Kathryn Flett: "Call me a prude..."

Kathryn Flett writes on children viewing photographs in Saturday's Guardian.She asks whether children should see either pictures with a sexual element (specifically Mapplethorpe's) or pictures showing the aftermath of violence (specifically Stuart Griffiths photographs of mutilated servicemen).

I think I'm with Flett on this one, but the question is whether adults should see more of images of violence - with Remembrance Sunday just past, I can't recall seeing any picture on the television or in the papers that remembered the horrors of war in the way that Griffiths' pictures do. The idea that we are overrun with pictures of violence and suffering is laughable - in the UK at least, graphic images are self-censored and controlled.

This is what Flett has to say - read the whole article here.


Anyway, there I was on one of my child-free weekends, soaking up the culture, clocking the penises and the Patti Smith portraits, when I spotted a couple of cool-looking mid-30s mums and dads plus their offspring, ranging from babies to not-quite-double-figures, all "enjoying" the Mapplethorpe oeuvre en famille. At which point I felt almost comically middle-aged and reactionary. And for the second time in a fortnight, no less, having experienced similar bemusement at the sight of groovy parents, singly and in couples, hauling their kids around one of the edgier exhibits at the Brighton Photo Biennale – the horribly mutilated subjects of Stuart Griffiths's fine but harrowing (and also very large) colour portraits of maimed ex-servicemen.

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Having first been struck by the Small Children + Scary Pictures = Who Knows What equation at Stuart Griffiths's Brighton private view, I wondered what the photographer felt about his work being right up there with a Pizza Express pit-stop and 3D Despicable Me as part of a cosy family day out: "Well, I grew up with a very rose-tinted, Action Man view of the army as somewhere where men were able to be men – but my son, who has grown up with my images, doesn't have that at all. I've asked him if he'd ever want to join up, and straightaway he said no, he doesn't want to end up like one of my photographs. As far as he's concerned, war is bad and that's that," says Griffiths.
As anti-war propaganda, then, Griffiths's pictures are undeniably powerful tools – and all the more so for having been made by an ex-soldier. And then there is a human narrative largely missing from the Mapplethorpe oeuvre that might engage even relatively young children (though I think mine are too young) in a potentially positive way.
The picture at the top is an illustration of Hilary Mantel who writes a disturbing but entertaining article on the visceral and psychological indignities  served up when an operation goes wrong. The illustration reminds me of Eikoh Hosoe's Ordeal by Roses. Read the article here.

A Short Interview with Tim Jeffries of Hamiltons Gallery

A short interview with Tim Jeffries of Hamiltons Gallery

When we started Hamiltons in 1984, we decided that to have a fighting chance of getting noticed we needed some heavyweights like Norman Parkinson, David Bailey and Don McCullin. Later we got Robert Maplethorpe and Irving Penn. When we started, late 20th century photography wasn’t collectable. It was early 20th century photographers like Man Ray, Edward Steichen , Stieglitz, Weston and Atget who were selling.

We need to keep an eye on young, developing artists. Often they come to me or are brought to me. They send in their portfolio or a link, but to be honest, the bigger the name of the photographer, the more likely we are going to go for them.

If you’re dealing with someone of Penn’s stature, the price and editioning is done for you. We don’t decide. In the case of a younger photographer, I would have a great hand in the pricing of a work. One needs to know what is going on in the auction world, you need to place the artist in comparable company in terms of price. The big danger is pricing them out of the market, because there is nothing worse than having a show where nothing sells and there’s nothing better than a sellout show. As a golden rule of thumb, if you’re not sure of a price, put it on the low side – because you can always put a price up, but lowering a price always looks really bad.

When I first met Robert Mapplethorpe I was relatively new to the business. I was so excited by being in his presence, I didn’t think of asking the price of his prints. Then I found out they were going for US $1,500. This was in 1987 when our other most expensive prints were US $1,000. I thought I was going to have trouble selling them, but they flew out of the door. It was a turning point because if you have the opportunity to work with a truly international superstar it brings a new market with new collectors and a new inspiration.

We have a solid group of regular collectors. But for me a real collector is almost obsessive – collecting is like a sickness where somebody simply has to have a picture. They have nowhere to put it, but they have to have it. Many people today are not collectors, they are decorators. They have a room with wall space and they need something to fill that space, something that will go with the rest of the room.

Photography is very accessible. We must be aware of how photography has informed our generation. We are all, in some way, visually literate – so there is a less of a barrier between a photograph and, for example, a pickled shark. In the next 50 years, tastes will change. Look at how photography has changed in the last 10 years – now traditional film photography looks backward. So today’s photography has made yesterday’s more valuable. In the same way, the photography of the future will make today's photography more valuable.

Patti Smith on Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe is one of those photographers I don't entirely get (John Gossage is another one - I can look and look at his books, but no, nothing comes through), but when I talked to people from London galleries a few weeks ago (for an article in the BJP), it was fascinating to hear the passion he generated and how this helped transform the British market for photography.

Tim Jeffries at Hamiltons showed his work first in the UK and Mapplethorpe prints redefined contemporary pricing.

“When I first met Robert Mapplethorpe I was relatively new to the business. I was so excited by being in his presence, I didn’t think of asking the price of his prints. Then I found out they were going for US $1,500. This was in 1987 when our other most expensive prints were US $1,000. I thought I was going to have trouble selling them, but they flew out of the door. It was a turning point because if you have the opportunity to work with a truly international superstar it brings a new market with new collectors and a new inspiration.”


And for the lovely Michael Diemar at Diemar and Noble, they started him on first the way of the collector and last year, the way of the gallerist.

"I started buying Mapplethorpe, the first picture I bought was a Maplethorpe flower, and gradually I worked myself backwards in time until I was buying 19th century Gustave Le Gray prints. You need a background either as a collector or working in an auction house to have a gallery that deals with the whole of the history of photography. You need a real feel for the photograph as an object."

Mapplethorpe was also a great self-promoter and Just Kids, the recently published autobiography by Patti Smith details his transformation from small time hustler to global superstar. Another one to put on the to-buy list.

Edmund White does a great review here. 

Patti and Robert were both born in 1946 and both were raised by poor parents, she in Germantown, Pennsylvania and then New Jersey, he by a Catholic family on Long Island. Like all ­lovers, they told endless ­stories to each other about their childhoods: "We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl ­trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad." They both succeeded. As a child he'd been a ­mama's boy and had made necklaces for his mother, but later, as an adult, he identified himself in the public mind through his photographs with pain and blood and exotic sexual ­practices, and even with something as seemingly transgressive (but actually innocent) as pictures of child ­nudity. She had held factory jobs in New Jersey, where the other workers accused her of being a communist ­because she was reading a bilingual edition of Rimbaud's Illuminations. She'd given birth out of wedlock, as we used to say, to a child she'd had to put up for adoption. Later, when she lived with Mapplethorpe in Brooklyn, she turned herself into a ­disciplined poet and breadwinner. For a long spell she supported the skinny, charismatic Mapplethorpe, who at the time was making "altars" of found objects somewhat in the manner of the American surrealist Joseph Cornell. He discovered photography only later, but once he settled on it as a career he was tenacious and highly tactical in plotting his rise in the world.

From The Guardian.