Photography-unpicking your own tapestry

Frozen Narratives 102

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

I have watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.

Roy Batty (Blade Runner)

In many ways, at certain times, I suppose I feel like the rat Ratatouille in the movie. Sometimes I really feel as if I am running backwards and forwards along the shelf, while the enraged chef aims his throwing knives at me. At one end of the shelf, I am a classic documentary photographer, trained in the old ways which are nearly 2 centuries old, in love with a medium for its own sake. On the other hand, at the other end of the shelf, somewhere past the knives quivering in the wall, is a space where Photography as we know it is undergoing a metamorphosis, where tradition has little relevance and a new paradigm is being born. Where everything has been altered by the power of PhotoShop.

So, as I dance backwards and forwards along the shelf, what are the things which help me in looking at my own work and coming to some sort of decision as to where I am? What are the marker posts which tell me where I am, either as an artist or as a photographer? The answer, I suppose lies in what I perceive myself to be on any given day. The answer lies with me. Purely and solely.

Some 20 years ago I gave away the idea of photography as an opportunistic process. Until that day I used to view photography as being a case of what I felt like at the time, and a response to whatever was in front of me. This meant that I could be a portrait photographer, a landscape photographer, a Cartier-Bresson wannabe, or perhaps even a person who photographed fungi on the forest floor. It depended upon where I was, who I was with, and what I eaten for breakfast. A photograph here, a photograph there, but very little direction. Occasionally I would decide I was a landscape photographer and, hell-bent, pursue that direction towards the shrine of the great Ansel Adams, then I would fall off the log and try something else. I meet a lot of photographers who are in the same boat, who are not really sure what threads make up the weave of their own photographic journey. It is a great joy to be able to sit with them and help them unpick their own photographic tapestry.

What had however happened, was that I was coming to realise I was not the sort of photographer who was happy to spend his entire life making photographs of a specific subject. I look with deep admiration and, at times, a little envy, upon photographers who have devoted their lives to studio portraiture or fungi photography or even the romantic landscape. I look with awe upon people whose whole photographic raison d’être seems to revolve around increasing mastery of digital postproduction. I look astounded upon the photographs which they make (and I mean make!), the fabrications which they feel freely compelled and content with constructing. Occasionally I have the pure joy of understanding what they are trying to say, of feeling in touch with their sense of statement. Often, however, I receive little more from them than a masterclass in technique. Upon realising that particular image is in this category, I bow an acknowledgement, hopefully express my admiration, and move on, none the wiser and certainly no more edified.

It is not easy being a restless soul, one who can only work with the genre for a particular length of time. It is definitely not easy being a generalist, although in recent years I have come to realise that there are some aspects of photography which neither interest me nor draw me to master them. Perhaps that is a function of increasing age. However, curmudgeonly though it may appear, I have come to a point where there are some corners in the photographic cabinet which I have no urge whatsoever to dust or to explore. It is not that I do not value those corners, simply that they have no interest for me. But some do.

When we begin to move from photography as an opportunistic endeavour, namely one where a photograph is made whenever the opportunity presents itself, to one where a more considered and thematic approach is taken,  one of the first casualties of this new process is that all the dross and alloy tends to fall away. When we begin to think in terms of theme, topic and process, we tend to take a more focused approach to what we are doing. We tend to read around the subject and, when we pick up our cameras, to explore around it. Within a very short space of time, if we hold to this methodology, we will find that we are beginning to develop a body of work. Suddenly we will begin to see the tapestry, and, more importantly, the threads which make it up. We will probably acclimatise to this new manner of working if we are generalists to begin with, rather than being impaled upon the horns of a particular genre.

After 20 years of working with bodies of work, spending time down a particular back road, then being willing to relinquish it for another, I have found the number of things beginning to happen, a shift in the way in which I approach my photography.

Once I began to realise that my work is composed of a number of finite (or, if I am lucky, infinite) threads, then it becomes easy to move between them. I realise that there is no compulsion to complete any one by a certain date or time (unless an exhibition is in the offing), but there is a certain knowledge that sooner or later resolution will occur. Then comes a process of being open to what is happening, exploring what comes, and having the wisdom to put it down when the time is wrong. And return when the time is right.

I have a number of these threads. One thread which has occupied my attention for nearly a decade is mannequins. I am certainly not the first person to be fascinated by the seemingly lifeless replications of the human form, and I will almost certainly not be the last. Photographers have made pictures of mannequins for decades, and filmmakers have used them as the lead actors. There is a fascination here which has probably not lasted as long as the mannequins themselves. And I am sure it will continue.

