Keith Medley's Archive: Double Take

The highlight for me of Liverpool Look/13 was Double Take, a collection of double images made on glass plate negatives in Keith Medley’s studio near Liverpool. The pictures are quite astonishing, with pictures showing the same subject with different expression – sometimes it’s a very different expression, sometimes it’s just a subtle shift. But those subtle shifts transform the person in the left hand image into somebody quite different from those on the left.

The collection on display in Liverpool was edited by Ken Grant and Mark Durden. I put a few questions to Ken about the archive and his answers are below.

There's a book out too - which is available at the Walker Art Gallery where Double Take is currently on show. You can buy one (not sure if this is only from the UK or if you can order from overseas) from the  Walker Art gallery Shop on 0151 478 4199 and there will be online sales from next week.

But how great are these pictures - they are captivating!

How did you find the archive?

Keith Medley's son held the work after his father's death and approached Liverpool John Moores University. They have a number of collections and a very good research archive but until that point, photography hadn't featured in it. Keith Medley's work, which comprises of over 30,000 glass plates, is now housed there. Because of their local nature –and because it was photography- I was invited to look at the archive and appraise it, along with Mark Durden. I'd lived in New Brighton, not far from where Medley's studio was and I was familiar with some of the history of the Medley studio in that part of Merseyside.

What's in the archive?

Keith Medley ran the studio meticulously. We've been able to benefit from the many ledgers that are hand-written of course, and which detail the appointments that took place each day. From that point it was easy to see that the working day included portraits, calls to photograph on location, civic events, awards dinners, shop fronts, still lives of domestic products. We also noticed the letters 'PP' were added when Passport pictures were required. It's noteworthy that the first package holidays to leave from Manchester, an hour away, was established in 1961 and it's probably widely known that the Northwest was a major point of departure for many journeys throughout the 20th century.

Looking at the glass plates, it was clear that the cropped end result was one outcome - but the wider frame, relating what people wore, how they addressed the camera and the further details that contribute so much to our understanding of the moment in which the pictures were made, betrayed so much more. Mark and I began to get excited by the Passport pictures, once a few samples were scanned and printed though all those other aspects exist in the archive and should be given consideration as things move forward.

How did you edit the archive?

We looked at the portraits that were at the heart of the collection and then realised that most of those we were interested in were made through a sustained spell in the 1960s. It was apparent that the changes taking place in the region (and amongst them we could imagine the rising waves of popular culture, through the music that most of us are familiar with) were becoming apparent in the pictures, haircuts were changing, styles of dress echoed the new fashions happening across the country but nestled amongst portraits of elder sitters who seemed to remain in hand made clothing. Some younger children look as though the influence of their parents, who would have been adolescent in the 1950s, remained, in their choice of quiffed hair and Brylcream. Amongst all of this though there is the sense of the Wallasey and New Brighton area as a mixed and engaging district. It was (and still is) a place where commuters return to after days working in Liverpool, a place surrounded by docks, river and sea, a place where working and middle classes coalesce… if those terms are relevant any more. It was important to try and articulate something of this rich mix when editing the work.

Why did he make the pictures on glass plates?

Keith Medley had a long and distinguished career that involved film making as well as the many daily responses he would make to appointments at the studio. The short answer is that he learnt on that technology and it was easy to get hold of pre-sensitized glass plates throughout his career. In the archive, there are some rolls of roll-film, but they are modest in number and seemingly made later in his career. The camera used was a wooden studio camera that dominated the ground floor of the studio. I imaging a long established process is hard to change.

Why did he do the split pictures?

If you spend time with them it's clear that there are a number of occasions were the sitter was to change across the two exposures. I imagine using the first picture to put the sitter at ease and the second to make the more sedate Passport response must have made sense. The are examples in the book where sitters just couldn't compose themselves and going to studio was I'd imagine quite a big deal –a rare appointment to sit for a picture that will stay with you a long time. Our relationship with photography is more gregarious these days….then there's the question of economics, re-using the same plate instead of doubling the expense may have been a consideration. I particularly like the exceptions, where the sitters change and cousins are photographed together –and when a husband and wife take half a frame each –as if they couldn't bear to be apart…that stops you dead.

How did he divide the pictures?

The process was achieved through an adapted dark-slide. There are commercially available ones known of, and research will often take you to America where enthusiasts use 19th Century cameras. However the sting in the tail is that after the studio closed, the camera disappeared and, with it, the materials and equipment Medley used.

