Two Events in Canterbury on 21 March

I'm doing two author events for Push Process this Thursday, 21 March, in Canterbury.

The first is at the Canterbury Christ Church University bookshop at 1 p.m.

The second is at the University of Kent, in Keynes Lounge, Keynes Building, at 6.15 p.m.

Both are open and free to attend. Come along if you're nearby!

Photographic Inspirations: Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus is one of the most influential monographs in the history of photography. Since it was first published in 1972, a year after Arbus’s untimely death, it has continued to provoke strong reactions in viewers, who see contradictory meanings in Arbus’s confrontational pictures of teenagers, outsiders, freaks, nudists and psychiatric inmates. Compassion, curiosity, openness to other ways of being; cruelty, prurience, voyeurism: even Arbus herself was not entirely certain which category her work falls into.

Arbus never published a book in her lifetime – her biggest exposure was in 1967 as one of the three featured photographers in the New Documents exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (with Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander). Diane Arbus is not, then, strictly speaking a 'self-titled' book, because it was edited after her death by her friend, the painter Marvin Israel, and her daughter, Doon Arbus. It features eighty photographs – a small selection of those available in Arbus’ archive. They date from 1962–71, the last decade of Arbus’s life - her forties, more or less. It’s a masterpiece of editing, cut to the bone. Every image is remarkable, though some are more remarkable than others. The sequence jumps around chronologically, except at the very end where there is a small group of consecutive images all dating from 1971, depicting residents at a psychiatric institution.

For many years, this was the only work by Arbus freely available, and her estate holders were criticised for not allowing wider access to her archives, but in a sense the posthumous success of Diane Arbus reveals the effectiveness of their strategy. There have been several other volumes printed recently – a set of the 1971 photographs, a compilation of magazine work from the early 60s, and the catalogue for a recent retrospective; but the first cut is still the deepest. Thinking of the posthumous creation of this unique monograph reminds me of the relationship between Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish - perhaps Arbus might not recognise herself in the book that bears her name.

Except that the voice of the photographs is there in the written preface too. Informal, ironic, intellectually inquisitive, but impatient of theory and abstractions. The preface is full of quotable aphorisms, which speak powerfully of Arbus's aesthetic:

Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way but there’s a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can’t help people knowing about you.

It’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s.

A whore I knew once showed me a photo album of Instamatic colour pictures she’d taken of guys she’d picked up. I don’t mean kissing ones. Just guys sitting on beds in hotel rooms. I remember one of a man in a bra. He was just an ordinary, milktoast sort of man, and he had just tried on a bra. Like anybody would try on a bra, like anybody would try on what the other person had that he didn’t have. It was heartbreaking. It was really a beautiful photograph.

These are all Arbus’s words, but none of them were written down by her. Instead, it's a collage transcribed from excerpts of taped interviews. So, in fact, the preface is a masterpiece of editing too.

However much I might admire Arbus's photographic work, it has little in common with my own. But I found her voice in the preface to the 1972 monograph compelling. Insofar as I was able to write effectively about photography in Push Process, I learned to do so in part from her.

Extra Images From Push Process: 3

All the published photos in Push Process are printed in black and white, and the vast majority were also shot on black and white film, but about one quarter to one third of the photographs I took in Venice were actually shot on colour negative, or (particularly for 35mm) colour slide film. Indeed, six of the images in Push Process (about 10% of the total) are converted from colour originals. 

Here are three other colour images in their original glory. The first is a rare close-up, which is about the transition from analogue to digital: I mean that it juxtaposes a manual ticket-stamp machine at a vaporetto stop with a digital swipe machine. The new machine had already replaced the old one – some time in 2004 I think – but the latter had yet to be removed. 

The second image is of the ‘back’ entrance to Piazza San Marco, though I was more interested in the pay phones: I was always trying to place the classical version of Venice within the modern infrastructure that makes our encounter with it possible. In this case, the pay phones are now a historical, obsolete example of that infrastructure. 

The third image is of the car ferry that runs between Tronchetto and the Lido (and other locations around the edges of the lagoon). The last two images have the acid colours of uncorrected artificial lighting.

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.

 

Photographic Inspirations: Robert Frank, The Americans (1959)

The title of Robert Frank’s The Americans knowingly places it in conversation with Evans’s American Photographs from 1938, which Frank used as an 'iconographical sourcebook' (the phrase is Tod Papageorge's). Indeed, Evans sponsored Frank’s application for the Guggenheim Fellowship he used to finance the cross-country trips on which the images were taken, and these trips sometimes followed itineraries suggested by Evans based on his travels while employed by the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s. But there are important differences as well as similarities.

