One of the things I noticed most after returning to England after a year in Russia were the seasons. In Russia we experienced either winter or summer, and very little in between.
Here’s a short poem by the English poet, painter, and printmaker, William Blake, in celebration of Autumn!
To Autumn
by William Blake (from Poetical Sketches, 1783)
O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stain’d
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may’st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.
“The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and
Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till clust’ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather’d clouds strew flowers round her head.
“The spirits of the air live in the smells
Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.”
Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat,
Then rose, girded himself, and o’er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.
I’ve been looking at Geoffrey Grigson’s book Britain Observed; the Landscape Through Artist’s Eyes (Phaidon Press, 1975) where he examines some seventy artists from Rubens to Victor Pasmore and looks at how they have reacted to the landscapes of England, Scotland and Wales. His approach is emotional rather than art-historical and the result is what he calls ‘a book of art and a book of places’.
There’s an interesting chapter called Landscape journeys where Grigson studies J.M.Turner’s sketchbooks to get an understanding of how the artist worked. He writes-
“Summer, especially early summer, when the light was more vigorous and there was less chance of rain and cold, was the time for such professional expeditions, for finding and sketching views, for building up a stock of drawings of every chance thing, every mass of trees or movement of water of deployment of clouds or waddling ducks, which might come into the finished pieces to be worked up, through autumn and winter, for patrons for the exhibitions, for the aquatint publishers.”
There’s a particularly revealing section where Grigson highlights the importance of Turner’s patrons to his summer itinerary-
“The way to sales and livelihood was not to wander off and please yourself. The painter worked in neighbourhoods which attracted the well-to-do summer ‘tourists’ and their families, he sketched the ruined abbeys, the waterfalls, the harbour, the rocking stone they might like to remember and admire again in a drawing-room portfolio of watercolours…..the expedition had to be planned carefully and carried out economically. There were orders to be arranged ahead of travel, there were patrons to be visited en route for new orders or in search of payment for views already ‘taken’ and delivered.”
Several of Turner’s early sketchbooks show how the artists worked out his itineraries, listing his mileage, and placing beforehand the castles, churches, the abbeys, the bridges and so on, which might be worth sketching.
From a sketchbook of 1974, Turner then ninetten years old:
Derby; near which is Dale Abbey.
Nottingham, 3 Churches, St. Mary, Gothic, a large Castle, romantic situated. In the Market Place, one end   Justice, the other a Cross supported by 4 Doric Columns. A Bridge of 19 arches.
Linton, a mile from N., a Abbey.
At Southill or Southwell is a Collegiate Church. There is remains a Battlement Tower of a Castle N.
Newark, a Bridge, a Gothic Church and Castle.
At Stamford, R. of a Castle.
At Crowland a triangular Bridge, pure Gothic. Great part of the Abbey still remains the Steeple, with the West isle, with carv’d Figure.
Peterborough Cathedral.
A large number of Turner’s sketchbooks (nearly 300) were bequest to the Tate after his death. You can see extensive samples of them on the Tate’s website here. (See the screenshot above).
You can read two previous blog posts I’ve made about Turner here and here.
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“Sitting comfortably, I open my copy of The Revolution of Everyday Life.” So begins Keiller’s video take of a “peripatetic study of the problem of England” conducted by the deadpan Robinson and his long-suffering mate. A mysterious advertising agency has tasked Robinson with investigating the ‘problem of England’. He and the narrator embark on a series of seven journeys across England, inspired by Daniel Defoe‘s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, based on Defoe’s travels as a spy in the 1720s. Paul Scofield narrates a series of illuminating snippets of information as the itinerant camera focuses on one provincial backwater after another.
Guardian writer Robert Clark describes the film as “like being lucky enough to get stuck on a train next to somebody’s utterly erudite and slightly potty grandfather. If you sometimes get fed up with the state of England, watch this. It won’t change a thing, other than cheering you up no end.”
