Bite 43: William Henry Fox Talbot - The Open Door, 1843

The Open Door, 1843

This is the birth of photography as an art form. Plate 5 from Talbot's groundbreaking photobook (one of the first ever) The Pencil of Nature - an apt descriptor for the new medium - he explained the work as an example "of the early beginnings of a new art." 

The first to see this potential, Talbot invented the calotype photographic process in England simultaneously with Niépce and Dageurre's invention in France. Although it was not blessed with the same initial success as the daguerreotype, it can be seen as perhaps a more foundational invention in the history of photography. Being a negative/positive process it was possible to create countless images from the initial negative thus becoming the basis for almost all succeeding processes. 

With The Open Door Talbot is not only exploring the capabilities of his new invention - "especially useful for naturalists since one can copy the most difficult things, for instance crystallization's and minute parts of plants, with great detail" - but he is also specifically emulating seventeenth-century Dutch paintings of scenes from everyday life. Photo-historian Larry Schaaf points out that the photograph draws on the doorway as a traditional symbol of the passage between life and light, and death and darkness. 

The broom is positioned diagonally against the doorway. The deep darkness of the interior, with only a hint of light from a window, emphasises a mystery and ambiguity.

Talbot has clearly taken deep consideration over the image's composition, and even the time of day for the negative to be exposed to increase contrast and utilise shadow as an aesthetic element - parallel to the broom - as well as to bring out texture in the door.

Although certainly relying heavily on the medium of painting - as much early photography which aspired to art did - The Open Door none-the-less represents the beginning of an ongoing exploration and tension within the medium over the relationship between photography and the history of art.

Sources:

Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, Lawrence King, 2002.

Bite 42: Louis Daguerre - Boulevard du Temple, c. 1838

Boulevard du Temple, c. 1838

This is probably the first portrait photograph ever taken - albeit somewhat unintentionally. During a several-minute-long exposure Louis Daguerre, who is seen as a co-inventor of the photographic medium, has captured a pedestrian who has stopped to have his shoes shined. 

No other subject or vehicle shows up. Only this anonymous figure was still long enough to become a silhouette on the light sensitive surface of the daguerreotype - a technology which was yet to be announced to the world.

With a mundane activity he has unwittingly made photographic history.

Bite 41: Joseph Nicéphore Niépce - View from the Window at Gras, 1826

View from the Window at Gras, 1826

The first 'photograph'. Although controversially regarded so, Niépce's View from the Window at Gras is none-the-less widely seen as the earliest existing photographic image.

The technology for the recording and fixing of light - through the invention of the camera obscura and the discovery of light sensitive silver halide - existed for many years prior to this image being created. Here Niépce brings the two discoveries together - one chemical, the other optic.

Taken from an upstairs window of his country estate near Chalon-sur-Saône by an eight hour exposure - light can be seen on opposing buildings - the grainy image can only be seen with intense manipulation and an increase in contrast. Then a blurry landscape emerges. 

Taken as an experiment, Niépce surely had no full comprehension of how radical this breakthrough was, how world changing the birth of this medium would become.

Don DeLillo on Writing

"Writing is a concentrated form of thinking... a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions."

                                                     - Don DeLillo

Bite 40: Andy Warhol - A Woman's Suicide

A Woman's Suicide, 1963, silkscreen print, installation view

"There was no profound reason for doing a death series, no 'victims of their time'; there was no reason for doing it at all, just a surface reason."

                                                     - Andy Warhol

The subject matter here is not so much a woman's death by her own hand as the public consumption of that event's representation. A photographer has captured a woman mid-flight. Warhol, having appropriated this image, has reproduced it degraded and repeated referencing the simulacra of commodity culture and mass media. 

We experience the image repeating and overlapping - like the visualisation of a stuck record. Any meaning, sentimentality or individuality has been drained from the only referenced event; yet we still ask ourselves about her. In the lack of any information - or perhaps because of it - we are intrigued by the mystery of this woman's circumstance.

At the same time Warhol confines her to a cliche, a generalisation, merely referring to the reference of suicide.

Image

Bite 39: William Eggleston - Southern Environs of Memphis, 1969-70

Southern Environs of Memphis, from William Eggleston's Guide, 1976

"Eggleston's photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekends he searches for that lost ticket - it must be somewhere - with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation."

