Turn and face the strain: history and politics

When I was quite little I was thrilled to receive a grown-up atlas for Christmas – a real step-up from my dog-eared Where’s Wally? sticker atlas that was only really satisfactory for the period that I was looking for the nomadic, bespectacled one. But by the time I had found him, Wilma, Odlaw and Wizard Whitebeard… I’m sure you can imagine that the sticker atlas rapidly became less compelling.

Returning to the subject of fact-crammed books that teach us about the world we live in, I was recently glad to discover a gem of a publication from 2005 – Things as They Are: Photojournalism in Context since 1955, edited by Mary Panzer. The book is split into chronological sections, tracing the evolution of the photo-essay by showing photographs in their original magazine formats and the supposed ‘development’ of the photojournalist, culminating in the final chapter that is titled ‘Rise of the Reporter Artist’. Although this suggestion of linear progression is not without its problems, the book might be a valuable educational resource for all students of global social and political history.

What intrigued me most however was the idea that the book itself had become subject to the strictures of its own present. Pages 372-373 examine Richard Avedon’s portraits of those on the campaign trail for 2004 presidential battle between George W. Bush and John Kerry.

The book elevates the significance of this year as one in which the deaths of Avedon, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Helmut Newton supposedly pointed to the end of a classic era in twentieth-century photography. What specifically captivated me on this page was that the original photo-essay is open on the spread of the former U.S. President Jimmy Carter opposite the Senior Senator of Illinois, one Mr Barack Obama. His appearance, completely unmentioned in the descriptive text, is so stark and incongruous it is almost troubling.

Carter and Obama are both photographed from the shoulders up, frontally and unsmiling – mug-shots for a democracy. I like that this book about historical context is in itself an artefact through which we can observe the tumult of politics.

As I’m writing this, there is a feature on BBC Radio Four’s Westminster Hour (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/westminster_hour) about the conflict of interests between politicians and those who photograph them. George Eustice, formerly Conservative Chief Press Officer for Michael Howard and David Cameron, discusses the potential of images of politicians for future news stories. Such pictures are held onto after party conferences and other staged photo opportunities have passed, should since they can become useful in a climate of fluctuating attitudes towards those in power.

It has perhaps been overstated that we are unable to grasp a clear-enough picture of what defines the present when we are living through it, and that through retrospect we have the benefit of critical distance. Although nostalgia is one emotion to arise out of such musings, it can be harnessed to show that change is always a real possibility, even if it is simply desiring to learn more about the world than Wally is able to teach us.

'The Real Thing': Contemporary Art from China

In recent years, handbags by European fashion houses come with hologrammed price-tags to assure customers of their authenticity; perhaps in reaction to the vast output of faked designer goods from South-East Asia. It therefore seems ironic that an exhibition on contemporary Chinese art held at Tate Liverpool in 2007 takes as its title The Real Thing. The curators of the exhibition cite a number of inspirations: the move away from the Cynical Realist style that characterises much Chinese painting towards the end of the 1990s, and the reaction against the spectacle of economic and social change in China’s Reform Era. Against the curators’ intentions, however, the title would also makes one wonder about the necessity of such rhetoric, as if we were visitors to a Victorian Museum of Curiosities, uncertain as to whether to spend our hard-earned pennies on a ticket to the show. The ‘real thing’ is also spoken of in almost manifesto-like terms in describing a group reacting to Debordian spectacle; it is stated explicitly in the exhibition catalogue that these artists are attempting to maintain their creative integrity in the face of commercial temptation. One only needs to turn to Ai WeiWei’s Working Progress (Fountain of Light), an undeniably beautiful construction of metal and electrical lighting that is based on Vladimir Tatlin’s paradoxically spectacular Monument to the Third International, to wonder about the care of thought with which such a declaration can be made.