Evans was interested in what he took to be a shared American vernacular culture. And for the FSA, if not for Evans, the disadvantaged human subjects of his photos were all aspirant participants in a shared American dream. They were just down on their luck, and needed a helping hand to participate fully. But by the time we get to Frank, there is no unified community to which his book's title might refer; or rather, for Frank, 'society is an association of minorities', to use a phrase John le Carre gives to his character George Smiley. The Americans therefore depicts a multiplicity of subcultures: bikers, Jews on Yom Kippur, a portrait of three trans people that is very striking, not only because such people were rarely depicted in documentary photography of this period, but because it’s one of only two images where Frank's subjects are smiling and playing to the camera. 

The Americans may not be a unified vision of America, but it is a very inclusive one, with many African Americans, as well as Latinos, possibly Native Americans (two hitchhikers driving Frank's car) and, indirectly, Asian Americans (via the photo of a 'Chinese cemetery'). One might say that Frank occupies one of several roles in relation to these various milieux or subcultures: a passer-by, a visitor, or sometimes perhaps a guest, but he's never a member, still less a participant. 

There are several examples of what I would call temporary pseudo-communities: bars, a casino, a factory, crowds at a film premiere, kids gathered round a jukebox, men crammed together along the counter of a diner (but all intent on their own eating). The political events also fall into this category, since there’s an emphasis on the hollowness of the rhetoric and the underlying realpolitik of wheeling and dealing: the grimacing or sneezing city father on a platform; the tuba player with an Adlai Stevenson badge whose instrument obscures their face so that its parping mouth comes to stand for the rally as a whole; the small group of men huddled together like mafiosi in a convention hall, oblivious to the larger crowd behind them ('sleek face earnest wheedling confiding cigarholding union boss fat as Nero and eager as Caesar in the thunderous beer crash hall leaning over to confide' as Jack Kerouac puts it in his introduction to the book).

Many pictures, however, show people alone – distracted, miserable, or just silent and self-contained. Or, if not literally alone, then psychologically so – for example, the man getting his shoes shined in a Memphis men's room. This image is particularly interesting: nominally a portrait of deference and privilege (the black man bent down at the feet of the white), but here transformed into what Kerouac calls 'the loneliest picture ever made, the urinals that women never see, the shoeshine going on in sad eternity'. It's tempting to read the hand over the man's face as a gesture born of shame, but more likely Frank just waited for a moment when the man's view of him was occluded, so he couldn't see Frank take the picture. This is also one of many photographs in the book depicting people engaged in service work (waitresses, a nurse, an elevator girl).

The larger idea of the country is still there, but it's represented primarily by shared symbols: the images of American flags that effectively divide the book into chapters, most of which are a little ragged and tattered (like America itself, they’ve seen better days) – and also by the cars and highways, by cowboys and jukeboxes. It's perhaps telling that the two photos of cowboys – both titled as connected to rodeo shows – were taken in Detroit and New York: that is, they're of men assuming the role as performers or audience members for a kind of travelling-circus version of the West.

As with Evans’s work, the images in The Americans are of public scenes. Unlike Evans’s, many of them depict interiors, but these are also public places: not houses, but cafes, bars, diners, restaurants, railway cars, hotels, municipal buildings. There are no domestic scenes or posed portraits at all. Cars are ubiquitous, partly because Frank’s project was conceived and executed as a series of road trips. There are plenty of cars in Evans too, but they were not so central to American life in the 1930s as they had become by 1955–6, when Frank worked. The paraphernalia of car culture is also everywhere: gas stations, rest-stop cafes, road intersections, casualties of road accidents. Again, Evans photographed car junkyards and garages, but it’s more insistent in Frank, and the infrastructure of automobile culture has become more complex. By contrast, a tram, a ferry, and a train interior all appear exactly once – and buses and aeroplanes are completely absent, though there are several photographs of urban pedestrians.

Unlike Evans, Frank shows little interest in architecture as a subject in and of itself – and despite the emphasis on cars, the suburbs are entirely absent. As the title of the book suggests, the majority of photographs have a human presence as their animating subject: that is, even if such subjects only occupy a small part of the frame, they are seemingly the justification for the photograph’s existence. There are several restricted milieux where, without the support of an institution like the FSA, Frank must have negotiated access himself (the 1956 Democratic convention in Chicago, a Detroit factory, a funeral among the black community). 

