Yevonde: ‘Be Original or Die’

Joan Maude by Yevonde (1932). © National Portrait Gallery, London

'Be original or die would be a good motto for photographers to adopt.’
Yevonde

I recently attended an exhibition of the work of photographer Yevonde. (‘Life and Colour’ is at The National Portrait Gallery, London until 15 October.)

Yevonde captured the Bright Young Things of British Society between the wars. She was the first British photographer to exhibit colour portraits. She shot with style and a light touch, and her images were laced with classical and surreal flourishes. She celebrated beauty, personality, modernity  - and, above all, vibrant, thrilling, luminous colour. 

‘In no phase of modern life has women’s influence proved so stimulating as in photography.’

Yevonde Cumbers was born into a wealthy family in Streatham in 1893. She was educated at progressive schools in England, France and Belgium. Having joined the Suffragette movement, she was prompted by an ad in the newspaper Votes for Women to apply for a job at a portrait photographer’s. After a three-year apprenticeship, and with a gift of £250 from her father, at the age of 21 she set up her own London studio - styling herself Yevonde, or sometimes Madame Yevonde.

‘I took up photography with the definite purpose of making myself independent.’

Yevonde photographed society figures and stage stars, debutantes and dowagers. While her pictures were carefully staged and lit, her approach was informal and witty. This was the golden age of the illustrated press and her work often appeared in magazines like The Tatler and The Sketch. As she gained recognition, she increasingly took advertising commissions too. 

Orchids by Yevonde © National Portrait Gallery, London

‘In almost any other job I must have failed, but by great good luck I had adopted an art-trade-profession-science that, like myself, was not properly ‘grown up.’ I was carried along by a demand which exceeded the supply of the commodity.’

In the early 1930s Yevonde began experimenting with colour photography, using the new Vivex process. This technology employed three negative plates (cyan, magenta and yellow) exposed through a ‘one-shot’ camera and processed separately. Colour photography was frowned upon by the establishment at the time, but she embraced it with gusto. 

‘[Colour photography] has no history, no tradition, no old masters, but only a future!’ 

Red-haired actor Joan Maude is shot in a crimson shawl against a scarlet screen; painter Cathleen Mann, hand on hip, wears a salmon-pink jacket and cloche hat; film star Vivien Leigh, in a cornflower coat, stares into the distance with piercing ice-blue eyes. A model in a bright marmalade and marigold dress, with matching bonnet, clasps a bouquet of yellow orchids. These portraits are vivid, radiant, intense.

Dorothy Emily Evelyn (née Whittall), Lady Campbell as Niobe, Vivex colour print, June 1935 © Yevonde Portrait Archive

Yevonde’s women are surrounded by eye-catching props - flowers, frames and masks. They wear bold shades of lipstick and nail varnish; striking styles of jewellery. 

For her series ‘Goddesses’ Yevonde photographed society women in classical costumes and fantastical settings. Dido is bathed in eerie blue light. Niobe is shot close-up, her azure eyes shedding tears of misery. Minerva, in primrose silk gown, wears a helmet and carries a revolver.

‘There must be arrangement, elimination, imagination.’

Yevonde’s images reveal the changing fashions of the time - shorter hair, dropped waistlines, looser fits - as well as growing female independence. While we sometimes see women engaged in domestic tasks, they are also cycling, smoking, relaxing on the beach. Racing driver Jill Scott sports vermilion overalls, shoes and cap. Artist Natalie Sieveking regards us with casual confidence. A bespectacled debutante in a caramel dress reclines on a sofa engrossed in a scholarly tome.

A Day in the Life of a Debutante: An hour's serious reading (Betty Cowell) by Yevonde © National Portrait Gallery, London

‘The duties of a wife with a separate career have yet to be defined, and although complete unselfishness has always been considered a sure foundation for domestic happiness, I am not convinced.’

In 1939 the Vivex process went out of service and, with the constraints of World War 2, Yevonde returned to working in black and white. She continued to produce portraits and to experiment - in still life fantasies, montage and Solarisation. In 1968 she staged an exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of women’s right to vote. She worked up until her death at the age of 82 in 1975.

Yevonde teaches us to pursue our careers with passion and to embrace new technology with vigour. She also reminds us that colour can be exhilarating, startling, dazzling.

'If we are going to have colour photographs, for heaven’s sake let’s have a riot of colour, none of your wishy washy hand tinted effects.'

Yevonde with Vivex One-Shot Camera, by Yevonde, 1937, © National Portrait Gallery, London

'Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead end street,
Faster than the wind, passionate as sin, ending so suddenly.
Loving him is like trying to change your mind,
Once you're already flying through the free fall.
Like the colors in autumn, so bright, just before they lose it all.
Losing him was blue, like I'd never known.
Missing him was dark grey, all alone.
Forgetting him was like trying to know
Somebody you never met.
But loving him was red,
Loving him was red.’
Taylor Swift, ‘Red'

No. 428

‘Look at This - Look at That’: Ruth Orkin’s Street Photography and the Art of Multi-Tasking

Geraldine Dent, New York City, 1949. Photograph: Ruth Orkin

'My mother said that when I was young I was constantly saying, ‘Look at this - Look at that.’ I think that taking pictures must be my way of asking people to ‘Look at this - Look at that.’ If my photographs make the viewer feel what I did when I first took them - ‘Isn’t this funny... terrible... moving... beautiful?’ - then I’ve accomplished my purpose.'
Ruth Orkin

Last year was the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of American street photographer and filmmaker Ruth Orkin.

Orkin was a pioneer. A photographer who recorded ordinary people at work and play, who celebrated the complex rhythms of city life, who recognised the poetry of the everyday.  A hard working, resourceful woman, determined to make a mark in a business dominated by men.

‘Maybe because my primary interest was in movies, I wanted to tell stories with pictures, even if they didn’t move.’

