It was Nobel Prize-winning American author, William Faulkner who said it first: Kill your darlings.
The term is used by authors to describe how you should cut to the chase and have the courage to get rid of the elements that you love so much yourself, but that don’t really add anything to the whole – or, even worse, actually weaken it.
So this weekend, with the help of Chris Boot, I attempted to kill my darlings. I’ve now got the edit down to 54 pictures (from about 90 in my last post). It was a painful but valuable experience having created, in my opinion, a stronger book.
ps. It’s also the title of a track by the Swedish band Tony Clifton. Watch their video here-
“These poor villages,
This meagre nature,
Long-suffering land,
Land of the Russian people!”
– Fedor Tiutchev
“The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him.
If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also omit to paint that which he sees before him.â€
– Caspar David Friedrich, quoted in Romanticism and Art.
The theme of Romanticism has come up several times in the past couple of months; I was recently interviewed by photographer Wendy Pye who was researching her MA dissertation on the links between Romanticism and its influence on twenty first century photography, while a couple of blogs have commented on my work with reference to beauty (see American Suburb X and Ben Huff’s blog). Regular readers of the blog will also have spotted references in my post about Peter Bialobrzeski’s book Heimat – note the obvious reference to Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea and Bialobrzeski’s photograph Heimat 34.
Romanticism is an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe. The movement stressed strong emotion as a course of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and awe, especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities. It was Romantic artists who first asserted the supreme importance of landscape – prior to that it had been subordinate to historical paintings (Titian or Poussin’s principal theme had been nature not man). While the great 17th Dutch painters had been engrossed in the simple depiction of a locality, known as naturalism, it was in Scandanavia (notably in Copenhagen) and Germany that attempts were first made to infuse landscape painting with a sense of the spiritual. Interestingly, the movement took root around the same time as the invention of photography.
While Romanticism can tip easily into parody and melodrama, at its finest, romantic art is overwhelming, beautiful and uplifting. Just think of paintings by JMW Turner, such as this one-
Snow Storm: Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps, JMW Turner (1812)
Writing in the catalogue which accompanied the exhibition Damaged Romanticism, A Mirror of Modern Emotion at The Art Museum of the University of Houston USA (September 2008), Terrie Sultan asserts that “photographers are taking up the Romantic spirit, querying their ability to portray an objective truth and wanting to create images that are open to the interpretation of the viewer.” And Pye notes how several landscape, pictorial and documentary photographers (for example, Nicholas Hughes, Ori Gersht and Elina Brotherus) have adopted romantic styles in some of their work.
In relation to my own work, I certainly wouldn’t deny that I’m an emotive photographer whose images include romantic (with a small r) overtones – elements of intuition, imagination and feeling. To be precise, I would say that I’m more interested in notions of beauty, and what constitutes beauty, rather than specifically applying motifs in my photographs that are linked to Romanticism. Of course, admitting such can be dangerous to your career! Producing romantic, or at least beautiful imagery, is often viewed as profoundly uncool and nostalgic rather than contemporary.
The trouble with beauty is that tastes and standards of what is beautiful vary so much. Take Russia, for instance. In the early 1800s, Russians commonly accepted the European judgement that their land lacked aesthetic value (as a result, Russian landscape painters tended to travel to Italy, where they learnt to capture the brilliant light, or study at the academies of Germany and France). This view of the Russian landscape changed with the outpouring of literary and artistic creativity that followed the century’s political upheavel and artists turned to their native land and revealed the power of gray skies, vast open fields, and simple birch forests.
Mast-Tree Grove, Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (1898)
In 19th century Russia there was move towards greater naturalism with artists enhancing the idea of Russian beauty and grandeur. The movement was led by artists like Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (1832-1898) who was famous for his scrupulously detailed canvases depicting the Russian countryside, its impenetrable forests and enormous skies; artists like Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi (pronounced Quind-gee, 1842-1910) whose paintings are characterised by their panoramic sweep, the simplification and stylisation of natural forms; and Isaak Ilich Levitan (1860-1900), who painted ‘mood landscapes’, in which he established an overall atmospheric unity.
