art and allusion

Saul Leiter: A Life in Colour (Hackelbury Fine Art, London, from June 2013)

Preview of an exhibition at Hackelbury Fine Art  June 2013. Follow this link for examples of Saul Leiter's painting and photography.  Also of interest: information about and a trailer for a recent documentary film about Saul Leiter  'In No Great Hurry' )

Read Jane Heath's views on Saul Leiter's photographs, and on his paintings.

Saul Leiter: A Life in Colour

 text by Nigel Warburton

‘Everything is what it is and not another thing’
Gottfried Leibniz

Sometimes words screen us from what is in front of us. In the face of abstraction it is easier to fall back on biographical references, on artists’ statements, on art historical contextualization: these can be alternatives to engagement, ways of avoiding what is in front of you. There is, of course, no innocent eye, no pure retinal experience of painting, but focusing on fact, meaning, and source can undermine rather than enhance the joys of looking.

"I have personally not cared about the emphasis on the personal because I think that what matters is the work you do. When an artist talks about his own work he’s not very often discussing the work, he’s discussing quite possibly what he’d like it to be, or what he thinks it is. What can you do? The work itself outlives what people say about it"

Saul Leiter’s paintings have an unmistakable beauty. They burst with colour – yellows, turquoises, violets, reds. If you give them a few moments they will draw you in. Saul will tell you how much he enjoys the act of painting, how unlike some artists he doesn’t suffer when he paints - far from it. He is openly seeking a particular kind of beauty, and the enjoyment in the process is as obvious as it is in his photography. But you should be able to see this. No one should have to tell you. It is in his use of colour, the variety of marks, and in his sheer exuberance in painting that this emerges. The temptation is to try and explain it all in terms of something else that it isn’t, something more complicated or more personal. There may seem to be a horizon, and a sense of landscape or cityscape in many of these – though perhaps not. Everything in his painting is what it is.

"I have a great weakness that I’m ashamed to talk about. I have a great secret. I love painting! When I wake up in the morning and I’m depressed I got into the front room and pick up a brush and I feel much better"

This delight in colour and in brushstrokes is visible and contagious. It is there in the exuberant choice of hue, in the free marks, in the asymmetrical compositions – a wonderful expression of Leiter’s personality, his intelligence, wit, and pleasure in life.

There are echoes of his photography in his painting - and of his painting in his photography. The ochres and reds of a passing taxi, the patterns of out of focus lights in Times Square, such details often find their equivalents in both the colour and form of particular paintings. Equally the delight in multiple layers of paint and texture can be seen in many of his exquisite street shots, which frequently use windows and mirrors to frame, veil, and abstract. In both media his sensibility has been shaped by his first loves: the paintings of Renoir, of Matisse, and above all, of Bonnard. He began as a painter, and it is painting that still inspires him.

"Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I reach over to one of my 30 books on Bonnard…if I can’t find the one I want, I go out and buy another copy"

Leiter works on an intimate scale, often on scraps of cardboard and paper, sometimes almost translucent paper. An old returned envelope or a photographic print provides a surface for painting as readily as does a notebook of watercolour paper. For one series he used discarded book covers from his father’s library; for a more recent one he has been collecting the slivers of cardboard that wine stores place between bottles to stop them breaking. Many of the marks he makes are self-consciously calligraphic. They are both delicate and direct. One of his favorite books is of Zen brushwork, that tradition of immediacy flowing from a clear mind.

"The brush is one of the greatest inventions of mankind. Even if I don’t always use it correctly, I aspire to a kind of quality in the marks I make"

Built up from layers of gouache and watercolour, his paintings are palimpsests. He returns to earlier work that he finds in the stacks of sketches that fill his apartment, adding a light stroke here, improving, reworking, layering. This is a highly personal way of working, but it has no secret private meaning. It is not a diary, not a confession. If it brings joy to those who look at it, that is more than enough.