Orkin was born in Boston and raised in Hollywood, the only child of a silent-film actress and a manufacturer of toy boats. Aged 10 she was given her first camera, a 39-cent Univex.

Comic Book Readers, West Village, NYC, 1947, Ruth Orkin

In her unpublished autobiography, written in 1984, Orkin described how she taught herself to use her camera by referring to a short 25-cent book ‘Photography for Fun’ by William M Strong. 

‘In Strong’s chapter on How To Learn Photography there were just six items: 

1. Look at good pictures. > I did that automatically because they attracted me.
2. Read the photographic mags. > I did.
3. Look at the camera club in your city. > There wasn’t any in Eagle Rock.
4. Get some more books on photography. > I looked at everything I could at the Los Angeles public library.
5. Look up photographic courses. > I wouldn’t have had the money. I gave my own course in photographic chemistry in chemistry class.
6. Take a lot of pictures. > I did.’

Orkin clearly had remarkable application. When she was 17 she embarked on an epic bike trip across America, from Los Angeles to the 1939 World's Fair in New York, taking pictures along the way. After briefly studying photojournalism at Los Angeles City College, she became a messenger girl at MGM Studios and during World War II she served with the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps. 

In 1943 Orkin moved to New York. By night she took pictures in the city’s clubs, and by day she shot baby photos. She saved enough money to buy her first professional camera, and eventually, in 1945, her first picture was published in the Macy’s employee magazine: an image of V-E Day celebrations on Times Square. 

In time Orkin found freelance work at most of the major magazines: Life, Look, Ladies' Home Journal, and many others. Viewed together her images provide a portrait of New York street life in the 1940s and early ‘50s.

Women on the Street, NYC, Ruth Orkin

A suited man walks along West 88th Street with only a trilby to shelter him from the rain. Middle-aged women in smart hats jostle to find a bargain at the Department Store. Tired travellers sit on their suitcases at Penn Station. Courting couples cuddle up close on Coney Island. 

There are people milling around the barbershops, cinemas and soda stands, at busy street corners, past neon signs and insistent advertising hoardings. You can buy watermelons, malted milk, ‘red hot frankfurters and ice cold drinks.’

The kids in the West Village are engrossed in their comic books. Teenage girls recline on top of a Ford Shipping Container at Gansevoort Pier, and a brave boy jumps into the Hudson in his trunks. With extravagant gestures and animated expressions, young Jimmy tells his friends a story. 

In 1950 Orkin won a competition set by the editor of Ladies’ Home Journal to find an image that reflected the more liberated post-war American woman.

‘I had not only just photographed a beautiful girl who was not a model, but she was doing something that all his female readers could identify with.’ 

New York housewife Geraldine Dent stands outside a greengrocer with a bursting bag of fruit in one arm. She seems animated, caught in conversation. There’s a pleasing echo of red, from her stylish beret, to her lipstick and scarf, to the half eaten-strawberry she clasps in her hand. It was the first time a 35mm colour slide had been used on the front of such a magazine and the issue sold out its 4 million print run.

‘In order to make a living as a photographer I had to make contacts, get jobs, and try to sell pictures. Some days I felt that I was forever going up and down elevators, riding subways or buses, walking on sidewalks, and waiting in offices.’

Orkin had to be determined to succeed in a male-dominated profession. There was a significant gender pay gap (‘You don’t have a family to support.’) and permanent staff reporter roles were reserved for men. 

In time Orkin learned to cherish the independence of a freelancer: her freedom from editorial control; her license to follow her own instincts and judgement to find the best stories.

‘It gives you all kinds of excuses to be where you’re not supposed to be.’

Orkin clearly thought deeply about her craft. She recognised that, as in all creative professions, her success or failure resided in the choices she made.

Three Boys on Suitcases, Penn Station, Ruth Orkin

‘It means MAKING DECISIONS
Deciding when to push the shutter
Deciding whether to sacrifice speed for depth of focus or vice versa
Deciding whether to keep my presence secret and get a picture that would not be as good as if I allowed my presence to be known
Deciding which BW proofs to blow up
Deciding how to lay out a caption and a picture story
Deciding which magazine to show it to first’

As a freelancer Orkin also needed to be a master of multi-tasking.

‘To be a photographer you had to know how to splice wires, clean a battery
Contact, load your own film (to save money)
Develop and print… Spot (darkroom technician)
Keep a record of all business expenses (accountant)
Type letters and bills (secretary)
Research pic stories in recent magazines (research)
Make dates with editors and show or discuss ideals (salesperson)
File clerk: file negs and prints
Keep files folder on each customer: mags publ, book publ, miscel (secretary)
Selling ideas
How to gate crash – or get into places you weren’t supposed to be.
Gallery chores’

Ruth Orkin

In the early 1950s Orkin was given assignments in Israel and Italy. She was also commissioned to take celebrity portraits: Leonard Bernstein and Lucille Ball, Tennessee Williams and Montgomery Clift; Einstein, Hitchcock, Brando and Bacall. In 1952 she married photographer and filmmaker Morris Engel and they collaborated on two independent films, the first of which ‘Little Fugitive’ was Oscar nominated.

Orkin returned to photography. Ever resourceful, she dealt with the constraints of caring for two small children by taking shots from her apartment window. This led to the publication of two ‘Through My Window’ books. 

'To be a photojournalist takes experience, skill, endurance, energy, salesmanship, organization, wheedling, climbing, gatecrashing, etc. – plus an eye and patience.’

In 1985 Ruth Orkin died of cancer at her New York apartment. She left behind a record of the American city experience in the mid 20th century. She told stories in pictures - stories that communicated a love of life, of ordinary people and the theatre of the street. She made us ‘Look at this - Look at that.’ And she taught us that success in any creative profession requires more than just talent.

'I always felt that being a photographer was 90 percent being a salesperson. Then and today.'

