One Man's Treasure

NIGHT

2012-02-10T10:56:00.000-08:00

Night scenes in real photo postcards

“I often think that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day.”

Vincent Van Gogh

Even though night photography was commercially feasible by the 1880s, you get the impression it didn’t catch on because photographers weren’t particularly inspired until the beginning of the 20^th century, when skyscrapers were lit up from within and floodlights illuminated their surfaces. Something profound had happened in the interim. The lighting of the city at night went from street level to several storeys above. What it radiated down wasn’t light so much as vision. Cast against the darkness, towers appeared as majestic monuments to the new age. Evelyn Waugh hated the Senate House in Bloomsbury when it was completed in 1937 and George Orwell imagined the Ministry of Truth in 1984 was housed there. Waugh made a point of hating everything modern and if Orwell didn’t go so far he also regarded its imposing presence on the skyline as a threat. This postcard of Senate House was posted on the 18^th of June 1939. Just over a year later the lights across London would be switched off and the city returned to darkness as the Blitz began.

The Nazis had already left their mark on Berlin’s Skyline. In 1933 they set fire to the Reichstag. Otto Junga Verlag published the postcard around 1928, when the dome was still intact, and when the company was producing several series of Berlin by night. Though it is a photograph the lighting is odd and unnatural. Both the moon and the lights emanating from the building would have been too weak to give detail to the façade and there is no evidence of any other outside light source close enough. It wasn’t difficult to concoct a night scene. A dark filter over the lens and the moon and clouds added in the darkroom were the only requirements. The effect in this study is almost anti-modern. The Reichstag looks gothic and ominous.

In 1910 Georges Claude gave night photography its greatest gift, though it couldn’t be properly appreciated for another decade. His original neon lights glowed red and orthochromatic film, the cheapest and most practical stock available couldn’t register them correctly. In the 1920s panchromatic film became more accessible and argon and mercury vapour were being used in neon lights to give more colour. Even better, the neon tubes were being twisted into letters and shapes and avenues like Kurfürstendamm in Berlin were ablaze with them. A photographer could stand across the street, snap at the cafes and bars on the other side with a hand held camera and get something like this; a patchwork of electric words suspended against the darkness. It looked like art. Café des Westens had held some of the earliest cabarets in Berlin and was a haunt for Hugo Ball and other artists. By the mid 1920s when this photograph was produced it had a reputation as one of the fashionably hedonistic centres of Weimar culture.

If Vienna’s moment as a centre of modernist ideas was passing by the 1920s it still had the artifacts and one was the Reisenrad, the giant Ferris wheel in the Prater. Ferris wheels were elemental symbols of early modernism. Their skeletal frames and engineering appeared impracticable and the inventor, George Ferris, had to fight hard to convince the committee overseeing the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair that something so enormous yet insubstantial looking could actually work. When the Reisenrad was built in 1897 it wasn’t as big as Ferris’ original, the Grande Roue in Paris or the Great Wheel in London’s Earls Court but by 1920 those had been dismantled or demolished so it held it’s place as the biggest until the 1980s. It became a symbol of Vienna the way the Eiffel Tower was of Paris and was recognizable even using a favourite trick among commercial photographers of slowing the exposure to reduce the wheel to ribbons of light.

In 2010 a book of Pierre Yves Petit’s photographs of Paris was published carrying the recommendation that he was the equal of Atget, Kertész and Brassaï when it came to capturing the atmosphere of Paris. Working under the studio name Yvon, he took thousands of photographs of the city, preferring the dawn and early evening when the fog clung to the streets, searching for that essence even people who had never visited the city would recognize as Parisian. Naturally, the Eiffel Tower made a regular appearance. When it was built for the 1889 World’s Fair the electric illumination of cities was just becoming realizable but still confined to the exteriors of buildings where it had the most dramatic effect. The Eiffel Tower carried electric lighting early on though it wasn’t until in the 1920s that the entire façade was dressed in lights. The claims the book makes don’t ring true. Most of his photographs are too impersonal, but when you see details like the silhouetted statue of the bull at the bottom here you know that words like genius or master don’t matter.

In 1938 it was Glasgow’s time to host an international expo and the centrepiece of the Empire Exhibition was Thomas Tait’s Empire Tower. Tait was one of Scotland’s leading modernist architects, designing significant art deco buildings such as Kodak House in London, Saint Andrew’s House in Edinburgh and the pylons on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Built on a hill, the Empire Tower stood 91 metres tall, had three observation decks and was intended to be a schematic image of Scotland. The construction from steel represented Glasgow’s place in the shipping and steel industries, which were then the backbone of the UK’s industrial economy. The exhibition ran from May to December 1938. A year later Britain was at war with Germany. Because the tower was considered an obvious target for air raids it was demolished. The Valentine Company produced dozens of photographs of the tower. Their attempts at hand colouring , this one anyway, can be considered a failure. The tower deserved better.

Back to the streets, to the Thames embankment sometime in the 1930s. Authentic night photography spurned the flash or any other form of artificial lighting. The idea was to use available light either to abstract the image or make it as naturalistic as possible. Technically, to capture this scene the photographer required an open aperture, a slow film and a shutter speed somewhere around 1/15^th of a second. Anything slower risked reducing the lights from the traffic in the background to streaks. It also required a time at night when there weren’t likely to be many pedestrians. It’s an entirely posed study of course but there’s nothing wrong with that. It gets something of the desolate mood and the mystery of London away from the life and noise of Piccadilly and the West End theatres. In the 1930s Patrick Hamilton wrote the trilogy of novels collected as Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky. Mostly they were located in bars and cheap boarding houses and though none of the major characters tried scratching a living as a street artist, in their most dejected moments, as they shuffled past the river, cap down and collar up, they probably passed this figure, oblivious to his own straitened circumstances and stoic forbearance.

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NIGHT

NAPOLEON

2012-02-04T07:31:00.000-08:00

6 real photo postcards from a lost 1903 film

“Gloryis fleeting, but obscurity is forever.”

Napoleon Bonaparte

In 1903 Lucien Nonguet was at the beginning of a prolific if undistinguished career as a film director, working for Pathé Frères, French rivals to Edison who were producing dozens of one and two reel films a month while securing their place as the largest producers of film equipment in the world. The cinema was still a novelty and audiences paid for the experience and the spectacle but already they were demanding more than three minute dramas and city scenes. The year before, Georges Méliès had released A Trip to the Moon, which set new standards not just in special effects but also in plot and, at 14 minutes, length. To compete, Pathé Frères began producing a series of epic tales from history. Napoleon was an obvious subject and Nonguet was given Épopée napoléonienne - The epic life of Napoleon – to direct. The film is all but lost. The Sulphur Springs Collection at SMU has a 33 second fragment of Napoleon crossing Mt Saint Bernard. Apart from that, these real photo postcards published by Rex for Pathé Frères may be all that remain of a film so vast in scope for its time it needed to be released in two parts.

Nonguet was becoming a specialist in historical epics. That year he also made a film about the life of Jesus, and what might be considered an early documentary, except that Massacres in Macedonia, concerning recent Ottoman atrocities in the Balkans, was filmed entirely in a Paris studio. Two years earlier he made a one minute version of Quo Vadis. For his historical epics he dispensed with plot, structuring the films around a series of tableaux with no continuity except that in overall time frame they moved from their subject’s childhood or youth to death. There were 15 chapters in Épopée napoléonienne. The IMDB page for the film lists At school in Brienne, On the bridge of Arcole, The campaign in Egypt, Passage of the St. Bernard Pass, The Coronation, The battle of Austerlitz, Soldier sleeping during watch, The burning of Moscow, Waterloo and The Emperor's death. Two of the scenes posted here, Napoleon wounded at Ratisbonne (Regensburg) and the abdication at Fontainebleau aren’t credited and two scenes, one involving Napoleon’s son, the other Josephine are mentioned elsewhere, which suggests the six images here don’t tell half the story but at least we get the picture.

In constructing his tableaux, Nonguet turned to well known history paintings by Horace Vernet and Jacques Louis David. In composition the coronation scene is a faithful reproduction of David’s painting of the same event and though in Vernet’s painting the positions of Napoleon and the man he shakes hands with are reversed, the overall structure with the flanking soldiers and the raised banners is almost identical. Nonguet was born in 1868 and grew up when dioramas and moving panoramas were still popular entertainment so might have envisioned his film as a series of moving paintings. That made conceptualizing of the scenes easier and if enough of the audience were familiar with the paintings or their various reproductions it saved detailed explanations.

Napoleon and the sleeping sentry was one of two exemplary tales used in the film intended to demonstrate the great man’s humility and why his soldiers were so loyal. Inspecting the guards one night, Napoleon discovered one asleep, a crime punishable by death in most circumstances. Saying nothing, Napoleon took the sentry’s rifle and kept watch all night. When the sentry woke the General quietly chastised him, guaranteeing the soldier’s lifelong devotion. The other is the snowball fight that began the film and heads the images here. Apparently, while having a snowball fight at school, the young Napoleon showed a natural ability for martial strategy. Maybe these events actually happened though they have more than a suspicion of the apocryphal and hagiographic to them.

In the first decade of the last century somewhere in the vicinity of a dozen films were made about Napoleon although the precise figure is vague because of some murky practices concerning copyright and the tendency among early studios to cannibalize films. The list includes one reel comedies involving Napoleon and Josephine and reconstructions of the battles of Waterloo and the invasion of Russia in 1927 with Abel Gance’s 330 minute extravagance. Why he should be the focus of so many films is something of a mystery to non-French people. If our knowledge of Napoleon came only from English sources he was a tyrant best known for his catastrophic defeat at Waterloo and for his even bigger failure in Russia. The British depicted him as undersized, which he wasn’t, and the state of mind where a short person needs to dominate everyone else is known as the Napoleon complex. There is also the sporadic debate among historians as to how or if he compares to Hitler. Arguably, the French have even less reason to love him but the ongoing fascination probably has less to do with his historical record than his complex image; the dictator who introduced one of the most admired civic legal codes, the imperialist invader who brought a small army of scholars to Egypt and opened up the study of antiquity and lead actor in one of the mythic romances of the 19th century.

The information on Nonguet is sparse, his most notable successes being a series of silent comedies starring Max Linder, also for Pathé Frères. Likewise Napoleon is not considered a great film or its loss a particular tragedy so far as enough of Nonguet and the Pathé Frères films demonstrating the tableau style of film construction are extant. Nevertheless when it is estimated that 75% of silent films are completely or partially lost then whatever survives becomes valuable in filling in the details.

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NAPOLEON

GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE

2012-01-27T23:56:00.000-08:00

Some more negative paper prints

“Ghosts are a metaphor for memory and remembrance and metaphorically connect our world to the world we cannot know about.”

Leslie What

In a previous post on negative paper prints I described the process as an extension of the original calotype process, where a negative print was made, a chemically treated paper was placed over that and exposed. Sean Foley at the Afghan BoxCamera Project pointed out another method still used in Afghanistan. The negative paper print is made in the camera then replaced in the camera with another treated sheet and the negative re-photographed. In Afghanistan, where supplies of film are in short supply (when they are available at all) photographers have adapted and done away with them altogether. They also build their own filmless cameras by cannibalizing parts from others. This is interesting enough but more so when you realize that in the 1940s and 50s it was common practice across West Asia, from India and Afghanistan through Iran and Iraq to Turkey. In small towns and villages, the photographers had limited access to materials and the way to make prints affordable was to cut down on them. These strange and ethereal negative prints are the cast offs from the most practical form of their trade.

Building your own camera wasn’t as hard as it might sound. All you needed was an old bellows camera like an early Kodak and a lightproof box, which could be constructed from the panels off fruit crates. Remove the back of the camera and fit the bellows and lens to the box. A few experiments would tell you where to set the focus and what the exposure time should be and once they were sorted there was no need to make another adjustment. Maybe the hardest part was making sure everything was lightproof. Even a gap a fraction of a millimetre would be enough to spoil the print. Once the machine was in working order it was low maintenance and most repairs could be carried out with glue or tape. Sometimes these cameras turn up in second hand shops around Istanbul. If the lens mechanism still works the whole apparatus should. Unfortunately, they are big and can look impressive and because the shop owners regard them as antiques (well, some of them are) they attach a price more applicable to a factory built machine.

A history of West Asia’s itinerant village photographers deserves to be written but it probably can’t. The businesses were often ephemeral, just one in several other services on offer unregistered and they didn’t keep records. All we have are a few of their photographs and maybe some villagers’ memories of the days when the photographer turned up. Maybe history is the wrong word. What we really want to describe is an entrepreneurial spirit in the face of adversity, human ingenuity and the vast and scattered records of others’ existence these people left behind. The photo above is the only one in the collection that shows the studio’s name. ‘Foto Ṣen’ translates as ‘the cheerful photo studio’. The camera might have been brightly painted and dressed with ornaments and amulets and the photographer’s shop was too small to have a studio.

There are a couple of ways to identify the positive prints. The white borders are often irregular because the print didn’t fit neatly into the bracket. The focus is aberrant because the original negative or the paper used for the positive print was slightly warped. The positive prints are often a muddy brown or splotchy because the developing was quick and slipshod, the idea being to get a print out for the customer as quickly as possible. Quite a few of the prints have the sitters’ faces tinted red. This was because the positive print, being itself a negative image, recorded the face as a neutral grey so if the exposure on the background was out, the face could still be printed with reasonably accurate tones.

A ghost is defined as the apparition of a dead person and in that sense a lot of photographs are ghosts but especially negative prints. They aren’t portraits. They don’t reveal anything about their subject, rather the opposite, abstracting them to a ghostly reflection. They become anti-photographs, only hinting at the image we are supposed to see. And they can elevate the image into strange places. This postcard comes from Bulgaria and was probably taken in the 1940s or 50s. The positive print would be a utilitarian photo of a group of soldiers without much aesthetic interest but the negative is spectral, unearthly and much more compelling.

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GHOSTS

TROUBLE AND STRIFE

2012-01-21T01:07:00.000-08:00

More untitled film stills

“Love is being stupid together.”

Paul Valery

Reach out and touch

Just realize; a week ago you were looking at the clock and thinking that it’s 4:30 on a Friday afternoon and what do you have to look forward to for the next couple of days but two hangovers and the bleak realization on Sunday that the routine was about to start over again. Then it all changed, in a matter of minutes when you think about it, and now she is asleep in your bed, the most beautiful woman in the world; well, there’s no other way to put it, that’s exactly what she is. Statistically speaking, if this relationship doesn’t crash on the rocks in the first few months it will survive long enough for the two of you to find contentment sitting together in the evenings, watching television and discussing finances. You have friends who are doing that already and, admit it; you’ve felt pangs of jealousy overhearing guys at work discuss weekends taking the kids to piano lessons or driving out to the suburbs to buy a new barbecue. Sure, you tell yourself, watching two flies climb up a wall is more interesting than that. So, what’s it going to be? Which form of spiritual death is the most comfortable?

Love is two hearts beating as one.

This isn’t the right time, but there is so much you want to tell him, like how you felt butterflies in your stomach the first time you met, about that way he moves his head that sets something off in you, about growing up in a small town and coming to the city every summer, how you wanted a pony but your father insisted on a dog and you called it Bubbles until the day the truck hit it. It’s so strange. You don’t normally feel this way but something about him just makes you want to tell him everything about yourself. Is it love? Is this what happens when you find the real thing?

As long as we have each other …

They’re watching. Ignore them. News travels fast and everyone has been waiting to see the two of you together. They all say the same thing; what wonderful news, how happy they are, how beautiful she is, what a catch he is – all of this on first impressions alone. You wish the way you announced your couple-dom could have been different, not so public, perhaps introducing one friend at a time. You feel a whole new pressure in your life. ‘This is great,’ they all say, leaving out the next part: ‘Don’t screw it up.’ You want to say, ‘listen everyone; thanks for all your good words but can I just say it is early days right now? Yes we are happy but we’ve only just met so let us develop our relationship in peace. What happens if it does go wrong? How will we look then?’

The heart says yes but the head says no

Some things are best left unsaid. Her taste in music is as interesting as an old cucumber sandwich but his tobacco stained teeth takes nerves of steel to handle. Her best friend is intolerable for a variety of reasons and his is too, but only for one; he’s a drunken boor with the emotional age of a six year old. They have been together six weeks. She already wants to know where the relationship is going while he’s content to let things unfold of their own accord. She has a list in her head of things about him she can change and others she just has to live with. He knows he has no reason to be unhappy but if that’s so, why does he still talk with his ex? Both of you are in love, both happy (so you tell everyone but especially each other) and yet there’s this feeling you share that you are a couple of boxers, the first bell has just rung and you’re circling each other.

We need to talk

How did it happen? You were at your friends’ house for dinner. The food was good, the wine not bad and the conversation bubbling along harmlessly. Then he said something. What it was you can’t remember exactly but suddenly you saw him without your blinkers on. No, it wasn’t a jolting revelation. It was more like a violent attack of nausea. ‘My god,’ you heard yourself saying. ‘He’s really no different. How could I have fooled myself?’ You leave the table and hurry to the bathroom where alone you unleash the demons. When they have passed and you are splashing water on your face you are astonished at how strangely unchanged the room is. You feel as though a tornado has just blown through.

It’s not you, it’s me

What a deplorable situation, and yet, as the truth comes out about the other man, you know the signs were always there; you just chose not to read them. That curious forced laugh she developed, the times she disturbed routines you took for granted so that suddenly you were no longer meeting under the clock tower any more but making your own ways home. Last Sunday was perfect yet on Tuesday night you felt her lying awake and thinking. And the worst of it is that you’ve just realized the mistakes you made. That tone in your voice when she asked if you liked the dress was the wrong one. And that time you were walking along the street and she stopped to pat the little tortoiseshell kitten, you didn’t need to snap. You weren’t in a hurry. Think again. The real worst of it is that as the litany of missteps and faux pas becomes apparent, you know that no single thing you did was that bad that you deserve this.

Love means never having to say sorry

So, I guess this is it. Do we have anything to say? Of course we do, quite a lot but it will have to wait and may remain unspoken. There’s a moment as they look at each other when both believe that the right words will change everything, restore order and bring back love. The air is heavy with the tension of what must be done but then neither of them really know the words and in the end both lack that strength of purpose to find them. He starts to say her name, she shakes her head and like a light going out the moment vanishes. When they look at each other again it’s with the knowledge the link is broken. When he leaves the strongest sensation she has is his presence.

Things happen for a reason

Well, what if it had worked and you married each other? Isn’t it clear now that eventually you would have found yourselves in the divorce court dividing up property and, yes, even children, as though these were objects in a game and you just lost? Well, before that there is the other hall of justice to contend with - trial by friends. She’s sitting in a café being grilled by hers, repeatedly cutting her off mid-sentence to admit what they’d always suspected about him; self-centred deadbeat and emotional cripple. He’s in a bar, on his fourth scotch and soda. His friends have a solution to his problem. There’s a party tomorrow night where they know there will be loads of beautiful women. What he really feels like doing is breaking down and telling the lads how he failed but he knows they won’t stand for that. Meanwhile she is scraping a teaspoon over the remains of a carrot cake and wondering why, if her friends had seen everything so clearly and for so long, they never spoke up before. It is a Saturday afternoon in autumn. Outside the sky is grey and leaves slowly drop from the trees. She thinks she should have brought a shawl. He thinks he just wants to be alone, with a bottle for company. Right now, they don’t know it but what they really want is each other, even if it were only for an hour or two, for support against the harrowing good intentions of friends.

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TROUBLE AND STRIFE

CURSE OF THE PHAROAHS

2012-01-14T01:44:00.000-08:00

Postcards of Egyptian monuments

“He died in great agony, raving of mummies, pyramids, serpents, and some fatal curse which had fallen upon him.”