“The articulation of a specifically Russian landscape in art and literature contributed to the construction of Russian national identity. This process entailed learning both to view Russia without European aesthetic filters and to love the very features of Russian land and nature that seemed impoverished by comparison with European landscape conventions. ‘Proud foreign eyes’, so important in the late eighteenth-century approaches to Russian landscape imagery, would cease to hold authority by the end of the nineteenth. At the turn of the twentieth century, Russia’s ‘meager nature’ and ‘humble barrenness’ were no longer dull and tedious for Russian viewers, but highly valued, even a ‘blessing’. The meagre, humble, barren and suffering land gave birth to the special strengths, endurance, and soul of the ‘Russian people’. ‘This meager nature’ thus became a font of national celebration. Russian’s came to embrace their land’s modest beauty.”
(On this point, it’s worth noting that one of Romanticism’s key ideas and most enduring legacies is the assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic art and political philosophy).
In relation to We English, which was partly inspired by both Turner and another Romantic British artist, Constable, the work is no doubt rooted in the consciousness of my own attachment to England and is at times an unashamedly lyrical rendering of every day landscapes.
The British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, famously announced that ‘There is no such thing as society’ (October 31, 1987), a quote which has been borrowed for the title of a relatively recent publication about British photography. No Such Thing As Society: Photography in Britiain, 1967-1987 by David Alan Mellor (Hayward Publishing, London, 2008), draws from the collections of the Arts Council and the British Council to give an appraisal of these two turbulent decades.
Book cover featuring photograph by Daniel Meadows
The early 1970s saw the emergence of new and independent approaches to documentary photography which focused on social realism. The leading exponent, Tony Ray-Jones, captured the comedies of social class and the absurdities of human behaviour within the constraints of British culture. The human costs of de-industrialisation and globalisation were the great central themes of the documentary photographers active in the North of England in the late 70s and 80s. The social disasters captured in Chris Killip’s work extended into the darkly coloured, claustrophobic interiors of DHSS offices photographed by Paul Graham, and Martin Parr’s lividly coloured documents of holiday makers in New Brighton, Liverpool. By the end of the 80s, the status of photography within the artistic context had been established. Motifs of intense political dissatisfaction spread across the urban vistas of Ian Dobbie, while more conventional forms of photo-journalism of urban conflict in the North of Ireland and the streets of South London were employed by Philip Jones-Griffith and Paul Graham.
No Such Thing As Society has been curated by David Alan Mellor, Professor of Art History at the University of Sussex. He has written and curated extensively on aspects of post-war British art and photography, including Antonioni’s Blow-Up, London 1966 (2006), Liliane Lijn, Works, 1958-1980 (2005), Interpreting Lucian Freud (2003), and The Art of Robyn Denny (2002).
Having shot 1500 photographs, and scanned an edit of 250, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to cull that down to a final edit for the book. After poring over a set of 6×4″ mini-lab prints, with several intense debates with some trusted friends (and my most trusted editor, my wife), I’ve gone from this-
To this-
Then on Monday it was off to see my publisher, Chris Boot, to finalise the edit and work on ordering and layouts. A process that was helped enormously by Chris’ perceptive eye and lack of sentimentality towards the photographs.
And here’s the (nearly) final selection of 80 plates-
The photographs are now being laid-out by the wonderful boys at Fuel, the designers behind Motherland, and other publications like the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encylopedia’s, several of Juergen Teller’s books, and catalogues for Jake and Dinos Chapman and Tracy Emin. Using print-outs from their design, we’ll then no doubt make some final tweeks to ordering and agree on the exact number of plates. Next it will be on to the text and introductory essay, but more on that later.
