by William Boyd
It’s for this reason that I’ve appropriated the title of Wallace Stevens’s famous poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Looking at anonymous photographs and trying to analyse them, without a famous name attached, has the effect of sifting out a variety of responses to the photographic image. It seems to me that we look at photographs in ways that are far more varied and multifarious than the ways we look at other works of art. Sometimes these different responses complement each other, sometimes they cancel each other out, but when the photographer’s name is absent (and thus the photo’s historical-cultural-biographical context) we can, with better precision, more exactly investigate what assumptions and prejudices we bring to the photograph and how the photograph works on us.
Therefore I’ve tried to isolate, for harmonic poetic neatness, thirteen different ways we look at photographs. Perhaps there are more: perhaps some of my categories overlap somewhat, but I think the exercise—the thought-experiment—is valid because at the end of the process, if I am right, then what conclusions we draw about the anonymous photograph will bear intriguingly on the so-called “artless art” of photography itself.
Aide-memoire
Is this not why most of us take photographs? We use a camera to provide a visual analogue of a potential memory. We take photographs of places, people, pets, cars, houses, and so on, to store away. How many photographs are kept in boxes and not displayed in frames or mounted in albums (or, in this digital age, on hard disks)? Many of the anonymous photographs in this book inevitably fall into this category: here a little boy is snapped in front of a car; there, a housewife on a lounger looks up from her newspaper. Photographs of pets are of interest only to the owner (and possibly win the prize for the most boring photographs ever). The memory referent in these and other examples is lost to us now but in so many cases this must have been the motivation: the photograph functions simply as a way of recalling, a way of summoning up the past.
Reportage
This is the public face of the previous private category, in a sense. Often these images—of wars, of natural disasters, of historic events, of famous people, of gathered crowds—provide some of the most memorable images in the history of photography. Here the photograph is testimony, often of a shocking and harrowing order. Occasionally the horror gives way to more disturbing responses. The picture of the decapitated head moves beyond the initial shock of the image to something more surreal and unsettling. The juxtaposition of crashed car, empty country road and the victim’s head, seemingly carefully placed fifteen feet away from the body, looks like a scene from a Buñuel film. The camera is fortuitously present—or else, especially in combat zones, the photographer chooses to go where most of us would dare not. The great war photographers—Robert Capa, Don McCullin, Philip Jones Griffiths, Larry Burrows—come to mind
Work of Art
Sometimes the photograph tries to replicate the classic images of painting or sculpture. Think of the nude, the still life, the portrait. Here the photograph presents itself as a quasi-painting, a pseudo-canvas—with mixed results, in my opinion. Photos such as these—a corn cob or a vase of roses—seem vaguely ashamed of their mechanical reproductive nature and, by copying a genre, try to buy some aesthetic respectability. What’s the point of these images, one wonders (pace Mapplethorpe)? Only rarely can they outshine their equivalents in the plastic arts.
Topography
This category is related to the former, where the photograph tries to reproduce the effect of painted landscape, or a refulgent sunset. Or else the photograph is taken to register some natural phenomenon—mountain ranges, canyons, gorges, cataracts. As a means of recording a topographical situation the precision of photography is unrivalled. But is anyone as moved by the image of a photographed landscape as they are of a painted one?
Erotica and Pornography
This is perhaps a field that photography can claim as its own, having vanquished all rivals except, perhaps, the cartoon. The massive proliferation of sexual images (soft and hard) in our world exhibits something of the sheer range of photography’s power and effect—the gamut is extensive, the nuances of erotica are manifold. The naked women flourishing their suspender belts and baring their plump buttocks is frank titillation. The before-and-after images of three women, clothed and unclothed, make, perhaps guilelessly, a more intriguing social point. But the picture of a man and a prostitute in a darkened room with the shadow of a blind fanning over the cut-out pinups on the wall is interested purely in creating a fine photograph. Any erotic subtext is subliminal.
Advertisement
Subjects of erotic or pornographic images are selling their sexual frisson, such as it may be. But this category of photograph—the advertisement—is as ubiquitous as porn. These are photos that are programmed to function wholly as a form of allurement, as bait, as temptation. It is something photography does extremely well—better than any other form of image, conceivably. The whole huge world of fashion photography, for example, can be subsumed in this category.
Abstract Image
Here is another subclass that links with painting but in which photography has carved out a niche for itself. Something photographed in extreme close-up, for example, loses its quiddity and becomes near or wholly abstract. Two pairs of spectacles or the pistons and driving wheels of a locomotive are presented arrangements of shape and mass. A strange angle or extreme cropping can produce the same effect. The photograph functions simply and purely, being judged, like an abstract painting, in terms of form, pattern, texture and composition.
Literature
Again and again we are tempted to “read” a photograph, as if it were part of a narrative or a short story. This is particularly the case in anonymous photographs as we have so little to go on. Who are these masked women in their identical dresses? Or the odd trio in the bar (almost like a Brassai)—the two card-playing women and the young man with the glass and bottle. Is he with them? Perhaps he’s the true subject of the photograph. Does he know the photographer? (He’s looking into the lens.) We want to supply a “story” to the image, we want to find a narrative frame—or a series of frames—into which we can slot this image, and, as we bring our deduced or inferred narrative to the picture, attempt to understand it. This is a potent impulse in all photography and again it comes to the foreground when the image is anonymous. Walker Evans said: “Fine photography is literature, and it should be.”