Another film I watched recently was Gallivant (1996) by filmmaker Andrew Kötting. Gallivant is a 6,000-mile journey zig-zagging around the coast of Britain, which is both an experimental travelogue and an intensely personal story. Kötting begins the journey to bring Gladys, his 85-year old grandmother, and Eden, his 7-year old daughter, together. Gladys’s stamina is limited, and Eden has Joubert’s syndrome: she’s not expected to live to adulthood. Both are fragile, and the journey is an opportunity which may not be repeated.
This road trip film is part homage to the unsung eccentrics who make up our national identity, and part tribute to the bonds of family. It’s a tender film, definitely worth watching.
One of the wonderful things about the road trip are the random scenes that one comes across. Those unexpected moments and chance encounters which create a lasting impression or, one hopes, a lasting photograph. Two spectacular examples of this would be Joel Sternfeld’s ‘Exhausted Renegade Elephant, Woodland, Washington’ (1979) and ‘McLean, Virgina’ (1978), both from American Prospects (discussed below).
There’s an interesting article by Liz Jobey on The Guardian website called ‘Photographer Joel Sternfeld: close encounters’, from October 17 2008, which you can read here.
In her article, Jobey comments on these two pictures- “The first shows an elephant collapsed in the middle of a suburban highway with a truck, a small group of onlookers and the sheriff in attendance. The other depicts a farmer’s market, with a stack of orange pumpkins out front; in the background a house is on fire with flames pouring from its roof. The flames are exactly the same shade of orange as the pumpkins. A customer standing casually at the market with a pumpkin under one arm turns out to be a fireman, bagging a pumpkin or two while his colleagues tackle the blaze. In the present photographic climate, such pictures might have been assumed to be fictions, but in Sternfeld’s case they were repayment for his diligence; chance encounters in the strange and disturbing reality of American life.”
I’m putting myself on the line a bit here but, while not having quite the same fortune as Sternfeld, I did enjoy a series of chance encounters during the journey which resulted in some interesting pictures. In one case, while driving to Stonehenge in Wiltshire, we passed by the Avebury Stone Circle. On turning the corner of the road we were confronted with a very surreal scene: about a dozen men and women performing Amerta Movement on and around the rocks that make up the stone circle. I nearly crashed the motorhome on seeing it and after gaining my composure, pulled over and dashed out with my camera to try and capture the scene.
Here is one of the frames I took (unfortunately the size of reproduction here doesn’t do it justice) –
The photograph shows a number of people doing a series of Amerta moves around the stones, while others lay in the grass with their legs in the air. There is a ring of clothes and bags to the left of the picture. The exercices were part of a ‘Human Nature Ritual Art’ workshop being led by Suprapto Suyodarmo, from Indonesia, who created the Amerta Movement. He also features in the background of the photograph.
Amerta Movement is the original name of specific type of work with body based on natural movement and meditation. He takes advantages from simple elements of movement like: sitting, swimming, walking and recumbent posture. He uses two forms of meditation. One of them it is so called Sumarah, based on relaxation of body, mind and emotions, undergoing to movement and intuition of body. The second it is Vipasana during which man is concentrated over thoughts, emotions and impressions flowing from his inside. This is a type of deeper and more conscious meditation.
Forgive this self indulgence, but I’ve just been sent some photographs from my Dad taken while he joined us in the Lake District back in September. It’s not often you get to see yourself in action. Here are a few of them….
For ‘Roadtrip’ the artists found a carousel of slides, mostly of empty landscapes, that originally belonged to George’s grandfather. His grandfather, whom he had never met, had traveled across Canada to meet with a doctor in New York for the cancer that he was dying from. The slides are projected onto a screen, while out of two audio speakers a conversation between the artists can be heard discussing the order and reason for the slides, trying to discover the mystery behind the images.
And of course we should also look at the work by some contemporary American photographers who have been inspired by Frank, Sternfeld and Shore. Here are three series by photographers Alec Soth, Amy Stein and William Lamson, that deserve a mention.
