Photography, curation & the power of time

Synchronicity. It’s an odd concept, but when I see something that’s ‘related’ in some unexpected way to something else, it makes me smile. I had such a moment this week. And grinned broadly, as ‘the penny dropped’ for me.

I was scanning some old negatives and transparencies and scrutinizing the way I ‘saw’ things when I was younger. And two images in particular intrigued me, both taken in apartheid South Africa in the 1970’s, but I couldn’t quite put a finger on what it was about them that connected them. And as I scanned and pondered up popped a tweet from John Edwin Mason linking to an excellent new post he’d written on 20×200 exploring the enduring legacy of a pair of images by Marion Post Wolcott. Two striking images recording a particular moment in history.

 

 

Also festering in my mind were two articles I’d read in the previous 24 hours, the first by Sean Pett in the Guardian, commenting from Le Mois de la Photo in Montreal. Pett’s comments, and the remarks by some of the shows contributors, displays the kind of ‘artistic’ arrogance that dismays me:

“The use of vernacular images runs throughout the festival and reflects the fact that, of the billions of photos we snap each day, the majority depict banal and everyday things, pictures made to be forgotten. Amsterdam-based Erik Kessels recontextualises cast-off images by resituating them within a book, which gives them a significance beyond their creator’s intention.”

and

Many of the artists at the festival operate through appropriation, though Fontcuberta thinks this term is out of date now the internet has upended the idea of property. Instead, he suggests we use “adoption”, which, in Latin, means to choose or select. Patricians in ancient Rome, he explains, would adopt a child by selecting a poor boy to increase his rank: an example, in his view, of culture triumphing over the nature of origin. “I think that now most artists adopt images because they don’t pretend to be the biological parents, they just pick those images to make them alive in another context. The importance is how we assign meaning. The craft and authorship of the image are no longer relevant issues, which brings us to the crisis of photography.”

Leaving aside the “..internet has upended the idea of property…” nonsense upon which appropriators like Richard Prince thrive, the ‘arrogance’ I mention above is in assuming that ‘vernacular’ (*the language of the ordinary people) = uninteresting, and that it requires the intervention of the ‘curator’ to imbue this “banal and uninteresting” work with some other status; and here’s a phrase to wrestle with: “…culture triumphing over the nature of origin….”.  Throughout all these debates on ‘post photographic’ techniques the role of the originator is downplayed, the meaning and importance of the original work dismissed until it’s ‘true worth’ is somehow revealed by a ‘reassignment of meaning’.  And of course that reassignment requires the intervention of the opportunist ‘artist’. They choose what qualifies to be imbued with ‘worth’.

But there is a downside to all of this, to the way our images are used as a currency of sorts. If ‘we’re all photographers now’, then it follows ‘we’re all curators now’ too, and the role of ‘curator’ can be played in reverse, by omission. Or more precisely by ensuring certain images are NOT seen. Just as curators may seek to “make an image alive in another context” so too can they kill them in their original context. That’s a disturbing prospect.

I watched photojournalist Joey Lawrence’s video a few months ago as he traveled through Kurdistan making portraits. His superb images from this project are on Instagram. Or rather they WERE on Instagram. As a consequence of complaints that the subjects of some of his images are ‘terrorists’ and are therefore in breach of Instagram’s T&C’s, they’ve been removed. You can read about it here. That’s the real and very ugly power of curation for you.

 

Wolcott’s images are ordinary. At the time of their creation they would depict scenes that were played out daily, the banal ‘vernacular’ so beloved of the artist/appropriators. It’s no great leap of the imagination to assume that had the internet been in existence back then, these images may have fallen foul of race laws and the Instagram censor.

But time has altered the prism through which we view such images. And time, and reading John Edwin Mason’s Wolcott post, has made me alter my appraisal of my own two images. Here’s their story:

 

 

 

“Thank you sir, thank you. Thank you for the fruit” said the badly disabled black South African man to me, as he lay on the pavement in Johannesburg.