Text
Why are there so many photographs of signs? There is a whole subdivision, throughout the history of photography, that concerns itself with the photography of writing or printed signs, running from an image like the photograph of a diner where its signs are what attracts—“Bohemian Lunch Café”—to the sophisticated work of someone such as Lee Fried-lander. I find it hard fully to comprehend this impulse but it is clearly near-universal and one the anonymous photographer is equally prone to adopt. The entrance to a town, the hand-painted advertisement, the comic misspelling or the absent letter—something about words seems to provoke the desire to photograph them, as if the verbal joke needs to be visibly enshrined.
Autobiography
Every photograph, if we knew enough about the circumstances of its taking, will contain some biographical information about the photographer. A photograph such as that of the little black boy with the dummy in his mouth and the toy rifle in his hand is a form of biographical signifier of the man or woman who took the picture. This is a wonderful photograph (very Diane Arbus in its calm eeriness) but is the juxtaposition of symbols deliberate or a result of chance? Is this child the photographer’s son? What’s trying to be conveyed here about the photographer’s attitude to innocence and experience? Can we move on from there to ask if every photograph, therefore, is an unconscious fragment of the photographer’s autobiography? Will all the photographs a person takes in his or her life be as much a record of that individual as anything written down?
Composition
One could argue this is a subclas
s of the “work of art” category but I feel that the traditional fine-art concept and rules of composition particularly apply to photography. Many of the most memorable photographs, in my opinion, are also beautifully composed. The picture of two Nazi storm troopers hand in hand with their identically uniformed toddlers is, apart from anything else, a perfect composition: it could almost be a Cartier-Bresson. The photograph of two boys fishing works precisely because of the inadvertent mirror-imaging of their pose. Of course the classical elements of composition—balance or asymmetry, grouping of forms, the placing of light and dark etc., etc.—apply to a photograph as well. But I find in a well-composed black-and-white photograph—and perhaps this is something to do with a combination of depth of field and the photo’s monochrome nature—an element that is absent from painting. One is more intensely aware of composition in black-and-white photographs. I think, for example, that this idea of composition is behind the unanalysable appeal of some of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs. Why are they so tenaciously memorable? It’s not simply a question of subject matter: the ones I remember best also tend to be the best composed.
A Means to an End/Tool
Photography cannot be separated from its pragmatic advantages. The huge subclass of anonymous photography as pedagogical illustration (in text books and encyclopaedias, for instance) bears this out. There are interesting ramifications, however: a photograph, for example, of James Dean’s wrecked Porsche will fall under the category of “reportage.” A similar photograph, but taken by the insurance loss adjuster investigating the accident, will have an entirely different import. Crime scene photographs also vacillate between these two designations, at once helping to solve the crime but also with their own curious aesthetic effect. Or, to put it another way, once the pragmatic task of the photograph has been satisfied it may transmogrify into something else. The professional photographer’s Polaroid is an exemplary instance. As someone who has been photographed many times by professional photographers, I often find the most pleasing image is the one they discard after the shoot. Professional accessory eliding into serendipitous portrait.
Snapshot
The photographer Nan Goldin has gone on record claiming that the snapshot is one of the highest forms of photography. I would like to go one step further and say that in the snapshot we distil the very essence of photography and find in this concept an explanation of this artless art’s idiosyncratic and enduring power. All photographs and all the types of photographs that are outlined above borrow from or share in the nature of the snapshot to a greater or lesser degree. For what distinguishes photography from all the other visual arts is its particularly intense relation to time. That mechanically retrieved image is the record of a split second of the world’s history. A photograph is a stop-time device and this is what makes every photograph, however sophisticated, however humdrum, unique. And because our mortality and our lives are so bound up with the sense of our time passing—or with the sense of our lives heading on remorselessly to their end—then the artificial ability to stop time yourself with your own photographs, or to witness time stopped in the photographs of others, is profoundly, atavistically appealing. I would argue that it is this feature of photography (and not, for example, Roland Barthes’s concept of the punctum, the “detail”) that explains the individual response to the strange enticement of an individual photograph. One of the great images in this collection (it could have been taken by Henri Lartigue) is a photo of a group of wealthy, well-dressed people, holding umbrellas high against the rain, dashing across a wet road through advancing traffic. The women’s feet are blurred in their hurry, defying the speed of the camera shutter. The ambience is all energy and momentary alarm. The composition of the group is near-perfect: the diagonal swerve of the tyre track imprinted on the glossy tarmac (and how it draws us back into the picture); the vertical shafts of the umbrellas beginning to cant forward in the direction of the rush. Yet what, finally, “makes” this photograph—why it works, I would claim—is the women’s feet frozen in the air in mid dash. This is the pure element of snapshot (our rosebud, our blackbird): we see it plain—time is halted, time stands still.