Louisa May Alcott, Lost in a Pyramid (1869)

Little Women would make Louisa May Alcott famous and relatively wealthy but while she was writing it she needed money so she pumped out some lurid tales including Lost in a Pyramid, which some critics credit as the first story about an Egyptian mummy’s curse reaping what it had sown. By 1922, when Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb the idea was already a boilerplate so when people associated with the discovery started dying off others took it for granted that ancient curses existed. The finger of suspicion regarding Tutankhamen’s curse is often pointed at Arthur Weigall, a respected Egyptologist who was offended that Lord Carnarvon had given the story to the London Times and not to him. Weigall was also a journalist and theatrical set designer so he knew how to spin a convincing story. He didn’t have to try hard. Back in 1909 newspapers around the world had speculated on the strange events around mummy case number 22 542 held at the British Museum. Several people who came into contact with it, whatever that exactly means, suffered horrid fates. It was claimed that a photographer who photographed the casket killed himself after his developed plates revealed the cold, hateful face of an ancient priestess staring back at him.

Before Edward Said got hold of the word, an orientalist was a scholar interested in ancient Egypt and the Near East. An authentic orientalist was supposed to be fluent in several dead languages and an astute art historian as well, able to date artifacts at a glance and spot anomalies. Despite having one of the most exotic job descriptions on the planet, orientalists spent a lot of time painstakingly deciphering fragments of papyri and if they were good enough to be given charge of an excavation that meant months in the disease ridden desert caught in the negotiations between British and Egyptian authorities. Given a limited season to work, they often had to call a halt to the excavation and wait for some detail to be worked out in London. The images of the orientalists as either toffee-nosed eggheads in linen suits or rugged adventurers in khaki shirts are wildly wrong. Most of them came from the epicentre of the middle class and their interest in the ancient world reflected a quiet alienation from the mainstream. Weigall’s story of Tutankhamen’s curse was scurrilous but he believed that Egypt’s antiquities should remain in the country and fought for that. Carter was also fired from his job as inspector for the Egyptian Antiquities Service when he took sides with the Egyptian guards against foreign visitors. They were also in the habit of upsetting long held biblical doctrines and weren’t to be trusted.

Too little is known about Mohamed Aboudi. He was one of the few Egyptian orientalists working in the 1920s. His guidebooks to the ruins of ancient Egypt carry a scholarly authority, well mapped and frequently advising the visitor to pay attention to small details whose significance could easily be overlooked. A photo online suggests he came from a wealthy family, which is a given since only very wealthy Egyptians could afford interest in ancient history. Also, the British authorities kept Egyptians at a distance in case they got any ideas about national rights. He was also a photographer and used his images to illustrate his books. It can seem sometimes as though it was impossible to take a bad shot of an ancient monument, or an original one. Lehnert and Landrock produced photos of this statue of Rameses II at Luxor taken from almost the same position as the one above. The emphasis in photographs of ancient monuments was always on size and scale. The figure just behind Rameses is of his most beloved wife, Nefertari. She is probably twice the size of an average person so does it need to be said that Rameses had a high opinion of himself?

In the 1920s orientalism was still a highly regarded discipline, people were making discoveries that rewrote history, several important languages still required decipherment and governments and educational institutions weren’t yet infected by the doctrine that business was their sole raison d'être. So what did orientalists think of all the European studios setting up business in Cairo and photographing the ‘essence’ of Egypt for customers back home? As long as romantic interest in Egypt was sustained the orientalists kept their prestige, but then they also had to contend with tourists who were often both bored and amazed by how tedious the work of an archaeologist appeared in real life. Lehnert and Landrock never produced an image that wasn’t a cliché. You couldn’t seriously consider them great artists, not against some of the photographers who had already documented Egypt nor against the standards of what was being produced in Europe at the time, but the point of clichés is that they meet assumptions. They depict what people want to believe in. The photo above came from the Scortzis Company, preceding Lehnert and Landrock by a decade though the work of both companies is almost indistinguishable. In the popular imagination, Egypt was a land still dominated by ancient mysteries. A study of a shepherd and his flock resting at an oasis with the pyramids in the background said it all.

Osiris, god of the underworld, was killed by Set, god of the desert and of chaos. Isis gathered all the remnants of her late husband - except his penis, which she threw into the Nile – and assembled Horus, the falcon headed god of the sky. For centuries Horus was the chief deity of southern Upper Egypt and Seth of the northern delta -Lower Egypt, and the two gods engaged in a long metaphysical war. Around 3000 BCE the two states united, which finally brought the gods to the negotiating table. The temple to Horus at Edfu was completed during the reign of Ptolemy XII, making it one of the last great monuments of ancient Egypt. The figure in this photo is usually reckoned to be Ptolemy, It is on the entrance wall to the temple, a building which, in photos at least, could pass for a late 20^th century government office block.

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EGYPTIAN RUINS

UNDER WESTERN EYES

2012-01-07T00:03:00.000-08:00

A La Franga in Turkey and Bulgaria

" What, do you mean a little fellow, with double whiskers, and blue spectacles?"

" Yes, sir, the photographer."

" Oh, he's a good little Ghiaour enough. He always takes off his hat to me, a la franga, in the street. I thought he was a Frenchman."

Ivan Vazov; Under the Yoke, a romance of Bulgarian liberty, 1888

At first glance these photos might look like typical studio portraits from the turn of the last century, no different to what you would find in any western country at the time. In Constantinople and Sofia, where they were taken, they could be construed as political statements; not radical or explosive by any standards, more subtle perhaps than flaunting a ‘vote Teddy Roosevelt’ button though they were just as unambiguous.

In the 1880s women in Bulgarian and Turkish cities began wearing a la Franga fashions – broad brimmed hats, furs and gowns especially – as a way of identifying themselves as having French, which is to say Western, attitudes. It was more than a conscious rejection of Ottoman values; in a way it disparaged them, implying they were backward and unsophisticated. In Constantinople a la Franga belonged to the Armenians, the Levantines and Greeks, in Sofia, Plovdiv and Veliko Tarnovo it was the style of upper middle class Bulgarians. It was politics without a manifesto or even an ideology, more like a common act of self-expression. One thing everyone had in common was that they anticipated the imminent collapse of Ottoman rule.

The relationship between the Armenians and the French goes back centuries, to the first crusade to be precise, when Christian towns and forts offered sanctuary to crusader armies. For some French intellectuals Armenia came to represent a hopeful bastion of Christianity in a region surrounded by Muslims and other infidels. By the late 19^th century French had become the language of business in Constantinople, which explains why so many Armenian photographic studios adopted French names (Phebus, Abdullah Frères) and French Christian names were popular among Armenians (Pascal Sebah). Any studio in Constantinople with a French name was almost certainly Armenian (one exception being Photo Francais, run by the Jewish Romanian émigré, Jean Weinberg) and no tourist or non-Muslim resident of Pera ever called its main street by the official Ottoman name, Cadde Kebir. It was always La Grand Rue de Pera. Armenians living in Constantinople regarded France as the pinnacle of culture, and they weren’t alone in thinking that. When Abdülmecid I wanted a new residence to replace the Topkapi in 1843 he had the Dolmabahçe Palace built. To realize a home befitting a Sultan the architects looked to the baroque extravagance of Versailles for inspiration. Even the Ancien Regime was trés chic.

In Bulgaria a la Franga had different connotations. Rural Bulgarians were every bit as nationalistic and independence minded as the urban intellectuals but if pretensions to Frenchness weren’t exactly a betrayal they did seem to be replacing one set of foreign values with another. The A La Frangistes became objects of ridicule and satire, seen as too precious for their own good. In Ivan Vazov’s novel quoted above, a la Franga isn’t really to be trusted. Assuming a man is French implies he isn’t a true Bulgarian. Not that the haut bourgeoisie of Sofia and Plovdiv were too bothered by what rustic bohemians thought of them. A la Franga wasn’t just about wide hats and long gowns. It was a lifestyle encompassing household furniture, interior design, table manners, even toilets because in a country long used to the squat hole, an actual seat was a sign of wealth and elegance.

In Constantinople during the First World War ‘a la Franga’ was a snide remark aimed at anything suspiciously European. German military officials turned up with ‘a la Franga attitudes’ the Turkish soldiers wouldn’t buy into. Across the border Bulgaria was in a mess. Having declared its neutrality the Government found itself obliged to form an alliance with the empire it had just spent most of a century trying to be free from. After the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1919 when Bulgaria was forced to hand over its Aegean coast to Greece and other territory to Serbia, a la Franga didn’t sound so good there either. Still an image of French culture as sophisticated and worth aspiring to persisted. What killed it off wasn’t so much anti-French feeling as the shift in cultural attention that regarded America as the repository of all things desirable. Mind you, in the 1920s the place to see the hottest acts from across the Atlantic was Paris.

A la Franga belonged to that period around the turn of the century when people were conscious that the new century would be different, more technological, more modern, but they weren’t sure how that would be manifested. Looking around, France was the obvious model for culture even if by then its place as a centre for science and technology was over. As a fashion statement it managed to be contemporary and anachronistic at the same time.

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A LA FRANGA

WOMEN IN LOVE

2011-12-31T00:09:00.000-08:00

Some scandalous lives of the Belle Epoque

“I have to admit that I'm up to my neck in frivolity, buried in dresses to the point of ruin!”

Liane de Pougy; My Blue Notebooks

"I have been a slave to my passions, but never to a man."

Carolina Otero

“The thought flashed across my mind,” Carolina Otero explained with studied flippancy to the journalist from the London Daily Mail. “Why not try marriage, just to see what it is like?” In January 1907 she had been married to Englishman Rene Webb for just two months. He came to the marriage with a substantial dowry including a promise to set La Belle Otero’s sister up in business, and something else – his collection of several thousand postcards of the dancer. These images were almost certainly in the collection. Leopold Reutlinger, photographer to the stars of Parisian theatres and dance halls had shot Ms Otero over hundreds of sessions and she was one of the most popular subjects for his photographs.
The biography of Carolina Otero that appears in the Who's who on the stage 1908 makes for fabulous reading. Born in 1871, the daughter of the Count and Countess Cassarow, she first appeared on the stage at age eight. While performing in Madrid she was kidnapped “by secret agents of the Spanish King, spirited off to his palace and locked in a room. She forced a window and escaped.” More likely she was born to poor Galician farmers a few years earlier, may have been raped when she was ten and possibly married an Italian count when she was fourteen. What is certain is that in the process of bedding a fair number of Europe’s royals and statesmen she accumulated several million dollars worth of jewelry, which she gambled away, dying penniless in 1965 aged about 96.

American journalists working around the beginning of last century referred to prostitutes as courtesans. They would not however call a courtesan a prostitute. A true courtesan was not paid for her services, she received gifts sometimes more from a single assignation than typical streetwalkers could expect to earn in their entire lives. Caroline Otero had no problem with the word courtesan, she exploited her reputation to the fullest, but she was usually referred to as a dancer or, in that way that French can be simultaneously explicit and inoffensive, la belle horizontale. The three great horizontales in the Belle Époque were Otero, Liane de Pougy and Emilienne d’Alencon. They made no secret of their lifestyles or the price they attached to it but flaunted their extravagances with a kind of grinning contempt for the ordinary people who found something offensive about it. Of the three, d’Alencon pushed the idea of succès de scandale to its limits, sharing her bed with the usual motley crew of dissolute nobles as well as the famous can-can dancer La Goulue, the American poet Renée Vivian and possibly de Pougy. She was also an enthusiastic consumer of opium and cocaine, which led many people to assume she lived her final years in a drugged out fog. Actually she lived a respectably long life, dying in 1946 aged 77.
This portrait by Reutlinger presents her as an epitome of innocence. She started out her stage career as a young girl with a troupe of performing pink rabbits and was described by Jean Lorrain (author of Nightmares of an Ether Drinker) as ‘raspberry ice’ – presumably he meant something cute. By the turn of the century the rabbits had been packed away and she was performing with a python as her dancing partner. She was also an inspiration to Coco Chanel and one of her favourite models for headwear in the 1910s.

Were Otero and d’Alencon talented performers or was their fame thanks more to their notoriety? It’s hard to say since very little survives of their work – a brief clip of a frenzied Otero on YouTube and a book of poems by d’Alencon that veers between sentimental and crassly erotic. One way a critic could show disapproval of their lifestyles while maintaining a veneer of sophistication was to soundly trash their performances. That happened often but no performer came under so much cruel scrutiny as Gaby Deslys. “The worse she sings and the further in her dancing she widens the limits of choreographic mediocrity, the more evident it is that she is a pretty girl.” That was Paris critic Ernest Charles writing in 1912 in an article that was so nasty she sued. A year earlier the Italian soprano Luisa Tetrazzini tersely dismissed her as ‘not art’. (In the same interview the opera singer complained that she had recently seen a suffragette parade but ‘they are all ugly and not neat in their dress’.) In her brief career Gaby Deslys managed to have official censors called in during performances in London, Paris and the US and became the focus of a riot by Yale students when the police cut one of her performances short. Part of the problem was her popularity. She was one of the very few to make a name for herself in Europe, Britain and the US, and that was because her stage act hovered between highbrow and popular. Filling a concert hall with ill behaved students was one way to offend the arbiters of taste. Another was to carry on a very public affair with King Manuel II of Portugal. When Manuel was deposed in a revolution in 1910 Deslys was widely held to be a culprit; her goings on with the King apparently inflaming radical Portuguese tempers. Actually the revolution had been brewing for years and might not have happened had the initial insurrection been handled properly. She had nothing to do with it though years later she was still referred to in some papers as the woman who brought down the king.
In December 1919 she was hospitalized with a throat infection. It may have actually been a tumour. Thinking surgery would destroy her looks and her voice, she refused to allow the doctors to cut into her neck. After nine operations, on February 11 1920 she died, aged 38. One of the minor scandals in her affair with Manuel had involved a string of pearls he had given her on their first date. It was estimated to be worth $70 000. In her will she directed that all her jewelry including the infamous string of pearls be sold and the proceeds distributed among the poor of Marseilles.

Even in death Gaby Deslys could not be left in peace. It had always been assumed she was born Marie-Elise-Gabrielle Caire, daughter of a middle class merchant in Marseilles and her stage name was a contraction of Gabrielle of the Lilies. During her affair with King Manuel a private detective claimed to have discovered that she was in fact Hadiwga Nawrati, a Czech farmer’s daughter. This obviously excited a few people though unlike Otero and d’Alencon Deslys had never concocted a past so at the time the story never gained real traction. After her death however various Czechs, Hungarians and Americans bearing similar surnames came forward claiming her inheritance. One Hungarian man declared he was her father while an American woman cited a cross shaped scar on her finger and a nurse’s story as proof she was the singer’s daughter. It was also said that the real Gaby Deslys, that is to say the woman whose identity she had stolen, was still alive and could be found. These claims dragged on for years. None were found valid though in accumulation they had the effect of adding mystery to a fairly ordinary background. On March 21, 1930 thieves inspired by stories she had been buried draped in pearls smashed open her mausoleum but couldn’t get past a steel plate.
A bed bought for her by King Manuel and designed in the shape of a swan was bought by Universal Studios after her death and appeared in several films, most notably it was Norma Desmond’s in Sunset Boulevard.

Sophisticated critics were in no doubt that Lina Cavalieri was an exceptional singer, and that she deserved her reputation as one of the most beautiful women in the world. The difference in their treatment of Deslys and Cavalieri speaks volumes, especially as both performers came from similar backgrounds and both began their careers in the less than high-toned music halls. What mattered was that Deslys’ persona was funny and animated while Cavalieri played her part with cultivated poise. Reutlinger’s photo of her above was taken near the turn of the century, as she was making the transition from the music halls to opera. Opera singers were expected to lead glamorous public lives with enough romantic intrigue to keep the public interested, but scandal and by extension open sexuality was out. In the future she would be portrayed in ways more fitting to a world famous soprano. Cavalieri might have been astute enough to keep her affairs discreet but she was helped by a fawning press. Critics whose ears pricked up at the latest gossip concerning d’Alencon or Otero turned a deaf one to news that, yet again, Cavalieri’s recent marriage was foundering.
In August 1908, Princess Vittoria de Teano, who claimed a lineage extending back to the 5th century and included several popes among the various dukes and princes, attended a reception held by the Duchess of Sutherland. On hearing that Lina Cavalieri was to be the guest of honour the Princess announced; “I am not accustomed to meeting such people,” before making a haughty exit. A few of her equals, including well known pouncer Edward VII, approved of her stand. Cavalieri’s great offence apparently was that she had begun her working life as a humble flower seller. Apart from casting an unnecessary light on how class bound Europe was, the story reveals something of how the lives of celebrities were already being confected to suit the market. The Princess claimed to have principles and in her vulgar way, she was saying she saw through the hype. No matter how beautiful or talented Cavalieri was, she came from the streets.

Cavalieri’s private life doesn’t quite square with her press (Whose does?). Take her four marriages, all to men with either artistic credentials or titles, two of which lasted just months. She could have made poor choices but one mark of an elegant woman is that she shouldn’t. The suspicion is that behind the quietly dignified persona lurked an unpleasantly temperamental diva. Her death is also obscured by conflicting accounts. On February 7, 1944, the US Air force began a bombing raid over Fiesole outside of Florence. Either she was collecting her jewellery before running to the air raid shelter or she suddenly jumped from a car and ran back to collect it but a bomb hit the house, killing her. The first version suggests bad timing, the second that she had misplaced her values.

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WOMEN IN LOVE

TRAINS AND BOATS AND PLANES

2011-12-23T23:42:00.000-08:00

transport as studio props

“The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete.”

Marshall McLuhan

Self respecting books on the history of photography ignore or avoid but in any case stay right away from examining the long tradition of studio photographs using imitation transport as props. It’s frustrating because there is plenty of room for speculation but a few hard facts wouldn’t go astray. It would be useful to know something about the photographers. Most of the photographs here look like they come from fairground midways but were the photographers typical carnies who based the value of their work on the dollars they counted at the end of each day? Was this a viable environment for a beginner to cut his or her teeth on or was it more likely dismissed as assembly line work? If the answer to that is the second, then how did such a system produce some of the most unconventionally compelling images in vernacular photography? People who collect snapshots and postcards will tell you they keep an eye out for them, also that they have seen a lot in poor condition but they’ve never seen a bad image. There are people who find them intensely irritating, but that’s their problem.

There is a genteel history to these photographs. It begins with the invention of collodion plates, the carte de visite and the cabinet card in the late 1850s, when photographers began treating the studio as an element in the photograph rather than just the space the image was recorded in. The first photographers used stage boats and the idea was to make the scene as naturalistic as possible, so even though the viewers knew it was artificial they were supposed to appreciate the photographer’s dexterity (you can see some examples here). By the late 1880s the trick had lost its magic, so to speak, and no one needed to maintain a pretence. It didn’t matter that the background was so obviously painted since the photo was now a joke that everyone could be in on. In the same way that studios used composite printing to place the sitter in Egypt or against Niagara Falls, it wasn’t a case of ‘special’ so much as ‘novelty’ effects. The best place to find studios that carried out this work was at seaside resorts or carnivals.

From the first decade of the 20^th century photographers also had trains, planes and cars to play around with, and quick-to-produce postcards. It’s tempting to see the arrival of these new modes of transport on the photographic stage as a response to modernity but if that’s the case we have to ask why so many of the cars are clapped out jalopies and why, even into the 1920s, the most common type of aircraft was still a pre-Wright brothers flying machine. Well, obviously, that was supposed to be funnier, and maybe we don’t need to read anything more into it. If it really were a comment on the marvels of modern technology then we would have to assume that everyone, photographer, subjects and audience, was conscious of the statement being made. Appearances suggest otherwise.

And speaking of appearances, there is some mystery as to why, if being photographed in a studio car was supposed to be fun, people seldom look amused. In Folk Photography, Luc Sante says that “enjoyment was conceived of primarily as an activity and only secondarily an emotion (so) it was not necessary to show yourself laughing”. I’m sceptical and can think of a couple of other more convincing explanations. One is suggested by the man on the right in the photo above. He holds a bottle of cheap looking liquor in his hand. It’s my guess a fair few of the men in these photos were either drunk or most of the way there when they climbed into the props. This was at a fairground after all, and what was that but a place to wander through looking for desultory fun. That doesn’t account for all the families wearing the same stunned mullet expressions.