"In a very imperfect world it is good that something you’ve done gives pleasure to people"

There is a story, of course, of how he came to be as he is. Leiter’s father, a distinguished, scholar and rabbi, cried when Saul had his first exhibition, literally cried: ‘Now everyone will know’ he lamented. Saul’s artistic career, he jokes, began in adversity. Some seventy years on, this is still poignant. That’s where it all comes from. He wasn’t meant to be an artist, but, as he puts it, with a shrug in his voice, ‘What can you do? I preferred looking at paintings to sitting in a synagogue praying to a god I wasn’t sure was listening to me.’

Leaving Pittsburgh for New York, in part to get away from a life that others were planning for him, he took a different path. There he fell in with painters and photographers, worked as a fashion photographer, read, looked at paintings, enjoyed friendships, built up a personal portfolio of colour street photography that has only recently been fully appreciated and collected. But always he kept painting. Not every day, but most days, finding beauty and joy in brushstrokes when he wasn’t finding it in the street through his photography. Painting is at the core of his being. Despite the pressures to earn a living, he sidestepped attempts to show his work until he was ready. He quietly got on with what he wanted to get on with, living his own life, resisting the Siren calls of the art world. The resulting paintings, in portfolios and boxes, surround him in his New York home, like Saul himself, not seeking attention, but amply rewarding the interested observer who takes a step closer and stops awhile. 

Today, his work is in major collections, is the subject of retrospectives and a recent television documentary, but that sort of attention and fame was never what drove him – his independence allowed him to do what he has done in his quiet and focused way. While his contemporaries were painting large-scale canvases for museum spaces, he carried on creating intimate abstractions on torn cardboard. Franz Kline once said to him ‘If you worked big, you could be one of the boys’. That wasn’t a choice he wanted to make, and he doesn’t regret it. Working small has brought different, purer rewards.

But don’t take all this as an explanation. The point is not to interpret, but to enjoy, to look at what is there. As he told me when I said I wanted to write about his art: 

‘You’re going to write about my work? Really, and I mean this, the less said the better.’

For Press information regarding Saul Leiter: A life in colour please contact Amy Barder at Four Colman Getty [email protected] or 2030239025.

 

 

Man Ray Portraits - a review of the National Portrait Gallery exhibition, London

A version of this review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, March 15th 2013.

Man Ray Portraits 

review by Nigel Warburton

(NPG until 27th May 2013)

Although he thought of himself as a painter, posterity celebrates Man Ray (1890-1976) as a creator of Dadaist objects and as an experimental photographer. Yet for much of his early life he worked more prosaically as a studio portraitist, photographing his contemporaries on commission. His interest in photography ebbed and flowed over a career that lasted five decades and as he moved back and forth across the Atlantic, but he nevertheless bequeathed an impressive portfolio of portraits of the artistic, musical, and literary avant garde, many of which are included in this National Portrait Gallery exhibition, the first to show the full range of his portraiture. In this chronologically arranged parade of stars Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Picasso, Braques, Salvador Dali, Ernest Hemmingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Eric Satie, Stravinsky, Bernice Abbott, Lee Miller, and even Catherine Deneuve all feature. Portraits of the famous are interspersed with those of more obscure contemporaries and friends, together with nudes, fashion photography, and self-portraits. The 150 or so prints, mostly vintage, are simply framed, minimally captioned, and presented in 5 rooms that tell the story of Man Ray’s periginations: ‘New York 1916-20’, ‘Paris 1921-8’, ‘Paris 1929-1937’, ‘Hollywood 1940-50’, and ‘Paris 1951 – Later Years’.

Man Ray loved women. No one visiting this exhibition could fail to realize that. In his experimental, affectionate and erotically-charged portraits of lovers, his artistry and originality are unmistakable. His portraits of men, in contrast, are more formal, less inspired, frequently cold, and occasionally stiff: their main interest lies in their sitters’ subsequent fame. Few fulfill the photographic promise of his early portrait of his friend Marcel Duchamp in a wicker chair (1916) – a remarkable image by any standards that would still hold our interest had Duchamp remained an unknown.