On the subject of editing, there’s a Q&A with Paul Graham over on PDN Online, where he discusses the influence of American photography on his photographs, why the “documentary†label misses the mark in describing his work and how he goes about editing for his books (although I must say his answer to the latter left me slightly confused). Read the interview here.
I was interested to listen to photographer Tom Hunter’s somewhat candid presentation last weekend at the Rhubarb Rhubarb Cultivate seminar held at London College of Communication, where I was also speaking. Hunter graduated from the college in 1994 and has gone on to have a successful career exhibiting at galleries nationally and internationally (including being the first photographer to have an exhibition at the National Gallery, London). He first came to prominence in 1998 after winning the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award with this picture:
Hunter is interesting as his work has often concentrated on a very small geographical area, that of his home in East London and particularly Hackney, while his subjects have tended to be members of the community of travellers he knows as neighbours and friends. (It’s worth noting the work of Stephen Gill whose photographs have also extensively explored the area of Hackney). I’ve not got time to discuss Hunter’s work, instead here are a selection of photographs from various series he’s made in Hackney over the past few years, along with links to some articles and audio interviews.
These two images are from the series Empty Towerblock, which Hunter describes as: “The empty tower block stands as a symbol of a paradigm failure in UK social policy: the Dystopia and ultimate waste of castle-in-the-air housing projects which were scrapped and abandoned. They are all the more poignant a choice for imaging, given that tower blocks were originally meant to be a dream (Utopian) solution to the issue of ‘decent’ housing.”
These last three images are taken from his series, Life and Death in Hackney, which he describes as: “More overtly than other series, these images convey a bleak outlook, but one which is familiar and fair, and broadly resonant with today’s society. Subjects are shown in soporific states, or role-playing ‘death scenes’, and these are located in overgrown fields, wasteland, or graveyards….This assists the ethereal, or ‘other-worldly’, quality to the frames as the wild, untouched-looking country found in Hackney seems apocryphal and ‘dream-like’, despite its contemporary reality.”
Hunter’s show at the National Gallery, Living in Hell and Other Stories, took as its subject the lives of the ordinary residents of Hackney, as reported in local newspapers. These often startling stories are told in carefully staged photographs derived from Renaissance paintings. You can read an article about the work by Martin Herbert here.
You can watch a slideshow and audio tour of the National Gallery show on the Guardian’s website here. While James Lomax discusses the exhibition on his blog here.
British photographer Paul Graham is shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography prize, which is currently on show at the Photographers’ Gallery, London (also shortlisted are Emily Jacir, Tod Papageorge and Taryn Simon). I’ve already done a post about his work (see A1- Great North Road here), but just wanted to highlight an article in today’s Guardian where he talks about his best shot.
Graham has been nominated for the prize for his publication a shimmer of possibility. Inspired by Chekhov’s short stories, it comprises 12 individual books, each volume a photographic short story of everyday life in today’s America. Most of these books contain small sequences of images, such as a man smoking a cigarette while he waits for a bus in Las Vegas, or a walk down a street in Boston on an autumn afternoon.
I agree with the picture that he’s selected (Pittsburgh -Man cutting grass), which is actually one of a sequence of photographs he took on the first evening of a two-and-a-half-year trip around America, starting in 2004. As he explains “I was just travelling with no particular purpose, taking photos along the way. This was in the car park in front of the motel where I was staying, and there was this guy cutting the grass of an entire huge field with a very loud old push-mower. He saw me and lifted his hand at one point, but he didn’t really care. So I kept on taking pictures, with the sun shining directly into the camera. (It’s lovely to do everything that Kodak tell you not to.)”
There is something quite magical about this image. It’s beautiful in the ordinaryness of the event, which has been captured as the rain falls and a burst of sunlight breaks through the clouds, illuminating the scene with sparks of colour and light. You can read Graham’s comments on the image here.
In her continuing series on photography books, you can read Liz Jobey’s review of Graham’s a shimmer of possiblityhere. It is a very original publication and in my opinion the series of photographs works much better in book form than they do on the gallery wall.
