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      • tagsgallery programme
      • titleOrganisational - Half Moon Photography Workshop/Camerawork
      • subtitleGallery Programme with details of exhibitions held at Camerawork in 1985-86 including attendance figures
      • dimension3
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      • copyrightFour Corners/Half Moon Photography Workshop/Camerawork
      • credits
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      • locationBethnal Green, London, UK
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      • pdf_text/ & ( o Four Walls: 20 March - 12 April An exhibition of installation and multi-media, as part of the East End Festival. Helen Chadwick; Hannah Collins; Keith Frake; Tony Sinden. Attendance: 300 plus 150 < opening. ? The Food Shows: a series of three exhibitions around the theme of food. Food as Politics: 24 April - 18 May Work representing the food chain from production through consumption to disposal and exploring areas and concerns within that. Bobby Baker; Pavel Buchler; Clare Charnley; Tony Chircop; Graham Foskett; Carl Gardner; Mark Garland; Pam Gill/Tower Hamlets Local Interest Group; Malcolm Grout; Tim Head; Henry Heap; Jennifer Jones; Mike Jones; Sharon Kivland; Peter Kennard; Karen Knorr; Sally Lancaster; Colin MacArthur; Maureen Paley; Clare Prior & Judith Green; Lulu Quinn; Bruce Rae; Judith Rugg; Tim Smith; Students from Central London Polytechnic; Patrick Sutherland; Jonnie Turpie; Cerith Wynn Evans; Verdi Yahooda; Camerawork's Women's Workshop, Sandra Lahire. The exhibition was accompanied by two seminars:7 May: "Food & Advertising" by Judith Williamson, author of "Decoding Advertising". 14 May: "Women, Jobs & Food" by Sandy Hunt from the Greater London Enterprise Board. Attendance: 648 plus 250+ @ opening Food as Ritual: 22 May - 8 June The second Food show takes a more allegorical approach to its subject matter. Julia James; Janine Rook; Helen Underwood. Attendance: 225 plus 100 @ opening Food as Metaphor: 18 June - 6 July A work.,in progress - speculating on.-the. .relationships which exist between foods and individual/group perception of foods and their place in daily life. Janet Anderson; Stuart Bfisley; Sharon Morris. Attendance: 76 plus 180 @ opening Science and Technology: a series of three exhibitions which relate the theme to health, women and fiction. The Medicine Show: 10 July - 27 July A critical look at the NHS service. Gil Galvin; Bruce Rae & Paul Rutishauser; Jo Spence. Publicity materials also included from local health campaign groups. Attendance: 375 plus 100 @ opening / V m s - 2£ Workshops held during The Medicine Show:10/17/24 July: "Dancing to keep fit, have Tun and relax", with Mary Prestidge, Tower Hamlets' Community Dance Worker. 11 July: "Finding your voice", with performer Jessica Loeb. 18/25 July: "Give yourself a treat", massage workshop with Judy Senior. Women and Science: 31 July - 17 August Exploring the presentation of women within scientific myth. Roberta Graham; Sandra Lahire; Susan Trangmar. Attendance: 585 plus 150 @ opening Dance/Performance: 2 August "You can't keep a good woman down", with Anne Seagrave "Sportswoman of the year", with Mary Prestidge. Blinding with Science: 21 August - 14 September Exploring the mythology of science and science as myth. Terence Bond; Chinese Poster Work; Greg DaVille; David Godbold and John Wood; Gadi Hollander; Kieran Lyons; Annie Morrad. Attendance: 720 plus 200 < opening § Suberting: A temporary edition: 17 September - 28 September A work in progress, using early issues of Camerawork magazine. Amikam Toren. Attendance: 69 plus 100 € opening Leisure/Out of Work: a series of three exhibitions Home Entertainment: 2 October - 26 October Indicates some attitudes towards leisure time and how it is passed. Graham Ellard; Jean Fraser; Carl Gardner & Mike Poole; Rebecca Haines; Julie Lambden; Caroline Wilkinson. Attendance: 5^0 plus 100+ @ opening Out of Work: 29 O c t o b e r 16 November Two contrasting views of time spent out of work; travel in another country and the pleasure and entertainment of pet-keeping. John Blake; Ron Haselden. Attendance: 3^2 plus 200 @ opening Special Event 16 November:Experiments in sound with the mentally handicapped, with Peter Gregg, Ron Haselden, Caroline Wilkinson. Joint mail-out with newly-launched Lamont Gallery. After a Fashion: 20 November - 14 December The exhibitors find inspiration in images from magazines, movies, postcards and television. Karen Knorr; Gregory Paveley; Helen Sear; John Stezaker; Mitra Tabrizian. Attendance: 460 plus 200 @ opening. / ... (D G h i u z z y P Z a S t Z A Y t K j p Christmas Box Show 18. - 21 December 1985 Following the one-day successful 'Souvenir Show' in JUne the Christmas Box Show, presents some unusual presents Attendance 106 P for Photography 14 January ' 8 6 - 1 February An exhibition of giant photographs, personalised photocopy wallpaper, dustbin pinhole pictures and polaroids, produced by 6 to 16 year olds from the Chinese Association of Tower Hamlets, Hackney Downs, Montefiore Centre and Oxford House Summer schemes as well as Camerawork's Young Photographers. Attendance 458 Festivals - Domestic Stories 11 February - 1 March 1986 New work by 10 women examining celebration from a domestic viewpoint, portraying both personal and familly events. Edwina Fitzpatrick; Sarah Kouhen; Trudy Bellinger; Clare Charnley; Verdi Yahooda; Terri Frecker; Jamoula McKean; Sarah Willis; Mari Mahr; Alison Marchant. Attendance 543 Festivals - A Grand Parade 11 March - 22 March A celebration of the public face of Festivals, timed to co-incide with The East End Festival. The exhibition looks at Diwali, a Jewish Wedding, Coronations, Peace Parties and May Day, Chinese New Year and TEEF '85 . Work by/from Prodeepta Das, Barry Kafka, National Museum of Labour History, Chinese Association of Tower Hamlets, Museum of the Jewish East End, Tower Hamlets Local Library and Hackney Archive Department. Attendance 191
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      • archiveFour Corners Bishopsgate
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      • authorSee sections X to AC
      • author_editorLiz Wells, Sue Foll, Yve Lomax
      • author_writerDavid Bate, David Green, Anita Phillips, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Philip Derbyshire, Wendy Ewald, Grace Lau
      • author_photographerGarrard Martin, Chris Wainwright, Bill Culbert, Andrew Pepper, Michael Graves, Martine Bedin, Ettore Sotsass, Jim Burke, Janine Rook, Verdi Yahooda, Wendy Ewald
      • author_designerSue Foll
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      • tagsscience,scientific frameworks,stereotype,objectivity,foucault,discipline,punishment,power,rationality,truth,panopticon,body,records,surveillance,history,great western railway,brunel,steamship,kingdom,nineteenth century,19th c,progress,victorian,press,industrialisation,visual display unit,typist,computer,word processing,advertisement,light,sculpture,illumination,post-modernism,maxism,rhetoric,semiotics,knowledge,technology,documentary,stories,women,american,canadian,native,indians,isolation,cultures,underprivileged,apalachia,female,fantasies,glamour,model,sexuality,erotic,role reversal,gender roles,nude,sexual identity,jo spence,review of work 1950 – 85,public,private,health,wellbeing,polysnappers,,arts council of great britain,conference,photographers in,television mythologies,classroom
      • titleCamerawork Magazine - Issue 32
      • subtitleIssue 32: Science and Technology
      • dimension35 pages
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      • copyrightFour Corners/Half Moon Photography Workshop/Camerawork, David Bate, David Green, Anita Phillips, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Philip Derbyshire, Wendy Ewald, Grace Lau, Garrard Martin, Chris Wainwright, Bill Culbert, Andrew Pepper, Michael Graves, Martine Bedin, Ettore Sotsass, Jim Burke, Janine Rook, Verdi Yahooda, Science Museum
      • credits
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      • locationBethnal Green, London, UK, (pg 10) Bristol, UK. (pg 11) Russia. Crimea. (pg 21,22,23) America. Canada. (pg 26,27,28) Cambridge, UK. Cardiff, UK.
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      • pdf_textCAMERAWORK Science and Technology Scientific Frameworks w o m e n o e n m a m e Lens 32 Summer 1985 £1.75 Wednesday 10»h July Saturday 27th July GIL GALVIN, BRUCE RAE with PAUL RUTISHAUSER, JO SPENCE SPECIAL EVENTS Wednesday 10th, 17th, 24th July 11.00 1.00 'Dancing to keep fit, have fun, and relax' led by Mary Prestidge Community dance worker for Tower Hamlets. Thursday 11th July 11.00 1.00 'Finding your Voice' Voice workshop led by Jessica Loeb. Thursday 18th & 25th July, 10.30 1.00 'Give Yourself a Treat' A practical introduction to massage, led by Judy Senior (Women only). 50p charge for each session. CAMERAWORK WOMEN AND SCIENCE Wednesday 31st July • Saturday 17th August ROBERTA GRAHAM, SUSAN TRANGMAR, video work by SANDRA LAHIRE Friday 2nd August 7.00 Dance'Performance 'Sportswoman of the Year Awards' MARY PRESTIDGE 'You can't keep a good woman down' ANNE SEAGRAVE Cl .00 waged, 50p concessions BLINDING WITH SCIENCE Wednesday 21st August Saturday 14th September TERENCE BOND, GREG DAVILLE, GADI HOLLANDER, KIERAN LYONS. ANNIE MORRAD, CHINESE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENTS. JOHN WOOD AND DAVID GODBOLD. OPENING HOURS Tuesday to Friday 1.00 6 00 Saturday 11 00 3.00 CAMERAWORK. 121 Roman Road, London E2 0QN tel: 01 980 6256 SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY THE MEDICINE SHOW Camerawork CAMERAW ORK Front cover photograph by Garrard Martin Camerawork Is: Administrator Darkroom worker Co-ordinator Darkroom worker Exhibitions organiser Darkroom worker Darkroom worker Publicity/touring shows Magazine editor Finance officer Mary Caws Jean Fraser Carl Gardner Pam Gill Sharon Kivland Anne McNeill Lesley Mitchell Loren Sherman Liz Wells Celia Wood Camerawork magazine: Editor Design Production Liz Wells Sue Foil Yve Lomax Sue Foil Published by Camerawork, 121 Roman Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 OQN Telephone: 01-980 6256 Camerawork is funded by The Arts Council of Great Britain, The Greater London Arts Association, and The Greater London Council. Typesetting and Printing by Calvert's Press, 55 Mount Pleasant, London WC1X OA Distribution by ARTS EX.PRESS PO Box 633, London SE7 7HE Telephone: 01-853 0750 ISSN number 0308 1676 Copyright of articles is held jointly by Camerawork and the writer. The views expressed do not necessarily represent the views of Camerawork. Editorial The choice of Science and Technology as the Camerawork theme for Summer 1985 has proved particularly interesting and challenging: technological development is both consequent upon and permeates most areas of contemporary experience. Furthermore, Science is arguably all encompassing in offering particular notions of logic and methods of explanation which frame a total way of thinking. This 'totalitarian'!!) conceptual frame-work is investigated in the first section of the magazine through work on images of scientific development; on photography and the making of history: on Foucault, power, and photography. Indeed, ‘fixing reality through photography' might be an appropriate sub-title for many of the pieces in this issue, for photography - itself a technology - in selectively capturing particular views of social realities, plays a major role in the construction of history. Whose reality, we may well ask? Yet 'Science' as a paradigmatic area of intellectual exploration is increasingly under challenge. Totalising modes of thought are centrally addressed in our three pari section on post-modernism, especially in the argument by Lyotard (founded upon a 1948 interview). The aesthetics of post modernism are implicated in the new insecurity of unitary modes of scientific philosophy. Artistic work in all its forms is arguably increasingly influenced by the refusal of closure, of narrative resolution, the refusal ot what Barthes has termed plaisir. Jouissance lies in the extension of formal boundaries, in experimentation in style and content, in the refusal to pander to conventionalised expressive sensibilities. 'Scientific achievement' is experienced by most of us in our everyday contact with technology. I am typing on an electric typewriter and this editorial will be electronically typeset. Military installations and uses of nuclear power provide the major focus of political debate relating to uses of technology. But our health and well-being is affected by new technologies in much more mundane moments of exposure. Computerisation, with attendant health risks, is a key contemporary influence within employment - or rather, unemployment patterns, as well as actual work conditions, especially where women are concerned. In relation to this, I was surprised at the apparent lack of photographic material expressing something of First WorldTThird World economic relations. New technology is ubiquitously glamourised in advertising, yet depends on the systematic exploitation of low paid workers for a continuous supply of components. Western women are not alone in suffering from changing technologies. So who benefits from new technology? Following the format established in the Spring, this issue offers features sections, followed by a News, Views, Reviews (contributions always welcome), and an account of what's going on at Camerawork, in the gallery, in the darkrooms. The final features section extends the theme of technology into consideration of ways in which photography, as a technology, has been approached and used by women photographers in ways which differ from dominant (male-defined) ways of working. The three women photographers included share a determination to explore and question the ‘terms' of photography. The work of Jo Spence Contents and of Grace Lau, in particular, arouses discussion and disagreement at Camerawork, debates which, I hope, are both valid and productive in relation to the development of alternative modes of photographic practice. Science may have made it possible, but this should not deter us from challenging fixed conceptual frameworks. Liz Wells Editor 4 Scientific frameworks Science has made it possible; On Foucault: disciplinary power and photography; Photography and the making of history. 12 Technology at Work Fast operators - women at the workstation; Illumination. 16 Post Modernism: Truth falls apart 21 Women Behind the Lens Documentary Stories Through the lens: female power fantasies? The words say more than the pictures: Jo Spence’s work reviewed. 29 News, Views, Reviews 32 Camerawork Scientific frameworks THE ENCOUNTER IMPRESSED RELATIVE POSITIONS FATHER FIGURED HIS INVENTION WOULD EXERT INFLUENCE BEYOND BELIEF W h a t is it th a t c o n s titu te s th e s te re o ty p e of scien ce. T h e w h ite coat, th e ex p e rim en t, th e la b o ra to ry ? Such im a g e s a re fam iliar th ro u g h th e ev e ry ­ d ay re p re s e n ta tio n s of sc ien c e in a d v e r­ tisin g , film, television, n e w s a n d dram a. If w e k n o w our w orld th ro u g h r e p r e s e n ­ ta tio n s th e n it w ill b e w o rth co n sid erin g su c h a s te re o ty p e for a m o m en t. Like all s te re o ty p e s th is o n e is a p ro c e ss of sh o rt-circu it critical th in k in g , it is co n ­ v e n ie n t, m a k es life ea sy , b u t w h a t or w h o s e in te r e s t is in v e s te d in its circu la­ tion? Science se e m s to e x ist b y itself. M ore th a n a su m of 's c ie n tis ts ' it is a d is­ c o u rse a p p e a rin g to b e o n th e sid e of T ru th , b u t like o th e r d isc o u rs e s its b o u n d a ry is a p ra c tic e of exclusion. N ot b y to p ic (scien ce k n o w s all) b u t by th e d isq u alificatio n of c e rta in sp e a k e rs. O ne m u st h a v e w h a t is called o b je ctiv ­ ity. W h a t th is all a d d s u p to is a sty le, a m y th (in B a rth e s ’ s e n s e of d e-p o liticised sp e ec h ) th a t h a s co n n o ta tio n s of th e o b ­ jectiv e. T he m a te ria l of sc ien c e is n a ­ tu re , it rew o rk s n a tu re in to th e n a tu ra l - as n a tu ra l a s te ch n o lo g y . T h e re is n o ­ th in g n a tu ra l or ob jectiv e a b o u t th is p ro ce ss, it is cu ltu ral a n d th e re fo re s u b ­ je c t to th e political, econom ic a n d u n ­ co n scio u s c o n d itio n s of c u ltu re. Science sy p h o n s off th e s e o th e r d e te rm in a n ts like th e p u rita n s e e k s fre ed o m from m oral pollution. T h ere is a lw a y s ideol­ ogy, n e v e r im partiality, w e s p e a k from so m e position. S cience (full of facts) sp e a k s a b o u t 4 SCI ENCE has made it possible David Bate tech n o lo g y , it c a n ta lk a b o u t m icro-proc e sso rs, n u c le a r fu sio n a n d p h o to g rap h y . It c a n u s e p h o to g ra p h y to ta lk a b o u t th e s e o th e r th in g s . Firm ly lo c a te d w ith in th e d isc o u rse of scien ce, th e 'scientific' p h o to g ra p h a p p e a rs - scientific, Its c re d e n tia ls a re b o u g h t th ro u g h facts: th e d a te , tim e, film u se d , exposu re , w h o to o k th e im a g e a n d finally th e u b iq u ito u s ca p tio n . P h o to g ra p h s cann o t b e in trin sically scientific, only app ro p ria te d . Science has made it possible Scientific frameworks MOTHER MENTIONED HER BODY OF WORK It I THE ARMS WERE OPERATIONAL DESPITE SUPERVISION THE WITNESS CONCEALED EVIDENCE FROM THE PROCEEDINGS P h o to g ra p h s from th e S cience M u seu m : 1 T h e p e rsp e c tiv e room 2 M o o n scap e 3 V ictorian k itc h e n 4 Body s c a n n e r d isp lay 5 T elep h o to le n s ex h ib it 5 Scientific frameworks on Foucault: disciplinary power and photography David Green R ecen tly th e w r itin g s of th e F rench h istorian and p hilosoph er, M ichel Foucault, h ave b een in cr ea sin g ly w id e ly r e v ie w e d in th is cou n try a n d if th e ir re c e p tio n h a s n o t a lw a y s b e e n e n ­ tirely fav o u rab le th e c o n s e n s u s h a s b e e n th a t th e y m e rit carefu l c o n s id e ra ­ tion. F o u c a u lt’s influ en ce, h o w ev e r, h a s b e e n la rg e ly co n fin ed to th e re a lm s of ac ad e m ia . T h u s o n e s u s p e c ts th a t th e p o te n tia l v alu e of h is id e a s to cu ltu ral p ra c titio n e rs w o rk in g w ith in a n o p p o si­ tio n a l p olitics h a s y e t to b e fully rea lise d . It is, th e re fo re , w ith th e aim of e x te n d in g th e a u d ie n c e for his id e a s th a t I shall a tte m p t h e re to briefly r e ­ c a p itu la te th e p rin cip al c o m p o n e n ts of F o u c a u lt's w ork, to tra c e th e tra je c to ry of h is a rg u m e n ts a n d to a s s e s s th e im ­ p o rta n c e a n d u s e of h is co n clu sio n s for a c o n te m p o ra ry c u ltu ra l p olitics of p h o to g ra p h y . P o w er/K n ow led ge F o u c a u lt’s w ritin g s a re n o to rio u sly 'dif­ ficult' b u t th e c h a lle n g e to th e re a d e r is n o t so m u ch a t th e level of la n g u a g e or te rm in o lo g y b u t w ith h is g e n e ra l r e ­ fu sal to a c k n o w le d g e th e tra d itio n a l b o u n d a rie s of a c ad e m ic d isciplines. T he m ain b o d y of F o u c a u lt's w o rk ca n b e sa id to b e lo c ate d w ith in th e h isto ry of id e a s or m o re specifically w ith in th e h isto ry of scien ce. Initially, h o w ev e r, F o u c a u lt’s p o in ts of d e p a rtu re se e m bew ild erin g ly d iv e rse : from h is earlier s tu d ie s of p sy ch o lo g y in M a d n e s s a n d C ivilisation (1961) a n d th e b irth of m o d ­ e m m ed icin e in T h e B irth o f th e Clinic (1963), th ro u g h th e m u ch m o re a p p a ­ re n tly eclectic g ro u p in g of philology, biology a n d political eco n o m y to b e fo u n d in T he O rder o f T h in g s (1966), to th e stu d y of crim inology in D iscipline a n d P u n ish m e n t (1975) a n d finally to th e p ro je c te d six vo lu m e an a ly sis in T he H isto ry o f S e x u a h ty (1976). Y et b e h in d th e in v e stig a tio n s of th e s e v arie d p h e n o m e n a lie tw o c e n tra l in te rc o n ­ n e c tin g th e m e s : th e d e v e lo p m e n t of c e rta in form s of ra tio n a lity w h ic h p o sit 'm a n ' a s b o th th e su b je c t a n d o b je c t of k n o w le d g e ; secondly, th e com plex re la ­ tio n s b o n d in g p o w e r a n d k n o w le d g e w h ic h a re im plicit to su c h form s of r a ­ tio n ality. T h e h isto ric al focus of 6 F o u c a u lt’s w o rk h a s th u s b e e n th a t m o ­ m e n t w h e n m a n c o n s titu te s h im s e lf in W este rn cu ltu re a s b o th th a t w h ich m u s t b e c o n c e iv e d o f a n d th a t w h ich m u s t b e k n o w n , th a t is th e p erio d of th e la te e ig h te e n th a n d early n in e te e n th ce n tu ry . Prior to th is, h e h a s arg u e d , th e re w a s no specific d o m ain of k n o w ­ le d g e p ro p e r to ‘m a n ’ him self. T h e m o d ­ e rn n o tio n of m a n a s a u n ita ry a n d u lti­ m a tely k n o w a b le su b je c t is th e p ro d u c t of a n h isto rical p ro c e ss a n d o n e th a t is fo rm u late d in th e a p p e a ra n c e of all th a t w e u n d e r s ta n d to d a y b y th e h u m a n a n d social sc ien c es. F o u c a u lt’s w o rk c a n th e n b e s t b e v ie w e d a s a n a tte m p t to u n d e r s ta n d h o w th e h u m a n a n d social sc ie n c e s b e c a m e h isto rically p o ssib le, to m a p o u t th e c o n d itio n s th a t e n a b le d th e ir em e rg e n c e , a n d to in d ic a te th e c o n s e q u e n c e s of th e ir ex iste n ce. T he fulcru m of th e s e in v e stig a tio n s h a s b e e n th e id e a th a t th e h u m a n a n d social sc ie n c e s re p r e s e n t n o t only th e e m e rg e n c e of n e w form s of k n o w le d g e a b o u t 'm a n ' b u t also th e d e v e lo p m e n t of n e w form s a n d m o d a lities of p o w e r ov er m an. T h e reflexive rela tio n s of p o w e r a n d k n o w le d g e w h ich F o u cau lt h a s s o u g h t to d e fin e re q u ire a fu n d a ­ m e n ta l sh ift in o u r u s u a l u n d e rs ta n d in g of th e s e co n c e p ts. T h u s p o w e r c a n n o t b e re g a rd e d only, a s it o fte n h a s b ee n , as a n e g a tiv e force w h ic h m a k e s itself k n o w n th ro u g h th e o p e ra tio n s of re p ­ ressio n , exclu sio n , lim itatio n or c e n so r­ ship. P o w e r m u st also b e re c o g n ise d in its p o sitiv e form s w h e n it e n a b le s th e p ro d u ctio n of k n o w le d g e : . . . th e p ro b le m is n o t th e refo re th a t o f d e te rm in in g h o w p o w e r s u b ju g a te s k n o w le d g e a n d m a k e s it s e rv e its en d s, or h o w it im p rin ts its m a rk on k n o w ­ led g e, im p o s e s on it ideological h m its. N o b o d y o f k n o w le d g e can b e fo rm e d w ith o u t a s y s te m o f co m m u n ica tio n , re ­ cords, a ccu m u la tio n a n d d isp la c e m e n t w h ic h is in its e lf a fo rm o f p o w e r a n d w h ich is h n ke d , in its e x is te n c e a n d fu n c tio n in g , to th e o th e r fo rm s o f p o w e r. C o n v ersely n o p o w e r can b e e x e r c ise d w ith o u t th e extra ctio n , a p ­ propriation, d istrib u tio n or re te n tio n o f k n o w le d g e . On th is level, th e re is n o t k n o w le d g e on th e o n e sid e a n d so c ie ty on th e other, or sc ie n c e a n d th e sta te , b u t o n ly th e fu n d a m e n ta l fo rm s o f p o w e r /k n o w le d g e . . . ’ F o u c a u lt's in s is te n c e on th e rec o g n itio n of th e p o sitiv e, p ro d u c tiv e c h a ra c te ris­ tic s of m o d e rn m o d a lities of p o w e r of­ fers a n a lte rn a tiv e to th e ideological c ritiq u e of sc ie n c e in w h ic h p o w e r a p ­ p e a rs only a s a co rru p t or d isto rtiv e force. If th e k n o w le d g e s of ‘m a n ’ p ro ­ v id ed b y th e h u m a n a n d social sc ie n c e s a re a b le to se rv e th e n e e d s of p o w e r th is is n o t a ttrib u ta b le to th e veils of ideo lo g ical m y stificatio n b u t to th e ir ab ility to d efin e a c e rta in field of em p iri­ cal tru th , w h a t F o u c a u lt h a s called a 'p o litics’ or ‘reg im e of tr u th ’. P o w er, th e re fo re , d o e s n o t s ta n d o u tsid e of tr u th a s th e p o te n tia l tra n s g r e s s o r of th e b o u n d a rie s of le g itim a te scien tific k n o w le d g e ; p o w e r is itse lf alre ad y tr u th a n d th e v ery te rra in u p o n w h ich k n o w le d g e is p o ssib le: T h e im p o rta n t th in g here, I b eliev e, is th a t tru th is n 't o u tsid e p o w e r, or la c k­ in g in p o w e r: co n tra ry to th e m y th w h o s e h isto ry w o u ld re p a y fu rth e r stu d y , tru th is n 't th e re w a rd o f fre e spirits, th e child o f p r o te c te d so litu d e, n o r th e p riv ile g e o f th o s e w h o h a v e s u c ­ c e e d e d in lib e ra tin g th e m s e lv e s. T ruth is a th in g o f th is w orld: it is p ro d u c e d o n ly b y virtu e o f m u ltip le fo rm s o f c o n ­ stra in t. A n d it in d u c e s reg u la r e ffe c ts o f On Foucault Scientific frameworks pow er. Each so ciety h as its regim e o f truth, its ‘general politics' o f truth: th a t is, the ty p e s o f discourse w hich it ac­ cep ts and m a kes function as true: th e m echan ism s and in sta n ces which en a ­ ble one to distinguish b e tw e e n true and false sta te m e n ts, th e m ea n s b y w hich each is sanctioned: th e tech n iq u es and procedures accorded value in th e ac­ quisition o f truth; th e s ta tu s o f those w ho are charged w ith saying w hat counts as true.2 F o u cau lt is n o t n e c e s sa rily co n ­ c e rn e d w ith th e 'c o r re c tn e s s ’ or o th e r­ w ise of th e co n c e p ts, m e th o d s a n d co n ­ te n t of th e m o d e rn sc ie n c e s b u t w ith th e effect of p o w e r w h ich is linked to th e institution and functioning o f an or­ ganised scientific discourse w ith in so ci­ ety. It is a q u e s tio n of w h a t a n d w h o g o v e rn s scientific s ta te m e n ts so a s to c o n s titu te a s e t of p ro p o sitio n s, a d is­ cu rsiv e form ation, w h ic h is a c c e p te d as tru e ; A t this level it is not so m uch a m a tter kn o w in g w h a t external p o w er im poses its e lf on science, as w h a t e f­ fe c ts o f p o w e r circulate am ong scien ­ tific sta tem en ts. D is c ip lin a ry P o w e r F o u c a u lt's m o st w id ely re a d w o rk Dis­ cipline and P unishm ent, first p u b lis h e d in 1975, re tu rn s to th e a n a ly sis of a sin g le d isc o u rs e /in s titu tio n rela tio n w h ich h a d p ro v id ed th e s tr u c tu re of his ea rlier s tu d ie s of M a d n ess and Civilisa­ tion a n d The Birth o f th e Clinic. It c h a rts th e o rigins of th e p riso n a n d th e d e ­ v elo p m en t of m o d e rn p en o lo g y d u rin g th e e ig h te e n th a n d early n in e te e n th c e n tu rie s . B ut in th is w o rk especially, th e im p licatio n s of F o u c a u lt’s an a ly sis re a c h far b e y o n d h is im m e d ia te su b je c t m a tte r, a n d th e b ro a d e r th e m e of th e book is th e e m e rg e n c e of a n en tirely n e w form of p o w e r a n d m e a n s of dom i­ n a tio n w h ich d efine, w h a t F o u c a u lt h a s called, a ‘d iscip lin ary so c ie ty ’. T he e m e rg e n c e of th is n e w form of p o w e r is tra c e d th ro u g h th e c h a n g e s w h ich o ccur in th e c o n c e p t of p u n is h m e n t from a sy ste m of re trib u tio n to a sy ste m of reform . It involves th e g ra d u a l r e ­ p la c e m e n t of ty p e s of p u n ish m e n t w h ich a re sp e c ta c u la r, ritu a listic an d m a n ifestly violent, a n d in w h ic h th e b o d y of th e o ffe n d er w a s th e d irec t an d im m e d ia te ta r g e t of re trib u tio n , b y a m o re m o d e st, d isc re te a n d s u b tle m e a n s of co rrec tio n a n d tra in in g w h o se ta r g e t w a s no lo n g e r th e b o d y of th e of­ fe n d e r b u t h is ’so u l’, u n d e rs to o d in te rm s of su b jectiv ity , c o n sc io u sn e ss and p erso n a lity . It w ould, sa y s F o u cau lt, b e a m is ta k e to s e e th e s e c h a n g e s sim ply a s th e in e v ita b le triu m p h of re a so n ov er b a rb a rism , th e re p la c e m e n t of a ty ran n ical a n d b ru ta l reg im e b y a m ore h u m a n e a n d b e n e v o ­ le n t sy ste m . It w a s, of co u rse, p rec isely th e s e th in g s b u t it w a s also th e im ­ p le m e n ta tio n of a m ore p e rv a siv e an d m o re c a lc u la te d form of p o w e r a t th e h e a rt of w h ich lay th e ex e rc ise of d isc ip ­ line: Discipline m a y b e identified neith er w ith an institution nor w ith an ap­ paratus; it is a typ e o f pow er, a m o d ­ ality for its exercise, com prising a w hole s e t o f instrum ents, techniques, proce­ dures, levels o f application, targets; it is a ‘ h y sic s' or an anatom y o f pow er, a p technology3 F o re m o st a m o n g st th is 'tec h n o lo g y ' of discip lin ary pow er a re th e m e c h a n ism s of su rv eillan c e for w h ich Je re m y B e n th a m ’s 'P a n o p tic a n ' p ro ­ v id e d th e id e al m odel. A s originally e n ­ v isa g e d b y B e n th a m th e P an o p tic an w a s an a rc h ite c tu ra l co n stru c tio n : a c e n tra l to w e r is en c lo se d by a circular b u ild in g w h o s e cellu lar s p a c e s a re o p e n on th e in sid e a n d th e ir o c c u p a n ts ex ­ p o se d to th e u n re m ittin g g a z e th e to w e r affords. In th is field of u n in te r ­ r u p te d visibility, in w h ich only th e o b ­ se rv e r re m a in s u n se e n , it b e c o m e s p o s ­ sib le to co m p are in d iv id u als to ea ch o th e r a n d to im p o se a sy ste m of form al eq u a lity , th e re b y ex e rcisin g a n o rm alis­ in g ju d g e m e n t. Y et b y p ro v id in g th e m e a s u re of co m p ariso n th e m e c h a n ism s of su rv eillan c e m ak e it p o ssib le to g a u g e d iffe ren ce s b e tw e e n individuals. S u rv eillan ce is ab o v e all a n ex e rc ise of h ie ra rc h ic al o b se rv a tio n . T h e P a n o p tic a n w a s th e p e rfe c t m a n ­ ife sta tio n of d iscip lin ary p o w e r a n d th e p rin cip les of its fu n ctio n in g - if n o t r e ­ plication of its a rc h ite c tu ra l form — co u ld b e u tilise d in a v a rie ty of c o n te x ts o th e r th a n th e p e n a l in s titu tio n s for w h ic h it w a s in te n d e d . In th e ex te n sio n of its m e c h a n ism s of s u rv eillan c e a n d in th e co in cid e n ce of th e o rg a n isa tio n of th e p rison , th e h o sp ital, th e school a n d th e factory, th e d iscip lin ary te ch n o lo g y of 'p a n o p tic ism ' becam e d iffu sed th ro u g h o u t so ciety . T h u s w h ilst th e ini­ tial d e v e lo p m e n t of th e te ch n o lo g y of d iscip lin ary p o w e r m ay h av e b e e n d i­ r e c te d to w a rd s p ro h ib itiv e a n d r e p r e s ­ siv e fu n c tio n s its s u b s e q u e n t p ro lifera­ tio n in d ic a te s a n in h e re n tly p ro d u c tiv e a n d p o sitiv e cap acity . Discipline and P unishm ent s ta k e s o u t m o re clearly th a n an y o th e r of F o u c a u lt's w ritin g s th e c o n c e p tio n of th e n e c e s s a ry in te rd e p e n d e n c e of p o w e r a n d k n o w led g e , a c o n c e p tio n of p o w e r/k n o w le d g e rela tio n s. In d e e d it w o u ld b e im p o ssib le to co n ceiv e of th e e m e rg e n c e of th e form s of d iscip lin ary p o w e r w ith o u t th e e m e rg e n c e of a n a c ­ co m p an y in g field of k n o w le d g e w h ich p e rm e a te s a n d s u s ta in s th e m . T h e specific te c h n iq u e s of su rv eillan ce, d o c u m e n ta tio n a n d a d m in istra tio n of in d iv id u als w h ic h a re c o n s titu tiv e of th e form s of d iscip lin ary p o w e r a re th e p ro d u c t of th o s e n e w ‘ra tio n a litie s', th o s e n e w k in d s of k n o w le d g e a b o u t ‘m a n ’, th e h u m a n a n d social sc ien c es. T h e p ro v e n a n c e of th e h u m a n a n d s o ­ cial sc ie n c e s c a n n o t b e lo c a te d in so m e d is in te r e s te d se a rc h for p u re k n o w ­ le d g e sin c e th e ir o rig in s a re b o u n d to th e b irth of th o s e d iscip lin ary in s titu ­ tio n s - th e p riso n , th e asylum , th e h o s ­ p ital, th e school, th e facto ry - of w h a t F o u cau lt h a s called, th e 'c a rc e ra l n e t­ w o rk ’. The carceral netw ork, in its com pact or dissem inated forms, w ith its sy s te m s o f insertion, distribution, surveillance, ob­ servation, has been the g rea test su p ­ port in m odern society o f the norm alis­ ing pow er. The carceral textu re o f soci­ e ty assures both th e real capture o f the b o d y and its perpetual observation; it is, b y its very nature, the apparatus o f p u n ish m e n t that conform s m o st com ­ p le te ly to the n e w econom y o f p o w er and the in stru m en t for the formation of kn o w led g e th a t this very econom y needs. Its panoptic functioning enables it to p la y this double role. By virtue o f its m eth o d s o f fixing, dividing, record­ ing, it has b een one o f th e sim plest, crudest, also m o st concrete, b u t perhaps m ost indispensable conditions for the d evelopm ent o f th e im m en se ac­ tivity o f exam ination that ha s objec­ tified hum an behaviour. . . .1 am not saying that th e hum an sciences em erged from the prison. But, if th e y have b een able to produce so m a n y p ro ­ found changes . . . it is because th e y have b een conveyed b y a specific and n e w m odality o f pow er: a certain policy o f the body, a certain w a y o f rendering th e accum ulation o f m en docile and useful. This policy required th e involve­ m e n t o f definite relations o f pow er; it called for a technique o f overlapping subjection and objectification; it brought w ith it n e w procedures ofin d ividuahsm. The carceral n etw o rk consti­ tu te d one o f the arm atures o f this p o w er/kn o w led g e that has m a d e the hum an sciences historically possible. K now able m an (soul, individuality, con­ sciousness, conduct, w h a tever it is cal­ led) is the object-effect o f this analytical in vestm en t, o f this dom ination-observa­ tion .4 F o u c a u lt’s c o n c e p t of p o w e r/k n o w ­ le d g e re la tio n s a s in te g ra l to th e ex is­ te n c e a n d fu n ctio n in g of th e m o d e rn 7 On Foucault Scientific frameworks h u m a n a n d social sc ie n c e s ta k e s one b e y o n d th e id e a th a t p o w e r is alw a y s lo c a te d a n d e m a n a te s from a c e n tra l n e x u s of d o m in a tio n w h e th e r th is is s e e n as a n individual, a ru lin g cla ss or th e s ta te to a co n c e p tio n of m ultiple form s of d o m in a tio n w h ic h p e rm e a te th e social fabric. P o w e r is n o t so m u ch p o s s e s s e d a s ex e rc ise d th ro u g h th e m y riad in s titu tio n s a n d d isc u rsiv e p ra c ­ tic e s th a t e x ist a t all lev els of social life. C learly th is h a s c o n s e q u e n c e s for th e an a ly sis of p o w e r h e n c e th e c o n c e p t fo rm u late d by F o u cau lt of a ‘m icro­ p h y sic s of p o w e r’ w h ic h s e e k s to rev e al h o w th e m e c h a n ism s of p o w e r in a d is­ ciplinary so ciety o p e ra te ro u tin e ly a t th e level of ev e ry d ay life, lo c alised in th e m in u tia e of social rela tio n s, p r e s e n t in th e p ro saic e n c o u n te r of crim inal a n d crim inologist, p a tie n t a n d doctor, p u p il a n d te a c h e r, child a n d p a re n t. T h e P o litic s of th e Body A c o n s is te n t th e m e in F o u c a u lt's w o rk an d , in p articu la r, in h is a n a ly sis of d is­ cipline h a s b e e n w ith th o s e form s or ta c tic s of p o w e r w h ic h h a v e b e e n di­ r e c te d to w a rd s, p e rh a p s o n e could sa y in sc rib ed u p o n , th e body. T h e se form s or ta c tic s of p o w e r a re n o t m a n ife st as p h y sic al v iolence - in d e e d th e b o d y is to u c h e d a s little a s p o ssib le. R a th e r it is th e c a s e th a t th is p o w e r is re a lise d only b y th e su b je c tio n of th e b o d y a s th e o b ­ je c t of k n o w led g e ; a n d th e fu n ctio n of th is p o w e r lies in its ability to e x tra c t k n o w led g e , n o t p ain , from th e body. It is, I b elieve, in th is an a ly sis of h o w an d w h y th e b o d y b ec o m e s, a t a c e rta in m o­ m e n t in tim e, th e n e x u s of p o w e r/k n o w le d g e re la tio n s in a discip lin ary so ciety th a t F o u c a u lt's w o rk h a s b e e n of th e m o st p ro fo u n d im p o rta n ce . H is co n c ern w ith a n d h isto ric al co n c e p tio n of th e b ody, or, m ore precisely, w ith th o s e d is­ c o u rse s of th e b o d y w h ic h a re alw a y s h isto rically situ a te d , h a s p e rm itte d an u n d e rs ta n d in g of th e e n try of th e b o d y in to th e s p h e re of p o litic s: T h e b o d y is d ire ctly in v o lv e d in a p o liti­ cal field; p o w e r rela tio n s h a v e an im ­ m e d ia te h old u p o n it: th e y in v e s t it, m a rk it, train it, to rtu re it, force it to carry o u t ta sk s, to p erfo rm c e re m o n ie s a n d to e m it sig n s. T h e p o h tica l in v e s t­ m e n t o f th e b o d y is b o u n d up, in accor­ d a n c e w ith c o m p le x reciprocal rela­ tions, w ith its ec o n o m ic u se; it is larg ely a s a fo rce o f p ro d u c tio n th a t th e b o d y is in v e s te d w ith re la tio n s o f p o w e r a n d d o m in a tio n ; b u t, on th e o th e r h a n d , its c o n stitu tio n a s lab o u r p o w e r is p o ssib le o n ly i f it is c a u g h t u p in a s y s te m o f s u b ­ je ctio n . . . th e b o d y b e c o m e s a u se fu l fo rce o n ly i f it is b o th a p r o d u c tiv e b o d y a n d a s u b ju g a te d b o d y .5 F o u c a u lt's ea rlier h isto ric al stu d ie s, co v ers th e p e rio d of