                                                - Geoff Dyer, The Eternal Moment

There is something altogether sinister about William Eggleston's suburbia. Exactly centred in the frame, headlights for eyes, the car sits ominously by the curb of a wide street in Memphis. A cloudy Southern winter sky hovers above.

The beauty of Eggleston's work, and particularly his ground-breaking book William Eggleston's Guide (a guide to what?), is the seeming randomness of his eye. 

He confounds. It is impossible to fully grasp his aim or even overall message; yet his work is coherent in an indescribable way - like classical music as opposed to Pop.

The Guide is nothing short of a symphony, and can claim to be the first such in colour in the history of photography. Focusing on 'banal' details of suburban American life, Eggleston creates a stillness, a tone of melancholic meditation, that continues to reward the seeking, returning reader time and time again.

Bite 38: Peter Panyoczki - New Zealand Sheep in Manhattan Dreaming of Home, 2010

New Zealand Sheep in Manhattan Dreaming of Home, 2010,
 inkjet and perspex on aluminum and backlight, 150 x 150 x 65 cm

The Keeper of Sheep XXXIX

The mystery of things – where is it?
Why doesn't it come out
To show us at least that it's mystery?
What do the river and the tree know about it?
And what do I, who am no more than they, know about it?

Whenever I look at things and think about what people think of them,
I laugh like a brook cleanly plashing against a rock.
For the only hidden meaning of things
Is that they have no hidden meaning.
It's the strangest thing of all,
Stranger than all poets' dreams
And all philosophers' thoughts,
That things are really what they seem to be
And there's nothing to understand.

Yes, this is what my senses learned on their own:
Things have no meaning: they exist.
Things are the only hidden meaning of things. 

Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa)

Currently on view at the Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, Auckland.

  
Source:
TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre Opening Exhibition Catalogue

Bite 37: Sam Foley - Intersection, Serpentine Ave and Canongate Rd, 2008

Intersection, Serpentine Ave and Canongate Rd, 2008, oil on canvas with projection, 200 x 118cm

A car approaches. You hear the dull, steady hum. Ghostly, appearing only as light on the canvas, headlights beaming, indicator blinking as it turns, a car passes across the painting. 

Streetlights flicking, the scene is eerily quiet - like any suburban street after dark - the only life the bright windows of houses hinting at the domesticity within, cars passing by. A window onto one such intersection, Sam Foley's highly original work captures this scene effortlessly, mesmerising in its envelopment, a simple but intelligent use of projection and sound with paint bringing the tableau to life.

Many great work of art focus on the mundane, emphasising the profundity of elements of the world around us which many of us ignore or do not see as noteworthy. This work achieves exactly this, venerating with oil on canvas a 'banal' streetscape after dark. Void of people yet populated none-the-less each car that passes speaking of loneliness and a uniquely 'suburban' frame of mind, a frustration within order.

Currently on view at the Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, Auckland.
Location on Google Maps.

Bite 36: Ryuzo Nishida - Self-Portrait, 2004

Self-Portrait, 2004, nails and paint on board, 100 x 100 cm

Each 'pixel' here making up the face is a gray or black nail driven into board. Yet despite the apparent drawbacks of Nishida's chosen mixed-media method, this self-portrait none-the-less remains remarkably commanding and highly expressive. 

In fact the use of nails seems somewhat appropriate to this mans expression - his eyes silently scream just as his wide mouth does - while the 'calming' pale blue background off-sets this tension. 

A Japanese-New Zealander who often confronts imperialist social issues in his work, Nishida may well be in consternation against racial assumptions or invisibility. Or perhaps he is angry at a constant misunderstanding of his creative endeavors, at always being put into particular conceptual boxes. 

He succeeds, however, is remaining gloriously ambiguous, staring us straight in the face, confronting us with a highly personal identity crisis. 

Currently on view at the Pah Homestead, TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, Auckland.

Bite 35: Theo Schoon - Geothermal Study No. 6, c. 1950

Geothermal Study No. 6, c. 1950

Through extreme close-up, decontextualising geothermal pools from their surroundings, Schoon is able to draw an abstract beauty and symmetry out of unique but natural phenomena found in Rotorua,  New Zealand. Altogether transcending traditional tourist imagery of the twentieth century he had an obsessive purpose - to reach past the trite and commercial to the unique, the magical, the true beauty of these areas," as Michael Dunn explains.

