Robert Frank: Say Goodbye

 Robert Frank is sick of goodbyes and is perhaps more entitled than most, with the whole weight of America on his shoulders and the weight of his own history – that burden of vision, the sheer restless energy of the man refusing to be contained, at first by the expectations of his respectable upbringing and later by the conventions of the medium he would so fundamentally make his own, changing it irrevocably in the process, bending its forms to his own secretive will, using the camera to conjure up shadows in the brightly lit world of America’s post-war social conformity and later, rejecting what had at the time seemed like his most profound achievement, perhaps from an instinctive reluctance to accept any easy definition of his art and of himself.

So he abandoned it and in retrospect it’s perhaps easier to see the development of Frank’s films in his earlier work, the books seeming to unroll like a series of stills, fracturing cinematic time. But it is his return to photography, where his use of the medium was utterly transformed (and indeed, transformative) that now seems the more radical departure, rejecting every tradition, walking the high-wire between confession and sentimentality, he goes to the heart of photography’s conflicted nature, its broken grammar of seeing, rendering the very surface of his images, their skin, permeable to language, and to autobiography. Those expecting the dark lyricism and near musical control of structure found in The Americans were no doubt surprised by the aggressive, almost violent tone of this work, to say nothing of its fierce inwardness – Frank had, in the meantime, become a studio artist. There is perhaps no other image that embodies this late blooming of Frank’s own particularly wayward genius (and arguably on other word seems more apt) than that the piece Sick of Goodby’s from 1978.

The tremulous space within the frame just barely manages to hold the contradictions that have come to define all of his late works in photography – the blurred and the angular, the public admiration and the private grief, the word and the image, all come jarringly together – all that is known and unknown about Frank as an artist and as a man boil under the clotted surface of this photograph. Actually, there are two photographs within the frame, so maybe Frank is telling a story after all – a story that is formed in the dialogue between these two frames (and the frames within them, looking out and looking in), that bloody smear of words overlaying them both, unified in fracture, carrying the weight of the image, if not its meaning. There is so much here we could never hope to describe it all – the distant horizon, tilted down, a world come off its axis. The repeated motif of the telephone poles, seen indistinctly, is a communication that cannot be realised, never made to come into focus – these are all the things we never say, the words that choke us, that make us sick.

Then that little dancing figure in Frank’s own claw-like grasp, his actions, his very existence, what moves him, tossed on the sea of fate, his animation at the whim of sources outside his control, dancing on the edge of an unknown horizon, his predicament is ours and Frank’s of course, mocking his own helplessness, acting as both the hand of fate and its subject (in the form of his surrogate self). The mirror reflects nothing except the blank indifference of the sky; it arches blindly over Frank’s play-acting and his despair, offering neither consolation nor the promise of escape – his games seem futile in comparison, but of course he knows that and it’s why they matter, his awareness, how he challenges the silence. Spaces over-lap, what’s inside and what’s out. This is his view, one illuminates the other, retreating to the particular confines of a room and of a window, to try and understand what he has seen and where he has travelled. The view out must inevitably be the view in – to look in is to confront the world and here Frank confronts the eternity just beyond that tilted horizon, just out of view, but oppressive none the less, in that it colours everything, the forces that shape our lives, outside of comprehension and which are lived as something that feels perilously close to chaos.

His use of the medium too is nearly brutal, wilfully deforming the material in such a way as to expose its weaknesses, its laboured surfaces and false confidences, making what had seemed a refined, oh-so-seductive whisper in his other work appear now as a free-form, manic rant, forever asking the same questions and facing the same void in return: no answer. But that’s to be expected, the lines are broken, all the maps rendered meaningless and he finds himself out on the edge of everything, tired of loss, but unbowed, angry even. His distrust of language is just as deep, rejecting its easy consolations, it glib, covering discourse, it way of working all the angles. Here language is confrontation, it is rejection even, making language reject itself (that missing “e” for example); having to say it makes him sick – maybe he can’t, even if he wanted to, whatever it is; goodbye. Yet in bringing the words and the images together, forcing their mutual awkwardness to interact, they become the catalyst for some otherwise intangible truth, crossing the horizon, dancing in the grip of fate, when the mirror can’t even show him what he looks like and would he even recognise himself anyway?