My suspicion is what looked like a good idea was actually intimidating once you started. The photographer was shouting at you to keep still while glancing over a shoulder at the queue outside and trying hurry it along. He or she had already done the technical work of framing the scene, setting the focus and rigging the lights hours earlier. The only people who were going to mess the shot up were the sitters and they weren’t given the luxury of a second try.

Not quite a mode of transport, unless you were planning to go over Niagara Falls, the barrel was almost as popular a studio prop as the car and the boat. The oddest thing about this sub-genre is not what point anybody would see in pretending to be in a barrel - that was their choice - but that so many feature the snarling little bulldog chained to it. Most that you see will have it. The dog bears a passing resemblance to Spike the bulldog in Tom and Jerry but that doesn’t mean much. It could be some forgotten piece of folklore but there is also the possibility that one company was producing a lot of the props and this was by way of a signature. The props in the photo of the two men in the speedboat – one with his tie askew and looking like he has already taken a few slugs from the hip flask – look almost identical to others I’ve seen, the big difference being the name of the state on the banner. That also supports the notion one company was producing a lot of the scenery. If that was the case, their place in American folk art is sadly unrecognized

The last in this series is a photo that doesn’t come from a fair and doesn’t use a prop but is actually a piece of artful photomontage. It is postmarked 1906, just three years after the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk and three before Louis Bleriot flew across the English Channel. Powered dirigibles were still more popular than aeroplanes for getting about in the skies and for some people remained the most feasible form of powered flight. Only ten years earlier persons still unknown had flown across parts of the southern and mid-western United States in a powered dirigible and been witnessed by thousands. Even in 1906 a dirigible in the sky was likely to draw crowds. This French postcard is obviously intended as a cutely romantic gesture but at the time it would also have been a very contemporary image.

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TRAINS AND BOATS AND PLANES

MORE CABINETS OF CURIOSITY

2011-12-16T23:59:00.000-08:00

Four cabinet cards that deserve a closer look

“Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.”

Duane Michals

At the beginning of the 20^th century Azerbaijan was the world’s largest exporter of oil and Baku was a boom town, thanks in no small part to the Nobel brothers, one, Alfred, being responsible for dynamite and the peace prize. Still part of the Russian Empire, this was both good news for Baku – it became wealthy – and a case of bad timing. The automobile had been invented but it was yet to be mass produced, there were only a handful of aeroplanes airborne and modern plastics were a few years off. The world needed oil but it wasn’t yet dependent on it the way it soon would be. Azerbaijan made money but not nearly so much as Texas would start to in the 1920s.

These men are engineers or chemists in Azerbaijan. At a guess they are either working on the design of a new storage facility or a method for distilling petroleum. The cabinet card comes from the English Studio. Was it a studio run by English people or a studio that used the name because at the time England and the British Empire evoked a sense of power and sophistication? No idea. The British presence in Azerbaijan was apparently strong, helped by the fact that the Tsar was first cousin to the King. The study is posed; the man sitting on the right is not looking at the page he is writing on. Was it used top promote Azeri advances in technology? Possibly.

On the cusp of full independence from the Ottoman Empire, educated and middle class Bulgarians rejected the ties to their Turkish heritage. Because that was so ingrained after 500 years, nationalism meant in part looking westward. Rather than embracing those elements intrinsic to Bulgarian identity, some people adopted French styles and attitudes. This man is an example. Dressed in the typical outdoor clothing of the Western European rambler he has subtly defined himself as a modern sophisticate. But the most interesting detail is the camera in his hand. It is a folding bellows camera. With a bit more expertise we could probably identify the make and model. Set against a fake outdoor setting, he is also depicting himself as a man of leisure. Whether his favourite subject was flora, fauna or landscapes, he has the time to pursue his hobbies. In other words, compared to a lot of Bulgarians he is free.

At first glance a man who has resolutely clung to his Ottoman heritage, but it is only the fez and the moustache that give that impression. From the neck down he is every bit the European gent. The head and facial wear are signs he was probably a clerk and may well have been Armenian or even Greek, given the fez was part of the standard uniform for civil servants in the late Ottoman era. At the turn of the century Phebus was one of the best known studios in Constantinople, run by Boğos Tarkulyan, an Armenian who had begun his career under the Abdullah Freres. In the 1890s he was one of the photographers commissioned to provide work for the Abdulhamid collection and in the 1920s he was appointed an official photographer to Kemal Ataturk. He is an example of how slippery categories are when analysing photographs from the era. An Armenian who moved from the Sultan’s court to that of the first president of the secular republic would need to be pragmatic in his social and business dealings, aware yet discreet. This portrait captures something of that ambivalence. If the subject is a Turkish Muslim he has already adopted Western modes. If he is an Armenian Christian he is comfortable with Turkish symbols.

Great Falls, on the border of New Hampshire and Maine, was a town built on textile mills so even though that part of the world was famous for its brilliant autumn colours and the forests that ran all the way into Canada, you can bet that at the turn of the last century it was choked with smog and caked with industrial filth.

This man has the fierce glare of the Protestant fanatic in his eyes and there is something God fearing about his beard too. His clothes are well cut. If he was a mill owner or had a managerial position, you assume he knew how to make the workers cower when they came in with their demands. First impressions matter but if you look closer you realize the intensity of his stare may not come entirely from a black heart or belief in damnation. His pupils are tiny and at equal points above them sit two pinpricks of light. This is very likely an early example of photography under electric lamps. Between 1895 and 1905, which is the estimated date range for this image, electric lighting was becoming more common in studios but it was still expensive, first to install and then to use. This might explain the subject’s stiff composure as well. He may be used to being photographed but this process is new to him and he doesn’t quite go for sitting still and staring at a light globe. Who’s to say that when Etters indicated he had finished, our subject didn’t inhale deeply, smile and grant his workers the afternoon off?

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RED DAWN

2011-12-09T23:42:00.000-08:00

Postcards and portraits from the golden age of Stalinist cinema

"You must remember that for us, cinema is the most important of all the arts,"

Lenin

Back in the 1980s Soviet cinema was still something of a mystery. At one end, the beginning, we had Eisenstein and Vertov, and no matter how excruciatingly boring Battleship Potemkin was to sit through you could accept it was a landmark film. At the other was Tarkovsky, and again, if The Stalker and Solaris were as slow as drying paint they were like nothing else you had seen before. Very little else came out and what did went to the arthouses where they played for a week if they were popular, so between those bookends it was easy to imagine Russian cinema was an entirely strange creature. The few films that emerged from Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary perpetuated the sense. Behind the Iron Curtain they were very good at creating a grey and moody and sometimes a sharp, cold cinematography. You could be forgiven for assuming that all Soviet cinema was like that. If most American films were predictable, all Russian films were art. It was a revelation therefore to find these photo postcards in Bulgaria. Graphically, they are different to anything the Americans were putting out and you can still see something of the 1920s revolutionary posters in them, but they are also a reminder that one possible reason we didn’t see a lot of Russian cinema was that it wasn’t worth showing. Back in the Stalinist era Mosfilm was producing dross that looked like nothing else so much as Hollywood at its banal, self censoring worst.

Musicals were the bread and circuses of Soviet cinema, which comes as no surprise. It is the most soporific of film genres. What’s the point to a musical if not to lull the masses into vicarious high spirits? And what more practical way is there to reinforce a political ideology than to get the audience singing along to it in the aisles? The Soviets were somewhat lagging - the high point of Hollywood musicals had passed by the 1940s – but they had studied the formula. Every musical needed one unforgettable song that people would start humming to as soon as they heard the opening bars. They also needed lavish sets. In Hollywood musicals set design and choreography were more important than the script. Not having seen a Soviet musical it is hard to compare them but Russia being one of the centres of modernist design we can hope there were people who knew exactly what to do with light and shadow, symmetry and movement. Musicals also needed stars. Hollywood and Gene Kelly and Ginger Rogers, Moscow had Lyubov Orlova. Most of her films were directed by her husband, Grigori Aleksandrov. The most popular was Volga Volga (1938), which was reputedly Stalin’s favourite film and concerned a group of singers and musicians travelling up the river to attend a talent contest. At about the same time, Stalin organized a folk festival for the blind Ukrainian folk musicians, the Lirniki. Every known musician attended – several hundred of them - and all were executed. The synopsis to another of Orlova’s musicals, Circus (1935) reads: an American circus artist has a black baby. The only way she can find happiness is among Russian people. Well she would, wouldn’t she?

We in the West tend to assume the only reason Russians joined the Communist Party was as a means to survive. Alla Larionova willingly joined the Komsomol and ran home to show her family her new red tie. It would be years before she understood why her grandmother said nothing but turned and left the room. This photo is a publicity still for the Russian film version of Twelfth Night, where she played Olivia. There is a yet to be written analysis on why foreign tyrants love Shakespeare. It has something to do with his unimpeachable status as a classic but also because he was so politically ambiguous that you can simultaneously show off your cultural credentials while eluding serious analysis. It actually suggests you have very little curiosity (A bit like saying your favourite painter is – yawn - da Vinci.) but that is another hallmark of the tyrant. Avoiding the plays that analysed political power – Hamlet, Macbeth – the Stalinist cinema produced a few films based on Shakespeare’s plays. With the advantage of distance, critics regard them with due respect, inevitably complaining that something is lost in translation from Elizabethan English to 20^th century Russian. Just after making this film, Larionova offended some high ranking official and soon had the displeasure to read stories about herself relaxing in bathtubs full of champagne. I would like to say it was Great Western but I think Peter Ustinov already used that line.

History was a problem the Bolsheviks claimed to have dealt with yet never could successfully. How could they wipe the slate clean without destroying the heritage – the Kremlin, St Basil’s, Red Square – which provided the fundamental Russian identity? How do you make a film celebrating Russia’s glorious imperial past while keeping to the line that what replaced it was absolutely necessary? Eisenstein tried with Ivan the Terrible and only saw part one of his epic trilogy released in his lifetime. In 1937 the director Vladimir Petrov released part one of his intended epic about Peter the Great, with Alla Konstantinovna Tarasova playing Katerina, the peasant girl who became Peter’s queen and eventually Tsarina Catherine the Great. It wasn’t the sheer scale of the enterprise that would be daunting so much as how to structure imperial history to suit a leader who regarded himself as a prophet of the modern world and a legitimate heir to the tsars. Petrov was adept at keeping within the boundaries but the trilogy would take nearly thirty years to complete and in its entirety run to over six hours.

The great Russian novelists of the 19^th century were realists critical of Tsarist policies and sympathetic to the oppressed so their works were acceptable for translation into cinema. One thing the Russian filmmakers had over their American counterparts was that they weren’t frightened by endurance. This was a land of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, where even short stories unfolded slowly and hung on a small detail like a raised eyebrow. The problem King Vidor had in the 1950s was how pare War and Peace down to 200 minutes. In 1968 Sergei Bondarchuk, husband of Irina Skobtseva (above), released his eight hour (484 mins) interpretation, which for that curious strain of purists who actually care about Tolstoy on screen is the definitive version. Vidor was an avowed anti-communist. If Bondarchuk was he had to keep that to himself but the real difference was that Vidor was under no pressure to show respect to Tolstoy. He could hack out the dull parts of the novel and reduce it to battle and romance scenes if he wanted. Bondarchuk on the other hand was dealing with a sacred text. He had to be faithful to the novel and to Tolstoy’s reputation. War and Peace isn’t famous for being a funny book though there are lots of jokes about it. On Hancock’s Half Hour Tony Hancock once asked a librarian for a copy just so he could stand on it to get another book off the shelf. In The Champions TV series Alexandra Bastedo’s character disposed of it in under a minute. The novel’s status as a classic owes something to so few people actually reading it, though who would need to with an eight hour film version available?

Marina Ladynina was the ideal of Stalinist beauty, meaning she was a standard that Stalin measured all others by. In this portrait she is young and elegant but not too glamorous or fashionable and the things she wants in life aren’t so far above her station. She is in the role of a demure and obedient secretary or some other office worker and while she dresses smartly she is obviously not wearing major fashion labels such as her American equivalent would be obliged to. In the first years of the Revolution artists were expected to experiment and to spread their ideas among the people so photographers like Rodchenko were free to use any means at their disposal to get the message across. Stalin suffocated all that, insisting on stolid social realism. This image is a result. There is something insentient about her that suggests the passive observer. She may have some idea of what is going on but she has learned to look away. Actually, she was one of the leading comedians of the era, renowned for playing the wise cracking, straight talking worker. This image has been heavily airbrushed; there are plenty of others where she shows why she was regarded as one of the most dynamic actresses of her time.

Soviet film directors working in the immediate post-Stalin era often made the point that though the state relaxed his strictures a little the fear remained. Their work in the 1950s was more timid than it could have been (Ditto for Hollywood post McCarthy; the 1950s were that great.) It would be another decade before they gave the envelope a proper nudge. Though Yulian Panich is still alive, there isn’t a huge amount of information available on him. He looks like he spent a good part of the 1950s and early 1960s playing intense and troubled youths, somewhere between Montgomery Clift and any inarticulate British actor in a kitchen sink drama, with a difference. In America the new teen market meant films about hot rods and rock and roll. One of Panich’s roles here, on the far right, was for a 1956 film with the uninspiring title, The Pedagogical Poem, based on a story by Anton Makarenko about how he came to develop his teaching philosophy. Panich must have played the kid who tested Makarenko’s patience until gentle persuasion coaxed him to see the error of his ways. In the still on the left, for the film that translated as Dearest (1957), he looks like any surly and self absorbed American boy whose parents didn’t understand the world was different now.

No doubt there are Russians alive who look back on this era with fondness and nostalgia, not because the films were artistic triumphs but because they represent simple virtues, which is pretty much what people think of American films from the same time. With some notable and rare exceptions, both sides of the Iron Curtain insisted that good always overcame evil, the family was the bedrock of the nation and questioning those two premises would only make your life more complicated and stressful.

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SOVIET CINEMA

THE SWEET SCIENCE

2011-12-03T23:50:00.000-08:00

Boxing photos from the wires

“To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other.”

Jack Handy

Isidoro Gastanaga, Dec 12, 1935

A glance at Isidoro Gastanega is enough to tell you he didn’t pick those muscles up in a gym; down a mine perhaps or on countless Spanish building sites but he has the look of a man who regarded roadwork and training as unnecessary gloss when the point of his trade was to knock another boxer flat. This portrait was taken in December 1935, a week before he was scheduled to fight up and coming contender Joe Louis in Havana. The fight didn’t place. When Louis’ manager, Mike Jacobs flew to Havana to settle final details he was met by six armed men, promptly turned around and caught the next flight back to New York.

Gastanega’s professional boxing career was as patchy as a crash victim in a hospital bed. He beat better men under suspicious circumstances and some of his fights ended in ways that left a distinct odour in the arena. Purses were withheld and investigations undertaken by boxing commissions, but those organizations existed essentially to see the gamblers and fixers maintained a veneer of respectability and their inquiries had a way of quietly fizzling out when no firm evidence of anything came to light. Gastanega’s death was also murky and unresolved. On the night of April 2, 1944, he was leaving a saloon in the Argentine border town of La Quica when a gunman fired off three bullets into him.

Tony Galento, 26/6/1938

Eight years on from the Gastanega non-event, Joe Louis had been the champion for six years and Tony Galento was the next tomato can in the so called “bum of the month” campaign. (You may hate boxing but you have to love its language.) “Two Ton” Tony trained on hot dogs and beer and the morning of the match pointed out to reporters that the proof he was taking things seriously was that he hadn’t had a drink for two days. Watching Galento on YouTube is a revelation in brute logic. Short and fat, he waddled around the ring with his mouth wide open, taking wild swings at opponents who sometimes had the wit to realize that if they only stayed out of danger for another round he’d be out of breath and theirs for the taking. Quite a few didn’t. It may appear astonishing that Galento had actually considered contender material but this photo provides the evidence why. Galento wasn’t a fighter; he was a showman. He bore a resemblance to Bud Abbott and shared his street instincts for timing and hype. This is a great image of a man who knows the odds are against his winning but the glory is in the paycheck and the secret is to get the press to eat out of his hand.

Joe Louis v Tony Galento, 26/6/1938

And here’s the result. It’s the fourth round and Galento has been effortlessly picked apart and punched about by a professional with surgical skills. Well, not entirely effortlessly since in the first round Galento connected and put Louis down for a brief count. Louis was heavyweight champion for twelve years and more than half a century on people may not know the facts or the statistics but they still recognize his name. Here he looks relaxed and unfazed, as though Galento might have fallen over before the fight actually started and he has popped over to lend the referee a hand. This bout marked the high point for Galento’s career, the one he would be remembered for. Later he would appear in a few films (a bit part in On the Waterfront), but he continued to fight, wrestling a reputedly dead alligator and a giant octopus and boxing a bear and a kangaroo. He died of a heart attack in 1979. Those in the press who remembered the 1940s mourned his passing, knowing they’d never get such great copy from a single character again.

Henry Armstrong v Lew Feldman, 30/3/1938

Physically, and somewhat in personality, Galento also resembled the photographer Weegee, both being masters of shameless self-promotion. Boxing photos of the 1940s and ‘50s are usually classified under ‘sport’ but they really belong to the genre of tabloid photography that Weegee exemplified. They share the same graphic quality, particularly in the way the flash bulbs froze and isolated figures against stark black backgrounds, and the photographers operated in the same tribal milieu. The Jewish and the Italian kids battling each other in a small downtown arena was merely a sanctioned version of the violence wrought in the nearby alleyways. The best photographers understood the elemental fascination for the savagery they depicted. In this photograph Henry Armstrong, world featherweight, and lightweight and soon to be welterweight champion, is in the process of finishing off Lew Feldman in a non-contest bout. In a lot of photographs the ropes would get in the way of the action. Here they make it work by dividing it up. They separate the fighters from the reporters, gamblers and fans outside the ring, and from us. They are a reminder that whatever is going on inside their barriers, we are essentially voyeurs. It’s also the ropes that tell us it’s all over for Feldman. In the cramped and claustrophobic territory of the boxing ring he has nowhere to escape to anymore.

Henry Armstrong v Lou Ambers 22/8/1939

The most famous name among boxing photographers of the era was Charles Hoff, thanks largely to a book, The Fights (Chronicle Books, 1996) that rescued his photographs from the storage vaults of newspaper archives. Erecting two strobe flashes at the sides of the ring, Hoff could set the shutter of his Speed Graphic to 125^th of a second but capture the action at around 1/20 000 to 1/30 000^th of a second. This photo shows Armstrong landing low on Lou Ambers’ trunks. Though The Fights has a photo by Hoff of this bout, the one above is unaccredited so the best we can say is it looks like one of his. High speed flash records at speeds much faster than the eye registers and the results can be deceptive. At this moment Ambers appears to be slouching against the ropes and casually inviting Armstrong to hit low, or at least he looks not so concerned as he ought to. This is one of a few dozen low blows Armstrong would land that night but Ambers was a tough street kid and he’d take them if that gave him permission to land some of his own. He went on to win the decision.

Archie Moore v Joey Maxim, 27/1/1954

Finally, a photo that gets so much wrong yet one thing right. Archie Moore is 38. He has been fighting for around 20 years and in a few minutes he will be crowned world light heavyweight champion. Yet, at his moment of triumph, he is obscured by the referee’s voluminous backside, his opponent Joey Maxim is also hidden and the whole composition becomes a study in boot soles. Maybe the photographer was loading film at the wrong time and turned desperately in the hope of capturing something. What he got was the antithesis of the standard boxing photo, no tight framing and no sense of the significance of the moment. In 1954 a new light heavyweight champion was an international news event but here it is just another contest between two unknowns. It is also a reminder that just because boxing is a legitimate sport that doesn’t make it elegant. For photographers like Hoff the mark of a great photo was its grace, the symmetry of two figures locked in a fight and that eloquent space that existed between them. What they might be depicting was one man who had lost self control and was desperately trying to extricate himself from more bloody humiliation, or another being battered to an insensate standstill. Even in the most brutal of Hoff’s photos, when a fighter’s face is grotesquely distorted by a landing punch, the essential perfection of the image neuters the violence. There isn’t any pain in this image of Moore and Maxim but there is a clumsy banality that belies any idea of sporting excellence.