There are previously unseen portraits on display here, and visual discoveries to be made by those prepared to jostle and move in close enough to appreciate the smaller prints, but it is the familiar and iconic images that stand out, enhanced by juxtaposition with other photographs of the same sitters. Although the ‘Violon d’Ingres’ (1924), that picture of Kiki de Montparnasse’s naked back with the ‘f’ holes of a violin superimposed, is now a cliché (and scarcely a portrait), its presentation here alongside others of Kiki allows us to see it as of a specific spirited individual rather than of ‘a woman’s back’.  The title doesn’t simply allude to the woman-into-violin Surrealist joke, or to the pose and patterned turban reminiscent of an Ingres nude, but also to Ingres’s habit of playing the violin to visitors to his studio: from this ‘violon d’Ingres’ came to mean any favourite pastime for which the person in question was less known, a second string to one’s bow, as it were. Man Ray’s ‘Violon d’Ingres’ combines a visual, an art historical, and a linguistic pun, and, perhaps, too, a more private message about his relationship with Kiki, and with women in general – a literal objectification, woman as instrument. As Marina Warner points out in the exhibition catalogue, the 1920s were unenlightened times, and the notion that women might become playthings for men a given. Yet Man Ray’s attitude to representing women was more complex than many, driven as it was by Surrealist notions of Eros and a willingness to explore the near dream imagery of desire and fantasy.

 In another familiar photograph, ‘Noire et Blanche’,  which is of Kiki with her head resting on a table next to the African mask which she props up with her hand, her pose as if asleep, is reminiscent of, and possibly inspired by, Brancusi’s sculpture ‘Sleeping Muse’.  Originally captioned ‘Visage de nacre et masque d’ébène’ (mother of pearl face and ebony mask), it first appeared in Vogue in May 1926. In the exhibition it is displayed near a less familiar variant from the series in which Kiki stands cradling the mask against her cheek. Also in the exhibition – and easily missed -  is a small and intimate portrait of Adrienne Fedelin (‘Ady’), Man Ray’s later companion. Ady was a dancer from Guadelope, and hers is one of the few non-white faces included. In this snapshot-like photograph from 1937 she is standing in a dressing gown, smiling, facing the camera, her hand resting on a white bust of Man Ray’s head echoing Kiki’s in ‘Noire et Blanche’. The naturalness of Ady’s smile contrasts with the controlled closed-lipped pose of almost every other woman depicted, reminding us of the degree to which Man Ray directed his sitters and controlled their poses.

The highlight of the exhibition is a remarkable solarized portrait of Lee Miller in profile from 1929 which has the calm beauty of a Renaissance painting by Baldovinetti that hangs a few hundred yards away in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. Miller was Man Ray’s assistant, lover and model, before leaving him to become a photographer and journalist, subsequently working on the frontline in the Second World War, and documenting the liberation of Dachau. The serenity of the Miller portrait belies their tempestuous three-year relationship that, when it ended, left Man Ray with a suicidal energy that he eventually re-chanelled into his art: Lee Miller was the inspiration for ‘Indestructible Object’, the famous metronome with a photograph of an eye attached to its arm, that the viewer was encouraged to attempt to destroy.

Man Ray left Paris for the States in 1940, settling in Hollywood with his new partner Juliet.  There he made portraits of film stars, including Ava Gardner,, before returning to Paris in 1951 where he continued to photograph until the late 1960s.  But as this rich and varied exhibition reveals, it was in the artistic crucible of Paris in the 1920s and 30s in the Golden Age of Surrealism, living among the artists, writers and composers who were to become the founders of modernism, that he reached his apogee as a portraitist. [ends]

[Read some other reviews of the exhibition here]

Brighton One-Day Conference on War Photography

Julian Stallabrass (check out his archive of downloadable articles) has organised a one-day conference on war photography on Saturday 15th November, 2008,  Memory of Fire: the war of images and images of war, as part of this year's Brighton Photo Biennial. Looks really interesting. Photographer Simon Norfolk is among the contributors.