[You can see a record of Ruth Orkin’s work in the excellent book ‘Ruth Orkin:  A Photo Spirit’]

'I play the street life
Because there's no place I can go.
Street life,
It's the only life I know.
Street life,
And there's a thousand cards to play.
Street life,
Until you play your life away.
You never let people see
Just who you wanna be.
And every night you shine
Just like a superstar.
The type of life that's played
Attempts at masquerade.
You dress, you walk, you talk,
You're who you think you are.’

Randy Crawford, ’Street Life’ (W Jennings / J Sample)

No. 361

Botanical Photography: ‘A Fine Sight in the Winter’

Anna Atkins, Dictyota dichotoma

I recently visited a fascinating exhibition tracing the story of botanical photography from the 1840s to the present day. (‘Unearthed: Photography’s Roots’ is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery until 30 August.)

There is a long history of people creating impressions of plants. Thirteenth century Islamic scholars illustrated books with pressed leaves. Leonardo da Vinci wrote about the practice. In the eighteenth century Tahitian tribespeople made images by placing leaves soaked in ink from tree sap onto tapa cloth. Benjamin Franklin claimed to be the inventor of ‘nature printing’ to foil counterfeiters.

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) was one of the pioneers of modern photography. In 1834 he found that he could capture impressions of objects when he placed them in direct sunlight on paper coated with salt, water and silver nitrate. He called this process ‘photogenic drawing,’ and at the exhibition you can see his delicate images of primroses in a teacup, dahlias in a vase, a pineapple in a basket. 

'I do not claim to have perfected an art, but to have commenced one, the limits of which it is not possible at present exactly to ascertain.’
William Henry Fox Talbot

William Henry Fox Talbot - A Fruit Piece with a single pineapple

Botanist Anna Atkins (1799-1871) was an early adopter of the cyanotype process, which involved mixing two chemicals to produce a photosensitive solution. (Cyanotypes were employed to reproduce architectural drawings, hence the term ‘blueprint.’) She published twelve volumes of algae images, the first books with photographic illustrations, and helped to fuel the Victorian ‘fern craze’. Against a vivid Prussian blue background the plants have an ethereal presence, a fragile beauty. 

'The difficulty of making accurate drawings of objects so minute as many of the Algae and Confervae has induced me to avail myself of [the] beautiful process of Cyanotype, to obtain impressions of the plants themselves, which I have much pleasure in offering to my botanical friends.'
Anna Atkins

Sometimes early photographers catalogued plant life for scientific records. Sometimes they sought to recreate Dutch flower painting. And sometimes they designed images that suggested life’s transience. Subsequently they saw in plant photography compelling abstractions or resemblances to the human body. They used their pictures as inspiration for textile designs. They turned to botanical subjects to escape the ravages of war.

Broccoli Leamington, c.1895-1910 by Charles Jones. © Sean Sexton/ Dulwich Picture Gallery

Charles Jones (1866-1959), a gardener at Ote Hall in Sussex in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, took hundreds of photographs of the plants in his care using a glass plate camera. Probably self-taught, he was not recognised as a photographer in his lifetime. It was only in 1981, 22 years after his death, that a collector found a trunk of his photographs on Bermondsey Market. His images were close cropped and precisely lit – sensitive portraits of turnips, tomatoes, potatoes and broccoli; loving records of cabbages, cucumbers, celery and sugar peas. Stark and simple, they look like they come from another world.

Kazumasa Ogawa (1860-1929), the son of one of the last Samurai, belonged to a Japanese generation that embraced modernity and industry. An early master of colour photography, he adopted the chromo collotype process, creating up to 25 separate plates, one for each colour. Photographers from elsewhere in the world employing this method tended to use only 6-8 colours per picture. Even today, after progressing past gallery walls filled with black and white imagery, one is shocked to see Ogawa’s vibrant colour pictures of chrysanthemums, lotuses and lilies. Such frail elegance.

Ogawa Kazumasa: Chrysanthemum, albumen print, hand-colored, Japan c. 1890

What can we learn from all these exquisite archaic images frozen in time? 

First we can appreciate the virtues of constraint. The early photographers concentrated on plants because exposure times were around 40 minutes. Animals and people made quite challenging subjects.

Then there is the power of observation. If we scrutinise a subject, however humble; if we really examine it closely with curious eyes, it will offer up extraordinary rewards. 

And thirdly we can reflect on the fundamental capacity of pictures to communicate. In her Foreword to the exhibition catalogue, gallery director Jennifer Scott quotes a 1606 letter sent by the Flemish painter Jan Brueghel on the completion of a still life.

‘I have invested all my skill in this picture. I do not believe that so many rare and different flowers have been painted before, not rendered so painstakingly: it will be a fine sight in the winter.’

Of course, we now inhabit a visual culture where pictures are ubiquitous - so easy to create, edit and distribute. But Brueghel’s remark reminds us of the primary powers of the image: to demolish distance and time; to bring beauty to drab surroundings; to transport us to other worlds; to conjure up companionship in our loneliest moments, and sunshine in the depths of winter.

There was one final lesson that I took from the exhibition, a lesson about priorities.

Charles Jones, though a hugely gifted photographer, loved his plants first and foremost. Once a photograph had been printed, he would scratch the glass negative clean so he could use it again - or repurpose it as a cloche for his seedlings. 

'Think it over,
Life ain't a four leaf clover.
Love is a flower, from that a bud,
To spread its sunshine and make us love.’
The Emotions, ‘Flowers’ (A Bowers / R Harding / J Hibbert / C Lee / B Mitchell / L Prior / S White)

No. 330

Seeing Without Being Seen: Vivian Maier and the Issue of Hidden Talent

New York, NY September 10, 1955 © Vivian Maier/John Maloof Collection. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

‘I’m a sort of spy.’
Vivian Maier

The splendid 2013 documentary ‘Finding Vivian Maier’ tells the story of the posthumous discovery of one of the twentieth century’s great street photographers.