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BOXING

ANCIENT MYSTERIES

2011-11-19T23:46:00.000-08:00

British topographical postcards from the 1920s-1930s

“Among the smaller islands there is one of fair size that is now called the Isle of Man. There was a great controversy in antiquity concerning the question: to which of the two countries should the island properly belong? Eventually, however, the matter was settled. All agreed that since it allowed poisonous reptiles to live in it, it should belong to Britain.

Gerald of Wales (12^th century monk)

If Francis Frith had died in Egypt he would still be remembered as one of the great 19th century photographers of ancient ruins, but what he considered his masterwork usually gets overlooked. Returning from Egypt in 1859 he opened a studio in Surrey with the intention of photographing every town and village in Britain. When he died in 1898 his mission was incomplete but the studio was one of the most important in Europe and at various times employed more than 20 photographers to carry out the work. Coincidentally, James Valentine and George Washington Wilson had similar ideas and when the real photo postcard emerged at the turn of the century the Frith and Valentine companies in particular had enormous archives to draw on. By that time Britain was the most thoroughly photographed nation in the world and there was scarcely a hillock or a turn in a country lane that hadn’t been documented. Aesthetically speaking, most of the topographical postcards are merely interesting, and only then to people with a particular fascination in the time or place. But they deserve a closer look. The photographers did not consider themselves folklorists or historians yet their work coincided with the first serious attempts to collect British folklore and what they photographed in the landscape often corresponded to the folklore – ruined castles, desolate moors, ancient places enveloped with an alternative history.

These days ghosts are big business for British tourism, which has inevitably cheapened their value. Because the photographers were working towards commercial sales they understood the value in atmosphere and often the topographical photos have that gloomy ambience associated with Britain’s other world. Anyone who has read M. R James, especially stories like A Warning to the Curious, will appreciate the photograph of Greenan Castle above. “Well, at the top of my little hill, a line of these firs strikes out and runs towards the sea, for there is a ridge that goes that way; and the ridge ends in a rather well-defined mound commanding the level fields of rough grass, and a little knot of fir trees crowns it. And here you may sit on a hot spring day, very well content to look at blue sea, white windmills, red cottages bright green grass, church tower, and distant martello tower on the south.” This is just the place where a hapless scholar would find himself up against ancient mysteries and his meddlesome ways would prove the death of him. Greenan Castle was built over an Anglo Saxon fort and is one of several ruins pinpointed as a possible location for Camelot.

The website for Yorkshire’s medieval Shambles boasts of “great shops, cafes, restaurants and tourist attractions”, which is exactly what you don’t want if you are looking for its most famous resident, Margaret Clitherow. She was arrested for harbouring Catholic priests in 1586 and sentenced to die by suffocation. Whether this was more compassionate than other popular ways of dealing with heretics, burning at the stake or dismemberment, is a matter of opinion but it disguises an even darker aspect. Her husband, John, a Protestant and a butcher by trade, was also the city chamberlain, responsible for the jail where she was held as well as managing the expenses involved in executions. A convert to Protestantism but tolerant of her beliefs, he could have intervened had she called him as a witness. She refused to and on Good Friday that year a sharp stone placed was under her back then a heavy door placed on top of her and on top of that enough heavy boulders to crush her to death. Officially she is the first female Catholic martyr of the English Reformation, “Catholic” distinguishing her from the hundreds of Protestants executed under Mary I.

Knaresborough Castle in Yorkshire has at least two ghosts but between the 1480s and the 1560s it also had Mother Shipton living in a nearby cave, or it didn’t. Whether she actually existed is debatable. Her prophecies were not published until nearly a century after her death, in the middle of the English Civil War and at the height of England’s first real print culture. Thousands of tracts and pamphlets were published by dissidents for popular consumption and they were full of strange signs and omens. Sea monsters regularly washed up on the shores, bolts of lightning torched Puritan houses and the Devil turned up everywhere. The most famous prophecy Mother Shipton made about her own times concerned Cardinal Wolsey, a confidant of Henry VIII until the King wanted his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled. Mother Shipton claimed Wolsey would see Yorkshire but never enter it, which was roughly accurate though it also first came to light in the 1640s, 110 years after Wolsey, last protector of the Catholic Church in England, died at Leicester and who was in Puritan England an easy man to hate. Her prophecies make Nostradamus’ read like models of clarity. "Water shall come over Ouze Bridge; and a windmill shall be set upon a tower, and an Elm Tree shall lie at every mans' door." Well, it could be a prediction that one day water would be piped to York, if you wanted proof such an event had been foretold.

Devout Catholics may mutter darkly about the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII but for the rest of us it has meant that England and Wales are

dotted with ruins that have become a natural part of the landscape. In the 18^th century it was fashionable for wealthy landowners to have a bit of faux classical architecture on the grounds. By the mid 19^th the thing to show off was an actual ruin, all the better if it had once been part of an Anglo-Saxon or Norman church. Two things helped. One was that some minor nobles had fallen on hard times and were selling off their land fairly cheaply and the other was that Britain was at the beginning of a national revival of identity that would draw on everything from King Arthur to Boadicea, Richard the Lionheart, Agincourt, Celtic myths and the Elizabethan age. All of that is present in Buckfast Abbey. In the 14^th century the monks ran one of England’s biggest businesses exporting wool to Europe. This might look like a typical Medieval church but construction on it started in 1906 and ended in 1937. Before that it was a ruin, destroyed during the dissolution. In the late 19^th century the owner of the land decided to sell it to a religious organization. A group of Benedectines picked it up for £4000.

It’s hard to think of another nation that has celebrated the violence and depravity of its past with such enthusiasm, but England doesn’t hold a candle to Scotland in that department. North of the border the landscape is more hostile, the weather more extreme and the supernatural beings that lurk on the moors uglier and more vicious. Revenge can be stretched out over generations. On the morning of February 13, 1692, members of the Campbell clan who had been staying with the MacDonalds in Glencoe rose from their beds and began murdering their hosts. 38 were killed in the house and some forty others died from exposure in the mountains or were killed later. Needless to say, dead MacDonalds haunt Glencoe pass but so too do the ghosts of wandering Vikings, not to mention the various zoological misfits like changelings and shape-shifters that make day to day living up here even more difficult.

The battle of Culloden Moor was a minor event in the long scheme of things; it lasted less than an hour though it was followed by weeks of hunting down and killing rebels. The landscape is scattered with memorials. Some thirty Scottish Jacobites were said to have been burnt to death by the Duke of Cumberland’s soldiers at Culloden cottage, the Duke ate breakfast then directed the battle on the Cumberland stone and clan leader Alexander MacGillivray was killed at the Well of the Dead. In 1881 Duncan Forbes, owner of the estate, erected the cairn and several other memorials and restored other landmarks, all with a strong sympathy towards the highlanders. His ancestor at the time of the battle, also Duncan Forbes, had been avowedly anti-Jacobite.

Of all the haunted castles in Britain, Edinburgh is claimed to have the most ghosts, including a veritable orchestra of pipers, drummers and disembodied voices. This is scarcely surprising given the number of people who met violent ends inside its walls. Mary Queen of Scot’s husband Lord Darnley, various members of the Douglas clan including one woman accused of witchcraft and two chiefs, a fistful of nobles who were knifed, garroted or stabbed by a family member and innumerable and un-named soldiers and civilians caught up in various attacks upon it. Whatever the photographer was thinking when this photograph was taken, you know that dark deeds took place in the building on the hill. Down below in the slums around Grassmarket, William Burke and William Hare murdered 17 people and sold their bodies to an anatomist in the 1820s. That doesn’t sound surprising, nor somehow that these days there is a strip club in the Grassmarket called the Burke and Hare.

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ANCIENT MYSTERIES

THE GREAT MOUSTACHE MYSTERY

2011-11-12T08:37:00.000-08:00

Some great moustaches

“Since I don't smoke, I decided to grow a moustache - it is better for the health.

However, I always carried a jewel-studded cigarette case in which, instead of tobacco, were carefully placed several moustaches, Adolphe Menjou style. I offered them politely to my friends: "Moustache? Moustache? Moustache?"

Nobody dared to touch them. This was my test regarding the sacred aspect of moustaches.”

Salvador Dali

Actually, there are several mysteries regarding the moustache. One is its erratic place in our history. Today’s moustache would be a joke if it were actually funny. On most men it’s not much more than a puddle of fuzz across the upper lip, biologically something between a nicotine stain and a pipe cleaner, especially when in it’s most fashionable form, attached to a neatly trimmed goatee. Not a hundred years ago however, a moustache could be a thing of great and audacious beauty. A man tended to his the way he would a garden, lovingly clipping, pruning and shaping it. He devoted time to it. After all, it was his identity.

For the Edwardian gentleman serious about cultivating his facial hair, the investment wasn’t just in time but money. Alongside the various clippers and razors he needed curlers, which needed to be heated to a precise temperature that would allow the ends to be shaped without burning the whiskers. Wax was essential, as was a snood, a netted mask that retained the moustache’s shape during sleep. Moustache cups and soup bowls had a bar across the lip that protected the whiskers from liquids and if he had the money he could think about a silver moustache spoon that had a guard to stop soup clinging to his face, saving others the indignity of having to avert their eyes during conversation. When travelling, a comb and a dab of grease would suffice for his hair but he’d probably need a small bag for all the accoutrements necessary to keep his moustache in working order.

Research (Wikipedia) suggests the earliest documented free standing moustaches – i.e. not backed up by a beard – belonged to the Pazyryk of the Altay Mountains, which is no surprise. The Pazyryk were ancestors of Turkic tribes and had strong cultural affinities with the Scythians who inhabited regions west to the Ukraine. The finest, at least the most ostentatious moustaches have always been associated with Turkey and the Balkans, heirs to both ancient races. Still, the moustache has a patchy history. Maybe some Gaulish chieftains of the late Roman early Middle Ages wore them but since our visual records are all later impressions that could be conjecture. For most of Western Europe’s history the free standing moustache was out of favour. Charles I, England’s least manly king, sported a dashing and fashionable Van Dyke but after the 17^th century the moustache all but vanished, until the mid-19^th when it suddenly returned with a flourish.

Why exactly is one of those historical problems for which any theory proposed has scant evidence to support it. Personally, I think it had something to do with industrialization fragmenting long entrenched social orders. By the mid-19^th century entirely new social classes of factory owners, engineers and other self made men had emerged. It was the beginning of the great shift to the cities. If scholars and peasants alike still preferred the antique looking full beard and Protestant firebrands the preposterously ugly chin strap, a 19^th century man who wanted to show he belonged to the modern world wore a moustache, particularly something as visually arresting yet impractical as the handlebar. Wearing one let the viewer know two things; you took care of your appearance because you had self-respect.

Whatever a beard may be, a moustache is a badge. The style a man chose – the English, the handlebar, the imperial, the walrus, the pencil, the toothbrush – was his way of letting people know his station in life, When he walked into the saloon one only had to glance at his moustache to know his class, occupation, political views, sense of humour, whether he was a thinker or a fighter, a family man or a rake. It saved time and made conversation a lot easier. You wouldn’t go up to a man wearing a walrus and ask what he thought of last night’s opera performance but you could try that if he was wearing a handlebar. A man with a toothbrush on his upper lip might not have a vivid imagination but if you wanted some common sense on business he was the one to go to.

Several moustaches have fallen out of favour. Thanks to Hitler the toothbrush is finished for the time being. The handlebar and the English with their waxed tips look more pretentious than colourful these days. In the late ‘60s the walrus made a comeback, especially among Californian country rockers. It evolved into the horseshoe but survives in small pockets where the full extent of modern technology has yet to make a real impression. Some are decidedly ethnocultural. The pencil is Latin and looks inconsequential on a blonde man, in the same way that an imperial can look entirely natural on a Croatian waiter yet pompous on an English comedian. At one time a European man looked to his royal family for advice regarding facial hair. These days it’s only the minor royals, by and large an unsavoury bunch of drug addicts and tax dodgers, who sprout the stuff and no one cares to follow their examples. Ironically, given the moustache’s long identification with overt and very heterosexual masculinity, it is the gay community who have rescued some of its finest forms from ignominy.

The rebirth of the moustache coincided with the invention of photography and it followed that a man who had spent months cultivating the growth on his upper lip would not be shy about hiding it from the camera. There are thousands of splendid examples out there. Here are just a few.

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GREAT MOUSTACHE MYSTERY

CABINETS OF CURIOSITY

2011-10-29T01:40:00.000-07:00

Reading 6 cabinet cards

“Photograph people as they really are - do not dress them up”

Henry Peach Robinson

1:What we see isn’t always the whole picture.

There are probably hundreds of thousands of cabinet card portraits taken in studios using elaborate backdrops. The photographer, Whittemore, went to a lot of effort or expense with his studio stages; note the fake grass and the landscape behind disappearing into mist. Still, it’s not that remarkable, except that Whittemore was based in Ashland Nebraska, about as mid-west American as you could ask for in the 1890s. Reading Ashland’s local histories it quickly becomes apparent that the chroniclers struggled to come up with anything interesting to say. This was a farming town, hemmed in by snow in the winter, prone to unpredictable weather the rest of the year, a place for sodbusters who wanted to do it hard. Even at its height, when the railroad brought in more trade, the population barely exceeded a thousand. This cabinet card is a portrait but it is also a highly contrived fiction. From the cheap plaster plinth and faux moss on the wall to the woman’s elaborate hairstyle, it is a fantasy about a world far removed from Ashland. There doesn’t appear to be a lot of information about a photographer called Whittemore in Ashland though a Frank Whittemore ran a saloon in town and the name crops up in 19^th century Nebraska registries, suggesting the family were early settlers or at least were successful in business.

2: We are not always sure what we are looking at.

Is this a man or a woman? His or her face is sufficiently ambiguous and though the hands look more masculine than feminine it is the hairstyle that begs the question. Note the painted art nouveau dresser on the left, the floral decorations and the bust on the table. If it is a he then he is stating his position as an urbane sophisticate, an arts student possibly and nothing too remarkable about that. If it is a she then the implications are obviously much more subversive. Note the ring on the middle right finger, or don’t. Some brief research via Google indicates that for some people a ring on this finger is a sign the wearer is gay. There are just as many who see no significance in it. There does not seem to be any evidence it was worn as a symbol of sexual preference in turn of the century Germany but there is a tradition that when a woman bought the ring herself this was the finger she should wear it on. This is a photo you could look at for hours, analysing the significance of every detail without being confident you had arrived at an answer. It is of course possible that this was what the photographer and the sitter wanted.

3: The devil is in the details

Here are late 19^th century Balkan politics boiled down to less than 100 words: four empires, the Russian, the Ottoman, the German and the British, have their own motives for maintaining influence in Bulgaria, the only common ground two of them sharing being a desire to keep the other two out. Serbia and Greece want a say in affairs too. The Bulgarians meanwhile want their own state, which the four powers are very keen to see happen, but on their individually specific terms. One sop to this mess was the Principality of Bulgaria, established in 1878 and nominally subject to the Ottoman Empire, a situation that satisfied no one.

The capital of the short lived principality was Turnovo, which was where Adolphe Bornfen set up his studio some time in the late 1880s. He probably took this photo in the early 1890s. At first glance it follows all the rules for a typical family or wedding portrait but several details are important. The first are the crucifixes the women wear. In opposition to the Ottomans who had ruled Bulgaria for 500 years, Christianity was inextricable from the Bulgarian National Revival. By wearing the crucifixes the two women appear to be making a quiet though pronounced stand. The woman on the right, presumably the man’s wife, also wears national dress, not something she’d put on in daily life. Is it a wedding dress? The man’s costume is typically Bulgarian though it is borrowed heavily from Ottoman traditions. This may not be a political image though its politics are everywhere.

4: Or not, as the case may be.

Another cabinet card by Bronfen. It appears to have been taken a few years later. To call yourself supporter of Bulgarian independence might not have been such a big deal in the 1890s. If you were Bulgarian you were, the only issue being which faction you supported; populist and democratic or a sympathiser with more militaristic ideals. We can’t say what side Bornfen belonged to. Though the man on the left wears a sword he doesn’t appear to be a soldier; an aide de camp perhaps or a government man in ceremonial dress. If so, the man on the right would be a politician or bureaucrat. Once you start looking for political meaning it crops up all over the place. The clouds could suggest some celestial ideal, but then they may just be a studio trick.

5: Truth is stranger than fiction

Henry Peach Robinson is one of the most significant photographers of the 19^th century. His composite images such as Fading Away and When the Day’s Work is Done are considered landmarks and he is credited with coming up with the term ‘Pictorialism’. The several books he wrote on photography were manifestos for establishing photography as a fine art, but like thousands of others in Britain his main business was in the studio. Interesting, you might think, that for someone famous for using a battery of special effects, this portrait relies on entirely natural props. Information on the back dates this as post 1878, a period when Robinson was at his most dogmatic in declaring how and why photographers should aspire to art, but then his theories were always somewhat anachronistic. He still believed for example that art should reflect truth.

6: Less is more.

At first glance this woman appeared to be in the throes of emotional disturbance but it was her dark velvet top with its sharply angled shoulders and her somewhat aversive posture that gave that impression. She doesn’t look entirely comfortable with being photographed, otherwise she seems the image of the prim and respectable teacher or governess; someone well versed in Latin or French history and worn down by a succession of pupils who couldn’t care less. If this were a standard carte de visite, about a third the size, certain details such as her pince-nez and the texture of her clothes would be lost. The large format of cabinet cards gave us more information, in this case just enough to want to look twice.

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CABINETS OF CURIOSITY

THIS IS NOT A HAT

2011-10-22T01:32:00.000-07:00

THIS IS NOT A HAT

The fez in photographs

“In Bulgaria you still see the local Turkish peasants working in the fields in the Turkish traditional costume – the red fez with the embroidered yellow scarf wound round it – and it is curious, when you enter Turkey, to see this familiar figure of the Turk, as you know him, suddenly disappear from the landscape.”

Arnold Toynbee; A Journey to China, or Things Which Are Seen, 1931

On November 25, 1925, Kemal Ataturk, first President of the two year old Republic of Turkey, delivered a speech in the small town of Kastamonu with far reaching effects. “This is a hat,” he said, holding up a Homburg. “It has a brim.” From now on, wearing the fez was outlawed. His reasons for prohibiting an internationally recognized symbol of Turkey had to do with its historical connotations, though whether as some people say he saw it as a symbol of submission to Islam or more a very obvious artifact of the Ottoman Empire isn’t clear. It could have been both. There is a story that as a young attaché in Paris, Ataturk was approached by a French official who pointed to his fez and asked why he wore such a ridiculous accoutrement. That sounds suspiciously apocryphal; as though Ataturk carried the official’s words in his heart for years when he would have heard far more stinging insults directed against his decaying nation.

Like the burqa, the fez is implicitly associated with Islam and variations on its design are found from Morocco to Indonesia though it is most strongly identified with Ottoman Turkey and Egypt. There is some dispute as to its origins, with some scholars pointing to the Balkans, but the hat as we know it really began its life in 1829, when Sultan Mehmed II decreed that it become part of a civil servant’s uniform. One reason given for the decline of the Ottoman Empire was its absurdly over managed bureaucracy, which meant – among other things – that in Constantinople close to half the men wore fezzes. That is also why, despite its religious significance, Armenians, Greeks and Jews appear in photographs wearing the fez. It identified them as respectable members of the middle class; in the same way the black bowler hat became a symbol of the professional classes in England.

As hats go, the fez is supremely non-functional. It does not protect the wearer from the sun or keep him warm but Ataturk may have overlooked something Mehmed II realized. A man in a fez looks dignified and urbane. This isn’t simply the effect of looking back on the past from a safe distance. Something about its elemental design added gravitas in ways denied to more elaborate headwear. The top hat for example really needed an overcoat and ideally a cane to mark its wearer as a man about town. The fez needs nothing more than a jacket.

