Sharmila Tagore and The Look of Love

picture: Sally Mann

The last post looked at The World of Apu and how Satyajit Ray directed the 14 year old female lead, Sharmila Tagore - very simply. Look up, look down, look left, look right resulted in a sumptuous and beautiful scene filled with yearning and love.

I think with any kind of photography, there is a visual Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle at play. We can pretend to be objective or we can pretend to be subjective, but the person determining the picture is outside our control.

Some people have the intelligence to use this. So Sally Mann exploited the boredom of endless reshoots to capture her children complete with elegance, grace and a certain attitude. Her children look moody, grumpy and bored because they are moody, grumpy and bored - with their mother mostly. And that is what makes Mann's work so special. Rineke Dijkstra used minimal direction to allow her subjects to fill the space with bewilderment or their own expectations of what they think they are supposed to be.

In-your-face photographers also get the look they want. Look at the pictures of William Klein, Mark Cohen and especially Bruce Gilden and you see people who are monumentally stressed. They might be stressed because they are living in big cities (or in Cohen's case, a small industrial town), but it's more likely it's because they've got Bruce Gilden in their face with a Leica. So what we see is people who are pissed off (or smiling manically) because Bruce Gilden is in their face. Which is not necessarily the way we read the pictures, but possibly makes them finer than they are before we discovered this universal photographic truth - your camera affects everything it sees.



Hurry up, mum! It's only the bleedin' focus!

How not to Photograph: Street Credibility

picture: Colin Pantall - Does my bum look big 0n this?

First of all, I love street photography. The history of photography is powered and invigorated by the street. If it weren't for the street, photography would collapse under the weight of its essential vanity and self-regard. Walker Evans, Robert Frank, William Klein, Henri Cartier Bresson, Garry Winogrand, Daido Moriyama, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Trent Parke, Paul Graham believe-it-or-not, Bruce Gilden, Mark Cohen (and I could go on ) are all fantastic examples of the broad spectrum of photographers who have used the street as their location.

At its best, street photography has an energy and vitality of its own, the photographer fuelled up on adrenaline and fags flits around the city capturing the nervous edge of the people and spacial politics of the city. The photographer becomes one with the street, personal, private and public merging into the amorphous mass that is the urban zeitgeist of a particular space.

The street photographer maps the psycho-geography of the built-up environment in other words. That's the idea anyway.

But it doesn't always happen like that. The street photographer has the street as his location for a reason; the street is anonymous, amorphous and impersonal. And sure, you can pursue your obsession with the amorphous for years and years, and if you are obsessive and hard-working enough you might end up producing something as great as the photographers mentioned above.

But most of the time, having the street as a location is an abdication of responsibility and choice. We forget the hard-work bit and use the street because we couldn't be arsed to do anything better. We don't have to choose, we don't have to focus, we don't have to relate to anything beyond a second. We photograph whatever comes into our rangefinder and rationalise it away with some mumblings about...? About...? About what exactly? I'm not sure really. Most of the time street photography is a cop out, a simple expression of our dysfunction as human beings, our failure to relate to each other, our limited attention span.

We can be in-your-face like Gilden and Cohen (and I love the work of Gilden and Cohen, but one of each is enough), but what is that apart from a photographic invitation to be at the end of a slapping. We can do the blurry Daido-thing (and I love the blurry Daido-thing), but then doesn't everywhere end up looking alike.

If we live in a really big city where lots goes on (aka New York or Tokyo) we can search out those random locations where shop displays, loading bays and wealthy women of a certain age collide to provide us with Winogrand-lite visions ofa lovable, huggable but essentially crappy Whimsy City. It's low rent slapstick, the photograph equivalence of the film scene where someone walks across the street holding a giant pane of glass.

Or we photograph the light, we try to do what Trent Parke did so brilliantly in his black and white work of Australia. We lurk on street corners waiting for the sun to come round and shine on the faces and bodies of those coming towards us. We can borrow some ideas from Philip-Lorca diCorcia's Heads and mutter something about "the individual" and "isolation" and "the loneliness of the long distance commuter".