th e e ig h te e n th a n d early n in e te e n th c e n tu rie s . T he d e ­ v e lo p m e n ts of th o s e p h e n o m e n a h e is c o n c e rn e d w ith a re th e re fo re co n tin ­ g e n t to a se rie s of p ro fo u n d d e m o g ­ rap h ic, political, social a n d cu ltu ral c h a n g e s c o n s e q u e n t u p o n th e rise of in­ d u stria l cap italism . T h e q u e s tio n is if 8 ju n c tu re , a n d b y m e a n s o f a certain n u m b e r o f tra n sfo rm a tio n s, h a v e b e g u n to b e c o m e eco n o m ica lly u se fu l.5 th e e m e rg e n c e of th e form s of discipli­ n a ry p o w e r w h ic h F o u c a u lt h a s a n a ly se d in te rm s of q u ite specific d is­ cu rsiv e a n d in stitu tio n a l p ra c tic e s a re re la te d to th e s e o th e r lev els of th e so ­ cial form atio n an d , if so, in w h a t m a n n e r a re th e y re la te d . H e is carefu l to d is­ ta n c e h im self from a sim p le c a u sa l re la ­ tio n b a s e d u p o n th e M arx ist p rin cip le of econom ic d ete rm in a tio n : I b e lie v e th a t a n y th in g can b e d e d u c e d from th e g e n e ra l p rin c ip le o f th e d o m i­ n a tio n o f th e b o u rg e o is class. W h a t n e e d s to b e d o n e is s o m e th in g q u ite d if­ feren t. O ne n e e d s to in v e s tig a te h isto ri­ cally, a n d b e g in n in g from th e lo w e s t level, h o w m e c h a n is m s o f p o w e r h a v e b e e n able to fu n ctio n . . . .W e n e e d to s e e h o w th e s e m e c h a n is m s o f p o w e r, a t a g iv e n m o m e n t, in a p re c ise co n ­ F o u cau lt g o e s o n to s u g g e s t th a t it is n o t th e ex clu sio n of th e crim inal a n d th e in sa n e w h ic h s e rv e d th e in te r e s ts of th e b o u rg e o isie b u t th e te c h n iq u e s a n d p ro ­ c e d u re s th e m s e lv e s of su c h a n ex clu ­ sion. It w a s th e a c tu a l m e c h a n ism s of d iscip lin ary p o w er, th e a p p a r a tu s e s of su rv eillan ce, w h ic h b e c o m e politically u se fu l a n d le n t th e m s e lv e s to econom ic profit. In th e c a s e of th e facto ry or w o rk ­ sh o p d iscip lin e m ay h a v e b e e n ev o k ed a s a m o ral in c e n tiv e b u t th e im p o rta n ce of d iscip lin e in c re a sin g ly b ec o m e o n e of m ax im isin g p ro d u ctiv ity a n d th e re b y th e p ro fitab ility of lab o u r. T h e p h y sical d ivision of s p a c e a n d th e im p o sed s e g re g a tio n of in d iv id u als, th e carefully co n tro lled rh y th m of a c tiv itie s a n d th e im p o sitio n of rigid te m p o ra l s e q u e n c e s, b e c a m e co m m o n fe a tu re s of b o th th e p riso n a n d th e w o rk p lace. It is th is ‘ec o n o m y ’ of p o w e r w h ic h d is tin ­ g u is h e s d iscip lin e a n d w h ich p ro m p ts F o u c a u lt to v ie w it a s o n e o f th e g rea t in v e n tio n s o f b o u rg e o is s o c ie ty a n d as a fu n d a m e n ta l in s tr u m e n t o f in d u stria l ca p ita lism a n d th e ty p e o f s o c ie ty w h ich is its a cc o m p a n im en t. T h e e m e rg e n c e of a d iscip lin ary soci­ e ty c o rre sp o n d s to a p a rtic u la r h isto ri­ cal c o n ju n c tu re : th e g ro w th of n e w m o d e s of p ro d u c tio n c e n tre d u p o n th e facto ry a n d th e in c re a se of p o p u la tio n c o n c e n tra te d w ith in u rb a n com ­ m u n ities. T h e m e c h a n ism s of discipline, w h ic h F o u c a u lt d e s c rib e s a t le n g th in D iscipline a n d P u n ish m e n t, g a v e rise to a p o litica l a n a to m y o f th e b o d y, a cer­ tain w a y o f re n d e rin g th e a ccu m u la tio n o f m en docile a n d u sefu l. T he te c h n iq u e s of d iscip lin ary p o w e r e n a ­ b le d th e im p ro v e m e n t of th e efficiency a n d p ro fitab ility of lab o u r. In so far th a t d iscip lin e is a p o w e r w h ic h e n g a g e s a n d in filtra te s th e p h y sic al cap ab ilities of in d iv id u als c a u g h t w ith in its m e c h a n ism s w e c a n s p e a k of a politics of th e b ody. B u t d iscip lin ary p o w e r also e n g a g e d th e b o d y a s a ‘sp e c ie s' b o d y a n d it g a v e rise to a ‘p o litics of p o p u la ­ tio n ’, th e focus of w h ic h w a s a se rie s of re g u la to ry co n tro ls effectiv e a t th e level of th e ‘so c ial’. A s th e p ro b lem s c a u s e d b y th e ra p id e x p a n sio n of u rb a n p o p u la ­ tio n s b e c a m e m o re e v id e n t th e n e e d for p o litical co n tro l a n d in te rv e n tio n b e ­ ca m e m o re n e c e s sa ry . In th is c o n te x t th e b o d y to o k on a n e w a n d cru cial im ­ p o rta n c e a s th e b e a re r of th o s e q u a l­ ities of fertility, h e a lth a n d sic k n ess, s tr e n g th a n d w e a k n e ss, w h ic h w e re s e e n a s v ita l to th e fu tu re of so c iety an d th e n a tio n a s a w h o le. H en ce w e ca n u n d e r s ta n d th e sig n ifican ce a n d im p o r­ ta n c e of th e p ro liferatio n of th e d is­ c o u rse s of se x in th e n in e te e n th c e n tu ry a n a ly se d b y F o u c a u lt in T h e H isto ry o f S exu a lity. C o n tra ry to th e p o p u la r m y th w h a t is in volved in th is ‘in c ite m e n t to d isc o u rs e ' is n o t a re n u n c ia tio n of p le a ­ s u re n o r a re je c tio n of th e flesh b u t an in te n sific atio n of th e b o d y th ro u g h th e On Foucault Scientific frameworks co n c ern for its h e a lth a n d vitality. T he o rg a n isa tio n a n d th e a rtic u la tio n of th e d isc o u rs e s of se x u a lity in th e n in e te e n th c e n tu ry p ro d u c e d a n e w c o n c e p tio n of th e b o d y w h ic h b e c a m e th e focus of discipline n o t only as a m e a n s to re n d e r it m o re p ro d u c tiv e b u t also m ore m orally a n d phy sically h e a l­ th y . T h e effect of th is w a s to su b je c t th e b o d y in a n e v e r m ore d e ta ile d w a y to e n d le s s m edical a n d p sychological e x a m in a tio n a n d to th e m e c h a n ism s of su rv eillan ce. P h o to g ra p h y a n d P o w e r P h o to g ra p h y h a s b e e n h isto rically im ­ p o r ta n t to th e fo rm a tio n of th e d is­ c o u rse s of th e b o d y w h ic h h a v e b e e n su c h a vital c o n s titu e n t of discip lin ary p o w er. In p a r t th is w a s d u e to th e w id e ­ sp re a d b elief in th e o b jectiv e n a tu re of th e p h o to g ra p h ic p ro c e ss w h ic h e n ­ su re d its p riv ile g ed p o sitio n in th e p ro ­ c e d u re s of scientific in v e stig a tio n an d w h ic h m e a n t th a t th e p h o to g ra p h ic im a g e w o u ld b e re g a rd e d a s a form of em p irical tr u th or ev id en c e of th e real. B ut clearly involved h e re w a s n o t th e d isco v ery of p re -e x is te n t tr u th s w h ich th e ca m e ra so m e tic u lo u sly re v e a le d b u t th e c o n s tru c tio n of n e w k in d s of k n o w le d g e a b o u t th e in d iv id u al in te rm s of visible p hysiological fe a tu re s b y w h ic h it is p o ssib le to m e a su re a n d co m p are ea c h in d iv id u al to a n o th e r. P h o to g ra p h y , th e re fo re , w a s c o n tin g e n t to o th e r m e th o d s u s e d in th e o b s e rv a ­ tio n a n d classificatio n of individuals, form ing a p a r t of th e m e c h a n ism s of su rv eillan c e a n d th e e x e rc ise of a n o r­ m alising, discip lin ary p o w er. T h e com pilation of p h o to g ra p h ic re ­ cords, o fte n u s e d in co n ju n ctio n w ith te c h n iq u e s of p hysiological m e a s u re ­ m e n t a n d w ritte n d o cu m e n ta tio n , b e ­ ca m e com m on p ra c tic e for a v a rie ty of scien tific discip lin es. T h e em p lo y m e n t of p h o to g ra p h y in th e fields of a n ­ th ro p o logy, m e d icin e a n d crim inology, in p articu la r, d ra w s to g e th e r a w h o le se rie s of d isc u rsiv e o p e ra tio n s levelled a t th e b o d y a n d o rg a n ise d alo n g th e a x e s of race, cla ss or g e n d e r. S ub ject to th e g a z e of th e c a m e ra th e b o d y b e ­ ca m e th e o b je c t of th e c lo se st scrutiny, its su rfa ce co n tin u ally ex a m in e d for th e sig n s of its in n a te physical, m e n ta l an d m o ral inferiority. F rom th is sc ie n c e of co rp o rea l se m io tics th e re e m e rg e d n e w form s of k n o w le d g e a b o u t th e in d i­ v id u al a n d n e w w a y s of m a p p in g d e ­ prav ity. T h e se sim ple, alm o st b a n a l im ­ a g e s c a n n o t re v e a l th e full com plexity of th e p o w e r/k n o w le d g e rela tio n s w h ich lie b e h in d th e ir su rfa c e b u t, as Jo h n T a g g h a s in d ic ated , th e y re ta in th e tra c e s of th e ir fu n ctio n in g : The bo d y isolated; th e narrow space; the subjection to an unreturnable gaze; th e scrutiny o f gestu res, faces and fe a ­ tures; th e clarity o f illum ination and sharpness o f focus; th e n a m es and the n u m b er o f boards: th e se are th e traces o f pow er, reduplicated in num berless im ages, rep ea ted cou n tless tim es, w h en ever th e photographer prepared an exposure, in police cell, prison, con­ sultation room, asylum , H om e or school.7 T h e h isto ric al in v e stig a tio n of p h o to ­ g ra p h y a s a m e c h a n ism of su rv eillan ce in th e ex e rcise of d iscip lin ary p o w e r r e ­ m ain s an im p o rta n t in itiativ e. T h e w ork of J o h n T ag g , m y self a n d o th e rs h av e b e g u n th is ta s k th ro u g h a se rie s of a n a ly se s w h ic h h a v e c o n c e n tra te d u p o n th e u s e s of p h o to g ra p h y in th e la te n in e te e n th c e n tu ry w ith in su c h fields a s crim inology, m ed icin e, a n ­ th ro p o lo g y a n d eu g e n ic s. B ut an h isto ri­ cal p e rsp e c tiv e is only n e c e s sa ry an d d e fe n d a b le a s a m e a n s of h elp in g u s to u n d e r s ta n d th e p r e s e n t a n d allo w in g u s to c r e a te th e a p p ro p ria te a n d effectiv e m e a n s of w o rk in g stra te g ic a lly w ith in th e re la tio n s of p o w e r a n d k n o w le d g e w h ic h cu rre n tly e n d u re . T h e force an d v a lu e of F o u c a u lt's id e a s a re o w e d to th e fac t th a t w e c o n tin u e to live in a so c ie ty w h ic h is c h a ra c te rise d , p e rh a p s in c re a sin g ly so, b y th e form s of d isc ip ­ line a n d m e c h a n ism s of su rv eillan ce w h ic h h e h a s id en tified . H o w ev er, a m ajor criticism of F o u c a u lt’s w o rk h as b e e n th a t it c r e a te s a p ic tu re of so ciety in w h ic h th e p re s e n c e of p o w e r is so p erv a siv e, so d iffu se a n d p o ly m o rp h o u s th a t it w o u ld a p p e a r to m ak e im p lau si­ b le an y form of re sis ta n c e . F o u c a u lt’s re s p o n s e h a s b e e n to in sist th a t w h e r e ­ v e r th e r e is p o w e r th e re is th e p o te n tia l for its re sis ta n c e . B ut ju s t a s th e form s of p o w e r a re lo calised a n d specific so sh o u ld b e th e form s of re sis ta n c e . W e m u s t e n g a g e p o w e r a t th e p o in ts of its a p p lica tio n a n d o p era tio n ; th a t is, w ith in th e p a rtic u la r d o m a in s of k n o w ­ le d g e a n d th e p a rtic u la r in stitu tio n s th ro u g h w h ic h it is o p era tiv e. This m e a n s th a t th e re c a n n o t b e a n o verall s tr a te g y for a n o p p o sitio n al c u ltu ral p olitics of p h o to g ra p h y ; on th e c o n tra ry it is n e c e s s a ry to d ev e lo p a lte rn a tiv e w a y s of w o rk in g w ith p h o to g ra p h y , a n d to d ev e lo p d iffe ren t p h o to g ra p h ic form s a n d d e v ic e s s u ita b le to th e v a rie d co n ­ te x ts in w h ich th e p h o to g ra p h is p la ce d a n d u se d . 1 Quoted in Sheridan, The Will to Truth, p 131. 2 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p 131 3 Foucault. Discipline & Punishm ent, p.215. 4 Discipline & Punishm ent, pp.304-5. 5 Discipline & Punishment, pp 25-6. 6 Power/Knowledge, pp 100-1 7 Tagg, 'Power and Photography', pp 44-5 Camerawork gratefully acknowledges The Royal Anthropological Institute for perm is­ sion to reproduce photographs S e le c t B ib lio g ra p h y M ajor te x ts b y F o u cau lt M adness and Civilisation Tavistock, 1967 (1961) The Birth o f the Clinic Tavistock, 1973 (1963) The Older o f Things Tavistock, 1970 (1966) The Archaeology o f Knowledge Tavistock, 1972 (1969) Discipline and P unishm ent Allen Lane, 1977 (1975) The History of Sexuality Allen Lane, 1979 (1976) Power/Knowledge (ed C Gordon) Harvester Press, 1980 (dates given in brackets refer to the publication of the original French edition) W orks on F o u cau lt Alan Sheridan, M ichel Foucault: The Will to Truth, Tavistock, 1980 Barry Smart, Foucault, Marxism and Critique, RKP, 1983 Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism and History. Polity Press, 1984 W orks on p h o to g ra p h y w ith refe re n c e to F o u cau lt John Tagg, 'Power and Photography, Screen Education, Autumn 1980, no.36, pp. 17-55. Frank Mort, 'The Domain of the Sexual', Screen Education, Autumn 1980, no.36, pp. 69-84 Frank Mort and Nicholas Green, 'Visual Representation and Cultural Politics', Block, no.7, 1982, p p .59-68. David Green, Classified Subjects: Photography and Anthropology', Ten/8, no. 14, 1984, pp 30-37 Robert McGrath, 'Medical Police', Ten/8, no. 18, 1984, pp.13-18. David Green, A Map of Depravity', Ten/8, no. 18, 1985, pp.36-43. David Green, 'Veins of Resemblance: Francis Galton, photography and eugenics', Oxford Art Journal, vol 7, no. 2, (forthcoming). 9 The illustrations that accompany the foregoing account of one of the most rc.markable scientific undertakings of modern times, boasted the Illustrated Times, have been engraved in every in­ stance from photographs . . . . Scientific fremeworks Photography and the making o f history Brunei’s Great Eastern Steamship 1985 marks the 150th anniversary of the building of the Great Western Rail­ way from London to Bristol, one of Isambard Kingdom Brunei's most noted achievements. This, and other enterprises, are the focus of a new exhibition, B runei's Kingdom . The exhibition, significantly subtitled photography and the making of history, explores ways in which photography, itself an instance of technological development, contributed to the reporting of current events and therefore to the creation of a particular view of nineteenth century 'progress’ that has come to inform our historical perspective. This was especially evident in the case of Brunei's last major project: the Great Eastern 10 steamship - known until after its launch as Leviathan. The exhibition catalogue investigates and charts the role of photography in recording this particular episode in history: • Almost everything about the Great Eastern - its vast scale, its design, its purpose, its method of construction, and, eventually, the dimensions of its commercial failure - was without prece­ dent, even by Brunei's high standards. . . .There was something else com­ pletely new about the Great Eastern as well. Almost from the time when its gargantuan form first began to rise over the mean rooftops of Blackwall in 1854, right through to its troubled launch in the winter of 1857-58, the Great East­ ern was comprehensively photo­ graphed - the first major engineering work, aside from the Sydenham Crystal Palace of 1854, to receive the systema­ tic attention of the new medium. The men who engaged in this work, negotiating the mud and debris of the Napier Yard with their cumbersome photographic equipment, were not there through curiosity, for scientific ex­ periment, or leisure. Nor were they in pursuit of anything that could, by any stretch of the Victorian imagination, be called 'the picturesque’ They were . there consciously to make photographic documents, and they were there for money. • The decade of the 1850s coincided with a significant growth in the extent and influence of the Press, whose role Photography and the making of history Scientific frameworks w a s b e in g tra n sfo rm e d b y social a n d eco n o m ic d e v e lo p m e n ts. T w o o v e rla p ­ p in g e v e n ts c o n trib u te d sig n ifican tly to th is su rg e in th e p rin t m ed ia. O n e w a s th e ab o litio n of th e sta m p d u ty on n e w s p a p e r s in 1855. T h e o th e r w a s th e w a r a g a in s t R u ssia in th e C rim ea (1854-56), w h o s e n o v elty a n d p o p u la r­ ity u n le a s h e d a tre m e n d o u s p u b lic a p ­ p e tite for in form ation. T h e illu stra te d p a p e rs w e re forging n e w a n d v ery m o d e rn links b e tw e e n n e w s a n d im ag ery , le n d in g th e r e p o rt­ in g of e v e n ts a n o th e r d im e n sio n a n d in ­ te n sity . A s th e p o p u la r h u n g e r for w a r in fo rm atio n sp illed o ver in to th e re p o r t­ in g of o th e r c u rre n t e v e n ts, th e Great Eastern d re w c o n sid e ra b le P re ss a t te n ­ tio n , b o th w ritte n an d visual, w h ich a c ­ c e le ra te d a s th e sh ip n e a re d co m p le­ tion. • S te re o c a rd s c o n s iste d of tw o p h o to ­ g ra p h s ta k e n from slig h tly d iffe ren t v ie w p o in ts w h ich , p a s te d sid e by sid e o n a card , c re a te d th e illusion of th re e d im e n sio n s w h e n o b se rv e d th ro u g h a b in o c u lar v iew fin d er. A t th is tim e th e y w e re w ell on th e ir w a y to b ec o m in g th e p o p u la r cra z e w h ich , to g e th e r w ith th e m a ss-p ro d u c tio n of cartes-de-visite p o rtra its , m ark s th e b e g in n in g of th e in d u stria lis a tio n of p h o to g ra p h y . • T h e Great Eastern p h o to g ra p h s of C undall, H o w lett, a n d D o w n es a re r e ­ m a rk a b le in m an y w a y s - in th e ir p ic to ­ rial q u alitie s, in th e skill a n d vision of th e ir m aking, in th e v isu al c a p a b ilitie s th e y so stu n n in g ly rev e al th e y o u n g m ed iu m of p h o to g ra p h y a s p o sse ssin g . V iew ed to d a y , th e y still o p e n u p s c e n e s of g ig a n tic in d u stria l e n te rp ris e w ith a n im p a ct a n d im m ed iacy th a t ca n only h a v e filled th e ir V ictorian a u d ie n c e w ith a m a z e m e n t a n d aw e. B ut th e y a re im p o rta n t for o th e r re a s o n s too. T h ey sh o w th e im p a c t of p h o to g ra p h y on illu stratio n , a n d p ro ­ v id e rich g ro u n d on w h ic h to co m p are p h o to g ra p h ic a n d n o n -p h o to g ra p h ic re p re s e n ta tio n . T h ey sig n a l n e w roles for th e n e w m e d iu m - a s ev id en c e, a s ra w m a te ria l for th e P re ss, as co m ­ m o d ities in th e m a rk e t place. M u ltip lied a n d m o v in g o u t in to th e w o rld — in d i­ rectly via th e illu stra te d p a p e rs, d irectly v ia th e s te re o c a rd — th e Great Eastern p h o to g ra p h s a c q u ire d a n e w sig n ifi­ ca n ce , re -p re s e n tin g e v e n ts w h ich co u ld n o w b e co n su m ed , se c o n d -h a n d , a lm o st a s th e y h a p p e n e d . P h o tao g ra p h y e n tra n c e d th e s e c o n d -h a n d e x ­ p e rie n c e , s e t n e w s ta n d a r d s a n d n e w d im e n sio n s for th e vicario u s c o n s u m p ­ tio n of reality . It b e g a n to co n trib u te , in a v ery m o d e rn w ay , to th e re p o rtin g of c u rre n t e v e n ts - a n d th e re fo re to th e w id e r ch ro n ic les of h isto ria n s. Brunei's Kingdom was researched by Rob Powell and produced by Watershed. An 80page, duo-tone catalogue written by Rob Powell accompanies the exhibition. Dates: Watershed, Bristol (June 11 - July 27); Plymouth Arts Centre (August 3 - August 30); Bradford Museum of Photography (Sep­ tember 10 - October 6). 11 Technology at work A n e le g a n tly d ressed w o m a n is se e n in th e p o se of a sk ille d g y m n a st. The co n tra st b e tw e e n h er s ty le of d ress, a sm artly cut suit, and h er p ose, creates su rp rise, an ap paren t paradox. A rh eto ric al device, fam iliar e n o u g h in a d ­ v ertisin g , is u s e d to in trig u e th e rea d er. T his p a rtic u la r a d v e rtis e m e n t is o n e of a s e rie s p ro m o tin g v ario u s ty p e s of n e w te ch n o lo g y in a m a g a z in e ca lle d W hich C o m p u ter. W e c a n re a d th e im a g e a s th e w o m a n p u ttin g on a p erfo rm an ce , b e in g s e e n b y a h id d e n au d ien c e. A w a re of th e e y e s u p o n her, s h e p lay s h e r p a rt, e v id en tly w ith c o n su m m a te e a se . H er c lo th e s sh o w h e r a s u p w a rd ly m obile, c a p a b le a n d b u sin e sslik e : by e x ten sio n , th e stro n g individual, th e w in n er. A n d th e p o sitio n of h e r body sh o w s a n o th e r sid e of her, a p h y sical s tr e n g th a n d s u p p le n e s s w h ic h co m p le­ m e n ts h e r c o m p e te n c e a n d d e te rm in a ­ tion. U nusually, a n d u n lik e m o st r e p ­ re s e n ta tio n s of w o m en , th is p a rtic u a lr im a g e is n o t a n in v itatio n to a sp e cta cle . T h e re is a c tu a lly n o th in g to se e . W e ca n s e e n e ith e r th e w o m a n ’s face, no r h e r body. W e are, in fact, in v ited to iden tify w ith h e r , ra th e i th a n to f e a s t our ey es. T h ro u g h th e u s e of p ara d o x , th e a d v e r­ tis e m e n t a p p e a ls to th e wom an r e a d e r ’s e x p e rie n c e of d islo catio n b e t­ w e e n th e d iffe ren t p a r ts of h e r life: w o rk e r/tra d e u n io n ist, w o rk e r/d o m e stic w o rk er, s tro n g /w e a k , to u g h /e m o tional, p h ysically fit/e x h a u s te d , healthy/ill, a n d so on. It a p p e a ls to th is e x ­ p erie n ce , b u t sim u lta n e o u sly im p o ses a re so lu tio n to th e s e conflicts - w o rk a n d p lay a re a ssim ila te d in to th e sa m e act. In d ee d , if w e look a t th e c a p tio n it b e ­ co m es obvious th a t th e a d v e rtis e m e n t is a d d r e s s e d to w o m en , p ro b ab ly s e c ­ re ta rie s, ty p is ts or clerks w h o a re likely to b ec o m e VDU (V isual D isplay Unit) o p e ra to rs. W ith Word, yo u e a sily d is ­ co v er a n e w p o w e r, sa y s th e cap tio n . T h e g y m n a stic p o w e r sh o w n in th e im a g e e q u a te s w ith th e n e w skills th e s e c re ta ry w ill a c q u ire w ith th e in tro ­ d u ctio n of 'W ord'. T his n e w p o w e r h a s o th e r m e an in g s, too. T h e ex p e n siv elooking su it a n d w ell-g ro o m e d h air of th e w o m a n in th e im a g e im ply n o t only a m e tic u lo u s a tte n tio n to h e r a p p e a r ­ an c e, b u t a h ig h incom e —a n e w s p e n d ­ in g p o w er. A n d th e su it h a s a m a s ­ culine, se v e re c u t —a ladylike inv asio n of m ale p o w er, p e rh a p s. If w e re stric t o u r look to th e to rso of th e w o m an , ig n o rin g th e r e s t of th e im ag e, w e c a n s e e w h a t looks very m u c h like th e b ac k v ie w of a ty p is t a t w o rk . T he im a g e se e m s to w o rk by s u g g e s tin g th e co n v e n tio n a l n a tu re of th is p o se, th e n s u b v e rtin g it e lse w h e re , p articu la rly by th e p o sitio n of th e w o m a n ’s le g s. In a n o th e rw is e blacka n d -w h ite im age, th e fe e t a re tin te d a b rig h t, lum in o u s g re e n . T h e re is an e x a c t colour m a tc h w ith th e d ig its on th e VDU, p ro m in e n t a g a in s t a black b ac k g ro u n d . T h e g re e n is r e p e a te d in, a n d th e re fo re fu rth e r m a rk e d by, th e 12 fast operators women at the workstation Anita Phillips m o n ito r-sh a p e d re c ta n g le w h ich c o n ­ ta in s th e o verall im ag e. T h e im a g e th u s fo c u sse s o n th e le g s a n d fe e t of th e w o m an , sh iftin g a w a y from th e arm s a n d h a n d s w h ic h a re in c o n s ta n t u s e by a ty p is t or VDU o p era to r. T h e in v ersio n of a rm s a n d leg s, h a n d s a n d fe e t w o rk s to e m p h a s is e th e p h y sic al a n d g y m n a s­ tic p o w er, w h ic h th e n c o n n o te s o th e r ty p e s of p o w er. T h e a d v e rtis e m e n t d o e s th is, a s m a n y a d v e rtis e m e n ts do, to co n c ea l n e g a tiv e c o n n o ta tio n s of th e p ro d u c t in q u e s tio n , in th is c a s e w o rd p ro c e sso rs. T h e w o m a n is sh o w n as d y nam ic, activ e, skilled, p o w erfu l. For w o m e n re a d e rs, it is fla tte rin g to th e ego. B ut e g o s a re n o t all th a t is a t sta k e . T h e yo u of th e c a p tio n ca n also b e re a d a s a n a d d re s s to th e em ployer, th e alm o st ce rta in ly m ale b o s s w h o w ill b e p ay in g for th e e q u ip m e n t. A s a re s u lt h e w ill a c h ie v e a n e w p o w er: th e p o w e r to e x tra c t a h ig h e r level of p ro d u ctiv ity from h is e m p lo y ee s a n d to force th e m to im p ro v e th e ir p erfo rm an ce . A c re a tiv e in tro d u c tio n of n e w te ch n o lo g y could m e a n job e n ric h m e n t, sh a rin g of d e c i­ sio n -m ak in g in th e office, w o m e n e n te r ­ in g in to e x e c u tiv e roles, s h o rte r w o rk ­ in g h o u rs, m o re flexible w o rk in g a r­ r a n g e m e n ts so th a t ch ild ca re co uld b e in te g r a te d in to a w o m a n ’s w o rk in g life. B ut m icrochip te ch n o lo g y is b e in g in tro ­ d u c e d a t a tim e of rec essio n , a s a w a y of m a k in g sa v in g s. S h arin g of d ec isio n ­ m a k in g rem a in s a ru m o u r, d e s p ite a Fast operators With Word, you easily discover a new power S«i v n u M l- >»\ (I|IK>MII4| W i U l i liH \ • Mil M.-i« i i i l n s h . h UIi n I | * i \ v «-i h.mcls i n t h e r.asilV 1m-si h . h i f t t i • v m i< }hissiI>{«' Word on M acintosh. MICROSOFT Right. First tim e. n u m b e r of a rtic le s 1 w h ic h p o in t to th is po ssib ility. Jo b s a re b e in g de-skilled, r e ­ d u c e d to a se rie s of re p e titiv e ta sk s. Som e jobs invariab ly d isa p p e a r. 'N a tu ra l w a s ta g e ', w h ic h h a p p e n s w h e n so m e o n e le a v e s th e ir job or r e ­ tire s a n d is n o t rep la ce d , th ro w s m ore a n d m ore y o u n g p e o p le o n to th e dole q u e u e . T h o se in w o rk a re e x p e c te d to do m ore, a n d th e c o m p u te r a t th e w o rk ­ s ta tio n c a n b e p ro g ra m m e d to m onitor e a c h individual w o rk e r's p erfo rm an ce. T ec h n o logy sp ie s on th e w o rk e r (w om en) for th e em p lo y ers a n d m a n a ­ g e rs (m en). F e a r of job loss, th e n , b e ­ co m es in T h a tc h e r's B ritain a so u rc e of in te n s e a n d p ro lo n g e d s tr e s s for th e w o m a n VDU o p e ra to r, p u s h e d to th e lim its of h e r p ro d u c tiv ity a n d e n d u r­ an ce, h a n g in g on for d e a r life to h e r h a rd -w o n p la c e in th e la b o u r force. T h e s tu d ie d e m p h a sis u p o n th e p h y sic al h e a lth a n d s tr e n g th of th e w o m a n in th e a d v e rtisin g im a g e c o n c e ­ als so m e th in g e lse - th e in h ib itio n of m o v e m e n t of th e VDU o p e ra to r a n d th e d a m a g in g effec ts th a t th is w o rk h a s on th o s e w h o do it. T h e list of p h y sic a l ills re p o rte d b y VDU o p e ra to rs is e x h a u s ­ tive. It in c lu d es ey e d iso rd ers, skin ra s h e s , sto m a c h p ain s, h e a d a c h e s , in ­ flam m atio n of h a n d s a n d w rists (ten o sy novitis), v arico se vein s, b o w el a n d b la d d e r p ro b lem s, n a u s e a , irritabil­ ity, fa tig u e a n d d e p re ssio n . VDUs m ay also h a v e a harm ful effect u p o n th e d e ­ velo p in g fo e tu s of p re g n a n t w o m en o p e ra to rs. VDUs em it X -rad iatio n (norm ally a s ­ so c ia te d w ith c a n c e r tr e a tm e n t a n d 'Xr a y s ’) a s w ell a s o th e r form s of ra d ia ­ tion. T his k in d of ra d ia tio n is k n o w n to b e c a p a b le of c a u sin g b irth d efe cts. B e t­ w e e n M ay 1979 a n d M ay 1980, four o u t of five VDU o p e ra to rs a t th e T oronto S tar n e w s p a p e r classified a d s d e p a r t­ m e n t g a v e b irth to b a b ie s w ith c o n g e n i­ ta l b irth d e fe c ts: clu b foot, cleft p a la te , an u n d e rd e v e lo p e d ey e a n d m u ltip le h e a rt a b n o rm a lities. Since th e n a n u m b e r of ‘c lu s te rs ' of b irth p ro b lem s of VDU o p e ra to rs h a v e b e e n lo c ate d all ov er th e w orld. T h ey h av e in c lu d ed m is­ c a rria g e s, se v e re b irth d efe cts, stillb irth s a n d n e o n a ta l d e a th s . Al­ th o u g h X -rad iatio n lev els from VDUs a re w ell b e lo w le g a l lim its, th e re is b a s i­ cally no sa fe level of e x p o su re to su c h rad iatio n . A n d th e lo n g e r th e e x p o su re to X -radiation, th e g r e a te r th e likeli­ h o o d of so m e form of ra d ia tio n injury. So far, very little re s e a rc h h a s b e e n d o n e on th e e ffec ts of lo n g -te rm in te n siv e e x ­ p o su re to lo w lev els of rad iatio n . M any B ritish tr a d e u n io n s n o w h a v e a policy of ad v isin g b ra n c h e s to n e g o tia te so th a t p r e g n a n t w o m e n c a n tra n s fe r to non-\h3U w o rk if th e y w ish to. T en o sy n o v itis is th e o th e r m ajor h e a lth p ro b lem w h ic h h a s b ec o m e w id e s p re a d w ith th e in tro d u c tio n of n e w te ch n o lo g y . 'T en o ', a s it is u su a lly called, is c a u s e d by co n tin u o u s or r e ­ p e titiv e arm or h a n d m o v e m en ts, a n d le a d s to sw ellin g a n d p a in in th e m u s ­ cles a n d te n d o n s . If it is n o t tr e a te d a t a n early s ta g e (and it h a s o ften b e e n m is-d ia g n o se d by th e m ed ical p ro fe s­ sion), th e su ffe re r c a n b ec o m e p e rm a ­ n e n tly d isa b le d , lo sin g th e u s e of on e h a n d or arm a lto g e th e r. T he d ra m a tic in c re a se in 'te n o ' is d u e p a rtly to th e m o d e rn elec tro n ic k ey b o ard , w h ich al­ lo w s a n o p e ra to r to k ey in d a ta a t th e r a te of u p to 36,000 k e y -stro k e s p e r h o u r, all d a y long. W h en jo b s a re h a rd to com e by, w o rk e rs te n d to h a n g on to th e m , e v e n if th e y a re o v erw o rk e d a n d h a v e b e g u n to n o tic e v ario u s a c h e s ad p ain s. A t B ritish T eleco m 's C ardiff C o m p u ­ te r C e n tre, th e c o m p u te r w a s p ro g ra m ­ m e d to co llect s ta tis tic s on th e s p e e d of keying-in, n u m b e r of erro rs m a d e a n d tim e a w a y from th e k e y b o a rd of ea c h VDU o p e ra to r, co n tin u o u sly . A ny w o rk e r fo u n d w a n tin g w a s b ro u g h t in fro n t of m a n a g e m e n t a n d re p rim a n d e d . H alf a d o z e n o p e ra to rs w e n t d o w n w ith te n o sy n o v itis: o n e lo st th e u s e of h e r left h an d , p e rm a n e n tly . It is clear th a t th e 'n e w p o w e r’ g a in e d h e re is th e p o w e r of th e m a n a g e r or b o ss to t e r ­ ro rise th e w o rk e r by co n tin u o u s su rv e il­ la n c e in to w o rk in g fa s t for p ro d u ctiv ity p u rp o se s. T h e w o rk er, b y c o n tra st, is crip p led for life. S he h a s lo st th e p o w e r of p a r t of h e r body. By now , th e u s e of a 13 Fast operators T echnology at work g y m n a stic p o sitio n in th e a d v e rtisin g im a g e b e g in s to look like a r a th e r d e s p ­ e r a te n eg a tio n . W hile u n e m p lo y m e n t w e a k e n s th e ability of th e w o rk e r to d e fe n d h e rse lf from h e r m a n a g e r or em ployer, or to sim ply c h a n g e jobs, in a lo n g e r te rm , it m ay b e p o ssib le to w re s t so m e a d v a n ­ ta g e s from n e w te ch n o lo g y . N ew te ch n o lo g y re p r e s e n ts th e m o st re c e n t ex a m p le of office w o rk ’s g ro w in g a s ­ c e n d a n c y o ver m a n u a l w ork, th e w h ite collar e x p a n sio n a s th e b lu e collar d e ­ clines. W om en a re a lre a d y em p lo y ed in la rg e n u m b e rs in th e office, a n d it is th e ty p is t or se c re ta ry w h o is likely to b e ­ co m e th e n e w VDU o p e ra to r in th e w o rk sta tio n . T his m a y b e h a rd ly ideal, b u t d u rin g a re c e ssio n a t le a s t a p ro p o r­ tio n of w o m e n w ill b e a b le to h a n g o n to th e ir p la c e in th e la b o u r force. S tre n g th is n o t re q u ire d for th e o p e r­ atio n of an y kind of n e w te ch n o lo g y , so in th e lo n g ru n it is g o in g to b e m ore a n d m o re difficult to k e e p th e s e jobs for th e boys. C y n th ia C o c k b u rn 's B ro th e rs2 d e s c rib e s h o w in th e p rin tin g in d u stry , w h e re cra ft u n io n s h a v e m a in ta in e d a m a le c lo sed sh o p for c e n tu rie s , com ­ p u te ris e d p h o to c o m p o sitio n b e g in s to o p e n d o o rs to w o m en . S he c ite s a m ale co m p a s sa y in g m o re w o m e n w ill co m e in, ye s, a n d to m e th is is a b a d thing. A n o th e r sa id : I th in k th e re is a r e s e n t­ m e n t a b o u t girls c o m in g in to th e in d u s ­ try. It is a th rea t, a d e fin ite th re a t in th a t s e n se . S he p o in ts o u t th a t m e n in th e p rin t h a v e also b e e n u n d e rm in e d in th e ir s e n s e of in te lle c tu a l su p e rio rity to w o m e n b y th e r e c e n t e n try of w o m e n in to jo u rn alistic a n d a d m in istra tiv e p o s ­ itio n s in p u b lish in g . T h eir a rg u m e n t h a s lo st m u c h of its cu rre n c y in to d a y 's Bri­ tain , w ith o b v iously c a p a b le w o m e n in so m e very p ro m in e n t p o sitio n s, a lb e it a tin y m inority. M uch of th e id eo lo g ical u n d e rp in ­ n in g of th e m a le cra ft or m a n u a l w orker, ta k in g h o m e a fam ily w a g e to s u p p o rt a w ife a n d fam ily, h a s n o w d isa p p e a re d , w ith eq u a lity le g isla tio n e n s h rin in g th e p rin cip le of e q u a l o p p o rtu n ity a n d e q u a l re w a rd , a n d th e sim p le fac t th a t w o m en a re refu sin g to h a n d o v er th e ir jo b s to m en. B ut for VDU o p e ra to rs to g e t a b e t­ te r d e a l from n e w te ch n o lo g y , to im ­ p ro v e th e ir jo b se c u rity a n d c a re e r o p ­ p o rtu n itie s, to s e t p ro te c tio n from ill h e a lth , d e c e n t fin an cial re w a rd s a n d th e re o rg a n is a tio n of w o rk in g p ra c tic e s to in te g r a te w ith ch ild care, th e y w o u ld n e e d to h a v e th e s u p p o rt of a la b o u r m o v e m e n t w h ic h w h o le h e a rte d ly s u p ­ p o rte d th e m a n d w a s re sp o n siv e to th e ir n e e d s. T h ey do n o t h a v e th a t. T he la b o u r m o v e m e n t in B ritain is u n ­ Short Cuts to Sharp Looks 14 eq u iv o cally m a le -d o m in a te d a n d fig h ts for m ale w o rk e rs' d e m a n d s. T h e first u n io n s w e re m en -o n ly clu b s, a n d th e tra d itio n h a s e n d u re d . T h e re a re alm o st no w om en tr a d e u n io n le a d e rs. 'W o m e n 's is s u e s ' a re p u s h e d to th e e n d of th e a g e n d a a n d w o m e n m e m b e rs ’ v iew s, if th e y a re h a rd y e n o u g h to e x ­ p re s s th e m , a re m o re or le s s ig n o red . P e rh a p s th e sin g le m o st difficult p ro b ­ lem w o m e n face w
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      • archiveFour Corners Bishopsgate
      • vimeo_link
      • authorSee sections X to AC
      • author_editorCatherine Bradley, Greg Kahn, Jenny Matthews, Shirley Read, Don Slater, David Gordon, Mike Leedham, Setsuo Kato
      • author_writerJude Rugg, Cass Breen, Blaine Stothard, Dermott Killip, Owen Kelly, Andrew Bethell, John Halliday, Karin Lützen, Barbara Adler, Pat Harper, Jennie Lazenby, Andrew Wiard, Don Slater
      • author_photographerJames Allen, V.C. Bauer, Robert Flinn, Christine Halsall, Takashi Hamaguchi, Sonja Iskov, Carsten Jenson, E. Langhaff, Finn Larsen, Joanne O'Brien, Christian Poveda, Sven Türck, Caroline Tisdall, Chris Walsh, Annie Worthington, Neil Martinson
      • author_designer
      • author_intervieweeChristine Halsall, Annie Worthington
      • author_organisationDanish Women's Photo Archive, Film History Museum, Labour Movement archives, City Museum Collection, Poster Film Collective, Medical History Museum, Punch, Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Guardian
      • tagswomen,documentary photography,war & conflict,media,representation,photojournalism,censorship,control,press,state control,british army,power,war,conflict,repression,confrontation,protest,women’s movement,civil rights,occupation,danish women’s photographic archive,archives,racism,demonstration,black organisation,fire,deptford,murder,police,opposition,arrest,civil war,el salvador,liberation,struggle,narita,airport,resistance,trade union,airport opposition league,farmers,sato,government,displacement,sanrizuka airport,policing photography,press freedom,teaching,power and photography,schools,learning,children,young people,teachers,eyeopeners,words,language,text,image,using photography,pinhole,teenagers,workshop,history,arts and action project,arts council,photography working party
      • titleCamerawork Magazine - Issue 22
      • subtitleIssue 22: Women and Documentary Photography in War & Conflict
      • dimension19 pages
      • ocr1
      • copyrightFour Corners/Half Moon Photography Workshop/Camerawork, Jude Rugg, Cass Breen, Blaine Stothard, Dermott Killip, Owen Kelly, Andrew Bethell, John Halliday, Karin Lützen, Barbara Adler, Pat Harper, Jennie Lazenby, Andrew Wiard, Don Slater, James Allen, V.C. Bauer, Robert Flinn, Christine Halsall, Takashi Hamaguchi, Sonja Iskov, Carsten Jenson, E. Langhaff, Finn Larsen, Joanne O'Brien, © Christian Poveda/Agence VU, Sven Türck, Caroline Tisdall, Chris Walsh, Annie Worthington, Neil Martinson, Danish Women's Photo Archive, Film History Museum, Labour Movement archives, City Museum Collection, Poster Film Collective, Medical History Museum, Punch, Daily Mail, Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Guardian
      • credits
      • related
      • locationBethnal Green, London, UK (pg 1,2,3) War & Conflict, UK (pg 4,5,13) Denmark (pg 7) Brixton, London, UK. New Cross, London, UK. (pg 8) El Salvador (pg 9,10,11) USA. Japan. (pg 18) Liverpool, UK.