“What happened to your legs?” I asked

“Sisss man, just dont work, thank you sir, for the food” he replied

“May I take a photograph of you?” I asked

“What! What for…yes…yes, why? Where are you from?”

“I’m from Scotland, in the UK, just want a photo to show people at home some of the stuff I’m seeing in South Africa”

“What do you think of SA?

“Nice country but the way you folks get treated is shit”

He pulled himself up and to my surprise made a V sign, a Churchillian gesture, the significance of which was not lost on me. He was animated and engaged, and engaging.

But as I sat on the pavement conversing with this man what I was most acutely aware of were the many eyes watching me, white passers-by looking down at us both with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion, and (from some) ill-concealed contempt.

It was 1976, I was 17, had just bought a ‘decent’ camera and was exploring whatever it led me into seeing. And already, as a novice photographer, I was realizing that cameras (and a white skin) conferred upon the bearer considerable privileges.

 

 

A few days later some liberal South African friends enabled me to get into a gold mine near Jo’burg. This mine had a ‘visitor centre’ setup for tourists designed to portray the mine owner, and by extension the mining industry, as a paternal and benevolent employer. I’d been able to ‘unofficially’ tag onto a tour that was taking place, and my presence had gone unremarked upon until I’d wandered off from the main group and engaged with the lone diner sitting in the very shiny canteen, and raised my camera to photograph him. He was fit and healthy, looked well fed and powerful. Immediately I was flanked and ‘escorted’ by two members of mine management who tried with a distinct lack of subtlety to find out who I was and why I had a camera, and more importantly why I was taking pictures. “What are the pictures for?” they asked abruptly more than once. My “I’m a tourist, I’m photographing what I see”  response was greeted with disdain.

These two incidents separated only by a few days had eloquently underlined for me the ‘power’ of photography. But revealed also that the ‘connection’ cameras might enable could just as easily distance you from people, as bring you closer to them.

Now with the wisdom of hindsight, ‘reading’ these two images I see what I know I missed back then. There’s a suspicion in the eyes of the man in the canteen, he looks uncertain. Perhaps my interaction with him, although with the best of intentions, would result in consequences for him, and he knew that. I hope not. But his expression is of someone ‘trapped’ in that place and perhaps playing a role that is at odds with the true reality of his life.

The man on the street? Despite his deformed legs, and obvious physical ‘restrictions’ his arm up and fingers in a V strikes me as a gesture of freedom, an awareness, maybe even an anticipation of something more than the confines imposed on him by his disability, and by his black skin. Who knows. But history proved him right to a certain extent.

I’m not for a moment equating my two ‘amateur’ images with the elegance and importance of Wolcott’s, rather highlighting the simple fact that what I accepted as ‘ordinary’ at that time has with the passage of the years and the changing political landscape in South Africa become something more. Time did that. It needed no ‘adoption’, no need for ‘culture to triumph over the nature of their origin’. Curation may imbue work NOW with another meaning, but it may take the inexorable passage of time and the prism of history to really underline that in the moment of an image’s ‘origin’, it’s original meaning is enough.

“We’re all photographers now”, I recently read in a magazine. Although I’ve also heard proclaimed equally loudly that “photography is dead”. Yes we may all be photographers now, but photography is far from dead. It’s wriggling exuberantly and joyously, freed from the confines of the few into the hands of the many. (The refugees currently fleeing the conflicts in the Middle East know that only too well.) And whilst the curators would have us believe that our work is worthless until they’ve ‘adopted’ it, without our curiosity and our cascade of ‘celebrations of the ordinary’ shared daily, they have nothing.

I’ll leave the last word to John Edwin Mason:

However Wolcott made Jitterbugging in Negro juke joint, we can only be glad that she did. It’s an extraordinary, forever frozen moment of youth, grace, and joy. The moment is all. Nothing else about the photo is the least bit memorable. But that moment is more than enough. The moment is universal and at the same time specific to the time and place. It’s a reminder that, even in the heart of the Delta and even at a time when civil rights for black Mississippians were but a dream, people were never defined solely by their oppression.