Appearances - Notes from Session 3 - Tate Modern

The theme of this week's session of Appearances was Ethics: specifically some of the ethical issues that arise when taking photographs of people in the street. Ethics is largely a matter of how we treat other people (and, to a certain extent, the kind of person that each of us chooses to become). The point of this session was to raise questions rather than to give a definitive answer to those questions.

Ethical issues arise in the act of taking a photograph of someone who doesn't want to be photographed. Although in many parts of the world it is legal to photograph someone in these circumstances, it clearly causes some people distress. In extreme cases, it can be tantamount to stalking someone (the paparazzi syndrome). A photographer might argue that no one is seriously harmed in the process and that if people are in a public place they are fair game (and even that there is tacit consent to be photographed by entering the public space of the street). In Street and Studio in Tate Modern the sequence of images in Room 2, taken on the street in Hong Kong by Ed van der Elsken seems to border on harassment if we are to believe the caption saying that the photographer just followed a 'babe' around for a bit photographing her even though she didn't want him to.

The subsequent use of an image is also important. If I walk down Oxford Street and someone tracks my progress on a surveillance camera, that is very different from a photographer takes my photograph (perhaps in an unflattering way) and puts my image in an exhibition or prints it in a magazine or newspaper. In Tate Modern, the Philip-Lorca diCorcia images from the 'Heads' (review) series taken using a telephoto lens in Times Square from 1999 - 2001 are of people who did not know what was happening. They had no idea that they had been photographed. Their images have then appeared in public places (including a book and now Tate Modern) and at least one of the subjects has tried (and failed) to mount a legal case about this use on grounds of privacy. diCorcia's defence was based on the First Amendment right to free expression (the case was dismissed on the grounds that there was too long a gap between the act of taking the photograph and the complaint : read a New York Times article about the case and another in the American Journalism Review).

In these two examples above, a Kantian approach to ethics might suggest that the photographer's actions were immoral. For Immanuel Kant, the Categorical Imperative, the basic rule of ethics is that you should treat people as ends in themselves, respect their autonomy, rather than treat them as means to an end. Ed van der Elsken treated the woman as a simple means to get a photograph rather than acknowledged her as someone with her own desires and wishes; diCorcia seems not to be unduly concerned with the individuals' feelings about how their images are to be used - for him his right to free expression as an artist/photographer is the issue.

A consequentialist might point out that any harm done in these cases is minimal (though in the Van E case, they experience of being pursued could be psychologically traumatic) and the benefit in terms of producing interesting street photographs, large. So cost/benefit analysis would suggest that the photographer was justified in his approach in each case.

Less straightforward is the example of Boris Mikhailov.[read an interesting piece from the Guardian about him, and also an interview with him]  His photographs of people on the margins of Ukrainian society are disturbing documentary images. In some cases he has observed and photographed, and his actions are justified by the way in which he makes visible something that many people would rather not see. In this respect he is completely within the mainstream tradition of photojournalism. But at the point where he pays subjects to expose themselves for his camera he enters another domain. Here he is deliberately challenging our views about morality. These people are so destitute that very little sense of dignity is left to them, and Mikhailov demonstrates this by showing how readily they will further humiliate themselves for money. At first glance this appears a highly immoral act of exploitation of the vulnerable for the sake of a shocking image. A response to this view, though, is that there is a kind of  'tu quoque' move going on here, because in his commercial interaction and humiliation of his subjects he is simply mirroring economic relations that all of us are implicated in. He is perhaps saying 'You are no better than me'. Yet, even on this interpretation, it could be argued that as he has genuinely and knowingly further humiliated the downtrodden, he has done something seriously immoral to make a moral point, and that is not acceptable.

The neutral presentation of his highly challenging style of documentary photography in Tate Modern is unfortunate: most viewers need some background information about the circumstances in which these images were made to get a grip of what the moral issues might be here, and why they are actually an aspect of his approach to photography.