Ataturk might not have realized this either; as far as Hollywood was concerned, the fez came to represent something a fair distance from religion, piety anyway. Think of any film from the 1920s onwards that featured a Middle Eastern type wearing a fez. Always sinister yet undeniably elegant, he was the one who knew the secrets and just what was at stake for the naïve American or British hero. The most famous wearer of the fez in Hollywood was Boris Karloff in The Mummy; 3000 years old and filled with the wisdom of the ages. Glancing through a list of other Hollywood actors in roles that required a fez – Sidney Greenstreet in Casablanca, Victor Mature in something called The Shanghai Gesture (“People Live in Shanghai for Many Reasons... Most of Them Bad!”) – we see that they were inevitably on the wrong side of the law, either swarthy Middle Eastern types who dabbled in crime or Westerners who’d fled south and embraced dissipation. You didn’t need much in the way of character development when a simple fez said it all.

In a way that still holds true. It is all we require to understand an image in the context of time and place and it can turn an otherwise straightforward portrait into something exotic and mysterious. In Turkey, the fez may have gone the way of plus fours, the corset and the tricorn, a fashion item no one sees any good reason to resuscitate, but it still exerts a strange power, a key to the intangible heritage of cultural identity.

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THIS IS NOT A HAT

PAGEANTS OF PULCHRITUDE

2011-10-15T00:51:00.000-07:00

Miss World and Miss Europe in the 1930s

"My greatest ambition is to make my mother happy. I will not go on the stage or screen. Just a few week ago I saw a large city for the first time—Paris!"

Jeanne Juilla, Miss Europe 1931: Time Magazine, Feb. 16, 1931

In 1928 the French journalist Maurice de Waleffe, a fashionable type who favoured a return to knee breeches, hit upon the idea of a Europe wide beauty pageant. He had been having success with the Miss France contest he had set up a couple of years earlier and this sounded like a good idea. The organizing committee wasn’t in the business of predicting the future but it didn’t take a lot of foresight to realize that the world was in a parlous situation. Germany’s economy was gutted, the Communists had taken power in Russia, from China to Egypt another war looked imminent. No matter how lecherous the organizers’ motives were, any international competition that put beauty above politics would get popular support. A judge on the first panel was Paul Chabas, a member of the Légion d'honneur, (or he became so that year) known for his paintings of young, naked women in idyllic surroundings. September Morn was his most famous work, thanks only to the scandal it created in the US. Self respecting critics were of the opinion that whatever it evoked really should remain locked in the minds of pubescent boys.

Being a contestant for Miss Europe was tough. In the countries that already had pageants, the girls (No one would have suggested they were women, yet.) began in small contests and worked their way up, from local cantons to provinces and finally the capital, all the while maintaining their poise and dignity in front of judges who imagined themselves to be, if nothing else, astute connoisseurs of feminine mystique. The contestants had to possess those genuine, innocent yet sensual charms that could make an old playboy giddy at the knees. Some entrants came from privileged backgrounds, where they had been taught the etiquette of table manners and the art of small talk from an early age, but the judges could also be touched by a young lady’s journey from small town baker’s daughter to culture symbol to the metropolis. Such a girl had led a

wholesome, positive life, a role model you could say for a post war world.

The Miss Europe contest was avowedly non political though governments weren’t always aware of this. In 1934, the German ambassador to London, Leopold von Hoesch, turned down an invitation to judge the contest in Hastings because the German entrant, Emma Kant, was the grand niece of Immanuel Kant and not considered Aryan enough. At the same time, the Russian ambassador, Ivan Maisky, was fuming that his countries entrant, Yekaterina Antonova, wasn’t a true Bolshevik but a Kulak. The contestants remained diplomatically silent.

Meanwhile in Galveston Texas a group of businessmen had decided to expand their annual “Miss Splash” bathing beauty contest and make it international. The new name they chose – the International Pageant of Pulchritude –sounds like a marketing disaster and at first it only had moderate success in the States. Outside, in South America especially, it became huge, so much that the failure of Miss Brazil to secure a finalists position in 1929 created a brief but intense diplomatic spat. That same year Miss Austria, Lisl Goldarbeiter, became to first foreigner to win the title, which entitled her to be called “Miss Universe’. In 1932 the contest moved outside of America for the first time, to Spa in Belgium.

Around 1930 the Turkish chocolate company Lion Cikolatasi began inserting photographs of Miss Europe and Miss Universe contestants in their bars. Like the Ross Company in Germany, Lion sourced its images from well known studios in Europe who followed current fashions in glamour photography. Lighting was soft and full, eliminating shadows but also any blemishes. As with the contestants, the photographer’s look was lifted straight out of Hollywood. Unlike the case with fashion models, whose job was to advertise a product, the camera’s full attention was focused on the contestant’s face and she generally smiled straight back into the lens. More enigmatic expressions were the reserve of certain German actresses.

Lion was one of several companies in Europe with rights to publish the photographs. One difference was Lion’s distinctive narrow, rectangular postcard format (140 x 75mm). Other sets were produced about the same size as a cigarette card and were often roughly cut with uneven borders. Like all the companies with the licence, Lion never mentioned the contestant’s name, only her country, with one exception. Most of the cards here are dated 1932, the year Keriman Halis became the first Turkish contestant to win the Miss Universe contest.

The Pageant of Pulchritude closed for a couple of years during the Depression and beauty contests around the world took a hiatus throughout the Second World War. When they started up again things a lot had changed, including the idea of beauty. In none of the photos here is the woman’s body on display; beauty is reflected in the face. Glamour photography would never be the same either. A new generation of actresses, models and rich European aristocrats would determine tastes and they weren’t afraid to shock. The domestic housewife would become glamorized too. Miss Universe was still expected to be virtuous and healthy but she also had to look great in a swimsuit; the scandals involving drugs, nude photo shoots and single motherhood lay in wait.

Tracing what happened the various contestants after they won turns up precious little. A few moved on to acting or modelling careers, usually short lived and unspectacular. Some married into royalty. Aliki Diplarakou, winner of Miss Europe in 1930 died as Lady Russell having married a British lord and earning an international reputation as an expert on classical art. For most the beauty pageant was their one brief brush with fame. No idea what happened to Miss Russia, Miss Germany or any of the other Misses from the wrong side in the war and afterwards. Keriman Halis was still alive in 2007, aged 94, and no obituary has since been posted. She may still be with us.

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MISS UNIVERSE

PHOTOGRAPHY CAN BE FUN

2011-10-06T09:57:00.000-07:00

Humour and other oddities in photos

Why should a clergy man always wear well-fitting clothes? Because he should never be a man of loose habits?

Why are stutterers never to be relied on? Because they are always breaking their word.

Edwardian jokes

Step off the straight and narrow road of the established history of photography and you quickly find yourself in a place where received ideas have to be suspended. Words like ‘art’ and its even more vague corollary ‘genius’ are meaningless, as are some fundamental terms for describing things; ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ sound hollow. There are photographs for which the only category they belong to is ‘strange’. It isn’t always easy to pinpoint what that is. Would it make a difference if ‘the girl who wouldn’t’ was better printed and if she wasn’t blurred? Possibly, though improvements might also reveal its essential mediocrity. The photograph of two lovers on a sofa would have been sentimental and uninteresting except the attempt at colouring the champagne glasses was so inept it placed the image on another plane, maybe not a higher one but it has become something else.

These photographs aren’t snapshots. They were taken by professionals who were certain of what they wanted and a few were produced by studios that had the facilities to create various effects. One thing they share is that somewhere between thought and expression, something went askew. The postcard of the woman in the dirigible was always intended to be odd but in others the romantic looks creepy or there are details that maybe shouldn’t be there. It’s a bit like laughing at a joke and realizing afterwards that you didn’t really get it.

In the 1860s photographers realized that now they could mass produce images they weren’t limited to famous faces or views. There was a whole new market out there for people who wanted to indulge their sense of humour. The first efforts were tableaux vivants with a message at the bottom and composite prints where the fakery was obvious enough for anyone to get the joke. The usual formats were cartes de visite and stereographs. By the turn of the century, as the postcard took off, more and better techniques became available. The only limits for a photographer or publisher were imagination and skill, and the second wasn’t necessarily expected to be of a high standard.

Bad art is always bad but bad photographs can take on a new life It’s hard to figure out exactly what the person behind the photo above was thinking when he or she decided that a moonrise over a gloomy sea was suitable as a Christmas card and two angels carrying a banner would set things off nicely. The angels haven’t improved the image but they have made it more disconcerting. Another postcard with a religious theme is the one below, and though the thinking behind this is easier to follow, somehow the girls’ poses are all wrong. The taller one clutches the crucifix a little too desperately and why the photographer, a Mr W Greaves of Leicester, should think the image looked better if the other girl clung to her skirts is something only he could explain. Technically, there is nothing wrong with this photo but it does suggest the girls have a somewhat nervous relationship with their faith.

All of these photos come from that vaguely defined period immediately either side of the First World War, when the real photo postcard was coming into its own and photographers used every device and technique available to make their images different. It was also a moment when photography was being taken seriously as an art form. Portraits were meant to reveal something deep within the sitter, landscapes were meant to inspire and magazines were full of tips on fine printing and customized darkroom recipes. These photographs on the other hand are either wilfully ignorant or dismissive of the standard ideas of the day as to what good photography was but they remind us that photography could also be fun.

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PHOTOGRAPHY CAN BE FUN

BAD GIRLS

2011-10-01T02:29:00.000-07:00

Anthony Comstock and erotic photography

No sect nor class has ever publicly sided with the smut dealer, except the Infidels, the Liberals and the Free-lovers"

Anthony Comstock

Anthony Comstock cut a formidable swathe through New York Society between 1873 and 1910. Being a postal inspector he had some idea of what was passing through the city’s mailrooms and as head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice he was given the power to clean them up. In 1873 he announced that over the previous two years, alongside more than five tons of books, 21 000 impure song sheets, 5000 obscene microscopic watch and knife charms, 5 500 obscene playing cards and 30 000 immoral rubber articles, he had overseen the destruction of 182 000 obscene photographs. That suggests there was a fair amount of salacious photography in circulation, and or Comstock had a broad definition of pornography. It’s unlikely he would have been persuaded that a flesh coloured body stocking protected anyone’s virtue. A nude was a nude no matter what she wore.

Comstock argued that anyone who photographed a nude was a grubby and seditious pornographer, the type of character who skulked around back alleys and seldom washed. After several raids and attempts at entrapment of Weil’s studio on Broadway, he uncovered a portrait of the photographer’s naked infant son, which was enough in Comstock’s opinion to call in the police. One could never underestimate the cunning of a smut dealer or the vulnerability of young minds. Comstock’s witch-hunt extended to photographs of artworks even though the originals were on public display in museums. Many, probably most of the photographs circulating through the city actually originated in Europe; the number of New York photographers active in the porn trade was lower than Comstock wanted people to believe.

He also insisted that the women who posed nude for a photographer were innocent victims and cruelly exploited. The same idea would get some traction among feminists in the 1980s though in Comstock’s late Victorian world view suffragism was an evil on a par with pornography. Any woman who dared challenge his concept of marriage or suggested women should establish more economic independence was also a target. The New Woman movement emerging towards the end of the century had no fixed manifesto but its members tended to be straitlaced when it came to theories of work and economics. By ‘profession’ they meant law, medicine, business or education. Being an artist’s model was a little frivolous.

It followed however that if men like Comstock were as virulently opposed to suffragism as they were pornography, then eroticism could be used as a form of protest. For some performers it was definitely liberating. The photos of ballerina Regina Badet on display here are relatively chaste; she was not the slightest bit ashamed at undressing for the camera and whenever she did she appeared to be cocking a snook at someone. Women didn’t have to take off their clothes to rile the Comstockians. Smoking, drinking, dressing as a blacksmith or even just implying lesbianism, any behaviour that transgressed the image of the obedient woman was subversive.

Most of the women in this gallery are anonymous and we can’t be absolutely sure what their intentions were. They don’t look like victims. A few of them would be aspiring actresses, which has always carried a sense of being exploited, but appearances are everything, as Comstock well understood. It is enough to look like you enjoy breaking the rules to become dangerous to certain eyes. We could consider these photos as exploitation of women’s bodies but they could also be act of defiance.

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BAD GIRLS

THE GROUP

2011-09-24T04:09:00.000-07:00

Group portraits

“I can't belong to groups. I've tried. I behave normally, but people don't look at me normally.”

Jeanne Moreau

Behavioural psychologists used to love studying the group. Between the 1950s and the 1980s people like Solomon Asch and Stanley Milgram made their names constructing experiments that examined the way the group behaved. Milgram definitely wanted to consider the question in the light of the Holocaust and how easy it was for individuals to sacrifice their ethics to the group. Asch, who was born in Warsaw but migrated to the US in the 1920s probably had the same set of issues on his mind when he set up his conformity experiment in the 1950s, but he was also witness to the unedifying spectacle of Americans freely betraying one another to the House Un-American Activities Commission; proof, if he needed it, that culture was irrelevant. The behavioural psychologists were ultimately most interested in that moment the group turned into something else, it fell apart or became a mob, and how easily it could be manipulated to reach that state. You also get the impression that Asch, Milgram and the others already knew the answers to their questions and the experiments were needed to provide evidence to formally justify their worst fears.

There are literally millions of photographs of groups floating around. Most don’t hold our attention for very long and if they do it is usually because of the incongruities; someone is behaving out of synch with everyone else, the people form a shape or there is some other graphic detail that makes the image work. Occasionally you come across something else. Everyone has come together for a common purpose, they maintain their essential individuality but the strongest personality belongs to the group itself. Beyond the obvious reasons for the group’s existence, the image represents something more abstract, subtle and interesting, an attitude or character that reveals how groups work.

In a properly functioning group everyone understands its objectives and their role, whether they’re happy with that or not. The success of the group also depends on each member sustaining their individual identity. In some of these photos the leader stands out though the clues might not be immediately apparent. It is something in their expression or a gesture that tells us they bear the weight of responsibility or in some way they define the essential nature of the group. We can also find people who have been given licence to behave in certain ways, others who have tried to keep some distance from everyone else and sometimes people who don’t really belong. It isn’t entirely paradoxical that people secure their sense of self by belonging to a group. One thing Asch discovered was that some people, or personality types, can be easily persuaded to change their ideas to fit the group but even more independent minded people tended to express doubt rather than outright disagreement, as if they too wanted to be a part of it though on their terms. Unfortunately Asch nor other behavioural psychologists never pursued the further question of whether people who didn’t fit in were genuinely alienated or more simply hadn’t found the group they could fit into. Not feeling a part of the group doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t want to belong.

Current thinking has it that the group as we knew it is a dying organism. Computer technology has given people more rights to individuality but also isolated them o whether we are sitting on a bus listening to an MP3 player or at home on the Internet we don’t need the tangible group anymore. Neither do groups and collective action require that previously necessary element that everyone knew each other. This is a somewhat overheated argument. Firstly, we can be sceptical about how much of a role social network sites play in spontaneous collective action; you only have to look back 20 years to the collapse of Communism to see that you don’t need Twitter or Facebook to galvanise protests. Secondly, the traditional group is still going strong in families and workplaces, which have always been foundations of social activity. We haven’t replaced them, just enhanced our means of communication. Maybe there are contemporary Milgrams and Aschs conducting experiments on Web based social networks. The suspicion is that they would quickly discover those groups are far less cohesive, more open to suggestion and easily fragmented than a genuinely structured group should be.

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THE GROUP

NEVADA GAS

2011-09-16T01:44:00.000-07:00

Postcards from Nevada – 1940s to ‘50s

“Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.”

Charles Kuralt.

Ever since the 1930s when the Farm Security Administration photographers set out to document America’s hinterland, the west has been defined by a narrow range of iconography; the gas station, the run down motel, the empty highway vanishing into the horizon and neon. Everyone who followed in the footsteps of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange understood that if they wanted to locate their image for the benefit of the viewer they only needed to refer to one of these and all was understood. The west was always more surreal than gothic and what could capture the strangeness more than a petrol bowser or a neon sign out in the middle of nowhere? In the 1950s a photographer (possibly more than one) covered a relatively short stretch of the journey, along Route 40 between Lovelock Nevada and Utah’s salt lakes. The mission was straightforward; take photographs that could be turned into postcards for tourists, but what he, she or they found was pretty much identical to what the more existential wanderers were looking for.

"Devolite Peerless” in the stamp box dates the photographs to the 1950s and ‘Wendover Will’ as the neon cowboy is officially known was erected in 1952. The photographs therefore were taken about the same time Robert Frank was undertaking his epic journey, about midway between that point at the beginning, when the structures Evans found were relatively new and the late ‘70s, when Stephen Shore and others were documenting their decay. Not far from where these photos were taken the US was conducting atomic tests and the territory would henceforth be cloaked in mystery and conspiracy. It was a part of the country people travelled through without really stopping except to fill up the tank or if they were really pushed pull into a small motel for the night. Unlike the Grand Canyon or Monument Valley, this wasn’t a stretch where people were encouraged to stop and ponder. That would be left to photographers.

It is striking how easily, maybe the word is immediately, these photographs fit in with that tradition of documentary photography that began with people like Evans and still survives. An unwritten rule for all these photographers was that the west was not a wilderness but a place of human occupation. Our presence was to be explicit in every frame. This photographer (In the interests of fairness, hereon sometimes referred to as ‘he’, sometimes as ‘she’.) abided by that basic rule. That didn’t have to be. In the 1950s the Nevada Utah stretch of Route 40 was still desolate, with plenty of opportunities to photograph the landscape of cacti and desert scrub pretty much as it had been for millennia. The suspicion is that, like most people travelling through, our photographer found the desert to be quite monotonous. What impressed her was the idea of space and emptiness, meaning the distance between people. A photograph of a barren landscape doesn’t capture that but put some human evidence in the picture and you get it at once. The road with the car in “Great Salt Lake West on US 40 -80” tells you more about the remoteness than the photo would if it were just the bleached landscape and sky.

That is part of the reason why gas stations and neon signs became as emblematic of the American west as tumbleweed or saguaro. They are reference points to help us appreciate how isolated we are out there. Think of the number of films or books where someone crossing the desert sees a roadhouse in the distance and (usually mistakenly) imagines it is a place of refuge. In fiction anyway roadhouses are always places where a character’s life takes a sudden turn, usually for the worst. These are places where a man or woman is alone and vulnerable, and the locals are an odd lot. Border towns also have their unique American mythology, partly because of the country’s long tradition of states rights. Nothing much physically changes between Utah and Nevada but on one side we have Mormon territory with its theoretically drug free and puritan ethos and on the other casino land where people are encouraged to indulge their every vice. In American culture the border town is an ambiguous place, where the law is easily thwarted and freedom is always just a few steps away.

At least two photographers from the documentary tradition, Evans and Shore, admitted to a strong influence from commercial postcards. They liked the simplicity of the approach, knowing that a minimum of information was enough to say exactly what needed to be said. Some of these photos stand up against the best of their work in the sense that they get the same atmosphere of strangeness and desolation they aspired to. A Google search uncovered a few more photographs from the same area with similar inscriptions. One was dated 1947, another 1954. The photographer was unidentified. Presumably he worked out of a studio in one of the small towns on the highway, Lovelock, Winnemucca or Wendover, and used the postcards as a way to boost business. I suspect that if the name behind ‘State Line Service’ or ‘Nevada Desert Road’ were known they would have been thoroughly dissected for their meaning and significance by now.

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NEVADA GAS

MODERN TIMES

2011-09-10T05:24:00.000-07:00

Modernist German Architecture

“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.”