I really do not know what my absorption is with mannequins, but for nearly 10 years I have photographed mannequins in shop windows in central Christchurch. There are a limited number of shops which can hold mannequins in central Christchurch so you might think that I would have run out of inspiration a long time ago. Curiously, the converse has been the case. The more I photograph them, the more the narrative unfolds. You see, it is something like this:

Back around the turn of the millennium I was busy photographing nightlife on the streets of Christchurch. Perhaps, one night, while I was waiting for something to happen (at least, I think that is what I remember) I happened to look over my shoulder at a fashion shop in the city mall. It may have been that I sensed silent watchers behind me. But I did notice these mute observers, carefully dressed, trapped behind a glass wall, unable to participate. They looked fully human, but of course they were not.

Having spent time at university studying existentialism and existentialist literature, in particular Ionesco and Kafka, it seemed as if I was looking at a living example of the proliferation of matter, the concept core to existentialist literature. Materialism gone mad. We human beings are so insecure; we need to replicate ourselves to justify our existence. Or so it seemed at the time.

As I looked at the mannequins, they seem to come alive, to stand there, to move without moving, unable to comment or judge, yet unspeaking  participants in some sort of arcane morality play. In a way they seemed to me to be a living and concrete version of the Greek chorus, the group of people who stood to one side of the stage, who watched and commented upon what was happening in the play. It seemed to me that the mannequins watched and listened, observed without comment, judged without speaking, ever-attendant watchers in the background. From that moment on they were never ever plastic figurines upon an artificial stage.

Over the years, whenever I have the time, whenever I find myself in town at night, I will head out onto the darkened streets, in search of their latest gossip, looking to prise open some truth from the oyster shell of the tableau neatly arranged by the window dressers of the Christchurch fashion shops. It really does not take very much; a camera, perhaps a couple of lenses, wallets of memory cards, my phone and a little money. I dress warmly and make my way around them. Along the way, I will venture down the alleys which the graffiti artists haunt, looking for truth inscribed upon the wall. It never ceases to amaze me how often that occur. Truth and wisdom sprayed upon the wall. Bruce Willis and 12 Monkeys.

In the beginning, being a photographer, and being accustomed to dissecting time so finely that I could reveal truth in a fraction of a second (or like to think I could), with attempts to find a spark of super reality within the moment when the shutter was open and I was unable to be a part of it (the joy of using an SLR!). Occasionally I would make the slice at exactly the right moment or make it fine enough so that the truth was transparent. Usually I was nearby but not near enough.

Lately, however, I have begun to move beyond that, to realise that sometimes Truth extends beyond the exigencies of a fraction of a second, and that  sometimes it is important and possible to be able to fabricate it from multiple moments. In a funny sort of way it makes sense. If I accept the tenets of quantum physics, where everything occurs simultaneously, where Science appears to be proving that the movement of a butterfly’s wings in New Zealand will trigger a hurricane in the West Indies (or perhaps on Alpha Centauri) then all moments occur both sequentially and simultaneously. This makes it possible for me to use multiple moments, knowing that philosophically they are contiguous rather than consecutive. This would suggest that truth can be found in multiple locations, that absolute truth exists simultaneously in multiple dimensions and multiple planes.

And so, of late, I have come to the idea that the mannequins have a story to tell, and that their assistance comes not so much in the form of completed narratives but in suggestions given me to complete. I may complete them in whatever way I choose, and no matter what I do, the truth will remain, as truths do. The clothes I place upon the mannequins of my own exploration may dress the mannequin in a Technicolor Dreamcoat, but it remains a mannequin nonetheless.

This of course generates immense freedom but also immense responsibility. It calls into question the nature of truth and my participation in the depiction of it. So, as I allow the mannequin’s to talk to me in their own way, to communicate as only they can, as I allow myself to be forced to the window by the proliferation of matter, I can do only two things: I can listen, and I can make notes.

The listing occurs every time I am on the streets, and the notes are the images which come from that interaction, the Frozen Narratives told me by the mannequins, which I attempt to tease out and expose.

Curiously, in the beginning I attempted to tie this exploration to a particular working method. I would approach the mannequins in my best documentary photographer mode. Often it worked. Occasionally it did not. Then, I would take a more consensual approach, where I would collect and blend different material in such a way that the moment was more fabricated and then captured. Again, this was an approach which worked really well. But, again, often it did not. I began to realise that the fault lay not with the material itself but with my own intransigence, my own inflexibility, my own unwillingness to be open to what was before me, to the technologies available to me, and the possibilities arising therefrom. In other words, I was getting in my own way and preventing the message from getting through.

Of late, the urge to completely unravel this thread has diminished substantially. It may be that I find that I will unpick it from the tapestry, one day it will all be done, that I will hold up the thread and exhibit it as a completed journey. Then again the thread may continue past the termination of my mortal existence.

I really hope so.

To my mind there may be little worse than a dream which comes true.

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Published on Friday, June 25th, 2010, under Thinking about Photography and Art