In The Photobook: A History, Gerry Badger places The Americans with Ed van der Elsken's Love on the Left Bank as an example of 'stream-of-consciousness' photography – indeed as the definitive example of this mode, which Badger links to Existentialism in philosophy, to Abstract Expressionism in painting, to bebop jazz in music, and to the Beat movement in literature. Frank's book is certainly 'rough, raw and gestural ... spontaneous and immediate, highly personal ... exciting, expressive, flying in the face of accepted photographic good taste' (233). But there's something here that goes against the stream-of-consciousness characterisation, as there also is in van der Elsken's book. In The Americans, although a minority of the images are of people glancing back at the camera, for the most part they’re not about the subjects’ response to Frank, and unlike in Love on the Left Bank, many images are quite clearly of people unaware of being photographed. Indeed, these rely on our sense of Frank’s invisibility for their force: of overlooking people caught off-guard, eating alone in a San Francisco cafeteria or sleeping in a park with their shoes off. Kerouac has it right: Frank 'sneaks around'; he has the 'strange secrecy of a shadow'. And this self-effacement seems at odds with the idea of an insistent authorial voice.

Some of Frank’s first viewers complained that this was a negative and ugly view of America: Papageorge quotes initial reviews that dismissed the book as 'warped', 'sick', 'neurotic' and 'joyless'. Some of the images are certainly ironic, if not satirical: besides the union bosses above, we might note the sailor at a Navy recruitment office visible only from his feet propped up on a desk ('Join the Navy Ask me about it' says the sticker on the side of the desk); or the racially segregated streetcar in New Orleans whose occupants all look separately at Frank, caged between the bars of its windows. This is another one of the images where Frank’s acknowledged presence is crucial to the effect, although it also relies upon his separateness from the subjects. But as with Evans, one senses that everything included here was of interest to Frank: he didn’t photograph out of enmity or disgust, but curiosity.

Evans used a variety of cameras, which required different kinds of engagement with his subjects. By contrast, every photograph in The Americans is taken from a 35mm negative, and, if I’m not mistaken, all of them were shot handheld and without flash. There's some debate online about what lenses Frank used: I thought (and to me the visual appearance of the photographs confirms this) that most of the images were shot on a ‘normal’ 50mm lens, one whose angle of view corresponds roughly to how we directly perceive a scene. But some images may have been taken on a wider 35mm lens, and a few are certainly telephoto compositions (e.g. a group at a cocktail party seemingly shot from a distance). 

In using available light and preferring a 50mm lens, Frank’s approach echoes that of Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose The Decisive Moment had been published in 1952 and was immediately promoted to classic status. But Frank was otherwise reacting against Cartier-Bresson, of whom he once said: 'you never felt he was moved by something that was happening other than the beauty of it, or just the composition.' And Frank was in general suspicious of a photographic practice rooted in photojournalism, 'those goddamned stories with a beginning and an end'. So he wasn’t looking for elegant compositions, and there’s little overt drama or conflict in The Americans. Instead of decisive moments, Frank depicts (in the words of Jno Cook) 'America stood still, frozen into a frightful pose between moments'. Papageorge expands on what this means in practice:

The characteristic gestures in his pictures are the slight, telling motions of the head and upper body: a glance (19, 37 [Papageorge refers here to page numbers in the first edition, though my Steidl reprint is unpaginated]), a stare (15, 41), a hand brought to the face (31, 51, 53), an arched neck (17, 55), pursed lips (15, 31). They suggest that Frank, like Evans, believed significance in a photograph might be consonant with the repose of the things it described. 

One of Cartier-Bresson’s standard techniques was to identify a promising location or background, and then wait there for something interesting to happen – for a dynamic element to appear, and to interact with and play off the carefully arranged background, as in the image below, from 1932.

There’s little sense of Frank doing this. Where his compositions do seem superficially similar to Cartier-Bresson’s, as in the image of the naval recruitment office, it feels more like genuine happenstance. Perhaps he was interested in the flag, and the shoes were either there already, or arrived serendipitously. It’s difficult to imagine him hovering around the doorway waiting, not least because while one may anticipate the arrival of a bicycle (or a car, or a pedestrian) on a street, one would never imagine the shoes in advance.