In 2007 John Maloof, a Chicago-based local historian, was attending an auction of goods repossessed from storage lockers. He bought a box of negatives for $380, having in mind to use some of the photos in a forthcoming book.

On developing the images, Maloof discovered records of Chicago and New York in the ‘50s and ‘60s: quotidian scenes of suburban affluence - beach trips, parades and family days out; depictions of bustling downtown street life – commuters, shoppers, hucksters and hawkers; bleak encounters with inner city poverty. 

Maloof found the name Vivian Maier written on some of the boxes, but was unable to establish anything about her. When he subsequently posted a selection of the photographs online, they became something of a viral phenomenon. The pictures were intimate, affectionate, perceptive and playful. Experts recognised a real talent. 

Maloof traced some of the other purchasers from the storage locker sale, and bought their boxes too. Eventually a Google search picked up Maier’s death notice in the Chicago Tribune. She had passed away in April 2009.

So who was Vivian Maier? Why had her ability hitherto never been recognised? What was the tale behind this treasure trove of imagery?

Gradually Maloof pieced together the story. 

Vivian Maier - Girl In Car

Maier was born in New York in 1926, the daughter of a French mother and Austrian father. She spent her childhood moving between the United States and a small Alpine village where her mother’s family originated. Having been employed for a few years in a New York sweat shop, aged 30 she moved to Chicago's North Shore area. She worked there as a nanny and carer for the next 40 years.

According to her employers and the children she looked after, Maier was intensely private and fiercely independent. She spoke with a clipped French accent, was eccentric and opinionated, formal and strict. Wearing loose clothes, floppy hats and sensible shoes, she marched purposefully about her business. 

Maier had purchased her first Rolleiflex camera in 1952. Since it was held at waist level, the Rolleiflex enabled her to shoot people without looking them straight in the eye. It was less intrusive, more furtive. During the day she took the children on long walking adventures, often beyond the suburbs into the centre of town, all the time on the lookout for interesting subjects. 

‘Street photographers tend to be gregarious in the sense that they go out on the street and they’re comfortable being among people. But they’re also a funny mixture of solitaries… You observe and you embrace and you take in, but you stay back and you try to stay invisible.’
Joel Meyerowitz, Photographer

Vivian Maier - Chicago, IL

A young couple kiss on a crowded beach. People gather at the railway station and busy themselves at the supermarket. As they make their way home from church, a loyal spaniel waits expectantly. There are scuffed shoes by the doormat, flip-flops by the pool. There are cigarettes on the dashboard next to Jesus. 

‘Stop and shop.’ ‘Say ‘Pepsi, please.’’ 

Some smartly dressed women chat outside the diner. A pair of old ladies in their Sunday best look on disapprovingly. A man grips a mysterious small parcel behind his back. A stern matron holds onto her hat to save it from the wind. A nervous child clasps his hands to his ears to keep out the noise of the trains. 

Maier photographs herself reflected in the mirror, in the shop window; her shadow cast across the lawn; her bike standing forlorn at the roadside. She is there, but not there.

Let’s check out the street market, nose around the junkshop. A kid on the corner sells wind-up toys, as a blind man plays blues guitar, hoping for small change. A melancholy woman has her hair in curlers. A desolate teenager has his head in his hands. There are unshaven down-and-outs sleeping on park benches, kipping in the waiting room. In tatty clothes they sit on a hydrant, on a stack of newspapers, on a suitcase. Soaking up the sun, waiting for something to happen. There are discarded liquor bottles on the sidewalk, rejected flowers in a refuse bin. 

In 1959 Maier inherited a small amount of money and embarked on a solo trip around the world. She took pictures in Manila, Bangkok, Shanghai, Beijing, India, Syria, Egypt and Italy. When the expedition was over she returned to nannying in the Chicago suburbs. 

During her lifetime Maier took more than 150,000 photographs. And yet she rarely showed her pictures to anyone. And she left the vast majority of her work unprinted.

Vivian Maier

'The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’
George Eliot

Watching the documentary, one can’t help wondering about hidden talent. Maier went about her art quietly, unobtrusively. She had an extraordinary gift for seeing without being seen. She was not fuelled by reward or recognition. She just wanted to take pictures.

How many Vivian Maiers are out there pursuing a private passion, nurturing a natural gift – unseen, unappreciated, unknown? Perhaps to her it was more important to take the photos than for them to be shared, or even developed. Perhaps that’s just the way she wanted it. But it seems such a waste. 

In the past businesses made their fortunes mining natural resources – gold, oil, precious minerals. In today’s knowledge economy, where value is to be found in original thought and different perspectives, the increasing imperative is to prospect for talent; to search out unusual abilities in unexpected places; to find the diamonds in the rough.

As Maier aged she grew more eccentric. She adopted subtle variations on her name and accent. She piled up newspapers and hoarded boxes of negatives in her loft room - to the point that there was barely a way through and the ceiling creaked under the weight. She could be cruel and quick tempered with her charges.

When Maier was no longer able to find work, she lived in a series of cheap apartments on the edge of town and destitution. In 2008, having slipped on ice and hit her head, she was taken to hospital but failed to recover. The following year she died in a nursing home.

Vivian Maier

Beyond her photographs we have very little record of Maier’s thoughts and feelings. She is a ghost. She did however make a few audiotapes of conversations with her subjects. In one she reflects on life’s transience.

'Well, I suppose nothing is meant to last forever. We have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel. You get on. You have to go to the end. And then somebody has the same opportunity to go to the end and so on.'

'Baby, baby, baby,
From the day I saw you,
Really, really wanted to catch your eye.
Somethin' special 'bout you
I must really like you,
'Cause not a lot of guys are worth my time.
Baby, baby, baby,
It's getting kind of crazy
'Cause you are taking over my mind.
And it feels like,
You don't know my name.
I swear, it feels like,
You don't know my name.
Round and round and round we go, 
Will you ever know?’