Ken Grant: Feel the Love

The Photography Festival at Liverpool Look/13 was a great and diverse example of photography in all its forms, from the Rankin exhibition at the Walker Gallery to Ken Grant's work at the Beacon Community Centre.

Ken  has been photographing around the Centre (and nearby Anfield) for the last 25 years and his work is an example of a longterm community project. Seeing it in a community centre was really interesting too, and gave it quite a different context to the usual book or gallery form.

When I was there was a quiet time , but every now and then somebody would pop in and look at a picture and then get on the phone and wander round the pictures - "remember that old man who used to sit in the corner. There's a picture of him." Or, "there's John's cousin," or that's "Jane's aunt."

 

There was a sense that this wasn't a distant photographic project but part of Ken's soul at work here, and that this exhibition was more of a sharing than a showing. 

It would have been great to see the reactions the next day when the Centre was busy with people visiting before the football because there was such a sense of people and place.

You could feel the love and consideration in the pictures from the edit and from the way Ken related to the pictures as entities in their own right. Ken talked about a boy who he photographed when he was 5 years old and minding cars for 50p a time, and then showed a picture of the same boy minding cars for £5 a time. There was the man who led the chants at Liverpool, the dog described as 'strong' (I could think of some other words), and the man who looked like the ultimate Liverpool stereotype. This was a time and a place personified.

But people were almost always shown as part of something, in a community, with movement and people and things happening all around. I think they might have looked better in isolation, more odd and eccentric and stereotyped, but at the same time that would have been a kind of stitch up or a one-liner. But there were no one-liners here.

See Ken Grant's work at the Beaconsfield Community Centre, as part of Liverpool Look/13 parallel programme, an altogether fabulous festival.

The Act of Killing

I finally saw The Act of Killing by Joshua Oppenheimer last week.

It's an extraordinary film that opens up what happened during the mass killings in Indonesia in 1965-1966;  the killing of up to 3 million people took place after a coup allegedly organised by the Indonesian Communist Party (you can read a different version of events here).

Following this coup, the argument goes that for stability to be restored, lots of people had to be killed - otherwise chaos would reign. It's not a very good argument but it's one that has dominated public thinking in Indonesia for the last 60 years.

So military commanders (including, especially, the current president's father-in-law) were sent out across the province to encourage the murder of civilian leftists.

The Act of Killing focusses on one group that was involved in the killings, Pemuda Pancasila. PP are the biggest of a number of paramilitary groups in Indonesia that were/are involved in organised criminal activities.

The main protagonist in the film is a man called Anwar Congo, a dapper, melancholy chap who describes who he killed and how he killed them. Other supporting actors describe the women they raped, the houses they burned, the money they robbed - and we see how the past is still apparent in the present when one member of PP extorts money from ethnic Chinese market stall holders.

Things get weird when Oppenheimer gets the protagonists to dress up  as gangsters and re-enact their crimes. A touch of remorse starts coming through. There is film of PP conferences, we see provincial governors and government leaders openly talking about the necessity of gangsterism in civil society. We hear PP talk about illegal evictions, smuggling and gambling as income streams.

Already the film is an incredible document on the role of gangsterism in Indonesian society and how the narrative of the evil communists has been upheld over the years. It's the Age of Madness, where Wrong is Right and Right is Wrong.

But then the main protagonists begin to question what happened and ask whether they were the really evil ones. A man whose stepfather was dragged out of his house and murdered describes the effect on his life, the way he was forced to move to a village on the edge of the jungle, how he had no schooling. Anwar Congo describes the nightmares he has, another killer questions if it's not time to rewrite the Indonesian history books.

But the really extraordinary thing is that the killers believe that Oppenheimer is making a film that supports their initial view of the killings being a good thing. They also believe that he is making a dramatic film of the killings, complete with a script, songs, dancing and a giant goldfish.

Anwar Congo believes that 'Josh' is his friend. There are layers of subterfuge, deceit and dishonesty all round. what is staged and what is not staged is no longer apparent. 

How Oppenheim managed this is unfathomable (he says it is because the killers loved American films - though dancing off into a giant goldfish is more Bollywood than Hollywood).

How he managed to make such a sensitive film in the first place is even more unfathomable. A clue might be that certain major players in the killers are barely mentioned - in particular the army (but also religious organisations and the civil service). As a result the film gives the impression that they were not major protagonists in the murders. There is a nod that this is not the case in the film, but it is only a nod.