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      • pdf_textF arm ers pro test the Japanese riot poliee's killing of a cam paigner against the building o f N arita airport. T akashi H am aguchi Women and Documentary Photography in Northern Ireland Resisting Narita Airport Policing Photography Reporting the New Cross March After Brixton A Women’s Archive Teaching and Using Photography El Salvador Cameras as Convivial Tools No 22 75p/$2.50 1 CAMERAWORK Women and Documentary Photography in Northern Ireland ‘ Documentary’ photography is difficult to define. Its dictionary definition - ‘ aiming at a presentation o f reality’- is misleading. In looking at media coverage o f the Women’ s M ovement and Northern Ireland it is obvious that photojournalism and documentary photo­ graphy’ impression o f presenting us with the s ‘ truth’ can act as a cloak hiding two patterns of censorship: manipulation and distortion; and om ission and the refusal to present representa­ tions which do not conform to the needs o f the State and bourgeois society. Moreover, documentary photography as normally practised - particularly in the form of photojournalism - depends on a specific role for the photographer. The photographer is ‘ independent’ and voyeuristic, selectively covering events for sensational news value. In an attempt to redefine ‘ documentary’ for our own uses, many women taking photographs are redefining the role o f photographers and photography. In order to subvert the voyeurism and manipulation o f documentary and the credi­ bility given to anyone who takes pictures, we are linking photographic skill to political practices. The women who have written these articles have a specific relationship to and are politi­ cally active in the issues around Ireland and imperialism. Our photographs take their place in our other work within the W omen’ Movement s and other political groups. W e do not consider ourselves to be exclusively photographers, but see photography as an activity which has some political value and can be o f use to our work. The main difference between the photojoumalist/ documentary approach and ours is precisely that political involvement: a subversion o f the ‘ objec­ tive eye’ which results from relating to events actively and not through a photographic role alone. Through the various forms o f censorship and control by the State and other institutions which are described throughout this article. Northern Ireland has becom e the single most mediamanipulated issue in this country. The press continuously demonstrates its awareness o f photography’power o f selective recording; the s possibility o f publishing alternative viewpoints is limited; the sheer difficulty o f taking pictures there due to the British Army is a direct acknow­ ledgement o f the importance o f the media to the British presence. Without trying to analyse fully the role o f photography in Northern Ireland, this article intends to show what role we have found for photography in our own political experience: in terms of recording events that would otherwise be ignored, finding the limitations of photographic and other visual representations o f political struggle, confronting censorship, and subverting the role o f the ‘ photographer’ and of the ‘ documentary’ approach. Jude Rugg l1 ( on ik m v h t What happens in Londonderry is very relevant to what can happen in London, and if we lose in Belfast, we may have to fight in Brixton or Birmingham. A NATION THAT ENSLAVES ANOTHER CANNOT ITSELF BE FREE Poster by Poster Film Collective. ‘ What happens in Londonderry is very relevant to what can happen in London, and if we lose in Belfast, we may have to fight in Brixton or Birmingham!’ John Biggs Davidson, Conservative MP. ‘ nation that enslaves another cannot itself be free.’ A E d ito r ia l M uch left photography, and many issues of Camerawork, have been concerned with docum enung political confrontations. The problems in such photography are legion: the role o f the photographer, the forms o f representation employed, the use to which the images will be put, the attitude o f state, police and demon­ strator to media coverage. Several articles in this issue deal with such themes. W om en docum enting Northern Ireland details four w om en’ rejection o f the s role o f professional documentary photographer or photo-journalist. This role typically involves an exploitative relationship: however ‘ con­ cerned’ the documentarist, nothing bends him or her to reflecting the subjects’ interests. The alternative role privileges the subject, not the photograph: photography takes its place within a political relationship and practice as an act o f solidarity rather than professionalized observa­ tion. O ur articles on the New Cross march and El Salvador reflect the opposite extreme, where news reportage is divorced from identification with the struggles o f the group being repre­ sented. In one case, the news was constructed to bear no relation to the participants’under­ standing o f the events; in the other case, reportage is a function o f an imperialist foreign policy. The photographer as recorder o f police action became an issue during the events in Brixton and also during demonstrations in Denmark over Byggeren park. In the liberal version o f the state as a happy balance o f competing interests, the free press is the polite gadfly o f social institu­ tions. In actual conflict another story emerges: the police use the law and their own power to obstruct public scrutiny o f their methods. The freedom to photograph the state exercising is a journal o f the politics o f photography. It is designed as a forum for analysis, critique, theory and information in order to provide the basis for using photography within socialist and feminist practices and to develop and encourage socialist strategies within the politics o f representation. CONTENTS W om en and Documentary Photography in Northern Ireland A Danish W om en’Photographic Archive s Black Organisation: Press Presentation The New Cross March Photographers at Brixton El Salvador Narita Airport - Images o f Resistance Policing Photography in Denmark Teaching about Power and Photography Using Photography The Second Photography: Cameras as Convivial Tools Reviews, Information 121 Rom an R oad L ondon E2. Tel: 01-980 8798. 1 Karin Lutzen and Barbara Adler Jennie Lazenby 4 6 7 D on Slater Jon Halliday photographs by Takashi Hamaguchi Blaine Stothard Andrew Bethell Keith Kennedy Owen Kelly and Dermott Killip violence is not simply a matter o f journalistic liberties, but part o f the struggle and selfdefence o f oppressed groups. The fight against Narita Airport in Japan was one o f most determined struggles sustained in an industrialised nation since the war, uniting many different sections o f the population for over twelve years. The photographs are presented as exemplary political documentary photography: unafraid o f dramatic graphic effects or o f ranging from filmic set-pieces to intimate por­ 8 9 1 3 14 1 5 16 19 trayal o f personal involvement, Hamaguchi has constructed a powerful dossier o f popular struggle. W e feel the images provide lessons we can draw on for our own political visual culture. The remaining articles reflect other Cam erawork concerns: Photographs are an important and complex historical resource. The story of the Danish W om en’ Photographic Archive shows some of s the processes and problems involved. Even when new material is not unearthed, the I went to Northern Ireland for the first time in April 1980. What struck me most in the fortnight I spent in Belfast is the difficulty o f representing visually the war situation there, the reasons for it, and, in particular, the experiences o f the nationalist people. I went as a member o f an independent film crew, making a film to help win support in Britain for troop withdrawal and the right o f the Irish people to national self-determination. During our time there we filmed the massive Provisional Sinn Fein Easter Commemoration March, the tribunal on Armagh, and we inter­ viewed people from the nationalist areas. As the only woman in the crew I did the interviewing when we were filming women. Before we left England we had fairly workedout ideas about what’ happening in Northern s Ireland, but what was really good in being there as film-makers was that we couldn’ avoid t talking to people, and learning from them. In England, I’ taken ‘ d amateur’ photographs, mainly o f demonstrations or women in the street. I’ felt uneasy not talking to them about d what I was trying to do; manipulative, but not confident enough to speak. The film was much easier, as we would talk to people as we set up our equipment. Also the nationalist people have suffered a lot from media distortion so discussing what we were trying to do in the film was neces­ sary before they would have the confidence in us to relax and speak freely. And o f course these discussions made us modify our ideas. Being there and talking to people, we learnt about the repression, the sense o f what it’like to s endure it daily, and the strength o f the struggle against it. W e had read about the street searches and arrests and were ourselves stopped six times. The first time was the most frightening; at midnight we were stopped by ‘ blacked-up’ soldiers, our van searched, and we were made to give our names, addresses, and those o f the people we were staying with, where w e’ come d from, where we were going. You are obliged to give this information under the law. Two minutes later we were stopped by the RUC (the all-Loyalist sectarian police force) and taken through the same procedure. The army has cameras mounted above their forts all over West •anyone else with a camera is auto­ matically suspect. W e were treated lightly because o f our English accents, but we got an idea o f the daily harrassment. One Derry man kept a diary that showed he had been stopped 100 times in eleven weeks; the nationalist ghettoes are regularly raided at dawn; indivi­ duals are detained on remand for months and then released without any charges being brought. I realised that the radical images o f repression I had seen made the war very remote for me. Those images present the people as passive victims, being body-searched or aimed at by an dynamic by which history is continually re­ written is revealed: it was the archivist’ re­ s organisation o f photographs according to cate­ gories drawn from w om en’ lives and history s that brought to light material previously obscured in archives dedicated to quite different histories, and gave them new meaning and use. Finally, four articles which stem from work in community photography and education. In these areas, the aim is people’ active engage­ s ment in and use o f the politics o f representation, but - in contrast to the issues involved in photo­ graphy and political confrontations - these practices involve constructing new roles within the photographic process and examining them exhaustively and consciously. Keith Kennedy works on the personal level o f individual and group identity; Andrew Bethell starts from generating critical skills through projects on the media; Arts and Action base their broader aims in developing photographic skills themselves; Owen Kelly and Dermott Killip o f Mediumwaves present contrasting models o f the possible relationships between photographer, subject and technology, each with different consequences for the power, involvement and cultural positioning o f the people represented. There is an obvious contrast between the photographic role in documenting political con­ frontations and in community photography and education. The contrast partly stems from different strategies appropriate to different forms o f political struggle, but it is undeniable that this contrast is often experienced and practised as a split within socialist photography, which Cam erawork has often mirrored. Given the present level o f theory and debate in socialist photography, all we can hope to do for the moment is to provide a forum in which the dis­ cussion can be carried out and the issues clarified. CAMERAWORK Army rifle. Because we haven’(yet) experienced t this level o f repression in England, it becomes difficult to believe people could survive those conditions for ten years, and hence to really believe that those conditions exist. It’ as if the s war is happening on another planet. But the people aren’victims: there is a level o f struggle t much higher than I’ ever experienced before. ve W e did not want to make a film that would preach only to the converted. We felt it is important to challenge the arguments that successive Labour and Tory governments have used to justify British troops in Northern Ireland (it’a religious war; the Army is a peacekeeping s force; the IRA are ‘ gangsters’ We felt that film ). can deal with these arguments more easily and accessibly than can photographs. The interview format enables the people at risk to say that the presence o f troops does not prevent a bloodbath: photographs do not have to give their subjects a voice. The audience is invited to observe them, like scientists, and cannot be forced to read captions. It is an impor- these photographs to be let off the hook; they invite us voyeuristically to condemn the brutality o f the Army but do not suggest that we have any responsibility or interest in getting them withdrawn. One still from the film illustrates some of these points. It is from an interview with three women from the Relatives Action Committee, an organisation fighting for political prisoner status for prisoners in H-Blocks and Armagh. The soldier dominates the frame and stares directly into the room as one o f the women is speaking. If it were a still photograph the image would suggest the intimidation and surveillance that is part o f the Arm y’function in Northern Ireland. s But this sequence came very near the end o f the long filmed interview. Before they came the women had been talking o f the harrassment the people receive daily: even the young children are stopped and asked their name and date o f birth. One o f the women describes being arrested for refusing to give her date o f birth: Whenever we interview we learn a lot that is difficult to express visually. Apart from the sign above the door, the Ballymurphy P eople’Co-op s seems an average neighbourhood grocers. There are few shops in the area and it was set up by the local people to provide cheaper food. There is a thick pile o f Republican News on the counter, and above is a sign advertising H-Block records. W e film the women working there, but what they say undermines the ‘ women as service’ image. ‘h e police even run in one day after the T children and wanted to take them to the Henry Taggart police barracks .. . Sure they have no authority to come in and do that, and that’ why w e’ here because we’ able to s re re stand up to them.’ W e interviewed the W om en’ Co-ordinating s Committee o f Belfast Sinn Fein. They explain why they as women are part o f the national struggle. There can be no equality for women until Ireland is freed from colonial rule. Women have always been involved in the Republican movement, both politically and militarily. In recent years the movement has seen that agita­ tion on w om en’issues is integral to the national s Itt v s a v ~ . H um .i s and socialist aims o f the movement. W e also interview a woman recently released after six months on remand and 2Vi years ‘ on protest’ Armagh Jail. She explains that the in women in Armagh refuse to do prison work or conform to prison rules as they consider them­ selves political prisoners: ‘ one o f the girls would ever be in prison but N for the struggle out here today. Most o f the girls in there are all on trumped-up charges.’ Going to Northern Ireland is partly about the images that you can’ get: brutal beatings in t Castlereagh to extract signed confessions; condi­ tions in H-Blocks and Armagh, the quizzes, singsongs and debates the prisoners organise to keep up morale. And it is really difficult to convey the level of struggle over there. Going to Belfast was very important for me. People there didn ’ accept t that I hadn’been before because I didn’want to t t go as a tourist. They say it’ important that as s many people as are able to go over there to find out for themselves what the war is about. Pat Harper Circmft of M sn d r a lly h e a d q u a rte r s Still from film described by Pat Harper. In context, sequence and sound-track provide a reading of resistance; in still form, we are given another image o f a victim. The Belfast Europa Hotel occupied by H-Block protesters. Photograph by Annie Worthington. Why were you in Northern Ireland taking photo­ graphs? I was there for International W om en’ Day s weekend and then for the Tribunal. Taking pictures was incidental. I had only been using photography for a few months, but the situa­ tion was relevant to my activities politically and as a learning process. Still from sequence of film described in Pat Harper's section of article: the image of a woman in a service role is undermined by the voice-over interview which is about resistance and competence. tant part o f the British m edia’strategy to deny a s voice to the nationalist people. It’ not hard to s see why: many o f the people we interviewed argued that the British occupation of Northern Ireland is a testing ground for repression o f the working class in Britain. The news media maintain a virtual news blackout on events in Northern Ireland. We felt it important to provide basic information and arguments. As someone said to us: ‘ impres­ The sion the media give is that you have these people on the moon and they happened to land in the six counties and they started a wee war on their own and nobody supports them, but the reality is that no guerilla army can survive without people and it is a p eop le’war’The few news photographs s . and TV films present the situation as ‘ senseless’ violence (bombed-out buildings, rioting), ‘ reli­ gious feud’ (Loyalist parades), ‘ Godfather rule’ (IRA in berets and dark glasses). A lot o f radical imagery also obscures political issues. Images o f Army repression do make important points but often fail to explain why it happens, and so become more images o f ‘ senseless’violence. It’ easy for us watching s ‘ was brought to the barrack and I was held I for an hour and I was strip-searched - like maybe they thought I had my date o f birth tattoed on my body somewhere - but for that whole hour I was in that barrack they never once asked me my date o f birth. Which all boils down to the same thing, it was harrass­ ment . . . T h ey’ doing everything to break re us, but no way, they’ not break us.’ ll W e also film the women emphatically denying that the Army plays a peacekeeping role in Northern Ireland: ‘ they’ here to protect us why are they not If re out on the perimeter o f our areas? But they’ re not, they’ stuck right smack in the middle of re our areas, which means they’ not watching re anybody, only us and surely to God they don’ t think w e’ going to go out and murder each re o th e r . ..’ So when soldier after soldier walks past the window as the women carry on talking, all that the women have said is brought together. That sequence says a lot more about the Army’occu­ s pation o f Ireland and popular resistance to it than could be put in a single still photograph. H ow did you feel taking pictures there? I felt really nervous. When I was photographing the Europa occupation, I didn ’know who the t other people were on the street, unlike in Republican areas where people would feel OK about someone taking pictures, so I took them discreetly. When the RUC arrived I carried on but when they were crossing the road I thought they’ seen me so I rushed into the toilet in a pub d and hid the film there. I didn ’ attempt to take photographs o f the t Army. O ne woman photographed a soldier: he came up, opened the camera and took the film out. H e was really heavy until she opened her mouth and he realised she was English. I took som e photos o f the Divis Flats on Sunday morning when the troops came round to harass the occupants. The woman we were staying with showed us how to take photographs out the window. All the time she was saying, ‘ Be really careful because if they see a glint o f light they’ think it’ a gun and they’ just fire up ll s ll here.’ went to the window absolutely shaking. I H ow important is taking photographs to you? It is important if you have the skill to use it in situations that would go unrecorded. For example, I took a photograph o f a picket by the Relatives Action Committee in Belfast which would not have been recorded otherwise. I always take the camera if I’ going out on m demonstrations. I f anyone else had a camera at the Europa occupation I probably w ouldn’have t taken any photographs because I still feel embarrassed about photographing and being seen in the role o f photographer. I feel that I shouldn’be standing back, especially in a situa­ t tion like Belfast. H ow do you anticipate usingyour photographs? At the moment, I would use them as I have in the past - like in response to people who want to use them for a poster. The photographs o f the Europa were used in the Relatives Action Committee newspaper. I also used them in the W om en’Studies course I teach. s I took some photographs o f the w om en’ s picket outside the law courts in Fleet Street to show to Belfast W om en Against Imperialism in Northern Ireland: otherwise they w ouldn’have t seen any photographs showing support in Britain for the women political prisoners in Armagh. What sort o f photographs were you trying to get in Northern Ireland? I started to take photographs that showed the quality o f fife there. Much work done to show that is misleading: in the Bringing It All Back H om e exhibition there’a photograph o f a group s o f people in the Divis flats who look like they’ re out o f the Potato Famine. It didn ’really show t the resistance. Yet it’hard to take photographs s that do. I’ got some shops in Republican areas ve with wire mesh round the doors and concrete blocks that people have put up to stop the saracen tanks. I took a lot o f pictures o f kids on the Balleymurphy Estate. I had the feeling that in Balleymurphy everyone was used to being photographed and they never hear any more of it. I took some pictures o f what I thought were contradictions - we photographed a bunch of tiny little girls in white dresses: when we got closer we saw they had big rocks in their h an ds... People are used to being photographed there whereas they’ not here: the irony is that those re photographs are not used for their benefit. In a sense I got the feeling that everything is illegal in Northern Ireland. Photographs which try to describe the situation are such a small dent in the massive censorship o f the straight media that the Army really need not bother too much about every single photographer who goes to Belfast. Annie Worthington 3 CAMERAWORK You were in B elfast in 1977 fo r the first all-Ireland W om en’s Conference. Can you describe your experiences? This was my first visit to Northern Ireland since the Civil Rights Movement and the arrival of the British Army. For seven years I had been living in Britain where there still is great resistance to seeing that what is happening in Ireland is a war. My first sight of this as I walked around Belfast were army patrols, saracens, etc. Belfast centre was cordoned off by a series of checkpoints and roadblocks covered by the Army and the RUC: each checkpoint involved a turnstile you filed through to be searched. One such occasion I was asked whether my camera contained any film: Having answered no, my camera was opened and the film fogged. Taking photographs is obviously a delicate question for the army and the police has its own special role in the mainten­ ance of censorship. A photograph of the army in action could end up in a context which questions the role of the British state in Ireland. Walking about with a camera is not exacdy proscribed but you stand a good chance of being arrested for photographing anything to do with the British presence. I gather that when you left you only had one roll o f film intact because o f confiscation and intimidation . . . H o w do you think photography could confront censorship? I am not a professional photographer commis­ sioned by a newspaper and therefore have a degree of control over what photograph is pub­ lished how and where. I would be unlikely to sell a photograph to the bourgeois press given the fragility of a photographic image however strong its subject matter. That is, I do not believe in the photographs’ power to subvert dominant ideologies of representation. I don’t see myself as the on-the-spot photo­ grapher out to scoop the action-pic of the day. Fortunately I have access, through work, to facilities to use existing material in exhibitions, slide shows, pamphlets, etc. For example, three of us compiled an exhibition on the use of humour in perpetuating racism. We used cartoons ranging from nineteenth century Punch material to newspaper cartoons covering the Irish situation since 1968. It was compiled by people with a specific and active political practice. The intention from the beginning was to locate it within a defined political polemic. It was never intended for mass distribution but for localised use where requested. It has been used predominantly at women’s meetings and in the Irish solidarity movement generally. In ways like this photography becomes a means of addressing the Women’s Movement and the Left. It has become ever clearer that the Women’s Movement, in many of its British definitions, is not impervious to dominant ideological influences. It takes a lot of un­ learning to recognise that Britain is not the centre of the universe. This attitude has taken the form of criticism directed at Irish nationalist women by British women on the assumption that Irish nationalism is the same as British nationalism; requiring anti-imperialist forces in Ireland to display socialist credentials before offering support (thus not understanding the broad alliances of forces which compose around the world national liberation struggles); assum­ ing that women’s control of reproduction auto­ matically resolves itself into abortion on demand, when women in Ireland have not got access to contraception and third world women are faced with mass sterilisation programmes. It is fair to say though that recent developments within the Women’s Movement are making this kind of discussion possible. W e were talking earlier about the photograph o f a soldier up a lampost at the Bloody Sunday demon­ stration in Birmingham - that it was used for different statements in different papers. Censorship and self-censorship is powerful in all British media reporting on Northern Ireland. It is not total censorship, rather censorship on certain matters, eg, the historical background and context. The British public have an unclear idea brought about by being fed highly selective information. I suppose the photograph of the soldier up the lampost represents just how ri nth . m: tiik London photography is used in the reproduction of ignorance - this particular photograph is dramatic, sensational, ideal as a channel for all the usual racist assumptions. You said your most significant relationship with photography was through work. Can you describe this? I work at a resource centre in London. All of us work with photography in some capacity and have assembled a photo-archive. Our political practice involves us with specific areas of work and the kinds of photographs we take reflects this - eg, community events, conferences, demonstrations and material from countries like Ireland where an anti-imperialist war going on. We are often asked for photographs by groups working on an exhibition, pamphlet or leaflet. Normally the resource centre is credited rather than the photographer. We ourselves have produced exhibitions eg, women and health, racism, etc. Our direction is towards producing more of this kind of work in addition to our primary function of making printing facilities accessible to groups through teaching them the use of the equipment. Cass Breen chari vari .— si , i » i . TIME’S WAXWORKS. Security check at turnstiles going into and out of Belfast. Photograph by Christine Halsall. ‘Time’s Waxworks. (1881 Just added to the collection).’ ‘Punch’ cartoon employing racist image of the Irish as violent terrorist. H o w do your photographs differ from photographs taken fo r the bourgeois media? W hy did you take photographs on Northern Ireland? I didn’t go as a photographer but as a member of a collective who have produced posters on Ireland as part of our political work. We felt we could extend our work on Northern Ireland by photographing aspects of the situation that are usually difficult to get images of. I wanted to convey some of these aspects of life in the context of colonial domination in the north. H o w is your role different from a photographer taking pictures fo r the bourgeois media? There is a tendency for photographers to attempt to capture a pre-determined spectacle type of image: the explosion, death, riot, soldiercivilian confrontation - images that have ‘news value’. In hindsight, I wasn’t primarily interested in this process of photography. Kids on the street in riots, etc, is obviously a very important day to day struggle against the army but through staying in the community I was able to see the other side of this: parents’ constant fear for their kids’ safety and the level of conflict that can arise out of it. I wouldn’t really have understood this if I had remained simply the outsider photographer. Being a documentary photographer relies on the creation of a distance, being the ‘objective eye’. For instance, I had several discussions with prisoners’ relatives in which I felt it was more important to listen than to take pictures. This was a feeling of inhibition that came from me rather than anything imposed. We are much more interested in using images in a graphic context (posters or pages) than as photographs in themselves. This obviously affects my approach. We often go through a long process of discussing images beforehand, then continually re-photographing as part of a con­ struction programme which continues until we are reasonably decided on the finished result. Over the last year we have been working on a large women’s project which tried to deal with sets of interlocking histories: the family, socialisation, the development of public and private spheres, consumerism and women’s daily lives. In the Six Counties I tried to get a whole range of community activities like the Falls Road Taxi service, the different kinds of housing, barracks and forts hidden behind churches and schools, Republican plots in the cemetery, bombed out sites, and, on the anni­ versary of internment, kids building bonfires and burning vehicles in protest. Many of these were taken and used in conjunction with a set of interviews by members of the Troops Out move­ m ent, so it was part of a broad process. W hat do you think about the role o f photography in the situation there? One important role is that of photography as used by the ‘security forces’. The systematic photographing of the country in order to gather information and to control the nationalist people plays a key role in their suppression. The question is what our role should be: we feel it is central to the political struggle for the nationalist movement to get representations of how they see their struggle. Any dominated group in any Women protesting political prisoners at H-Block and Armagh occupied a department store in the centre of Belfast. Photograph by Christine Halsall. society has this problem: everything comes from the top downwards. But this particularly heightened the six counties after centuries of colonial domination. In any war, a main battle­ ground is information control and propaganda, and the British army is especially conscious of this process. They attempt to surround Ireland by a wall of silence and as long as they can create the setting and the framing of the war - ie, army as peacemakers, IRA as terrorists - they can maintain support here for their role. That’s why the struggle over political status has assumed such importance, for as long as they can brand the Nationalist army as criminals, the colonial nature of the war will remain hidden. The recent developments of the hunger strike in the jails of Armagh and Long Kesh has shown how the media was used to throw confusion at every stage. If people could see the conditions of people’s fives there - enormous unemployment, appalling housing, discrimination at all levels they would understand why there is a conflict. Photography and film can play an important part in this process - which is of course the reason for the censorship. The lack of TV coverage has recently been changed and some account and historical analysis attempted, but as this is piped directly into each private home it has no organising function and therefore remains documentary. In any case, representation should not only come from the outside: it is vital that the people who are part of any struggle should have the means to represent themselves. Christine Halsall, member of Poster Film Collective 4 CAMERAWORK Danish Womens Photographic Archive Studio portrait of Else Bauer, photographed by V.C. Bauer (undated). Photographs are often used by academic women researchers as a supplement to written material, and sometimes as illustrations for written material, but unfortunately seldom as a source for historical research in themselves. The Danish Women’s Photo Archives was started by three women: Barbara Adler (a photo­ grapher), Karin Liitzen (a student at the university in the Folklore Department) and Brita Wielopolska (film director). Having been active in the Danish Women’s Movement for many years, we wished to use photographs as a source of history and as a tool in women’s struggle. So we started to hunt for old photo­ graphs, showing women working and at leisure. We quickly discovered that finding photo­ graphs of women in the existing collections was a very difficult task. There are various photographic archives in Denmark: the Royal Library (the largest), the National Museum, the City Museum, all the specialized museums (Film Museum, Theatre Museum, Music History Museum, Post & Tele­ graphic Museum etc) as well as local district historical archives and the Labour Movement Archives. All of these collections have their own special cataloguing system: the specialised museums usually file by subject, the others often by topography, notable persons by name, and by institutions. That meant that to find photographs of women, one had to first figure out the system and then look through the whole collection from beginning to end, because the photographs we were interested in could be hidden anywhere. Most collections require that photographs ‘be identified’, and no matter how interesting a photograph might be, if it has not been identified, it is not filed. There are also different rules regarding the use of collections, from some it is possible to borrow the original and take it home to our repro equipment, other collections require that copies be purchased (and they are expensive). Because of all these problems we decided to start our own archives, for use of all women. In the autumn of 1979 we sent letters to over 100 women’s organizations, unions and private persons we thought might have photographs of women, asking them to give or lend us what they had. We did not receive a single response! We learned our first lesson: three unknown women cannot start something unless they are associated with an established organization or institution. In spite of our disappointment, we did not give up. We continued shovelling our Meeting of the housemaids’ union, 1903 (City Museum Collection). Still from the film ‘Friendship and Love’ (Film History Museum). way through the existing collections. The City Museum received us with interest and encouragement and we were invited to do an exhibition of photographs of women in Copenhagen. We decided to prepare the exhibi­ tion to coincide with the International Women’s Conference, July 1980. So now we had an institution to back us up, to help us organize a campaign to collect photo­ graphs, to give us the appearance of ‘respecta­ bility’ and to ensure that the women’s archives would be used. We therefore decided to launch a massive campaign that would provide us with photographs both for the exhibition and for our archives. The financial requirements of our project were partially covered by a grant from the Ministry of Culture which Karin received after submitting an application that explained that all photographs received would be given to the City Museum or the Royal Library, and we empha­ sized the importance of our active collection. We neglected to mention to the Ministry of Culture that fact that we were starting our own archives. We received a modest sum of money from a ‘grass roots’ women’s fund to cover the expenses in building up the archives. From the very start we decided that we were not interested in collect­ ing ‘original’ prints. We did not have the facilities to store originals under optimal condi­ tions (temperature, humidity, etc), and we have no use for them. We decided to make a collection of negatives, by making a repro negative and contact copies, thus being able to ‘collect’ a large number on a low budget. The City Museum covered Barbara’s wages for darkroom work on the enlargements, the cost of materials for the exhibition and the wages of the woman architect, Grete Silding, who drew up the design, layout and helped supervise the setting up of the exhi­ bition. In January 1980 the City Museum officially approved the plans and we started our campaign. We sent press releases to every news­ paper in Copenhagen and enclosed a few enlargements, which proved very valuable since the majority of the papers printed an article and reproduced the photographs. The press release described the planned exhibition and stated that we were looking for photographs of women in working and leisure situations. We stated that people were welcome to give us their old photo­ graphs (so that the City Museum and the Royal Library would be happy), but that if they wanted to keep them, we would like to borrow them. Photographs were to be delivered to the City Museum, which was a big advantage, since people felt this was a “safe” place they could trust, and did deliver photographs. Throughout the month of March the Museum accepted deliveries of photographs. About 100 people came to give or lend photographs; some came with a single picture, others with suitcases full. At the same time we sent out the press release, we sent letters to the same list of women’s groups and unions we had contacted the previous autumn - this time on City Museum stationery. During March Karin telephoned all the organizations that still had not replied, but this time on behalf of the City Museum and that made people more interested. Unfortunately most of the unions did not have any photographs (except for a few from congresses), but they referred us to the larger industrial firms that had collections of their factories. Some of the women’s organizations had a few photographs, so Karin visited them, as well as the large companies, and made another round through the official photographic collec­ tions. With the City Museum to back us up, we managed to get quite a few photographs. In April Karin sat in the City Museum and went through all the photographs which had been delivered, setting those we could use aside. Surrounded by the glaring eyes of the founding fathers of Copenhagen, antique treasures and burglar alarms, we rolled up the proverbial sleeves and did the repro work. We did not copy everything: having the advantage of being a private archive, we were not forced to take it all, so we were choosy. Our choice of pictures was not objective; it was rather determined through our feminist consciousness. We were looking for photographs that showed women doing something unusual for women, or showed women together, but of course we were also interested in all sides of women’s lives. Barbara developed the films and made two contact copies of each, with corresponding numbers on everything. Karin started to catalogue. The contact prints were cut so that each original photograph (and details) could be glued to a card. Then we wrote the corres­ ponding delivery number, archive number, film number, and negative number, and if we had a record of the year the photograph had been taken. It would have been best if all of the information we had about the photographs, could have been written on the card, but that would have taken quite a lot of work, so we stuck CAMERAWORK to the bare facts. The job of sorting out the pictures was massive. Barbara did the camera work and Karin did the filing work. Each photograph was allo­ cated an archive number, a film number and a negative number. The donor’s name and address was registered and a short description of the photograph written with as much information as we had. Before we started the repro work, Karin had thought about the kind of system we should use for the archives, and had investigated how other archives were organized. None of the systems she checked out would satisfy our needs, because our archives covered every aspect of women’s fives, and because we wanted to use the photographs as a source to show women’s fife in society rather than to prove that a certain person, congress, house or whatever, existed and what she/he/it looked like. It is the content of each photograph that is important; even if it is not of a “historical” event it is easy enough for us to place it in our system (and be able to find it again), whereas other archives cannot place uniden­ tified photographs. By inventing our own system, we risked the possibility that at some point it might prove insufficient, therefore we made an attempt to avoid making the classifica­ tions too specific. We had to start somewhere, so we took the well-tested library system of classifi­ cation, though there is a difference between classifying a book and organizing photographs. Our card catalogue is to be used by all women, and it is necessary to avoid using expressions that might be misunderstood or read as dogmatic. We tried to avoid expressions like ‘oppression’, ‘self-awareness’, ‘resistance’ etc that would imply that those using the catalogue have the same political consciousness and logic as we. We therefore stuck to a description of what the picture portrayed, to determine its categoriza­ tion. The fist of subjects can sound a bit naive, but it works. A card catalogue was started and the cards were filed in the appropriate category, some subjects were missing, so they were invented, and soon the cards (about 2000 of them) were in the right place. If a photograph could be placed in two different categories, it was placed in the one which seemed most obvious and a card of different colour was placed under the other possibifity(ies) with a reference. Since most of the photographs are from the collection for the exhibition at the City Museum, they portray the life of women in the city. As we expand the collection to include photographs of women from the rest of Denmark, we will have to supplement the list with new categories, especially of Women At Work. Many old photographs were taken in studios and are posed. These are filed in the categories where no activity or occupation is indicated: women with child, two girls, family, women dressed up to go to a party,maids, etc. If a ‘posed’ photograph was taken outside the studio, then it is filed according to the location: women in a house or garden, women in nature, etc. If there is activity in a posed picture, then it is the activity that determines its place in the file: handicraft, dance, music rehearsals, gymnastics. . . The archive is easy to use. With the help of a magnifying glass one can study the contact copy and through the delivery-number, the source and all other information we have on each picture can be traced. By giving Barbara the negative number, we can quickly make copies. We have done quite a bit of thinking about the restrictions we should place on the contexts in which the photographs in the archives are used. We have decided to deliver photographs to be used in any context that supports women’s struggle. Our economy is based on a Robin Hood system: the rich pay a bit extra, the poor idealists get photographs free. But we demand that in the case of publication the Danish Women’s Photo Archives is credited. We stamp the archive’s name, the delivery number, the film number and the negative number and any other information relevant on the back of each copy we deliver. The archive has already been used by a lot of women. Mainly those from the women’s move­ ment, who use photographs for posters or to illustrate papers on women’s studies. Women’s magazines useus to illustrate articles on women’s history. Those of us who worked on the exhibi­ tion are now working on a book consisting mainly of photographs of Danish women’s history (1880-1940) and the struggle for greater freedom. We are also doing the picture research for a big women’s history book being published in 1983 and written by feminist historians. Photographer, date and subject unknown. Studio portrait by E. Langhaff Employee at the Frederiks Hospital, undated (City Museum Collection). Three nurses at the ‘Kommunehospital’, 1897 (Medical History Museum). ■'i Barbara Adler and Karin Liitzen For further information contact: Karin Ltitzin Bredgade 35 1260 Kobenhavn K Denmark The cafe ‘National’, 1931 (photographer: Sven Tiirck). 6 CAMERAWORK When the black tide met the thin blue line • • . TH E VOICE O F BRITAIN Police injured in clash with demo blacks RAMPAGE OF A MOB [TUB L IF E Q F S U P E R W O M A N A T N o . C en tre P a » e i A w a ll oS p o lic e rio t sh ie ld s c o n ta in s m a rc h e rs a t th e a p p ro a c h to B la c k fria rs B ridge March: Calm start...an angry finish On March 2, about 15,000 black people marched from New Cross to Fleet Street. The demon­ stration was organised in response to the fire in Deptford in which 13 young black people were murdered: it was held to protest the police’s refusal to treat the fire as a racist attack and to protest the national press’s refusal to deal with the fire at all. In covering the march, national newspapers distorted it by imposing on it a structure of news reporting whose assumptions were both racist, and designed to completely miss the significance of the march. The march arose from a strength of feeling based on an acute political analysis of British racism within a highly politicised black community. The black groups didn’t view the fire in isolation as the media did, but as part of the reality of many years of widespread and organised attacks on blacks, increasing in vio­ lence and including arson, beatings and stonings. The black community contrasted this with the current state reaction: Whitelaw’s Nationality Bill, aimed at denying the automatic right of citizenship from those bom in the UK, and Birmingham MP Jill Knight’s singling out of West Indian parties as nuisances to be con­ trolled. Black people also contrasted the media’s extensive coverage of the Dublin disco fire and Mrs Thatcher’s public condolences - with the way it virtually ignored the massacre of 13 young blacks. ‘Silence is Violence’ was one of the slogans of the march, as many people realised the silence on the fire stemmed from a lack of interest in the black community, which will inevitably encour­ age those who perpetrate or condone racist violence. The police dragged their feet over inquiries about the fire during a time of increasing arson attacks in South London, con­ THE GUARDIAN centrating their investigations on interviewing black people such as Desmond Brown - whose brother died in the fire - rather than known racists in the area. Both press and police have chosen to look on the cause of the fire as a mystery and to describe those who see the fire as a racialist attack as ‘black extremists fostering racial hatred’ (Daily Mirror). The result was the first national anti-racist demonstration organised by black groups by and for themselves. As opposed to previous anti­ racist campaigns, primarily organised by broad coalitions of multi-racial anti-fascist groups such as the Anti-Nazi League, the crucial signi­ ficance of this march was black self­ organisation. Faced with this complex situation, the Fleet Street newspapers’ coverage of the march was concerned with only one theme: order on the one hand, disorder and violence on the other. The ‘order’ is clearly the order of the police, who we are meant to sympathise with, doing their duty in trying to ‘control’ (Guardian) and ‘contain’ (Daily Mail) the ‘riotous’ march. The black people are characterised as ‘looters’, ‘spoilers’ (Daily Mirror), ‘The Rampage of a Mob’ (Daily Express) and ‘When the Black Tide met the Thin Blue Line’ (Daily Mail). The Daily Mirror contrasts this with a smaller inset photo on its front page entitled ‘Victim: A Policeman is helped to safety’. Yet readers would really see victims if every time black youths were harrassed on the street by policemen a photographer was present. This hasn’t been shown in the Fleet Street press, any more than the increasing racialist attacks (although they have been fully documented by the Joint Committee Against Racism over an 18 month period), or the frustration of black youths Black Organisation: Press Presentation unable to get jobs and decent housing, and seeing their own culture downgraded. By concentrating on the theme of a violent riot, the press is able to ignore the reasons for the march and seem justified in having ignored the fire. For the press the framework of events is simple: 13 young blacks died as a result of a fire at a party; trying to suggest this incident was a racialist attack, black people took to the streets and rioted. As both press and police refused to see the fire as a racialist attack, or offer any other cogent explanation, the only explanation for it we are left with is that black parties and marches naturally end in violence or that black people are so careless they bum themselves to death. The press devoted more column inches to a few violent incidents in one day than they have devoted to the horror of 13 deaths ever since January. We are told by both the Mirror and the Express that the demonstration was mainly peaceful, yet the coverage in both is all about violence and rioting. The Mirror: ‘Refusing to obey leaders they broke through police cordons, kicking and hitting at officers with sticks and bottles.’ The Daily Express tells us, ‘police said 3,000 marched but up to 10,000 were estimated when gangs of rowdies joined in’, that ‘hundreds of youths broke free from escorting police and rampaged along pavements, kicking cars, knocking down people and smashing shop windows. Several policemen threw themselves to the ground as they were pelted by milk bottles.’ The theme is almost one of tribal uprising with blacks running riot, the events being interpreted through colonial stereotypes more appropriate to the nineteenth century. But as Socialist Worker put it: ‘There wasn’t a riot in Fleet Street last Monday. But there bloody well should have been.’ The press could not recognize the importance of the first ever solely black-organised march, or the feelings of confidence and enthusiasm of a large black crowd marching from New Cross through the bastions of the establishment. The Fleet Street papers had to impose the order/disorder theme because a positive inter­ pretation of the march wasn’t admissible in their terms. The Mirror: ‘A peaceful demo by 10,000 marchers was marred by 200 young thugs yester­ day’ or ‘The March: Calm start . . . and angry finish’ (Daily Mail), or the Daily Express: the march ‘remained orderly until it reached Blackfriars Bridge more than three hours later’. Crowds of black people must be shown as either well-behaved or violent, never organised, politicised or confident. Every Fleet Street paper carried a picture of ‘A wall of police riot shields’ (Daily Mail) on Blackfriars Bridge, and only explained the presence of police as the forces of law and order controlling and containing ‘young Black trouble makers’ (Daily Mail) or ‘200 hot-heads’ (Daily Mirror). The Daily Mail explains: ‘Police, many with riot shields, formed a solid line in front of the march, and hundreds more could be seen on the Bridge behind them.’ The Morning Star explained how, when the marchers demanded to know why they were being stopped, ‘police brought out riot shields which only added to the soured atmosphere.’ From the photos published it certainly looks as if the march was being deli­ berately blocked, and it certainly must have appeared that way to the marchers themselves. CAMERAWORK 4 Photographers at Brixton T h ere w ere a n u m b er o f people seen to be in an o rganising po sitio n w ith the black y o u th s w ho w ere g a th erin g in large num bers . . . a n d there w ere a lo t o f p eo p le, m a n y o f them w h ite , w ith ca m era s, w h o w ere not press photographers. D r a w y o u r o w n conclusions. Assistant Police Commissioner Wilford Gibson, Guardian 13 April 1981. W hy not indeed: W e all know that there are some political extremists whose sole object in life is to take photographs that w ill discredit the police, but welldisciplined officers acting lawfully should have nothing to fea r from such surveillance . . . W hat are they trying to hide? British Journal of Photography, 24 April 1981 ‘The young thugs attacked anything and anyone th at tried to g et in th eir w a y ’ Assistant Commissioner W ilford Gibson is quite wrong when he insinuates that white non-press photographers were in Brixton on Saturday in an organising position. I , a white person, was there with my camera and I in fact had my film taken from me by black youngsters. They were quite polite to me, they ju st did not w ant me photographing black people because they did not know me. I was in Brixton on Saturday with my camera because I live there and I am a Nosey Parker. I t is not every day that you see your local shopping centre burned and looted. Several o f my white friends were also in Brixton on Saturday with cameras. They are also local people; they were not organising the black youngsters. Letter in Guardian, 15 April. The conclusion many o f his officers will draw is that the M e t has declared open season on ‘white people with cameras’ in black crowds. They are not going to stop and ask fo r a press card. Andrew Wiard, The Journalist, 16 April 1981. The police were attacking photographers in a concerted, well-organised and premeditated sort o f w ay. I was photographing police arresting a black youth. A constable screamed at me: ‘Keep out o f it.’ I said I was a press photographer. Before I could say anything else my finger was smashed by a blow from his truncheon. As I was being chased the police yelled ‘Sm ash his cameras’. Freelance photojournalist at Brixton N o t only are photographers likely to receive rough treatment at the hands o f the rioters but they are also at the mercy o f the occasional excitable young man in uniform, who steps out o f line and forgets his training. I t happened again at Brixton. BJP, 24 April 1981 Neil Martinson took this picture of an arrest on Saturday 11 April. Shouting ‘Get his camera’, police immediately attacked him, beat him to the ground with truncheons and kicked his camera. The Fleet Street dailies said nothing about the marchers’ frustration and anger at being pro­ voked in the way, nor about the confrontation effect of horseback police. The CONFRONTA­ TIO N the Mirror’s headline proclaims is one of violent black youths attacking policemen and property. The Guardian’s layout and approach appears more sober and objective than the other Fleet Street dailies, but its position was still clear. It posed a split between black youngsters who ran ahead of the march and the more orderly black stewards: a tense situation for about eight minutes was ‘contained by energetic black stewards and a low key police response’. Once again we have an orderly march, and a disci­ plined police force trying to keep in order young­ sters who were creating ‘scuffles’. The priorities of the Fleet Street dailies are clear - what they want to show us is how blacks on the streets run wild and make attacks on the property of upright ordinary white citizens. The Daily Express quotes at length a Mr Roland Kirkland, the managing director of Attenborough and Son: ‘Within seconds the rioters - I refuse to call them marchers - had smashed the windows and made o ff with every­ thing.’ M r Kirkland’s staff rescued a City policeman who was being beaten as he tried to protect the shop. ‘I must admit we were in two minds whether to open the door and drag him in. We were afraid he would be followed by a gang of looters.’ Black youths were both frustrated and exhil­ arated on the march, finding themselves con­ trolled and contained by the very police they were protesting against. As this is the frustration they experience every day, it was understand­ ably let loose. The Daily Mail, refusing to admit that black people could organise themselves, wheeled out the hoary idea of demonstrations being master­ minded by the wicked white ultra-left as well as black extremists, and even the Morning Star hastens to reassure us that although the march was ‘mostly black’ there were ‘many white anti­ racists’. Even the left press are a little afraid of the importance of organised blacks confronting the racist British system. The importance of the demonstration was the immense effect it has had on the political consciousness of black people, which will mean they won’t accept racialist attacks. The tone of the day was set by a black steward’s declaration: ‘There has never been a gathering like this of black people in the history of the country. March with pride, brothers and sisters, march with dignity, we will not be diverted.’ When an oppressed group organises itself to publicly demonstrate its anger, pride and strength, an ideological arsenal of labels is always available to the media to dismiss them, demean them or raise them as a danger to society. News categories are used to contain and minimize the people’s expression of their demands: they are the establishment’s safety filter. When a femi­ nist speaks out, she is described as ‘strident’ so she can be dismissed. When black people march, they are called violent so they needn’t be listened to. The response to these processes depends not only on oppressed groups building and expres­ sing their strength, but on specifically con­ fronting the media. Obtaining the right of reply to press attacks, building up alternative media and convincing media unions to take political stands on the content of their products are some of the immediate political priorities as well as developing more complex strategies for fighting ideological oppression by the media. Jennie Lazenby The much-propagated face of that heroic constable . . . having a good time? Caroline Tisdall « mented ‘careful monitoring of US press coverage . . . to avoid Nicaraguan style publicity for opposition insurgents’. Finally: ‘Conditions in El Salvador and our official posture have not encouraged adequate media coverage. Influential US journalists have been banned from the country by threats on their lives. Salvadorean government restrictions on visiting reporters have kept a tight lid on many critical events in the past six months. Informal signals to foreign desk editors during the electoral campaign discouraged their interest in the region.’ Christian Poveda •3 g ^ .2 c (j A story has been going round till recently that the moderate Christian Democratic government of a certain Latin American country has been doggedly struggling against the combined insanity of left- and right-wing terrorists. Despite reforms and attempts to keep order the government is being undermined by inter­ national terrorism. The story aroused minimal interest: it was the typically messy affair of banana republic, best left to the Americans to sort out. Only when El Salvador threatened to become another Vietnam did the story begin to crumble and it became apparent that the news we heard was an adjunct to American foreign policy. This article looks at the motives and power behind this story: the exercise of US imperialism through manipulation of news and information. El Salvador is a predominandy agricultural country controlled oligarchically: 2% of the population own 60% of the land. 40% of peasants have no land; 25% of the people are un­ employed, few people have year-round employ­ ment. The calorie intake is the lowest in Latin America, with 73% of children under five suffering malnutrition and 45% of deaths being those of children under five. The system has been maintained by military dictatorship since 1932; when the army crushed a popular uprising and massacred 32,000 people. Since then open political organisation has been brutally suppressed. The regime has an American-equipped and trained army and elite National Guard, a 100,000 strong secret informant network called ORDEN, a range of paramilitary forces and death squads, as well as the armed forces of other Latin American countries organised into the Americancontrolled Condeca: an integrated counterinsurgency organisation. The present ‘reform’ government is in no respect different in character. Such arrangements are integral to American domination of its ‘backyard’. However, the postVietnam, post-Watergate shift in America’s use of power plus relations of its involvement in Chile and similar operations required apparently non-interventionist forms of foreign policy, such as Carter’s ‘human rights’ policy. The successful revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua which apparently stemmed from US ‘softness’ were considered the nadir of US prestige. Nicaragua was a specific disaster in that America had ‘needlessly’ lost one of its most powerful South American clients, leaving CONDECA in disarray with the loss of Samoza’s armed forces. Carter could not afford a second Nicaragua. The American response to the destabilization of the area was to participate in an army coup in El Salvador in October 1979. A government was formed which reached deep into El Salvador’s political spectrum to include Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Communists. To the left and centre, this represented a lastditch attempt at a peaceful solution. To the US and its local accomplices, a ‘reform govern­ ment’ meant breathing space to rebuild CONDECA while apparently continuing a human rights policy. Aid could be sent again. Those outside the government could be labelled lunatic leftists and rightists. By January 1980 all but a few right-wing Christian Democrats had resigned amidst alle­ gations of repression, unchecked right-wing death squads and right-wing control of the government. Nonetheless, the US and the junta continued to pump out the story of a reform government. The ‘reforms’ it carried out were brutal. In may 1980 came the widely publicised Agricul­ tural Land Reform. Modelled closely on Opera­ tion Phoenix, which the US carried out in Vietnam, it involved the local election of repre­ sentatives to carry out reform in their areas: this gave the government the identity of local leaders, who would then be assassinated by death-squads. In any case, the ‘reforms’ were drafted to prevent real distribution of wealth. During this period, dubbed by the resistance ‘killings with reforms’, the ‘moderate’ junta, with the help of US military advisors, unified the death-squads and paramilitary groups, bringing them under army control. On the first day of land reform they also declared a state of siege and launched a massive offensive which included a massacre of 600 civilians. The degree of American concern over Salvadorian affairs was revealed in a US state department dissent paper leaked in November 1980: it states th
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      • archiveFour Corners Bishopsgate
      • vimeo_link
      • authorSee sections X to AC
      • author_editorMike Goldwater, Greg Kahn (co-ordinator), Jenny Matthews, Richard Platt, Shirley Read (co-ordinator), Terry Smith, Ed Barber, Emma Diamond, Nicky Hughes, Liz Kessler, Liz Mackie, Marguerite McLaughlin, Nick Oakes, Jill Pack, Siddhiratna
      • author_writerRosetta Brooks, Terry Smith, Ken Worpole, Peter Kennard, Mike Abrahams, Peter Kennard, Richard Platt, Adrian Barr-Smith
      • author_photographerGuy Bourdin, G.M. Cookson, Pete Smith, John Sturrock, Deborah Turbeville, Mike Abrahams, Peter Marlow, Chris Steele-Perkins, Peter Kennard, Helmut Newton, Richard Greenhill
      • author_designer
      • author_interviewee
      • author_organisationNational Museum of Labour History, Manchester Studies Archive
      • tagsfashion,representations of women,advertising,fashion industry,commercial photography,stereotypes,cliches,mechanical reproduction,media representation,vogue,helmut newton,guy bourdin,deborah turbeville,male gaze,female gaze,blair peach,police,police brutality,inquest,friends of blair peach committee,who killed blair peach? police racism,racial tension,anti-racism,demonstation,protest,activism,community,conservative,economic policy,photography/politics of photography,match-girls,labour history,strike,1880,depression,bryant & may,matchbox,national museum of labour history,social reform,union,unionisation,demonstration,capitalism,nuclear,windscale,nuclear waste,nuclear power station,radioactive waste,windscale inquiry,environment,postcards,printer,do it yourself,intervention,political statement,peter kennard,walkerprint,property,copyright,law,court,intellectual property,rights,privacy,pinhole,teds,
      • titleCamerawork Magazine - Issue 17
      • subtitleIssue 17: The fashion Spread, Blair Peach-No Cover Up, Matchgirls' Strike-Labour History Musuem, Pictures from Windscale, Postcards, Photography and the Law
      • dimension17 pages
      • ocr1
      • copyrightFour Corners/Half Moon Photography Workshop/Camerawork, Rosetta Brooks, Terry Smith, Ken Worpole, Peter Kennard, Mike Abrahams, Peter Kennard, Richard Platt, Adrian Barr-Smith, Guy Bourdin, G.M. Cookson, Pete Smith, John Sturrock, Deborah Turbeville, Mike Abrahams, Peter Marlow, Chris Steele-Perkins, Helmut Newton, Richard Greenhill, National Museum of Labour History, Manchester Studies Archive
      • credits
      • related
      • locationBethnal Green, London, UK (pg 1,2,3) France (pg 4,5) Southall, London, UK (pg 6,7,8,9,10) Hackney, London, UK (pg 11) Windscale (now Sellafield), UK (pg 13) Nevada, USA. South Africa
      • copyright_obtained0
      • signed_off0
      • uploaded1
      • origination_date1980
      • origination_year1980
      • origination_month0
      • created2018-06-04 14:58:19
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      • modified2025-09-17 22:36:29
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      • status1
      • featured0
      • pdf_textm f . Mm Postcard of YVindscale 1979 Mike Abrahams The Fashion Spread Blair Peach - No Cover Up Matchgirls’ Strike - Labour History Museum Pictures from Windscale Postcards Photography and the Law No 17 Half Moon Photography Workshop 60p/$1.75 1 CAMERAWORK Lcs nouveau \ T-shirlvdcbjrdcurx rcsscmblcnt .i lout saufa la chcrrmc dev dockets: ils sapparenteni plutot aux maillots dc danseuses modcrncs uvee leurs munches longues, leurs prolonds decolleics.ou uus hauls dc tutus avee leurs brcielles ct leurcorsuttebusiier A gauche. T-shirt a munches longues en jersey de colon dc Jjck>tcx. ci sa jupc portclcuillc cn jersey dc colon rouge reversible rosede Jack vies, Gianni Versace pour Callaghan SanJ.ilcs Charles Jourdan A df.. T-shirt bustier cn jersey de coion ct sa jupc fronccc cn mcme jersey. Dominique Peelers pourG uilare Sandalcs Charles Jourdan Au centre, bustier a brcielles cn jersey de coion cl short assorti. (juitarc. Coiffures Valentin pour J c a n - l OW9 D lV < 1 Maquillagcs L ancaster: tcints hales ct unil'ics avee Visage Bm n/c. Photo prise a I'I Intel I oniainebleau a Miami Bench. Tics gai. pour lous les instants dc voire v ie : “CabriolcT le nouveau parluni dbli/u b c tli Arden. Guy Bourdin, French Vogue May 1978: To turn the page is not only to open and close the spectacle of the fashion spread but to cut up the figure with which we are spatially identified - to open and close her legs. Fashion photography as anonymous history Fashion photography is traditionally regarded as the light­ weight end of photographic practice. Its close relationship to the economic imperatives of turnover makes the fashion photograph the transitory image par excellence. For his­ torians and critics concerned with isolating unique photo­ graphic images and according them enduring significance, the commercial sphere of photography - the domain of the everyday image —represents the debasement of the conven­ tion of such ‘great’ photographs. For most people, however, the commercial image represents the essence of their expe­ rience of photography. Cultural analysis of the commercial photograph has habi­ tually treated it as a departure from the naturalist and realist historic tradition, in which the ‘unique’ image is identified by excluding those characteristics most closely identified with the commercial world. Economic forces are seen as altering and negating the ‘reality’ of the photographic image. Market forces introduce the caption which can determine and distort what is seen in the picture. ‘Silence’ is converted into the ‘speech’ of the advertising caption or newspaper headline. Whenever photographic conventions hit the streets, they are encountered as ‘diluted’. Commercial images, so the argument goes, are produced under con­ straint, compromised or distorted by their proximity to the technological division of labour and responsibility. This view of the culture industry sees the destruction of the individuality of the images and the uniqueness of their production. We see the typical instead of the unique moment or event. We see stereotype and cliche where we want to seek the creative representation of human expression and emotion. The texture of mechanical reproduction seems alien and deadening; the image in currency is reduced to the commonplace of urban experience. Given this prevalent critical and historical attitude, photo­ graphers are inclined to regard the economic and techno­ logical processes as a ‘threat’ to their domain - the taking of the photograph. This, the ‘decisive moment’, is seen as the most powerful point in the process, the point at which the ‘real’ world reproduces itself; it is more creative than the mass production processes which deplete and assimilate the image, stamping it with the uniformity and monotony of a commodity. Photographers produce images and see them as fuel for the sequence of formulae and stereotypes within the turnover of trends and fashions, and within the machinery of production. Critical and historical tradition has thus made us see the creativity of the photographer and mass production as opposed to each other. This has prevented investigation of those features of photography produced by the combination of these processes. Although photography has its origins in the reproduction of nature by machine, fashion and advertis­ ing photography must be studied as a process of mechanical reproduction of the mechanical image. The ‘other’ side of photography is the ability to reproduce a number of copies from a single moment. The picture is one of many on the streets, in magazines, television and film. Media technology is structured for the repetition and pro­ liferation of images as commodities appearing and disappear­ ing in and out of mass circulation. Images are seen in relation to one another, as stereotypes going in and out of currency, rather than as unique peep-holes into reality. Not only does the camera enable us to look at the world, it also establishes the conditions for the world to look on us. Image is not simply something seen; it is also something we ‘wear’. The mass circulation of photographic images emphasises our awareness of self-image, and establishes a relationship between the particular and the typical. Historians of photography have yet to do justice to this ‘other’ side of photography, possibly because it is too familiar. Perhaps what is needed is what Siegfried Gideon calls ‘anonymous history’: an account of the effects of tech­ nology on personal experience. But how does one look at photographic history and do justice to the processes which make the imagery typical and transitory, without selecting certain great images in their uniqueness? The answer might be found by looking at the sphere of photography most tied to the machinery of the media: advertising photography. Changes in the nature of recent advertising and fashion photography also necessitate such an analysis, as well as a re-appraisal of the caricatures of commercial photography. The availability of photographs in the galleries of many major cities has enabled photographers to develop further areas of sponsorship in the Seventies, and has created a market for the Masters and for an established historical tradition, and yet the recent malaise of the realist/naturalist tradition has been accompanied by a greater inflexibility of its norms in the establishment of academic and economic sponsorship which has grown up around these genres. Incessant re-iteration of the ‘zero-point’ of the photo­ graphic document has transformed it into a rhetoric of its own. The contemporary politically-committed social docu­ ment produced for gallery exhibition tends to speak more of rhetorical nostalgia for its Thirties precursors, and for the innocence of style, than of its subject. This deathly quality of nostalgia, the event’s pastness rather than its currency in our political perceptions pervades so many self-conscious servants of tradition. However whilst the realist/naturalist genres are at a stand­ still, or are even regressing, there have been dramatic changes in the photography encountered in the streets - and particularly in the intimacy of the double-page spread. CONTENTS Double-Page Spread - Fashion and Advertising Photography is designed to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, views and information on photography and other forms of communication. By exploring the application, scope and content of photo­ graphy, we intend to demystify the process. We see this as part of the struggle to learn, to describe and to share experiences and so contribute to the process by which we grow in capacity and power to control our lives. Rosetta Brooks Page 1 Who K illed Blair Peach? Photographs from the exhibition Ken Worpole 4 Photography/Politics: One reviewed Terry Smith 6 Pictured History: The Matchgirls’ Strike 1888. Some photographs from the National Museum of Labour History, Limehouse. Terry Smith 7 Nuclear Wastes - Pictures from Windscale Mike Abrahams 11 Editorial Group: Mike Goldwater, Greg Kahn (co-ordinator), Jenny Matthews, Richard Platt, Shirley Read (co-ordinator), Terry Smith. Wish you were here: uses of the postcard and making your own Peter Kennard, Richard Platt 12 People who worked on this issue were: Ed Barber, Emma Diamond, Nicky Hughes, Liz Kessler, Liz Mackie, Marguerite McLaughlin, Nick Oakes, Jill Pack, Siddhiratna. Distribution: Keith Cavanagh. (ISSN 0308 1676) The Photographer and the Law part 1. Where you stand taking photographs Adrian Barr-Smith 14 This issue of Camerawork, January/February 1980, was produced by the Publishing Project, Half M oon Photography Workshop, 119 Roman Road, London E2. 01-980 8798. Printed by Expression Printers Ltd, London N l. Letters and information 15 CAM ERAW ORK Pensez Varese, le soleil >era votre com plice Guy Bourdin French Vogue May 1978: He organises his images around the divide of the double-page and the turn o f the page. o f minority opinions cannot be accounted for in the view which foresees the media industry triumphing in an identity and uniformity of cultural experience. For Marcuse, avant-garde art as oppositional culture is depleted by absorption and assimilation into mainstream 'affirmative culture’ While this may seem . prophetic in view o f the current state o f an, indifference to oppositional art is the result not o f a depletion or assimilation o f its meanings, but o f its isolation. It appears as one cultural ghetto amongst many, with its own diminishing media stake. It is not that the values o f a minority culture are distorted and absorbed into the mainstream. They pose no threat at all. The principle o f negation itself, which avantgarde culture once represented, is now built in to all spheres o f cultural activity. Even disco music, ostensibly the alignment o f human expression dance - with the rhythm o f the machine, has its negation in groups like Kraftwerk for whom the machine pulse which ‘ animates’ disco-dance is the object o f morbid contemplation. It is not merely a ‘ progressive’extension o f popular culture. What is incorporated is negation. This now guarantees a sort o f all-round authenticity. I can enjoy it for itself, or for its parody of itself. Irony mediates these days - it is no escape. Tolerance o f mechanised cultural products has ascended to a higher level: an acceptance of the limitations o f the medium in an engagement with the process o f mediation. As Adorno and Horkheimer said: The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products though they see through them.' Helmut Newton: manipulating stereotypes Many see the new representation o f women in advertisements and especially in fashion photo­ graphs as a sort o f masculine counter-offensive against the new feminist consciousness o f sexual stereotyping. That some o f the significant indi­ vidual contributions to this recent change happen to be from women in no way contradicts the claim that we are seeing the development of the most perniciously sexist imagery yet encountered in the very core of sexual stereo­ typing, fashion photography. Fashion photography in the Seventies has,in one sense,produced nothing particularly new, no recognisable ideal like Jean Shrimpton or Twiggy in the Sixties. N o particular look or appearance seems to dominate. Models seem to be straight off an assembly line, representing a well established physical norm. Most con­ spicuous is the repression of the model’ dis­ s tinctive individuality. She is treated in her identity with her type, not as a particular kind of woman, but as a model. Stereotyping appears to occur through suppression o f the awareness o f stereotype and by identification with the unique. The dynamics o f fashion are embodied in the dualism o f the world itself: fashion is what is general and typical, and yet it is also restricted and indi­ vidual. The fashion photograph is on a threshold between two worlds: the consumer public, and a mythic elite created in the utopia o f the photo­ graph as well as in the reality of a social group maintained by the fashion industry. Recent fashion photography seems to convert the utopias into dystopias. The Helmut Newton model is one o f a type, presented with the cold distance o f a fleshy automaton, an extension o f the technology which manipulates her and converts her into an object. Her veneer, which is at one with the gloss o f the image, is to be flicked past and consumed in a moment. When the models strike up stereo­ typed poses, it is their deadness and frc enness which is foregrounded. The suggestion that they are frozen from a narrative continuum empha­ sises their strangeness and their discontinuous, fragmented nature, like film stills isolated from the cinematic flow. Some have interpreted the strange, unusual settings in the work o f Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton - accidents and suicides - as the intru­ sion o f a ‘ world’ real into fashion photography. I think quite the reverse is the case: it is because scenes o f rape and death are commonplace in film and television that they can be treated with such distance in fashion photography. The aura o f a particular kind o f image, not the aura o f the streets, is utilised. The artificiality o f the image, its gloss and not its reality, is emphasised. It is the deathly aura o f mediation which encases everything in gloss. Newton’ harsh colours, s particularly his use o f red and blue, make an association with poor quality reproduction and thus invoke the limitations o f the medium. This emphasis upon the alien and artificial qualities o f the picture makes a straightforward accusation o f sexism problematic. All fashion photography, as the dominant currency o f female images, could be seen as inherently sexist, manipulating exchanges between self and self-image. Yet this is conventionally suppressed Deborah Turbeville, Wallflower (Quartet 1978): her photographs are presented scratched, violated, and montaged together. in the image o f the moment, as it binds us to a m odel o f femininity beyond existing norms, con­ verting them into stereotypes. T o recognise an image as a constraint, as a violation or repression o f femininity, is to glimpse the demise o f a stereotype going out o f circulation, its descent hastened by its very mass circulation. Each ascendant, newer image promises to escape those constraints. Accordingly, fashion photo­ graphy seeks to suppress any sense o f the strangeness o f sexual typification, the conver­ sion o f femininity into a static type or commodity. The sense o f stereotype must be reserved for hindsight in the succession o f female images. Newton manipulates existing stereotypes; their alienness is accentuated, and yet they are almost eternal archetypes in their sexual dramas. The passive reclining woman offers no threat: she is completely malleable, a dummy made of flesh. The object o f gratuitous sexual violence and violation, she offers no resistance, but because o f this she becomes unreal, like de Sade’ libertines. As the threat o f personality s diminishes, her image-like quality transports her beyond eroticism of the living to fetishism of the inanimate object. She fits into dominant stereo­ types so completely that she ceases to connote a reality apart from the images which constitute her fife. By mixing dummies with five models in the French V ogue o f June 1977, Newton makes an unambiguous erotic response (from either sex) impossible. Instead, the picture sequence directs voyeuristic attention to the conversion point between object and flesh, and to their deathly reciprocity in the photographic act. While the photographs are undeniably erotic, the eroticism is attached to the process of media­ tion itself. Many o f his more successful photo­ graphs hold a distanced engagement with the manipulative devices o f fashion photography and with the process o f mediation. Those alien features present in suppressed form in fashion photography and current images of women are exposed and foregrounded. The image is presented as alien: a threat rather than an invita­ tion. Stereotypes are presented as falsity. Guy Bourdin: ‘ trap for the gaze’ a . In the post-war period the growth of mass pro­ duction and reproduction was greeted in some circles as a threat to individuality and to the uniqueness o f human activity. The horrific spectre o f the totality o f industrial culture was the familiar expression o f a fear o f what seemed inevitable as a result o f consumer culture: the false universalisation and homogenisation of human experience. Theodor Adorno saw the stamp o f the machine everywhere, reducing everything to a ‘ sameness’ reflecting and , reinforcing a sense o f alienation in all aspects of private life and experience. As massentertainment and advertising become more dominant, they increasingly level experience down to ‘ lowest common denominator’The the . threat o f the culture industry is the production and reproduction o f sameness in all spheres of cultural life. Adorno saw the media as part of a great machine serving to encompass, assimilate and absorb all opposition and all individual variation by acceding to the sameness o f machine production. Current cultural trends could be inter­ preted as posing quite the opposite threat - the loss o f com m on cultural experience. The de­ centralisation o f fringe cultures and the increase They could not, however, have predicted the peculiar route to this triumph. From the vantage point o f the Forties and Fifties it was difficult to imagine a fashion photographer complaining about censorship by the machinery which Adorno predicted would subsume cultural pro­ ducers like Helmut Newton. The latter’ s complaints about English Vogue are echoed by fashion photographers beginning to talk about being ‘ given free rein’ magazines. When Guy by Bourdin claims to be an artist, he is laying claim to a specific type o f formal problem encountered with a particular kind o f image in circulation. It is not so much that ‘ double page is his the canvas’but that the double page is not canvas is , the basis o f the claim. H is material is what canvas stands in anti­ thesis to: the texture o f mechanical reproduc­ tion. In Bourdin’work, the double-page is not s the vehicle for communicating the image, it is a structure characteristic o f a particular kind of encounter. He organises his images around the form o f mechanical reproduction, around the divide o f the double-page and the turn of the page. In the May 1978 French Vogue the female voyeur/spectator figure is divided by the centre­ fold as she watches the almost symmetrical divi­ sion o f her reclining self-images. T o turn the page is not only to open and close the spectacle of the fashion spread, but to cut up the figure with which we are spatially identified - to open and close her legs. The model is completely engulfed in the vertical divide as though by a mistake in binding, leaving the two legs isolated on facing pages. At other times the double-page becomes its own mirror. In a March 1976 French Vogue 3 CAMERAWORK spread, a colour reproduction faces a black and white reproduction of almost the identical scene, as though frozen from successive moments. The process of reproduction itself is being repro duced. Within these more dramatic formal devices, spatial relationships are set up within the pictures which rebound upon the strange ness of our ordinary encounter with the double page, the photograph and with the advertise ment itself. We are re-directed from the object (the product) to the spatial ambiguities of its setting, which jar with the expectations built into encounters with photographs and advertise ments. Bourdin enhances the spatial strangeness of the conventional spread, to accentuate the alienness of what is unfolded in that horizontal continuum and around the vertical division in the process of unfolding. This spread best exemplifies the division and alternation of shallow and deep spaces, which is used to juxta pose facade and depth, the frontality of the image with the three-dimensionality of setting. Bourdin plays upon a hesitation in the spatial and temporal expectations of the double-page, emphasising the alienness of the setting of both the product and the advertisement. Brechtian distanciation and the formalist ‘exposure of the device’ have become mainstream rhetorical manoeuvres. Bourdin’s shoe advertisements provide a case in point. Without the manufacturer’s name as caption, some would be unrecognisable either as advertisements or as having shoes as their subject. In a passing encounter with the image that the fashion magazine produces, it is profitable to exert the negative principle as a subversion of the neutrality of ‘flicking through’. neutrality of the product-image in the context of the cash exchange. Obsolete product-images have been revived as nostalgia for the mythical past of the product itself. There is an obsession with the conversion point between the currency and redundancy of the image. In the same way, recent fashion trends have been exclusively nostalgic. Even current sci-fi and high-tech fashions come over as a nostalgia for older stereotypes of ‘futurism’, as a taming of images of technology which were once threaten ing. But recent forms of revivalism are not a specific attachment to a bygone age - they are more like Sixties nostalgias romanticising the peasantry, or other kinds of primitivism. This nostalgic undercurrent has come to dominate and has almost caught up with itself. Nostalgic attachment to the immediate past becomes an attachment to the process of turn over, a narcissistic identification with the alien qualities of one’s own past. That point of selfawareness at the juncture of the up-to-theminute and the out-of-date becomes an identifi cation with the very process of mediation that fashion represents. The photography of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin reflects a self-awareness of fashionphotography and of its falsities. They convey the sense of an impenetrable veneer, resistant to the very movement of stereotypes. In the work of one of the best woman fashion-photographers, Deborah Turbeville, a different sense of the alienness of the image is represented as a sort of hesitation between self-images. In many ways her photographs are at variance with charac teristics of her male counterparts. For example, her models are not chosen for their identity with a fairly neutral type, but usually for their diver gence from the type or image which they appear to represent. At best her work involves this hesi tation between the image presented by the model and the image presented by the picture, although finally this sense is always commu nicated by the latter. Conveying this uncom fortable relationship with the model’s selfpresented image pushes her towards portraiture, or her models towards acting. However, she is clearly not satisfied with communicating the strangeness of the female image through the illustrative neutrality of the photograph. In her book Wallflower, her recent photographs are presented scratched, violated and montaged together. In the foreword to this book she describes her photographs as: like the women you see in them. A little out o) balance with their surroundings, waiting anxiously jor the right person to find them, and thinking perhaps that they are out oj their time. They move jorward clutching their past about them, as i) the ground o) the present may jail away. . . Perhaps they accede a little too easily to an automatic overlay of nostalgia resulting from the associa tion of limited colour range with the faded photograph or with the technical qualities of early photography. At the moment her work seems unresolved, as she herself says: My pictures walk a light-rope . . . I am not a Jashion photographer, I am not a photojoumalist, I am not a portraitist. Whatever one’s opinion of the ‘success’ of her pictures, it is interesting that a photographer preoccupied with the kinds of self-image mass circulation produces should find the fashion spread the most accommodating site for her exploration, however provisional she may feel this to be. W'hether the alienness of the recent fashion image is an extreme expression of the autonomy of fashion photography, whether this implies a distancing from the form of coercion which the fashion spread represents, whether it constitutes the elevation of the advertisement to a higher power and greater autonomy, or whether it is the beginning of a break-up of that structure of representation: these questions have implica tions far beyond fashion alone. Rosetta Brooks I would like to acknowledge the writings oj John Stezaker, especially his ideas on stereotyping. I rejer to Archetype and Stereotype, a paper delivered to the Photography Convention organised by the Psychology Department oj Southampton Univer sity (to be published), and to Fragments published by the Photographers' Gallery. Rosetta Brooks teaches at St. Martin's School oj Art. She is currently writing two books, on jashion photography and on style in the seventies. F ootnotes 1. From ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, trans. John Cumming. Allen Lane 1973. 2. Lacan characterizes all pictures as ‘traps for the gaze’, but the phrase is used in the context of a discussion of the use of distorted images to ‘catch’ the eye and maintain the engagement of the gaze. Helmut Newton sequence, French Vogue June 1977: the cold distance of a fleshy automaton, an extension of the technology which manipulates the model and converts her into an object. An arrest of vision is required at all costs - even at the expense of accentuating the alienness of clothing itself. Our sense of puzzlement seeks double confirmation which is provided by the product name. A ‘trap for the gaze’2 may be the solution to the immediate pressures of the market, but the implications of an increasing dependence upon an enlarging and increasingly autonomous advertising industry are less easy to estimate. The new autonomy and independence from the product achieved by the product image seems to promise a fulfilment of the totalitarian ideal of propaganda for its own sake. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin saw fascism as the ‘political consummation of I’Art pour I’Art', in an elevation of propaganda to a new level of aesthetic self justification. The emancipation of the image from its caption, and of the product-image from the product, means that the advertising image has become the pure imperative, not divisible into form and content, the pure veneer, the absolute facade for and of itself. r m , M ri- f a rrr :n r -u rta n l p i- *>■ filrr. rl tn r llr r d r a t -h u rl- Io n -n r C ia lr r - i l oo ro a ra » ir Deborah Turbeville: nostalgia, wallpaper, etc This new autonomy of the product-image has created another market sector. The collecting of ephemera, the practice of surrounding oneself with old and sometimes not so old advertise ments, is now almost a middle-class stereotype. A large business has established itself selling not so much old as ‘fixed’ brand images. Mass pro duction exploits the borderline between con suming and collecting, between the connoisseurial attention to qualities and the sheer Guy Bourdin French Vogue May 1978: the alternation of deep and shallow spaces to juxtapose facade and depth. . . we are re-directed from the object (the product) to the spatial ambiguities of its setting. 4 CAMERAWORK WHO KILLED BIAIR PEACH? The death o f Blair Peach in Southall in April 1979 marked a watershed in the growing concern over the changing role and image o f the police force. Public concern, already roused by the increasing evidence o f corruption, racism and brutality within the police force, was faced with the larger question o f police accountability, of'w ho polices the police?’ This concern accompanies growing debate over the nature o f democracy in Britain today. ‘Public opinion’ still trusts in the existence o f democratic accountability despite what Stuart H all calls 'a deep and decisive movement towards a more disci­ plinary and authoritarian kind o f society’. This movement is clearly visible not only in the emergence o f the police as a militant ideological force but also in government policy and plans for new legislation. The ‘law and order’ issue cannot be seen as separate from Conservative economic policy which creates economic instability and social tensions while claiming to preserve a status quo. In this climate the media leads us to believe that all demonstrations, far from being essential to the expression o f differing opinions, are dangerous disturbances of the peace, and that those who attend them should ‘keep o ff the streets o f London’. This attitude underlies official indifference to the urgent questions raised by the events o f Southall and their aftermath. The exhibition from which these photo­ graphs are taken shows how it is vital that we examine all the implications o f the question Who killed Blair Peach? This exhibition has been put together by people in East London associated with the Friends of Blair Peach Committee. The exhibition is un­ ashamedly polemical in tone and propagandist in intention. We hope that it will bring many more people to an understanding of, and support for, the demands which this campaign formulated within a week of the police riot in Southall on the 23rd April 1979 and which we continue to press for today. These were, in brief: 1. A full public enquiry into the events in Southall on April 23rd, including the full circumstances surrounding the death of Blair Peach. 2. The disbanding of the Special Patrol Group. Subsequently the campaign has been con­ cerned to widen its demands to include a more general enquiry into the rising incidence of unexplained deaths in police custody, which has been one of the more worrying trends of the 1970’s. The exhibition integrates photographs and texts to try to give a picture of the police operation in Southall on that day, the particular tactics of the Special Patrol Group in the ‘mopping up’ operation in which Blair Peach died, and eye-witness accounts of the severity and brutality of the attack on Southall. There is one large panel, taken from the Morning Star, which examines in depth the manipulation of charges by the police to ensure that very few of the 342 people charged after Southall were able to elect to go for trial by jury. The exhibition gives figures detailing the travesties of justice which the Magistrates’ Court at Barnet put through on the nod. There is a series of photo­ graphs which convey the very real distress and grief occasioned by Blair Peach’s murder, both in Southall and within the wide anti-racist move­ ment of which Blair was a part. A detailed chronology of the important dates connected with Blair Peach’s death is given, from which one can see exactly how the police were able quite cynically to prolong the inquest - and the burial itself - in the hope of the matter fading from public memory. Other sections of the exhibition detail some of the more well known recent deaths of other people at the hands of the police and call for a wider campaign to bring more public accountability into police affairs; a final section suggests how people may take the campaign further. The title of the exhibition, ‘Who Killed Blair Peach?’, continues to represent for us the princi­ pal, though not exclusive, theme of the campaign. This is not to follow the path of martyrology, but neither do we wish to allow the Blair Peach’s funeral on June 13th murder of a widely-loved individual political militant to disappear into the abstractions of ‘inevitability’ or hard-edged political ‘realism’. It will be through the hard-fought public cam­ paign to have Blair’s murder fully investigated within the context of a public inquiry that the complicated manoeuvres, subterfuges, prevari­ cations and fabrications of the police and the legal authorities will be exposed. Already the campaign has pushed against, and finally over­ turned, the Coroner’s ruling supported by the High Court, that a Coroner’s jury was not neces­ sary. The commissioning of the independent John Sturrock/Report pathologist’s report, w'hich defined the wholly illegal nature of the murder weapon, the publi­ cising of the miscellaneous and very nasty weaponry found in the SPG lockers, the con­ tinual pressure on the press - all these have helped spotlight the mendacity of the police public relations campaign. In doing so, with such intensity, we feel these things have brought about public concern, and have also stimulated concern with many other disquieting cases. It is surely no coincidence that the whole question of deaths in police custody emerged to become a major political issue, following on from the most blatant of all police cover-ups - the failure to make any prosecutions in the case of Blair Peach who was murdered in front of dozens of eye­ witnesses. Since April last year, the Friends of Blair Peach Committee has sent speakers to dozens of meetings and organised many meetings itself as well as social and fund-raising events. It helped organise the highly successful, but little publi­ cised, national picket of police stations on October 10th, the night before the inquest finally re-opened, which involved over 10,000 people around the country. It works closely with the Southall Defence Campaign and stands in full solidarity with all the brothers and sisters arrested and charged on April 23rd. Yet the campaign still has far to go. The inquest will not finally re-open until probably the beginning of February, with a jury that will probably look as though it had just come straight from the New Year’s Honour List. The Southall Trials will carry on well into 1980 and need soli­ darity and support. The exhibition will, we hope, play an important part in raising people’s awareness of the enormity the state offensive on April 23rd 1979, and make them active in the campaign to re-write and re-visualise the Southall riot so that it goes into history as a failed attempt to defeat a popular and courageous anti-racist and anti-fascist initiative. Ken Worpole Friends of Blair Peach Committee Commemoration march through Southall in memory of Blair Peach G. M. Cookson/Socialist Challenge 'Who Killed Blair Peach?’ was compiled and designed by Graham Birkin, Neil Martinson and Ken Worpole and is an HMPW Touring Exhibition. CAMERAWORK John Sturrock/Report Southall, April 23rd 1979 Chronology of events following Blair Peach’s death at Southall 1979 April 23 April 24 April 25 April 26 April 28 May 25 June 6 June 7 June 8 June 13 June 14 July 7 July 17 September 10 October 3 October 10 October 11 October 12 November 15 November 22 December 14 Anti-racist demonstration at Southall. Over 700 people are arrested of whom 342 are later charged. Blair Peach is killed in an SPG ‘mopping up’ operation, struck on the head by an unidentified instrument. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Powis says, ‘This is a very serious matter. A man has died. We are treating this as a murder enquiry.’ Prime Minister Callaghan blames much of the violence on ‘outsiders’. Home Secretary Merlyn Rees refuses the widespread call for a public enquiry into the events at Southall. The Blair Peach inquest opens and is adjourned until July 17th at the request of the Metropolitan Police. Commemoration march through Southall in memory' of Blair Peach by 10,000 people. (Police continue to disallow release of body for burial). 147 MPs support motion calling for a public enquiry. Some five weeks have passed. As yet the police have still not searched the SPG lockers for possible weapons which might have caused Blair Peach’s death. Blair Peach’s family release their own independent pathologist’s report into the cause of death. Death is ascribed to one severe blow by something like a ‘lead-filled rubber cosh’. Press assumes therefore it was not a policeman un til. . . Daily Mirror front page scoop: ‘RIOT COP IN DEATH QUIZ’. The police announce that they have been holding a Barnes SPG officer for questioning. It seems the inquiry is about to produce a conclusion. The police officer held for four days is released. Blair Peach is buried in East London Cemetery following a funeral procession of over 10.000 people. At a press conference Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir David McNee defends the SPG from recent ‘ill-founded criticism’. He tells a black reporter who had expressed the concern which many ethnic groups feel about the SPG, ‘If you keep off the streets of London and behave yourselves you won’t have the SPG to worry about.’ The Morning Star leaks extracts from the Commission for Racial Equality report describing ‘undisciplined and uncontrolled clubbing of fleeing civilians.’ The inquest re-opens and adjourns until October at request of the Metropolitan Police who haven’t finished their enquiries. The coroner says he wants to hear about general police behaviour on that day and other injuries to demonstrators. Some twelve weeks have passed. As yet no identity parades have been held. Main trials of 342 people arrested at Southall begin at Barnet Magistrates Court. Sir Thomas Hetherington, the Director of Public Prosecutions,announces that, due to insufficient evidence, there are to be no prosecutions in the Blair Peach case. Nationwide torchlit picket of police stations on the eve of Blair Peach inquest. Over 10.000 people involved. Inquest re-opens. Inquest adjourned when Blair Peach’s family apply to the High Court for a jury. The High Court rejects the application for a jury. Police reopen internal inquiry after anonymous call providing evidence of SPG cover up. In the Appeal Court Lord Denning rules that the coroner’s inquest will have a jury. Southall, April 23rd 1979 John Sturrock/Report 6 CAMERAWORK he cover of the first Photography/ Politics annual declares its guiding prin­ ciples: an expanded definition of both photography and politics. Next to an image of a Hackney garment worker is placed a blow-up of one of the guides which annotate photographs in fashion magazines. Both images are thus montaged together: the substitution of worker for model, of work for display, produces the ‘third effect’ underlined by the caption Garment worker, whose wages don’t allow her to buy what she makes. The primary location for this meaning to do its counter-ideological work is as part of the exhibition Women - Work in Hackney by the Hackney Flashers Collective, touring community centres, libraries, schools and factories in the area since 1976. As part of a cover for a photography annual called Photography/ Politics, however, it is intended to be an example of how the editors see the relationships between the two terms of their title. These rela­ tionships are of crucial importance to current political practice: what has Photography/ Politics to tell us about them? Firstly, that ‘political photography’ should go beyond assumptions about the effectivity of the single image, no matter how powerful, to working critically with the verbal/display con­ texts in which images are reproduced. As well, it expands the arena of political engagement from the usual subjects of photo-journalism (events recognisably ‘political’), arguing that not only is personal life political but so, too, is work itself. The cover pinpoints, by image and text, a specific instance of the organisation and social relations of production under capitalism, a contradiction which results in the exploitation of the woman pictured and of all others in similar situations. Photography/Politics aims to be a theoretical and historical handbook for the practice of a socialist photography. In this respect, it is more useful than any other English publication I have seen, bringing together types of analyses and information otherwise available only in diverse sources. It is organised into three sections: theoretical, historical and examples of current practice. The first section is headed ‘Against the Dominant Ideology’ and employs, mostly, the Front cover Photography/Politics: One methods of Marxist structuralism. Sylvia Harvey’s introductory essay sets out the complexities of revisions of the base and super­ clothing and shelter for workers in many structure metaphor within recent theories of countries. It also coordinated cultural wr in all ork ideology. Gen Doy’s study of the role of photo­ media by establishing and supporting organisa­ graphy during the 1871 Paris Commune is tions for writing, theatre, dance, music, news­ detailed and scholarly, but also alert to the paper and other publishing, art schools and usages of photographs. Records of the clubs, and for film and photography. This work Communards’ pride in demolishing such passed through three phases: an emphasis on symbols of reaction as Thiers’ house and the worker-produced and controlled agit-prop Vendome column were used a few weeks later as during the twenties but especially the early evidence for their execution. Photographs of thirties, a shift to alliances with professionals and destroyed civic buildings were used to portray intellectuals after 1935 in Popular Fronts against the Communards as vandals, threatening Fascism, and a submergence into official antiprivate property. Photographers such as Appert Fascism during the war. Within this framework, made a brisk trade in montaged recreations of it was specific to class struggles in each country, events discrediting the Communards, especially that of Germany being perhaps the best-known, the comparatively rare executions performed by and thoroughly explored here by Korner and them, and in cartes-de-visite of some of the 25Stiiber. Solid work is also done on the U.S. 40,000 Communards executed by the returning and Dutch movements by Russell Campbell and Bert Hogenkamp, while Douglas Allan, in his government. In two articles on the illustrated weekly. short piece on the movement in Scotland, makes the point that in some cases it is already too late Picture Post, Stuart Hall brings out its to recover information from former activists. remarkable ‘transparency’ in relation to the Terry Dennett’s article on the English realities of the war period and Jo Spence explores (Workers’) Film and Photo League draws on the changes in ads directed at women - shifting recently recovered archives to show groups from distinct class and gender stereotypes to a active in Central and East London, Hackney and less class specific, double role (mother and Islington, producing photographs, films, slide worker) during the war, followed by a reversion shows and even ‘film slide talkies’ on work and to the distinctions as women were eased out of living conditions in their areas, local and inter­ the labour force after the war. An image which national politics, and disseminating films etc. uses the techniques of advertising against the from Europe, especially Russia. A valuable techniques of monopoly capitalism - John compilation of the League’s films (soon to be Heartfield’s famous photomontage of Hitler’s available from the B .F.I.’s National Film salute transformed into a hand receiving money Archive) by Victoria Wegg-Prosser completes from an industrialist (literalising the slogan the section. ‘Millions Stand Behind Me’) - is subjected to a detailed analysis in a welcome translation of Research such as this is essential to current political work, not only in that it establishes Eckhard Siepmann’s essay. This section ends with a long essay in which Judith Williamson traditions which loosen the stranglehold of deconstructs a series of ads which use images of modernism on young artists, but also in that, by families, showing the family to be a key site on studying the successes and failures of our pre­ which bourgeois ideology displaces class contra­ decessors, we can learn much for oppositional practice. One obvious lesson is the effectivity of dictions. All of these essays are usefully tied to applying an unrepentantly working class pers­ examples, all foreground class and gender (although not race), thus they rarely lapse into pective to producing material on concrete situa­ the theoreticism which mars much recent tions with and for specific, and perhaps rela­ tively small, groups within the class. Another is counter-ideological thinking. the value of intra-class organisation, across job, The real originality of the book is the middle geographic and ethnic boundaries. Willi section. This is the first attempt to set out a Munzenberg’s words, critically transposed, are history of socialist photography. It concentrates on the international worker photographer move­ still relevant today: ment between the wars, presenting the results of Photography has become an indispensable and out­ standing means of propaganda in the revolutionary recent research into worker photographer organisations in Germany, Holland, Belgium, class struggle . . . Much more important, in the end, the United States, Scotland and England. Evi­ is the political effect which is achieved by the juxta­ position of several pictures, by captions and accom­ dent throughout is the guiding hand of the panying texts . . . The revolutionary workers of all Workers’ International Relief, set up by Willi Munzenberg at Lenin’s instigation in 1921 and countries have to realize these facts very clearly. organised through Communist parties in each They have to fight the class enemy with all means, country. Initially seeking aid in the Russian have to beat him on all fronts. Just as the workers in the Soviet Union have learnt to make their own famine, the agency developed to provide food. T PHOTOGRAPHY/ POLITICS: ONE com plete, co-ordinating fashion story. Simpson have G ordon G ark e. T oday’s co n fident, stylish look sewn up. And sum m ed up. Main picture: Her long skirt and pink I, m edium or Her long skirt and tube-top in red or black Small o r m edium , s two-piece suit in ivy pure c o tta From ‘T rend’ d epartm ent. £95.00 Far left: Her gilet c o a t navy/w hite check and toning skirt in navy/w hite stripe. Both in wool. Worn with shirt in white viscose. medium or l a i « T £ 9 9 .5 0 ^ the three piecraltiiiM M > ^^ co tto n corduroy jack et, grey wool trousers and three-piece s m ^ M m a - e n d ' departm erffu 25.00 machine-tools, to invent things themselves to be put to the service of peaceful socialist construction, and just as workers in capitalist countries have leamt to write their own newspapers, so the proletarian amateur photographers have to learn to master the camera and use it correctly in international class struggle. (Der Arbeiter-Fotograf, 1931.) W. I. R.-inspired cultural organisations existed in many other countries - France, Japan and Australia, for example - and Photography/ Politics: Two aims to include material on these. It would be of great interest to survey also other left cultural work of the period (for example, the Artists International Association, discussed by Tony Rickaby in History Workshop Journal, no.6) and to set such work against the aestheticised, modernist, good-times-triumphant version of the thirties recently embalmed in the Hayward Gallery. The third section deals with ‘Left Pho­ tography Today’ - only partially, the editors apparently having already collected enough material for another annual on this topic alone. The outstanding feature of this section is that it is presented by practitioners; it lacks the dis­ tancing effects of art critical surveying and is thus useful for those working, or intending to work, in similar or related ways. Liz Heron’s report on the Hackney Flashers Collective is an honest account of the practical and theoretical struggles of the group over the best ways to effec­ tively present imagery which challenged the oppression of women both at work and through such regulators of the relationships between family and work as child-care provision. Similarly, the interview with the Film and Poster Collective maps out the development of their posters from single-image and short text to the complex formats they have recently tended to use. They end by citing Gramsci: ‘Creating a new culture does not only mean one’s own individual “original” discoveries. It also, and most particu­ larly, means the diffusion in a critical form of truths already discovered, their “socialisation” as it were, and even making them the basis of vital action, an element of coordination and intellectual and m oral order . While the relationship of socialist photog­ raphy to socialist political organisation was a key element in the history section, political parties made no appearance in the theoretical section and are referred to in only two articles in this section. MINDA discuss their photomontages for CARF, the newspaper of the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, especially their exposures of National Front leaders as Nazis and their closeness to Thatcherism. Robert Golden reports on his posters for Socialist Worker and on the series of children’s books he did with Sarah Cox, The People Working. These two articles are also the only ones whose main subject is racism and how to fight it. A further two articles show frankly what it is like to work for the local state. Nick Hedges details the stereo­ types used in ads for the charity Shelter, and Trisha Ziff gives a useful account of her work as a photographer in the Southwark Social Services Department. In contrast, I am puzzled by the inclusion of the mutual admiration notes of John Berger and Jean Mohr, and the presumption with which they treat their favourite subjects: women and peasants. Photography/Politics concludes with essays by two critic-photographers. John Tagg displays this nexus in a series of diary-like fragments, working notes on the problems of photographic representation, which range from the brilliant to the banal, from a subtle materialism to a very nearly sexist Barthesian speculativeness. Both self-indulgent and courageous, this text reveals much about the kinds of thought processes w'hich underlie the polished surfaces of most published critical writing. Allan Sekula’s ‘Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Docu­ mentary’ organises a similar range of concerns into a cogent dismissal of modernism (‘Only formalism can unite all the photographs in the world in one room, mount them behind glass, and sell them’) and an equally intense interrogation of documentary ‘realism’. He calls for a ‘truly critical social documentary’ which will ‘frame the crime, the trial and the system of justice and its official myths’, exemplifying the beginnings of this by describing the work of a small group of mainly young U.S. photographers/film-makers/video artists: Martha Rosier, Jon Jost, Brian Connell, Phillip Steinmetz, Fred Lonidier, Chauncey Hare and himself. All focus on aspects of working life seen in the context of power relations within parti­ cular industries. Displayed with extensive analytical captioning, the W'ork is returned for use within the political struggles of those who are the subjects of the photographs. It aims to ‘document monopoly capitalism’s inability to deliver the conditions of a fully human life’, an art of ‘resistance aimed ultimately at socialist transformation’. These remarks indicate the direction in which Photography/Politics points, the model of photographic practice which it proposes. It shows that there have been, and are, substantial achievements. It also reflects a core contradic­ tion of current interventionist photography: the tensions between individual work for the working class and collective work produced within the class. In this sense, the history section of the book mounts a critique of much current w’ork. Some of the important work being done w'ithin working class political organisations and community structures is included, but there is much more being done, here, in the U.S., Germany and Australia, for example, which could form the focus of the next annual. Finally, Photography/Politics, by occupying a space overlapping with the concerns of this magazine, poses some sharp questions. It was put together, and some of the articles written, by people who were instrumental in founding the Half Moon Photography Workshop, in building up its range of activities and in publishing Camerawork. They were obliged to resign, or were sacked, in August 1977, when the collective split for personal, political and ideological reasons. As a non-participant, I cannot comment on this affair. Nonetheless, part of the significance of Photography/Politics is that its future does not depend on Arts Council funding. Its total commitment to expanded definitions of photography and politics is a func­ tion of this independence. Camerawork has published issues (for example on Lewisham and Northern Ireland), and the Half Moon Gallery has mounted exhibitions, within a similar commitment. But not always. If every issue was overtly ‘political’ subsidies would dry up. Photography/Politics throws into relief the fact that Camerawork seeks to address a broad audience with a wide range of liberal/left opinions. The dangers here are those of ‘wishywashy liberalism’, directionless ineffectuality, of merely reflecting this diversity rather than seek­ ing to focus it. The advantage of this is that a variety of subjects can be tackled, at different levels, and a large audience or set of audiences reached. But it is not a question of some topics being naturally ‘political’, and others ‘not’, rather of a committed political attitude across a variety of subjects, from photographic archives to photo-journalist action, from kids participa­ tion to sexual politics. That commitment should, or could, be contingent on the political vagaries of Arts Council funding is a grotesque reflection of the ways this society is organised. T erry Smith PHOTOGRAPHY/POLITICS ONE is available for £4.95 (postage 6Op, overseas postage £1.00) from P .D .C ., 21 Clerkenwell Close, E C l, or Photography Workshop, 152 Upper Street, London S I . CAMERAWORK 4 Pictured History: Matchgirls' o strike 1888 .1 The value of photographs to labour history is strikingly illustrated here: the media distorts the conditions which led to the famous strike, the photographs point to the actual conditions. The media misreports the ‘girls’ as healthy and happy in the factories and fails to point out that half of the work of the industry, the making of matchboxes, was done at home in appalling and dangerous conditions for next to nothing. Photographs made this fact undeniable. Historians who fear photo­ graphs are denying themselves a key resource; photographers who ignore the ways history is constructed are limiting the effectiveness of their work. All of the images on these pages are products of the depression of the 1880s. Cassell’s Saturday Journal for December 10, 1887 illustrates comely girls busily working in open spaces, attractive appendices to the processes of match­ making. The text is equally distorting; in breath­ less style it details the growth of Bryant & May’s as if it were a natural flowering into modern tech­ nology from the primitive rubbing together of two sticks. It lauds the large, scientifically venti­ lated factory buildings, sets out the simple, almost casual nature of the work, claims that the girls are paid between 12 and 14 shillings a week, and praises them as ‘very industrious and remarkably well behaved’, adding that ‘nearly all the girls look strong and healthy’. Two years earlier these same girls had struck against the lowering of their wages and the undermining of their health, especially the loss of their teeth from inhaling phosphorus fumes. This led Tom Mann to say of Bryant & May’s: ‘Their working girls are most miserably paid, getting only some 8s. per week . . . And that company, during the first six months of its exis­ tence, actually paid over £330,000 to share­ holders, who had not done a single stroke of work towards producing it.’1 In July 1888, four girls who had given information on their condi­ tions to social reformer Annie Besant were dis­ missed. The result was the first step in the ‘new unionism’ - all the girls walked out. ‘If a woman can by honest work, earn a little money at home in her spare time (at match­ boxes), do you see any objection to it?’ The Chief General Inspector, Local Government Board, Poplar Union Enquiry, 1906. Why did they see mutual self-defence as worth risking their jobs for? Why did they, ignored by male organisers of predominantly male unions, feel the need to fight for the establishment of their own union? And why at Bryant & May’s, recognised by all sides as one of the better employers in the industry? By rationalising production in specially-built factories, Bryant & May’s systematically in­ creased its domination of the industry until the depression of the 1880s. Its response was not to lay off workers but the other classic manoeuvre, to reduce pay. When that was resisted, it achieved the same end by stepping up its system of fines. Eleven shillings a week was the theoret­ ically conceivable maximum for a girl working at full speed in optimum conditions. But these con­ ditions rarely obtained, and fines further cut average pay down to a few shillings a week. As well, the w'ork was dangerous: ‘phossy jaw’ (phosphorus necrosis) became common, spreading pain, inflammation and abcesses from the teeth throughout the jaw and face. Bryant & May’s were more concerned to prevent this than the usual small garret factories, but even they responded in the same way when the girls affected could no longer work quickly: they would be sacked. Photographs showing the interiors of match factories do not seem to be available, but medical photographs of ‘phossy jaw’ are, and they are appalling. The East End provided capitalists with a huge pool of labour ripe for the sweating, especially that of single girls and mothers with dependants. Bryant & May’s drew on this by dividing their production between matchmaking in the fac­ tories and matchbox making as ‘outwork’. The photographs show the conditions under which thousands of women and their families assembled the parts provided by the factories. Paid at a lesser rate than the factory girls, they worked a sixteen hour day at a maximum of %d per hour. They had to provide extra materials themselves, and to take the bundles of boxes to the factory to receive the pay. Many were sacked matchmakers, many were the only breadwinners in their family. Their desperate struggle for sub­ sistence was a constant warning to those in factory jobs. How' much of this can be ‘read’ from these photographs? The information I have just given is based on evidence presented at various enquir­ ies and observations made by various investiga­ tors; the analysis is based on the work of those who have researched the subject, especially Reg Beer.2 Little of it is stated in the photographs, but, in another sense, much more is made clear. The photographs do not state that the women pictured worked sixteen hours daily at 3 per Ad hour. They show something more important: that is, what it was like to work at that job, for those hours, at that rate. Historians often seem more comfortable with facts about experience than with facts of experience — for many of them, photographs and other visual material qualify as neither. Rebutting this requires that we go over some old and obvious ground about the nature of photography. ‘They left work there and then. The discharged one was taken back but this did not pacify them. A hundred of them marched to Fleet Street yes­ terday afternoon, and sent a deputation to see Mrs Besant. They expressed their determination to hold out. There is no organisation amongst them, but they seem to stick together well.’ The Star, July 6, 1888. Photographs are records of what the camera pointed at. They are records of momentary ap­ pearances, and relate to reality only to the degree that the recorded surface itself does. The camera records only a limited field of appearance, and thus a photograph is a selection from amongst all possible appearances; its relation to reality is, therefore, only as strong as the selection. Being a selection, a photograph is a reading of appear­ ances: we have to ask why the photographer was there at that time, which conventions of photo­ graphy she was operating, which ideologies were influencing her, what was the context of use of the photograph? As well, appearances can be, and often are, actively constructed — things and people are arranged, posed, juxtapositions faked — just as elements from different times and places can be combined and rephotographed. It is possible to photograph an appearance in a variety of ways, to alter the image drastically in printing it and to change it still further by the addition of other images and texts when it is re­ produced or displayed. These are some of the limits within which a photographer arrives at meaning; they are also some of the ways in which meaning is manipulated for the viewer. How does this bear on the logical status of photographs as evidence? Because photographs record what was before the camera at a particular moment, they are renderings of instances which, strictly speaking, cannot stand for any other instances. In being so easily manipulable, doubt can be raised about the degree to which they stand for even the instance ostensibly ‘caught’ by the camera. Thus the demand for extra-photo­ graphic authentication, by verbal and written documents and statements, implying that they are somehow less subject to partiality and mani­ pulation. For all these reasons, historians tend to use photographs as illustrations rather than evidence, and almost never think visually in their efforts to reconstruct history. But this caution becomes self-defeating as collections of unofficial, people’s memorabilia - such as that at the National Museum of Labour History - continue to grow, making more and more photographs available to resear­ chers, teachers, activist publishers and others. The point is that photographs are not only records of what the camera was pointed at; they are also records of how the camera was pointed and how the subsequent print was made. We can, in nearly every case, decipher the technical and ideological operations which went into achieving the image and into reproducing/ displaying it. Rules of evidence for photographs will obviously differ from those applicable to written documents, but they are nonetheless rules, with the same logical status. No-one operating such rules takes seriously the claim that photographs are unproblematic represen­ tations of reality, truth or whatever. They are partial selections, always for a purpose, always in context. Like written documents, official state­ ments, works of art, that is, like any commu­ nicative form. All are constructions, but all can, with proper analysis, be deconstructed. ‘The pity is that the match girls have not been suffered to take their own course, but have been egged on to strike by irresponsible advisers. No effort has been spared by these pests of the modern industrial world, the Social Democrats, to bring the quarrel to a head.' The Times, July 14, 1888. There are, I think, some further reasons why historians tend to distrust photographs. Most writers, especially when looking at early photo­ graphs, have attempted to account for the peculiar power of the images by pointing to their ambiguity, their susceptibility to readings beyond those perhaps intended by the photo­ grapher. Both Walter Benjamin and John Berger, for example, stress the sense of the subject ‘projecting through’ the image: the viewer’s disturbing awareness that the subject was aware of being photographed, has paused for a moment to be recorded. It is as if the act of photography has disturbed what it aimed to record, changing it from what it was - it has interrupted normal social relationships and communicative exchanges. Yet, at the same time, both photographer and subject know that text continued on page 10 K CAMERj Pictures from the National 7 The National Museum of Labour History was opened in 1975 in Limehouse Town Hall. Sponsored by the Trades Union Congress and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, it is the official repository of a large range and variety of items relevant to the history of the labour move­ ment. It houses banners, books, newspapers, posters, badges, ornaments, pamphlets, documents and photo­ graphs. Some of these are on permanent display, others form pa
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      • archiveFour Corners Bishopsgate
      • vimeo_link
      • authorSee sections X to AC
      • author_editorEd Barber, Mike Goldwater, Jenny Matthews, Shirley Read, Siddhiratna, Bruno Simes
      • author_writerGlyndwr Williams, Ian Macdonald, David Faddy, Angela Kelly, Frances Borzello, Stevie Bezencenet, Annette Kuhn
      • author_photographerE.J. Bellocq, Linda Benedict-Jones, Mike Disfarmer, Don English, Elmer Fryer, Nadar, Arnold Newman, Sir Cecil Beaton, Karen Knorr, Olivier Richon, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus
      • author_designer
      • author_intervieweeRoland Barthes, Jonathan Green, Anna Farova, Bruce Davidson, Lucy Lippard, Francis Brugiere, Lee Friedlander, Susan Sontag, August Sander, Edmund Carpenter, Doris Lessing, Cliff Richard, Yousef Karsh, Garry Winogrand, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, John Szarkowski, Oliver Wendel Holmes, Walter Benjamin
      • author_organisationCamera Press
      • tagsportrait,portraiture,photo-portrait,commodity,individuality,studio portrait photography,archetypes,poverty,environmental portraits,weegee,paparazzi,snapshots,family albums,mothers,holiday photos,memory,amateur,democratisation of photography,fame,celebrity,'public' vs. 'private' photography,19th century photography,daguerrotype,early commercial photography,early studio portrait photography,calotypes,experiences of sitters,carte-de-visite,cabinet photo,stereograph,pictorialism,portrait photography,punk,subculture,shelter,homelessness,national campaign for the homeless,housing,families,documentary,the nude,objectification,glamour,storyville portraits,hollywood,pin-up,pornography,star system,dolls,prostitutes,prostitution,second sight,record industry,album photography,portraits of musicians,publicity,david bowie,fashion photography,pop art,drug culture,commodification of sex,self-portrait,rembrandt,portrait photography vs paintings,art photography,women photographers
      • titleCamerawork Magazine - Issue 12
      • subtitleIssue 12: Portraits
      • dimension17 pages
      • ocr1
      • copyrightFour Corners/Half Moon Photography Workshop/Camerawork, Glyndwr Williams, Ian Macdonald, David Faddy, Angela Kelly, Frances Borzello, Stevie Bezencenet, Annette Kuhn, E.J. Bellocq, Linda Benedict-Jones, Mike Disfarmer, Don English, Elmer Fryer, Nadar, Arnold Newman, Sir Cecil Beaton © Cecil Beaton / Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Karen Knorr, Olivier Richon, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Roland Barthes, Jonathan Green, Anna Farova, Bruce Davidson, Lucy Lippard, Francis Brugiere, Lee Friedlander, Susan Sontag, August Sander, Edmund Carpenter, Doris Lessing, Cliff Richard, Yousef Karsh, Garry Winogrand © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, Irving Penn © The Irving Penn Foudantion, John Szarkowski, Oliver Wendel Holmes, Walter Benjamin, Camera Press
      • credits
      • relatedhttp://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O244805/photograph-beaton-cecil-sir/
      • locationBethnal Green, London, UK (pg 2) USA. Puerto Rico. New Guinea. Morocco. (pg 3) Austria. Essen, Germany. USA (pg 6,7) Paris, France (pg 8) Birmingham, London, UK (pg 9) Japan. Glasgow, Scotland, UK
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      • origination_date1979
      • origination_year1979
      • origination_month0
      • created2018-06-04 14:57:57
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      • modified2025-09-17 22:36:29
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      • status1
      • featured0
      • pdf_textJurgen Schadeberg From ‘ Contemporary Portraits' HMPW Touring Exhibition PORTRAITS No.12 Half Moon Photography Workshop 50p/$1.50 SOME APPROACHES TO PORTRAITURE “ ‘Portrait’ . . . (now almost always) a repre­ sentation or delineation of a person, esp. of the face, made from life by drawing, painting, photography, engraving, etc; a likeness.” The Oxford Dictionary Volume VII In photography the word ‘portrait’ has been used to refer to virtually any photograph showing a representation of a particular indivi­ dual. That person may be totally unaware the photograph was ever taken, s/he may have been outraged that it was taken or may have been totally involved in the whole photographic process. Whatever the case, the photograph of that person could be seen as a ‘portrait’. Such an image would be well within the dictionary definition, but is that really suffi­ cient? Given that photographers have been making portraits for over 130 years, some examination of the portrait in contemporary photography is overdue. Just how useful, or valuable is the word? What has it come to mean? In trying to find answers to these questions it will be useful to examine the practice of portrai­ ture through the work of particular photo­ graphers. We shall also need to look at some of the factors that will affect the final portrait and the context in which it is viewed: i) intention and use ii) choice of subject or sitter iii) relationship between photographer and sitter iv) stylistic devices and techniques Portraiture has always been a significant area of photography, both in commercial and social terms. In the 19th century it was primarily a studio based activity with its roots in a painting tradition. Since then, with technical develop­ ments in photography and mechanical repro­ duction, portraiture has become much more diverse. As a commercial studio activity, portraiture flourished in the mid-19th century, providing ‘likenesses’ that could always be adjusted to flatter the sitter. The wealthier the sitter, the more readily s/he could not only obtain a photo­ graphic likeness, but also one that was suitably re-assuring. In photographic terms, money could buy deception; photographic portraits not only reinforced the sitter’s chosen social role or position, but conferred status, as well as confirming it. At the other end of the spectrum the photobooth provides the cheapest possible portrait with absolutely no contact between photographer and sitter. Until the growth of a market for amateur photography in the 20th century, photographic portraits remained the domain of the famous and the wealthy. The commissioned studio portrait had a clearly defined social use; the photographer’s role and relationship to the sitter was similarly clear. Few photographers nowadays make a living purely from studio portraiture; since the 2nd World War the demand for such portraits has diminished, whilst the amateur market has continued to expand. Nonetheless, there are commercial studios all over Britain still pro­ ducing portraits in keeping with the long established tradition of flattering the sitter. The Daguerreotype and Ambrotype have given way to the colour portrait, printed on canvastextured paper, framed in gilt. Considering the diversity of individual photographers there is a remarkably homogenous product. will be chosen carefully depending upon the demands of the particular shot, campaign or product. Their relationship with the photo­ grapher will be commercially based, as it would be in a personal commission, except that they will stand to benefit financially from the trans­ action - money will buy their complicity. ‘Greatness’ John Ford Richard Avedon I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune-teller- to find out how they are. Rejection of tradition The long-established traditions of studio por­ traiture have not only been seen as an end in themselves, but also as a point of departure for some photographers. Richard Avedon is a photographer who has reacted against the confines of the studio tradition. Avedon now uses direct confrontation with his sitters, a white seamless backdrop and flat, frontal fighting. With his large format camera he mercilessly records every line and wrinkle on the face of his sitters. Many people find the work in his Portraits book provocative - Roland Barthes called the portraits: corpses that have living eyes which look out at you, which think. Avedon has an apparently simple view of portraiture: A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s being photographed. Yet he recognises that people in his terms: become almost symbolic of themselves. Avedon’s approach owes much to his reaction against traditional studio portraiture - he is no longer interested in flattering, or social roles, or environments. Instead he sees himself as seeking out that which the sitter hides even from himself: I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune-teller - to find out how they are. He does, however, make no claim that his portraits have psychological insight or character revelation: My photographs don’t go below the surface. They’re readings of what’s on the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. He records his sitters in infinite detail, stripping away the facade of their public persona. In the mid- 1960’s David Bailey began a series of portraits which owed much to the stylistics of Avedon’s work: frontal, white seamless back­ drop, close-up, harsh electronic flash, high quality image revealing every pore and facial detail. Rather than individual personalities, we are confronted by individual facial topography the work of a fashion photographer who, like Avedon, has reacted against the flattering cliches of traditional studio portraiture. Portraits in promotion The potential viewing audience of the commer­ cial portrait is usually restricted to the family and friends of the sitter, but portraits now have great currency in all kinds of promotional acti­ vities. Photographic portraits are used in all forms of selling: the ‘glamour’ image per­ petuated by so many magazines, the pin-up portraits in th'e daily tabloid or ‘Playboy’ magazine, the portraits of musicians on record covers, the portraits of people in advertisements selling anything from toothpaste to hi-fi’s, the front-of-house theatre portraits of actors. The list is a long one. Basically all these uses of portraits have one thing in common: they are geared to sell a product, whether it’s news­ papers or face-cream, the intention is the same. The people portrayed are part of that process; whether they’re models, actors, ‘personalities’, musicians, their role is very similar - they per­ sonalise and endorse the objects for sale. They Portrait photographers working in the 19th century studio moulds have been primarily con­ cerned with particular individuality and obtain­ ing a ‘likeness’ of the sitter: other practitioners appear to be more concerned with fame than individuality. Yousef Karsh is one such photographer: When one sees that residium of greatness before one’s camera, one must recognise it in a flash. There is a brief moment when all that there is in a man’s mind and soul and spirit may be reflected through his eyes, his hands, his attitude. This is the moment to record. This is the elusive moment of truth. People have been beguiled by his superb technique and see the sombre tones and rich textures as infusing the pictures with dignity and grandeur - part of his capturing the ‘inward power’ which he believes all men possess. Sadly, Karsh’s portraits reveal more about his technique and vision of greatness, and its portrayal in symbolic terms, than they actually show of his sitters as individual personalities. He works well within the old Victorian studio tradition, and to one extent or another all his ' 'sitters become subordinate to his portrayal of greatness and the stylistic devices he uses. His interest lies in the social role of his sitters; he researches the sitter before the session, but invariably produces portraits that present the public mask we are used to seeing. The Surreal Ernest Hemingway Yousef Karsh When one sees that residium o f greatness before one’s camera, one must recognise it in a flash. There is a brief moment when all that there is in a man’s mind and soul and spirit may be reflected through his eyes, his hands, his attitude. This is the moment to record. This is the elusive moment o f truth. The direct confrontation between subject and camera, so much a part of traditional studio portraiture, has held little interest for many photographers. Instead they have preferred to produce pictures that are clearly an ‘imposed’ view, where the sitter is but a foil for the photo­ grapher’s imagination. Bill Brandt’s portraits show people as creatures that inhabit his surreal world. This issue of CAMERAWORK, January 1979, was produced by the Publishing Project, Half Moon Photography Workshop, 119/121 Roman Road, London E2. 01-980 8798. is designed to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, views and information on photo­ graphy and other forms of communication. By exploring the application, scope and content of photography, we intend to demystify the process. We see this as part of the struggle to learn, to describe and to share experiences and so contribute to the process by which we grow in capacity and power to control our lives. The people who worked on this issue were Ed Barber, Mike Goldwater, Jenny Matthews, Shirley Read, Siddhiratna, Bruno Simes. Printed by Expression Printers Ltd, London N 1. If you have any comments to make or articles, letters or prints you would like to contribute we would be glad to hear from you. Please make sure it reaches us as soon as possible. (ISSN 0308 1676) 9 CAMERAWORK Puerto Rican woman with a beauty mark Brandt’s work has a certain harshness, which verges on brutality and mere affectation - such heavy treatments seem inappropriate in some of his portraits. His sitters are placed in unusual settings with ominous lighting and unexpected props - he manages to create a world of looming shadows where ordinary objects take on a strange, menacing quality, and even light seems to be an intrusion. Brandt describes this quality as: atmosphere. . . the spell that charges the commonplace with beauty. His portraits, like much of his work, are more concerned with design and form, textures and shapes, than individuality or likeness. People as objects In many portraits it is the individual personality that is of prime importance, but sometimes typicality becomes the dominant force in a photographer’s work. Irving Penn is one such practitioner - he has travelled all over the world making portraits of people in his ambulant studio on what he calls ‘neutral ground’. Penn’s work in advertising and fashion led him to develop certain stylistic devices that are now almost synonymous with his work - grey back-drop, north light, high quality images, formal poses. He has photographed the rich and famous in the same way that he photographed hippies in San Francisco or Mudmen in Papua^ New Guinea. He works within the confines of the studio tradition, but transports the studio to his location and isolates his subjects from their environment. His portraits show us representa­ tives of particular groups, tribes, classes, cults they are pictures of archetypes, not individuals. Many of his sitters, one suspects, do not fully understand the camera or the implications of being photographed. Of his approach, Penn says: I have tried tofind timeless and universal qualities . . . rather than to record accidental or transitory situations. A t the same time, I am always sustained by the docu­ mentary or historical value o f these records. According to Penn, taking people away from their natural circumstances transformed them, but they responded with dignity and seriousness. Edmund Carpenter, an anthropologist present at some of Penn’s shooting, has observed fear in the subjects and that the terror in their eyes is the tribal terror o f being recognised as individuals. These people of New Guinea need not have feared - Penn has transformed them into beautifully lit objects to adorn the pages of Vogue. This process of reification has made the most primitive peoples into still life photographs immaculate, detailed representations available for us to inspect at will. They leave one feeling ambivalent - visually seduced but intellectually and morally uneasy. The people portrayed have become objects of curiosity, unaware of the exploitative power of the camera and of photo­ graphy. Portrait of a people The anthropological approach that is apparent in some of Penn’s work was used many years earlier by August Sander, working from his commercial studio in Cologne. Shortly before the 1st World War he began a study of ‘Man of the 20th Century’ - he seemed to know what he Diane Arbus wanted from the outset: a genealogy of a people, a chart of humanity. He sought archetypes as subjects: The physical types in the chart were selected in a restricted area of the Westerwald. These people, whose way of life I had known from my youth, appealed to me because of their closeness to nature . . . all the characteristic common human qualities noted. His work was interrupted by the 1st World War, and later by the 2nd, but by then he had amassed a considerable archive of portraits of archetypes, people fulfilling a particular role in society yet remaining individual human beings. Sander rarely identified his subjects, preferring to identify them by occupation or activity. He managed to include some of his commercial clients in his project, but supplied them with more flattering gum prints, and for his own purposes used a glossy surfaced paper designed for technical photographs. The cumulative effect of his portraits is powerful, his straightforward approach, lacking the visual sophistication of practitioners like Penn, has a simple directness which makes his work more convincing. As Walter Benjamin observes: Sander’s work is more than a picture book: it is a training manual. Yet one still has reservations about his portraits - his obsession with genealogy leads him to overlook the possi­ bility of individuals being reduced to specimens in a collector’s album, rather than being recognised as the particular individuals they so obviously were. Freakshow In recent years photographers have been in­ creasingly involved in photographing people on the fringe of society, part of a ‘demi-monde’. ‘Borderline cases’ some people have called them. Back in the early 1960’s Diane Arbus, an American fashion photographer, began making portraits of transvestites, trans-sexuals, midgets, circus people, prostitutes, and a whole range of people she came into contact with during the hours she spent in Central Park, New York, or wandering the streets of that city. Her work has proved controversial and influential. Arbus committed suicide in 1971 and in 1972 a major retrospective of her work was shown in New York. This exhibition and the book that accompanied it contained some 80 or more portraits and edited transcripts of conversations with the photographer: Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excite­ ment for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends, but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were bom with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats. Such was her reverence for her subjects. They posed readily for her camera, and we can now see them caught by the electronic flash Arbus used. They stare out at us, unaware of the context in which we would be viewing them. The most disturbing aspect of her documenting ‘types’ is that seemingly ‘normal’ people have been caught in such a way as to make them look T hree market women of Rissani, Morocco ‘abnormal’. H er portraits have authority - derived from the contrast between the subject matter and their calm, attentive complicity. She has used the frontal moulds of photographic portraiture with its rhetoric of frankness, and disclosure she has gained their confidence, reassured them. According to Arbus: Photography was a licence to go wherever I wanted, and to do what I wanted to do. To her the camera appears to have been a passport cutting across moral boundaries and freeing the photographer from any responsibility towards the people photo­ graphed. Her work is a reaction against her own background and the commercial world which gave her a living. The portraits of Diane Arbus give us a view of an underworld, of victims, slow-motion private smash-ups according to Susan Sontag. Arbus brings them to our attention, but we must not be upset it seems; instead we must confront the grotesque and horrible with equanimity. They become less important as particular individuals, and instead represent certain bizarities: I do feel I have some slight comer on something about the quality of things. I mean it’s very subtle and a little embarassing to me, but I really believe there are things which nobody would see unless I photo­ graphed them. With such a view of the world we are all open to this kind of visual exploitation - we are all potential subjects, we all have quirks and nuances as individuals that might be seen as ‘exciting’ or ‘terrific’ if one sees things in a certain way. Put such images along with portraits of a few mentally retarded people, transvestites etc. and there is a powerful trade­ off. Beautification of poverty Just as photographers have obsessively docu­ mented more bizarre and unusual persons, so have they been drawn to minority groups. Josef Koudelka has been photographing gypsies since the early 1960’s. In his book Gypsies we are presented with photographs from East Slovakia 1962-68. People pose for Koudelka’s camera, but he does not reveal their identity to us. They are portraits but not of individuals. According to Anna Farova writing in the foreword of the book: A t first Koudelka was attracted by the physical beauty of the gypsies of Eastern Europe, the strangeness of their move­ ments and their facial expression, by their clothing and ornaments; later he was completely absorbed by his subject. John Szarkowski endorses this by writing: Josef Koudelka’s photography aims at a visual distillation of a pattern of human values: a pattern that involves theatre, large gesture, brave style, precious camaraderie and bitter loneliness. The main problem with these photographs is one of context - in an expensive hardcover book they take on a different meaning, aestheticising the suffering of these people. Presumably Koudelka has other plans for photographs of gypsies, or are they the result of a misguided romantic passion, destined never to be used positively? We may recognise or admire the altruism and power of his work, but we must also recognise its shortcomings. Bruce Davidson’s ‘East 100th Street’ operates in a similar way; it offers us a view of the people inside a Harlem ghetto in New York. The Irving Penn pictures are predominately portraits - people offer themselves to Davidson’s camera, aware of the camera, complied in making the portrait: Most of my photographs are compassionate, gentle and personal. They tend to let the viewer see himself. They tend not to preach. And they tend not to pose as art. Davidson’s book is an impressive record of a Harlem ghetto, the portraits show us represen­ tatives of that street - the images are wonder­ fully photographic, they beautify the poverty they document. We can savour it in the safety of our own comfortable homes. It’s interesting to see how people received the book when it first appeared. A.D. Coleman saw the East 100th St block as a place of squalor and degradation and was angered by Davidson’s aesthetically pleasing pictures; Philip Dante viewed the block as a soulful community and was upset by Davidson’s concentration on a dark journey into purgatory. These views appeared simultaneously in the New York Tim es in 1970. Later, Jonathan Green wrote about the photographs for an Aperture publica­ tion: Davidson’s images are not primarily meant to reveal the wrongs done to the people of East 100th Street nor to motivate the viewer toward social protest; rather Davidson, like Strand, has constantly used people from various lands and cultures as the basis of a highly personal and subjec­ tive art. His conception of the medium forces him to find the raw material of his craft in external reality. For Davidson reality has become merely the touch­ stone through which he is able to crystalise his per­ ceptions of the human predicament. Emotive portraits Since the earliest beginnings of photojournalism and reportage photography, portraits have been used as an integral part of picture stories and essays, often to evoke an emotional response and with the portrait standing as a personifica­ tion of that self-same event. Working on assign­ ment for Life magazine Eugene Smith used such portraits to punctuate and dramatise his photo-stories: ‘The Country Doctor’, ‘Albert Schweitzer’, and ‘Spanish Village’ all contain examples of his emotive portraits - dramatic fighting, very atmospheric, often close-up. Smith himself has viewed some of his portraits as symbolic - in writing about the mother and child in his Minamata series he said: As we photographed other things, things around her, and even the family, it grew and grew in my mind that to me the symbol of Minamata was, finally, a picture of this woman and child, Tanoko. Yet he also appears to have recognised the problems of taking such photographs: There are many ways lives can be changed by photographs, but I don’t think just the mere act of making a photograph will cause it to change. M inamata (subtitled ‘A Warning to the World’) published in 1975 was a carefully thought-out essay on one particularly obnoxious aspect of industrialisation in Japan: There’s nothing in this essay (Minamata) that can be taken as being other than affirmative, no matter how cynical I am at other times. The basic feeling is affirmation: it is not despair. These portraits highlight one of the contra­ dictions for the skilled photographer working in reportage; whilst s/he may produce powerful emotive images to be used for propaganda CAMERAWORK t , From ‘East 100th Street’ purposes in fighting a