All the things that should be self-evident are not longer so, but Frank marshals those same impossibilities, those absences, to make something wholly complete in its understanding of what absence can mean. This is not a comforting art, some wounds run so deep they never heal and splintered bone won’t knit as surely as before, but Frank is living with infirmity – whereas death is never lived through, it is only accommodated. So here we find ourselves, trying to face the broken horizon, the empty sky, our words insubstantial as dust and the most faithful seeming images just shadows that linger a bit more convincingly than the rest. You can say goodbye of course, but it’s still hard to mean it…

Miroslav Tichý: The Artful Voyeur

An outsider by choice and temperament, at odds with the expectations of the communist regime in his native Czechoslovakia, Miroslav Tichý became a kind of social cipher – a man who cast no shadow but slipped along the margins of other lives, almost unseen and hardly leaving any trace – except, of course, for the countless extraordinary photographs he has made, a body of work which is perhaps unique in the medium, a work of obsession that seems to have grown so large as to dominate how its creator saw and related to the world. The story of how his work came to be “discovered” is no more surprising or unlikely as any story of that sort but what stands out is the fact that it has happened at all, in light of his obvious reluctance to pursue any measure of recognition for his work. Yet as these photographs become more widely known it is their outwardly predatory character (especially with the photographs of young girls) that will no doubt attract plenty of attention. Their voyeurism is, of course, troubling – some may even find it repellent and one cannot deny or condone it, yet in its context we can try, at least, to understand it. There has also been a certain eagerness to paint Tichý as some kind of savant, merely working in thrall to his obsession or worse, as an “outsider” artist and so not really capable of reflecting on the implications of what he does. Yet given his art academy background and the self-consciousness of his approach to making pictures (so attuned to performance on both sides of the camera) he is clearly neither of these. But such popular (to say nothing of profitable) myths around the artist and his work have only served to obscure, for now at least, the real value of what he has achieved. While at his advanced age it seems that Tichý no longer makes photographs, or that photography was only ever a small part of his artistic output, a fever that passed, leaving him free to pursue other interests. But which also left him, in turn, with a vast trove of images, and this has proved a deep seam to be worked by dealers and curators who must surely feel as if they have struck gold. There is, no doubt, a slightly cynical air about how Tichý and his work have been promoted – with only scant attention paid to what the work itself implies in a wider sense. But seen in it’s social context and knowing Tichý’s own history, what emerges is one man pitting his own obsessions again the monolithic interests of the state, it is the kind of defiance that amounts to a covert political gesture – Tichý could not act for the greater good, or even for his own, but only at the behest of some interior necessity, what seems on closer inspection to be a carefully orchestrated expression of compulsive self-interest. In fact, the photographs really seem to have been produced as a direct result of Tichy’s will, as if no camera was needed. They are, in every sense, objects of desire, with the photograph serving as a fetish, both in Freudian terms and also, but just as importantly, in the sense of what might be called sympathetic magic, a way of creating a relationship. As a result there is a deep poignancy in viewing these photographs. The technical defects caused by his primitive (often self-made) camera equipment is a way of visualising the distance that existed between Tichý and other people – and women in particular, caught in all moods, at various ages, in all states of dress and undress. Tichý has made voyeurism into an art form, a life’s work and somehow into a metaphor for the existential distance that separates us. It’s true however that looking at these photographs can often be an uncomfortable experience, where the viewer is drawn into Tichý’s voyeurism by his clandestine photographic technique. Some are awkward glimpses of public nudity (a voluptuous young woman spied in the act of undressing, for example) but also what at first give the impression of being ordinary scenes can be rendered with a definite erotic charge by virtue of Tichý’s looking, by the very insistence of his gaze. With all his photographs (and his ostensibly more than others) we get to occupy the photographer’s position, we become the voyeur. At the same time, they raise the question whether or not this apparently fanatical need to photograph women, to catch glimpses of bare flesh in states of exertion or exposure should be considered a form of art practice at all – perhaps they are just the efforts of a man driven to extremes of loneliness and longing where the pictures become an index of his “outsider” status, his inability to belong. But also, as if by some strange combination of intuition or accident, Tichý shows a deep (and uniquely expressed) understanding of the photograph as object, insisting upon the material attributes of photography. Originally trained as a painter, he seems to regard the print as only being the raw material for what a photograph can become. Working it like a sculptor would, he often uses a pencil or pen to emphasise (re-emphasise, even) the graphic qualities of a photograph (the image) – outlining the curve of a woman’s breast, for example or shading a hairstyle (those quintessential signifiers of the feminine). He can treat his prints with indifference: they are careworn, spotted and stained, with a patina of usage and abandonment, like photographs discovered in an attic. After all, the image is not just the print, but something else entirely, something much more elusive. These photographs are in effect the very substance of his obsession and yet, regardless of whether or not they are the outcome of some private compulsion they also carry with them a sophisticated moral agenda. They point to the seemingly unbridgeable distance that can exist between people. So Tichý’s own alienation, of which his photography is a “proof” of sorts, can be like an unflinching mirror for that moment of shared dilemma when we are obliged to confront a perhaps fundamentally unknowable Other. That is what raises his work above the merely pathological – in short that is what makes it art.