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

There are two paradoxes to think about when looking at photographs of modernist architecture. The first is that the early modernists, the disciples of the International Style especially, were authoritarian in their demand that the only angle that could be used was 90˚. That was partly a reaction against the florid excesses of Art Nouveau and the unnecessary adornments of neo-classicism; clean, rigid lines were a proper response in the age of the engineered machine. But to capture that idea on film photographers had to look for dramatic angles. The flat perspective of a façade shot front on revealed nothing of the architect’s intentions. The second is that this generation of architects was the first to consider buildings as spaces utilized by people. This was an era when architects like Wells Coates believed an apartment was a place of refuge and it ought to be white with minimal, preferably no opportunity for the resident to decorate it with furniture or objects. Similarly, an office cluttered with distractions was no place to think. Photographs of buildings that included too many people proved the point. You couldn’t see how a train station was supposed to work if the photograph showed a crowded platform at peak hour. Deserted it suggested a transit place of rapid and convenient movement.

Around the turn of the century a significant break occurred in the way architecture was photographed. In the 19^th century photographers tended to choose the point of view that best explained the building. Monuments tended to be photographed straight on, from the point of view that they were supposed to be approached from, If a more imaginative photographer wanted to highlight the emotional importance of the structure it could be shot low down from an angle and made to dominate everything around it. The change in the 1910s came about partly because architects began to think of space as a mutable concept; their finished drawings didn’t have to reflect reality and they made much more use of dramatic perspective. Around the same time German camera companies like Leitz and Voigtlander were experimenting with small, hand held cameras with wide angles and apertures. They allowed photographers to get into positions denied to their predecessors who had to be able to mount a heavy box on a tripod. It’s no surprise that some of the most dramatic architectural photographs of the early modernist era come out of Germany and Austria, the birthplaces of Alfred Loos, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Even before the Bauhaus began articulating theories on what photography should visualize, photographers were taking a cue from architects.

German modernism of the 1920s and ‘30s can’t be disassociated from Nazism. For one, the Nazis embraced modernist architecture more than any other government – the only possible rival being fascist Italy. German modernist architecture reached its high point with something that was never built; Albert Speer’s reconstruction of Berlin. Had that happened all the principles regarding function, space and human usage would have crystallised. As it was, some of the best German architects were Jewish but even for those who weren’t yet were opposed to the regime, the ways in which modernism could be easily adapted to suit dictatorships exposed a critical flaw in the thinking. Fundamentally, the rigid and tightly controlled designs suited fascism. Where an architect imagined pace allowing flow of movement, a fascist could see the same as a means of control.

Another connection to consider is the number of buildings destroyed or so badly damaged during the war they were either lost or substantially reconstructed. It is easy to forget that the lost heritage of cities like Dresden or Berlin went beyond the medieval and Renaissance eras and included what, just a couple of decades earlier, had been some of the most contemporary designs in the world. One of the most idiosyncratic was the Tannenberg War Memorial, designed by Walter and Johannes Kruger. At first glance it looks like a medieval fortress but it was built between 1924 and ‘27 as a tomb of unknown soldiers from the First World War. Hitler later authorised it as the mausoleum of his predecessor, von Hindenburg. The Krugers were originally inspired by Stonehenge but also by two decisive battles that took place on the site, one in the First World War, the other 500 years earlier, when Polish and Lithuanian soldiers had defeated the Teutonic Knights. Modernism didn’t always mean a determined severance with the past. National identity and heritage being symbiotic, architects across Europe turned to historical evidence in the landscape for inspiration. In 1945 retreating German soldiers mined the monument, destroying most of it. The Polish government finished off the job in 1950 and only foundations remain.

All of the images in this post are real photo postcards from the mid 1930s. the photographers most likely had studios in the cities and though unknown and forgotten today were sufficiently aware of contemporary aesthetics to know how modern buildings should be photographed. To a certain extent that involved fictionalizing them, using wide angles to give unreal perspectives and removing as many people as possible from the scene.

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MODERN TIMES

AFTER THE GOLDRUSH

2011-08-30T08:09:00.000-07:00

Four photographs by John Joseph Dwyer

"In a way Australia is like Catholicism. The company is sometimes questionable and the landscape is grotesque. But you always come back."

Thomas Keneally

For urban historians, 19^th century gold rushes are like those moments in concertos when the cymbals crash, the brass steps forward and the music suddenly picks up. What came before turns out to have been a mere prelude, of moderate interest but not necessarily explaining what follows. There were four great gold rushes in the 19^th century; the Californian, Ballarat, the Yukon and Kalgoorlie, and they all had the effect of turning a distant port from a backwater into one of the richest cities in the world in its time. Most of San Francisco’s real gold rush history has vanished; there are only a handful of buildings from the 1850s remaining but walking the streets you still get the sense that once upon a time something big happened. Melbourne’s claim to genteel elegance rests almost entirely on its heritage of preserved gold rush architecture. Perth, which is some 500kms from Kalgoorlie, has actually had several mineral booms and manically reinvented itself in each so anyone visiting for the first time would be hard pressed to find evidence it went back more than fifty years. Go 20kms to the harbour of Fremantle however and you get the picture. In the 1890s it wasn’t just that the city needed to build but it had the money to do it on a scale that made its mother city always look a little dull and dingy in comparison. Its only rival was Kalgoorlie, out on the desert’s edge and which if not for the gold rush would have had no reason to exist.

Calling John Joseph Dwyer the most significant photographer in 19^th century Western Australia isn’t hard, and not simply because the competition was sparse but nobody else photographed anything like the range of subjects he did, from common portraits to landscapes to the inner workings of mines. It’s always an unknown factor whether a photographer like Dwyer was astute or lucky in being present at a great event – in this case the gold rush and the birth of a city – but if it was just luck he exploited it to the fullest. No other Australian photographer from the time has left has left as detailed a record of a place as he did. Born in Victoria in 1869 he moved to Kalgoorlie in 1896 and began taking commissions from the mining companies soon after. By 1900 he had opened a studio next to Kalgoorlie’s Palace Hotel (think the Dorchester or the Ritz in the middle of nowhere) and like any respectable photographer of the time worked on the principle of any image, any time. To get the best idea of his work you need to look at two books; An Everyday Transience by Philip Goldswain and Bill Taylor (UWA Publishing, 2010) and In Old Kalgoorlie by Robert Pascoe and Frances Thomson (West Australian Museum, 1989). Goldswain and Taylor’s book pays more attention to his portraits and cityscapes and is more revealing of the inner life of a gold rush town but in both we get an impression of a photographer who was technically adept and fascinated by the strange world he had entered.

There are accounts of people who disembarked at Fremantle more or less broke but were so anxious to get to the goldfields they invested what cash they had left in a wheelbarrow and a spade and walked to Kalgoorlie. Once they crossed the Darling escarpment they were on a long, flat, dry and sunbaked stretch for 360 miles. An astute botanist would have noted changes in the flora and the landscape but for most pedestrians it would have been a case of monotonous plains marked by diminishing vegetation. By the time they reached Kalgoorlie or its sister town Coolgardie they were in a scrubby desert marked by saltpans, granite outcrops and spinifex. It wasn’t all that miserable. When the seasonal rains came through Kalgoorlie’s landscape bloomed with everlastings and other wildflowers and as the indigenous people knew, water was about if you knew where to look.

There are a couple of reasons why Australia never developed any significant concept of landscape photography in the 19^th century. One is that the penetration of the interior was relatively slow and to the country’s lasting loss the exploration teams never thought to take photographers (sketchbooks at least saved space). The other is that few, probably nobody, thought it interesting enough. The ancient and eroded landscape held no wonders like America’s canyon system and in contemplating it one had to think not in details but expanse, something no photograph could do justice to. Dwyer was one of the very few from the 19^th century to leave a body of landscape work worthy of attention. There is no grandeur in these four images; on the other hand, nor is there anything of the romantic sensibility that would frequently obscure the work of later Australians like Harold Cazneaux. You get the impression Dwyer viewed the land dispassionately, as something that needed to be documented because without it the record was incomplete. If that was the case his legacy in landscape work might lack the artistic inspiration of near contemporaries like the American William Jackson but it is protected by its authenticity and his familiarity with it.

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AFTER THE GOLDRUSH

ID

2011-07-30T01:52:00.000-07:00

Passport and other ID photos

“I loathe my own face.”

Francis Bacon

Here’s something you can think about in a quiet moment: is there anyone alive right now who hasn’t been photographed? Deep in the Amazon there are tribes that have had little contact with the outside world but we know about some of them because we’ve seen photographs of groups of villagers taken from helicopters or else anthropologists have managed some furtive snaps. There are groups like the Amish who reject modern technology but in order to live in the US they need to have their identities recorded somewhere and that involves a camera. Billions of people around the world have access to cameras but when it comes to documenting citizens, states have vested interests in seeing everyone photographed. Take a country like North Korea where it’s likely very few people own cameras; the government has doubtlessly made sure that every citizen has been thoroughly documented. As a rule of thumb; the more authoritarian the state, the more photographs it has on file of its citizens. In Turkey a few years ago, any foreigner applying for a residence permit had to submit 16 photographs that were then distributed to various ministries. Today 4 is sufficient, which doesn’t mean the state has become less vigilant, rather its bureaucracy has become more streamlined.

The realization that photography was useful to the state for monitoring citizens occurred pretty much immediately the collodion process was invented and photographs could be reproduced ad infinitum. There are accounts from the early 1860s of police departments in the US photographing everyone they had arrested. This was for identification only and only for local use. Transmitting photographic records of felons to other police departments was either impractical or unnecessary and the images could not yet be reproduced on posters. Still, it’s interesting (maybe not surprising) that the first people considered for this type of documentation were those perceived to be enemies of the state. It shows that the camera was always perceived to be an authoritarian’s tool.

In 1863 a Manchester man, a Mr McLachlan, wrote to the English papers with a proposition. Every photographic studio in the UK should photograph every notable citizen and submit the results to the National Portrait Gallery. The NPG had opened in 1856 and Mr McLachlan’s idea was that to be a genuine portrait gallery it needed to be a storehouse of the nation’s identity, not simply a repository of fine art. The NPG didn’t take up McLachlan’s idea though over a century and a half it has become something like what he envisioned. There are very few notables from the era who don’t have a CDV in the collection though quite a few studios are missing.

In 1871 London’s police department wanted every criminal arrested to be photographed. Some what had a bit of previous were clever enough to take the issue to the courts and convinced a few magistrates that a man’s portrait was his personal property so they ought not sit in front of a camera until they had at least been convicted. It is probably thanks to them that in most countries now people aren’t photographed until they have been formally charged.

If you think the fax is an invention from the 1970s you are out by about 100 years. In December 1876 Police in Lyons transmitted a photographic image of a wanted man to Paris. As the man alighted from his train gendarmes holding a paper copy of his portrait moved in an arrested him. From about the same time – dates need to be confirmed – an American journalist attended a prizefight in Paris and like everyone else was asked to present his photo as proof of ID. Incidentally there is a whole other history of the display of photographs of executed criminals, not so the public could identify them of course but so their extinction could be celebrated.

For a lot of people a trip to the studio for an obligatory passport photo is no light matter. Considering the sole purpose of the portrait is to provide a reasonable likeness for identification purposes, taking time to apply make up, choose the right outfit and attend to the hair – especially that – the time spent can seem excessive. Then again, there are people haunted by their passport photo. They cringe when they hand the document over to the customs official, strangely unaware that if they look that hideous in an instant photo they probably don’t in real life. Fortunately, in Turkey photographers are an understanding lot. The studio always has a small table with a comb, a mirror and a few small items to patch up any potential mistakes. The photographers are always considerate and give the subject a couple of minutes to prepare themselves.

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IDENTITY PORTRAITS 2

SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE

2011-07-24T00:58:00.000-07:00

The mystery of a married couple’s snapshots

“The past is never dead, it is not even past.”

William Faulkner.

The photographs in this post are a perfect example of the paradox of using photography as social history, namely, the more evidence accumulated the more uncertain the proof. Originally it was three images taken at the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931 that caught my eye, and then a few more showing the same couple in the box. Over the following months more turned up in other shops across Istanbul so it became a project accumulating as many as possible with the idea I was building up a picture of a marriage. But as photos emerged so did more questions, none with any answers. One photo showed the woman holding hands with a child about four or five. Was it hers? If so, why hadn’t he or she appeared in earlier photos? This wasn’t a case of discovering a skeleton in the closet so much as a jumble of bones in a museum’s crate and realizing some long departed curator had mislabelled them.

Why the photos turned up in so many shops was another of the mysteries. Clearly, they hadn’t been sold to one dealer as part of an estate. Possibly a descendant had unloaded them on the shops but it’s doubtful anyone would go to the effort of visiting so many stores and negotiating for what would have been a few lira at most. More likely they fell into the hands of an itinerant junk dealer who tried to get what he could.

There are now somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred photographs of this couple in the archive, and as the gallery indicates, there are ID, photo-booth and studio portraits mixed up with the snapshots. One small, intact album has photos of a man who is clearly the brother of the husband, and his wife living in Germany. The backs of the photos are stamped Frankenthal. Like the couple they were obviously well off and cultured. There are almost no handwritten notes on the backs of the photographs though a few have Ottoman script, suggesting they were Turkish citizens. Or at least the man was. There are a few of the woman with another woman who could be her mother and they appear to have been taken in France. It’s just a hunch but when I say they are Turkish citizens I mean they may be Armenians. It fits with the diaspora; a lot of Armenians left Turkey for Europe, then again there are a lot of hunches in this story.

It is obvious from the photographs that theirs was a happy marriage. The first photo in the gallery shows the two of them sitting in a garden. You will note that though they sit together she occupies a higher position. This may be a small point but in Turkish photos from the era it is more common for the man to stand behind and appear taller. In this shot there doesn’t appear to be any issues of ownership or dominance. Another detail is that the marriage is documented over at least a couple of decades. We watch the couple ageing together. The variety of types of photographs is also a good sign. They didn’t just take pictures of each other; they collected them.

Obviously (and speaking as a collector, this is a bit of a shame really) most people don’t make a point of recording the low points and moments of tension that are part of a marriage. What we get from any album is such a selective account it is almost fictional, in the sense anyway that we understand we are getting a highly edited version. Were we to take photo albums as any authoritative evidence of peoples’ lives we would be left with the conclusion that existence is a happy, quiet thing, a bit like a cat sleeping in the corner.

At a point about the couple’s late forties the photos stop. It’s natural to speculate on the worst – death, divorce – but this is a common situation. There comes a stage when people step back from documenting their lives and the job falls to a son or daughter who are staring their own family and beginning the process again. Maybe it also has something to do with vanity; after a certain point what we are recording now is ourselves growing older. Perhaps the marriage reaches a plateau where we no longer need any evidence to substantiate it. That though implies that the act of photographing is a kind of neurosis where we can’t rely on memory alone as proof that something actually happened, an idea most of us would naturally resist.

If these photos had been found intact in one album I would have considered them interesting though not necessarily special. That they were scattered about the city gives them their poignancy. At some point the record of two people’s love and marriage fell into the hands of somebody else for whom they were merely a bunch of old photos. Their dispersal became as effective an annihilation as tipping them into an incinerator. This raises another issue. By collecting the photos I was in effect perpetuating the memory of a marriage that meant nothing to me but in its way became important. Is that what we do when we collect old albums? Do we feel we have some responsibility to the dead?

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SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE

MISTAKES WERE MADE

2011-07-17T02:43:00.000-07:00

Bad photographs

“Mistakes are the portals of discovery.”

James Joyce

Perfection is a pain in the arse. People expect it from you, you try but come up short and in the scheme of things you haven’t done well, you have failed. Perfectionism in some people’s eyes isn’t about delivering the goods but doing it in a certain way, no matter how illogical or contrary to your nature the results are. Sometimes perfectionism is also a lot easier than making mistakes.

It is easy for example to take a perfect photo. Follow a couple of basic rules such as keeping the sun behind you and placing the object of focus in the centre. Set the exposure – if your camera has a light meter it will do that for you – and adjust focus. Press the shutter. According to every manual ever published you now have a perfect photo. It wasn’t difficult. Now, try taking one of the photos in this post, the one above for example. How did the photographer get that odd in the top half? I have no idea but I know this; he or she created a singular and unrepeatable image. Given the challenge of replicating the effect, most professionals would resort to cheap tricks or give up.

Mistakes in photos can be wonderful things. They liberate the image and make it completely new. I was discussing this with a couple of colleagues recently and it occurred to me, later on, that we train ourselves to remove errors so a photograph that doesn’t come out exactly as intended becomes a failure. Mistakes can however be a path to discovery. They suggest we stop seeing the photographic image as a formal representation or evidence and take it as an object on its own terms. The strange patterns of light or poor focusing that theoretically destroy an image turn it into something else. Perception is a part of experience so anything that broadens one does it to the other.

Searching through the archive for mistakes you realize that a lot of snapshots are flawed; the composition is askew, the shutter speed a trifle slow, the usual mistakes. These photos take the mistake and turn the photograph into something else. As a social worker might say; they’re not bad, they’re different.

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MISTAKES WERE MADE

FUZZY LOGIC

2011-07-09T08:16:00.000-07:00

Why do we hate Pictorialism?

"I don’t know anything about art, but for some reason or other I have never wanted to photograph the way you paint.”

Alfred Stieglitz

“Pictorialism,” the narrator of the BBC’s 2007 series, The Genius of Photography declared, “was photography at its most po-faced.” Well, yes, but so what? Artists frequently take themselves too seriously and become the butt of jokes. The Pictorialists were a sombre bunch. They also believed they were at the vanguard of modern art when what they produced often looks to us like cheap copies of the worst that came out of the academic painting salons. Still, dismissing them as dull and humourless is unfair; a little like saying that Dostoevsky would have been a great writer if he had cracked a few more jokes. He didn’t so regretting their absence is beside the point.

One problem with Pictorialism is that it very quickly became associated with a handful of categories, landscapes and nudes especially, as though art was still about natural beauty at a moment when genuinely progressive artists were thinking about machines and technology as the defining characteristics of the future. Another is that it outlived its welcome by much too long. Into the 1940s and ‘50s some photographic magazines still judged the artistic qualities of photographs on their Pictorialist elements. It’s hard to look at some of that work now without wondering if there was a deliberately perverse decision to stay behind the times. A third problem is that it was never about revealing some essential truth in the subject. That idea is perfectly acceptable now but during the Pictorialist era the entire point of photography was it revelatory power. Even the rawest Kodak amateur in the 1890s seemed to be saying more about the real world than the most seasoned Pictorialists.

The really great thing about Pictorialism is that 20^th century modernist photography couldn’t have existed without it. Most of the Americans who became associated with Modernism; Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Käsebier etc, began as Pictorialists and the shift wasn’t that profound or disruptive. A more obscure photographer to look up is Marjorie Content, whose work from the 1920s comes from the moment one movement was evolving into the other. It’s as though a fog is lifting and the world is gradually coming into focus.

There are some classic examples but no great Pictorialist works in this gallery. Not surprising really; although quite a few historians dismiss Pictorialism as conservative, authoritarian and vapid, they’ve obviously had little influence on the art market. The 2006 sale of Edward Steichen’s The Pond – Moonlight for nearly 3 million US broke records and inevitably dragged up the value of his contemporaries. No one really believes the upper echelons of the art market are inhabited by people of good judgement and taste but they do have power and they have decided that Pictorialism really matters after all.

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PICTORIALISM

THE SWIMSUIT EDITION

2011-07-02T00:35:00.000-07:00

Edwardian photo postcards of women in bathing costumes

“There are two kinds of bathing suits, those that are adapted for use in the water, and those that are unfit for use except on dry land. If you are going to swim, wear a water bathing suit. But if you are merely going to play on the beach and pose for your camera friends, you may safely wear the dry land variety.”
How to Swim, Annette Kellerman, 1918

In the summer of 1898 Paul Martin was wandering along the crowded Yarmouth beachfront with what looked like a box wrapped in brown paper. Every so often he’d stop, idle about then continue on, barely noticed by anyone. The box was actually a camera and he was after candid shots of the holidaymakers. What he caught on film should put to rest any notions the late Victorians were a prudish bunch. He caught dozens of couples groping in the sands, inevitably still wearing their suits and skirts but unabashed in their pursuit of flesh. The British seaside was a place where social mores were suspended. People could be themselves or, if this was what they really wanted, someone else; Still a timid bank clerk or a straitlaced domestic perhaps but let off the leash. No one cared, or if they did not too many were listening to their objections.

