Let me begin by saying that I still like Dragan Novakavic's photographs of Northern England just as much as ever. Still, there is no denying that he went there looking for some specific things, and found them. There is no way that "northern england" taken in toto looks, or ever looked, like that. For one thing, I am informed that there are rather a lot of sheep there, and I don't see a single one in Dragan's pictures. Which, of course, isn't the point of his pictures at all. He's after a specific facet of the area, not a complete summation of the place.
Mike C pointed out in a comment, astutely (he better be astute, I pay him enough!), that actual residents of Northern England might legitimately object to the photos.
Reading Darren Campion's take on Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi I had the exact point brought home abruptly to me.
Darren is a fine fellow who is, I think, reading rather too much in Alec's book. But then, I have not seen the book itself, just a lot of the pictures from it (maybe half or a bit more). I will note in passing that Darren's discovery that the Alec seems interested in Beds and in Boats becomes a lot less interesting when you review the title of the book. Sleeping. Mississippi. Yep.
While I am sure that Alec would nod sagely at all the analysis, because he is not an idiot and would like to remain successful, I don't see much depth in the book. What I see is a book that was well set up, probably by accident, so that excessively clever people who already despise middle america could read a lot of depth into it if they chose.
Anyways, the thrust of Alec's pictures is a pretty gloomy one. It presents the middle of the USA as full of prostitutes, broken men, weirdos, christian zealots, and desolate landscapes. As a midwesterner, I have to say this whole fucking genre pisses me off no end. Everyone seems to trundle around middle america these days giving us these gloomy color photos of bullshit. It is apparently a rule that you have to cite Eggleston and Twentysix Gasoline Stations and you must never, ever, suggest that anyone living in a state without a coastline has a shred of hope.
This, of course, plays well with the coastal elites who very much like to think of the middle part of the USA as a bunch of god-forsaken cannibals (even, perhaps especially, if they're from one of those states).
The midwest isn't like that. Soth's pictures are not even a facet, they're a complete fiction. Or rather, they are snippets of reality so narrow, so specific, that they imply a larger world that is utterly false. Midwesterners are fully formed people who read books, write books, have kinky sex, laugh, drink, and make beautiful things. Just like the people on the coast. Yes, there are strip malls and broken people in the midwest. Just like on the coasts.
Now, it's perfectly possible that Soth intended to re-imagine the Mississippi's watershed as a fictional world of his own invention, and if so, great. I've done that myself, and it's a fine thing to do. It has been taken by critics to be a true vision, though. We get stupid phrases like "late stage capitalism" and "the dream's final unravelling" (a fond hope, but things can get a hell of a lot worse before the wheels actually fall off) applied to this whole genre. These things are taken as harbingers of a coming revolution (or something) in which, presumably, the art critics for New York based publications are finally made the God Kings they so obviously should be.
Anyways, I can see how people living in Northern England (or, really, anywhere) might get annoyed with the work of photo tourists walking briskly through their world, taking the same blighted photos again, promoting the same false vision. Perhaps Dragan's pictures do get at an essential reality of Northern England, or perhaps they too take such a narrow view as to be in the end false.
I cannot speak to whether Dragan intended his work as a fictional idea based on Northern England, or if he hoped to get at some true soul of the place. Perhaps he has no firm idea on that point.
As always, there is a great deal I do not know. I do know that the "Americana" genre is a kind of ruin porn, and that it angers me.
Parts of Northern England DID look like that, 40 and 50 years ago.
ReplyDeleteIt's authentic views of a landscape that hadn't changed much since Bill Brandt took his photos in the 1930s, of the same areas.
(The ginnel in Halifax is the same as in Brandt's photos; homage to the Master??).
Even the lighting (moody, grainy, that shows the 'soul o't'mill', etc.)has been aped to something approaching that produced by Brandt.
The very nature of those'dark Satanic mills' demands it!!
However, these photos of Dragan's are at least 40 years old and do not represent the modern vistas that one finds in Yorkshire and Lancashire today.
Which is probably why the locals don't go for them.
I was a student in Leeds, West Yorkshire, in the 70s and found/photographed landscapes exactly like those shown here, because it was of the SAME TIME.
Today, it's generally much cleaner, more open, the sub-standard housing has largely been replaced.
But I don't really know what it's really like today, as I haven't been back to visit in the last 15 years.
And that, perhaps, is the trouble: we are presented with things that the artist THINKS they SHOULD look like, according to the mindset of that artist, the popular politics/culture/misrepresentations of the day, not what they really are.
However, to what degree should we represent, say, the poverty of San Fransisco, for example?
Seeing the food queues in Tenderloin reminds me of the Dorothea Lange photos of the 30s; is this more representative of California than, say, the glittering architecture of the hi-tech enclaves further south in Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Stanford, etc?
Tenderloin is a part of the tourist bus route in SF and "does one's heart good to see all those cool tourists snapping the 'poor folk' with their cellphones, to get a real feel of 'the poor'".
(SARCASM Alert!)
Guess it depends on your point of view; should I 'darken' my photos of poverty in Oakland that I take through the windows of the BART, just to show the squalor and considerably more than sub-standard conditions that some folk live under?
