Photographic Inspirations: Chris Killip, In Flagrante (1988)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Killip's photographs are not only the culmination of a particular tradition: they also represent an extraordinary technical achievement. They were all taken on a 4x5 large-format camera, borrowing a technique from Weegee, in that Killip often used flash, even in daylight. This allowed him to shoot handheld, presumably by presetting the exposure and focal distance to match the flash parameters, and sticking to subjects positioned within that range. Evans – and most other photographers, including myself – usually use large-format cameras to photograph architecture or landscape. Killip instead primarily used it to photograph life in flux: people in the midst of unfolding – and sometimes dynamic – situations. In the 1980s, this self-imposed task must have seemed quixotic, but, as the example of Weegee suggests, it was once the norm for press photographers to shoot handheld on 4x5 cameras, so it was far from unprecedented. Because of the large negatives and the even lighting, the results are extraordinarily rich in detail, and thereby portray the full, intense human presence of the people shown in a way that enlargements from 35mm negatives just can't compete with. If the supposed justification for the roughness of Robert Frank's imagery was that it was an inevitable consequence of the attempt to catch life on the fly, then Killip gives the lie to that claim. [Edit: Since writing this, I have learned that at least one of the images included in In Flagrante was taken with a smaller 6x7 camera on medium-format roll film, a somewhat less challenging proposition. I don't know how often Killip used this alternative format. In all the photos I've seen that show him at work, he's carrying a 4x5.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extra Images From Push Process: 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographic Representations of Venice: Fulvio Roiter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes on Photography: The Outmoded

He was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the 'outmoded', in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them.

Walter Benjamin on the Surrealist leader Andre Breton

Push Process is illustrated with photographs taken on black-and-white film (plus a few colour Polaroids, though these are reproduced in black and white). Even in 2000–5, the period from which the photographs date, these were obsolescent technologies. They once seemed natural or innovative, but now seem peculiar, quaint, redundant. Because they are outmoded, we become aware of their specific properties and limitations.

Here are versions of the four cameras I used to take the photographs used in the book (apologies for the image quality): a Polaroid Spectra c. 1980s; a 1955 Rolleiflex; a Voightlander–Cosina Bessa-R – mine was bought new in 2002; and a Tachihara wooden field camera c. 1980s.

A photograph is no longer a second-generation print enlarged from a negative – and before digital technology displaced film, the default state of a photograph went from being a daguerreotype (1840s), to a black-and-white print (mid-nineteenth century until the 1960s, but in several different successive modes, e.g. albumen print, silver–gelatin print; and from glass–plate negatives to celluloid or acrylic strips), to a colour slide transparency (in the 60s and 70s), to a print from a colour negative (in the 80s and 90s).

To their original users, all these technologies seemed intrinsic to the definition of what a photograph was.

To use an outmoded technology is not, therefore, an invitation to nostalgia; or it need not be. It is instead an invitation to consider the results as the product of a historical process.

Photographic Inspirations: The Phaidon 55 Series

‘The illiteracy of the future’, someone has said, ‘will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography’. But shouldn’t a photographer who cannot read his own pictures be no less accounted an illiterate? Won’t inscription become the most important part of the photograph?

Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, 1931

The first part of this quotation was cited by the art publisher Phaidon as one of the inspirations for their 55 series, a set of small monographs, published in pocket-sized paperback editions c. 2000 (I believe the concept was the brainchild of Chris Boot). Each title in the series was dedicated to an individual photographer and features fifty-five images by him or her, with separate commentary for each image, and an introductory essay. The format and design for each book in the series was identical: it opened with a photographic portrait or self-portrait of the subject, followed by the introduction in continuous text (i.e. with no interpolated illustrations or 'figures'), followed by a series of 55 commentary / image layouts, most of which had a short passage of text on the left page (verso) and a photograph on the right page (recto). At the end of the book, there was a chronology for the subject’s life and work, followed by a final page with biographical notes for photographer and commentator / editor.

The initial price of each volume was £4.95 in the UK. The idea was to provide affordable, portable introductions to the work of key photographers, to enable people to acquire a library of such works, in much the same way that Penguin Classics encouraged engagement with the literature of the past in postwar Britain. They were readable not only in the sense of being written for non-specialists, but in the sense you could slip them in your pocket and take them out to browse on the bus or train.