Arguably true abstraction within 'straight' photography is impossible, so instead Schoon responds to an abstraction already present in nature, representing a kind of Modernist vigor. The organic compositions came from months of observation, analyzing the perfect light to illuminate the glistening mud pools for the black and white negative, and waiting for the requisite combination of bubbles and flow. 

The result here is an image where the elements seem in conversation - or at least compositional equilibrium. This is photography in a pure form of its intended purpose - to freeze a moment for deliberation, to hold-still a changing surface so as to fully comprehend its inherent beauty and abstractness.

Sources:

New Zealand Art From Cook to Contemporary, Te Papa Press, 2010.

Bite 34: Charles F. Goldie - The Widow, 1903

The Widow, 1903, oil on canvas

Weighed down by the burden of her 'dieing culture', as well as by the loss of her husband, an old Maori woman with a moko crouches on the floor of a thatched whare (house). By her lies her husbands pounamu mere (club) and huia feather. She meditates on a pounamu tiki, a further emblem of her grief but also of her culture and heritage. In reverie her mind is cast back to happier days.

Goldie seems to indicate that this woman's golden days are behind her, as they are for her people (or such was the belief held by Europeans toward Maori in the early twentieth century). This realist painting aims at capturing a world which will soon die out.

Bite 33: Roger Fenton - The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Crimea, 1855

The Valley of the Shadow of Death, Crimea, 1855

"Once he left his studio, it was impossible for the photographer to copy the painters' schema. He could not stage-manage the battle, like Uccello or Velázquez, bringing together elements which had been separate in space and time, nor could he rearrange the parts of his picture to construct a design that pleased him better.

From the reality before him he could only choose that part that seemed relevant and consistent, and that would fill his plate. If he could not show the battle, explain its purpose, its strategy, or distinguished its heroes from its villains, he could show what was too ordinary to paint: the empty road scattered with cannon balls, the mud encrusted on the caisson's wheels, the anonymous faces, the single broken figure by the wall.

Intuitively, he sought and found the significant detail. His work, incapable of narrative, turned to symbol."

                                                              - John Szarkowski

The most significant of early war photographs. It features no soldiers, wounded bodies, corpses or active conflict. This is the earth scarred after war, debris covering the ground, cannon balls scattered, the sky above stark white.

A Modernist take on war, the strength of the image is in its ambiguity, in its brutal minimalism. As Szarkowski points out, devoid of narrative or figure, the earth, the details of the cannon balls, speak volumes.

Source:
John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye, Museum of Modern Art, 1966.

Bite 32: Arthur Rothstein - Mr and Mrs A. B. on their Farm near Kersey, Colorado, 1939

Mr and Mrs A. B. on their Farm near Kersey, Colorado, 1939

A farmer and his wife photographed for the Farm Security Administration by Arthur Rothstein. The purpose of the small but highly influential FSA photography program between 1935 and 1944 was to raise national awareness in the United States on the plight of the rural poor.

This couple seems immensely pleased to have been chosen to be photographed and noticeably proud of their produce, which they hold up to the camera. The fruits of their labour - a still-life of sorts adding to the success of the composition. Going from the roughness of Mr A. B.'s skin, complemented by the bark of the tree he stands against, his labour must surely be hard. Yet for this sitting he has carefully combed his hair and his wife is certainly wearing her favourite dress.

A tender image of rural domesticity, Rothstein none-the-less manages to transcend the cliche, presenting the couple in essentially human terms with honesty and integrity.

Bite 31: Rachel Whiteread - House, 1993

House, 1993, concrete

As a work of art Rachel Whiteread cast in concrete the rooms of a condemned house in the East End of London (where she previously lived). The house, as 193 Grove Road, came to stand as a memorial of domesticity and the passing of time. The space once occupied by the density of life becomes literally dense, a sculptural "multi-faceted monument to the sum of all memories," as journalist Andrew Graham-Dixon puts it. 

The paradoxical work is but the 'ghost' of a house, rendered unusable by its very veneration. It is a sculpture created by out of the absence of things.

With House Whiteread became the first women to win the Turner Prize. It was controversially demolished by the local council in 1994.