I think this same notion underscores the allure of the November image in the 1965 Pirelli calendar for my fifteen-year-old self (and thereafter: I have it now—again—in a Pirelli album). There are agreeable associations in the picture—of sea, of sun, of summer—and the girl is pretty enough, in a very 1960s way, but—crucially—the image is un-posed, candid, snapped. Time has stopped: that match will for ever flare, her lips will be for ever slightly pursed.
This crucial, elemental aspect of photography could not be better enshrined than in the image on the title page of this book. In the middle distance a man, silhouetted against the sky, leaps from one towering column of rock to another. The unknown photographer captures him in mid-air, in mid-leap, poised above the significant abyss. This is a great and memorable photograph. All sorts of potential readings and interpretations crowd around it—was it a dare? What was the man trying to prove? Who was this leap designed to impress? How dangerous was it? We will never know, the facts of the photograph are lost to us: and because we can never know therefore all explanations are equally valid. But that moment of time has been recorded and held and the symbolic resonance around the split-second happenstance of its taking is rich. It could stand as a synecdoche for all photography. The great photographs—anonymous or otherwise, the photographs we love and remember—must have a snapshot of the human enterprise, of our human condition, about them, somewhere.
2004
Pierre Bonnard
An artist’s antipathies can often be as revealing as his enthusiasms. Picasso, for example, loathed Bonnard, describing his painting as a “potpourri of indecision.” Mind you, Picasso also purported to loathe Monet, which is not bad company to keep, I suppose. One can understand why it was necessary for Picasso to react against these painters—their evanescence, their seductive powers, their refulgence represented everything he himself didn’t want to do. Too soft, too representational, too retrospective, too harmonious and finally, for him, too safe. But like many antipathies such hostility often tells us more about the hater than the target. Such a dismissal of an artist of Bonnard’s rank is a brutal and deliberate misunderstanding. Bonnard’s work is far more disciplined and dogged, more modern and integrity-filled than Picasso’s aspersions would imply—indeed, as this superb exhibition at the Tate amply demonstrates—and it is both intriguing and telling to note that Matisse—the other giant of twentieth-century painting—was a lifelong and close friend of Bonnard and, as their wonderful correspondence illustrates, they were almost co-theorists in painterly matters. Matisse’s world could encompass Bonnard’s, but for an artist like Picasso Bonnard had to be removed far beyond the pale.
There is another problem with Bonnard, and not just his refusal to “go modern”: his pictures are simply too beautiful, too sensuous, too flooded with the most delicious light and colour. Any art—however high, however serious—that is hard to resist, that provokes immediate, almost unreflective pleasure, makes people (critics, historians, curators, academics) illogically suspicious. It is this reaction that prompts the classification of Bonnard as a kind of lazy post-post-Impressionist, a hangover from the nineteenth century, still basking in the creative afterglow of Monet, Renoir, Pissaro, Sisley et al. In fact Bonnard (born in 1867) first made his name at the end of the nineteenth century as an innovative, ultra-modern graphic designer, designing posters and making coloured lithographs. It is worth remembering that underneath the shimmering, feathery brushstrokes and the blurry juxtaposition of pigment there is a tried and robust graphic talent. In 1915 (when Bonnard was forty) he told his nephew that he had resolved a profound artistic crisis in this efficacious and straightfoward manner: “I drew ceaselessly.” And, as the studies for his big landscapes reveal, every painting had its beginnings in a series of highly detailed drawings.
The 1915 crisis had arisen from a fear tha
t colour alone was beginning to rule and overwhelm his art. So Bonnard reapplied himself, quite consciously and with no small pain, relearning the fundamentals behind painting, namely drawing and composition. This was the second crisis of his life that had redirected and corrected his artistic course. The earlier one had occurred in 1905 when he saw the work that Matisse was doing and realized that modernism and everything it implied—all its iconoclasm, its uncompromising decorative side and potential abstraction—was not for him. He voluntarily left that field to others and pursued his own lonely course, a factor that both explains the remarkable homogeneity of Bonnard’s work and also accounts for the marked decline in his reputation between the wars.
Bonnard stayed faithfully with figuration and remained sui generis: his subject matter was classical—the nude, the landscape, the interior, the still life. His development and stylistic divagations were consequently un-dramatic, often marked by nothing more significant than looser brush-stroking, a more severe flattening of the picture plane, a brilliant and daring use of composition, some mannerist distortion and, of course, one of the most rich and beguiling palettes of the twentieth century.
His reputation and his popularity have recovered, unequivocally, from the inter-war slump. Bonnard is now rightly considered one of the great painters of the nude—an equal of Degas and Modigliani. This was an obsession that began early in his life, particularly after his meeting with his muse, a working-class woman called, simply, Marthe, who was his model and companion for most of his life. They met in 1893 and Marthe died in 1942—immortalized in a sequence of paintings covering five decades, ranging from the erotically charged L’Indolente (1898) to the disturbing and celebrated Nu à la Baignoire (1930).