Or should they just be record shots, that show the conditions but lack impact?
How narrow should my view be, to meet today's Social criteria?
I don't know, except that I won't be publishing any books on the subject anytime soon.
The scenes are too private for that, also, I don't have others to support that Mr. Soth does (agent, publisher, etc.).
Re: the sheep; there are far more sheep in Wales (ask Mr. Chisholm, he's more familiar with Wales today)than Northern England.
Regards,
David
Hi Andrew, I really enjoyed this post. I think much of the photos you are talking about fall into the 'deadpan' category of photos, and to me, they are also the ones that I think all look like they were taken by the same photographer. Now, every now and then I do some of them myself because they are out there, and when they hit me right between the 'running lights', I can't resist making a photo.
ReplyDeleteIn a way, this whole subject is, surprisingly I think, linked to politics. I like to quote Howard Dean, who said, when he was Chair of the DNC, that the problem of the Democratic Party was that they did not know how to talk to the white guy in the pickup flying the Confederate flag.
Some time ago there were some photos by Alex Soth in the NYT, I think it was at the time when he had a showing at the High in Atlanta. They struck me as photographic examples of 'drive-by shootings' - with photos of Kudzu and all.
I notice that too much is being read into my Northern England photos and that my motives behind them continue to be misunderstood. The trouble with this is that I am sometimes judged on false premises and as doing, or failing in, something that was furthest from my mind. For instance, words and phrases such as 'hell', 'annoying', 'offputting' and 'highly selective ruin-porn fixation' have been used in connection with my photos of scenes where, in fact, I couldn't help gazing around me in awe and wonder and sensing an unworldly silence and beauty. I took no pictures there with the intention of defining or explaining or interpreting Northern England. At the risk of repeating myself, I want to make clear that I am not trying to express any opinion, make any comment or statement, air any view, pass any judgement with my pictures regarding either Northern England or anything else. As Harry Gruyaert, the master colour photographer, said in summing up his work, 'There is no story. It's just a question of shapes and light.'
ReplyDeleteHere's the thing, Dragan, you don't actually get to decide what people read in your work! The fact that we're Seeing Things in it is a victory condition, though. It says that, through some combination accident and ability you have made something that means something to people who look at it.
DeleteWhether you intended to or not, people will see things. We're pattern-seekers, meaning-seekers, and your work has lots and lots of material to hang imagined meaning on.
It's a *good* thing, and a positive reflection on you. It can be pretty unnerving, too. Stay calm, take a few deep breaths ;)
In the absence of any formal instruction or commentary from a photographer, I absolutely believe it's fair game for viewers to read into a photo (or a portfolio of photos) whatever meaning(s) or motivation(s) they wish.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, with my personal photography, I actively encourage this!
But when a photographer specifically states what his photos are or are not about, as Novakavic has now done, then I also believe that viewers should respect their wishes and not impute a motive or narrative where none exists.
Which, of course, is not to suggest that a viewer cannot say "when I view these photos, my reaction is XXXX" or "when I look at these photos, they make me think about YYYY," and then go on to explore those ideas at length.
But superimposing one's personal thoughts and/or beliefs on the photos, especially when these thoughts and beliefs are in direct conflict with the photographer's own clear and unambiguous statement about them, is, in my opinion, going a step too far.
It's my belief that while viewers of photos are certainly free to express their opinions about what they see, they are not entitled to speak for the photographer who took them!
That is a very sensible and reasonable position, and I am going to snaffle it for my own!
DeleteWe do tend to ascribe too much to the artist. It's unnecessary and often wrong. What matters is how the work reads (to me, to you, to the collective us).
A grey area exists where the artist says 'it means X' and yet I see clearly something else, Y. In this case, I stand firm on the side of 'I am fully entitled to read it as Y' but I will in future try to be more respectful of the artist's position when it disagrees with mine!
Hmmm... I have a bit of a problem with that position because to me that is actually saying "who are you going to trust, me or your lying eyes?"
DeleteChristian, I would say: trust the artist regarding his stated motive and trust your eyes regarding what they see.
DeleteIf I draw a hippo and people see it as a rhino, I can do nothing about it. Too bad. But if they tell me 'That's a wonderful/god-awful drawing of a rhino you made', I think it wouldn't hurt to put the record straight and reply 'Well, actually, I was trying to draw a hippo, not a rhino.' And then to admit to myself and to others that I have failed in either case.
I think the key word (not mentioned here) is "documentary". If one claims some work to be documentary, you'll have different expecations - it should state what exactly is covered and then present different points of view, at least try to be neutral, etc. And the actual objectivity of that is still questionable.
ReplyDeleteAnd if the work doesn't even pretend to be documentary, it probably tells more about the image maker than the subject matter. I didn't see any statement on Alec Soth's site, so one cannot assume he's documenting Midwest. On his Magnum profile he says "I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance. The picture is a document of that performance" - a closest thing to intro to his work I could find.
Although I understand it's not anyhow documentary or representative of the Midwest, I very much prefer Bryan Shutmaat's "Grays the Mountain Sends". And when speaking of modern day's industrial landscapes of Northern England, I'd suggest Simon Butterworth's project "Steel River".