The Deutsche Börse exhibition runsuntil the 12th April, with the winner announced on 25 March 2009.
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“The objective history of England doesn’t amount to much if you don’t believe in it, and I don’t, and I don’t believe that anyone in these photographs does either as they face the reality of de-industrialisation in a system which regards their lives as disposable. To the people in these photographs I am superfluous, my life does not depend on their struggle, only my hopes. This is a subjective book about my time in England. I take what isn’t mine and I covet other peoples lives. The photographs can tell you more about me than about what they describe. The book is a fiction about metaphor.” Chris Killip, Foreword to In Flagrante, 1988
In Flagrante jacket cover (First Edition)
I have to admit I’m slightly embarrassed that it’s taken me this long to write a post on what is often described as the most important photobook to come out of England in the 1980s. Better late than never!
In Flagrante by Chris Killip (Secker and Warburg, London 1988) has long been on my list of most wanted photo books, but has always eluded me, mainly thanks to it’s price tag. A first edition currently sells for around £380.00 (and there’s a copy available here if you’re interested). Instead, I’ve just bought a copy of the recently published edition In Flagrante: Books on Books #4 (Errata Editions, 2009), which arrived in the post this morning.
Jacket cover for In Flagrante, Books on Books
Errata Editions’ Books on Books series is an ongoing publishing project dedicated to making rare and out-of-print photography books accessible to photobook enthusiasts. These are not reprints or facsimiles but complete studies of the original books. Each volume in the series presents the entire content, page for page. This edition reproduces the original essay by John Berger and Sylvia Grant (‘Walking Home’) and also includes additional texts by Gerry Badger (‘Dispatches from a War Zone’) and Jeffrey Ladd (‘The Making of In Flagrante’).
Here are some of the sample page layouts from the Errata Edition (which unfortunately have none of the richness of the original):
The publisher notes at the time described In Flagrante as “a book of fifty photographs by one of Europe’s most outstanding and uncompromising photographers. The impact of these images is both immediate and enduring, creating one of the most authoritative and intense bodies of work produced this decade. This view of Britain in the eighties reflects the stark reality of industrial society in decline.”
In Flagrante describes the communities in Northern England that were devastated by the deindustrialisation common to policies carried out by Thatcher and her predecessors starting in the mid-1970s. The book was accompanied by an exhibition at the V&A in London. It’s worth noting that the photographs intially came out of a joint exhibition in 1985 entitled ‘Another Country’, that Killip made with his close friend, the photographer Graham Smith.
Photo-historian and critic Gerry Badger, describes it as “a fully realized photo-book by a British photographer; complex, subtle, allusive. It was in the documentary mode, that is to say, realist in tone, but realism shot through and through with a powerful and insistent personal inflection. For Killip, it achieved a long-term goal to make photography which might be perceived in a literary, cinematic way, with a narrative flow, however oblique, and the work of art was the book itself.†(Quoted in Chris Killip, Phaidon 55).
Christopher David Killip was born on 11 July 1946 in Douglas, Isle of Man. Killip moved to London in 1964 and worked as an assistant to the advertising photographer Adrian Flowers. He soon went freelance, but in 1969 stopped his commercial work to concentrate on the photography that he wanted to do. The inspiration of this is often cited as a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York where he discovered the work of Paul Strand and Walker Evans. Indeed Killip is quoted saying “In the sophistication of the MoMA’s permanent collection I discovered the context for their work. The fact that photography had a relevant, pertinent history” (Interview with Gerry Badger, Books on Books 4).
In 1970 Killip moved back to the Isle of Man, photographing it extensively. Two years later he was commissioned to photograph Bury St Edmunds and Huddersfield, and in 1975 he won a two-year fellowship from Northern Arts to photograph the northeast of England; Creative Camera devoted its entire May issue to this work. During the early 1970s he became the founder, exhibition curator, and advisor at the Side Gallery, Newcastle, and worked as its director from 1977-79.