The French title of The Decisive Moment was Images à la Sauvette, on the fly, the French idiom referred to a street peddler without a license, like the bag-sellers in Venice. And that original title perhaps suits Frank’s book better than it does Cartier-Bresson’s, even if Frank had arranged access in advance to several of his locations – but then many of Cartier-Bresson’s images were borrowed from photojournalistic assignments, something that is more obvious from the selection in The Decisive Moment than in subsequent best-of anthologies.

There are other differences. Many of Cartier-Bresson’s images aspire to a quality of lightness or grace. Frank’s images are heavy. Even by the looser standards of photojournalism, let alone those of fine-art photography, the reproductions sometimes appear underexposed. Presumably shot on the fastest available films (probably with a speed of only ISO200), many were likely push-processed. Some have poor tonal separation and poor acutance (sharpness or edge definition). The textures of objects are sometimes visible – e.g. the silk (?) protective cover draped over a Long Beach car, and the wool suit and barbered nape of a man on a ferry – but they have to compete with the texture of the medium, i.e. visible, intrusive film grain.

Incidentally, this image is one of my favourites in The Americans, for the line of hats and the intimacy with which the boy is pressed in against what I take to be his father’s back, ensuring physical contact even as each of them are absorbed in their own thoughts. But again this is not a dramatic gesture – it's hardly a gesture at all.

Frank’s aesthetic follows inevitably from the decision to use only available light and shoot in poorly lit interiors. In other words, Frank insisted on making his photographs depict the things and places he was interested in, even under conditions where other photographers would just have given up and gone home. Muddy is the word that comes to mind: not only for the tones, but for the sense that the world is full of inertia and resistance, so that existence is something you have to wade through and struggle against, and not just with a camera. 

If I have reservations about Frank's approach, it’s with regard to the images without people. The rough tonalities, dead shadows and blown highlights of the small negative seem less justified when there’s no ephemeral human element that demands to be captured on the fly. But presumably for Frank consistency was more important than Evans’s variety. Don’t muck about: master one approach, one camera, one lens.

Like American Photographs, The Americans has one image per spread, so that each photograph is first seen in isolation as an independent visual statement before one is tempted to consider its relation to others in the sequence. And the titles are similarly minimalist, although here they are displayed opposite the images instead of separately at the end. The original French publication of the book juxtaposed the images with texts excerpted from a variety of commentators on America from various epochs, sourced and chosen by an editor, but thankfully these were removed for the American edition. Frank’s position has always been that a photograph should ‘nullify explanation’: that is, its effect should be primarily visual, untranslatable into language. The titles are therefore often limited to a bare statement of geography; sometimes they also specify the type of location or a social context ('Cocktail party – New York City', 'View from hotel window – Butte, Montana'), but they almost never attempt to describe or label the individuals depicted, so we are left to make our own inferences about the relationships between them. (An exception to this is 'Jehovah's Witness – Los Angeles', but since the man is visibly engaged in distributing copies of the movement's newspaper Awake, he's effectively labelling himself. Also the image on a ferry shown above is titled 'Yom Kippur – East River, New York City', which in effect identifies its subjects as Jewish, as otherwise it would not be relevant that it was taken on the Day of Atonement.)

The Americans is certainly arranged as a sequence. There are many pointed transitions: e.g. from an older man standing alone under the stairs of a Los Angeles rooming house to another on a bench at Yale wistfully watching a line of new students in black filing past; from a pair of hitchhikers driving Frank's car to another car zooming past in the background behind a bench of sedentary Florida pensioners, followed by another car draped with a protective silk cover, then a victim of a road accident draped with a blanket, which is in turn followed by a luminous shot of an empty highway receding into the distance. Or the kneeling supplicant holding a rudimentary cross by the Mississippi, which is then followed by a silhouetted statue of St Francis holding a cross up to bless a Los Angeles road intersection, and then a shaft of sunlight illuminating three crosses marking the site of a road accident, followed by an interior of a Detroit car-factory assembly line. As Badger explains, the flow is looser and more recursive than it is in American Photographs, frequently doubling back on itself:

Ideas ebb and flow, are introduced, discarded, recapitulated, transfigured, transposed, played off and piled up against each other with the exuberant energy and precise articulation of a Charlie Parker saxophone solo. (247)

Perhaps the larger rhythm of recurrent motifs and themes, with the book split into 'chapters', each introduced with an image of the American flag, is overall more important than specific transitions from one image to the next. We might say the same of much of American Photographs, but Frank's sequence retains both its variety and its coherence throughout, without succumbing to the repetitiveness that arguably undermines the latter part of Evans’s work. 

