone wanted evidence of their dispositions for posterity.[2] 

The resulting images are quite unique in the Venetian context, although they bear a family resemblance to photographs taken by the employees of Matthew Brady’s studio during the American Civil War, or to photographs by Gustave le Gray of Napoleon III’s troops on manoeuvres in France in 1857. One difference from the work of Brady and le Gray is that none of the Venetian images commemorate individuals: they are all long shots in which the bodies of indistinguishable soldiers are distributed at regular intervals as a way of articulating the architecture of fortifications, or, in the background of the first example above, the space of an otherwise featureless impromptu parade ground. Indeed, the absence of individuation is precisely the point. These images are records of Austrian military power: apparently authoritative, but about to be rendered irrelevant by the fact of Italian unification. 

Fifty years after these photographs were taken, the Lido was full of holidaymakers in bathing suits. One hundred years after that, there is now an association for preserving the remains of the forts as an aspect of Venetian heritage. 

[1] Quoted in Sarah Quill, Ruskin’s Venice, 2003, p. 36. 

[2] The album consists of 14 individual prints glued into a bound volume, which was until recently held in the collection of the Querini Stampaglia library in Venice. Several of its prints were reproduced in Immagini di Venezia e della Laguna nelle fotografie degli Archivi Alinari e della Fondazione Querini Stampaglia, exhibition catalogue, 1979 (a brief description of the album can be found on p. 94). In 2005, the album could not be located by the staff of the Querini Stampaglia when I tried to find it, so it is possible that the 1979 catalogue contains the only surviving evidence of its existence, just as the album itself contained the only surviving photographic evidence of the forts.

Two Pieces About Push Process

 There are now two pieces up elsewhere about Push Process:

The first is at Lunate – the website of a great UK literary journal – and is about some of the literary inspirations for the book (plus one film): Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis, Pickpocket by Robert Bresson, and A Line Made By Walking by Sara Baume.

The second is at Ten Million Hardbacks, and is about my relationship to Venice, where the novel is set.

Pre-photographic Representations of Venice: Gaetano Zompini, The Lantern Bearer, 1753

Gaetano Zompini, ‘The Lantern Bearer’, from Le Arti che vanno per via nella Città di Venezia, 1753 

At night, I move backwards and forwards from the theatres to the casino, I am the man who lights your way with a lantern, I’ll go anywhere [you want], as long as you pay me. 

As with the post on Canaletto, I'm discussing this image because it's part of the pre-history of photographic representations of Venice. There was a long established tradition of genre painting in European art, in which poor people and tradesmen were presented in allegedly naturalistic surroundings for a respectable, middle-class audience. In the nineteenth century, Venetian studio photographers like Carlo Naya picked up on this tradition, and supplemented their architectural views with posed images of Venetian urchins, fishermen, beggars, and lacemakers. 

Zompini’s work is an unusually forceful and vivid example of genre illustration, whose first edition, published in 1753-4, was a commercial failure. His engravings, which depict street traders of Venice, were only rescued from obscurity by the local British consul, who sponsored a second edition.[1]

Many of Zompini’s subjects work in what we would now call service industries (as sellers of trinkets, snacks, drinks, and so on), catering to the needs of their social superiors. In this capacity, Zompini’s lantern bearer, like modern waiters, bellhops and shop assistants, is not only required to perform a specific task, but to be deferential, pleasant and cheerful as he does so. Nonetheless, his words strike a faintly sardonic, or even threatening, note. ‘I’ll go anywhere [you want], as long as you pay me’, he says, with the emphasis seemingly on the latter clause. 

In modern Venice, the volume of visitors places unique strains on this kind of interaction, which are symbolised by a dramatic reversal of the terms of Zompini’s illustration. Today, waiters wearing tuxedos and bow ties move among customers dressed in singlets, shorts and sandals. Prices may vary significantly in cafes depending on whether the staff recognise you, and it is not uncommon for Venetians to deride oblivious foreigners in dialect. 

[1] The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, eds J. Martineau and A. Robison, exhibition catalogue, 1994, p. 287.