If you are interested in getting an overview of three distinct approaches to ethics, listen to these podcasts:

On Aristotle's Ethics

On Kant's Ethics

On John Stuart Mill's Ethics
Roger Crisp on Utilitarianism
Brad Hooker on Consequentialism

Appearances - Notes from Session Two, Tate Modern Course

The main theme of this week's session of the Tate Modern course Appearances: Philosophy, Photography and the Self, was the way in which our imagination plays a significant role in interpreting and appreciating street photography.

When I look at a photograph of someone I know, my mind is taken beyond the photograph to that actual person and what I know about them. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about this in his book called The Imaginary. In his example, he sees first of all a photo; then he sees it is a photo of a man on the some steps; then he appreciates it is a photo of his friend Pierre. At this point his mind is taken beyond the photograph. His thoughts are about the man he knows: Pierre.

In contrast, when I look at a photograph of a complete stranger, as is often the case with street photography, all I have to go on is the appearance of that stranger, and the minimal information contained in a caption if there is one. The rest is down to my imagination. Not that my imagination is completely free and unconstrained here, rather it is tied to what I can plausibly see within the image. This is a like the duck-rabbit case that Wittgenstein used to introduce his concept of seeing-as. I can choose to interpret the picture in a particular way, provided that the interpretation is consistent with the highly ambiguous information contained in the picture.

Whilst it is true that photographs carry  factual information about their causes, this is rarely legible and highly open to manipulation by the photographer and other users of the image. Even with a straight photograph of a street scene, such as David Goldblatt's On Elof Street, Johannesburg, South Africa 1966-7, in Room 8 of the Street and Studio exhibition, the legible documentary information cannot be the source of our main interest in it since it is so minimal. We can recognize that there are children, adults, that some are black and some are white, and that they appear to be going somewhere, but little more. The caption tells us that we are in South Africa and the date that this is the era of apartheid. But even the facial expressions of those depicted may not be accurate about how they would have appeared over a period of a few seconds. The frozen instant can radically misinform us about what would have been easily legible had we witnessed the scene ourselves.

This is not to say that the photographs can never provide evidence about the past. A photo-finish image is fairly reliable evidence about which horse won the race. But that is in part because of knowledge about the circumstances in which the photograph was taken, but also because the information carried by the image is of a relatively simple and unambiguous type.

It is true that in ordinary life we frequently judge a person's character on the basis of a fleeting glimpse of their face. But in such cases we usually have a great deal of information about the context and location of what is going on. And it is rare for a fleeting glimpse to be as brief as 1/250 of the second. So we glean information about someone from changes taking place over time. With a single still image, particularly if it is in black and white, we have very little to go on. Consequently we use our imaginations to take us beyond the marks on the surface of the photographic paper. Street photography can be fascinating not principally because of what it shows us about reality so much as of a what it forces us to contribute as viewers of the images, what it suggests rather than demonstrates. This is not untethered fantasy about the lives of others, but rather a matter of filling in thoughts about what seems to be implied by the image, but yet might not be accurate about what was in front of the lens when the photograph was taken.

In other words, we are not simply passive interpreters of images whose meanings have been fixed by the moment of exposure, but rather active creators of their meanings to some extent. This differs considerably from our experience of images of, for example, famous people. When I look at a photograph of Mick Jagger, even though I've never seen him in the flesh, I recognized him instantly. My thoughts are taken far beyond the image to a man whose music I have heard, whom I have seen interviewed on television, and in Robert Frank's film. Although what I believe about Mick Jagger and his life may be misleading about the real man, I am not the one who is inventing the character that I believe to have been photographed. Whereas with a photograph of a complete stranger in the street I have to base my thoughts about who this person is and what they were doing and why almost entirely on non-specific quite general experience. The contrast is even more extreme if you think about a photograph of your child or lover. Here, although you see the photograph, I think Sartre is right when he suggests that we are typically transported in our thoughts to the person him or herself. In the language of philosophy, the phenomenology of looking at photographs of those we know, of those we recognize, and of those who are complete strangers to us, is very different.