Go forward a few years. Victoria is dead, Edward is King and bank holidays at resorts like Brighton and Blackpool have become part of Britain’s cultural identity. In France people head to the Mediterranean. The beachfronts already have somewhat salacious reputations and many of them have partitioned areas where ladies and gentlemen may stroll without needing to encounter more unruly citizens. The postcard has taken off and some of the most popular are comic pictures of fat men and women at the seaside mouthing bald double entendres. Certain resorts like Brighton are notorious as places to conduct affairs and private detectives can make some easy money tracking errant husbands or wives. The seaside is one place where a woman may appear showing her bare upper arms or her legs below the knees. Heady stuff and no wonder there is a market for real photo postcards of young ladies in swimming costumes.

Sharp-eyed observers will note none of the women here are actually at the beach. The term ‘fashion photography’ didn’t exist in 1910 although fashion photography itself did, albeit with picture editors still using photographs as the basis for pen and ink sketches. Fashion as it was understood belonged to the privileged. Only the well off could afford the dresses and accoutrements that people like Leopold Reutlinger photographed. The rest had to do make do with cheap copies but they could probably afford a swimsuit. During the Edwardian era it was woolen, loose and covered the upper arms and just above the knees. Since women weren’t expected to swim but sit in a wooden bathing machine that washed seawater over them, you could say it was adequate. Although segregation of swimming areas had ended a few years earlier and the bathing machine was being phased out, for some men these postcards were the closest they’d get to seeing a woman in a swimsuit. Photographers were cluing on to a principle of fashion photography. The market wasn’t gender orientated. Put a young lady in a swimsuit, the women would admire the costume, the men her body and everyone could appreciate the photographer’s good work.

In particular ways these postcards already resemble the fashion photography of the 1940s and ‘50s much more than they do the era that immediately followed them. During the 1920s and ‘30s the ideal model was a creature of high and unreachable elegance, enhanced by dramatic lighting that cast parts of her face or figure in shadow and usually provided the background too. Postwar she descended earthwards, a little, and might be photographed at a suburban cocktail party, playing tennis or at an actual beach. The lighting was flatter and the settings more adventurous. You can’t trace a direct line between these postcards and the work of photographers like Richard Avedon but you could say they share elements that had been neglected in the interim. There is so much in these images that became integral to fashion photography they would have to be included in any authoritative history of the genre, which, when you think about it, is strange. Somewhere in the dim and foggy place where fashion photography was born there is a link to the shameless behaviour of the unsophisticated at the British seaside.

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THE SWIMSUIT EDITION

BOYS WILL BE BOYS

2011-06-25T02:32:00.000-07:00

Some wallet sized studio portraits of men
”Men are all alike – except the one you’ve met who’s different.”
Mae West

What if back in the mid-1970s a Turkish record producer came up with a concept that would take disco out of the clubs and on to the top 40, a boy band for people who’d lost their innocence a while back? The five men fronting the group would be professional performers, not specifically singers, dancers or actors but a bit of all three. Forget art, this would be theatre. The performers would dress as Turkish stereotypes and everyone would get the irony immediately. Even old conservatives fundamentally opposed to the notion of gay men dressing up as Turkish stereotypes wouldn’t be able to stop themselves humming the tunes and practising the steps in front of the mirror. One of the performers, probably the front man, would be an Ottoman gazi or pasha (though a tea seller would suffice). Wearing a fez and a ridiculous moustache, he’d punch the air and twirl about as he led the anthemic chants for the other four. He might be centre stage but he wouldn’t necessarily be the star. The genius of the concept was that the audience always had their personal favourites.

Among the other four one had to be an army officer. Impeccably dressed down to his Sam Browne belt and jackboots, he’d represent that schizophrenic relationship Turks had with their army; part selfless defender of the borders, part instrument of dictatorship. When it came to minorities the producer needed to tread carefully. Some people had no sense of humour and might respond with bombs. Having someone dress up as an Arab could work. It acknowledged the imperialist past and think of him not as an Arab but as Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia and even the Arabs would laugh along.

Who was left? A policeman? There was already the army officer and the uniforms not to mention the political implications were already too close. A construction worker? No one would get that. How about a gangster of some description? By the mid-70s a fair number of real life gangsters were convinced they were living the dream, part Michael Corleone, part Little Caesar and besides, at that time people the world over believed gangsters were swarthy Mediterranean types. The last member of the group required some deliberation. How about an athlete? In the mid-70s Turkey didn’t have an international reputation for excellence in many areas but it had produced a succession of wrestlers and weightlifters who were more agile and could lift a lot more than anyone else around. Let the Americans triumph at short course running events, how many of them could raise twice their weight above their heads and hold it there? Put one of the performers in a wresting costume and it was like putting a beret and a handlebar moustache on someone and calling him French.

In the middle of the last century especially it was common for people to go to a studio to have their portrait taken, get a dozen or so prints that they could put in their wallet and distribute to whomever they thought required them. The idea was to get an image that distinguished the sitter’s individuality, or in other words their better side. What we end up with however are images that correspond to stereotypes. Maybe Jack Nicholson was right, there really are only twelve types of men on the planet, or possibly people in these photos look like stereotypes because that is the easiest reference point we have for them. One of the men in the gallery looks like a cross between a young Phil Silvers and an insurance salesman from Midwest America (hat, glasses, pin on lapel). There might not be a place for him onstage with the group but he’d make an excellent PR agent. It’s one of the strange things about these portraits; we always feel like we already know the person.

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BOYS WILL BE BOYS

TRIGGER HAPPY

2011-06-18T10:21:00.000-07:00

Guns in snapshots

“Like the people you shoot and let them know it.”
Robert Capa

Back when sideshows were popular and actually interesting, some of them had shooting galleries where for a few coins you could point an air rifle at a target and if you hit it, instead of a fluffy toy or a kewpie doll, you set off a camera shutter and received a photograph of yourself taken a split second after you squeezed the trigger. For the winners the prize was an innocuous snap but for philosophers of a certain persuasion these artifacts represent a moment when the camera and the gun become symbiotic.

From the very beginning when people were seeking metaphors to explain photography they turned, unsurprisingly when you think about it, to guns. So much of the language of guns fitted naturally into the new medium. You had to aim the camera, get the subject within range and you shot. Various dictionaries attest that the term ‘snapshot’ appeared around the beginning of the 19th century and meant a quick shot from a gun without taking aim. Writing in the Photographic News in May 1860, John Herschel spoke of his vision for photography: “What I have to propose may appear a dream; but it has at least the merit of being possible … taking a photograph, as it were, by a snapshot – of securing a picture in a tenth of a second of time.” Being one of the most respected scientists in Britain, Herschel chose his words carefully; he didn’t want people to think he was a crank, but he might have been aware that five years earlier Thomas Skaife had been arrested for pointing a device at Queen Victoria that looked (to the police anyway) like a derringer but was actually a camera, his pistolgraph.

Go forward to the late 1880s, to the first stirrings of the age of the amateur camera fiend, and the vocabularies for guns and photography have already become indistinguishable. Critics describe the amateurs as prowling the streets, tracking their victims and pouncing on unsuspecting strangers. The amateurs don’t appear too offended by anyone likening them to armed hunters. They boast of lying in wait for their prey, which may have been nothing so much as the dusk’s shadows reaching a particular intensity. Meanwhile the first magazines dedicated to hunting with a gun and camera appear. In their original incarnations the idea was to shoot animals twice, first with the gun then the camera but gradually the idea emerges that putting the rifle away is more thrilling. This doesn’t suggest a budding ecological consciousness so much as an ultimate challenge. It is one thing to shoot a lion with a well aimed rifle, quite another and a lot more dangerous with a camera. It was also technically near impossible until the 1920s. Today such ethically sound people as David Attenborough employ tricks learned from big game hunters, constructing camouflaged hides, using other animals as lures and lying in wait for the target to appear.

In the 1940s and ‘50s it was almost impossible to read about Henri Cartier-Bresson without some reference to his abilities as a hunter. Inevitably he was darting about like a wasp or stalking like a cat, always watching for that rustle in the bushes . He didn’t resile from these allusions, indeed more than any other photographer he seemed to encourage them. “I prowled the streets all day, feeling very strung-up and ready to pounce, determined to "trap" life - to preserve life in the act of living,” he was quoted in 1952. And this: “The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.” These days, photographers usually dismiss analogies between their work and hunting. It is an easy cliché but it also makes them sound vulgar and voyeuristic. Cartier Bresson incidentally spent some of his formative years in Africa and it was an image by Martin Muncaksi of African boys playing in the surf that made him see the potential in the camera.

Speaking of clichés, it is hard discovering which writer first thought up the idea of the perfect murder weapon being a gun disguised as a camera. Doubtlessly they congratulated themselves on their ingenuity for it’s a plot device that could only be taken seriously once and thereafter left to Get Smart or The Avengers to do what they chose with it. Predictable as the idea of the gun hidden in a camera may sound, it has become central to one conspiracy theory regarding the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Sirhan Sirhan, the argument goes, was only an accomplice. The real killer was a Pakistani/Palestinian/man of Middle Eastern appearance, who shot the senator with his camera. If it sounds feasible why hasn’t it been used more often? After all, if the Bulgarian secret service could kill dissident Georgi Markov with a poison dart fired from an umbrella, surely it isn’t too difficult to load bullets into a camera.

The image of the camera as a psychic weapon makes an appearance in Blow Up, the original short story by Julio Cortazar and the film by Antonioni, in The Eyes of Laura Mars with Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones and Michael Powell’s film Peeping Tom. In each example the images of violent death that people see are their own creations. In their hands the camera is a gun.

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TRIGGER HAPPY

MAGIC BOX

2011-06-12T08:30:00.000-07:00

Four cartes de visite by William Friese-Greene

"You must be a very happy man"
Laurence Olivier to Robert Donat in The Magic Box, a 1951 film about William Friese-Greene.

It is easy to cast William Friese-Greene as the archetypal tortured genius; a man whose passion to invent first ruined him then sent him to the edge of madness and finally killed him. Pit him against a dull witted public on the one hand and a ruthless, monomaniacal tyrant in Thomas Edison and the tragedy is complete. A gerbil would have a better chance extracting itself from a python’s coils than Friese-Greene had escaping his fate. Or so it seems. There are other sides to the story of the man some people (British, usually) insist invented motion pictures. One is the utter lack of any self-discipline. References to the hundreds of patents he took out for photographic devices and machines might suggest a fervid imagination but equally they point to an unfettered mind, incapable of seeing work through to its proper conclusion, uninterested in the dry business of marketing and especially so detached from any sense of public opinion that he could never understand why no one was particularly interested in his inventions.

Actually they were; any blame for a lack of enthusiasm regarding Friese-Greene’s various patents ought to be laid at his feet first. Take for example the claims that he sent a letter to Edison outlining his invention for a motion picture camera, that Edison failed to respond, or rather, his response was to unveil his kinetoscope a couple of years later. Edison never acknowledged receiving the letter, which some see as a very likely explanation although it probably was just that. How many letters a week would Edison have received from inventors around the world convinced they, with the great man’s assistance, would make a fortune? It is easy to say this now, but since Friese-Greene’s invention had been reported on in the Scientific American, a smarter move might have been to work through an intermediary.

As a photographer, Friese-Greene was successful enough to open a studio first in Bath, then Bristol, the Brighton and two in London, although reminiscences left by his business partner, Arthur Esme Collings, and receptionist, Winifred Tagg, suggest he had problems even then. She describes a decrepit looking studio being something of an embarrassment for the society ladies who came to have their portrait taken, Friese-Greene frequently vanishing for the day without giving reason and bills went unpaid. He was one of the first in London to install electric lighting in his studio but when he couldn’t pay the bill the London Electric Light Company began court proceedings. Friese-Greene’s response was to counter sue, which was reckless – he was bound to lose – but also an omen. Most of his efforts at suing others, inevitably over copyright, would fail. Reports of his case against Charles Urban, who tried to block Friese-Greene’s Biocolour film process just before the First World War suggest it was easy for Urban’s lawyers to depict Friese-Greene as a shambling, misguided crank. (He later won some of his credibility back in an appeal.)

Soon after Wilhelm Roentgen discovered x-rays in 1895 Friese-Greene was running a show at a London music hall x-raying various body parts of his audience. His quickness at seeing the potential in the latest innovations is admirable, the way he used them maybe not so. This story suggests that by the 1890s money, or more precisely, the fast buck, was the motive force in his work. With so many failures behind him, each attempt became more urgent, short lived and failed to give him any stability. There is a suspicion about Friese-Greene that more than anything he demanded recognition as a genius. Failure only pushed him further. While he was demonstrating x-rays to his audience, over in Vienna Freud was working on theories that in his terms would have described Friese-Greene’s problem as an aggressive battle between the ego and the id, with the superego, that part of his consciousness that might have restored some balance, being pushed to one side. In the end he got what he wanted - his headstone in Highgate Cemetery declares him the inventor of ‘kinematography’ - but his eccentricities overshadow his achievements. He is a case study in how not to go about things.

Portraits by William Friese-Greene aren’t that common although as artifacts these four CDVs are interesting only if you know something about their creator. You could otherwise be forgiven for assuming they are the work of an average portrait photographer. It’s the backs that tell us more. They come from that point when he was on top of his game, before everything started to unravel.

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WILLIAM FRIESE-GREENE

MIXED MESSAGES

2011-06-04T10:34:00.000-07:00

Photo montage: from the sublime to the ridiculous

“Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.”
Arnold Newman

Oscar Rejlander is usually credited with producing the first photomontage in 1857. Thirty two negatives were used to create the trashy moral fable he called The Two Ways of Life. One the right a group of young women representing virtue prayed, read and worked while on the left their not so clean living sisters swanned around in the nude. At the centre an old man was leading two boys through a portal. Naturally, the boy heading to the bad side wore a huge grin, his Christian companion appeared thoroughly disappointed with his lot. The point to the thirty two negatives was that Rejlander wanted to demonstrate that photography could involve the same mix of imagination and labour as painting but anybody looking at a print today could be excused for wondering why he wasted so much effort. All he had to do was build a stage, hire some models and set out the props and he would have achieved the same result. The seamless printing that disguised the edges of the negatives effectively hid Rejlander’s most sincere intentions. As a photograph it is historically significant but as photomontage it was a failure. Photomontage ought not be about fooling the viewer but impressing them with visual dexterity. It should obviously be faked.

Art historians talk of high points and golden ages because they are useful reference points for locating movements. Photomontage, which you could scarcely call a movement in itself, had three apogees. The first was in the 1860s, when the new wet collodion process and albumen printing freed photographers from the restrictions of the daguerreotype. Now they could splice in special effects, studios ran wild with gimmicks such as having someone sit in a chair then stand next to himself, or pose against the Egyptian pyramids. There was also the very popular idea of fitting as many portraits on to one carte de visite as possible. Eugene Disdéri, the inventor of the CDV, is also acknowledged as the creator of this form. It wasn’t difficult to achieve, involving nothing more than the careful cutting out of faces, remounting and then re-photographing them, the same process behind most future uses of the idea.

The third period began just after the First World War and extended into the 1930s, when artists like Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and John Heartfield experimented with images, text and graphic design. Most of us would recognize that period as the genuine high point of photomontage. The work was political, consciously avant-garde and visually compelling, pushing the definition of photography into an area most people hadn’t considered before. But it owed a large debt to the mass produced postcards of the early 20th century, when photomontage was at its height in terms of commercial popularity and, probably, experimentation.

We can say that because the studios producing the images not only used combination printing but brought various media like watercolours, oils, screen prints and text as well as scraps of material, glass and glitter. The skill lay in keeping photography integral to the image. Without that it was no longer photomontage but photomechanical printing, which offered nothing in the way of mystery or surprise. Photography gave the image the element of authenticity. When it could have easily become perfunctory design.

A century on, few people take these postcards seriously as works of art, which is no lapse in judgement, but to do so would also miss their point. More than showing off their creative abilities, the studios were interested in making money and that meant glamorous and beautiful women, cute children, flowers and sentimental clichés (all the better if they were in the same scene) for a popular taste easily swayed by such banalities. What we get from them now is something stranger than art and it’s no surprise the Dadaists and Surrealists scoured artifacts of popular culture like these for inspiration.

Authentic photomontage required cutting and pasting, when those terms involved scissors and glue, but there were other methods, such as this fairground snap from Bulgaria of four men in a biplane, that gave the same effect. Whatever the process, the result was always meant to be tongue in cheek. The best creators in the medium never expected to be taken seriously. If nothing else, photomontage was honest.

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PHOTOMONTAGE

MAIN STREET

2011-05-29T00:50:00.000-07:00

C. L Hunt: small town studio photographer

“A person can stand almost anything except a succession of ordinary days.”
Goethe

As photographs they aren’t particularly interesting, being typical of millions of cabinet cards produced in the US in the 1880s, but precisely because of that we can use them as a starting point to consider what it meant to be a small town photographer in America in the late 19th century. At a time when there was a debate in the cities as to whether or not photography was an art, people like Clarence Hunt regarded themselves as tradesmen. Success depended entirely upon the number of customers and in a town like Franklin Falls, which today we’d think of as a village, there wasn’t much chance of getting rich or famous. Once a town reached a certain size a studio photographer became essential but it was an occupation for people of middling ambitions.

C. L Hunt was born in 1852. By 1881 he was operating as a watchmaker and jeweller on Central Ave, Franklin Falls, and by 1888 he had branched into photography. The move wasn’t unusual. It was common for photographers to run two or three businesses out of the same shopfront and jewellery and photography had certain affinities. Both involved a working knowledge of chemistry, the use of mechanical instruments and detailed work. A jeweller working with electroplating and engraving should have easily adapted to photography. Economically it made sense. Neither occupation could have been sustained on its own and being a merchant by disposition he would have understood the logic in diversifying. The elaborate studio backdrop in the group portrait indicates he had at least a moderate sized studio. He would have had a staff as well; a receptionist and at least one assistant in the studio and/or the darkroom.

Franklin Falls was a mill town just outside Franklin on the Merrimack River in New Hampshire. Maps and photographs from the 1880s suggest there were probably no more than 3000 people living in Franklin, a population large enough to sustain one photographer, two at the most. Other photographs by Hunt online show he took a few landscapes and did some advertising work but mostly he was a portraitist who followed orthodox procedures. Prices for photographs varied between towns and states and by the 1880s they had fallen considerably over the previous 25 years but a working figure would be between 25 and 50 cents per cabinet card. Cost of living figures for nearby Connecticut show that in 1880 the average wage there was $1.75 per day. At a very rough guess, Hunt would have needed 5 or 6 customers a day just to stay afloat. Presumably he got them because he was still registered as a photographer at Central St in 1895 and worked at least another 7 years.

Go to a newspaper archive from New York or Chicago in the 1880s and search for ‘photographer’ and ‘suicide’. There are a few entries and they tell much the same story. A photographer doing alright for himself in a small town decided to try his luck in the big city. Things didn’t work out and one night he returned to his room in a shabby boarding house and put an end to his suffering. Photography was a cutthroat business, particularly at a time when the technology was rapidly evolving. The shift from albumen to gelatine based prints for example required a whole new investment in equipment at the same time as the new processes were making the production of photographs much cheaper. One way to survive was not to innovate. Keeping to a formula his customers were familiar with, he could turn out a steady number of portraits and the only adaptations required were in small technological advances. Electric lighting for example was around in the 1890s although he might not have used it because it was expensive and the studio skylights worked just as well. By the turn of the century albumen printing was redundant but still available. The cabinet card was also on the way out. If Hunt, now in his fifties, thought he was too old or close to retirement to change he would have watched the arrival of the Kodak camera with a somewhat indifferent resignation, realizing that in a few short years his most important clients were likely to be the mills and local businesses needing advertising. The real legacy of people like Hunt is that we have an archive of images of ordinary citizens from small towns, people who, like Hunt, had no ambitions to immortality but have been bestowed with something resembling it.