Pre-photographic Representations of Venice: Canaletto, The Stonemason's Yard, c. 1726-30

A humble, untidy, unfamiliar area of the city, tucked away from tourist gaze, is the scene of the daily round of labour, for women, it should be noted, as for men. … The city is lived in and used: washing is hung out on lines, and rooms are aired, and floors are swept. Above all, art is being created in the midst of it: stone is being chipped and crafted to make a building beautiful … Michael Levey[1] 

The history of photographic representations of Venice begins long before the invention of photography – with the painted views of Canaletto and his eighteenth-century contemporaries, although in fact they often adopt fictional viewpoints that would be difficult or impossible to emulate with a camera: usually above head height, and sometimes in mid-canal. They also depict scenes under blue sky and sunlight. Atmospheric effects are eschewed in favour of clarity of line and definition of form. 

The habit of representing Venice under fog and snow is a much later one, which is bound up with the idea of the city in decline – a site for nostalgia rather than for scientific examination. Under fog, the city becomes mysterious and elusive; under the clear light of Canaletto, it is rational and explicable: an Enlightenment city rather than a Romantic one. 

I've chosen this painting because it anticipates the declared purpose of the protagonist of my novel Push Process to represent Venice as a 'work in progress', as something that 'isn't finished yet'.

[1] The Glory of Venice: Art in the Eighteenth Century, eds J. Martineau and A. Robison, exhibition catalogue, 1994, p. 43.

Scheduled Posts

Over the next several weeks, I'll be publishing regularly here with a series of posts about photography, Venice and the inspirations for my forthcoming novel Push Process, starting tomorrow with a post on Brassai's Paris After Dark (132/3).

Tintoretto's Paradise

The version of Paradise that Tintoretto painted for the Ducal Palace in Venice in 1592 is reproduced above. It is referred to several times in the text of Five Wounds (although I never name the artist in the novel). It is also quoted visually in a diptych on pages 28-29. In the standard scholarly biography of Tintoretto, by Eric Newton, there is a long passage on the painting, which I sent to Dan as reference material. Starting on p. 198, this passage reads as follows.

The finished painting is, as it were, a colossal three-dimensional wall-paper, a vast pattern representing space itself, marked out in dark patches, between which one’s eye [199] seems to penetrate into a radiant, crowded infinity, as though innumerable groups and clusters of figures had arranged themselves like galactic systems one behind the other in the interstellar void.

At first glance this absence of formalized planes and, in particular, the lack of a base with a firmly established foreground, confuse and bewilder the eye, but gradually the brave pattern, with the noble silhouettes of Christ and the Virgin as its climax, asserts itself. One begins to see it as the only possible solution to the problem. .... The finished painting is ... governed by none of the normal optical laws. The effect is not of standing in this world and gazing into the remote distances of the next but of seeing through a glass wall into a celestial aquarium in which both light and distance mean nothing. Single figures and groups of figures float through this supernatural ether, towards or away from the glass wall, in a ceaseless rhythmic movement, not under the spell of gravity but in obedience to the magnetism that radiates from Christ and the Virgin who bend gently towards each other above them. The gaps between them are not areas of radiance but glimpses of interstellar space, and that space is not so much occupied by the myriads of the blessed as composed of them. The radiance in which they have their being has become interchangeable with their being itself. The world of visual experience with its vocabulary of ‘near,’ ‘far,’ ‘upper,’ ‘lower,’ ‘towards,’ ‘away from,’ no longer exists. This, in purely practical terms, gives Tintoretto the immense advantage of being able to enlarge or diminish any figure at will without contradicting the laws of perspective; it retains the medieval system of scale by importance without abandoning the Renaissance system of scale by distance.

Newton’s insistence on seeing the Paradise as the crowning achievement of Tintoretto’s career (he died in 1594) seems misguided, given that the painting is now usually attributed jointly to Tintoretto’s son Domenico, a much inferior artist, and to the workshop. With this revised attribution in mind, the peculiar composition seems less the result of unconventional artistic genius and more like incompetence, but this illustrates a more general point about the nature of interpretation, which is always the result of a series of enabling preconceptions. As Gabriella concludes in Five Wounds, an illegible message was easier to transcribe if one already had some idea of what it might say.