“The title, Sleeping by the Mississippi, alludes to the recurrence of beds, a symbol found throughout Soth’s work. As he makes his way South along the Mississippi River, Soth show us the bed used by a young Charles Lindberg, photographed at his childhood home in Little Falls, Minnesota. We see the Reverend and Margaret’s bedroom, plastered with snapshots, in Vicksburg, and Sunshine, a smug grin on her face, leaning back on what appears to be a hotel bed in Memphis. If anything at all, this is a group of images about place and their inhabitants. There is no story, per se, but rather a series of unconnected dots, placed before the viewer humbly and unapologetically. Soth’s working method is meticulous and methodical, as dictated by the 8×10″ view camera he uses, and this reflects an inner methodology based in quiet, steady human relationships, abundantly evident here.”
See the full series of photographs on Alec’s website here.
“Beginning with the government’s failed response to the flooding of New Orleans in 2005, the American people suffered through a series of devastating corruptions of their traditional structures of support. Stranded is a meditation on the despondence of the American psyche as certainty collapsed and faith eroded during the second term of the Bush administration. The images in this series live in the road photography tradition of Robert Frank, Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld, but where they sought to capture the American experience through “the journey,” my photographs seek to tell the story of this time through the journey interrupted.” Amy Stein, 2008
You can see the full series of photographs here and a map of Amy’s journey here.
“In September of 2004, while I was driving around America working on a project called Encounter, I began photographing myself in the landscape as a means of activating the photographic process when no other subjects presented themselves. This artistic exercise opened the door to a new way of making work that completely changed my photographic practice. I went from being an observer, trained by my interest in the American landscape photographers of the last half century, to a photographic collaborator, physically engaging with the landscape as a form of creative play. The series consists of images in which I am either performing an activity dictated in part by the location, or attempting to become part of the scene by assuming an inanimate form. In both cases, I conceal my face to emphasize the physicality of my body and its relationship to the landscape. Although this project began as an exercise, the playfulness, experimentation and sense of humor that emerged from it has come to represent the new way that I approach my work.”
You must see William’s new video work particular ‘Sublunar’. It’s wonderful.
I’m quickly running out of time before the imminent arrival of my second child (due next week) so my series on the road trip in photography is going to be much briefer than I’d originally envisioned.
In this second post I’m going to look at the work of three photographers who have each produced hugely significant photographic documents while using the road trip as a vehicle for exploring American society. The photographers are Robert Frank, Joel Sternfeld and Stephen Shore. In a future post, I’ll turn to the work of some European photographers who have explored their own homelands via road trips. I’m afraid that most of the text that follows has been taken from the publishing blurb. Apologies, but it’s lack of time!
Robert Frank- The Americans
“That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in the tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eig ht states in an old used car (on Guggenhiem Fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genuis, sadness, and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film.†Jack Kerouac, from his introduction to The Americans
Robert Frank made this seminal body of work after leaving his native Switzerland, heading out on an extended road trip across the United States. First published in 1959, this book, one of the most famous and influential photography books ever published, consists of a series of photographs taken by Frank on a trip through America between 1955 and 1956 – pictures of normal people, everyday scenes, lunch counters, bus depots and cars, and the strangely familiar faces of people we don’t quite know but have seen somewhere. As Kerouac writes in his introduction, Frank’s photographs had “sucked a sad, sweet, poem out of America.” The slightly offset angles and the blurred focus of many of the photographs suggest the nervousness and dislocation of the people they capture. Frank dispels any romantic notions of the lingering pioneer spirit of America by presenting a landscape of people and places absent of hope and promise.
The Americans has just been re-released, published by Steidl, and Joel Sternfeld was on hand at Steidl’s Gottingen press to witness the process along with Robert Frank. On writing of the experience in PLUK magazine (Summer 2008) Sternfeld comments: “When I was first becoming a photographer in the late sixties his book The Americans was already a landmark – that’s much too weak a word but what other term should you use for a body of work that changed the course of the river of photography forever? I would look at it before I went to sleep and in the morning I would reach for it like a smoker reaches for a cigarette. I needed to see it again.â€
Sternfeld goes on to write: “He [Frank] has come to Europe to receive a prize in Spain but the real agenda was to see if the Switzerland of his childhood would be the right place for his final days. Surprisingly, it failed in that regard. Robert wanted to go home: to America…..He spoke of his desire to return to America, of what a good country it was that it had given him his chance…..I thought about ‘home’ and its power, and about an idea I have that many of the great practitioners photograph their ‘home’ landscapes. I had excluded Frank from my thesis because America was not his home. But now it was. A phrase ‘I did not choose this place but now I am of it’ came to mind.â€
Joel Sternfeld, American Prospects
Since publication of The Americans, many photographers have made personal journeys to take the cultural and political temperature of the United States, but none has done so with more conviction than Joel Sternfeld.