Appearances: Philosophy, Photography and the Self - Tate Modern - Aims of the Course

Appearances: Philosophy, Photography and the Self
led by Nigel Warburton

Mondays 2nd June – 23rd June,  6.45 p.m. – 8.15 p.m. followed by  optional drinks till about 9 p.m. (4 Sessions) Tate Modern (booking required - course sold out)

Course Description

Aims of the Course

•    To explore a range of philosophical ideas about the self and photography
•    To think about and discuss these ideas in relation to photographs in the Street and Studio exhibition
•    To gain new insights into particular photographs in this exhibition

No prior knowledge of philosophy or the history of photography assumed.

The main themes of the course are:

Appearance and Reality
The Self
Photography’s relation to reality, truth and the imagination
The Ethics of Photographing People
The Power of Photographic Portraiture

Notes, ideas for further reading etc.
I will provide a brief summary with links and ideas for reading after each session and will post it on this weblog.

Booking open for Appearances Course at Tate Modern

Appearances: Philosophy, Photography and the Self ...Booking for this course at Tate Modern in June  is now open. Booking is via the Tate Modern website or by telephone on 020 7887 8888.

Forthcoming Course on Photography at Tate Modern

Coming soon...

Appearances: philosophy, photography and the self

A 4-session course at Tate Modern

Led by Nigel Warburton, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, The Open University
2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd  June 2008
6.45 p.m. - 8.15 p.m. followed by drinks.

What is the self? Is this something that photographs can reveal? Or is photographic portraiture merely an art of appearances? To what extent does the alleged documentary nature of photography affect our understanding of what we see?

In this 4-session course, led by philosopher and writer Nigel Warburton, participants will explore philosophical ideas about photography and the self. Sessions will include discussion of thinkers as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Erving Goffman, Roger Scruton and Kendall Walton. There will be opportunities for critical engagement with specific works as well as discussion of more general theoretical approaches.

Booking from early May on the Tate Modern website. These courses are usually oversubscribed, so book early if you want to come. The course will coincide with the Street and Studio exhibition.

(Read a review of Max Kozloff's new book on photographic portraiture, The Theatre of the Face)

Philip Jones Griffiths has died

Magnum photographer, Philip Jones Griffiths, one of the great war photographers of the Twentieth Century, has died (19th Feb. 2008). He is best known for his book Vietnam Inc., an angry protest against inhumanity, which epitomises the power of photojournalism to combine documentary recording with a subjective stance. You can watch and listen to an excellent Magnum in Motion podcast 'Vietnam' that shows and discusses some of this work. Watch this if you are unsure why he was such a great photographer and why his work was so valued.

His 1996 retrospective book was appropriately named Dark Odyssey. Stuart Franklin, the current president of Magnum wrote:

'It was Philip's consummate skill as a picture maker, carefully able to draw the viewer closer and closer to his subjects through his emotionally-charged compositions that lent such power to his work.  Philip was always concerned with individuals - their personal and intimate suffering more than any particular class or ideological struggle.'

Jones Griffiths' own words:

'My tools as a photographer are different to other reporters. I don't have the time or space they have to go into context; my images speak alone, which can be a problem. But all journalists share two concerns: first, for truth; second, for the suffering of innocents. No man can see what I've seen and not be moved to tell others about it.'

Read a tribute by Stuart Franklin (includes a slideshow and useful links)

Reliable Biographical Information from Magnum site, with slideshow

Watch a series of QuickTime interview clips with Philip Jones Griffiths

Read New York Times Obituary

Read Obituary by Amanda Hopkinson in The Guardian

An interview and another interview

A selection of his best known photographs

Robert Capa Negatives Found!

A huge cache of Robert Capa's negatives from the Spanish Civil War have just been found. Read about this here: 'The Capa Cache'

I wrote about the famous Falling Soldier image (allegedly of a Republican solider at the very instant of his death) in an article in History of Photography 'Varieties of Photographic Representation' (1991) vol. 15 (203-210) based on information from the Robert Whelan biography (you can read an article by Whelan on the topic here. Perhaps the question of whether Capa staged that image is about to be answered definitively...