Sources:
www.andrewgrahamdixon.com

Bite 30: Käthe Kollwitz - Mother with Dead Child, 1903

Mother with Dead Child, 1903, etching

There is no condolence here. The viewer is faced with the brutal fact of mortality - death far too soon - just as the mother depicted is. She is shown as a dark, jagged, hunched-over mass, clinging to what is left of her child, who is etched as almost angelic in comparison, with delicate features and a bony shoulder emphasising his vulnerability. In many ways the child is more present here. 

The overwhelming grief of the mother is focused interminably on the corpse of her child as she desperately embraces him. A pain no person should ever experience is here made all too real and tangible. 

Beate Bonus-Jeep, Kollwitz's close friend, described the etching as, "A mother, animal-like, naked, the light-coloured corpse of her dead child between her thigh bones and arms, seeks with her eyes, with her lips, with her breath, to swallow back into herself the disappearing life that once belonged to her womb."

Created with immense feeling the work represents a deep understanding of its subject matter yet Kollwitz had no direct experience of this. It was only during WWI that her own son, Peter, age 21, (who posed as the Dead Child at age 7) was killed in the trenches. Her grandson died in WWII.

Sources:

NYU Database

Bite 29: Caravaggio - The Calling of St. Matthew, 1599-1600

The Calling of St. Matthew, 1599-1600, oil on canvas

"The Calling of St. Matthew depicts five men sitting round their usual table, telling stories, gossiping, boasting of what one day they will do, counting money. The room is dimly lit. Suddenly the door is flung open. The two figures who enter are still part of the violent noise and light of the invasion. (Berenson wrote that Christ comes in like a police inspector to make an arrest.)

Two of Matthew's colleagues refuse to look up, the other two younger ones stare at the strangers with a mixture of curiosity and condescension. Why is he proposing something so mad? Who's protecting him, the thin one who does all the talking? And Matthew, the tax-collector with a shifty conscience which has made him more unreasonable than most of his colleagues, points at himself and asks: is it really I who must go? Is it really I?

How many thousands of decisions to leave have resembled Christ's hand here! The hand is held out towards the one who has to decide, yet it is ungraspable because so fluid. It orders the way, yet offers no direct support. Matthew will get up and follow the thin stranger from the room, down the narrow streets, out of the district. He will write his gospel, he will travel to Ethiopia and the South Caspian and Persia. Probably he will be murdered.

And behind the drama of this moment of decision is a window, giving onto the outside world. In painting, up to then, windows were treated either as sources of light, or as frames framing nature or an exemplary event outside. Not so this window. No light enters. The window is opaque. We see nothing. Mercifully we see nothing because what is outside is threatening. It is a window through which only the worst news can come; distance and solitude."

                                                                                      - John Berger

Source:
John Berger,  And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, Pantheon Books, 1984, p. p. 81-82.

Bite 28: Mary-Louise Browne - Font, 2009

Font, 2009, basalt

   "But all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well". 

                                                               - St. Julian of Norwich

A shallow fountain leads away from St. Patrick's Cathedral in Auckland, directly adjacent to the altar and baptismal font. Even within this context - while quoting a Catholic mystic - Mary-Louise Browne's inspired work Font remains universal in truth and reception, encouraging stillness and thought.

You move around and over it as you read the text. The river of water continues to flow. Birds bathe and drink from it. Sitting by, it seems more made for them than for us, echoing the engraved text. "Look at the birds. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren’t you far more valuable to him than they are?" (Matthew 6:26).

A reflection on time and eternity the work remains immensely soothing, a consolation for the soul. The words, repeated over, never cease to confound, gathering new meaning, speaking to all those who are willing to stop for a moment and listen.

Further into the park the water leads down wide steps and out into the city. Blessed, it will certainly continue to nourish.

Sources:
www.aucklandcity.govt.nz
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Bite 27: Caspar David Friedrich - The Monk by the Sea, 1808-10

The Monk by the Sea, 1808-10, oil on canvas

Insignificant before nature the small figure sits just below the horizon, visually swamped by the sea and sky before him. The 'monk', sometimes seen as the figure of the artist, appears to float on the sand. Barely grounded yet centreing the composition. Originally met with bemusement and even annoyance the work is now seen as a forerunner to abstraction, appearing almost like a Rothko if the figure is removed. 

Yet the work sits firmly within German Romanticism, presenting the Sublime in its purest form, focusing on the loneliness and ambiguity of what it is to be human faced with the magnitude of the expanse of nature and eternity.