The photographs for In Flagrante were all made in black and white, on 4×5 film. They hold to the documentary rather than the formalist wing of modernist photography. The book was well received on its publication in 1988, but Killip’s kind of black and white documentation of the underclass was going out of fashion quickly in Britain, as photographers used color to show consumerism and for consciously and explicitly artistic purposes. (Somewhat ironically perhaps, Killip was approached by Pirelli U.K. which thought that he might photograph its tire factory in Burton. The resulting work was published in book form only in 2007 – Pirelli Work, Steidl).
In Killip’s photographs the bleak landscape of the North East becomes an extension of its human subjects, underscoring the harshness of their lives. Some of his most memorable pictures in In Flagrante are taken in the North Yorkshire fishing village of Skinningrove (see above and below). Skinningrove is a fishing village between the Tees conurbation and the picturesque fishing port of Whitby. Badger describes the portrait of Bever as “demonstrating a perhaps muted, but palpable violence. And there is an undercurrent of conflict and threat throughout much of In Flagrante, which make the book’s rare moments of tenderness all the more effective.”
Killip photographed on the Skinningrove foreshore on several occassions over the course of three years, often spending long periods of time getting to know his subjects. Crabs and People (below) is for me, Killip’s most striking and enduring images. Beautiful, disturbing and compositionally brilliant. It’s an image that asks as many questions as it does provide answers.
“Chris Killip is not a sociologist with a camera, nor a historian. He is an artist, a poet, with a compulsion to enter people’s lives and try and make something of them. To understand them perhaps. To share his compulsion with us – undoubtedly. To assume the role of advocate – possibly. Or maybe it is all an attempt to reveal something else, both known and unknown.†Gerry Badger (Quoted in Chris Killip, Phaidon 55).
I’ve been looking around the web for any interviews where Killip discusses his work, but without any success. I did come across this quote where he comments on a photograph by Boris Mikhailov which was included in the Tate Modern’s Street&Studio exhibition.
“I was shocked when I first saw this work, and shocked when I returned to ponder on these slyly referential, snapshot-like photographs, now blown up on the gallery wall. Boris, how apt. This compelling work cannot help but raise the question: what is a photograph and what is its purpose? The self-congratulatory smugness of most photographic offerings has lulled me into a very low level of expectation. The bulk of photographic work produced for galleries, produced for Hollywood, produced for the art scene is geared to an audience. It is self-censored, and its reception (such a strong American concern) is second guessed. No wonder that most of current photography is so devoid of content. I mean, perfectly seriously, who is going to buy Mikhailov’s work? Masterpiece it might be, but who wants to be reminded so forcefully by content that actions always have consequences?”
Killip currently works as Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University in Massachusetts, USA.
There’s an interview with Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins in the current issue of the RPS Journal (March 2009) where Steele-Perkins discusses a retrospective of his work shot in England, which he is currently editing.
Apparently the project will collect material shot during the course of Steele-Perkins’ career, from his student work, to what he is shooting now. “I’ve not been interested in doing retrospective books”, he says, “but I realised I’ve been photographing England for about 40 years. If I’ve got three picture from every year, that’s 120 pictures.”
Looking through this huge body of work, he says, themes emerge of which he was only vaguely aware hitherto. “I’ll probably run it chronologically”, he tells David Land, “because it’s interesting to see a theme re-appearing over time in slightly different ways.”
“This is the first time I’ve looked back. I’m trawling through my old contact sheets, and finding images that haven’t been printed up, that were lost, or put into the Magnum system and forgotten about. It’s interesting, because you forget about the stories you’ve done, but it’s also tedious: you do shoot a lot of muck, and are reminded of all those mediocre pictures you’ve shot.”
The book will published by Northumbria University Press. Hopefully it will include some of these (not mediocre) photographs taken from his previous publications, The Teds (1979, re-published by Dewi Lewis, 2003) and The Pleasure Principle (Cornerhouse, 1995).