There were of course other, related publishing initiatives (besides my collection of Phaidon 55s, I have several volumes from the Photo Poche series by Delpire, published originally in French, but acquired by me in various languages, depending on where and when I was able to get hold of them). However, the Phaidon series seems to me to have been the most imaginative and ambitious because of its use of text, which was, incidentally, typeset in light grey (with black for the headings). In skipping from photograph to text, the grey therefore served as a sort of calibration for the tonal scale of the image.

While the design and production of the books was uniform, the protocol for the selection of the images and the nature of the commentary differed from title to title. In most cases, a curator chose the 55 images and wrote both the introduction and the commentary. In some cases, a critic wrote the introduction, but the photographer made the selection and / or wrote the commentary. Some of the chosen writers contributed rather dull, pseudo-academic introductions that occasionally lapsed into artspeak, but in other cases the combination of writer and photographer was inspired: for example, in the volume on Walker Evans, where the text is by Luc (now Lucy) Sante.

The direct commentary on the photographs was usually evocative and incisive, since it was almost always less than one hundred words per image, and it also avoided technical information (these were not 'how-to' books). But it otherwise varied greatly, both in tone and in what we might call its terms of engagement with the images. The commentary for the Eugene Richards 55, for example (by Charles Bowden), is a sort of continuous rolling jazz riff on the circumstances and characters of the human subjects of the images, cut into 55 short segments that run on into one another, like a Beat poem.

I own almost all of the paperback 55s, and in acquiring them I encountered many photographers about whom I previously knew nothing, so from my point-of-view the concept was an unqualified success, their only flaw being that the binding and glue tends to fall apart with extensive use (a problem that may be attributable to the paper, which is necessarily thicker than that used for most paperbacks). However, Phaidon significantly revised the project in the mid-2000s, when they started to issue new titles in the series (along with selected reprints of popular earlier titles) in a larger, hardback format, and at an increased price. So, perhaps, from Phaidon's point-of-view, the initial concept did not prove to be cost-effective. 

The newer iteration of the project was still cheaper than many photographic monographs or exhibition catalogues, but not by much - their 55 title on Edward Curtis was initially advertised at £22.95! At that price, I'd only buy a volume if I had a prior interest in the subject, and even then I'd have to consider it carefully. The increased price and page size also discouraged browsing and continual use, whereas, because of the cheap price, I didn't much mind if the original paperbacks became dogeared or worn from carrying them around. 

The 55 series was not only an essential part of my visual education, but also a primer for the second part of Benjamin’s comment above (along with the work of John Szarowski): they taught me how to write about photographs in a concise and meaningful way. 

Since most of my photography books are currently in boxes in a shed in Melbourne, I re-bought many of the most relevant 55 titles secondhand on ebay in 2020–1 as I started taking photographs again, and as I rewrote the manuscript that became Push Process. I found them just as useful then as I had twenty years before – and there's been no successor line. Even in 2021, the secondhand copies were still the cheapest way to obtain an overview of the work of many photographers.

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.

Notes on Photography: The Photographer's Body

In Push Process, I tried to argue – and to dramatise – the idea that photography is something one does with the whole body, not a disembodied eye. Below is an extract from an interview with Stephen Shore on the same theme:

Stephen Shore: I was thinking of how I would approach the issue of embodiment in photographic terms, and that is if you become aware of yourself as a physical object in space, as though you were a dancer moving through the space of a room, your perception changes, your perception of space changes, your perception of time changes, and to the degree that that perceptual change is visual, it could be communicated in a photograph. So the sense of space is often the easiest of these subtler qualities to talk about, but if your physical awareness of yourself changes your perception of space, if you are a photographer that has had a lot of experience, a practiced photographer who has control of the medium, the picture you take can communicate that.

Michael Fried: Yes. What struck me in [your] landscape photos ... is that I felt something intensely empathic about, for example, the way they depicted the unevenness of the ground. And about the way in which they treated the whole question of relative distance. It had to be read. I mean I was keenly aware of the visual work I had to do to make my way imaginatively through the photos, to figure out distances, to read scale relations. Let's say there is something at a certain distance, it might be a big rock or it might be a smaller one. Everything depends on whether it is a big rock at 800 yards or a small rock at 75 yards, and those photographs don't immediately deliver that information. They make you work for it, and I came to feel that the labor of construal they forced me to do was implicitly physical, if you see what I mean. It was more than just mental, it was equivalent to imagining myself having to physically negotiate that space. So they were for me extremely interesting photos precisely with respect to the issue of bodiliness and empathy. Also, they made me register the unevenness of the ground in a more than strictly visual way -- the way I would have done had I been walking on it, climbing that slope, or coming back down. 

From the recent Phaidon volume on Stephen Shore