We hear the waves crash and stare towards the distant horizon, overcome by the mystery of why we are even standing on this sand.

Walt Whitman - One Hour to Madness and Joy

One hour to madness and joy! O furious! O confine me not!
(What is this that frees me so in storms?
What do my shouts amid lightnings and raging winds mean?)
O to drink the mystic deliria deeper than any other man!
O savage and tender achings! (I bequeath them to you my children,
I tell them to you, for reasons, O bridegroom and bride.)

O to be yielded to you whoever you are, and you to be yielded to me
in defiance of the world!
O to return to Paradise! O bashful and feminine!
O to draw you to me, to plant on you for the first time the lips of
a determin'd man.

O the puzzle, the thrice-tied knot, the deep and dark pool, all
untied and illumin'd!
O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last!
To be absolv'd from previous ties and conventions, I from mine and
you from yours!
To find a new unthought-of nonchalance with the best of Nature!
To have the gag remov'd from one's mouth!
To have the feeling today or any day I am sufficient as I am.

O something unprov'd! something in a trance!
To escape utterly from others' anchors and holds!
To drive free! to love free! to dash reckless and dangerous!
To court destruction with taunts, with invitations!
To ascend, to leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me!
To rise thither with my inebriate soul!
To be lost if it must be so!
To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fullness and freedom!
With one brief hour of madness and joy.

Source:
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (The 'Death Bed' Edition), 1892.

Bite 26: Jusepe Ribera - St. Paul the Hermit, 1640

St. Paul the Hermit, 1640, oil on canvas, 143 x 143 cm

Paul of Thebes, the first Christian hermit, lived in a cave in the Egyptian desert for much of his life, almost 100 years. Here he is old, weary from a life lived in seclusion and frugality. 

He seems in conversation with a skull. He gestures towards himself - hand touching hand touching chest - contemplating mortality with a complex ardour. 

Muscles sagging and a deep furrowed brow, his bones tight against his skin, the saint has been painted with startling realism, using a chiaroscuro technique borrowed from Caravaggio, emphasising the hermits intensity, and hinting at the rich interior life the man surely lived.

Sources:

The Art Book, Phaidon, 1994.

Bite 25: David Hockney - Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1971

Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1971, acrylic on canvas, 214 x 305 cm

The California sun illuminates the swimming pool. An anonymous figure swims beneath the cool water. Peter Schlesinger, fully clothed, stares into the pool. 

A 19 year-old art student when Hockney met and fell for him, Schlesinger soon moved in with the artist and became his favourite model, appearing in many of his famous pool scenes. Seen as inherently homoerotic these works were created at a time when such themes were rarely presented in art and almost never so conspicuously. In this work even the detailed landscape behind the figures seems to suggest the phallic.

Shall we then take the swimmer to be Hockney himself? Regardless, the complexity of the at-first-glance 'sterile' work lies in the relationship between the two figures. There is something intense about Schlesinger's stare, hinting at the unsaid. A vast distance seems to exist between these men, even as their intimacy is suggested. 

For all the brightness and vibrancy of the L.A. sunshine something darker lurks just beneath the surface. But what a glorious surface it is.

Bite 24: David Hockney - Looking at Pictures on a Screen, 1977

Looking at Pictures on a Screen, 1977, oil on canvas, 188 x 188 cm

The act of spectatorship itself as the subject of an artwork is a major revolution of 20th century art and a primary tenant of Post-Modernism. In Hockney's Looking at Pictures on a Screen the artist's friend Henry Geldzahler stands in profile before photographic reproductions of paintings tacked to a screen. 

The flat surface of the picture plane is referenced (or even in this case: of the computer screen) as we watch Geldzahler regarding a picture. The viewer steps back and in a way watches themself looking.

This self-reflexivity opens the viewer up to a raft of conceptual angles as the space, social position, culture and overall context of the viewer is highlighted as relevant and highly influential to the art experience. Many of us today more often see art in books and online than we are able to in galleries. This cannot have no influence on how we view art today compared with previous generations. 

 It is only by being conscious of our own looking that we can fully embrace the art of seeing.