cause (Smith’s pictures were used in the fight for recognition and com­ pensation in Minamata), once that battle is fought the now famous images can be marketed in another context as high-quality books viz. Minamata, and Is Anyone Taking Any Notice? by Donald McCullin. The environmental portrait For the past 50 years or more photographers working on assignments for magazines have been using some elements of the sitter’s surroundings when making their portraits. ‘Natural’ portraits were pursued with relentless vigour by reportage photographers like Felix H. Mann and Alfred Eisenstadt. In more recent years the ‘environmental’ portrait has been talked about as if it were a new development. Reportage photographers continue to use a person’s surroundings to place them ‘in context’. Other photographers have developed an approach that is based on relating the sitter to his/her environment. Arnold Newman’s portraits demonstrate this very well. Newman works with detailed pre-knowledge of his sitters, using the large-format standcamera and elaborate lighting. This formal approach is clearly developed from studio tradi­ tions. He employs a tried and tested formula to produce utterly acceptable and often prestigious portraits in keeping with the image of Harper’s Bazaar and similar glossy magazines. He sees his pictures working on a symbolic level: We must also show the subject’s relationship to his world, either by fact or graphic symbolism. The photographer’s visual approach must weld these ideas into an organic whole and the photographic image produced must create an atmos­ phere which reflects our impressions of the whole. Some of Newman’s portraits overstate the person’s environment - the sitter as a particular individual becomes subordinate to the symbolic use of surroundings. His portraits are rarely less than immaculate in terms of photographic quality, but his formularised approach raises doubts as to the value of such formal portraits apart from their ability to reinforce an already established public persona. Rarely do his portraits cut through these masks. Innocent bystanders For the last fifty or so years, news photo­ graphers have been relentlessly ‘grabbing’ pictures of people that later get used as portraits. Certain conventions operate in this work, one in particular dominates - the use of direct flash. The work of Weegee typifies this approach, in his Weegee’s People and Weegee by Weegee Bruce Davidson books we see his flashlight catching people in the most bizarre and outrageous poses. His pictures of people offer a sceptical view of America of the 30’s and 40’s, they are just one part of his work as a press photographer engaged in covering news events. His pictures show little regard for the feelings or thoughts of his subjects. Instead he uses his camera to interrupt the stream of events and seize upon the most outlandish moment. In certain photographs one feels the person portrayed is paying the price of being in the public gaze, a ‘personality’. The work of ‘paparazzo’ photographers, such as Ray Bellisario and Ron Galella take this to an extreme as they ‘snatch’ pictures of their rich and famous subjects, using whatever photo­ graphic equipment, (be it high-powered tele­ photo lenses or direct flash) necessary to get the picture they want. Often held up as being portraits, these unguarded moments have more in common with surveillance photographs. Similarly, street grabshots have been viewed as portraits by some historians (see the section on ‘Street Portraits’ in Ben Maddows Faces book). ‘Grabshots’ by photographers like Garry Winogrand are portraits of events rather than portraits of particular individuals. Winogrand’s curiosity is summed up when he says: I photo­ graph to find out what something will look like photographed. So much for his concern with the individual. The raw material For many photographers the actual physical appearance of the subject/sitter will be of prime importance, and may prove to be instrumental in the formulation of the portrait itself. Some photographers have been attracted to certain kinds of people, or people in certain kinds of circumstances, who ‘fascinate’, ‘interest’, or ‘attract’ them. Each and every one of us has a particular facial character, w of ray dressing, way of moving etc, etc. On the street we’re all raw material for photographs. It’s all too easy to become involved in documenting ‘types’ of people without first thinking out the reasons for doing so, the point of such pictures, the use to which they can be put. The exploitative possibilities of photography need to be clearly thought about, particularly when making photographs of people without their permission. Ed Barber Ed Barber is a member of the H.M.P.W. Collec­ tive. He is currently working on a portrait research project. Alfred Krupp. Essen, Germany, 1963 Arnold Newman 4 CAMERAWORK Janice Green. I liked the Polyfotos when they used to take whole \ relax a bit. N icci always thinks I look like theQueen,I think it’s the big sheets and you just picked the ones you wanted. You can see the pearls. I t ’s not very often that I have a photograph taken because first ones are serious very conscious o f what they are doing, thenyou j it’s usually me taking the photograph. Family Snapshots hotography has changed the way we see ourselves and our families. Through their Kodaks, Brownies, Bantams, and Instamatics ordinary people can see and sense their visual ancestry. The invention of photo­ graphy has extended the possibility of clinging to time through portraits of ourselves and others, providing for us a real link with the past. The indulgence of leaving one’s image for posterity was initially only available to the wealthy and educated, and so the picture we have of Victorian times is one of privilege which allowed lives of leisure, travel and erudition. However, patterns of use for photography were set during this period: the pursuit of the medium as an art and as a means of public docu­ mentation; and the personal family photography presented in the form of the family album. This album originated in the scrap book and, with photographs, providing an essential visual contact with the past: becomes a living social document . . . unique in its concrete, visual record o f worlds o f past experience (The Expand­ ing Eye Alan Thomas). The popularisation of photography through the simplification of processes and the develop­ ment of a photographic industry brought with it photography for all, although this development was greeted with consternation by those who had exclusive use of the medium to that date. By its mass availability photography had been de­ based and the product of this mass use, the snapshot itself, was only of value as a means of commercial exploitation. It could also be used as a term of abuse, ‘just a snapshot’, or be defined in the Dictionary of Photography as Originally a photograph taken at a shutter speed high enough to be hand held, but now most usually applied to a photograph taken without care or skill, or by a beg­ inner. So family photographs produced and certainly valued by millions of people, are given no attention except in the provision of equip­ ment and materials for their production. The amateur photographic market in the UK is esti­ mated at around £360 million for 1978. The em­ P phasis has certainly been upon consumption with scant attention given to the uses to which people might put the product. There is little doubt about what the manufacturers think should be photographed. I remember, I remember . . . says the Kodak as it clicks its way around the world. Ilford films for faces and places, Put your family in the picture. A pattern of use for photography in the fam­ ily appears to have been set in the period 1848-70, and this mode of use has been rein­ forced by advertising. It seems to fall short of revealing a total ‘record of their own way of life’, with a particular bias that everything must be viewed through a viewfinder that reinforces the happiness myth. In attempting to fix individual fragments of the pursuit of this illusory ideal, the snapshooter produces an image which has considerable emotional charge. The ‘snapshot aesthetic’ which has developed in the work of certain contemporary photographers may be an attempt to kifidle such emotion felt when looking at snapshots but not felt when looking at art photography. The first serious history of the rise of popular photography. The Snapshot Photograph by Brian Coe and Paul Gates has recently been pub­ lished. Criticism apart, the important factor is that the snapshot has come from a scrap of paper ‘taken without care’ to an art object able to stimulate a new genre of photography. In the course of my current research on snap­ shots and family albums I interviewed a number of families in order to establish case histories of the family use of photography. The second half of this article is a direct result of this investiga­ tion. Snapshots have been described as our ‘self-image’ or as ‘psychological documents, frozen dreams’. However interpreted, it is clear that they participate in a link with family and friends and our collective past. But is this a very limited view of the past distorted by the need for adequate light to take pictures by? Are there no memorable moments in winter? The people I interviewed took it for granted that one did not take pictures in winter unless they had a flash. One couple did not have any pictures of their first baby when she was very young as she was a winter baby and the flash frightened her. Sun­ light and happiness are interdependent in our human experience and the good old days are much improved by viewing them through good light. It will be interesting to see if Kodak’s launching of fast colour negative films will change this pattern, or the collective equation of summer equals photography will prevail. Holidays, children, family reunions, weddings, the chosen subjects are all about love and belonging. The camera fixes its focus to give a reinforcing, permanent form to what may be a fragile unit, but can for the sake of the photo­ graph express a unity and exclude all others by the neat white border around the print. In a family where parents and children are split, there is the photographic presence of members who are absent. The moment of rupture is stated by their absence and a break of continuity in the family narrative. There may also be hints within the pictures of changes of relationship subtly expressed and capable of detection. Ann O ’Leary, who had many pictures of weddings, had none of either of her own marriages. Since my interview in November 1977 she has visited Australia to see her daughters, leaving her second husband in Britain. It seems this depar­ ture may be permanent. The absence of some photographs may be of equal significance as the presence of others. Photographs are rarely destroyed. There seems to be a sanctity in the image on paper, however blurred, faded, indistinct or unflattering. The destruction of the photograph seems to be an act of violence, of murder by proxy. Removal from the family album is an act of casting out the olfender. In one family the marriage of one of the sons had broken up, and the subsequent death of the father wasconsidered to be a result of the stresses involved. The daughter-in-law was blamed for this and all trace of her was removed from the family album, leaving blank spaces. In modern terms this has the potency of exorcism. The photographer in the family is an impor­ tant person. Except in one case where a more ex­ pensive camera was purchased, the woman was the prime photographer in the families I spoke to. This could be interpreted in many ways; as an expression of wanting the power to control the nostalgic images of childhood, as an expres­ sion of a loving relationship with her family, and perhaps also as a show of vanity in not wishing to expose herself to the critical eye of the camera. Motives are rarely simple or necessarily obvious. Not to take photographs of children is a sign of parental indifference. As a society, we build a fantasy round the concept of an idyllic childhood within an ideal family, and reinforce the fantasy of perfect parenthood by reflecting ourselves in the images of our children. The major period of photographic activity seems to cease as the children grow older. Then teenage children start to take photographs, making their own record of their lives, and these remain in their own possession. The ageing of the parent and the assertion of independence by the child­ ren is a process which, perhaps, inhibits the parents’ desire for record-making, and the next phase is the receipt of photographs of the grand­ children. Intense pleasure was seen and remembered as children in viewing the photographs of the family. It is here that a major demonstration of family continuity was taking place. Children, through access to parents’ and grandparents’ collections, and being photographed themselves, were establishing themselves as part of the family heritage, showing that life is more than of evanescent value. Thus multinational photographic corporations provide a means of producing a tenuous, spiritual ancestry for us as more traditional values wither in mass indifference. CAMERAWORK photography in any expressive sense. Mystification wins again, but the definition of the snapshot as ‘taken without care’ is false. Taken without knowledge is much more appropriate. I have observed the snapshooter vforking with intense concen­ tration upon the task in hand. The people photographed give advice based upon photo folklore, and great care is given to pose and situation. What was clear was that people did not know any­ thing of the process they were using, it was a magic thing that happened when they pressed the button. We are in an age of great mystification reinforced by the concept of automatic equipment as a replacement of knowledge and the initiative of the individual. None of the people spoken to feel they had any technical know­ ledge of photography nor did they feel they had any ability to use I was about eighteen then and I was on holiday. It was ragged like that because it was in my husband’s wallet. W "W T hy do we so often take and see photo% / ■ / graphs of the same people? Why do ▼ * the same entertainers, sportsmen, politicians, and ‘personalities’ receive so much free publicity, and why do we appear to come back for more? The ‘we’ referred to here is not the ‘we’ who are more interested in photographs than in what or whom they represent, but the much more numerous ‘we’ who look at maga­ zines and books out of curiosity, interest, and a desire to pass the time. John Berger has drawn our attention (Ways of Remembering Camerawork No. 10) to the dis­ tinction that is to be drawn between the public and private uses of photographs, maintaining that the private context creates a continuity which is parallel to the continuity from which the photograph was originally taken, whereas the public photograph has been severed from life when it was taken, and it remains, as an isolated image, separate from your experience. Although I don’t deny that such a distinction can be made and that it is a useful and important one in some respects, it is also misleading in terms of the way we look at photographs. In considering pictures of people - loosely termed ‘portraiture’ - it would seem that there are a number of parallels between public and private usage which considerably blur the distinction and are significant in both contexts. My reservations stemmed initially from Berger’s assertion that public photographs are usually images o f the unknown, or at best, they are images o f things which are known only through other photographs. There is, however, a whole category of pictures in which this is not true. We are continuously presented, in news­ papers, magazines, books and galleries, with pictures of people with whose appearance we are already familiar and about whom we already ‘know’ a great deal - not just through other photographs, but through their television appearances, radio broadcasts, what we have read about them or by them. The fact that this ‘knowledge’ is second-hand, entirely produced through the media and possibly entirely mis­ leading, does not prevent it from producing that ‘reconstitution of continuity’ which Berger says is the special characteristic of private photo­ graphs. We very rarely look at photographs of people in order to find out what they look like. We are more interested in pictures of people we know. We may be fascinated by our own holiday snaps but are likely to be bored by other people’s. We pay more attention to and are more curious about magazine or newspaper pictures of those we have seen represented many times before than those who are new to us. Even the excep­ tions to this generalisation can be found in both public and private contexts, as when we look with interest at a picture of a brother’s wife whom we have never met or of an admired writer or musician we have never seen. It may be objected here that this tendency in Stewart Mann Stewart Mann teaches photography on an Art Foundation course and is doing research for an M.Phil. on photography and schools. He would be pleased to hear from anyone working on photography in the family. That’s me. It’s not me, but that’s how I like to seem. I think that’s fantastic. Doesn’t look a bit like me really does it?A t twenty three I can say I looked like th a t. . . the public use of pictures is forced upon us by the media, that we really don’t want to see yet another picture of Margaret Thatcher or Hitler or Bruce Forsyth, and that editors and tele­ vision producers, either engaged in some con­ spiracy to reinforce the dominance of elite groups or for the more humdrum reasons of wishing to use available material and create attractive page lay-outs, make us look again and again at the same people. There is, however, Ann: This sort of thing with your stomach sticking out, you know, having a scratch or something, that’s more me. But it’s not me as I want to go down in posterity. considerable evidence that there is genuine public demand in operation here, as in the popularity of certain photographs in galleries, or in the sale of books, or in the fact that maga­ zines featuring new photographs of the royal family or pop stars do sell better. There seems to be a desire, not to get to know new people, but to increase our acquaintance and familiarity with those already known. There is also a correspondence between the Familiar Faces forms of pictures produced in the public and private contexts. Just as the high street photo­ grapher is called in to take pictures of weddings or cricket teams or new graduates in caps and gowns, so it seems that the public relations photographs of the captains of industry or the investiture pictures of the Prince of Wales are required. Conversely, we are continuously deluged with well-known people ‘taken unawares’, ‘looking natural’, ‘in an unguarded moment’, which serve to emphasise that feeling of familiarity and ‘private’ knowledge and spon­ taneity which are valued in family snapshots at the seaside. (Occasionally the two forms are brought comically together, as in Cecil Beaton’s coronation portrait of the Queen in which she is represented in formal pose with all the trappings of a thousand years of monarchy looking like the lady next door who has just won a week’s holiday for two at Butlin’s). The forms have changed historically, also in parallel, the stern grandfatherly picture of Gladstone on the parlour wall being replaced by kindly avuncular Jim Callaghan on the maga­ zine cover on the kitchen table, the stiff unsmiling and carefully arranged Victorian family group in the photographer’s studio by the Polaroid Christmas dinner table scene with raised glasses and paper hats. There are similarities too in reactions to public and private photographs. We bring to bear our feelings and knowledge and prejudices about the subjects and see in the same smile on the face of Edward Heath either goofy grin or affable good nature, determined by both our political convictions and our previous expe­ rience of him, just as our attitudes towards relatives and friends are brought to bear upon their pictures. O f course, Berger’s distinction still survives in that the nature of private experience is funda­ mentally different to mediated public expe­ rience, and we know we are deceived into thinking we have familiarity with well-known people when we have, in fact, none. We can recognise the abuses inherent in this bogus relationship and can deplore the elitism involved, the perpetuation of the hegemonic domination of our society by the few so regularly presented to us and the consequent devaluation of private relationships and experience. We are nevertheless victims of our own pleasure in recognition, and forced to live with this, the real Family of Man created and perpetuated by photography - Mum, Dad, Auntie Gladys, Dennis Healey, Stirling Moss, Petula (dark, John Betjeman, Jimmy Carter and Annie Walker. We may not like Big Brother but he is after all a close relative. Perhaps it’s a comfort that we know him so well. David Faddy Her Majesty The Queen. 1953 Sir Cecil Beaton David Faddy is Head of Film and Photography at the Polytechnic o f Central London. « CAMERAWORK he main function of portrait painting has been to establish a social role for the sub­ ject, the concern being not for indivi­ duals, but for their place in society. The portrait served, both explicitly (display of property) and implicity (suggestion of wealth and leisure) as evidence of status. Towards the end of the eighteenth century there was an increasing demand for portraits. Wood-engraving returned to fashion, litho­ graphy was invented and then came photo­ graphy. The announcement in Paris in 1839 of the details of the Daguerreotype process, and its gift to the world, was to be the beginning of an en­ thusiasm for photography, which was directed almost immediately towards portraiture. Contemporary methods of representation, i.e. painting, drawing, and lithography possessed characteristics of uniqueness, colour, and reproduceability. The work could be produced with varying degrees of speed and displayed with corresponding degrees of realism. This was limited by the skill of the artist and defined by the qualities of the medium. The advantage of the Daguerreotype was that it required less manual dexterity and could be produced relatively quickly. The equipment was costly, the process hazardous and frequently resulted in failure. None of these factors deterred the amateurs, for it had one great advantage - the D aguerreotype by an unknown photographer. cl852 capability to reproduce ‘accurately’ and to record minute detail to a degree previously inconceivable. The qualities were obvious. This was a process that combined the singularity of painting, the speed of drawing, lacked the flat­ ness of the lithograph and exhibited a realism that none of the existing mediums could attain. Above all, it was faster and so it was cheaper. The sensitivity of the plate, which required long exposures, was a major drawback as far as portraiture was concerned, yet a contemporary account by a pupil of Daguerre’s states: Within fifteen days after the publication of the pro­ cess o f M . Daguerre in Paris, people in every quarter were making portraits. Adamson’s technical skill enabled them to pro­ As the mechanics of having one’s picture It was not that these new photographers had a duce simple, spare portraits which seem to hint taken were still rather uncomfortable in the great desire to record the public but, as portraits at the ‘individual’, as much as revealing the 1840’s/50’s it was sensible to attempt to put the became easier, interest increased. The ‘type’.The Calotype had certain advantages:it client at ease, before enduring what has been subsequent commercialisation of photography was a negative/positive method, the image was for this purpose was partially in response to a compared with a session at the dentist. Presum­ not vulnerable and it did not have the harsh demand. As the financial benefits began to be ably one ‘dressed up’ to be photographed, so ‘realism’ of the Daguerreotype. However, it did how pleasant to parade around, socialising, realised, social trends and studio advertising rather resemble a drawing, while the public pre­ admiring portraits and generally being ‘seen’, served to stimulate further demand. ferred the image that resembled the miniature. before offering oneself to the critical eye of the The first documented portrait was made in So, for the first twelve years the Daguerreo­ camera. This objective tendency to ‘realism’ October 1839. The subject had her eyes shut type ruled the commercial studio. The process against the harsh sunlight and her face was pow­ could easily be overcome by a skilled retoucher, and patent restrictions were two of the most dered for a shorter exposure. The necessity of who might well be a redundant miniature important factors in early portraiture. It was yet keeping still for several minutes resulted in a painter, now getting his revenge on another process that caused photography to rigid expression, the final result being almost photography, by obscuring all the qualities that expand and alter in the next few decades. made it remarkable in the first place. However, corpse-like. (In fact, a suitable and common despite this tendency for ‘improvement’, many subject). In the following months many n 1851, Frederick Scott-Archer introduced improvements were suggested, some by of the early portraits survive unblemished. the Wet-collodion negative. Its basis, emul­ interested scientists, most by eager he client might as well have been sitting sion on glass, was not new, nor was the albu­ commercialists. Of these, the most significant for a painting. One expected to be viewed men paper used for printing. But as the accelera­ were: toning - to improve the contrast and by the camera-operator and collaborated tion method made it possible to use Daguerreo­ protect the image; and the acceleration method, in the display and recording of information. The for portraiture, so Scott-Archer’s fast emul­ type sion revolutionised photography, especially which increased the speed of the plates. composure of the sitter and the composition of portraiture. An albumen print from a collodion By m id-1840 the first portrait studio had the photographer combined in the image. The negative combined the fine quality of the metal opened and by the end of 1841 there were transient expression was replaced by the sub­ plate process with the plural nature of the paper studios in most major towns in Europe and stantial and generalised one. one; it became the predominant process until it Many early portraits have a gentle quality to America. Success was immediate. Beard of was superceded by the dry-plate in the 1880’s. London made £30,000 in his second year alone. them and it is not difficult to relate them to There were several related forms of This was mostly from portraits, the rest being Benjamin’s idea of ‘aura’. Here Benjamin presentation: ambrotype, ferrotype and from the sale of licences. He had purchased the quotes Orlik: carte-de-visite, all of which were beneficial to patent on the Daguerreotype process in The synthesis of expression brought about by the the growth of photography. These modes were England (the only country to suffer this length of time that a model has to stand still is the instantly adopted by portraitists, which led restriction). He advertised for prospective main reason why these (early) pictures, apart from them to phase out the earlier methods, whilst at their simplicity, resemble well-drawn or painted licensees by displaying a sample price chart. the same time, offering an increasing variety of portraits and have a more lasting effect on the spec­ There were two headings: Charge and Profit. form. This development did little to alter the The latter could be 90% of the former. Competi­ tator than more recent photography. social conventions of the studio, but it did affect This quality is particularly evident in tion was a significant factor in technical and its commercialisation. commercial developments. Every operator was Calotypes. Few portraits were made using this . . . it was a little thing, a man standing by a fluted determined to offer a more advanced or process, despite the fact that it appeared almost column, full length, the head about twice the size of interesting result; e.g. Claudet, a competitor of immediately after Daguerre’s. (Two important factors were the inconsistency of paper quality a pin. I laughed at that, little thinking I should at a Beard’s, patented the use of painted backdrops day not far distant, be making them at a rate of a in 1841. The idea was immediately fashionable and the difficulty of the emulsion ‘taking’ to the thousand a day. (New York Daguerreotypist, on and hence saleable, both through Claudet’s paper.) Talbot, the inventor, in an attempt to gain money rather than recognition, had issued studio and by the sale of licences. first seeing a carte). strict patents, which covered his and other re­ Prior to 1851, a degree of craftsmanship was n theory, a portrait was now a possibility lated methods. Threatened law-suits deterred necessary to produce results. As many artists for all but the poor. At last, a truly demo­ interested photographers, who refused to pay had been forced into becoming ‘photographercratic form of representation; no longer artists’ to continue working, there was also an the high licence fees. Moreover the public had does the lack of wealth discriminate! Yet in 1843 become used to the high quality of the French element of concern for the ‘picture’. Portraits Claudet’s price for a single image, untinted, was were relatively expensive, even for the middle process and found the coarseness of the paper 21s. It actually took several years before the classes, and a studio needed only a few sitters print less attractive. One portrait studio, cheap assembly-line method of production each day to be a viable commercial began to be possible. So, even though the gap devoted exclusively to the Calotype process, lasted only a year. Apart from Hill and enterprise. had narrowed, visiting a studio was still a limited and consequently privileged activity. With the Adamson in Scotland, where there were no s the public became aware of the new and larger studios this became a social event. The restrictions, few seem to have made an extended usually cheaper pictures the studios besuccess of Calotype portraits. successful establishments combined art-gallery, L came transformed. Outwardly they ap­ meeting-place and drawing room as well as the These two men produced several thousand peared the same and if anything more lavish as ‘operating’-room. An account of Brady’s pictures in the 1840’s that are firmly based in the the fashion spread. Through names like ‘Palace style of conventional painting, yet stand apart Broadway gallery in the early 1850’s: of Photography’ and ‘Temple of Photography’ The floors are carpeted with superior velvet tapestry due to the unique qualities of the process. In­ proliferated, behind the scenes they came to re­ . . . the walls are covered with satin and gold paper. stead of considering the grain of the paper print semble mini-factories. Portrait photography became a production-like business. Not all the The harmony is not the least disturbed by the superb as a disadvantage, they used it to produce studios worked this way and this procedure did rosewoodfurniture - tete-a-letes, reception and cosy ‘breadth of effect’, a feature intermittently not necessarily produce poor results. What it chairs and marble top walls, all o f which are multi­ sought after by artists (as indeed Hill was). did produce was mediocrity, on a scale that Hill’s talent for lighting and composition and plied by mirrors from ceiling to floor. T From Commercial Beginnings T I I A must have seemed staggering to the early inven­ tors, many of whom lived long enough to experience the shift from amateur dabbling to mass industry. This in no way affected its popu­ larity. It would appear that though clients did require an image that was recognisably personal, they were apparently satisfied, and maybe even desired, to fit a general image of their ‘class’. In this decade the process became subordinated to the result. The investigations of the early practitioners and the delight in the means of representation was replaced by a desire for uniformity of image, though not of represen­ tation. The individual became increasingly type-cast with appropriate props, gestures, and background, this completed the already limited nature of the camera. The photographer as ‘interpreter’ was trans­ posed into photographer as ‘recorder’. Certain qualities of the medium were developed, usually those that were an asset to the business aspect. The arguable ability to capture ‘aura’ was neg­ lected; there were too many pictures to take; there was not enough time. This change did not happen overnight. The 1851 Crystal Palace Fair, which exhibited photographs from all over the Western world, provided a showcase and stimulant to photography. Scott-Archer provided the means. Though he gave his process freely to the world, it was not till 1855 that all processes were unrestricted by patents and practitioners could operate easily. There are two points to be made about the expansion of commercial portraiture in the 1850’s. Both are concerned with attempts to make the public purchase images of people. First, there was a movement to extend the potential clientele of the studios by offering cheaper portraits. Disderi had patented the carte-de-visite in 1854 (a method of making eight or ten images on one plate), as he knew that many could not afford current prices. Simultaneously, at the other end of the scale, increasingly large, elaborate and hand-worked pictures were being offered to attract the wealthy, presumably as an alternative to a ‘por­ trait in oil’. There arose a very complex scale of prices, from 6d. for a tintype, up to $750 for an American Imperial. There were other scales for size, number, amount of retouching, type of presentation, personal backdrop, etc. Demo­ cracy at last. Now, whatever one could afford there was a product to suit the purse. All but the very poor could obtain their picture, yet the wealthy could buy photographs suitably different, so as to be able to disassociate their pictures from the more ‘common’ side of the trade. The second point is concerned with the rise of the ‘celebrity’. The more successful studio photographers established extensive records of the famous of their time, to be sold at a great and continuing profit. Brady in America published a volume, Gallery of Illustrious Americans, in 1850, a first step towards his ambition to be the photo-historian of his time. Disderi in Paris became court photographer and by 1866 had 65,000 portraits of celebrities for sale. Mayall in London published the Royal Album, fourteen pictures of the Royal Family and sold 100,000 copies. The practice was simple. A well-known figure was requested to sit and, as they did not pay, the copyright remained with the photo­ grapher. Hundreds of prints would then be made from the negative and could be viewed by the public when they came for their own pictures. oth these factors led to an ever-increasing number of images, particularly carte-devisites . . . the social currency, the senti­ mental ‘greenbacks’ of civilisation (Oliver Wendell Holmes). Benefits claimed earlier by the Calotype were now reaped by this form. There wereperiods,such as during the American Civil War, when photographers followed their clients (in this case the army), and could not keep pace with demand. However, for some, this was an objectionable development: The appearance of Disderi and the carte-de-visite spelled disaster. Either you had to succumb . . . or resign. (Nadar) Despite the similarity of much of the studio work, there were those who managed to combine their own particular style, which went deeper than mere appearance. Nadar was such a photographer. In a lawsuit of 1856 he stated: The theory of photography can be learnt in an hour and the elements of practising it in a day . .. What cannot be learnt is the sense of light, an artistic feeling for the effects of varying luminosity and combinations o f it, the application of this or that effect to the features, which confront the artist in you. What can be learnt even less is the moral gasp of the subject - that instant understanding which puts you in touch with the model, helps you to sum him up, guides you to his habits, his ideas and his char- B i CAMERAWORK acter and enablesyou to produce, not an indifferent reproduction, a matter of routine or accident such as any laboratory assistant could achieve, but a really convincing and sympathetic likeness, an intimate portrait. During the 1860’s Nadar was one of the most successful portraitists in Paris. He had a signifi­ cant advantage in his wide circle of friends in the arts, most of whom patronised his studio. He was thus in an excellent position to fulfil his desire for an ‘intimate portrait’, since he was well-acquainted socially with many of his sitters. These pictures are surprisingly simple and non-decorative, for Nadar was an eccentric and flamboyant man, who worked in lavish surroundings. The portraits appear as a record of the interaction between the sitter and the camera rather than the sitter and the photographer. The latter relationship is suppressed in favour of the intimate act of ‘dis­ closure’ to the lens. One is aware of the lighting and the sitter, nothing else interferes. Whether Nadar achieved the depth of study to which he aspired is not easy to say. Rarely do we view his photographs without the benefit of a title, usually a recognisable name. So how do we know whether we are being informed by the image or the text? If we are already acquainted with Offenbach and Baudelaire, either visually or through prior knowledge of their lives, to what extent can the portrait work alone? Indeed, why should it? ike Nadar, many photographers have used commercial portraiture to providea secure economicbaseforother less lucrative acti­ vities. Two of his contemporaries serve as good examples - Rejlander and Robinson. Both established portrait studios in the late 1850’s, but unlike Nadar are not particularly well known for their work in this field. The studio work subsidised their pictorial activities. Occasionally a photographer might even be able to discard the protective umbrella of the more traditional commercial work to become totally involved in ‘art’ photography. This was (and in­ deed still is) a rare occurrence and there are few practitioners today who are not answerable to a client for their product. Many resent it: Another conserver of strength and saver of time has been the retouching of all my professional sittings by a paid retoucher. The work seldom means anything to me beyond money, the public does not appreciate any difference in results, so why should I ruin my eyes and tax my nerves? My one regret is that I must sign these prints . . .(Edward Weston, 1924) Whilst some worked outward from their commercial base there were others who arrived at studio work after somewhat different beginnings. It can be difficult to distinguish between amateur and professional styles in por­ traiture or to make generalisations about their characteristics. However, it is possible to be more definite about the pressures that affect the final result in examining the work of Charles le Negre, who initially took photographs as an eager amateur, later as a disillusioned profes­ sional. He was a contemporary of Nadar and though he began by using the medium as an aid to painting, he soon turned to it in its own right. He took many portraits characterised by an informal ‘family album’ quality. After some years of experimentation with the medium he was required to move to the south for health reasons. Here, embittered by lack of official recognition and in need of money, he was forced to accept portrait commissions and sell pictures to tourists. His later portraits are noticeably different to his earlier images. Many were in the form of a stereograph, a double image that gave a three-dimensional effect when seen through a special viewer. The points of comparison between the two bodies of work are few, there seem only to be points of contrast. In the later images there is none of the naturalness which characterised the early portraits. Now the lighting delineates harshly, destroying tonality and modelling. The painted backdrop does not quite blend with the jumble of objects in the foreground and parts of irrelevant studio props intrude to ensure our awareness of the whole contrivance. As for the subject, the lady appears as a cardboard cut-out placed in an equally ‘dead’ environment. (There is a distinct similarity with Pollack’s toy theatres - cut out the figure, paste onto cardboard, attach wire, slide onto stage against paper scenery and move to and fro for animation ). It is apparent that there is a significant diffe­ rence in the quality and type of portrait that le Negre produced at these distinct times in his life. It is not possible to say whether it was the photographer or the demands of the clients that caused this change in his ‘style’, but once involved in commercial photography his photo­ graphs became crude and cliched. Is this due to the pressure of earning a living, or to his dis­ illusionment? Difficult to say, but I suspect that other practitioners followed the same path. To
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      • archiveFour Corners Bishopsgate
      • vimeo_link
      • authorSee sections X to AC
      • author_editorEd Barber, Terry Dennett, Marylin Dalick-Noad, Mike Goldwater, Liz Heron, Sue Hobbs, Eric Molden, Tom Picton, Jo Spence, Paul Trevor
      • author_writerTom Picton, Jo Spence, John Berger, Nick Hedges, Steve Hoare, John Tagg, League of Socialist Artists, David Hoffman, Clark Kent, Colin Osman, Albert Camus, Chris Steele Perkins, Institute of Incorporated Photographers, Roger Mayne, Dick Huntington, George Solomonides, Ed Barber, Mike Goldwater, Terry Dennett
      • author_photographerBob Long, Ed Barber, Nick Hedges, Steve Hoare, Paul Strand, Neil Martinson, Michael Ann Mullen, Richard Greenhill, Erwin Kneidinger, Gerhard Ludwig, Erika Sulzer-Kleinemeier, Bob Carlos-Clarke, Anwar Hossain, Struan Robertson, Henry Angelo-Castrillon
      • author_designer
      • author_intervieweeBill Gaskins, Barry Lane, Lou Lessen, Annie Spike
      • author_organisationInstitute of Incorporated Photographers, League of Socialist Artists
      • tagspaul strand,social realism,neo-realism,portrait photography,factories,industrial,class,photography as evidence,documentary,children's photography,half moon photography workshop al collective,commercial photography,viewpoint,curriculum,pinhole,alternative technology,depth of focus,amateur,'working lives',centreprise publishing project,workers' al association,work,routine,nude,ethnography,art photography,objectification,capitalism,mass reproduction,printing,picture post magazine,marxism,robert golden,roger mayne
      • titleCamerawork Magazine - Issue 06
      • subtitleIssue 6: John Berger, Steve Hoare, Tom Picton, Nick Hedges, Roger Mayne, Jo Spence, John Tagg
      • dimension13 pages
      • ocr1
      • copyrightFour Corners/Half Moon Photography Workshop/Camerawork, Tom Picton, Jo Spence, John Berger, Nick Hedges, Steve Hoare, John Tagg, League of Socialist Artists, David Hoffman, Clark Kent, Colin Osman, Albert Camus, Chris Steele Perkins, Institute of Incorporated Photographers, Roger Mayne, Dick Huntington, George Solomonides, Ed Barber © Edward Barber Estate, Mike Goldwater, Terry Dennett, Bob Long, Paul Strand, Neil Martinson, Michael Ann Mullen, Richard Greenhill, Erwin Kneidinger, Gerhard Ludwig, Erika Sulzer-Kleinemeier, Bob Carlos-Clarke, Anwar Hossain, Struan Robertson, Henry Angelo-Castrillon, Bill Gaskins, Barry Lane, Lou Lessen, Annie Spike
      • credits
      • related
      • locationBethnal Green, London, UK (pg 1) New York, USA. Mexico. New England, USA. Hebrides, Scotland, UK. USA. France. Italy. Egypt. Ghana. Romania (pg 2,3) Wolverhampton, UK (pg 4) Hackney, London, UK (pg 8) Austria. Germany. South Africa. Istanbul. Bangladesh (pg 11) North Kensington, London, UK. Leeds, UK. Lambeth, London, UK
      • copyright_obtained0
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      • uploaded1
      • origination_date1977
      • origination_year1977
      • origination_month0
      • created2018-06-04 14:57:36
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      • modified2025-09-17 22:36:29