We could perhaps describe Evans as Apollonian – characterised by sobriety and lucid description – and Frank as Dionysian – characterised by passionate intensity. Certainly the introduction by Kerouac fits this description, and also seems well-suited to the visual aesthetic. But I don't see The Americans as a work of intoxication. Frank’s response to the scenes he photographs is his alone – with very few exceptions, he doesn't share himself with anyone he depicts. So if there's a loss of self involved it is, as with van der Elsken, in the form of a kind of erasure rather than an ecstatic communion with the world(s) depicted. But unlike in the work of Brassaï and van der Elsken, none of these images are collaborations with the subjects – nor do they seem directed or stage-managed (with the possible exception of the image of the three trans people on both counts). And whereas for the earlier photographers, subcultures constitute a genuine alternative to the mainstream, a parallel and independent mode of existence, many of Frank’s subjects seem more marginal. Partly this is because Brassaï and van der Elsken photograph their worlds from close up, whereas Frank catches them in passing.

Evans found it difficult, if not impossible, to match the achievement of American Photographs. Frank didn’t even try to match The Americans, shifting his artistic aspirations to filmmaking shortly after the book's publication. Though perhaps this usual summation of his career is too simple: he continued to work as a photographer for hire, or so I infer from a famous anecdote by Joel Meyerowitz, whose own career as a photographer was inspired by watching Frank do a shoot for the ad agency where Meyerowitz worked in 1962. Indeed there's plenty of evidence online showing him doing commercial work much later than this. But he didn't publish this work in books.

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.

Launch of Push Process Tonight!

A final reminder for friends in Glasgow that Push Process is published today, and the launch event is at 7 tonight at Waterstones Byres Road, where I'll be talking to Zoe Strachan, who was my supervisor when I wrote the original version of this book for an MFA at the University of Glasgow. 

Bonus for early arrivers: since this is an Italian-themed book, there will be free homemade gelato, provided by Ieva Grigelionyte!

Join us on Wednesday 6th March at 7pm as we celebrate the launch of Jonathan Walker's Push Process! Jonathan will be in conversation with fellow author and lecturer of Creative Writing at Glasgow University Zoe Strachan, as well as answering questions and signing copies of Push Process. This is a free event, but please let us know if you are attending by reserving your place via the link below; Push Process will be available to purchase on the night. 

PUSH PROCESS - Coming 6/3/24 

"More speed, more light, more time. But this is the fastest possible film, pushed as hard as it can be pushed; the lens wide open to catch every drop of brightness; the slow exposure shaking the image apart. Right up at the edge. Go farther, closer." 

VENICE, 2000.

Richard is a postgraduate student living in the city to research its past. He's supposed to be working in the archive, but he meets Merlo and Lars, two art students who are more interested in Venice's present. He decides to pick up a camera and join them. The world comes alive for Richard through photographs: for the first time, he feels connected to a place - and other people. He's determined to continue, whatever the cost. 

Push Process is a novel about art, friendship and being European, illustrated with over fifty black-and-white photographs of Venice.

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.

Photographic Inspirations: Ed van der Elsken, Love on the Left Bank (1956)

The line that runs from Walker Evans through to Robert Frank and Robert Adams (all subjects of past or future posts here) is probably the most important set of influences for the images created for Push Process, but there’s another line, one that runs from Brassaï, through Weegee’s Naked City (1945), on to the subject of today’s post, Ed van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank (1956), and thence to Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin (the last two also subjects of future posts). 

Van der Elsken’s book seemingly owes nothing whatever to American Photographs, and, since I didn’t encounter it until long after I’d finished photographing in Venice, and even after I’d written Push Process, it wasn’t really a direct influence on my book (although I’d previously seen and admired some of the individual images). But it does offer a direct precedent for a work that juxtaposes documentary photographs with a fictional narrative, more so than Evans and Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which is creative non-fiction (Agee must surely be one of the contenders for having invented this field). And while Let Us Now Praise Famous Men presents text and image as separate but interdependent statements, Love on the Left Bank, like Push Process, intercuts text and images throughout.

