Speaking to the Frenchman the other day and hearing him say that my work was not original was exactly the opportunity I was waiting for. My heart contracted only momentarily and I launched into a defence nearly instantly. It is worthwhile to start building a strong case for why these photos are unique and worth spending all the difficult time that I’ve been spending on them.
Most importantly, these photos are real. The Frenchman, after having seen 4 or 5 photos from the Architecture of the Human Face, referred to them as portraiture. Further, he later said ‘portraiture from India, Pakistan’ etc. This is fundamentally wrong. There is no statement I would fight harder than to have these photos referred to primarily as portraiture. They are not.
My photos are street photographs. They are ‘in state.’ They are without any consent, and in the overwhelming number of cases without the subject’s knowledge. Traditional portraiture, starting from the very beginning with etchings and then paintings and sculpture meant the artist had to share power or representation with the subject. Often this power was overwhelmingly with the subject, as are the portraits of political leaders even now. People are highly adept at presenting a ‘face’, a narrative that they controlled. After all, they did it every day. And once people become aware that a photo is going to be taken, they start manipulating the image that will be presented.
The very best portrait photographers such as Avedon, or Arbus could undo some of this reluctance, and facade with a huge effort in time and trust but it is not only the truth of an unguarded character that is lost, but also of what I call situational truth. Situational truth is really existential truth, an authenticity that comes from a lack of any meta-alteration of reality. A reality without the taint of artifice. Of course, there is the everyday artifice and control that people take out with them but that is within the sphere of situational truth and isn’t subversive. The faces of these people on the street is what was there. Was what others walking past these people were seeing. What is destructive to my purpose is a concerted effort to change the situational reality by anyone other than me.
Why is this situational authenticity important? Because most people aren’t shooting it anymore. The current trend in photography, after it relinquished it’s crown of being the arbiter of truth-telling to video, is to a staged, conceptual photography. I don’t agree with Papageorge that this is inherently a wrong direction for photography to go in, although I can see that it is not the most natural fit for the medium. I think great staged photography can and is being made, work by Roger Ballen for example which is meaningful, funny pictorial art. But as with any movement that is mainstream, with so many practitioners who are starting out with little experience, both of the medium and of life, there will be a lot of pure, unfiltered shit produced.
I want to put myself in sharp contrast against that and my work does that. The expressions, the skin, the glasses these are all real. These are what the people look like in real life, and what they use day to day. The bent, deformed teeth is what that man has had to live with everyday of his life. Like all great meaningful art, I want to use my imagination as subservient to reality, to life, and not for it’s own sake. The truths and stories in my work is how life is. There are no actors taking off costumes at the end of the shoot. This is one of photography’s strengths.
But capturing an uncontrolled reality isn’t unique in the history of photography. In fact, it was the norm for much of it. But what I’m also doing which is truly new is that I’m getting closer than anyone has on the street before. I’ve written before about the detail that I’m trying to capture. And I don’t mean closer in filling the frame. That can be done with a zoom. But closer with my body, and a short lens, and I’m working with a very narrow depth of field of about 20-40cm which makes the sweet spot for the shot very tight. There is also the question of race. I can get that close because my skin is brown and my parents are Bangladeshi. No one that I’ve seen has gotten this close in street photography. And a white person couldn’t.
It is a combination of these two factors which assures the uniqueness of the work that I’m producing. I’m eager to hear of any counter-examples that can be produced. It is also important to say however that I’m not making work just to be unique, that isn’t a high enough test for art although it is an important one for significant, remembered art. I’m doing this because it fits what I’m trying to say about the world, to look closer and deeper, at the things which are becoming lost in our increasingly same same cultures. I’m also exploring personal issues of age, and growth, and history. These people are the ones that I’ve come from. Will I look like this? As the Frenchman emphasised to me, there must be strong meaning behind the work to differentiate it and I believe that my perspective of a wholly assimilated immigrant is an important one, a rare one if not a unique one. But what I’m not making is ethnic art, my work is in the line of the Western tradition in which I’ve been schooled.
So far, I have been talking just about the Face work. But I believe the Twilight work itself is new too. Great night work has been done from before Brassai on down. But I don’t believe that detailed, coloured, low light, people filled work in third world countries has been done before in any significant amounts. I do remember a book that has been released in the last 3 years (unfortunately I can’t remember any of the details at the moment) which did work in India at night which looked great, but it was not of the same style. I believe that the technical capabilities of the cameras we have now has been a significant factor in the newness of the work.
Of course, these night photos themselves are again, real. I walked in the depths of the night through a foreign town with unfamiliar faces chattering, plotting in the shadows. I wasn’t in a warzone, but it was something.
Beyond this, what I found during the editing of the Twilight of the Male Soul was how strongly I was trying to tell a story rather than have a random juxtapositions of similar pictures. The story is complex and I hope subtle. And it is intimately about me and how I think about the world and how I feel about life. This is unique. We will see if other people believe this story is well told and whether it is important but it is my story and no one else can reproduce that.
I feel the tone of this essay is too arrogant, and self-satisfied. I don’t mean it to be. I’m early on and these are my first works and I have no history or reputation to rely on. I must make and protect my reputation because at this point no one else will. I’m not even close to being satisfied with the work that I’ve made, and although they make me happy in some ways, seeing the ragged edges, and mistakes, and bits of potential I didn’t capitalise on, is depressing. But it is new work, it is unique work that hasn’t been done before. That is very important to me. Because there is no other purpose to high art than to increase man’s knowledge of himself. Otherwise, it is decoration, not art.
Posted 2 years ago