Roger Ballen: Telling Stories

Imagine a house: and this house has many rooms, more than you might have thought possible, perhaps an infinite number, each with some private drama, here brought unflinchingly before the lens and we know, of course, that these mysterious performances, the pictures themselves, are being staged for our benefit, but there remains the suspicion, however unfounded, that what we see might have happened regardless of “our” presence (the photographer’s presence), that what these photographs capture are stories already in progress. In other words, the images made by Roger Ballen don’t always seem like staged “events” but rather like a number of points in some endless narrative, one that will go on being lived after the photographer has gone, that his presence was merely fortuitous or tangential – he just happened to be there. This is the illusion that these pictures so profitably exploit, yet each is meticulous in its construction – there may well be “chance” elements, of course, but nothing is superfluous to the narrative intent of Ballen’s myth making, his own story. If his vision is a blade, he goes to the bone; prying open the black box of human consciousness in order to see the labyrinths of that inner dream-time, places not of the world, but the world we have made – the world we carry within us, as fragile vessels of longing and despair, of hope and tenderness, of violence and lust. They have the spectral glow of memory, but not necessarily a memory that had to be lived. Indeed, some were greatly perplexed by Ballen’s sudden shift from a more traditional mode of “documentary” making, with all its assertions (caveats really) of humanistic interest, to the increasing self-referential work he makes today, but in truth Ballen has only ever had one story to tell and this “change” in his approach, if not his working methods, was surely the result of a decision on his part to reduce the scope of his interests to a point of absolute necessity. In many ways too our understanding of Ballen’s earlier work, its ostensibly “factual” tone, must be re-evaluated in light of his more recent achievements and even the most cursory of comparisons will reveal just how wilful a “documentary” photographer Ballen actually was – at least in terms of how the role has been traditionally conceived. The perspective of that work is so skewed, so subject to distortion on the part of the photographer, that it is hard to see it as anything other than as a statement of intent for his current style. This is not to say that the work is not successful on its own merits, because it is – but rather with the benefit of hindsight it is obvious that his pictures never belonged within that particular tradition. It would seem then that each “drama” is Ballen’s own, but they are also ours, in that they are basically anonymous – they are not seen as “types” but as lucid statements of fact: his “staged” photographs appear more like documents than his earlier work ever did. Now it seems that the people he photographs are, in many ways, incidental to the pictures, even though it is obvious they are his collaborators and not just another example of photography’s fetish for the states and surfaces of poverty. While remaining very much grounded in the social realities of South Africa (it is their “skin” in many ways, their atmosphere) it is clear that they are not intended as parables of a specific experience, but rather of a generally human one. It might seem somewhat of a contradiction that Ballen should have “condensed” the narrative implications of his earlier work by opening his pictures up to the inchoate, if elemental, materials of dreaming – yet they are not pictured as mere circumstance, but as a process, as a story and in Ballen’s story-world there are rooms you can never leave, just as you can never “leave” your body – or the burden of consciousness. Their “story” and Ballen’s story is that of our endless struggle with the limits of existence – beyond which stands a tangible, irrefutable void. So even if, in recent years, the credibility (and the market) for elaborately staged photographs have enjoyed something of a boom, comparatively speaking, the principle influence on that sort of work has been cinematic, with deftly implied narratives and making use of the latest technology, Ballen’s staged images have as little relation to that style as his earlier work did to the documentary tradition, superficially alike as they may seem. In truth his photographs have more in common with the conventions of post-war existential theatre, with its taste for savage absurdities – his actors just happen to live their roles. However, it might be further argued that how Ballen uses the people he photographs is a kind of exploitation and this charge is, in truth, harder to accommodate, given the grotesque intensity of their performances and how they behave (in the pictures) with a seeming lack of self-reflection. But then again it might well be just this aspect of how they “perform” their roles that allows Ballen to escape, at least in part, such considerations. The scenes themselves involve such a substantial degree of participation and exchange that it is hard to imagine his subjects are anything other than willing to act as they do – even if they cannot fully conceive of the camera’s power (the photographer’s power really) to rupture that thin shell of artifice we all wear, even – or especially – in performance. It really seems as if the very contrivance of these scenes is in some way a “proof” of their authenticity – as if Ballen was saying that the closest as he can come to the truth of what he photographs is as fiction, as a kind of theatrical self-impersonation, which is perhaps why they seem so credible – acting as some composite version of themselves. No doubt Ballen sees his work as a challenge to those lingering conceptions of photography as a medium of the real, which is not to say that Ballen is involved with anything so juvenile as a “critique” of photography’s more traditional values, but rather that he wants to complicate the seemingly obvious relationship between what we see and what we can know about it – it is this issue of the “real” itself that interests him, albeit not in the detached way it has been of interest to more self-consciously conceptual photographer-artists, but as the crux of a philosophical dilemma that goes to the heart of our ideas about reality. After all, how do we separate the story from how it is told?