Alicia Keys, ‘You Don’t Know My Name’ (A Keys/ K West/ H Lilly/ J R Bailey/ M Kent/ K Williams)

No. 305

Dora Maar: A Subversive Life

Dora Maar Untitled (Hand-Shell) 1934 © Estate of Dora Maar / DACS 2019

'All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.’
Andre Breton, Surrealist Writer

I recently attended a fine exhibition of the art of Dora Maar (Tate Modern, London until 15 March).

Henriette Theodora Markovitch was born in 1907 and raised in Argentina and France. Her French mother owned a fashion boutique and her Croatian father was an architect. She studied art in Paris and gradually developed an enthusiasm for photography. In 1931, with director and set designer Pierre Kefer, she opened her first studio. And she changed her name to Dora Maar. 

Initially many of Maar’s assignments were in fashion and advertising. Between the wars there was a burgeoning interest in women’s style, health, and fitness. As consumption grew, so did the appetite for bold, arresting images. This was a time when advertising walked hand-in-hand with contemporary art. 

Maar was naturally inventive and had an eye for the unusual and uncanny. A woman washes her hair and the lather takes on an alien quality. A lady removes her smiling face as if it were a mask. A model’s head is replaced by a sequinned star. 

Cecil Beaton Dora Maar behind one of her works, in her studio at 6 rue de Savoie, Paris 1944 Musée Picasso (Paris, France) © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s

In one striking image Marr hand-painted elaborate tattoos onto an elegantly attired woman. For an anti-aging cream she superimposed a spider’s web over a model’s face. She had a talent for subversion.

‘Nothing is as strange as reality itself.’
Brassai, Photographer

Maar was active in left-wing politics at the time and developed an interest in street photography. Recording the poverty on the edges of Paris, travelling to Catalonia and London, she sought out the strange sights that surround us in everyday life. A wicker kangaroo wearing boxing gloves stands watching the traffic. A legless mannequin looks out from a first floor window. A suited man disappears beneath the pavement. 

'The unconscious must reign through the intellect.’
Eileen Agar, Surrealist Painter and Photographer

Maar established close relationships with the Surrealist movement that was then based in Paris and she became one of the few photographers to be included in their classic exhibitions of the 1930s. The Surrealists celebrated the power of the unconscious mind. They were fascinated by the revolutionary force of dreams, and believed that the associations we bring to everyday objects reveal our unconscious desires.

Dora Maar, The years lie in wait for you (around 1935). The William Talbott Hillman Collection © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019

Photography had hitherto mostly been a medium of fact and rationality. But in Maar’s hands it was a vehicle for subjectivity and fantasy. Through extreme close-ups and bold crops she challenged the viewer to look afresh. Through unexpected contexts and dramatic angles she made cryptic images that questioned logic and common sense. Through carefully constructed photomontage she created bizarre and exotic new worlds.

A two-headed calf sits atop a classical fountain. A hand emerges from a conch shell on a beach. Eyes float across a gloomy sky. A child bends backwards on an inverted stone vault. And a baby armadillo regards us with sinister detachment. 

Maar teaches us to challenge rationality and convention at every turn; to construct and deconstruct; to subvert people’s expectations - of ourselves and the world around us. If we want to catch the eye, to arrest attention, to provoke thought, we need to see the strange in the everyday. We need to stop making sense.

Dora Maar, Man Looking Inside a Sidewalk

From the late 1930s Maar pursued painting as an artistic outlet. She created cubist portraits, sombre still-lives and melancholy landscapes. And then in her seventies she returned to photography, her first love, making a series of photograms – camera-less images produced by placing objects on photo-sensitive paper. With these moody abstractions, sometimes scratched and over-painted, she was asking questions to the last. 

Maar died in Paris in 1997, aged 89.

In support of International Women’s Day (8 March), this piece was written without any reference to Dora Maar’s famous partner.

'Isn't it strange?
Isn't it strange?
I am still me.
You are still you.
In the same place.
Isn't it strange?
How people can change
From strangers to friends,
Friends into lovers,
And strangers again.’

Celeste, ‘Strange’ (C Waite / J Hartman / S Wrabel)

No. 270

Who Is Normal? The Strange Beauty of Diane Arbus

Man in hat, trunks, socks and shoes, Coney Island, NY, 1960, by Diane Arbus

‘You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.'
Diane Arbus

I recently attended an excellent exhibition of the early work of photographer Diane Arbus. (‘Diane Arbus: In the Beginning’ is at The Hayward Gallery, London until 6 May.)

Diane Nemerov was born in New York in 1923. Her parents owned Russek’s, a Fifth Avenue department store, and she grew up in some comfort. At 18 she married her childhood sweetheart, Allan Arbus, and soon after she took up photography. For just over a decade the Arbuses ran a commercial photography business, with Diane contributing as stylist and art director. In 1956 she quit and began life as an independent photographer.

'My favorite thing is to go where I've never been.'

Arbus wandered the streets of New York searching for subjects. She was drawn to Central Park, Times Square and Coney Island; to bars and barbershops, the subway and snack bars, movie theatres and the morgue.

'Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.'

Arbus was fascinated by human frailty and eccentricity. Perhaps what we take for ordinary may be worth a second look. Here’s a slim kid with a toy hand grenade, a teenager in a monster mask, a uniformed usher by the box office, an elderly lady in a mink stole. Parents carry sleeping children. Here’s an anxious man yelling in the street, a couple arguing - snarling, eyes bulging - a mannequin in an evening gown.  The world seems somehow crooked, distorted, out of joint.

‘I am full of a sense of promise, like I often have, the feeling of always being at the beginning.’