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C L HUNT

COLOUR MY WORLD

2011-05-21T09:33:00.000-07:00

Hand painted studio photographs

“With colour one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.”
Henri Matisse

Back in those days, if you didn’t think photography was art but you thought painting was, where did you put hand painted photographs? Probably nowhere; any compromises would have offended purists, were ignored and left for a future generation to decide upon. But hand painting of photographs is one of the few elements of photography that can be considered a tradition. The earliest efforts date back to the daguerreotype process at the very beginning and the concept was carried on for another century until colour photography became practical and cheap enough to make it redundant. It didn’t die. Today we are certain where the people applying paint or ink to photographs stand. They are artists; they wouldn’t do it otherwise.

The questions that faced people applying colour to photographs were usually more basic than anything to do with art. One was how much to use. Have a look at the online exhibition of 19th century hand painted photographs at Luminous Lint. There are a few examples that could fool you into thinking the colour came from the photographic process. Often though a tint of pink in the sitter’s cheeks or a splash of colour in the clothing was enough to lift the portrait. Whether it always worked is a matter of judgement. Sometimes the photograph ceased to be a portrait per se but became a curiosity, like the family portrait in the gallery where the boy’s red bow tie dominates the image so loudly that you barely see anything else. Technically speaking, it fails but it makes its case as an example of the strange paths photography could take.

Unless steps were taken to protect the original print by laminating it, applying paints or inks interfered with the chemical processes. This could change the colours so that what we are looking at today is no longer the original. Obviously, when customers returned to the studio and collected their print they weren’t looking at some evocation of another age, but what did they see that we do now? It’s a small but critical issue when dealing with coloured photographs because they influence so much of our perception of the past.. When some colour film footage of the Second World War was unearthed and released to the public about fifteen years ago, the people behind the release were at pains to assure viewers the scenes were genuine and hadn’t been manipulated. As it happens, the fragile stock had faded. Some of it looks, well, hand coloured. Think of the number of times the early 20th century is evoked in films through washed out pastel colours. What we are looking at isn’t so much a representation of the past but nostalgia for it.

The best hand colourists rendered their work to be as natural as possible but there was never any hint of deception. Everyone understood that what they were looking at was merely an impression but it is also true that with a really good hand coloured photograph it is hard to imagine the original black and white could be more interesting or superior in any way.

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COLOUR MY WORLD

LOST WORLD

2011-05-14T23:43:00.000-07:00

Armenian and Greek Studio Photographers from Constantinople

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.
Cicero

If you were to write a history of Armenian photography you would begin in Constantinople in the 1870s, when Pascal Sebah, the Abdullah and Gülmez brothers owned three of the most important studios in the city. There may have been Armenian photographers in Europe, Russia, the Middle East and America but in Constantinople they dominated the business. They had three advantages; their own community was large enough to sustain business on its own if necessary, there was a demand for albums and views of the city in Europe and they were living in an Islamic state slow to encourage the new technology within its faith. It is a myth that the only photographers in Constantinople were Christians and Jews. There were Turkish Muslim photographers but not many. Into the 1930s, most studios were run by Armenians or Greeks.

During the late Ottoman Empire Armenians and Greeks were marginalized, being obliged to live in certain districts, subject to unequal imposts and denied rights given to Muslims, but their situation was more complex than that suggests. They were preeminent in foreign trade, banking and the professional classes and the areas they had to live in were among the wealthiest in the city. There are stories of Armenian and Greek revolutionaries (we’d call them terrorists these days) seizing banks, of shootouts and riots in the city that ought to lay waste to the myth that Muslims and Christians lived peaceably as neighbours, also to any notion the Christian communities were innocent victims or pawns. From the 1880s onwards relationships between Christians and Muslims were punctuated by violence, a fair amount of it instigated by the Christian minorities sensing the imminent collapse of the empire.

No essentially ‘Armenian’ or ‘Greek’ aesthetic distinguished the photography – few studios in 1920s Constantinople advanced ideas about composition beyond what had been practiced since the 1860s – it is their subject matter that is important. The people who sat for their portraits belonged to the middle and upper classes and in a lot of cases could claim an ancestry in the city stretching back centuries. Even before the events of 1915 however they must have realized that regardless of how badly they might have wanted to see an end to the Ottoman Sultanate its demise meant theirs as well. Read any personal account from Turkey set between the beginning of the First World War and the declaration of the Republic in 1923 and you won’t find much celebration. Mostly it is fear and uncertainty, conditions made worse by the 1923 Lausanne Treaty and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Though Greeks in Constantinople were theoretically immune from the exchange, the writing was on the wall. From here on Turkey was for the Turks; the Greeks, Armenians and Jews who stayed on would not be made to feel at home. These are the faces of people living through the end of times, when a city they have called home for generations is being shut off to them.

Identifying a Greek or Armenian studio portrait is usually straightforward because of the photographer’s stamp. Sometimes there is a message on the back in Armenian or Greek script and obviously, a girl in her communion dress or a crucifix around someone’s neck indicates an indisputable fact. Clothing isn’t always an indicator. Ataturk’s reforms westernized dress, (the fez and, for a time, the headscarf were prohibited) which makes it more difficult to determine who people were in photos from the 1930s onwards. There is a small problem with studio names too. Although Greeks tended to use their surnames, Armenians, like Turks, preferred more generic business titles, such as Foto Venus or Sabah (Turkish for morning, and a later manifestation of the Sebah studio). Often the research throws up small but intriguing scraps, such as Foto Galatasaray being run by Maryam Sahinyan, undoubtedly one of the few if not actually the only woman running a studio in Istanbul in the 1930s.

All the photographs in this post can be confirmed as either being taken by Armenian or Greek studios or being of Christians living in Constantinople/Istanbul. It would be remiss however not to acknowledge the diaspora following events in 1915, when Armenians emigrated to Europe and the Middle East, Cairo, Alexandria and Beirut in particular. Between the 1920s and the 1950s some of the best known studios in these cities belonged to Turkish born Armenians such as Armand and Van Leo.

All photographs become more interesting the older they get and all old photographs show a lost world but a particular case can be made for these. In September 1955, Turkish nationalists rioted in Istanbul, attacking Greek buildings, killing 13 people and raping a number of women. The pogrom effectively marked the end of the Hellenic contribution to the city. Within a few years the Greek population had halved. By the 1990s it was estimated to number about 2000. Turkish nationalists did their utmost to erase the memory of Christian communities in Istanbul but for Armenians and Greeks (who still officially refer to Istanbul as Constantinople) the city became infused with a mythic ideal, the garden from which they’d been banished. There are still reminders of the Armenian and Greek communities in Istanbul, churches, inscriptions on buildings and the like but they tell us nothing of the people who lived here. Portraits such as these are the most tangible evidence we have of a society in the process of self-destruction.

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LOST WORLD

PASSAGE TO INDIA

2011-05-08T02:39:00.000-07:00

A 1930s snapshot album from India

At the third glass his eyes got brighter, and he began to talk … of strange scenes and doughty deeds, of wars and plagues and strange peoples …
… “I’d like to go to India myself,” said the old man, “just to look round a bit, you know.”
“Better where you are,” said the sergeant major, shaking his head. He put down the empty glass, and sighing softly, shook it again.
W. W Jacobs; The Monkey’s Paw

Something happened to India in the 1860s. It had always been strange to the western imagination but now it became a land of occult mystery; at least it did in popular fiction. Once it had been a blighted land, mostly used as a device to conveniently kill off secondary characters, now army officers were returning with talismans or strange powers they’d picked up (stolen, more usually) from some distant temple. Think of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, W. W Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw and quite a few of the Sherlock Holmes stories. In 1879 Helena Blavatsky met Alfred Percy Sinnett, editor of the Pioneer newspaper in India, and moved the headquarters of the Theosophical Society to Bombay. Four years later Sir Richard Burton published the first translation of the Kama Sutra. The three of them gave an intellectual credibility to the idea of the mysterious east that made the most ludicrous story of ancient curses feasible. Photography also had a part to play in this transformation; the camera brought the country to life in ways that confirmed the wildest tales, and Darwin was also important. For a lot of people the theory of natural selection didn’t destroy religion so much as make it, the western version, trite and uninteresting. Rather than embracing atheism they looked for alternative religious ideas, of which India had a multitude. Cholera and restless natives were still dangerous but now India was also the home of snake charmers and other magicians and just possibly secrets of inner wisdom long lost in the west.

These photographs come from a small, yellow album and were most likely taken in the 1930s. They appear to be a mix of the owner’s personal snapshots and others bought in souvenir albums, though which is which is sometimes hard to tell. Throughout the album the owner has written descriptions in painstaking calligraphy and on a couple of pages added deft sketches of local types wearing fezzes and turbans. The skill in this work suggests he or she might have been a draughtsman for an engineering or architectural company, or even a journalist since at that time the ability to knock off a quick sketch was still valued by newspapers. One page has two photographs of British people – two of them officers - relaxing at Ootacamund, a hill station and resort in Tamil Nadu. A woman is in one of the photographs and there is no reason to think this wasn’t her work in the album.

Whoever put the album together, it was obviously intended to be more other than a collection of holiday snaps. It has something in common with the Gaumont or Burton travel films of the era; ‘impressions of India’, if you like, with sequences of scenes showing the architecture, the people, the land and so on. Most of us can probably recognize this India from old novels and films like Kim and The Man who would be King. It was the India that was so thoroughly distilled in the European consciousness it is impossible to be rid of even now when India means Bollywood and economic statistics.

It is said that every stereotype has a grain of truth to it, or as David Cronenberg put it more bluntly; ‘every stereotype is true’. This album could be seen as a collection of stereotypes but if you think that you also have to ask whether the photographer went out in search of or happened upon them by chance, and if it is the second does that make them more authentic? Obviously, like any snapshot album, this one involved some judicious editing beforehand but photographs have a way of making a case in ways the written word can never match. ‘This is the India of our imagination’, the album’s creator is saying; ‘and I have the proof it is real’.

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PASSAGE TO INDIA

MAN'S BEST FRIEND

2011-04-30T05:28:00.000-07:00

Photos of dogs

“I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven’t got the guts to bite people themselves.”
August Strindberg

For most of the 20th century New York’s status as the world’s greatest city couldn’t be challenged. It was one of the biggest, the richest and it had the tallest buildings. None of that is true anymore but if you want to measure its decline you don’t have to read the statistics. Go down to street level and look at the thousands of people walking their dogs, then look at the animals. Most of them are tiny, preposterous creatures; dachshunds, chihuahuas, shih tzus and other pedigrees cosseted in tartan jackets and kept close to their owners on diamond studded leashes. People who claim to really know dogs, professional dog handlers and the like, say that the smartest dogs are the mongrels. Purebreds are like the European royal families before the First World War; pampered and glamorous but riddled with genetic weaknesses that made them fundamentally unsuitable rulers. This predilection for toy dogs represents a neutering of the city. It is no longer street smart and self confident but small and yappy and expects everything on demand according to some long lost privilege.

In Australia – and no doubt in New Mexico and Texas – people generally expect some reciprocation in their relationships with dogs. The animal might not look that good but it can protect the owner and it ought to know not to run in front of a car. Even so, there are stories of devotion to dogs that leave non-dog lovers scratching their heads. Dog rescuers make it their mission to take abandoned and brutalized dogs into their care. Most people ambivalent about dogs would still find that admirable, after all ambivalence doesn’t mean we are not bothered by stories of cruelty. One dog rescuer was obliged to move out of the city, firstly because she was accumulating dogs but also because a lot of them were psychologically damaged and liable to turn vicious. When one was bitten by a snake she had to drive it to a vet some 60kms away for treatment. The drive alone would have been tense. A dugite or a tiger snake bite can kill a dog within an hour. The dog was saved but the real point to the story was the bill - $6000. Naturally she paid it. Would you?

Dogs don’t occupy a special place in photography, not in the way horses do via Muybridge and chronophotography. Towards the end of the 19th century there was a fashion for portraits of prize dogs, gentlemen sat for portraits with a favourite hound at their feet and taxidermists advertised the quality of their work with cabinet cards but as a rule the best images of dogs are amateur snapshots. That is probably because most of them are spontaneous. The dog is doing something, the owner has a camera handy and a Kodak moment is captured. The equation is that since amateur photography is an important part of the medium’s history and because pets, like newborn babies, are an important to amateur photography, we should see the images as valuable records of a private world. The presence of a dog can reveal more details about the inner life of the owner but really, like old cars, masks and handguns, they make snapshots intrinsically more interesting.

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DOGS

EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY

2011-04-23T10:24:00.000-07:00

What price would you put on these photos?

“I don't think any collector knows his true motivation.”
Robert Mapplethorpe

The discovery that some respectable fine art photography dealers are offering anonymous snapshots, and not necessarily exceptional examples of the genre, for $300 to $400 shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise; anybody who has been collecting for a while has watched the prices creep up and the art market depends upon the intangibility of value for its survival. It raises a few questions, one being who is willing to pay that much for an anonymous snap when, if they’re prepared to spend time instead, they can find what they want at a fraction of the price. A more pertinent question is how do you value a snapshot?

If you accept the definition of a work of art being something consciously created to be so, then snapshots are not art. Part of their allure is that we can’t tell how much of what we are looking at intentionally came from the photographer. Was the decision to press the shutter at that precise moment entirely wilful? How much credit should we give to the camera? And how much to the lab, which in processing every print to an average did not pay due care to one and so gave us something dark and moody when the photographer only saw gray, hazy skies? The contemporary idea that every beautiful object created by people can be considered art evokes G K Chesterton’s famous quote: “When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything." It suggests we’re in danger of losing the ability to discriminate and if you don’t have that can you really make a sensible judgement about the value of an object?

Anybody who has shuffled through boxes of old snapshots knows that not every photograph is a wonderful artifact in itself. One family can look an awful lot like another and the only intrinsically enigmatic quality to most of the photographs is their anonymity. But certain photographs hit you. Sometimes a tiny detail like somebody’s gesture changes the whole dynamic of the scene but it could also be the particular tone of the image that lifts it out of the ordinary. Suddenly a tiny photograph has a strange weight to it. It is difficult to describe the feeling these snapshots impart and if we could make it clear what that elusive quality was we probably wouldn’t be interested in them in the first place. We know however it has nothing to do with monetary value.

One thing dealers do recognize is that snapshots are unique objects. Most of the time the original negatives have been long lost and another print can never be made again. That puts them in a different category to works by master photographers held in museum collections. The museums often own or have access to the negatives too so if a print needs to be made it won’t be vintage but if printed correctly it won’t have lost the original quality either. The uniqueness of snapshots makes them fragile and fragility has its worth.

Something else unique about snapshots is their randomness. Since professional photographers are professional by reason that they know exactly what they are doing, they eliminate the mistakes and accidents that distinguish snapshots even when it appears that they have included them. It isn’t only the print that can’t be replicated but the entire circumstance. Even so, it’s hard to reconcile prices in the hundreds of dollars when it’s still possible to pick up prints by well known photographers at not even half the price. That is particularly true of 19th century photographers. A carte de visite by Felix Nadar of an ordinary French citizen needn’t set you back a lot and what do you have but an original print by one of the pioneers of photography. Nadar is reckoned to have photographed some 30 000 French citizens and quite a few of those prints are still kicking about, so you can say for a start that there are a lot more Nadar’s than any single collection by any amateur snapper.

There are also trends to consider: snapshots in, Nadar out, for the time being. No astute dealer is going to attach a price to something unless they are confident they can get it so you’d think, hope even, that the prices some snapshots are being offered for come from careful consideration. Even so, collecting snapshots is highly idiosyncratic. Most collectors have their particular categories; indoor shots, photos of cars, dull banality, double exposures and printing errors or mottled effects and stains, but everything is fluid. Nothing that gives an object an intrinsic value exists in snapshot collecting. It’s purely an aesthetic pleasure and a desultory one at that, seeing as so much is left to chance. Nobody sets out collecting anonymous snapshots with the idea they’ll get rich. This revelation about prices, while no great surprise, is ominous.

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EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY

THE DIRTIEST GAME IN TOWN

2011-04-17T05:57:00.000-07:00

Photographs about politics

Not every problem that someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.”
Herbert Marcuse

In the 1980s you could buy t-shirts with the phrase “All art is political” across the front. At first hearing it sounded irrefutable, even, you could say, virtuous. After all, if you weren’t prepared to stick your neck out for something you believed in, what were you doing calling yourself an artist? With a little more thought however the statement quickly turned trite and vacuous. Firstly, if you were going to make any statement about the world and your place in it, it was by the contemporary definition political. Even if you chose to withdraw completely and create work based on the minutiae of your personal life, that could be construed as political. Inevitably, artists quickly learned to dress their work in politics and that wasn’t so hard. An ordinary, thoughtless installation could become a metaphor for political conflict and who was the viewer to criticize the artist’s intentions when a pile of bricks in the corner represented the threat of nuclear war or the divide between the sexes? (Sexual politics is a so much better term than ‘gender politics’; it suggests the issues are physical and emotional rather than clinically theoretical.) We don’t hear that all art is political so much anymore, partly because behind the maxim lurked too much bad art but mostly because politics is everywhere. All art is political and it pretty much has been since it left the caves.

Every news photograph, every image in a social documentary, every identity card portrait is political and if a photograph wasn’t originally taken intended as a political statement it could easily be given one. But what about photography that is about politics; photographs about ideology, the things people are prepared to die for? Anyone can read the political message in Boris Ignatovich’s portrait of the Kazakh soldier at the top: The glorious Soviet state is young, vigorous and looking upwards. For another view of politics consider the postcard at the top of this paragraph and the one immediately below: same woman, same photographer, same outfit, only difference being the flags, one American, one Dutch. Perhaps the studio produced dozens of these postcards, each with a different flag, and the last thing on the photographer’s mind was a particular nationalism. What we get however is the cynical malaise in every voter’s heart: “It doesn’t matter whom you vote for; they’re all the same.”

And here is a more deliberate statement; a group of Nazi officers eating dinner under a portrait of Hitler. There is really no doubt that the photographer composed the photograph with the intention of having the leader’s portrait as the centre of attention. There is a small question as to whether that was done out of love or fear. The sense is that it was the former though that could have been motivated by fear. The portrait changes the whole dynamic of the image. No one can seriously think this is merely a scene of a group of men sitting down to a meal for it tells us everything we need to know. They are complicit.

Compare that to these two photographs taken by an English couple in Berlin for the 1936 Olympics. What were they thinking when they posed under the swastikas? By 1936 Hitler had made it clear he intended to invade Czechoslovakia and Poland and concentration camps were being set up. Jewish athletes were forbidden to compete for Germany, several countries had already boycotted the games and there was an international debate about how closely the Olympic salute resembled the Nazi salute. It’s a fair bet that “I’m only here for the sport” was heard a lot in Berlin that summer but no visitor could claim ignorance about what was going on in Germany. That doesn’t mean they either were supporters or that they felt the need to be sensitive to the situation. We have a natural attraction to sinister icons and you can also bet that they weren’t the only English visitors snapping away at Nazi symbols during the day, shaking their heads in pious disbelief over a few beers in the evening.

For another comparison we have two snapshots of Turkish politicians. There aren’t a lot of clues to tell us what their convictions were but then, when we are talking about politics ideology isn’t always important. What we can see is that the man with the top hat appears well versed in the theatrics of politics. The hat itself suggests a man who believes power is his by birthright. That upright finger is intended to persuade rather than admonish his listeners. Consider then the man we shall call his opponent. Surrounded by flags and people, he offers a grimmer, more pragmatic vision of the world. His rhetoric might have been full of paranoid allusions to dark forces but his audience understood what he was talking about. If we continue to imagine that these two were pitted against one another, the contest is between one who offers what people want to believe and the other who gives them what they suspect is the truth.

The gallery includes one propaganda postcard from France, because propaganda is about politics, and a couple of snapshots of crowds attending a speech by Kemal Ataturk. It doesn’t include portraits of political leaders because it is only by identifying them the portrait becomes political. Nor does it include war, surveillance, bureaucratic, protest or several other forms of photography that are deliberately political in intent. When everything is political you have to draw the line somewhere.

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POLITICS