Bite 23: Unknown - Couple Holding Daguerreotype, c. 1850

Couple Holding Daguerreotype, c. 1850, daguerreotype

There are three subjects in this highly reflexive image: a man, a woman, and a photograph. From the couple's solemn expressions - one looking away, the other confidently apprehending the lens, fist clenched - it would appear the family in their precious daguerreotype (they clearly value this image, holding it tenderly on a pedestal; far more than today we would value a material image) it seems the people in the image must have past, or be physically distant from them, the couple grieving on time past just as it is 'present', in some frustrating form, with them here.

It being a work by an anonymous artist/photographer heightens the mystery and ambiguity already present in the image. We do not know these people or their names. This object - an object of an object - has been separated from its extended family, yet we are intensely interested in this couple and what they are feeling here. The interest lies also in that we are unsure what the very purpose of this image even is, the life it lived for these people.

Photographs, as icons of nostalgia, are objects which seem to grow in authenticity and interest as they age. It seems appropriate then, and even adds to the value of this object, when it is scratched, damaged or even smashed.

This image, a powerful statement on what photographs are and mean to us, has an entire new life of its own, fully divorced from the people it depicts and its intended purpose. Perhaps unintentionally Couple Holding Daguerreotype comments strongly on the simultaneous tangibility and ephemerality of photographs, and their subjects. This image is well deserving of long meditation.

Bite 22: Édouard Levé - Pornographie, 2002

Untitled, from the series 'Pornographie', 2002

A twisted family portrait or a bizarre, neutered porno? It appears an awkward couples dinner party gone haywire. Private fantasy as a perversion of social convention.

While employing the established language of filmed sex the scene evokes the absent, the subjects' faces hidden just as their sexual organs are. 

Explanation is withheld also. Clinically cold and bland, the environment is stifling to even regard, the characters appearing profoundly alienated even as they mock intimacy. Being a portrait (or rather non-portrait) without faces, encourages viewing the tableau as a dead-pan, geometric study in shape or even as a still-life. Reduced to the almost abstract, and lacking eroticism, the situation plays on the inherent absurdity of human sexual scenarios.

Sources:
Frieze Magazine, Issue 134, October 2010.

Bite 21: Steve Woodward - Step Touch Stone, 2009

Step Touch Stone, 2009, granite

A solid, dignified, upright sculpture, sitting among skyscrapers, suggesting momentum - simultaneously upward and downward - Step Touch Stone is an efficiently minimalist work alluding to a raft of complex ideas and paradoxes.

Consisting of twin inverted staircases standing in St. Patrick's Square next to the Catholic Cathedral the work is successfully spiritual in its associations while remaining open, interpretable under many cultures and belief systems, least of all being Buddhism.

The staircases combine in tension: Yin, yang. Light, dark. Hope, despair. The work remains both grounded and transcendent, solid and ephemeral.

It is a open reflexive object, encouraging silent meditation on the human condition.

Sources:

www.aucklandcity.govt.nz

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Bite 20: Duane Michals - The House I Once Called Home, 2003

The House I Once Called Home, 2003

The raw material of photography is light and time. Each photograph then, although appearing solid, contains the ephemeral. This is a fundamental paradox of the medium and the key reason for its inherent ambiguity.

Duane Michals in his series The House I Once Called Home combines an exploration of the ephemerality of photography with that of place, returning to his childhood home to recreate family photographs, eerily absent of people.

Here he stands in for an uncle. The courtyard has now overgrown; nature has reclaimed where people once lived. The middle image, a transition between the two states - then and now - is inhabited by ghosts of the past. For Michals they are still present in this space, as he pensively overlooks it. Any understanding of a sense of place, of location, then, is inseperable from an exploration of personal history, a meditation on time past. The photographic medium, by its very nature, is equipped to explore these concerns.

Bite 19: Don McCullin - Shell-shocked Marine, 1968

Shell-shocked U.S. Marine, Hue, 1968

This image depicts the unspeakable, presents the indescribable. In this man's eyes all pain is held. They are each an ocean of death. He stares into nothing yet sees too much. 

For us his portrait becomes a powerful stand in for brutalities which would be impossible to truly capture. Yet to see his reaction is perhaps more moving than seeing the reality.

A tragic non-portrait, this is an image of a man who is not really present. He is numb, trapped somewhere else in a place he may never escape from, his distant gaze unable to fully register what he has witnessed. Expressionless, saying all and nothing with his eyes alone, he holds on to his gun as if it were a crutch to rely on and a burden to be carried.