Arbus’ pictures suggest stories that are just beyond reach, incomplete narratives that are about to begin. A down-at-heel Santa Claus walks the city streets. A boy in an ill-fitting boater wears a ‘Bomb Hanoi’ badge.  An elderly Uncle Sam looks depressed and tired in his tatty apartment. 

'If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.’

Arbus is also interested in our relationship with entertainment. She photographs the TV and the cinema screen: a blonde about to be kissed, a screaming woman with blood on her hands, a man being choked to death. She is particularly drawn to the world of stage performers and circus sideshows. She introduces us to trapeze artists, strippers and cha cha dancers; wrestlers, fire eaters and female impersonators. A clown in a fedora. We meet ‘The Human Pincushion’ and ‘The Jungle Creep.’ Andy ‘Potato Chips’ Ratoucheff gives us his Maurice Chevalier impersonation.

'A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.'

In the past some critics expressed suspicion of Arbus. Is she just giving us a ‘freak show’? Is she exploiting the vulnerable? Is she lacking empathy or compassion?

Female impersonator holding long gloves, Hempstead, L.I. 1959, by Diane Arbus

I suspect that 2019 eyes have a quite different response. Arbus is clearly curious about the margins of conventional society. But she is neither judgemental nor sentimental. She takes people for who they are, revealing their essential humanity. Her pictures have a strange beauty.

'I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don't like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.'

I left the exhibition concluding that we are united by our flaws and foibles, our kinks and quirks. We all have idiosyncrasies. They’re what make us attractive, what make us human.

‘The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way.’

In the communication industry, we are constantly considering core consumers and bull’s-eye behaviour. We like to determine average users, typical targets. But these calculations often take us to the anodyne, bland and boring. They represent a filtered reality, an edited truth.

Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962 , by Diane Arbus

Arbus asks us to think again: Who is normal?

Surely in 2019 normal is diverse, irregular, bizarre and offbeat. It is strange and peculiar, different and contradictory, shifting and changeable. Normal is whatever we want it to be.

I’m reminded of a line I recently heard from jazz futurist Kamasi Washington: 

‘Diversity is not something to be tolerated, but something to be celebrated.’

In 1971 Diane Arbus took her own life. She had been suffering from depression, an illness that had also afflicted her mother. She was 48 years old.

In one of her pictures from 1960 a homeless man in a shabby overcoat, trilby hat and zip-up sweater holds a dollar bill to the viewer. It is as if to say: 

‘What’s this for? Is it really worth it?’ 

No. 225

Don McCullin: Photography as Feeling

Don McCullin The Guvnors in Their Sunday Suits

'Seeing, looking at what others cannot bear to see, is what my life is all about.'
Don McCullin

I recently attended an excellent retrospective at Tate Britain of the photographer Don McCullin (until 6 May).

Born in 1935, McCullin grew up in a two-room flat in Finsbury Park, an area that had been battered by war and poverty. His father died when he was 14 and he had to leave school to support his family. He bought his first camera when he was on National Service, and he took to photographing North London’s gangs, tearaways and immigrants. Some of his pictures were picked up by The Observer newspaper.

'I fell in love with photography accidentally – it chose me, I didn't choose it.'

In 1964 The Observer commissioned McCullin to cover the civil war in Cyprus.

A running man in a raglan coat, with a peaked cap and Stenn gun, casts a crisp shadow in the Limassol sun. Two dead men lie in a pool of blood on the cool tiled floor. A child grasps his despairing mother by the hand. The soles of four corpses look out at us from the back of a Land Rover. These are scenes of Biblical sadness.

Don McCullin ‘The Cyprus Civil War’

'Cyprus left me with the beginnings of a self-knowledge, and the beginning of what they call empathy. I found I was able to share other people’s emotional experiences, live with them silently, transmit them.'

Soon McCullin was off covering wars and civil strife all over the world for The Observer and The Sunday Times. The Congo, Biafra, Vietnam, Cambodia, Northern Ireland, Bangladesh, Beirut, Iraq, Ethiopia - the conflicts that dominated our news bulletins for over half a century. Unflinching, he examined pain, fear, cruelty, death and grief; he exposed the realities of war, the starvation, shell shock, looting and torture; the dark fruits of this bitter earth.

He worried that he was becoming addicted to hostilities.

'I used to chase wars like a drunk chasing a can of lager.’

But McCullin had a strong sense of moral obligation, of duty to report what he saw.

'You have to bear witness. You cannot just look away.'

Of course, continuous exposure to human suffering and inhuman cruelty came at a price. McCullin was troubled by doubts, haunted by nightmares.

'I am tired of guilt, tired of saying to myself: ‘I didn’t kill that man on that photograph, I didn’t starve that child.’'

Periodically McCullin took assignments in the UK. But even here his conscience drew him to ‘social wars’- to document the poverty, inequality and deprivation on our doorsteps. He observed the homeless in London’s East End; considered the effects of industrial decay in Bradford, Doncaster and Wigan; captured the harsh economic realities in Hartlepool, Liverpool and Sunderland.

Homeless men stand around the fire, sleep amid the litter. Heads down, eyes shot, faces grubby, hands knotted. Kids play in the rubble, unemployed men forage for coal, a courting couple take a drag on a cigarette. Parkas, prams and flat caps. Cold rooms and damp walls. England ‘laughing in the face of defeat’.

'Photography is the truth if it’s being handled by a truthful person.'

Don McCullin Gangs of Boys Escaping CS Gas Fired by British Soldiers

If you’re familiar with photographers, you’ll know that they like to discuss their equipment: lenses and light exposure, apertures and aspect ratios. I was quite struck by McCullin’s inclination to focus on human qualities.

‘The photographic equipment I take on an assignment is my head and my eyes and my heart. I could take the poorest equipment and I would still take the same photographs. They might not be as sharp, but they would certainly say the same thing.’

Indeed McCullin describes his craft as a matter of feeling rather than technical expertise.

'Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling. If you can't feel what you're looking at, then you're never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures.'