But is the narrative of Love on the Left Bank fiction? The book opens with a statement ‘The text accompanying the photographs is entirely fictional and is not related to any living person.’ However, an earlier version was published as a four-part photo-essay in the British magazine Picture Post in 1954, where the editors informed their readers that ‘This is not a film. This is a real life story about people who do EXIST.’ And in this earlier version van der Elsken used the real names of the people featured in the photographs, although the insistence of the disclaimer itself betrays some anxiety about the authenticity of the images. Maybe van der Elsken got cold feet for the book after the reaction to the magazine publication, or maybe the book version is freer with invented details. We might anachronistically call the story autofiction, except that, as we shall see, it’s indirect autobiography, since van der Elsken erased any direct reference to himself from the narrative. 

I don’t know much about magazine photojournalism of the 1950s, but surely Picture Post was not in the habit of dedicating four-part stories to virtually unknown photographers? So it must have impressed them, even if they saw fit to censor some details later restored for the book (e.g. a reference to venereal disease). I haven’t seen the magazine version, but the book design by Jurriaan Schrofer is certainly rooted in the tradition of magazine photo-story layouts (and in the example of Weegee’s Naked City), even if the layouts of Love on the Left Bank are bolder and more experimental than the usual Picture Post story. 

The situation that led to the book’s creation is described by Hripsime Visser as follows in the Phaidon 55 monograph on van der Elsken. After he moved to Paris from Holland in 1950: 

in a café he met a Russian, who dragged him along and introduced him to the bohemia of Saint-Germain-des-Prés – young people of every nationality, all of them marked by the war in one way or another. These were drifters who spent their days in bars, cafes and little restaurants, dazed by alcohol and drugs, desperate, bitter and negative. Van der Elsken photographed them, fascinated by something he discerned: an outlook on life. Often against their wishes yet, at the same time, as one of them, he captured them drinking, eating, making love and smoking. He had found his style: artificial lighting, smoke and reflections determine the atmosphere. [6] 

The book situates its story in 1956 to match the date of publication, though obviously that can’t have been the case in the Picture Post version. Outside of the book, the individual images are elsewhere captioned with a possible date range of 1950–4, though in specific cases also 1951 and 1953. In other words, while the book purports to be set in the mid-50s, it actually depicts the early 50s. This is significant insofar as Love on the Left Bank depicts the aftermath of the Second World War – although it’s also important that most of the characters were too young to have fought in that conflict. Van der Elsken, born in 1925, was a few years older: he'd gone underground in Holland in 1945 to evade forced labour. 

Love on the Left Bank is often described as the first photonovel or beeldroman, the Dutch term suggesting the importance of that country in the history of this genre. So obviously there were other examples, for example Johan van der Keuken’s We Are Seventeen (1955) is often cited. The prior date perhaps does not qualify it as the ‘first’ either because van der Elsken initially published in 1954, or because We Are Seventeen was avowedly non-fictional, a collective portrait of the author and his friends at the titular age. It’s hard to say how influential or widespread this tradition was – although there are certainly famous non-Dutch examples like Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes's The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955: again, it's not immediately clear why this doesn't take precedence as the first example). My associations with the term ‘photonovel’ are of 80s romance comics where paid actors were directed to act out teen dramas sometimes based on readers’ letters. But if one considers the alternative descriptions of the beeldroman as ‘diaristic’ or ‘stream-of-consciousness’, it’s a tradition that might include Robert Frank, and certainly looks forward to Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. 

There’s actually very little text in Love on the Left Bank by comparison with even the shortest works of prose fiction, maybe about three thousand words total, and split into very short, non-continuous sections, sometimes only a sentence or two. Most of the text is descriptive and summary, setting up a situation, or sketching out the basic, shared conditions of life in the café society of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The frame narrative concerns a Mexican itinerant called Manuel who falls in love with a bohemian Australian dancer, Ann, played by Vali Myers, who is the real protagonist and principal subject of many of the photographs. For example: 

We went to a little place called the Mau Mau and she slept in her chair. I fell in love with her. That afternoon we went for a walk. We wandered from café to café and I met Ann’s friends. 

The last phrase then serves as the narrative justification for several spreads featuring, firstly Ann in various guises, then exteriors of the cafes, followed by portraits of the friends, both singly and in groups. 

The excerpt above is pretty bald and functional prose, all tell and no show (because the photos perform the latter function), but other sections capture the quality of life quite well, either in short anecdotes or summaries. These often switch to third-person narration, and Manuel therefore seems to disappear periodically from both the text and the images. For example: 

Dinner was a piece of bread eaten on the street. At night you could swipe milk bottles left on the pavement outside dairies. For thirty francs you could get chips at the Place de l’Odéon. When the going was good you might blow a hundred francs on a meat-ball or spaghetti Levantin. You could buy a litre of wine for less than sixty francs. You could sleep in cafes, on a bench in the Luxembourg, or in parked cars on the Place Saint Sulpice. During the day you could sleep in the cinema or the métro. When you had a new girl-friend you stood yourself to a room in a hotel. 