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      • pdf_textBob Long "Photo Montage” May Half MoonExhibition , John Berger Nick Hedges Steve Hoare Roger Mayne Tom Picton Jo Spence John Tagg No.6 Half Moon Photography Workshop 30 p E w an M acL eo d , S o u th U ist, H eb rid es 1 9 5 4 PAUL STRAND 1890-1976 here is a widespread assumption that if one is interested in the visual, one’s interest must be limited to a technique of somehow treating the visual. Thus the visual is divided into categories of special interest: painting, photography, real appearances, dreams and so on. And what is forgotten —like all essential questions in a positivist culture — is the meaning and enigma of visibility itself. T I th in k of this because I w ant to describe w hat I can see in tw o books which are in fro n t o f me. They are tw o volumes o f a retrospective m onograph (published by A p ertu re, New Y ork), on the w ork o f Paul Strand. The first photographs date from 1915, w hen S trand was a sort o f pupil of A lfred Stieglitz; the m ost recent ones were taken in 1968 — though S trand, w ho died in March, 1976 at th e age o f 85, w orked after th a t. The earliest w orks deal m ostly with people and sites in New Y ork. T he first of them shows a half-blind beggar w om an. One of her eyes is opaque, the oth er sharp and w ary. R ound her neck she wears a label w ith BLIND p rin ted on it. It is an image w ith a clear social message. But it is som e­ th in g else, too. We shall see later th a t in all S tra n d ’s best photographs of people, he p re ­ sented us w ith the visible evidence, not ju st o f their presence, b u t o f their life. At one level, such evidence o f a life is social com m ent — S trand consistently to o k a left political position — b u t, at a different level, such evidence serves to suggest visually the to ta lity o f another lived life, from w ithin w hich we ourselves are no m ore than a sight. This is why the black letters B-L-I-N-D on a w hite label do m ore than spell the word. While the picture remains in fro n t of us, we can never take them as read. The earliest image in the book forces us to reflect on the significance of seeing itself. T he n ext photographs, from the 1920’s, includes photographs o f m achine parts and close-ups o f various natural form s — roots, rocks and grasses. Already S tran d ’s tech n i­ cal perfectionism and strong aesthetic in­ terests w ere apparent. But equally his obstinate, resolute respect for th e thing-initself was also apparent. And the result is often disconcerting. Some w ould say th a t these photographs fail, for they rem ain d e­ tails o f w hat they have been taken from : they never becom e independent images. N ature, in these photographs, is intrasigent to a rt, and the m achine details m ock the stillness of their perfectly rendered images. From the 1930’s onw ards, the p h o to ­ graphs fall typically in to groups associated w ith journeys th at S trand m ade: to M exico, New England, France, Italy, th e Hebrides, E gypt, G hana, Rum ania. These are the photographs for which S trand becam e wellknow n, and it is on the evidence o f these photographs th a t h e should be considered a great man. I am forced to use th a t som e­ w hat archaic term because in the end it is less confusing than saying artist, p h o to ­ grapher, th in k er, image-maker. What it am ounts to is th a t with these black-andw hite photographs, w ith these records which are distributable anyw here, he offered us the sight of a num ber o f places and people in such a way th a t our view o f th e w orld can be qualitatively extended. On his travels S trand avoided th e pic­ turesque, the panoram ic, and tried to find a city in a street, th e way o f life o f a nation in the corner o f a kitchen. Mostly his approach let him choose ordinary subjects which in their ordinariness are extraordinarily representative. He had an infallible eye fo r the q u in tes­ sential: w hether it is to be found on a M exi­ can doorstep, or in the way th a t an Italian village schoolgirl in a black pinafore holds her straw hat. Such photographs en ter so deeply in to the particular th a t they reveal to us the stream o f a culture or a history which is flowing through th a t p articular subject like blood. The images o f these p h o to ­ graphs, once seen, subsist in our m ind until by JOHN BERGER some actual in cident, which we witness or live, refers to one o f them as though to a m ore solid reality. But it is n o t this which makes S trand as a p h o to g rap h er unique. His m eth o d as a p h o to g rap h er was m ore unusual. One could say th a t it was th e an ­ tithesis to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s. The p h o ­ tographic m om ent for Cartier-Bresson is an instant, a fraction of a second, and he stalks th a t in stan t as though it were a wild animal. The photographic m om ent for S trand was a biographical or historic m om ent, whose d u r­ ation is ideally m easured n o t by seconds b u t by its relation to a lifetim e. S trand did n o t pursue an in stan t, b u t encouraged a m om ent to arise as one might encourage a story to be told. In practical term s this means th a t he de­ cided w hat he w anted before he to o k the pictu re, never playing with the accidental, w orked slowly, hardly ever cropped a pic­ tu re, often used a plate cam era, formally asked people to pose fo r him . His pictures were all rem arkable for their intentionality. His po rtraits were very frontal. The subject is looking at us; we are looking at the sub­ je ct; it has been arranged like th a t. But there is a similar sense o f fro n tality in many o f his o th er pictures o f landscapes or objects or buildings. His cam era was n o t free-roving. He chose where to place it. Where he chose to place it was n o t where som ething was ab o u t to hap p en , b u t w here a num ber o f happenings w ould be related. Thus, w ith o u t any use o f anecdote, he tu rn ­ ed his subjects in to narrators. The river narrates itself. T he field w here the horses are grazing recounts itself. The wife tells the story of her marriage. In each case Strand, the p h o tographer, chose the place to p u t his cam era as listener. The approach: neo-realist. The m ethod: deliberate, frontal, form al, with every sur­ face thoroughly scanned. What is the result? His best photographs are unusually dense — n o t in th e sense o f being over-burdened or obscure, b u t in the sense of being filled w ith an unusual am o u n t o f substance per square inch. And all this substance becom es the stu ff o f the life o f the subject. In the tw o volum es, which include over 200 photographs, there are at least 30 pictures of this kind o f au th o rity and intensity. Their quality depended upon his technical skill, his ability to select, his know ­ ledge of the places he visited, his eye, his sense o f tim ing, his use o f the cam era; b u t he m ight have had all these talents and still n o t have been capable o f producing such pic­ tures. W hat finally determ ined his success in his photographs o f people and in his lan d ­ scapes — w hich are only extensions of people w ho happen to be invisible — was his ability to invite the narrative: to present him self to his subject in such a way th a t the subject is willing to say: I am as yo u see me. It is m ore than a statem ent o f im m ediate fact: it is already an explanation, a ju stifi­ catio n , a dem and — it is already au to b io ­ graphical. S tran d ’s photographs suggest his sitters tru st him to see their life story. And it is for this reason th a t, although the p o r­ traits are form al and posed, there is no need, eith er on the p art of photo g rap h er or p h o to ­ graph, for the disguise o f a borrow ed role (“ smile, please.” ). Photography, because it preserves th e ap ­ pearance of an event or a person, has always been closely associated w ith the idea o f the historical. The ideal of photography, aesthetics ap art, is to seize an “historic” m om ent. But Paul S tran d ’s relation as a p h otographer to th e historic is a unique one: his photographs convey a unique sense of duration. ‘PAUL STRAND - A RETROSPECTIVE MONOGRAPH’ A perture Books, New York and G ordon Fraser, L ondon 1971. (Pub­ lished in tw o volumes) ‘PAUL STRAND - SIXTY YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHS’ A perture Books, New Yoek and G ordon Fraser, L ondon 1977. This is th e only book of S tra n d ’s w ork still in p rin t; it is beautifully p ro d u ced , b u t at £ 16.00 is hardly good value when com pared to the earlier tw o volum e m onograph of 1971. This issue of CAMERAWORK, A pril, 1977, was produced b y the Publishing Project, Half M oon Photography W orkshop, 27 Alie Street, L ondon, E .I., 01- 4 8 8 — 2595. is designed to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, views and inform ation on p h o to ­ graphy and o th e r form s o f com m unication. By exploring th e application, scope and co n ten t of photography, we intend to dem ystify th e process. We see this as p art of the struggle to learn, to describe and to share experiences and so con trib u te to th e process by w hich we grow in capacity and pow er to control our ow n lives. Ed Barber, Terry D ennett, Marilyn Dalick-Noad, Mike G oldw ater, Liz H eron, Sue H obbs, Eric M olden, Tom P icton, J o Spence, Paul Trevor. Printed by Expression Printers, 5 Kingsbury R oad, L ondon, N .l. If you have any com m ents to m ake or articles, letters o r prints you w ould like to co n trib u te, we will be glad to hear from y o u . Please m ake sure it reaches us by 1st Ju n e 1977 (ISSN 0308 1676) Factory Fantasies? by NICK HEDGES Judy sits at the assembly line, head sunk in her hands; on the girder next to her hangs a travel poster of a bikini-clad girl laughing at the world. Just down the same assembly line Rose has stuck up some snaps of her children, and a blurred print of herself and her husband. At lunchbreak Vera apes a pin-up posture, and Ron performs his standard practical joke with his false teeth. At the steelworks a row of empty safety helmets welcome you in, and down by the open hearth furnace you are welcomed to Hell. Emil stands by his flower pots, ‘to cheer the cabin up’, - he was Polish, survived the Germans, killed three weeks after the photograph was taken when his fork-lift truck toppled over and crushed him. In Joe’s cabin the pin-ups are stuck with darts. Charlie who is third-hand on the furnace wears his safety clothing like a Samurai. At tea break George challenges Ron to a game of Mastermind. b ased a t W olverham pton P o ly te c h n ic . T he fellow ship is w o rth £ 1 ,8 0 0 p .a ., th e p o ly ­ tech n ic su p p ly m e w ith m aterials w o rth £ 4 0 0 p .a ., an d u n d e rta k e to p ro v id e m e w ith h a lf a d a y ’s teach in g a w eek in th e F acu lty o f A rt a n d D esign. O verall th e fu n d in g is w o rth a b o u t £ 2 ,7 0 0 gross a y e a r. I w o rk a b o u t 55 h o u rs a w eek o n th e p ro je c t. I t ’s m y tim e , I organize it. M ost o f th e p eo p le th a t I ’m p h o to g ra p h in g earn a b o u t th e sam e, o r a little m o re ; th e ir w o rk in g w eek is s h o rte r b u t th e y have n o c o n tro l over th e ir w o rk in g tim e. T he p ro je c t th a t I ’ve u n d e rta k e n is a p h o ­ tographic d o c u m e n ta tio n o f p e o p le a t w o rk , an d th e en v iro n m en t o f w o rk p laces. T h e in ­ te n tio n is to p ublish b o th p h o to g ra p h s an d tra n sc rib e d interview s a t th e e n d o f th e p r o ­ je c t in 1978. M eanw hile I ’m p u ttin g on e x ­ h ib itio n s in each o f th e fa cto ries th a t I ’ve v isited , u sually in th e w orks ca n te e n . My stim ulus has com e fro m th e h id d e n n a tu re o f w o rk p laces (in re c e n t years B ob G o ld en is on e o f th e very few p e o p le to a tte m p t to p o rtra y h o w w e all sp en d on e th ird o f o u r lives, w hilst th ere have b e e n an in fin ite n u m ­ b e r o f d o c u m e n ta tio n s o f leisu re, th e sea­ side, e tc .). In th a t sense it was a conscious decision to sw ing th e b a la n c e , a n d to re c o g ­ nize all th o se w o rk ers w h o p ro d u c e th e m aterial w ealth th a t p ay s fo r o u r w elfare state. T h e facto ries th a t I ’ve v isited so far are: B irchley R olling M ills, N o rto n V illiers, Nick Hedges T hese p h o to g ra p h s a n d te x t are o ne a tte m p t a t try in g to com e to term s w ith w o rk e rs’ re ­ ac tio n s to w o rk . T hese re a ctio n s are e x ­ p ressed in th e visual an d verbal stim u li w hich th e y in je c t in to th e fa c to ry : h u m o u r, fa n ta sy a n d h u m a n n ess. It is also m y ow n re c o g n itio n o f ‘fa n ta s tic ’ elem en ts p re s e n t in w o rk en v iro n m e n ts. I t ’s y o u r b irth d a y — SM ILE. I t ’s th e u n io n c o n fe re n c e — ‘I t ay n o u se ’. I t ’s tim e fo r th e Sun - SEE PA G E T H R E E . People o f W o lv erh am p to n S u p p o rt N o rto n V illiers. W hen I arriv ed a t W o lverham pton to sta rt m y p ro je c t n o o n e in th e P o ly te c h n ic , sta ff o r s tu d e n t, knew w here th e N o rto n facto ry w as. N o o n e th a t is e x c e p t F red B aistow th e c a re ta k e r/d o o rm a n ; h e ’d w o rk ed th e re on ce, to ld m e to ask fo r Iv y , a n d m e n tio n his n am e. T he gap b e tw e e n e d u c atio n al in s titu tio n s an d th e real w o rld depresses m e. E ach tim e I re tu rn fro m a session o f d a rk ro o m w o rk or te a c h in g to th e e n v iro n m en t o f th e w o rk s, I feel b a c k in tu n e . M iddle-class ro m an tic! — “ E xpensive c am e ra, m a te ” , I quickly ra tio n ­ alise, “ T h e y ’re like a d e c e n t set o f to o ls, I earn m y living w ith th e m .” Being a p h o to ­ g ra p h e r is easy , an d living as a p h o to ­ g rap h er allow s y o u th e ch an ce to a tte m p t c o n tin u in g assessm ents o f th e real w o rld . All th e tim e y o u are u n d e rsta n d in g m o re a b o u t in te ra c tio n s in th e h u m a n w orld. I ’m w o rk in g o n a fellow ship fu n d e d by th e W est M idland A rts A sso ciatio n , an d CAMERAWORK 6 Nick Hedges Jo siah Parkes (lock m anufacturers), Unigate Dairies, and th e British Steel C orporation (blast furnace and open hearth steel furnaces). Over the n ex t year I in te n d -to spend the coverage to include a service industry, a w hite collar industry, a group of farm s, a high technology industry and a m edia industry. While I am w orking on the p roject I shall be doing an M. Phil., based on the docum en­ tatio n . Part o f the problem o f docum entary w ork is to decide on how to present the evidence, and fo r the M. Phil., I shall be te st­ ing various m ethods. T here are several schools o f thought on how to com m unicate evidence: 1. T he classic ‘Family o f M an’ style, in which all the photographs are used as m e ta­ phors for generalised statem ents ab o u t the ‘quality o f life’ (sic). This style may succeed in reaffirm ing established views ab o u t life, b u t it has little to do w ith actual truths ab o u t th e subject m atter. It is m ore like a p o litician’s election address than a serious study o f reality. 2. The detailed and massive study o f a p articu lar phenom ena in w hich evidence is collected over a long period o f tim e. A t its best (Vietnam Inc. Philip Jon es G riffiths), this type o f study gives unique insights and understanding o f the subject. au th o r drops the stance o f the hidden observer. Exam ples o f this might be R obert F rank’s Lines o f M y H a n d, Agee and Evans L e t Us N o w Praise Fam ous M en, and to some ex ten t D anny Lyons Conversations w ith the Dead. The dangers o f this latter approach can b e th a t it turns in to a public display an a u th o r’s posturing at the expense of the c o n ten t o f his photographs, w ith the result th a t the w hole w ork moves tow ards th a t perilous arena o f ‘A rt’. The examples I’ve q u o ted manage to avoid this, how ever, and to my m ind are very considerable p h o to ­ graphic works. 5. D ocum entation in w hich the sub­ ject is also th e au th o r. I have in m ind the com m unity based photographic projects like Paul C arter’s in Blackfriars. This concept has n o t really been fully tried o u t; if it has weaknesses it could be in the difficulty in es­ tablishing a single defined aim, and in the structural weakness o f a collective sta te­ m ent; I recognise th a t this weakness is also its strength. This list o f docum entary categories is by no m eans conclusive, and my own tendency is to move som ew here betw een 2 and 4. 3. Conventional new spaper and magazine stories w here the authors are pressured by deadlines into a sketchy o r sensationalised approach, and th e full w eight o f w hat has to be said is lost in a forest o f com peting infor­ m ation. W hat is news is n o t necessarily the tru th ab o u t a situation. 4. A d o cum entation w hich presents in detail a study o f a phenom enon, b u t which also reveals the a u th o r’s own involvem ent. So th a t w hilst being a study o f an aspect of hum an reality, it also opens up th e au th o r to a similar exam ination. In this way the Kids and Photography... A contemporary Candide can spend 13 years in school and seven years in higher education, before spending 40 years on the dole (or receiving Arts Council or other grants) and retiring on the old age pension. Official edu­ cation offers literacy and numeracy while the real teachers are disguised as television and film producers, news­ paper and magazine owners, and advertisers. Photography is now offered as another panacea. O-level pupils study the documents of Matthew B. Brady and the experiments of Angus McBean, and,as an ‘art medium’ it is used to de­ , lay the boredom of the classrooms for a few more years. It is clear that edu­ cational institutes avoid the real and urgent issues. Most teachers and university lecturers remain ignorant of the manipulation that engulfs us. We believe that it is worth telling children about the real uses and misuses of photography. We claim no false neutrality. We think we can begin to control our ow n lives by running w orkshops outside the official system . Education has to com e o u t o f th e academic closet. For this reason the H alf M oon Photography W orkshop has an educational collective th a t runs w eekend and other w orkshops, gives lectures, w rites arti­ cles and sets up short-term projects. T o this end, three one-day integrated w orkshops w ere held in February and March in London on KIDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY. . . . The w orkshops tried to relate p h o to ­ graphy to oth er disciplines; to discuss a variety of approaches to th e subject, going far b ey o n d the teaching o f photography as a curriculum subject; and to reject th e fast developing and highly-lucrative audio/visual aid industry in favour o f hom e-m ade aids, re ­ volving around the direct needs o f children. Previous w orkshops were held in May, 1976. W orkshop 1 dem o n strated th a t there is a consciousness industry o perated by th e mass m edia and schools, and co n cen trated on the w ork of photographers, b o th in the use of pictures and of language. E xtracts were show n from Tham es Television’s program m e VIEW POINT. Made for schools broadcast­ ing, tran sm itted once and then banned by the In dependent Broadcasting A u thority, V iew point explores the concept th a t ‘com ­ m unication is co n tro l’. In the ex tract shown we saw how pictures are taken by p h o to ­ graphers, then ed ited , industrially processed and published by new spapers. E xtracts were also show n from THE HISTORY BOOK, a 16mm Scandinavian colour anim ation film (with English soundtrack) w hich presents w orld history from th e view point of oppressed and exploited people. It is suita­ ble fo r kids from eight onw ards and can be hired from The O ther Cinem a.1 N um erous speakers to o k different aspects o f m edia ranging from the magazines th a t children read, to the ways in which adults themselves m ediate inform ation to children. Much of th e w ork also centred on practical sug­ gestions for co m batting and discussing the sexism, racism and class bias inherent in mass media. Work show n and discussed ranged across personal and social id en tity an d docum en­ tary projects, involving the use o f images from magazines and new spapers, com bined w ith the taking and collection of p h o to ­ graphs and the com pilation o f personal his­ tories. Ideas were opened up for teaching ab o u t local com m unity life and w ork, about living in a multi-racial co m m unity, and to discussing concepts of pow er w ith children. The em phasis was always upon low cost, low technology and group w ork. W orkshop 2 co n cen trated on the bias of mass technology, w ith an illustrated in tro ­ duction to the concept th a t m uch of w hat was discovered in the photographic past has now been dropped or ignored by “ official” histories o f p h otography an d by mass m anu­ facturers. The dangers were also p o in ted o u t o f th e cu rren t policy o f w ithdraw ing p ro d u cts and services, sim ply because they do n o t m ake a certain arbitrarily-fixed am o u n t of p ro fit (cost accountancy), and photographic adverts w ere show n to d em on­ strate the alm ost universal attem p t on the p a rt o f the suppliers to inculcate in us the h ab it o f “consum erism ” (encouraging reliance on expensive and fashionable co m ­ m ercial eq uipm ent rath er than giving us the knowledge and m eans to m ake decisions based on our actual needs). Small w ork­ shops included one on pinhole cameras (m any m ade o f cocoa tins, some w ith rising fro n ts, others w ith stereo or 16 pinholes), and th e use of the cam era obscura. O ther groups in tro d u ced alternative p h o to chem istry and hom e-m ade things, p h o to ­ graphy w ith o u t a cam era, practical p h o to m ontage sessions, cam era handling and d ark­ room w ork. T he audience o f 80 m oved, in small groups, through the w orkshops o f their choice. W orkshop 3 dealt w ith the practical problem s o f introducing p hotography to kids, how to raise m oney, how to plan a darkroom , etc. G roups discussed p h o to ­ graphy in adventure playgrounds, p h o to ­ graphy as a curriculum subject, or as used w ithin language developm ent, image co n ­ stru ctio n , urban studies, social, com m unity an d y o u th w ork. Chairperson for the three W orkshops was Tom Picton, and a b o o k stall was run by Bob White. T he education collective prepared and issued to w orkshop m em bers a com prehen­ sive loose-leaf kit. This co ntained a variety o f articles specially w ritten for th e occasion, plus off-prints o f o th er relevant articles, reading lists, useful addresses, a P h o to Chem ­ ical H andbook, details o f how to m ake hom e-m ade photographic em ulsions. Also by Tom Picton and Jo Spence included was th e excellent ‘L ad y b ird ’ book o f THE CAMERA, a pam phlet by Paul C arter o f Blackfriars Settlem ent on how his p ro ject was set up an d is ru n , and issue 21 of SCREEN EDUCATION2 which contains several useful articles on practical w ork, in ­ cluding one by Terry D ennett and J o Spence “ Photography, Ideology and E d u catio n ” . These jackdaw s can be purchased separately (at cost price) from H.M.P.W. at £ 5 .0 0 in ­ cluding postage and packing, or £ 4 .0 0 if collected — cash w ith order). A nyone interested in w orking w ith the collective should co n tact them at th e Half M oon Photography W orkshop, 27 Alie S treet, L ondon, E .l — tel. 01 488-2595. Most o f the w ork done on these three w o rk ­ shops was voluntary (for w hich m any thanks) and expenses incurred were grantaided by the G reater L ondon Arts Association. 1. The O ther Cinem a, 12/13 L ittle N ew port S treet, L ondon, W .I., tel: 01 734 8508. 2. SCREEN EDUCATION, Society for E du­ cation in Film and Television, 29 Old C om pton S treet, L o ndon, W .l. Costs 70p plus p & p. Final discussion on second day. CAMERAWORK 6 4 student Pinholing: From Here to Infinity cocoa tin pinhole e began making pinhole cameras several years ago, started big, using dust-bins with crude pinholes made in oven foil, and large bromide paper negatives. The obvious links with photography’ history are impor­ s tant. We still use paper negatives al­ most exclusively but have added a whole range o f cameras in many sizes, including wide angles up to 180 degrees, zooms, rising fronts, stereo, colour, and recently a 16-in-one model inspired by the Victorian ‘ carte de visite’ cameras. W The principles o f the pinhole camera has o f course been known for centuries, and any light-proof contain­ er can be made into a practical camera by painting the inside black and mak­ ing a small hole in one side. But few people realise that it can produce images o f very good quality, or that such a wide variety o f special purpose pinhole cameras can be made for little or no cost. with a size 9 needle hole in a 9-inch deep box, the exposure will be about five minutes on a sunny day, using bromide paper. You can do a great deal o f interesting work with­ out even getting into the complications o f exposure calculations. Just stick to working on sunny days and get to know the exposure time for particular cameras by trial and error. The smaller the hole, the longer the exposure; the smaller the box, the shorter the exposure. In theory you can use any light sensitive material in a pinhole camera, though some might be too slow for practical use. Film is very quick to expose and produces good prints, but it is very expensive in the large sizes needed for good pinhole photos. Ordinary photograhic paper has the advan­ tage o f being much cheaper and can be pro­ cessed under a safelight. It will even tolerate a surprising amount o f white light leaking in­ to an improvised darkroom, whereas film will not. You can work with pinhole cameras with a minimum o f photographic knowledge and you can learn most o f the basic principles o f cameras and processing, but it is important to realise that its potential is far greater than simply as an introduction to photography. Pinhole cameras can do many things conven­ tional cameras cannot do. Most o f the dis­ advantages can be turned into advantages and even the limitations can be enjoyed. Seen as a genuine alternative camera rather than a crude photographic toy, the pinhole camera should have a great future. mobile camera obscun^/darkroom Steve Hoare teaches in the Art and Design Department o f Dartington College o f Arts and runs a weekend photography group with children at Dartington Hall School. He gave a recent workshop in the series, ‘ Kids and Photography’run by the Half Moon Photo­ , graphy Workshop Educational Collective, on pinholes. The Art and Design Department at Dart­ ington at present runs a course for those in­ tending to teach in schools, with the empha­ sis on the middle age range o f 9 — 13. A new Diploma o f Higher Education, “ and Art Design in Social Contexts” the first o f its , kind, starts in September. These courses have led towards an increasing com m it­ ment to the use o f low technologies where possible. Steve Hoare Most books or courses on photography either ignore or dismiss the pinhole camera as a crude device which produces a blurred image. Invariably they point only to the dis­ advantages, blurred images (not true), long exposures (what’ the hurry?). The long ex­ s posure is o f course a disadvantage in many situations but can be an advantage in others. A good lens can produce a sharper image than a pinhole, but if you use a large nega­ tive in a pinhole camera you can get a re­ markably sharp photo. Unlike the lens, the pinhole has an infinite depth o f focus. This is a great advantage to the amateur camera maker as it entirely eliminates the problem o f focussing and makes it possible to con ­ struct a remarkable variety o f cameras that would be impossible or extremely difficult when using a lens. For example, the back o f the camera can be curved into a semi-circle to produce a 180 degree (almost) wide angle camera which produces much less distortion than a fisheye lens costing hundreds o f pounds. My 180 degree camera cost about 5 pence. The infinite depth o f focus makes a ‘ zoom camera’ with variable angle o f view a simple matter. You can use a movable film or paper holder inside the box. A converted folding Kodak makes a zoom pinhole camera with eight shots on 120 roll film. Pinholes are ideal for architecural ph oto­ graphy. The wide angle often required pre­ sents no problems and a rising front is easily incorporated. Just make a vertical line o f pinholes. Other camera movements such as a ‘ horizontal shift’ are also easy — just add more pinholes; cover them all with black tape ‘ shutters’and remove the appropriate one to make the exposure. I have a stereo camera made from a Carousel lens box which exactly matches the size o f a junk shop viewer. Other cameras are purpose-built o f plywood, such as the colour model, four exposures onto one sheet o f 10 inch x 8 inch paper, and the 16 inch x 20 inch ‘ carte de visite’ but most can be , made from ready-made containers. For work with children ready-mades are best, but avoid the flimsy cardboard box which is difficult to make really light-proof, gets blown away by the wind or collapses under the weight o f a steadying brick. Try to find containers which can be made light­ proof with a minimum o f modification. Small cans have the double advantage o f being quicker to expose and are cheaper on materials. Cylindrical cans produce strange­ ly distorted pictures, square ones produce ‘ normal’ pictures. For really large format work a black polythene dustbin is fine. We have also used a VW van with the windows blacked out. This was both camera and darkroom. There are two important factors in pro­ ducing really good quality pinhole photos. The pinhole must be a very small hole in a very thin material, such as 0.002 inch brass shim, and the negative must be large. Pin­ hole negatives will not stand up to a high degree o f enlargement as will a negative pro­ duced by a good lens. You must make large negatives and contact print them. Photographic paper works fine for negatives and contact prints well too. T o make the pinhole use a needle, mounting it in the end o f a piece o f dowel. ‘ Drill’ the point into the brass shim placed on a piece o f card. Turn the brass over and remove the burr with the finest carborundum paper you can get — at least ‘ 400’ grade. Push the needle carefully back through the other way and re­ move the burr. Repeat until you have a per­ fectly round hole which is just the diameter o f the needle. I check my pinholes against the light with a xl5 magnifying glass. The smallest needle comm only available is a size 9, but I have bought numbers 10,11 and 12 from the manufacturers. The holes may be made smaller than size 9 by using the point only, but the advantage o f making the hole the full width o f the needle is that you can standardise hole sizes on different cameras or for stereo etc., and you can actually work out the f number and make proper exposure calculations. The exposures required with pinhole cameras can be very long. For example, wide angle pinhole by STEVE HOARE CAMERAWORK 6 a by TOM PICTON nnie Spike slum ps in the arm chair. shoem aker. He edited the transcribed tex t Her eyes are closed, h er head is bent w hich was published as Years o f Change. forw ard, resting on her knuckles. Her elbow Working Lives One. The Publishing Pro­ is on the arm of th e chair. H er o th e r hand je ct decided to produce a series o f books holds a p acket o f cigarettes and a lighter. ab o u t w ork. ‘We did n o t w ant to get Her fingernails appear short and w orn with trapped in to always looking b ack ,’ Neil w ork. The heel of one fo o t rests on the toe M artinson said. ‘People m ake history every o f the other. The chair fits w ith th e G-plan day.’ Most o f the people they talked to m odernism o f the other furniture. There is a were already know n to the group. ‘We’re heavy glass ash tray on one sideboard, and very unscientific. D on’t go to the Census,’ an em pty vase on th e other. The w indow is Neil adds. A dem olition w orker w hose life covered w ith a lace cu rtain , the w ooden is in th e b o o k was already a m em ber o f the floor is bare. Annie Spike is exhausted, n o t evening class. A n o th er w orking life was Neil even able to take a cigarette o u t o f the M artinson’s fath er w ho is a cabinet m aker. p acket. The photograph o f Annie Spike, for that Since then C entreprise has becom e a is w hat is described, will appear in Working w ord factory. So far, 1,800,000 have been Lives Tw o, the latest venture o f Centreprise collected. T he People’s A utobiography Publishing Project o f H ackney in East group listen to the tapes and decide which to London. transcribe. This is shown to the person in ­ This photograph can be read in many terview ed, w ho edits it before it is published. ways. It can sym bolise exploitation. It can Ken W orpole is certain o f th e p ro jec t’s be considered to show an obsolete division value. ‘A t present m ost p eo p le’s lives go u n ­ o f labour th a t ceased to w ork w ith the in­ recorded, as if they possessed no inner life vention of agriculture and certainly becam e w orth know ing,’ he has w ritten . ‘The oppressive with the death of th e extended struggle for self expression is often thw arted fam ily, if n o t long before. I t can be seen in schools, totally denied a t w ork, and merely as a photograph of a tired w om en. ignored by th e com m unications in d u stry .’ Its m any meanings justify its use in Working Working Lives Two will be published in Lives. A photograph tells you things you August. Interviews will be accom panied by w ould miss by only reading Annie S pike’s photographs by Sally G reenhill, Barry Lewis, w ords. A photograph is terse and direct. It Neil M artinson, Michael A nn Mullen and J o can open a p erso n ’s life as efficiently and Spence. Each pho to g rap h er read the in ter­ brutally as a tin opener. As Roland Barthes view before taking th e pictures. All the p h o ­ w rites in M ythologies: “ Pictures, to be sure, tographers th en looked at each o th e r’s prints are m ore im perative than w riting, they im ­ and in m any cases w ent back to take m ore pose m eaning at one stroke, w ith o u t analys­ photographs. Each interview will have six to ing o r diluting it.” ten pictures. Annie Spike does n o t talk ab o u t her ex­ The b o o k will have 14 interview s, ten o f haustion. (Most ‘w orking m others’, as she them w ith pictures show ing the people at is called, are perm anently tired. T he term s ‘m o th e r’ and ‘housew ife’ im ply only th a t the “A w orking w om an’s jo b is a nerve racking w om an is n o t paid for her labour. ) She thing. A husband gets up in the m orning, does n o t talk ab o u t collapsing in to the arm ­ gets dressed, has a cup o f tea and a slice of chair at the end o f the day. bread and b u tte r, kisses the kids “ T a-ta” and C entreprise is m any other things besides tells th e wife h e ’ll see h er at six. T he wife the publisher o f W orking Lives. These has to get up m aybe half an h o u r before the include: ■ a green double sh opfront in Kingsland High S treet, H ackney, East L ondon. ■ The only bookshop in a borough of 220,000 people. A t present it is selling about 60,000 books a year w orth £35 ,0 0 0 . ■ A nursery, coffee bar, advice centre, m eeting place. ■ The publisher, so far, o f 25 other books. As Neil M artinson, one o f the m em bers o f the Publishing Project says: “It does seem a logical step, if y o u ’ve got a bookshop, to get people to w rite.” C entreprise’s first b o o k was brought to them by tw o teachers from Hackney Downs Com prehensive School. They were poem s w ritten by a 12 year-old boy b o m in Jam aica, Vivian U sherw ood. Vivian was a t­ tending remedial classes at school w hich re ­ garded him as illiterate. In another class he was w riting am azing poem s. Centreprise p rin te d 500 copies for £20. The inside pages were typed on pap er plates and p rin te d on an offset duplicator in a local Shopping (above) college. A local p rin ter p roduced th e covers Cleaning (below) for £ 1 0 . This first edition sold o u t in eight weeks. Since then, 5,000 copies in five editions have been printed — w hich is a large circulation for a b o o k o f poem s. A year later, in 1973, the Project got its first full-time w orker. It now has tw o, Ken W orpole and Neil M artinson, w ho also w ork in th e coffee bar and bookshop like other m em bers o f Centreprise. W orking Lives began as a jo in t evening class w ith the local W orkers’ Educational Association to sta rt a People’s A utobio­ graphy o f H ackney. Both groups felt that the history of com m on people is neglected. Its first book was When I Was a Child by Dot S tam . For tw o years the Central WEA re­ fused to recognise th e group. They said the tu to r did n o t have the correct qualifications and th ey did n o t consider it was a history course. The first tu to r was Ken Worpole w ho had taught English at Hackney Downs before joining Centreprise. Fifteen m em bers o f the group used cassette tape recorders to in ter­ view local people. They also advertised in local papers for elderly people to talk to. At th eir meetings they listened to the tapes. In 1974 they spoke to A rthur N ew ton, a A “ Since com ing back after the war, I ’ve seen m any changes here, b o th in the neighbour­ by Lou Lessen (barber) w ork. The others will have p o rtraits because the people have retired or le ft th a t jo b . They include a teacher, housewife and nightcleaner, p o stm an , barber, hairdresser, school leaver, bu ild er’s m erchant, taxi driver, health visitor, fish fryer, vicar, m achinist and m ortuary technician. Centreprise did n o t have photographs in the early books. Working Lives One te n ta ­ tively used snapshots, and a few pictures specially taken fo r the b ook. W orking Lives Two will use m ore than sixty photographs com m issioned for the b o o k . The p h o to ­ graphers got paid £ 1 0 a day w ith expenses. C entreprise has also published tw o books of historic photographs o f H ackney. C entreprise lose m oney on the first editions o f m ost o f their books b u t m ake a small p ro fit on later editions. So far, they have m anaged to keep th e cost o f thenbooks below £ 1 , an d several have been specially p ro d u ced fo r ad u lt literacy classes. Finally Ken W orpole: “ I t’s im p o rtan t to p ro m o te discussion an d reassert the value o f ‘ordinary life’. We hope th e books will m ake a dent in our general political culture w hich has y et to recognise the significance o f the m ajority of the p o p u la tio n .” T he only reason for looking at o th er lives is to understand our own. Considering the value o r futility o f y o u r own w ork is a first step on th e long road to freedom . husband to m ake the breakfast, get the chil­ dren ready for school and perhaps a daughter ready for the office — and she may have to be o u t by half-past seven to get in to the factory at eight. She’s trying to organ­ ise, tidy up and m ake sure th e house is secure as well before she goes o u t. Then she’s thinking: “ In my dinner h o u r I ’ve got to go o u t and do the shopping” — after w ork ing fo r five hours in the factory in the m o rn ­ ing. On the way to w ork she’s nearly getting killed crossing busy roads. On the way hom e she can see her m achine in her eyes; she ca n ’t get w ork o ut o f her head, and she has to worry ab o u t getting the dinner on. Perhaps h er children finish school at 4 and she doesn’t finish till 5; so she worries ab o u t w hether they com e hom e safe from school as well. On top o f all this, there are some husbands w ho th in k th a t ju st because th ey ’ve given a w eek’s wages, their washing should be do n e, their hom e cleaned and their children well-dressed. A nd if the wife ca n ’t afford to buy herself clothes, she starts to go down an d begins to look like an old h o b o because she can ’t afford a nice dress to go o u t in. T hen th e husband do esn ’t b o th er ab o u t her, so he goes o u t drinking w ith his mates. “Women in factories are sw eating their guts o u t for their children. A lthough they say they got rid o f the whip years ago, they still have the whip behind us really. T h ey ’re still w hipping us, in an o th er w ay. For ex­ am ple, a friend o f m ine w orks in a clothing factory. I t ’s a basem ent and there are no w indows at all. In sum m er the tem perature reaches 120 degrees and the governor sends o ut for iced drinks. T h ere’s no union. T h ey ’re still getting away with i t.” Annie Spike (Housewife & Working Mother) Michael Ann Mullen Life at Work hood and in hairstyles. I t used to be ju st a m atter of short back and sides, w ith the o c­ casional Boston. A ‘B oston’ m eans tire hair is cu t at the back in a line, instead of gradually tapered out. A lo t o f shops now adays have p h o to ­ graphs o f styles, b u t I have never gone in for th at. I believe in cu ttin g each p erso n ’s hair in his own individual style. There are very few really short back and sides; even the shorter style is longer than it was previously, and people are m ore hair-conscious now than ever before; and 1 think there is n o thing nicer than seeing a well-groomed m an, with neat, clean, tidy hair . . . There is a relationship betw een my type o f barber an d his regular custom ers, th a t al­ m ost borders on friendship. This is evident w hen these custom ers com e in for atten tio n ; the m utual greetings are m ore like those b e­ tw een friends than betw een a barber and his custom er. The highest pinnacles for me, are w hen regular clients move o u t o f the district or have to change th eir local jobs, b u t still m ake the effo rt and co n tin u e to patronise my sh o p .” At the end of a day CAMERAWORK 6 From “ FAMILY SELF PORTRAIT” by Richard Greenhill — a Half Moon Photography Workshop Touring Show Nell, ten minutes ifter she was born. Richard Greenhill CAMERAWORK 6 8 The World of Photography or he Photography Yearbook continues to be like all the magazines you ever found in dentists’ waiting rooms. Turning its pages is like flicking through a colour supplement denuded of text: advertisement merges with feature photo, documentary image with fashion pic. The captions at the back of the book read like the hackwork of the ill-named popular press: ‘Excuse me, this is where I get o ff, as a cyclist falls headlong into a river; ‘It’s not all make-believe in Holly­ wood’, as two Los Angeles policemen from the Special Weapons and Tactics Section charge from a doorway, in battledress, wearing gas masks and clenching automatic weapons. J Image follows image so th a t their individ­ ual sense is lost. W hat you see is a m edley: the w hole book in a cinem atic m ontage. A p ro testo r on a National A bortion Campaign rally follows a nude captioned ‘Love’ from an ‘Essay on W om en’. A blown-up Saracen in an Irish country lane, lying on its side like a dead beast, fades into a grainy, mood-filled vision o f the ‘tim eless’ Spanish landscape. German Chancellor Schm idt faces a Maka Indian from Paraguay. Prince Phillip finds it thirsty w ork at the National Carriage Driving Cham pionships and Cuban w orkers sweat in the fields o f a sugar-cane p lantation. The fam ous rub shoulders w ith the unknow n in the dem ocracy o f the page. Each plate has equal standing. Meaning cancels out meaning. Y et, as p art o f the very same process, a fu rth er m eaning arises which em braces all the images. It is the e d ito r’s belief th a t, merely by avoiding the pairing o f images by different photographers, one can escape the suggestion o f meanings different from or ad­ ditional to those intended by the individual photographers concerned. Such a view, however, is n o t just naive. It conceals the fact that w hat happens to the images is more significant than their individual distortion. The equal weighting given to them , despite great differences in subject m a tte r, purpose and m eth o d , suggests th a t while, on the one hand, each image possesses a singular value w hich cannot be com pared, on the other hand, taken together, the images are in some way equivalent. T he exact nature o f this equivalence is im portant to specify for it is through it that the individual photographs becom e vehicles for m ore general and ex ten ­ sive them es. It is the concealed ability to m ake the particular stand for the general which gives photography its special ideological pow er. Such pow er is exercised as well in single images as in com binations of them — though here we are dealing mainly w ith the la tte r — and it trades on p h o to g rap h y ’s widely accepted authority as a recorder of the co n ­ crete and th e real. T hrough it a dialectical process w hich binds a class and its m em bers is usurped by an unm ediated conjunction of individual and universal. In the representa­ tion of people, for exam ple, photography has the p o tential to picture specific individu­ als, in all their p articularity, as both com pos­ ing and representing the social class or classes w ithin w hich their individuality is realized. Y et, p o rtra it photography has al­ m ost invariably given us unique, even if anonym ous, individuals who by intention or by the unprom pted effect of image on image, com e to stand for universal categor­ ies: the thinker, the toiler, the m other, the lover, the m ourner, the clow n, the sufferer. The cam era lens has given us G o d ’s eye-view o f the hum an conditon. Woman is w om an eternal. Man is born, learns, w orks, plays, laughs and cries, and dies. Everywhere the sam e; all over the world. ‘The toil o f life from y outh w ith its eager­ ness to the tranquility o f old age never ceases to intrigue,’ w rites Eric Cookson, a m agistrate, p roperty developer and Lloyds underw riter, who has included photographs of a shepherd boy in Egypt and a young scholar from the independent school Eric owns in England. The processes o f life — m ost rem arkably those o f labour — are thus bereaved o f their reality, divorced from the conditions in which they occur, and ab­ stracted to the p o in t where they hardly re ­ tain any m eaning. Even a portfolio o f p h o ­ tographs from T urkey, which are an in­ tense and unsentim entalised image o f ritual circum cision ‘at an age w hen the boy will never forget it’, com es to seem no m ore than a rendering o f the ancient m yth o f the ‘Seven Ages o f M an’. Woman does n o t seem to undergo this evolution. She inhabits a pre-cultural plane. Pictured w ith a rose, a leafing tree, a CAMERAWORK 6 ploughed field, or even the man-m ade props o f m odem life, she offers her nakedness as evidence o f an unaffected, unchanging nature. How soon in the history o f p h o to ­ graphy w om en are placed in this passive and subservient relation to the camera. Men may em ploy the full rhetoric of costum e, dressing up for the cam era in a celebration o f their differences. Women at least, until the age w hen they can be p ictu red w ith babies — are stripped and becom e all the same. The thin veils o f artifice and so-called creative cam era­ w ork hide nothing. This Yearbook contains the usual q u o ta o f sexist images, in inverse p ro p o rtio n to the qu o ta o f w om en photographers. Towards the end o f the book is a single photograph which pictures this very relation o f w om en to the cam era w ith p ath etic, unconscious clarity. It is depressing to n o te th at it comes from Poland. A naked w om an crouches on the ground — o u t in the co u n try , somewhere on the edge of a forest. We see her from b e­ hind as she goes on all fours; beyond her butto ck s and upraised head, ano th er five male photographers are eagerly taking her. She is submissive and vulnerable; enticing and seemingly willing; animal-like, one might say, if the copulating giant tortoises in the photograph by H eather Angel did n o t show so m uch m ore dignity in th eir sexual fulfil­ m en t than these protagonists. She falls b e­ fore the cam era b u t n o thing passes betw een them . T he exposure is filled w ith the em pti­ ness o f a faked climax. H ere, a translation o f the concrete into the universal is n o t achieved: the situation reveals too much o f the m om ent to take on the appearance o f a timeless co n fro n tatio n . T hat such a translation be accom plished is, how ever, essential to the success o f a p h o to ­ graph in realizing its ideological purpose. I shall retu rn to this p o in t b u t let us, for the m om ent, pursue the them e in to a com ple­ m entary area: the way the Photography Yearbook presents the contributing p h o to ­ graphers themselves. The main section o f the Photography Yearbook is called ‘International P h o to ­ graphy’. Here, the w orks of photographers from twenty-six nations appear entirely interm ixed, w ith only the nam es to identify them . The general m eth o d o f presentation is familiar from the earliest editions o f the Yearbook and the specific form at has re ­ m ained unchanged for nine years. Details o f nationalities, subjects and the very d if­ ferent purposes for w hich th e photographs were produced — advertising, newspapers, com petitions, freelance com m issions, indus­ trial uses, private or sponsored research, leisure — appear separately, in small p rin t at the back of the book. The categories of photographic p ro d u c­ tion endorsed by the Photography Yearbook also rem ain fairly con stan t from year to year: sports photography, natural history photography, p o rtraits, ethnography, exotica, erotica, landscape, fashion, p h o to ­ journalism and the various m odes o f “art p h oto g rap h y ” , especially Surrealism. They take on the appearance o f given categories through w hich the photographer, of w hat­ ever n ation, class or creed, m ust seek expres­ sion. There is only one transcendent criter­ ion and th at is technique, which is raised by the Yearbook to th e level o f a fetish. The im plications o f this way of present­ ing the work are th at the problem s co n fro n t­ ing photographers are the same the world over b u t achieve their solution in the individ­ ual p h o to g rap h er’s personality. J u s t as the subject appears to take on a significance th at is, at once, universal and particular —just as the sitter can present, at one and the same tim e, the face of hum anity and the face o f a unique individual — so the great family of in ­ ternational photographers, whose kinship is based on expertise, is m ade up o f unique individuals. A ttem pts by com m unity photographers to w rest th e cam era from these experts and n o t only p u t it at the service o f ordinary people, b u t actually place it in their hands, are misconceived, editor J o h n Sanders w rites. ‘There is an aphorism th a t w hen every­ body is som ebody, nobody is anybody, and this may be the fatal flaw in a p h il­ osophy th a t places such em phasis on the prom otion of egalitarianism th at it fo r­ gets the uniqueness o f individuals . . . Memorable photographs by talented photographers usually happen because the person w ho m ade them is fully aware of his or her own individuality. . .’ As we observed earlier in relation to subject-m atter, anything intervening betw een the unique and the universal is ex ­ cluded. Class, n atio n ality , tradition do n ot m atter. And now , th e k n o tted cords of ideology are given one m ore tw ist. The ed ito r continues: ‘T he fact th at such photographs are still being taken in parts o f th e w orld where individuality is n o t exactly encouraged, is a heartening rem inder th a t artists usu­ ally manage to have the last laugh over their p atrons, if n o t always in th eir own lifetim es.’ People are people, the world over. P h o to ­ graphers are photographers, the w orld over. It m ay n o t be given to anyone to take a good photograph: to do so requires talent. But talent is talen t, across the w orld. It is no accident th at these are familiar claims. It is absolutely necessary for b o u r­ geois dem ocracy to seek to establish them as indelible tru th s. On the one side, we are all unique personalities. O ur consciousness is o u r own — the p ro d u ct o f our personality. We are free and equal as individuals. On the other side, we are in some deep way all the same: equal and u n ited in our submission to certain universal tru th s. Though it m ay never be able to achieve a synthesis o f these two strands o f argum ent, bourgeois ideology m ust, if it is to be succes­ sful, contain them and hold them together. picture 214 ERWIN KNEIDINGER (Austria) This is im perative if the illusion o f personal freedom w ithin com m on purpose is to be achieved; if the existence o f rifts, radical in ­ equalities and conflicts w ithin society is to be denied; if, in short, the bourgeois social order is to defend itself against the conse­ quences o f deepening class consciousness and class struggle. The category w hich, above all others, m ust be denied is th a t of class. We have seen how this central co n trad ic­ tion which aries from the attem p t to contain the unique and the universal inform s two areas — the picturing o f people and the image of photographers. It is also at w ork in a fu rth er feature o f the Photography Year­ book : in the conflicting dem ands o f p h o to ­ graphy as a form o f hum an com m unication w hich needs no translators, since the p ic­ tures speak fo r themselves, regardless o f w ho to o k them or w hence they cam e, and p h o to ­ graphy as personal expression; in the duality of th e com m ercial exploitation o f p h o to g ra­ phy as a means o f mechanically reproducing imagery and o f photo g rap h y as the p ro d u c­ tion o f lim ited editions of original prints; in the co ntradictory b u t coexisting identifica­ tions of photography as a tru th fu l, natural, evident and im partial record and o f p h o to ­ graphy as art. It is where it has been able to contain these co ntradictory tendencies th a t p h o to ­ graphy has been m ost effective as an in stru ­ m en t of ideology. The p hotograph has ap ­ pro p riated certain elem ents o f the ideology o f art, while preserving certain advantages n o t given to the processes o f Fine A rt. If this appropriation goes too far, however — as it does in all the featured contributions from the Royal College o f A rt, w ith the exception o f the photographs o f the paraplegic Olympics — then these advantages will be lost and the p h o to g rap h ’s special ideological effectiveness will be threatened. T he m ost explicitly ‘artistic’ photographers may re­ ceive critical acclaim , exhibitions and govern­ m ent grants, b u t they do so at the price of quitting the m ainland of ideological p ro ­ picture 215 GERHARD LUDWIG (Germany) 1*?« IRKA i picture 19 ERIKA SULZER-KLEINEMEIER (Germany) picture 105 BOB CARLOS-CLARKE (G.B.) 9 Photography of the World ? pictures 86/87 ANWAR HOSAIN (Bangladesh) pictures picture 135 to 74 137 STRUAN ROBERTSON HENRY ANGELO-CASTRILLON (Istanbul based) duction. They join that crew o f ‘ Fine Artists’ whom capitalist economies have been prepared to support only to a limited and temporary extent. They are, as they have recently been described: ‘ people rowing out to join a sinking ship.’ What we see here is a process which has been characteristic o f photography through­ out its history. From its beginnings in the eccentric experiments o f isolated inventorscientists in the early decades o f the nine­ teenth century, photography underwent an extremely rapid development. In this, it followed the pattern o f many other scienti­ fic and technological differences — in the fields o f printing, transport, engineering and chemistry, for example — which provided the impetus for, and received their unbridled exploitation in, the hectic growth o f early capitalism. The market both for photographs and for photographic equipment did not cease to ex­ pand in the nineteenth century, encompas­ sing, by stages, more and more sectors of society. However, this expansion brought photography into direct competition with existing means o f manufacturing images. In particular, it engendered early conflict with the great numbers o f portrait painters and miniaturists, o f all kinds and levels, who tried, in vain, to protect their trade from the advances o f the photographic salons. It is in the context o f this econom ic struggle within early capitalism that the idea o f spirit and soul in art first emerges. The very econom ic processes which, particularly after the inven­ tion o f glass negatives enabling multiple re­ production, led to the ever-accelerating de­ velopment and exploitation o f photography, also produced and sustained an ideological recoil which seemed to contradict the work­ ings o f the econom ic laws yet which, here as elsewhere, served to limit control o f the means o f production. Photographic technology did not stand still and soon the same contradiction was gen­ erated within the new medium itself. The first claims to artistic quality in photography come at a time when the first photographers, who concentrated on the production o f limited numbers o f large-scale, high quality prints, were themselves threatened by the commercial operators, led in France by Disderi, who industrialised the process, in­ creasing their production and making their products available to a wider and wider clientelle. For their part, the mass producers of ‘ visiting card’portraits endeavoured to make their mechanical output acceptable to the taste, as well as to the pocket, o f the bourgeoisie. Whilst for theirs, the art ph oto­ graphers sought to consolidate their superior rank by disdainfully rejecting commercial necessity and by exploring, as in the fashion­ able photography o f today, every technical device such as blurring, tinting or gum print­ ing, and every form o f manipulation o f the subject which might recapture that very ‘ aura’ f art which the invention o f ph oto­ o graphy had so emphatically abolished. What united both categories o f ph oto­ grapher was that they operated in the capi­ talist art market, either by selling their wares and services on the high street, or by pre­ ferring their independent products in the vast and prestigious Salons o f art. The latter were as much a consequence o f the develop­ ment o f photography under capitalism as the former. It is only with the predominance o f the free market and the consequent wither­ ing away o f the old patron-artist relations that the idea o f the free artist emerges. These are the conflicts which make up the history o f photography. On one side, the manufacturers o f photographic equip­ ment and materials have argued, since the marketing o f the first Kodak camera in 1888, that anyone can take a photograph: you just point the camera and press the button; they do the rest. On the other, mass participation and the collective recording of the world, have been denigrated in favour o f the individual artist-photographer’ sub­ s jective interpretation o f what he sees. Be­ tween the two — feeding on the conventions o f the one and transmitting them to the other — are the ranks o f the mostly anony­ mous producers o f photographic images for mass consumption: the *power workers o f bourgeois ideology’ the photojoumalists, — feature photographers, advertising image makers, illustrators and shop photographers. There is a certain degree of mobility in these classes: a small minority o f commer­ cial photographers do emerge as “ personal­ ities” in their own right and thereby win title to greater artistic “ freedom ” in their work; certain amateurs, not always o f private means, do win photographic com ­ petitions or have photographs published in yearbooks such as this. Such social mobility is no greater here, however, than it is in society at large, though the institutional and ideological channels which reproduce the hierarchical order, procuring both domin­ ance and consent, do not operate in a crude and exposed way. One such channel is The Photography Yearbook. It may repay further analysis. by JOHN TAGG Photography Year Book 1977 Published by: Fountain Press Price: £7.50 Edited by: John Sanders CAMERAWORK 6 10 Letters Big and Little Art Dear Camerawork, We were interested to read your articles on the Arts Council and the problems o f funding, and on community art. Whilst we cannot comment particularly on the situation in photography, we can as­ sure you that the state o f affairs in painting and graphic arts (in which the majority o f our members are active) presents a sorry tale o f the exclusion from aid o f any artists who produce any kind o f inspiring or truthful work. Artists whose end product can serve only to mislead, to deceive or corrupt, receive generous funds. We have uppermost in our minds performance artists and com ­ munity bandwagon-jumpers, who attempt to ‘ entertain’working people (often living in areas which have been systematically run down because o f the econom ic policies o f central and local government). Such ‘ is art’ funded by government grants at the same time as this systematic running down is tak­ ing place. This state o f affairs impelled us to set down our views in the pamphlet, Class War in the Arts, which your readers might find o f some interest. T o turn to the thorny question o f Tower Hamlets Art Project, we can do no more than agree with your contributor when he states that the state-sponsored arts move­ ment is in a muddle. Where we would pos­ sibly take issue with him is in his naive view that this is merely accidental. A state appar­ atus exists which is large enough, powerful enough and sufficiently tactically diversi­ fied as to be able to penetrate into every cor­ ner o f society, into every nook and cranny where social protest might threaten the real interests o f those who really hold power. Even in the last analysis into the minds o f individuals who — like your contributor — have been conditioned into acceptance of an idealised view o f the harsh realities o f class and class struggle today. He is in fact active­ ly assisting in the deception and the political manipulation o f masses o f people, large or small. More specifically on the role o f art and culture, our experiences have shown us that only an art capable o f expressing in all its richness and variety the real life experiences and struggles o f the masses o f working people can fulfill a positive role in society today. If it is the desire and intention o f your contributor to really hit reaction and privil­ ege where it hurts — or ‘ reject authority to . . . or any structure’he could do no better , than to join in the development o f a progres­ sive realist art and culture. League o f Socialist Artists 18 Camberwell Church Street London, S.E.5 tel. 703 0561 Dear Camerawork, I am putting together a book o f ph oto­ graphs o f the E.I area o f London. I am looking for pictures taken since 1970, by photographers who were living in the area when they took their pictures. Any photographers interested in contri­ buting to this book are invited to send proofs or contacts to the following address. David Hoffman 144 Field Gate Mansions Rom ford St., E.I tel. 247 2518 Dear Camerawork, I was particularly interested in Terry Dennett’ article on s special printing techniques. If Terry is to be a regular contributor (as he appears to be) I feel that it would be better if he were to cover less ground with more detail in future. To really talk about flashing as a means o f contrast control, or to discuss unsharp masking in the depth needed to enable som e­ one who had not ever tried it to begin to use it as a practical method, really requires more space than they were given in CAMERA­ WORK 5. Had the double page spread been devoted CAMERAWORK 6 to just one o f the several topics, it could have been covered in detail and over the months could build up into a really useful reference work. As it was, however, the ar­ ticle contained enough information to whet the appetite but not enough to stand up on its own. Clark Kent ‘ Flasher’ Dennett writes: You can ’ win 'em all! Some said ‘ t Give us m ore.’others, like reader Kent, wanted less. ; The whole idea o