Nan Goldin: Public and Private

There is a remarkable consistency with which Nan Goldin has approached photography’s potential as a way of gathering together the stray data of a life, in this case her own, and making from it a narrative that is more than the sum of its parts, an on-going history, one in which we are all implicated, narratives of loss and failed redemption, the course of our shared mortality. The celebratory tone of her photographs, their seeming lushness, is more often than not tainted by an awareness of how fragile the illusions we live with actually are and Goldin snatches at them as they pass by her camera and in her life. This is what makes Goldin’s photography, in its own way, so profound – how she can be so immediately inside of what she photographs. Borrowing from the traditional forms of amateur photography, the snapshot and slideshow, she articulates a vision that is fundamentally personal, yet authoritative in its scope, with an ambition to record her experiences as directly as she can. Her self-portraits in particular, one of several re-occurring themes in Goldin’s body of work and one that typifies her approach as a whole, reveal her as an artist who can reflect on both the distinctively elusive nature of her medium and the performative nature of identity, how we can live our roles in front of the camera, without ever falling into critique or recrimination; she is never less than sincere. The suspicion has persisted however that a large part of Goldin’s acclaim rests on a fascination with her lifestyle – the atmosphere of her pictures, that shadow-land of urban excess, young men and women living intensely on the very edge of pleasure. All of which seems to mark her as trading, with no small degree of cynicism, on the outrageous glamour of difference, the thrill of flouting those conventions of “normal” behaviour, with scenes of drug-taking and ambiguous sexuality. It’s true that Goldin is as capable of titillation as all this suggests, and a self-regard that would seem to negate any possibility of deeper meaning, particularly in her more recent projects where the diary-like approach has gradually hardened into a brash stylistic gloss, at times pushing her out of what she photographs. However, what her detractors and imitators alike fail to grasp is the precarious balance that Goldin manages to negotiate, in her own unique way, between the realms of public and private significance. This narrowness is the greatest strength (and also the greatest failing) of her photography, a single-minded determination to show what she lives and how it matters. Luc Sante has called Goldin a “portraitist of souls” and she certainly is, but more than that she can capture the raw moment of a soul’s exposure, in which individual relevance, the life being lived before her camera at that moment, falls away, only to reveal something that transcends the personal – regardless of how close it is to her, the pictures are closer still to us, collectively, because what Goldin’s pictures really concern themselves with, beyond the particularities of time and place, is that disparity between how we are seen and the image we project of ourselves. So while the popular notion is that photography can strip away artifice, and is at it’s most truthful when it does so, the hallmark of Goldin’s vision is to crystallise the performance, letting it stand as itself – in her photographs all poses are accepted as genuine, or at least true to the moment in which they occur; what is stripped away, emotionally as well as physically, shows itself as another form of concealment, hiding in nakedness, in tears and ecstasy, all those in-between moments of a life shared. And Goldin shares; her pictures rarely suggest an intrusion, but rather a deep sense of complicity, her own stake in what is happening – an involvement that means she can never really stand outside of what she photographs, even if the camera gives her a measure of detachment, a certain coldness. The colour in her photographs has a physical presence that moves beyond the surface of the print or the page, it locates the photographs in the immediacy of Goldin’s life – they are present, in every sense. She is arguably and perhaps in spite of herself, one of the most remarkable colourists in American photography. The glare and often fevered hue of her palette is key to the emotional range of her photography, as much in the landscapes and interiors as her more familiar portraits. The electric jolt of the artificial light she used so often in the early years of her photography reflected the artificial highs pursued by those she photographed – and by Goldin herself. In formal terms these pictures are uniquely her own, as personal landscapes of living colour; their smeared neon intensity is a challenge to the viewer – to feel as deeply, as fearlessly, to simply live as much as Goldin herself dares to, without restraint, the consequences as well as the pleasures. At the same time, however, the pictures themselves don’t seem to matter, as pictures, but simply the fact of her being there, the experience that photography allows, an opening it creates for making a connection, with the camera as a conduit of some intangible energy – desire or compassion, let’s say, or even just something seen in passing, all those half-feelings with no particular name. This is her family album then, an on-going record with Goldin herself at the eye of the storm, which is not to say, of course, that she could not have made these pictures if she was not so intimate with the people she photographs, but rather that her intimacy is the reason she makes the pictures, it is their driving force and why they can matter as much as they do – she lets us share in a way that is as visceral, as profound, as her own experience. Goldin trades in the same economies of desire and loss that we all have to contend with; she takes the raw material of her own life and transforms it into something of archetypal significance. She is our mirror.