Again, the next several pages then bear the weight of illustrating these several propositions, with some more textual details added in the margins of the image spreads. The individual images have no titles or captions, however – only these occasional narrative addenda. 

Some of the photographs would have seemed pretty crude by contemporary journalistic standards: both technically and, perhaps, at the level of content, with occasional nudity. In fact, other than this nudity, there’s no explicit sexual content in the images, but there are numerous frank allusions in the text, e.g. to interracial and same-sex liaisons. Oddly the most graphic images for me are of people eating – voraciously, shamelessly, with no regard to manners or other people’s sensibilities. 

Love on the Left Bank contains miniature examples of both the standardised series and the sequential narrative: a page with multiple shots of different café exteriors, each shot in the same manner; and a couple of dynamic situations developing over time (e.g. a girlfriend is disappointed when her beau is distracted by the arrival of a rival; the same man and a male friend get drunk and cause trouble on the Paris streets). 

But the most important organising principle is that of restless variety: the book rarely sticks to the same kind of layout consecutively. Some pages or spreads have a single portrait image, for example a severely cropped face printed full bleed, extremely grainy. Others jumble images together as promiscuously as the café inhabitants mix with one another. In this, Love on the Left Bank resembles another book of the same period also influenced by Weegee, William Klein’s Life is good and good for you in New York: Trance Witness Revels – but since that was published in the same year as Love on the Left Bank, Klein’s work was presumably not a direct influence (and his book contains no real narrative element, fictional or otherwise). But one thing the two books share is an interest in pushing photographic technique until the limitations of the medium become part of the meaning of the image.

Sometimes van der Elsken's approach to layout sells individual images short: powerful, striking compositions get lost among the noise, especially when they are printed small and overshadowed by other, weaker images on the same page or spread. It also promotes several rather banal images to larger roles because of their illustrative function. But overall the visual cacophony gives what one imagines to be a good impression of the highly strung, overstimulated state of mind of the protagonists. 

There’s also considerable variation in technique among the images: some were shot on a 35mm camera; others on a medium-format Rolleicord that produced 6x6cm negatives, that is, of higher quality. Some images were clearly shot handheld in available light only; others use flash, and a few of the more staged ones almost certainly used a tripod. Most were taken at night, both in the cafes and outside; a few in daylight. A few are also reproductions of drawings or paintings created by Ann or other characters, presumably photographed in a studio. 

Often against their wishes yet, at the same time, as one of them: this is a very odd phrase. Clearly van der Elsken’s relation to his subjects is different to that depicted in, say, Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959): closer, more personal, and above all ongoing. But curiously van der Elsken substitutes an alter-ego for himself, and suppresses any explicit acknowledgement of his role as resident artist to this decadent court centred around Queen Ann. There’s at least one image where, in the full-frame version, van der Elsken appears reflected in a mirror holding his Rolleicord, but he cropped this part out for reproduction in Love on the Left Bank. In other words, there is no photographer character: no one is taking these photos within the fictional world of the story. 

The images where subjects respond directly to van der Elsken might seem to contradict this, but I think in these cases the camera temporarily assumes the viewpoint of an offscreen character – sometimes this is explicitly Manuel, but it’s never van der Elsken, since he does not exist in the fiction. In this self-erasure, van der Elsken is following photojournalistic tradition – but by presenting the narrative as fictional the conceit becomes more self-conscious than in most documentary photography. Perhaps one might say that the camera is a character, even if van der Elsken isn't. 

Often against their wishes yet, at the same time, as one of them: from the images, we might speculate as to what was involved in practice. Nearly everyone depicted knew van der Elsken, was used to him being around and taking pictures. Vali Myers was his direct collaborator, who he both photographed as she went about her life, including in quite intimate circumstances in her home – and perhaps also directed or suggested preferred scenarios for her to improvise with. 

Others were perhaps directed in their interactions with Myers to some degree – given a character and a scenario, or posed for particular shots, particularly the individuals cast as Manuel and Geri, the latter Ann’s flatmate and eventual lover (though neither of them have to ‘act’ in any real sense). But many others were probably not directed at all, just photographed opportunistically and spontaneously, and then fitted into a scenario or narrative post-facto. Or else van der Elsken seized on a situation unfolding and then used that as the basis for a subplot, such as the various escapades of Jean Michel and Benny, who both look a little too dangerous and unpredictable to submit to direction. 