Newton starts with the presumption that the painting is by Tintoretto, and Newton knows that Tintoretto is a genius. Everything in his account follows from that basic premise. My own, admittedly uninformed, first impression was that it was rather turgid, whoever painted it, but that makes Newton's achivement in this passage even more impressive. It is a brilliant piece of creative writing, insofar as it succeeds in reinscribing this apparently mediocre work as a masterpiece. Even so, Newton's approach seems rather old-fashioned now (the biography was published in 1952), and not only because it is based on obsolete research.

Newton is a late descendant of a tradition of conoisseurship that goes back to Giorgio Vasari, who founded art criticism as an academic discipline in the sixteenth century, and in the process suggested what it is that critics should be doing. Vasari’s purpose was three-fold: to provide clear descriptions of paintings that, in an age before photographic reproduction, could often only be viewed in situ; to establish a set of criteria by which one could distinguish great painting from good, and good from bad; and to establish a canon of painters who, collectively, embodied those criteria.

Vasari was perhaps the first major theorist of Western art, but one of the first important art critics in the same tradition was Pietro Aretino, whose literary output was far more varied and whose ideas on art were far less systematic, but whose letters and sonnets about Titian helped to establish the latter as one of the most successful painters in Europe in the middle of the sixteenth century. For example, Aretino described Titian’s portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino (above), painted c. 1536-8, as follows.

The union of colours laid in by Titian’s brush expresses, besides the concord that reigns in Eleonora, her gentle spirit. Modesty [modestia] is seated with her in an attitude of humility, purity resides in her dress, consciousness of her virtue [vergogna] veils and honours her breast and hair. Love fixes on her his lordly glance. Chastity and beauty, eternal enemies, are in her likeness and between her eyelashes the throne of the Graces is seen.

The flattery is obviously aimed at Eleonora as well as Titian, but its effect depends on the assumption that Titian’s painting displays her character rather than merely representing her appearance. According to Aretino, the painting opens a window into Eleonora's soul. Eleonora, the painting, Aretino's description: each of these things is, in some sense, identical with the others. There is no mediation. Everything is transparent.

Aretino claims to be ‘reading’ the portrait, but what he’s actually doing is interpreting it, and, as with Newton's description of the Paradise, reinscribing it: that is, writing meaning over it. I defy anyone to look at this picture unprepared and say, ‘I see the concord that reigns in Eleonora, her modesty, purity, etc., etc’. Aretino is trying to influence the way we read the portrait by annotating it, but at the same time insisting that his annotations add nothing that is not already there.

One way of clarifying this problem is to reverse the terms of the relation between word and image. Would someone who only had Aretino’s description of Titian’s portrait – or Newton’s description of Tintoretto’s Paradise – be able to visualise the paintings in question accurately on the basis of the description alone? The answer is surely, ‘No’.

I am interested in this question for practical reasons, because my collaboration with Dan involved writing descriptions of pictures that did not yet exist, which Dan then used to bring these potential pictures into actuality. In this case, the description generated the picture, rather than the other way round, but that actually makes the role of interpretation more explicit. Dan’s illustrations were always a loose translation of my instructions, inevitably, because they were rendered in a different medium by a different process and via a different sensibility. They always added something to the written description, no matter how exhaustive my instructions aspired to be. So I could never predict what they would look like.

One might argue that Dan was doing the same thing that Newton and Aretino were, but in reverse. I think it's a bit more complicated than that. We may see Tintoretto's and Titian's paintings in a new light as a result of their efforts, but Newton and Aretino are not actually attempting to open a conversation: rather, they aim to have the last word. The painter, or rather the painting, has no right of reply. In the classic version of connoisseurship, the definitive interpretive act is an attribution: 'Yes, this painting is an authentic Tintoretto'. But the authority of that attribution derives not from Tintoretto himself, who lacks the insight to understand his own talent (Tintoretto does not know what it is that makes him Tintoretto), but from the disinterested mind of the connoisseur.

What I was doing, by contrast, was inviting Dan to alter the meaning of my work, to divide the responsibilities of authorship with me (quite literally in the case of Five Wounds).