Despite all this, the film is quite incredible and questions what is real, what is staged, what is friendship and what is not.

Here is a review of the film that calls it manipulative.

And here is an interview with the director.

Here is how the film fits into a wider debate opening on the events of the 1960s in Indonesia.

Still Lives, Allotments and Galaxies

The BJP has a Still Life special this month featuring, from top down, the work of Nadege Meriau, Klaus Pichler, Nicolai Howalt and Deborah Bay (and interviews by myself and Lauren Heinz examining their work).

All the artists photograph something we take for granted and then recontextualise it  - Meriau, Howalt and Bay all have projects that transform things into something resembling galaxies; dust, vegetables and bullet holes become Supernova in their hands.

Pichler and Meriau have both worked with allotments and now work with food, Howalt's Car Crash Studies look like close up of birthday party wrapping paper and Deborah Bay's project is called Big Bang and she's from Houston so there has to be a Sheldon Cooper connection in there somewhere.

The Big Bang project reminded me very much of Claus Stolz's sunburn pictures too -one of which is below. Which brings us full circle to the night sky and the stars. Somehow Still Lives are a bit more about movement, living and the fundamentals of human life.  And it all started with a Big Bang!

Susan Sontag Scares Photographers

   

I talked to David Goldblatt a couple of weeks ago for an article on the BJP on age, creativity, developing a voice and going stale.

Goldblatt's photography attaches to the politics of South Africa and it was interesting that he thinks that it hasn't changed throughout his career.

I like the way the best photographers don't stay the same, but change in tune with politics or people or places. I spoke to Alec Soth who doesn't go stale simply because he keeps on doing different thing ( that's why we haven't had Mississippi 3, 4 and 5) , or Anouk Kruithof whose work emerges through the energy of the people she meets  and places she lives; Duane Michals continually reinvents himself and  just never does anything twice and Max Pinckers is starting out on his career but is already discovering that he always wants to do something new.

Allied to this doing of something new is a contempt for those who churn out the same formula. Duane Michals wrote a book on this, and Alec Soth called that kind of regurgitation of the same old stuff to fulfil marker demands 'obnoxious'. Which I really liked.

I also liked this video of David Goldblatt in coversation with Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in which he says Susan Sontage scares people off photography.

Which I think is true. I don't think Goldblatt would have made anything if he had stuck to the edicts of Sontag and others ( I don't think Annie Liebovitz would have either). I wonder how many photographers now have been scared off making something substantial and topical because of the agonizing over what it is suitable and not suitable to portray - an agonizing that is almost entirely negative in its outlook. The agonizing should rather be over how something can be portrayed, a positive agonizing that gets the story told to its best effect (which is something Goldblatt, Soth, Kruithof, Michals and Pinckers were all very concerned with despite their hugely different approaches).

I was going to have a little series here on people who were working on work that dealt with the current financial crisis in the UK and the effect it is having on communities and organisations but after Jim Mortram and Molly Lansman I ran out of steam.

Perhaps it's just me, but aren't the shocks of the biggest economic crisis in 80 years, and the effective dismantling of the welfare state something worth photographing? Am I being ignorant - or is it the case that so few people are photographing these radical changes in UK society? And if they are not photographing it, what is the reason. Back in the 1980s, people photographed it? What's the difference? Maybe photographers today are just too distant from economic crises ( perhaps they fund their photography through property development like Freddie here ) but somehow I don't think so. But Goldblatt's explanation, that they have been scared off somehow - that rings true.

100 Years of Indian Cinema

100 years ago today the first Indian-made film, Raja Harishchandra was screened in Bombay.

This is what India's greatest screenwriter Javed Akhtar has to say on contemporary Indian film (which has shifted from a focus on the poor exploited by the rich in the 1950s to a celebration of the rich and famous now).

Raja Harishchandra

Mod Couples

Following on from Owen Harvey's Dancing Mods, here are Carlotta Cardana's rather splenid Mod Couples, showing at Photofusion in Brixton.

They seem a bit far from the amphetamine fuelled fishtail parka, Phil Daniels knee trembling beloved of  old, with a touch of the Old Fogey/Brideshead look about them.

Where did it all go wrong?

I blame Sir Bradley Wiggins. Here are some people who refused to become Sir -  including David Bowie, Danny Boyle, Aldous Huxley, Mohammed Ali Jinnah ("I prefer to be plain Mr Jinnah"), Stephen Hawking, Graham Greene, L.S. Lowry (holds the record most honours declined) and Rudyard Kipling.