Supported, as Frank had been, by a Guggenheim fellowship, Sternfeld set off cross-country in 1978, driving a camper van. His quest, he says, was that “of someone who grew up with a vision of classical regional America and the order it seemed to contain, to find beauty and harmony in an increasingly uniform, technological and disturbing America.” The photographs that resulted would become his first, now classic book, American Prospects.
American Prospects is an exploration of the landscape as simultaneously idyllic and dystopian, reflecting on the changing states of American society. Over eight years, Sternfeld crossed the American continent in a camper van taking images of what he saw, which included the most familiar and the unexpected. The impact of this body of work continues to resonate through contemporary artistic, filmmaking and photographic practice.
Sternfeld’s angle in his photographs is that of a local. Yet his home appears to have many different facets. On the one hand, there’s the America in which he spent a sheltered youth and whose stories he heard and, on the other hand, there’s the America which he got to know on his trips after 1978: monotonous, overly technological, confusing, bizarre. On his journeys, he lost his faith in an ideal world, but he did not abandon his sense of humor and sarcasm – both are always present in his photographs.
While Sternfeld tends to shoot pictures of common people in common settings, he always manages to uncover extraordinary motifs in those ordinary scenes. His prosaic still lifes capture the irony and strangeness of everyday America in the form of monumental images. A good example is the bizarre shot of the collapsed elephant on a country road in Washington State. Are we witnessing staged reality here? We are not, since nothing is staged in Sternfeld’s shots, nothing manipulated – he just keeps showing up in the right place at the right time.
Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places
“Until I was twenty-three I lived mostly in a few square miles in Manhattan. In 1972 I set out with a friend for Amarillo, Texas. I didn’t drive, so my first view of America was framed by the passenger’s window.” Stephen Shore, 1982
Shore is one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century, best known for his photographs of vernacular America taken in the early 1970s two bodies of work entitled American Surfaces and Uncommon Places. These projects paved the way for future photographers of the ‘ordinary’ and ‘everyday’ such as Martin Parr, Thomas Struth, and Nan Goldin.
On July 3, 1973, Stephen Shore set out on the road again. This road trip marked an important point in his career, as he was coming to the tail end of American Surfaces and embarking on a body of work that is known as Uncommon Places, which was published by Aperture in 1982.
Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated version of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore’s images retain precise internal systems of gestures in composition and light through which the objects before his lens assume both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance.
Quoting Thomas Weski, in Stephen Shore: Photographs, 1973-1993, “Although Shore’s photos also present the status quo in the America of the 1970s, they are not documentary photographs of the type produced for the police, or for architects or archaeologists. Photos of that type are produced according to set rules, so that they can later be evaluated on a scientific basis. Shore uses the stylistic methods of documentary photography, but his images are the results of a subjective vision. He therefore stands in the tradition of the photographers who shaped this apparently objective style of personal photography: Eugene Atget with his photos of Paris at the turn of the century, and Walker Evans with his photos of America at the end of the 1920s. Like those two photographers, Shore also works in series. The individual shots are placed in a sequence, in a visually complex system of references, and the cumulative effect of the photographs allows them to be viewed at several different levels.”
Shore has also just published the aptly named book A Road Trip Journal, which documents a month-long journal he kept in June 1973. In a deadpan, unemotional style, Shore’s journal itemizes where he stayed, what he ate, which television programs he watched, what photographs he took, how many miles he drove, and how many postcards he distributed on each day of his trip. The journal also includes postcards of the towns where he stayed as well as some of his own photographs alongside hotel, restaurant, and gas station receipts.