There’s a lesson for us all here.

In creative professions we often hide behind the tools and technology; the gear and gadgets; the arcane language and expert jargon. But the best practitioners are often characterised by their humanity; their feeling for others; their empathy.

A recent BBC documentary (‘Don McCullin: Looking for England’) followed the photographer on a tour round his home country.

‘I’m never bored by trying to discover what makes me tick and this country tick.’

In Eastbourne he comes across a bunch of intrepid old folk in anoraks - watching a brass band play, eating sandwiches in the rain.

‘Terrible weather,’ says McCullin to one of them.
‘But the show must go on’, comes the reply.

This tickles McCullin. He can barely hold himself together. He wipes a tear from his eye.

'This bitter earth,
Well, what a fruit it bears.
What good is love,
That no one shares?
And if my life is like the dust,
That hides the glow of a rose.
What good am I?
Heaven only knows.

Oh, this bitter earth,
Yes, can it be so cold?
Today you're young,
Too soon you're old.
But while a voice
Within me cries,
I'm sure someone
May answer my call.
And this bitter earth
May not be so bitter after all.’

Dinah Washington, ‘This Bitter Earth’ (Clyde Lovern Otis)

No. 221

Gursky and the ‘Democratic Perspective’: Learning to Look Before We Leap

Tokyo Stock Exchange

‘I am interested in the ideal typical approximation of everyday phenomena – in creating the essence of reality.’

I recently attended an excellent exhibition reviewing the work of Andreas Gursky (The Hayward Gallery, London, until 22 April).

Since the early 1980s Gursky has been creating photographic images that prompt us to consider humanity’s relationship with nature, our impact on the world and each other.

'I am never interested in the individual, but in the human species and its environment.'

Gursky has shown us people dwarfed by the vast natural world around them; the complex interaction between man and machines; the elaborate infrastructure of our industrialised landscape; the curious beauty that sometimes occurs when humanity imposes itself on the world; and the wholesale damage we have done to our planet and environment.

His monumental images present us with the swarming energy of the Tokyo Stock Exchange; the complex choreography of an F1 pit-stop; the dehumanising effect of a Vietnamese furniture factory; the tribal abandon of a gigantic Dortmund dancehall. He gives equal weight to the Tour de France and Toys R Us; to supermarkets and skyscrapers; to autobahn, airport and Amazon warehouse.

Salerno I

Gursky reflects on the world with a cool detachment. He seems withdrawn, rational, objective. Perhaps he is asking us to think rather than feel; to properly consider the systems, patterns and relationships that rule our lives and shape our world.

'I stand at a distance, like a person who comes from another world.' 

Gursky’s work often employs advanced digital and post-production techniques. He uses cranes, sophisticated software and satellite cameras. His images are carefully orchestrated and arranged.

‘Reality can only be shown by constructing it… Montage and manipulation bring us closer to the truth.’

This inclination to convey constructed rather than documentary reality resonates with us in the commercial world. We are generally comfortable with artifice and abstraction, distillation and editing, if they serve to communicate a brand essence or human truth.

We could nonetheless learn something from what Gursky calls his ‘democratic perspective.’ He consciously creates images that are uniformly sharp and clear. There is none of the foreshortening or depth of field to which we are accustomed from conventional photography or image making. Everything is high-def, hyper-real. Everything is in focus.

‘Figuratively speaking, what I create is a world without hierarchy, in which all the pictorial elements are as important as each other.’

As a result when we regard a Gursky image, and get past the initial sense of wonder, our eyes roam freely, exploring every detail, examining every corner.

By contrast, when we in the field of marketing and communications consider a sector, we tend pretty quickly to apply instinct and intuition to the data that presents itself to us. We hastily seek narrative, purpose and direction. We rush to find a focal point.

Sometimes perhaps we leap too soon.

Over the years I sat in a good many creative reviews with John Hegarty and I was struck by his tendency in the early stages of the process to be open-minded about different routes and possibilities. He’d let teams run with a variety of thoughts, exploring diverse avenues and approaches. He seemed reluctant to close things down too quickly. At the outset he had a ‘democratic perspective.’ Only later in creative development did he settle on a particular theme and idea. Only then did he demand singular focus.

Utah

I’m sure strategy works the same way. When we embark on a task we would do well to allow ourselves time to consider all the options; to explore and experiment; to review the whole picture, the panorama of perspectives; to look before we leap.

But, having said all this, we should never be slave to the method. We should always listen to our instincts.

In 2017 Gursky created a work inspired by an image taken on an iPhone through the window of a moving car. ‘Utah’ depicts homes, sheds and caravans at the freeway’s edge, speeding past us as we proceed on our way. They are largely out of focus. They are all a blur.

No. 172

Eggleston: The Poetry of Normal

William Eggleston, Untitled (Girl with Red Hair, Biloxi, Mississippi), 1974

‘The idea of the suffering artist has never appealed to me. Being here is suffering enough.’
William Eggleston

There’s a fine exhibition of photographic portraits by William Eggleston running at the National Portrait Gallery in London (until 23 October).

Born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, raised in a well-to-do household in Sumner, Mississippi, Eggleston was shy and laconic, guarded and private. Self-taught and self-sufficient, he developed an affinity for free spirits, local bourbon and antique guns. He dressed like a Southern gentleman and caroused like a rock musician.

Eggleston took up photography at university. From the mid ‘60s he experimented with colour, and in 1973 he embraced a dye transfer printing technique, which hitherto had been the realm of commercial magazines and advertising. As a result his colours are rich, vibrant, intoxicating. We are seduced by the vivid yellows and pinks, the deep reds and blues; the bold tones of manmade fibres, floral prints, formica and leatherette. They sing out above the flat umbers and olive greens of the enduring rural South.

Untitled, .1974 by William Eggleston

‘I photograph democratically…I don't have any favourites. Every picture is equal but different.'