In this clip from a short film van der Elsken made with Vali Myers in 1972, she discusses Jean Michel and Benny using their real names: 

Myers's commentary here suggests dispiriting fates for the people featured in the book: imprisonment, madness, suicide. What neither she or van der Elsken mention, either here or in Love on the Left Bank itself, is that this crowd included several members of the Letterist International, a group who later contributed several important concepts and personnel to the Situationist International, and thence to the 1968 protests in France – and beyond that, to the culture of punk. One of the LI members, Jean-Michel Mension – rechristened ‘Pierre’ by van der Elsken, i.e. not the pseudonymous ‘Jean Michel’ referred to above as is sometimes erroneously suggested – published a memoir of his time in what he called The Tribe in 2002. In it, he describes the prevailing attitude: 

If someone had said … “I want to be a famous painter,” if someone had said “I want to be a famous novelist,” if someone had said, “I want in whatever way to be a success,” then that someone would have been tossed instantly out of the back room right through the front room onto the street. There was an absolute refusal … We rejected a world that was distasteful to us, and we would do nothing at all within it. 

The history of the LI is explored in detail in Greil Marcus's book Lipstick Traces, which explains that the group's headquarters was the same cafe that lies at the centre of Love on the Left Bank, where it's rechristened as the Mau Mau: 

The café was Chez Moineau, 22 rue de Four, a block from Saint-Germain-des-Prés. People from all over the world passed through. It was a haven for refugees, would-be artists, budding suicides, runaways and class cutters, petty criminals, dope pushers, bums, eccentrics (one old man regularly appeared in a Japanese warrior’s helmet from which, by means of a wire, he flew a pack of cigarettes), and the new Lettrist International, which is to say a table, where sat those [Guy] Debord [the leader of the LI, and later of the Situationist International] judged ready to change the world. ... Though Debord forbade him on pain of violence to shoot the LI, van der Elsken roamed the room, aiming into the mirrors that covered the walls. In some ways, the pictures he got say as much about the LI as the manifestos the group was writing at its table—a fact Debord acknowledged when he clipped images out of van der Elsken’s first book … and dropped them into [his own account of this period] Mémoires. [349–50] 

Marcus quotes from a 1954 manifesto of the LI, which also works as a description of van der Elsken's technique of fictionalisation: 

The construction of situations will be the continuous realization of a great game, a game the players have chosen to play: a shifting of settings and conflicts to kill off the characters in a tragedy in twenty-four hours. [320] 

One should not overstate this connection: most of van der Elsken's characters were not members of the LI, and its most important members, notably Debord, do not appear in Love on the Left Bank. 

The bar photographs in Push Process are not as complex or bold as van der Elsken's, although some have a similar look to his, since I was also interested in working at the limits of the medium (and I was also using black-and-white film). And like Love on the Left Bank, Push Process situates documentary photography within a fictional narrative, although with a much longer, continuous text. The characters it depicts perhaps have something in common with the denizens of Chez Moineau, though they are more conventional in their artistic aspirations. My first book Pistols! Treason! Murder!, a very experimental biography of a Venetian spy, which I researched and wrote during the same period in which I took the photographs featured in Push Process, is actually much closer to the provocations of the LI and the Situationists (it was described as 'punk history'). But in Push Process, unlike Love on the Left Bank, the creation of the photographs is the main subject of the narrative, and the photographer is the central protagonist. Conversely, the photographs do not purport to depict the characters in the story. Rather they are of strangers, in the mode of Walker Evans or Robert Frank. And after the text ends, there is an extended photo sequence modelled on Evan’s American Photographs (1938), depicting contemporary Venice. 

Are there other precedents for this mingling of fiction and documentary photography? I was certainly influenced by Ross Gibson's novel The Summer Exercises (2009), together with the associated multimedia work Life After Wartime (2004), by Gibson and Kate Richards – both works juxtapose crime-scene photographs from the New South Wales police archives with a fictional narrative. I'll be writing or otherwise discussing this work elsewhere at some point. I was also aware of André Breton's Nadja (1928). There's also the novel Double Negative by Ivan Vladislavić, at least in the original edition, which was accompanied by a companion volume of photographs by David Goldblatt (2010). Are there other examples?