You can read an in-depth interview with Shore on Seesaw magazine here.
I managed to get to Birmingham earlier this week to see the Knight of the Camera exhibition featuring the work of Sir Benjamin Stone.
The exhibition is staged outside in Centenary Square and was designed and built by Standard 8, a company who specialise in large-scale outdoor exhibitions (previous displays include projects for Oxfam, Reuters and Tom Stoddart’s iWitness). It was a pretty miserable day and probably not the best weather to be viewing the photographs in, however, an enjoyable excursion none the less.
Although I was most interested in Stone’s photographic record of customs and festivals, it was interesting to see his series of Parliamentary photographs. As Pete James and Elizabeth Edwards identify in the introduction to the book A Record of England, Stone’s approach to the Houses of Parliament has an ethnographic quality. Illustrated, for example, in this portrait of Corporal Laxon.
Stone’s Parliamentary Diary (June 4 1908) notes: “Lunch at the House of Commons with Captain Wandsop who came with his servant Dyak from Borneo in native costume.” Whilst there is a sense of negotiation and arrangment to many of Ston’es portraits, Corporal Laxon, a former ‘Dyak Head Hunter’ and member of the Borneo Native Police, was reduced to the kind of typological representation adopted in anthropolocial studies, pictured front and side profile in both native and western dress.
There was also a panel which looked at Stone’s legacy and included the work of Tony Ray Jones, Daniel Meadows, Homer Sykes, Matthew Murray (whose work I’ve not come across before), David Moore and ongoing work by Anna Fox.
I’m Interested to see how Anna’s work develops. Called ‘Back to the Village’ it observes the uniquely English rituals that take place in the picturesque villages of Hampshire. Citing Sir Benjamin Stone as an influence, Anna is creating a collection of photographs documenting the customs – such as nativity plays, Halloween festivities and Guy Fawkes Night – that take place in thee villages. I can only find a couple of images on her website at the moment, including the one below.
I’ve just come across this article by Blake Morrison on The Guardian website where he reflects on what our photographic heritage reveals about our changing national character

.
Think of England
Blake Morrison, May 19th 2007
“A photograph seeks to capture the present, but by its nature can only contain the past. However alive or ‘gritty’ or imbued with a sense of instantaneity, the photo can’t help but be nostalgic, since its subject (whether a face or a landscape) is frozen in the moment the shutter clicked – a remembrance of things past. When Philip Larkin, writing lines on his girlfriend’s photo album, said that photography is “as no art is, / Faithful and disappointing”, this was the paradox he tried to pin down – that on the one hand photos seem immediate and “empirically true”, but on the other they commemorate “just the past”:
Those flowers, that gate, 
These misty parks and motors, lacerate 
Simply by being over; you 
Contract my heart by looking out of date.
The Tate’s new exhibition of 150 years of photography in Britain is entitled How We Are. It’s a good and perfectly justifiable title, since the 500 images that are included, ranging from Julia Margaret Cameron and Lewis Carroll through Bill Brandt and Cecil Beaton to Chris Killip and Jane Bown, provide us with a composite portrait of ourselves as a nation. But the show is also the story of “how we were”, since even the most recent exhibits are a commemoration of lost time, and reveal not just what is constant in the British landscape and character, but how much is changing or has already changed. For the curators, Val Williams and Susan Bright, the defining characteristic of British photography is its obsession with the past, and the dominant images “taken in the frustrating place of the present, are infused, explicitly or implicitly, with a sense of melancholy”.