Eggleston’s style seems informal, casual even. By 1976 he was abandoning his viewfinder and shot as if firing a gun. He photographed ordinary people in the bar, at the diner, in the parking lot; regular folk at the counter, at the phone kiosk, on the travelator; waiting in the car, striding along the sidewalk, seated by the kerb. There’s a young woman with a Heineken, a businessman with a burger, a singer with a cigarette. We see the elderly lady on her garden chair, the office worker in his lunch hour, teenagers on a date. We see a lone old man sitting on the edge of a bed, with a drink, with a revolver.

Eggleston’s subjects look straight at us, through us and past us. They stand and stare; they sit and watch; they turn to one side. They seem lost in thought, alone, even though they’re with us.

It seems a world of doubt, regret, indecision and detachment. But maybe it’s nothing of the kind. We want to know the stories that attend the images; the befores and afters. But Eggleston denies us this narrative. He leaves his subjects untitled, unidentified, unknown.

'A picture is what it is, and I've never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn't make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them…I mean, they're right there, whatever they are.’

Untitled, c.1970 (Devoe Money in Jackson, Mississippi) by William Eggleston

Although by no means the first serious photographer to shoot in colour, Eggleston’s exhibition at New York’s MOMA in 1976 is widely recognised as a watershed moment for the genre. At the time there was fierce criticism of his work from a photographic establishment that was looking for meaning and message. The New York Times described it as ‘the worst show of the year.’ His choice of everyday subjects was felt to be banal, boring and bland. His informal, spontaneous style was labelled ‘snapshot chic.’

But these are the very factors that make Eggleston’s work compelling. There is a mystery in the mundane, a simplicity in the spontaneous, a beauty in the bland.

Untitled, c.1970 (Marcia Hare in Memphis, Tennessee) by William Eggleston

‘I am at war with the obvious.’

In the field of commercial creativity we should feel affinity for the ordinary and everyday. Ours is a world of small choices and regular habits. Eggleston teaches us that, if we look close enough, we will see, and if we think hard enough we will feel; that we should seek merely to amplify the truth, to intensify it with considered gaze and vibrant colour; that there’s no need to resort to excess and exaggeration, superheroes and superstars.

As for myself, I’ll take the bland and banal every time. Give me small and inconsequential rather than grand and meaningful. Give me repetition and routine rather than fireworks and fun. It’s the poetry of normal.

Last week I gave a little money to a woman outside Waitrose. With her cropped hair and harem pants, she seemed earnest and a little concerned. ‘Would you like a book about the structure of the universe?’ she asked. ‘No, thank you. I need a new packet of Tuc biscuits.’

No. 100

Julia Margaret Cameron: Sometimes Truth Is Out-Of-Focus

'What is focus - and who has the right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?'
Julia Margaret Cameron

It’s two hundred years since the birth of the experimental photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and there are two exhibitions in London celebrating her work. (The V&A until 21 February; The Science Museum until 31 March)

Although Cameron came to photography late in life (she first took up a camera at the age of 48), she was a pioneer in the understanding of photography as an art form. Most of the early enthusiasts regarded photography as a science that should concern itself with accuracy and precision. Cameron aimed to ‘record the greatness of the inner as well as the outer man.’

Certainly many of Cameron’s portraits have an intimacy that still resonates today. She shot in profile or face-on, making astute use of lighting and shadow. Her sitters have a stillness, a seriousness, that suggest the private, individual, interior life. It’s as if she’s caught them on their own in a room looking in the mirror.

Cameron came in for a good deal of criticism from the Victorian photographic establishment for the perceived ‘mistakes’ in her work. There were blotches and swirls resulting from the uneven application of chemicals and smearing when the plates were wet. And many of Cameron’s images were slightly out-of-focus.

‘What in the name of all the nitrate of silver that ever turned white into black have these pictures in common with good photography? Smudged, torn, dirty, undefined and in some cases almost unreadable, there is hardly one of them that ought not to have been washed off the plate as soon as its image had appeared.’
The Photographic News

Cameron believed that her technically flawed images conveyed greater emotion, truth and impact. And some of the more enlightened critics of the time agreed.

‘Mrs Cameron was the first person who had the wit to see her mistakes were her successes and henceforward to make her portraits systematically out-of-focus.’
Macmillan Magazine

The state of being in-focus is of course a technical matter. But it is also something that is socially determined; something that is felt.

In a fabulous scene from Woody Allen’s 1997 movie, Deconstructing Harry, a camera crew is having problems shooting the actor Mel, played by Robin Williams. After inspecting their lenses, they conclude that there’s nothing wrong with their equipment. It’s Mel that is out-of-focus.

‘Mel, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re soft. You’re out-of-focus…I want you to go home; and want you to get some rest. See if you can just sharpen up.’

I have a lot of sympathy for Mel. Sometimes we just don’t seem to be in tune with everyone else. We’re out of step, misaligned. Sometimes we feel out-of-focus.

Could the communications and marketing industries learn from Julia Margaret Cameron? Would we ever willingly seek to be out-of-focus?

We are for the most part cursed by an obsession with polish and perfection. But this very finesse may diminish our ability to communicate authenticity, integrity and emotion. Conveying truth is not the same as conveying fact. Facts are hard, precise, unyielding. Truth is a matter for intuition, interpretation and imagination.

We could also learn from Julia a singularity of purpose, a determination in the face of critical pressure.

My mother was a keen amateur painter. She worked in oils using a palette knife, a method taught by the TV artist Nancy Kominsky (Paint Along with Nancy was a big deal in the UK in the 1970s). I once came across her painting a series of seagulls on a rock. There were four or five of them all in a line, pointing in the same direction. It looked to me as if they were queueing for a bus. I told mum that this wouldn’t happen in nature; that things are less regimented in real life. She told me she didn’t care. This was the picture she wanted to paint.

No. 65