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      • tagscamerawork,press release,science,technology,myth,terence bond,chinese poster work,greg daville,gadi hollander,kieran lyons,annie morrad,david godbold & john wood
      • titleBlinding with Science - Terence Bond, Chinese Poster Work, Greg Daville, Gadi Hollander, Kieran Lyons, Annie Morrad, David Godbold & John Wood
      • subtitlePress release for the "Blinding With Science" exhibition, part of the Science and Technology Programme
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      • pdf_textPRESS RELEASE Drawing on the all-pervasive imagery and ideology of Science and Technology the present exhibition series examines, questions and interprets science's impact on health', women and fantasy. Last in the series... "BLINDING WITH SCIENCE" E x p l o r i n g t h e m y t h o l o g y of s c i e n c e and s c i e n c e as m y t h w i t h f i c t i t i o u s t e c h n o l o g i e s , invention, h u m o u r a n d . t h o u g h t f u l n e s s . . .projection, transformation, construction, destruction, instruction... T E R E N C E BOND • C H I N E S E P OS T E R W O R K G R E G D A V I L L E • GAD I HOLLANDER' K IE R A N LYO NS • A N N I E M OR R A D D A V ID G O D B O L D & JOH N WOOD details overleaf Wednesday 21 August - Saturday 14 September 1985 Gallery opening hours Tuesday - Friday Saturday 1.00 - 6.00pm 11.00 -3.00pm Transport: Bethnal Green tube; 8, 8a, 106 buses For further information and press prints contact publicity organiser: 980 6256 after "Blinding with Science".. "CLEARING OUT" 16 - 28 September 1985 2-week work in progress by AMIKAM T0REN F in a n c ia lly a s s is te d by GLC funded Greater London Arts Association Greg Daville's work produced with generous support from C0PYTEC SERVICES LTD • LONDON SW7 "BLINDING WITH SCIENCE” T E R E N C E BOND Photographic works whose point of origin is imagery of or pertaining to the father of modern science. Sir Isaac Newton, the mythology relating to Newton, and a particular use of this mythology today. CHINESE POSTER WORK "Modern Educational Experiments" Informative, scientific and most up to date, these images can only serve to light a passage in the gloom of ignorance... "Enlightened, exotic and eager, our tiny hands become adept at the use of chopsticks, no longer fumbling in the dark". GREG DAVILLE "Melancholia" Dyeline print following themes from 'The Sound of Sad Mechanics' and based on Albrecht Durer's print 'Melancholia 1'. "..the subject..temporarily 'blinded' on the occasion of each step towards a heightened self-awareness." DAVID GODBOLD & JOHN WOOD "The Bashful Engine" a 'camerawork' installation — a self/double/triple portrait a blatant and clumsy mechanism — hypnotic a spectacle to entice and delight. GAD I H O L L A N D E R "Anatomical Xerox Portraits" Transformed images from 'the art of human anatomy' and the scientific art of perspective using 'available' illustrations and text KIERAN LYONS "Losing the Battle" .a calculated form of forgetting" a toy cannon, a sequence of photographs...but "as a gun it remains..a source of great concern for the future". ANNIE MORRAD "The Savage Rip" "In terms of archaeology Science can only explain the past by means of the knowledge it has at t-he present... science stumbles upon an inner light by opening out a dark area, this opening is ripped..to reveal..a projected light" o o o o o o o O O O o O o o o o o o o o o o o . o o o 0 o o o o_. o o 0 0
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      • tagscamerawork,science,technology,myth,terence bond,chinese poster work,greg daville,gadi hollander,kieran lyons,annie morrad,david godbold & john wood
      • titleBlinding with Science - Terence Bond, Chinese Poster Work, Greg Daville, Gadi Hollander, Kieran Lyons, Annie Morrad, David Godbold & John Wood
      • subtitleBooklet for the exhibition with artist CVs, part of the Science and Technology Programme
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      • pdf_texto Born 1946 1964 - 68 1968 - 71 EXHIBITIONS 1969 1970 1971 INSTALLATIONS 1973 1974 1975 PERFORMANCES 1973 1974 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 PUBLICATIONS K I E R A N L Y O N S Bath Academy of Fine Art, Dip.AA.D. Sculpture Yale University, School of Art & Architecture, MFA Sculpture 1076 Gallery, New Haven, Conn., USA Jewish Centre, New Haven, Conn., USA 1076 Gallery Degree Students, Yale Museum 1Superimpression', University of Auckland, New Zealand 'Four Men in a Boat', Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand 'WelderijS Weakness', Barry Lett Galleries, Auckland, New Zealand C 3 Kerikeri Township Performances, Northland, NZ Five Nights for Pavillion 'K', Auckland, NZ 2B Butlers Wharf Group Show, London 'Wine and Milk', 2B Butlers Wharf 'Monkey's Malic Mainstay', Fine Art Centre, Belfast 'Three Tales', 2B Butlers Wharf, Ayton Basement - Newcastle-uponTyne, Project Arts Centre - Dublin 'My Middle Wicket', Project Arts Centre, Dublin 'Lying in the Lecture', Northern Ireland Arts Council Gallery, Belfast 'Cross-Purpose', Serpentine Gallery, Summer Show 1 'Peace at the Palace (at 4am)', The Basement, Newcastle 'Sink the Dream Ship', The Basement, Newcastle 'Dream Ship Sinks', The Acme Gallery, London 'New Art' Recent Developments in NZ Sculpture and Post-Object Art Editors: Allen and Curnow, Heinemanns Ltd, 1976 » "LOSING THE BATTLE" I have recently finished a drawing of a toy cannon that I am now in the process of trying to forget. It is a calculated form of forgetting brought on by regularly washing the image away in a photographic solution that is’ extremely unpredictable, producing each time a weaker and weaker effect. I am hoping that by constant printing and reprinting of the original it will become so devalued that the cannon will have to surrender its authority over its surroundings and then disappear altogether. The toy cannon is a popular model howitzer, made by BRITAINS and it can be bought over the counter in just about any toy shop. Mine hangs on my studio wall from a paper clip. The toy cannon, the drawing, and the sequence of photographs will be on display in the gallery during "Blinding with Science". The drawing will be a puzzle to some for it is difficult to see a toy cannon at all and therefore it & might be asked why I should want to do away with something that was never there in the first place. Well, it is assuredly there. It is most accurately drawn, every line measured and calculated from a plan and elevation and then carefully transferred to the blotting paper surface. It was very important to draw the toy with all its working parts revealed and to achieve this I drew it twelve times summersaulting through space showing off its back and then rolling on to reveal its underparts, all systems working, the barrel going up and down and doing all the things that it is supposed to do. This continuum becomes impacted into a welter of blots and spots and thousands of straight lines that eventually do more to disguise the image than to reveal it. Nevertheless it is there and the problem is that I don't think that it should be. I am not sure why I made a drawing of a toy cannon in any case, let along one that was so laborious to execute into the bargain. Since its completion, I have devoted my energies towards devising a scheme to get rid of it. The photographic method that I have adopted seems to be as painstaking and laborious as the original but its main virtue is that I think it will be thorough. When it's done the outstanding problem will be what to do with the actual gun itself and all I can say to that is that as a gun it remains as a source of great concern for the future. Born 1952 1968 - 70 1971 - 74 1980 1981 - 81 - 89 A N N I E M O R R A D Somerset College of Art London Film School, Diploma (Hons) Yeovil College Reading University, BA (Hons) Fine Art Degree Between Film School and starting at Reading University I undertook freelance film work which consisted of camera operating and animation. I also worked in graphics' studios and taught part-time in schools, mainly film. As a painter, working predominantly with colour, I found I was not getting from pigments, paint, etc what I wanted in terms of colour and intensity and in terms of what I wanted to say. The edges of the canvas presented a particular restriction. Wanting to develop a purer form of colour and expression, that was less arbitrary, more precise, three years ago I began working with colour gels and projection. Spent a year experimenting, developing a grammar/language, discarding things that did not work. Moved on to exploring what happens between projector/projection and space projected upon... leading to a move from projection to using light sources as an integral part of a work. I do not use things like laser beams because of their technical demands/restrictions, which limit their flexibility. In terms of imagery, I am very interested in pre-christian civilisations, preChristian history and symbolism....especially symbols and labyrinths...how light was important in pre-christian cultures, as seen in worship, the almost mystical aspect of light. This 'mystique' of light brought out looking at the ways in which light can be pushed, turned round corners, its flexibility, the ways in which it alters areas/surfaees through shadow, etc... 'THE SAVAGE RIP1 In terms of archaeology science can only explain the past by means of the knowledge it has at the present. This work shows how science stumbles upon an inner light by opening out a dark area, this opening is ripped, held by forceps to reveal a projected light which is a Labyrinth. T E R E N C E B O N D D A V I D h o r n E p p ln g , Essex BA (H on s) ( F i r s t C l a s s ) Wolverhampton P o l y t e c h n i c J o i n e d a r t i s t s ' s t u d i o i n Wolverhampton I n s t a l l e d dar kroo m f a c i l i t i e s t o s t u d i o w i t h g r a n t from West M i d l a n d s A rts P e r fo r m a n c e e v e n t s t a g e d i n Wolverhampton town c e n t r e w i t h g r a n t from West M id lan d s A r t s Moved t o London; s t u d y i n g a t Roya l C o l l e g e o f A rt ( E n v i r o n m e n t a l Media D e p t . ) 1957 1981 1981 1982 1983 198'I - 86 1961 1979 1980-81 1 9 ?1 -8 ' i 1983 1983 1983 198*1 C H I N E S E P O S T E R WO R K "Modern E d u c a t i o n a l E x p e r i m e n t s " : e n l i g h t e n e d , e x o t i c an d e a g e r , o u r t i n y h a n d s become a d e p t a t t h e u s e o f c h o p s t i c k s , no l o n g e r f u m b li n g i n t h e d a r k . (Owing t o p r e s s u r e s , b o t h p e r s o n a l an d p o l i t i c a l , t h e s e o r i e n t a l i d e a l i s t s p r e f e r t o r e m a in i n s c r u t a b l e and anonymous. D B 0 L D k J O H N WOOD DAVID CODBOLD "Humour i s a s e r i o u s t h i n g " ( J . T h u r b e r ) The c o n c e r n s o f my work o r i g i n a t e w i t h i n t h e d o m e s t i c e n v i r o n m e n t . T h i s e n a b l e s me t o comment upon e v e n t s o f an a u t o b i o g r a p h i c a l n a t u r e , which a r e a t t h e same tim e l a r g e l y a r e a s o f common e x p e r i e n c e . C e r t a i n e v e n t s and o b j e c t s seem t o h ave a b o u t them a c h a r a c t e r which im p lic a te s q u e s tio n s concerning t h e i r fo rm atio n . I t i s th e presence o f t h i s q u a lity w h ich a t t r a c t s me t o p a r t i c u l a r s i t u a t i o n s w i t h i n t h e d o m e s t i c e n v i r o n m e n t . W h i l s t a s a r e s u l t o f t h i s •a t t r a c t i o n t h e work may r e so u n d w i t h q u e s t i o n s c o n c e r n i n g c a u s e an d e f f e c t , - u n l i k e t h e s c i e n t i s t - f i n d i n g an s w e rs t o t h o s e q u e s t i o n s i s n o t my c o n c e r n . I n d e e d , t h e r e i s a m i s t r u s t o f t h e v e r y i d e a o f s u c h e x p l a n a t i o n - t h a t t h r o u g h i t we c a n ' u n d e r s t a n d ' phenomena more f u l l y . As a n a r t i s t my c o n c e r n i s w i t h t h e e x p r e s s i o n o r r e p r e s e n t a t i o n o f t h e s e e v e n t s i n s u c h a way o s e n c o u r a g e s t h e i r r e v a l u a t i o n - f o r t h e work d e p i c t s t h e e v e n t o f phenomena i n s i t u a t i o n s w h er eb y , i n c o n v e n t i o n a l t e r m s , i t a c q u i r e s l i t t l e s i g n i f i c a n c e : b r o k e n l a c e s an d h o l e s i n t h e k n e e s o f t r o u s e r s b e a r w i t n e s s t o t h e e f f e c t s o f f r i c t i o n ; a 'home- made' crew n e c k p u l l o v e r m i s t a k e n l y p u t on 'b a c k t o f r o n t ' h i g h l i g h t s t h e p u z 2 l e o f how one i d e n t i f i e s t h e f r o n t an d b ack o f su ch a garment - given no l a b e l / n e c k r e f e r e n c e . T h i s ' i n c i d e n t a l r i c h n e s s ' g i v e s t h e work an e s s e n t i a l l y ' D a d a i s t ' f l a v o u r . I t a l s o p r o v i d e s i t w i t h a n i n b u i l t ' s u b j e c t b a s e d ' i r o n y . T h i s i r o n y seems t o r e s i d e i n two i n c o n g r u i t i e s : i ) t h a t b e t w e e n t h e d o m e s t i c s u b j e c t an d t h e t r a d i t i o n a l n o t i o n t h a t t h e c o n c e r n o f a r t i s t s i s more w o r t h i l y " t h e c o n t e m p l a t i o n o f t h e a n g u i s h o f t h e human s p i r i t a t h i g h p o i n t s o f a w a r e n e s s " ; i i ) t h a t between t h e d o m e s ti c e n v i r o n m e n t an d t h e c o n c e n t r a t i o n w i t h i n t h a t e n v i r o n m e n t upon t h e ' e v e n t o f phenomena' i n s u c h a way a s r e c a l l s t h e c o o l , c o n t r o l l e d , ' o b j e c t i v e ' q u a l i t y o f t h e p h y s i c s lab o rato ry . D e s p i t e t h i s c o n t e x t u a l i r o n y , t h e s u b j e c t ' s c o n v e n t i o n a l l y b an al n a t u r e r e q u i r e s t h a t i f t h e ' o b j e c t s ' c r e a t e d a r e t o en g ag e t h e v i e w e r , t h e n la n g u ag e must be u s e d i n a s i n v e n t i v e a manner a s p o s s i b l e . I t i s i n t e n d e d t h a t ' i m p a c t ' i s c r e a t e d a s a r e s u l t o f b e i n g l e d t h r o u g h t h e a r t w o r k , o n l y t o be d i r e c t e d t o t h a t a s p e c t o f i t w h ich may h ave a p p e a r e d a s i n s i g n i f i c a n t . S u z i G a b l i k , w r i t i n g a b o u t M a g r i t t e , d e s c r i b e d h i s l i f e (work) a s "an a t t e m p t t o o v e r t h r o w o u r s e n s e o f t h e f a m i l i a r , t o s a b o t a g e o u r h a b i t s , t o p u t t h e r e a l w o r l d on t r i a l " . The d i s a r m i n g q u a l i t y o f t h e i r o n i c t r a n s a c t i o n make i t a p p r o p r i a t e t o my own work i f t h e v ie w e r i s t o be l i b e r a t e d i n h i s / h e r r e l a t i o n s h i p w i t h t h e commonplace. F o r t h e e x h i b i t i o n BLINDINC WITH SCIENCE I w i l l make two o r t h r e e p h o t o g r a p h i c ' w o r k s ' . T h e i r ' p o i n t o f o r i g i n ' w i l l d i f f e r somewhat Trom p a s t work i n a s much a s t h e s t a r t i n g p o i n t w i l l be im a g e r y o f o r p e r t a i n i n g t o t h e f a t h e r o f modern s c i e n c e , S i r I s a a c Newton. I t s s o u r c e i s s u c h t h a t i t i s e q u a l l y f a m i l i a r . At l e a s t one o f t h e 'w o r k s ' w i l l make e x p l i c i t p l a y upon t h e t i t l e o f t h e e x h i b i t i o n . The works c o u l d be p e r c e i v e d a s v i s u a l j o k e s t a k i n g a s t h e i r s o u r c e t h e myth ology r e l a t i n g t o Newton, eg t h a t Newton d i s c o v e r e d t h e ( a ) law o f g r a v i t y w h i l s t ( b e c a u s e o f ) s i t t i n g u n d e r an a p p l e t r e e ( w h e t h e r t h e r e i s f a c t u a l e v i d e n c e t o c o n f i r m t h i s i s i m m a t e r i a l h e r e an d i r r e l e v a n t t o t h e w o r k ) . As a r e s u l t o f t h i s ' s t o r y ' one c o u l d s a y t h a t a p p l e t r e e s c o n n o t e N e w to n 's law o f g r a v i t y (amongst o t h e r t h i n g s ) . The work w i l l n o t a t t e m p t t o ' d e c o n s t r u c t ' t h i s m y th o lo g y . R a th e r i t w i l l u s e t h e ' f a c t ' o f i t ( t h e t r u t h o f i t s p r e s e n c e ) a s a p o i n t w i t h w h ich t o en gag e t h e v i e w e r . G 0 198*1 198*1 1985 1985 F o rth c o m in g B o rn , N o r fo lk A r r a n g e d , p r o d u ced and p erfo rm ed m u sic f o r E d in b u rg h F e s t i v a l F r i n g e production, "le ss" Norwich School o f A rt G o l d s m i t h s ’ C o l l e g e o f Art. ICA New C o n t e m p o r a r i e s G reek I s l a n d Camera - c o n s t r u c t i o n o f cam er a an d p h o t o g r a p h e n t i r e l y from i n d i g e n o u s n o n -co m m ercial m a t e r i a l s M u l t i p l e s Show, B r i x t o n A r t G a l l e r y - E x h i b i t i o n o f M u l t i p l e P i n h o l e imago G o l d s m i t h s ' C o l l e g e Degree Show, i n s t a l l a t i o n o f m u l t i p l e p i n h o l e an d e n v i r o n m e n t a l cam eras an d p h o t o g r a p h s C h r i s t i e ' s I n a u g u r a l , The P ic k o f New C r a d u a t e A r t - 16 f o o t m u l t i p l e f i g u r e im ag e, p h o t o g r a p h e d w i t h 3 6 0 ' e n v i r o n m e n t a l p i n h o l e camera November 2*lth, I s l i n g t o n A r t s F a c t o r y . F i r s t p e r f o r m a n c e w i t h th e 3 - d i m e n s i o n a l p r o j e c t i o n s c r e e n i n c o l l a b o r a t i o n w i t h J o h n Wood and the K reutzer Q uintet G o l d s m i t h s ' C o l l e g e Wednesday E vent (New p e r f o r m a n c e w i t h John Wood an d t h e K r e u t z e r Q u i n t e t ) T a r g e t s an d S h i e l d s , U n i t 7 G a l l e r i e s ( C o l l a b o r a t i v e i n s t a l l a t i o n w i t h J o h n Wood) S ep tem b er 1 9 8 5, show w i t h John Wood a t Woodlands G a l l e r y , London JOHN W OOD B o r n , B a th , England "King o f S h o u t i n g House" - com puter a s s i s t e d p l a y , ICA, London "Machine f o r S a y in g S o r r y " - e l e c t r o n i c m u l t i p l e , W h i t e c h a p e l G a l l e r y "The Tune D o o d le r " - e l e c t r o n i c t o y e x h i b i t e d i n 21 c o u n t r i e s I n v e n t e d and p u b l i s h e d e n e r g y - s a v i n g schemes t o m eet b o t h p r a c t i c a l an d p o l e m i c p u r p o s e s , e g " S u n s h a r e r " ( e x h i b i t e d O s l o ) , " C i r c u i t f o r S o l a r Roof" ( p u b l i s h e d New S c i e n t i s t ) , "The B la c k h o u se " 1973-78 F o u n d e r member o f "Dea f S ch o o l" r o c k g roup 1982 Founder member o f "The K r e u t z e r Q u i n t e t " Recent perform ances: 1983 " T a l e s o f t h e T r i p t y c h Man" ( A i r C a l l e r y ) 198*1 " E v e r y t h i n g i n i t s P l a c e " (The Diorama) 198*1 "A F i n e M o u stach e" ( C o r a c l e P r e s s ) Recent e x h i b i t i o n s : 1983 "On t h e S i d e o f T h i n g s " - one p e r s o n show ( S c r a t c h G a l l e r y , London) 1985 " T a r g e t s / S h i e l d s " - t h r e e - p e r s o n show a t U n i t 7 , London 1985 F o rth c o m in g f o u r - p e r s o n show a t Woodlands G a l l e r y , London i n S eptem ber ia"5 1968 1969 1970 1971-73 The Godbold/Wood p a r t n e r s h i p p r o d u c e d i t s f i r s t j o i n t i n s t a l l a t i o n a t t h e I s l i n g t o n A r t s F a c t o r y i n November 198*1. The work c o n s i s t e d o f a m o b ile e g g sh a p e d " s c r e e n " , i l l u s t r a t e d w i t h p h o t o g r a p h i c im a g e s , acco m p an ied by s p e c i a l l y composed m u sic by t h e K r e u t z e r Q u i n t e t . As i n d i v i d u a l a r t i s t s , b o th David Codbold an d John Wood a r e i n c l i n e d t o u n d e r t a k e an i n v e n t i v e p ilg rim m ag e i n t o t h e "making" p r o c e s s , a s a means o f p r o d u c in g im a g e s . N e v e r t h e l e s s , t h e i r m ethods a r e more t h a n t h o u g h t l e s s o r d e v o t i o n a l r o u t i n e s ; t h e i r " w o r k s h o p - l o g i c " i s a f i t t i n g means by which t h e r e l a t i o n s h i p be tween 'Body' an d 'M a c h i n e ' c a n be e x p l o r e d . W ith in t h e l i m i t s o f s u c h a m a t e r i a l i s t v e n t u r e , o t h e r l e v e l s o f meaning a r e i m p l a n t e d . Embodied i n t h e work may be found r e f e r e n c e s t o F u t u t i s m , P s y c h e d e l i a , Gl'- • u r P h o t o g r a p h y , an d a S c i e n t i f i c v o y e u r is m which l a p s e s i n t o U t o p ia n o r evei c i s t i c c l i c h e . M e ssrs Codb old and Wood would w i s h t o b e l i e v e t h e y have invent.-.., t h e w o r l d ' s f i r s t t e l e v i s i o n s c r e e n . T h e i r w h i l e - c o a t e d c r u s a d i n g s p i r i t n e v e r t h e l e s s fo rm s a c r e d i b l e b a s i s from which t e c h n o l o g i c a l , a u t h o r i t a r i a n m yths can be u n p ic k e d an d r e s t l t c h e d i n one d a z z l i n g o p e r a t i o n . THE OBJECT ITSELF A sim ple d e s c r i p t i o n o f the i n s t a l l a t i o n i s d i f f i c u l t , a s i t s Intended p u r p o s e i s t o un d erm in e how we lo o k a t t h e p h o t o g r a p h i c an d f i l m i c im ag e. I f i t s 'i m a g e ' can be led t o e x i s t o u t s i d e t h e r e t i n a l image a t a l l , i t e x i s t s on t h e s c r e e n . Hot ', t h e s c r e e n i s n e i t h e r p a l p a b l e n o r s t a t i c ; i t i s n e i t h e r f l a t n o r v e r t i c a l . F a sh io n e d i n t h e sh a p e o f t h e w o r ld i t s p i n s b o t h f a s t enough an d slow enough t o c o n fo u n d o r t h o d o x i c o n o g r a p h i c a l d e s c r i p t i o n . I f t h e p i e c e a c c r u e s an y " a u t h o r i t y " i n i t s h y p n o t i c a p p e a l , i t p r o b a b l y summons i t from t h e e a r l y s u b j e c t i v e s c i e n c e s ( o r t h e i r d e b a s e d an d p o p u l a r i s e d i m i t a t i o n s ) t o which we owe t h e O r r e r y , t h e P l a n e t a r i u m , t h e C r y s t a l B a l l , and t h o s e c r a f t y d raw in g room i l l u s i o n s o f t h e S p i r i t u a l i s t Medium. THE SUBJECT ITSELF Q Born 19791 9 80- 1982 1982 1982 1983 1983-85 198<l 1985 82 81 GREG D A V I L L F. 1 5 - 6 .6 0 Grade One BA (Hons) i n F in e A r t , C o v e n try ( L a n c h e s t e r ) P o l y t e c h n i c ’U n t i t l e d Act.; R e c r e a t i o n T h r i v e s ' an d ' 5 S e n se s R o a rin g T hro u g h ' 2 m o n i t o r c o l o u r v i d e o s shown a t A i r G a l l e r y b a s e m e n t , th r o u g h London Video A r t s 'N o t e s f o r p r o p o s e d v i d e o ' , 5 d r y p o i n t p r i n t s in t h e S t o w c l l s Trophy a t t h e Royal Academy D i r e c t o r o f V i d e o , F o ss e Community A r t s C e n t r e , L e i c e s t e r 'W o rld S c a l e s ' and ' P a c i f i c O cean' a s s e m b l a g e s shown i n open show a t S t M artins C a lle r y , L e ic e s te r Awarded A r t s C o u n c il Video B u r sa ry MA, RCA E n v ir o n m e n ta l Media a t t h e Royal C o l l e g e o f A rt 'C e o g ra p h y Box' a s s e m b l a g e i n New C o n t e m p o r a r i e s a t ICA, London 3 b l u e - p r i n t p h o t o g r a p h s shown i n p i c t u r e d e p a r t m e n t o f L i b e r t y ' s Over t h e l a s t 5 y e a r s I h ave worked i n many d i f f e r e n t m e d i a , from p r i n t i n g a n d bo ok- m ak ing t o a s se m b la g e an d v i d e o . My p r e s e n t work i s s t i l l p l u r a l i s t i n i t s a p p r o a c h a s I am a f i r m b e l i e v e r i n a l l o w i n g t h e i d e a t o d i c t a t e t h e medium best suited fo r i t s re a lisa tio n . I h ave d e v e l o p e d a g e n e r a l t h e m e / s t r u c t u r e w i t h i n which a l l my work i s now made. I t i s e n t i t l e d "The Sound o f Sad M e c h a n ic s" . The f i r s t p i e c e made a c c o r d i n g t o t h i s theme was an I n s t a l l a t i o n c o n s t r u c t e d f o r my f i n a l show a t t h e RCA w h i c h a c t e d a s a k i n d o f ' g r o u n d - p l a n ' f o r w h at I i n t e n d h o p e f u l l y t o be d e v e lo p e d a s a l i f e - w o r k . The i n t e n t i o n o f t h e i n s t a l l a t i o n was t o show t h e human b e i n g in an e x i s t e n t i a l l i g h t - a s The I n s t r u m e n t , r e c e i v i n g ( s p e c i f i c ) i n f o r m a t i o n ( l i k e when we r e a d a b o o k , c o n t e m p l a t e on s o m e t h i n g , c o n v e r s e w i t h o t h e r I n s t r u m e n t s e t c ) . T h i s was i l l u s t r a t e d by a l i f e - s i z e mannequin ( i t s e y e l e s s head s p o r t i n g a n a e r i a l ) w a t c h i n g a v i d e o - l o o p o f a t o y r o b o t w a l k i n g b a c k an d f o r t h . A l l o t h e r i n f o r m a t i o n n o t c o n s c i o u s l y acknowled ged by t h e I n s t r u m e n t a t one g i v e n t im e (fr o m wo rld i n f o r m a t i o n an d w o r l d c u l t u r e ) was i n d i c a t e d by a c o l l e c t i o n o f d y e l i n e p h o t o g r a p h s hung aro u n d t h e mannequin an d m o n i t o r . The images were a s e c l e c t i c a s p o s s i b l e , b e i n g p h o t o g r a p h e d by m y s e l f an d a l s o fou n d from v a r i o u s s o u r c e s i n c l u d i n g my own n o t e b o o k s , m a g a z i n e s , p o s t c a r d c o l l e c t i o n s e t c . The o v e r a l l c o n c e p t t h a t I t r i e d t o prom ote w i t h i n t h e i n s t a l l a t i o n was t h e t r a n s i t o r y o r e p h e m e r a l n a t u r e o f a l l t h i n g s - w h e t h e r i t be a t e l e v i s i o n s e t o r a human b e i n g : h en ce ' s a d ' m e c h a n i c s - a l t h o u g h i t m u st be s t a t e d t h a t t h i s i s a c e l e b r a t i o n o f t h e f a c t a s o p p o se d t o a l a m e n t . The m e c h a n i s t i c a n a l o g y i n my work s te m s from an i n t e r e s t i n a Duchampian a p p r o a c h t o a r t making and (more p r a c t i c a l l y ) from a p r e d e l i c t i o n f o r u s i n g m ach in ery i n t h e making p r o c e s s . My a b i l i t y t o u s e ' p r o f e s s i o n a l ' eq u ip m en t v e r y u n p r o f e s s i o n a l l y c o u p l e d w i t h a p r e f e r e n c e f o r t h e u t i l i s a t i o n o f d a t e d m ach in es ( c l o c k w o r k an d v a l v e s r a t h e r t h a n m i c r o c h i p s ) h a s l e a d t o a w o rk in g p r o c e s s t h a t I h ave l a b e l l e d "Amateur M echanics". The p i e c e I h ave made f o r t h e Camerawork show i s b a s e d on A l b r e c h t D u r e r ' s " M e l a n c h o l i a 1" p r i n t . Having r e c e n t l y r e a d up on i t s i n h e r e n t sym bolism I have been s u r p r i s e d a s t o t h e l a r g e amount o f ( c o i n c i d e n t a l ) c r o s s - r e f e r e n c e s t o t h e Sound o f Sad M e ch an ics i n s t a l l a t i o n an d th em e. The theme o f D u r e r ' s p r i n t i s one o f s e l f - r e v e l a t i o n l e a d i n g t o a s t a t e o f m e l a n c h o l y : an i d e a which t i e s i n which t h e " B l i n d i n g w i t h S c i e n c e " t i t l e , i n t h a t t h e s u b j e c t (o n c e a g a i n s e e n a s The I n s t r u m e n t ) i s i t s e l f t e m p o r a r i l y ' b l i n d e d ' on t h e o c c a s i o n o f e a c h s t e p t o w a r d s a h e i g h t e n e d self-aw aren ess. T h i s 'c a m e ra w o r k ' by Godbold an d Wood i s a s e l f - p o r t r a i t ; and t h e r e f o r e , n e c e s s a r i l y , a l s o a d o u b l e - p o r t r a i t . I f t h e i n s t a l l a t i o n c o u l d be c o n s i d e r e d a s d i s p l a y i n g i t s own u n i q u e i d e n t i t y a s ' B o d y ' , t h e p i e c e i s a k i n d o f t r i p l e - p o r t r a i t . I n an y c a s e , t h e n o t i o n o f s u b j e c t - a s - a u t h o r i s a p e r p l e x i n g one an d can l e a d t o e x c e s s an d c o n t r a d i c t i o n . N o t w i t h s t a n d i n g , i t i s hoped t h a t a n unknown an d u n s u s p e c t i n g a u d ie n c e may become e n t i c e d o r i n s i n u a t e d i n t o t h i s b l a t a n t an d c lu m sy m echanism , an d d i s c o v e r i t s e l f d e l i g h t e d an d t r a n s f i x e d w i t h i n a c l e v e r an d c o n v i v i a l s p e c t a c l e . CADI HOL L ANDE R Born i n J e r u s a l e m , 19*j8. Im m ig rated t o New York i n 1958. L iv ed i n I s r a e l from 1967 t o 1973. L iv i n g i n London s i n c e 1973- S t u d i e d E n g l i s h L i t e r a t u r e an d L i n g u i s t i c s . BIBLIOGRAPHY ( p o e t r y ) 1972 'T h e S m a l l n e s s o f I t A H ' ( O u t p o s t P u b l i c a t i o n s ) ' P a g e ' (X P r e s s ) 1979 1980 x s t e t (The H y p o t h e s i s ) ( T w i s t e d W r i s t ) 1980 'C a n ta ta P ro fa n a ' ( p r i v a t e p u b lic a tio n ) 1985 'The Book o f C r i s e s ' ( B r a n ' s Head - f o r t h c o m i n g ) s i n c e 1975 work i n t h e f o l l o w i n g m a g a z i n e s / a n t h o l o g i e s : C u r t a i n s , P r o s p i c e , C a l l e r y , Chapman, Europ ean J u d a i s m , The Woly o f S wot, S t r a n g e M a t h e m a t ic s , R e a l i t y S t u d i o s , The P r e s e n t T en se, Lobby P r e s s , 'V o i c e s W ith in The A r k ’ (Avon B o o k s ) . . . e t c PERFORMANCE AND VISUAL W ORK s i n c e 1981 P oetry read in g s a t v ario u s venues, in c lu d in g S t Pancras L ibrary, T o r r i a n o A r t s P r o j e c t , S u b - V o i c i v e , S o u th H i l l Park A r t s C e n t r e , 2nd I n t e r n a t i o n a l F e s t i v a l o f P e r fo r m a n c e ( B r a c k n e l l ) . . e t c 1982 - 8*1 ' S l e e p , Memory/THE XXth CENTURY BOOK OF THE DEAD' - a se q u e n c e o f x e r o x wor ks w i t h accompanying c h a n c e - t e x t s 1985 F ilm : 'Mnemosyne' ( S u p e r - 8 , 16 m ins) "ANATOMICAL XEROX PORTRAITS" The p o i n t a b o u t t h e s e p o r t r a i t s i s t h a t t h e y ' r e n o t drawn b u t tak en ( x e r o x e d ) from a v a i l a b l e i l l u s t r a t i o n s . The i l l u s t r a t i o n s a r e a l l t a k e n from a c l a s s i c b o o k , t h e 1901 e d i t i o n o f G r a y ' s Anatomy. an d t h e p i c t u r e s a r e t r a n s f o r m e d i n v a r i o u s ways t h r o u g h t h e p h o t o c o p i e r . A seco n d s o u r c e i s a book on p e r s p e c t i v e d raw in g from t h e 1 8 8 0 ' s , w i t h t h e f o l l o w i n g t i t l e : T h i r d Grade P e r s p e c t i v e by H . J . Dennis - ap p r o v e d by t h e s c i e n c e an d a r t d e p a r t m e n t - VR. The p a p e r b a c k r e p r i n t o f C r a y ' s Anatomy h a s a s h o r t i n t r o d u c t i o n which en d s w i t h t h e f o l l o w i n g wo rd s: " t h e I l l u s t r a t e d Running P r e s s E d i t i o n o f t h e American C l a s s i c C r a y ' s Anatomy o f 1 9 0 1 . . . ( s e r v e s ) a s an e x c e l l e n t r e f e r e n c e t o t h o s e i n t e r e s t e d i n t h e a r t o f human anatom y". In s h o r t , b o t h book s a r e open i n v i t a t i o n s f o r t h e e x p l o i t a t i o n o f a c e r t a i n k i n d o f s c i e n c e ( o r a r t , a c c o r d i n g t o t h e i r a u t h o r s ) by a r t , an d I ' v e s i m p l y t a k e n up t h e i n v i t a t i o n s . The o t h e r e l e m e n t s a t work - c o l o u r an d words - a r e i n i t i a l l y d e t e r m i n e d by c h a n c e an d i n t h a t r e s p e c t c o r r e s p o n d t o t h e chance f a c t o r i n t h e x e r o x p r o c e s s . The c o l o u r s a r e a p p l i e d b e f o r e t h e x e r o x i n g (so m etim es done w h i l e t h e p a p e r i s s t i l l w e t ) so t h a t I can n e v e r t e l l p r e c i s e l y where t h e ' image w i l l " l a n d " o r i n d e e d which image t o u se f o r t h e b e s t e f f e c t . (Where th e p a p e r i s wet o r damp t h e x e r o x image w i l l be f a i n t o r n o t p i c k e d up a t a l l . ) The words a r e a l s o d i s c o v e r e d by c h a n c e , u s u a l l y somewhere n e a r t h e i l l u s t r a t i o n s , an d when t h e y work ( a s poems o r f r a g m e n t s o f p o s s i b l e poems a c t i n g a s a c o u n t e r p o i n t t o t h e im age) t h e y a r e l e f t i n t a c t . O t h e r w i s e t h e y ' r e e i t h e r d e l e t e d o r o b s c u r e d .
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      • modified_by(null)
      • status1
  • 36(array)
    • Medium(array)
      • id36
      • nameFilm
      • iconicon-rushes
      • archive_item_count15
      • created2025-06-04 11:01:24
      • created_by(null)
      • modified2025-06-19 10:40:34
      • modified_by(null)
      • status1
• filterCrumb(array)
  • 0(array)
    • labelAll
    • url/archive/index
• activeTabarchive
• $request->data(empty)
• $this->validationErrors(array)
  • AppPreference(empty)
  • AppPreferenceExpanded(empty)
  • FrontpageRewrite(empty)
  • FrontpagePage(empty)
  • ArchiveItem(empty)
  • Tag(empty)
  • Collection(empty)
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  • 1AppTable
  • 2Form
  • 3Asset
  • 4AdminPreview
  • 5CookieCompliance
  • 6Frontpage
  • 7FrontpageSitemap
  • 8Html
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  • 11Text
  • 12Time
  • 13Number
  • 14Avatar
  • 15Antispam
  • 16Menu
  • 17SimpleGraph
  • 18Paginator
  • 19DebugTimer
  • 20Toolbar
  • 21AppJqueryEngine
  • 22HtmlToolbar

App Constants

CakePHP Constants

PHP Environment

Included Files

Include Paths

• 0/var/www/vhosts/fourcornersarchive.org/httpdocs/live/Plugin/App/Vendor/htmlpurifier
• 1/var/www/vhosts/fourcornersarchive.org/httpdocs/live/Vendor/pear/numbers_words
• 3/opt/plesk/php/7.4/share/pear
• 4-> /var/www/vhosts/fourcornersarchive.org/httpdocs/live/Vendor/cakephp/cakephp/lib/Cake/

Included Files

• core(array)
  • Behavior(array)
    • 0CORE/Model/Behavior/ContainableBehavior.php
  • Cache(array)
    • 0CORE/Cache/Cache.php
    • 1CORE/Cache/Engine/FileEngine.php
    • 2CORE/Cache/CacheEngine.php
  • Component(array)
    • 0CORE/Controller/Component/SessionComponent.php
    • 1CORE/Controller/Component/RequestHandlerComponent.php
    • 2CORE/Controller/Component/CookieComponent.php
    • 3CORE/Controller/Component/AuthComponent.php
    • 4CORE/Controller/Component/PaginatorComponent.php
  • Config(array)
    • 0CORE/Config/config.php
  • Configure(array)
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    • 1CORE/Configure/PhpReader.php
  • Controller(array)
    • 0CORE/Controller/Controller.php
    • 1CORE/Controller/ComponentCollection.php
    • 2CORE/Controller/Component.php
  • Datasource(array)
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    • 1CORE/Model/Datasource/DboSource.php
    • 2CORE/Model/Datasource/DataSource.php
  • Error(array)
    • 0CORE/Error/exceptions.php
    • 1CORE/Error/ErrorHandler.php
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    • 0CORE/I18n/I18n.php
    • 1CORE/I18n/L10n.php
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    • 3CORE/Log/Engine/BaseLog.php
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    • 0CORE/Model/Model.php
    • 1CORE/Model/BehaviorCollection.php
    • 2CORE/Model/ModelBehavior.php
    • 3CORE/Model/ConnectionManager.php
  • Network(array)
    • 0CORE/Network/CakeRequest.php
    • 1CORE/Network/CakeResponse.php
  • Other(array)
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    • 3CORE/Core/Configure.php
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    • 5CORE/Event/CakeEventListener.php
    • 6CORE/Event/CakeEvent.php
    • 7CORE/Event/CakeEventManager.php
    • 8CORE/Core/CakeObject.php
  • Routing(array)
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    • 1CORE/Utility/Inflector.php
    • 2CORE/Utility/ObjectCollection.php
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• app(array)
  • Config(array)
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    • 1APP/Config/bootstrap.php
    • 2APP/Config/config.php
    • 3APP/Config/routes.php
    • 4APP/Config/database.php
  • Controller(array)
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  • Datasource(array)
    • 0APP/Lib/Model/Datasource/Database/Mysql.php
  • Model(array)
    • 0APP/Model/ApplicationModel.php
  • Other(array)
    • 0APP/webroot/index.php
• plugins(array)
  • Admin(array)
    • Config(array)
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      • 1Admin/Config/routes.php
  • App(array)
    • Config(array)
      • 0App/Config/bootstrap.php
      • 1App/Config/routes.php
    • Configure(array)
      • 0App/Lib/Configure/YamlReader.php
    • Model(array)
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      • 1App/Model/AppModel.php
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      • 3App/Model/Tag.php
    • Behavior(array)
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      • 2App/Model/Behavior/IncrementalBehavior.php
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      • 4App/Model/Behavior/PurifyBehavior.php
      • 5App/Model/Behavior/TaggableBehavior.php
    • Component(array)
      • 0App/Controller/Component/AppComponent.php
    • Plugin(array)
      • 0App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier.auto.php
      • 1App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Bootstrap.php
      • 2App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier.autoload.php
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      • 5App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/PropertyList.php
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      • 7App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/VarParser.php
      • 8App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/DefinitionCacheFactory.php
      • 9App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/DefinitionCache/Decorator/Cleanup.php
      • 10App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/DefinitionCache/Decorator.php
      • 11App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/DefinitionCache.php
      • 12App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/DefinitionCache/Serializer.php
      • 13App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLDefinition.php
      • 14App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Definition.php
      • 15App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModuleManager.php
      • 16App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrTypes.php
      • 17App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrDef/Enum.php
      • 18App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrDef.php
      • 19App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrDef/HTML/Bool.php
      • 20App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrDef/Text.php
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      • 22App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrDef/HTML/Length.php
      • 23App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrDef/HTML/Pixels.php
      • 24App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrDef/HTML/MultiLength.php
      • 25App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrDef/HTML/Nmtokens.php
      • 26App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrDef/URI.php
      • 27App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/URIParser.php
      • 28App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/PercentEncoder.php
      • 29App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrDef/Lang.php
      • 30App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrDef/HTML/Color.php
      • 31App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrDef/Clone.php
      • 32App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrDef/HTML/FrameTarget.php
      • 33App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrDef/HTML/Class.php
      • 34App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrDef/Integer.php
      • 35App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/DoctypeRegistry.php
      • 36App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Doctype.php
      • 37App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier.php
      • 38App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Strategy/Core.php
      • 39App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Strategy/Composite.php
      • 40App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Strategy.php
      • 41App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Strategy/RemoveForeignElements.php
      • 42App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Strategy/MakeWellFormed.php
      • 43App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Strategy/FixNesting.php
      • 44App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Strategy/ValidateAttributes.php
      • 45App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Lexer.php
      • 46App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Lexer/DOMLex.php
      • 47App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/EntityParser.php
      • 48App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/TokenFactory.php
      • 49App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Token/Start.php
      • 50App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Token/Tag.php
      • 51App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Token.php
      • 52App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Token/End.php
      • 53App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Token/Empty.php
      • 54App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Token/Text.php
      • 55App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Token/Comment.php
      • 56App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Context.php
      • 57App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Generator.php
      • 58App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/CommonAttributes.php
      • 59App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule.php
      • 60App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/Text.php
      • 61App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/ElementDef.php
      • 62App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/Hypertext.php
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      • 64App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/List.php
      • 65App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/ChildDef/List.php
      • 66App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/ChildDef.php
      • 67App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/Presentation.php
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      • 69App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/Bdo.php
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      • 74App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/Image.php
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      • 76App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/StyleAttribute.php
      • 77App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrDef/CSS.php
      • 78App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/Scripting.php
      • 79App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrTransform/ScriptRequired.php
      • 80App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/Object.php
      • 81App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/Forms.php
      • 82App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrTransform/Input.php
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      • 84App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/Name.php
      • 85App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrTransform/NameSync.php
      • 86App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/XMLCommonAttributes.php
      • 87App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/Ruby.php
      • 88App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/Iframe.php
      • 89App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/Tidy/Strict.php
      • 90App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/Tidy/XHTMLAndHTML4.php
      • 91App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/Tidy.php
      • 92App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/TagTransform/Font.php
      • 93App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/TagTransform.php
      • 94App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/TagTransform/Simple.php
      • 95App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrTransform/EnumToCSS.php
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      • 97App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrTransform/Border.php
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      • 99App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrTransform/ImgSpace.php
      • 100App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrTransform/BoolToCSS.php
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      • 105App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/HTMLModule/Tidy/Name.php
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      • 115App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/IDAccumulator.php
      • 116App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/Encoder.php
      • 117App/Vendor/htmlpurifier/HTMLPurifier/AttrValidator.php
  • Asset(array)
    • Config(array)
      • 0Asset/Config/bootstrap.php
      • 1Asset/Config/routes.php
  • AssetAdmin(array)
    • Config(array)
      • 0AssetAdmin/Config/bootstrap.php
      • 1AssetAdmin/Config/routes.php
  • Blog(array)
    • Config(array)
      • 0Blog/Config/bootstrap.php
      • 1Blog/Config/routes.php
    • Plugin(array)
      • 0Blog/Lib/Routing/Route/BlogPostRouteView.php
      • 1Blog/Lib/Routing/Route/BlogPostRouteIndex.php
  • BlogAdmin(array)
    • Config(array)
      • 0BlogAdmin/Config/bootstrap.php
      • 1BlogAdmin/Config/routes.php
  • DebugKit(array)
    • Component(array)
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    • Plugin(array)
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      • 1DebugKit/Lib/Panel/HistoryPanel.php
      • 2DebugKit/Lib/DebugPanel.php
      • 3DebugKit/Lib/Panel/SessionPanel.php
      • 4DebugKit/Lib/Panel/RequestPanel.php
      • 5DebugKit/Lib/Panel/SqlLogPanel.php
      • 6DebugKit/Lib/Panel/TimerPanel.php
      • 7DebugKit/Lib/Panel/LogPanel.php
      • 8DebugKit/Lib/Log/Engine/DebugKitLog.php
      • 9DebugKit/Lib/Panel/VariablesPanel.php
      • 10DebugKit/Lib/Panel/EnvironmentPanel.php
      • 11DebugKit/Lib/Panel/IncludePanel.php
      • 12DebugKit/Lib/DebugTimer.php
  • Frontpage(array)
    • Config(array)
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      • 1Frontpage/Config/routes.php
    • Plugin(array)
      • 0Frontpage/Lib/Routing/Route/FrontpagePageRoute.php
    • Component(array)
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      • 1Frontpage/Controller/Component/AntispamComponent.php
    • Model(array)
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      • 1Frontpage/Model/FrontpageAppModel.php
      • 2Frontpage/Model/FrontpageRewrite.php
  • FrontpageAdmin(array)
    • Config(array)
      • 0FrontpageAdmin/Config/bootstrap.php
      • 1FrontpageAdmin/Config/routes.php
  • Opauth(array)
    • Config(array)
      • 0Opauth/Config/bootstrap.php
      • 1Opauth/Config/routes.php
  • Project(array)
    • Config(array)
      • 0Project/Config/routes.php
    • Controller(array)
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      • 1Project/Controller/ProjectAppController.php
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    • Behavior(array)
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  • ProjectAdmin(array)
    • Config(array)
      • 0ProjectAdmin/Config/bootstrap.php
      • 1ProjectAdmin/Config/routes.php
  • Search(array)
    • Component(array)
      • 0Search/Controller/Component/FilterComponent.php
  • Sentry(array)
    • Plugin(array)
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  • Story(array)
    • Config(array)
      • 0Story/Config/bootstrap.php
      • 1Story/Config/routes.php
    • Plugin(array)
      • 0Story/Lib/Routing/Route/StoryPostRouteView.php
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  • StoryAdmin(array)
    • Config(array)
      • 0StoryAdmin/Config/bootstrap.php
      • 1StoryAdmin/Config/routes.php
  • User(array)
    • Behavior(array)
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  • UserAdmin(array)
    • Config(array)
      • 0UserAdmin/Config/bootstrap.php
      • 1UserAdmin/Config/routes.php