The convention is to think of photography as the most up-to-the-minute of art forms – not just because its practitioners are impelled (or commissioned) to record the latest fashion, the freshest innovation, the newest face on the block; but because (unlike novelists or film-makers) they lack the freedom to set their work in the past. But history no longer happens without a camera being present. And photographers have always been more preoccupied with history than their reputation would suggest. Among the earliest photos in the Tate show, from the 1860s, is one of Stonehenge taken by Colonel Sir Henry James: a moody tribute to ancestral pagan origins. And from the 1880s comes a shot of two women and a man frolicking in the hay in their Sunday best: a pastiche of bucolic bliss. Neither fulfils the expectation that most of us have about late 19th-century photography, in which industrial might or urban poverty dominates the picture: Brunel posing in top hat and cigar against a backdrop of massive iron chains; the waifs and urchins rescued by Thomas Barnardo, as photographed by Thomas Barnes. But as becomes clear from the Tate show, the Victorians were drawn to rural idylls and costume portraits – with photographers like Francis Bedford and Benjamin Brecknell Turner quick to supply their needs by producing images of reassuringly timeless landscapes.
For early exponents eager to establish photography as a respectable pursuit, the temptation was to imitate classical scenes and poses. It was as if the newness of photography could only pass muster if it succeeded in looking old, and the best way to do this was to aspire to the condition of painting. (The Tate show even includes a bizarre example, circa 1870, by Kate Gough, of the two media being mixed: on to the necks of three painted ducks swimming on a pond, three photographs of women’s heads have been superimposed.)
But honouring the past was more than a PR exercise on behalf of an upstart art form. Many photographers then and since have been motivated by the need to preserve something they believe or fear is disappearing. In the late 1960s, for example, the short-lived Tony Ray-Jones (1941-72) set out to record what he called the “daily anachronisms” of British life, such as beauty contests, carnivals, galas, dog shows and strongman contests. As the country became “more Americanised”, “reduced to an island or defrocked”, he wanted to pay tribute, as Orwell had before him, to the British (or, more specifically, English) people, with “their old-fashioned outlook, their graded snobberies, their mixture of bawdiness and hypocrisy, their extreme gentleness, their deeply moral attitude to life”. Forty years on, the national psyche seems to have changed (whatever happened to our gentleness and moral rectitude?) The territory Ray-Jones explored has since been reoccupied by others, including Martin Parr, whose photo of morris dancers performing outside a high-street McDonald’s commemorates the perilous survival of ancient British customs in the global marketplace.
There’s a similar spirit in the work of Homer Sykes, who in the 1970s compiled a set of photos of “traditional British customs”, morris dancing included, and published them in a book called Once a Year. It’s an extraordinary document, not least because most of these customs – though venerated over centuries and still carried out on particular days of the year – are so weird. Without Sykes, we might not know what’s involved in burning the clavie, wassailing the apple tree, dicing for maid’s money, dunting the freeholder, firing the fenny poppers or bottle kicking and hare pie scrambling – nor have heard of the haxey hood game, the wicken love feast, the Painswick clyping ceremony, the Hungerford hocktide or the Hinton punky night. It’s true that you can get by very well without knowing a thing about them and still feel British. But Sykes’s attention to the wackiness and paganism of these activities is not the usual pointless heritage industry fare. What interests him is the contemporaneity of the participants, the coexistence of ancient and modern.
Take his The Burry Man, for example, which celebrates a tradition still carried out annually in South Queensferry in the Firth of Forth: on the second Friday in August, in order to bring luck to the local herring industry by acting as a scapegoat, a man dresses up in a costume of freshly collected burrs and walks through the town, calling in at every pub to collect money and be given tots of whisky. What makes Sykes’s photo more than quaintly folkloric is the contrast between the eyeless, flower-festooned beastie, or “green man”, and his quotidian surroundings: the battered bar with Youngers beer mats; the sharp-faced helpers, in jackets and ties; the drab pub backdrop, with a dispensing machine. It’s the same with other images from this same series: we see ancient rituals being performed or observed by people in ribbed tank tops, thin floral dresses, miniskirts, flared trousers and Zapata moustaches. The effect is incongruous to the point of surrealism, yet it makes you see how rites that have seemingly outlived their usefulness can serve to bring a community together.
A distorted attachment to indigenous tradition can also drive communities apart, which is perhaps what led Sykes to embark on another project in the 1970s, when he took photographs of National Front members during their meetings. More dramatically, he was one of the photographers present when NF marchers clashed with anti-racist protesters in Lewisham in 1977, and the police used riot shields for the first time. As Sykes shows, an alertness to history can work in different ways.