But our pictures will be pictures of patches of light - because that's what all pictures are. Unless you tie them together with a visual web where environment, history, people and place combine to make a beautiful and cohesive whole (as Parke did with his Australian work or di Corcia with his heads).

And I haven't even mentioned typography, signs, or advertising hoardings. Or flags. Or dogs. And I'm not going to because that would be to go into such a dark place that I would never emerge into the daylight again.

Street photography is the ultimate cop-out. It's for people who are too lazy to engage with the real world, for people who are scared of the intimacy of meaningful photography so seek out the sequential one-one-hundred-and-twenty-fifth-second-stand of the street, for people who just want to hang around on street corners snapping strangers, smoking fags and drinking coffee with fond imaginings that they will be the next Cartier-Bresson/Winogrand/Parke.

I know this because I am lazy and think this every day. I forget the foot-slogging, brow-beating unrewarded drudgery of it, the endless rolls of film wasted hanging around waiting for something to happen even if it's nothing much at all.

I forget all that and think how I'd love to be a street photographer!

William Klein, New York and doing something new

The White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire nod towards a more 'real' India, a break from the romantic, colonial and magic realist depictions of the country we are more familiar with. In the same way, Bonfire of the Vanities was Tom Wolfe's realist New York epic.

In the foreword to the current edition, Wolfe writes about the disdain held in the 1960s and 1970sfor the realist novels. Instead, there were Absurdist Novels, Magical Realist Novels, novels of Radical Disjunction and Puppet Master novels.

"The Puppet Masters were in love with the theory that the novel was, first and foremost, a literary game, words on a page being manipulated by an author. Ronald Sukenick, author of a highly praised 1968 novel called Up, would tell you what he looked like while he was writing the words you were at that moment reading. At one point you are informed that he is stark naked. Sometimes he tells you he's crossing out what you've just read and changing it. Then he gives you the new version. Ina story called The Death of the Novel, he keeps saying, a la Samuel Beckett, 'I can't go on'.Then he exhorts himself, 'Go on,' and on he goes. At the end of Up he tells you that none of the characters was real: 'I just make it up as I go along."

Wolfe says many of these people were wonderful writers, but that realist fiction provided a wealth of material that had the ability to move the reader in a way the non-realist material could. Realism in the novel gave Wolfe the ability to get all the currents of New York into one book, to get the big picture.

Reading that made me think of photography and getting the big picture. For New York, William Klein's pictures give the feeling of the city (which I have never been to, so what do I know?) in a very dynamic way - there's energy there. I don't think there is any photography of London or England that encompasses the city/country in anything like as satisfying a manner.

Perhaps that's because there is so much about photography that avoids the big picture, the basic truisms of life. There is little real imagery of childhood that conveys what it is to be a child with any depth - though Klein hits the spot. That is why I photograph my daughter, because photographing her involves a huge theme that is close to home and enables my photographic work to my family than it would be. It's a labour of love in other words.

A lot of people photograph their children for similar reasons as me. But what about other things? People say everything has been done, but it hasn't. I featured a football ticket a couple of posts ago; where is the convincing photography that conveys either what it is like to support a team or what it is like to play for a team. There isn't any. Or how about migration? Books like New Londoners or Promised Land provide a nice perspective to it, but how about something that has a sense of purpose and place, of being and not being in a place.

I think photography has really limited itself in what it can photograph, what it is permissible or cool or hip to shoot. We have endless images of flyovers and water towers, endless cliched portrayals of the homeless or addicted, but what about images that show what school is like or motherhood or commuting, that get under the skin and have the feeling and emotion that accompany all those things.

At the same time, I also think that people will loosen up in the coming year, and that new subjects and ways of portraying them will open up. Pleasing the editorial, art or commercial markets doesn't make so much sense if there is no light at the end of the tunnel. People will either stop shooting altogether or start shooting what they really want - whatever that might be.





not quite the same in photography, so why not