Through his eyes we see almost a glimpse of what he has seen. But we remain outside his gaze, unable to comprehend what he has seen, where he has been to.

For what this image speaks of more than anything else is that war cannot be imagined. That to experience it is to become the walking dead, to loss an innocence most of us take for granted, to gain a knowledge no person should ever have.

Don McCullin understands this deeply and has always aimed his camera with compassion and dignity. This image represents a mutual comprehension of war that the viewer is excluded from, for our own sake.

Bite 18: Arthur Tress - Bride and Groom, 1971

Bride and Groom, New York, New York, 1971

Gender is aligned with performance and displayed as a malleable element of identity in this complex Arthur Tress work. From the sequence Directors of Darkness in his series Theatre of the Mind, Bride and Groom presents the actor Stephan Brecht - one part husband, the other wife - in a derelict theatre, self-possessive before the camera, photographed straightforward, with space given to the context of the stage - as Diane Arbus may have presented him. 

Ceremony and ritual is referenced in his hand gestures. His 'male side' boldly takes an oath which his 'female side' graciously accepts. This is a parody of heterosexual marriage as we know it, yet his dignified expression, with upturned nose, indicates his seriousness and self-absorption - even as he appears to be marrying himself. Tress does not mean this to be read as ironic, or at least primarily so; but rather he is highlighting the intersubjectivity of identity, stressing an understanding of self - sexuality and gender - as fluid and contestable.

By presenting the binary of gender in a confronting and direct way, amalgamated within one subject, Tress succeeds in refuting the gender binary, questioning its foundations and the assumptions stemming from it.

Bite 17: André Kertész - A Red Hussar Leaving, June 1919, Budapest

A Red Hussar Leaving, June 1919, Budapest

"A mother with her child is staring intently at a soldier. Perhaps they are speaking. We cannot hear their words. Perhaps they are saying nothing and everything is being said by the way they are looking at each other. Certainly a drama is being enacted between them.

 The woman has just walked out of their home and will shortly go back alone with the child. The drama of the moment is expressed in the difference between the clothes they are wearing. His for travelling, for sleeping out, for fighting; hers for staying at home.

Everything in [this image] is historical: the uniforms, the rifles, the corner by the Budapest railway station, the identity and biographies of all the people who are (or were) recognisable - even the size of the trees on the other side of the fence. And yet it also concerns a resistence to history: an opposition.

This opposition is not the consequence of the photographer having said Stop! It is not that the resultant static image is like a fixed post in a flowing river. We know that in a moment the soldier will turn his back and leave; we presume that he is the father of the child in the woman's arms. The significance of the instant photographed is already claiming minutes, weeks, years.

The opposition exists in the parting look between the man and woman. This look is not directed towards the viewer. We witness it as the older soldier with the mustache and the woman with the shawl (perhaps a sister) do. The exclusivity of this look is further emphasised by the boy in the mother's arms; he is watching his father, and yet he is excluded from their look.

This look, which crosses before our eyes, is holding in place what is, not specifically what is there around them outside the station, but what is their life, what are their lives. The woman and the soldier are looking at each other so that the image of what is now shall remain for them. In this look their being is opposed to their history, even as we assume that this history is one they accept or have chosen."

                                                                                 -  John Berger

Source:
John Berger, Another Way of Telling, Vintage, 1982, p.p. 102-103. 

Bite 16: John Everett Millais - Mariana, 1851

Mariana, 1851, oil on wood, 60 x 50 cm

Mariana leads a dreary and solitary life, accompanied here by only a mouse, yet Millais has painted this scene with striking luminosity, taking great care in painting the detail of the stained glass, garden and tapestry. This beautiful painting presents foremost a dark interior world, a psychological state, while representing a Victorian taste for Gothic decorative craftsmanship. Millais marries these two aims in a masterfully ambiguous and paradoxical work.

Robed in a remarkably deep blue gown Mariana rises languorously to stretch. The embroidery and fallen leaves suggest time brutally marching on, life passing her by. The lamp is dim just as her face is tired; she leans back wearily, filled with the deep melancholy of having lost all she ever cared for, faced with a future alone and with little apparent hope. The beauty of the world around her is no longer enough to sustain her.

Based on words from Tenneyson, it was originally exhibited along with lines from his poem of the same name: "I am aweary, aweary - I would that I were dead!"

Sources:

www.tate.org.uk