Sykes comes from Vancouver. Ray-Jones, though born in Somerset, learned his art in the US. A striking aspect of the Tate show is how many iconic images of Britain and the British have been produced by outsiders: it’s as if we can’t see ourselves without their help. Among the artists featured are Otto Pfenninger, Bill Brandt and Albrecht Tübke (all German), Leonard Freed and Nancy Hellebrand (both from the US), Wolfgang Suschitzky (born in Vienna), Dorothy Bohm (Konigsberg), Horace Ove (Trinidad) and Vanley Burke (Jamaica). Others in the show – from Madam Yevonde in the 1930s (who grew up in Streatham but was educated in Belgium) to newcomers like Douglas Abuelo, Grace Lau and Penny Klepuszewska – have a perspective that helps them notice things which insiders might miss.
What they and the rest notice, invariably, is how eccentric the British are – or, rather, how much stranger and more interesting than we fancy ourselves to be. How fond of posing with exotic animals; how keen on dressing up and body painting; how obsessed with stardom (long before the age of celebrity); how drawn to clowns, mirrors, circuses, illusions, hats and masks; how shrill and gaudy in our choice of colours. There are more familiar images too, showing our attachment to gardens, villages and beaches. But, for the most part, this is the antithesis of the Picture Post view. The Britain that appears is dandier, showier, more European, more multi-ethnic. More arty, too: there’s a notable strain of surrealism, and in the context of the show even Wolfgang Suschitzky’s photograph of a bowler- hatted businessman outside Foyles in Charing Cross, circa 1936, begins to look like a meticulously orchestrated artwork rather than a piece of opportunistic social realism – the empty pavement, the lines and angles, the falling shadows are all beautifully arranged.
Though careful construction has always been part of the process, it also gives enemies the opportunity to shout “Cheat!” when they find that seemingly “true” photographs are works of artifice that have been set up. The Victorian Arthur J Munby insisted that the working women whose photos he assembled – pit girls, milkmaids, fisherwomen – wear suitably dirty working clothes. Walker Evans did much the same with his Alabama sharecroppers in the 1930s; Thomas Barnes found himself at the centre of a legal row over his “before” and “after” portraits of rescued waifs when the Rev George Reynolds objected, “He is not satisfied with taking them as they really are, but he tears their clothes, so as to make them worse.” There’s no denying Barnes had a propagandist purpose: to highlight poverty and class difference. But a sense of mission can sometimes help rather than hinder the making of art: without it, neither Barnes nor Evans would have created such powerful, aesthetically “pure” images. If we worry that their subjects were coerced and exploited, the Tate show reminds us that many people, not least the British, enjoy posing, crave the attention of the lens and are naturals at dolling themselves up.
Nowadays, people no longer need to go to studios for an image of themselves. The history of photography is, in part, the story of an art form becoming progressively more available to all – from daguerreotypes and the gelatin dry plate, through Leicas, 35mm film, Kodachrome and instamatics, to digital cameras, mobile phones and blogs. Though the Tate exhibition doesn’t go so far as to include phone camera images of 7/7, it does reflect the populism of the art – and its affinity with less privileged sections of society. A comparable show mounted 50 years ago would have offered a very different picture of the British, with greater emphasis on national pride, certitude and homogeneity. This one is postmodern, postcolonial and postmasculinist. Instead of generals and war heroes, we get Percy Hennell’s mutilated soldiers; instead of 1950s housewives in their kitchens, we get suffragettes (a radiant Christabel Pankhurst in 1912); instead of grouse-shooting toffs and flat-capped workers, we get Horace Ove’s Walking Proud, a photo of a black couple in 1971 – the woman tottering on platform heels, the man with his hands in his pockets, both of them wearing hats – the street clearing in their path, as if the world was all before them.
With only 500 images chosen from the millions available, and some wonderful photographers omitted, the Tate take on the British is necessarily partial and selective. But it does raise big questions about where our obsession with the past has brought us. How we are, on this evidence, is confused about who we are. But perhaps that’s not a bad place to be.”