Many of the blanket terms of postmodernist artistic discourse, such as Julia Kristeva’s abject and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome, attempt to define the ‘real thing’ that is supposedly concealed beneath the cultural constructs of language and behaviour. Perhaps then, this exhibition points unwittingly to the paradoxes of this condition – that, despite the hostility in scholarship to geist, and the advocating of cultural mixing, artistic purity is insisted upon in this exhibition of Chinese art. It is difficult not to see the exhibition, in this sense, as an attempted liberal Western apologia for industrial progress and the twentieth-century success of European and American modernist art trajectory, in the face of the Eastern cultural void. The ‘real thing’ might be the nitty-gritty of manual labour, as reflected in the coal-mine paintings of Yang Shaobin, in which, hovering between Photorealism and French Impressionism, large-scale oil canvases demand attention through their scale and compelling manipulation of paint. The ‘real thing’ could also be embodied in the lives of workers at the Osram lightbulb factory in Foshan documented in Cao Fei’s video, their performed aspirations bringing a tangible and personal side to the anonymity of the factory backdrop. Whilst China’s growing economic and political status cannot be ignored, the lack of contextualisation in the show through supplementary information suggests a curatorial uncertainty as to how to convey this change. The very fact that the curators were able to commission a number of works carries with it the uncomfortable possibility of non-Western artists tailoring their work to Orientalist specifications. Gu Dexin’s 2007/03/30 is described as part of an artistic practice that balances Gu’s divergent yin and yang parts, a quaint description which might be read as the artist exploiting his Chinese-ness to appeal to a British art institution. If “they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” has become the implicit message here, then perhaps this exhibition is a further presentation of postmodernist unravelling.

(photograph of Ai WeiWei's Fountain of Light courtesy of Kimberley Williams)

Units of Happiness

Faces of Fashion, Vanity Fair Portraits – the National Portrait Gallery’s recent spate of exhibitions have been centred around the pulling power of celebrity. The gallery’s current exhibition Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005 is no exception. In this case, however, the theme has been extended to the photographer herself, now a celebrity in her own right. The glitz of actresses, politicians, musicians and royalty rubbed off onto Leibovitz, and her relationship with the influential writer Susan Sontag has only further titillated the voyeuristic public. Leibovitz has now expanded the keyhole by exhibiting photographs of Sontag in her final months before her untimely death in 2005. The tiling of photographs in the exhibition is reminiscent of another relatively recent phenomenon that is related inextricably to celebrity culture and the cult of the camera.

We live in an age in which individual identity was been abstracted into numbers – the barometer of my popularity currently stands at 651. This rating may flicker up if a picture is surreptitiously taken of me on an ordinary day out, and could shoot up should I intend to show my face at a party. The popularity rating I refer to, however, is not based upon the number of paparazzi photographs or column inches about me in a glossy magazine, but the number of photographs of me on that ubiquitous social networking site, Facebook.

In this way, it is easy to focus on numbers as a way of quantifying popularity and the amount of excitement had in a life. The number of photographs can be seen to each represent a unit of happiness because people do not take photographs of unhappy occasions and post them for all friends (even if only Facebook friends) to see. Any unsatisfactory photograph can be ‘untagged’ in order to create the semblance of an idealised life.

It was Sontag herself who stated that photography’s uses were growing parallel with tourism. Her suggesstion in 1979 in On Photography, that “photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had”, resonates through the decades with the increasing insistence on fun being had at every opportunity. This has become the case to the extent that it is becoming evident that photographs are being taken for the sake of them appearing on the internet in the near future. Facebook not only facilitates the uploading and display of photographs, but has generated a new form of conspicuous consumption in which we know at what rate we have to keep up with the Joneses, since we can browse their photos at our leisure on the internet. So not only can the commodities that we accessorise ourselves with be broadcast to a much wider audience, but so can the fun itself.

The question of how this is relevant to Leibovitz’s own very personal images of pain and suffering still remains. In an era addicted to extremities it would seem that whilst we are keen to project perfect images of ourselves, we are equally obsessed by the tragedies of others.

A version of this article was first published in The London Student