People and Places
One of the most obvious weaknesses in my last project, Afon Lwyd, was the absence of people. In part, this was an honest reflection of the area, especially during the day when the streets seemed as empty as the open hills. But the towns and villages were not empty; behind the curtains, in the shops and pubs, in the schools, the Welfare Hall and in the library, the life blood of the valley flowed.
Much documentary photography exists essentially in images of the people who inhabit and define the places and moments that are being recorded. The absence of people was a function of my lack of confidence and lack of skill much more than it was a function of the place or my understanding of what was needed to represent it photographically.
If place, social structure and cultural processes can be literally ‘embodied’ in this way, so also might the reverse be true. That is to say that our individual and group allegiances, civic, social and public identities as well as our sense of who we are (and who we are not) can be encoded and decoded through looking at the ‘places’ which we inhabit in photographs.
Certainly, in fine art, formal portraiture offers an opportunity to be presented to the world in carefully chosen and defined environments where particular clothes, room setting or a specific geography can be shaped to add to the portrait’s claims to show not only ‘This is what I look like’ but also to make claims about, ‘This is who I am’.
The painter’s selection of built and ‘natural’ backgrounds, their use of symbolic objects and calculated compositional devices can be explicit, as for example, in the way that status, aspiration, affiliation and power were captured in English royal portraiture from the Reformation on.
As religious commissions declined and with the skills of perspectival painting already mastered by English court painters, the overwhelming political need to establish and secure a fragile nation-state ensured that royal portraiture was not only representational, it was also functional and its function was to declare a legitimate and successful monarchy. Hence, portraits from Henry VIII to Charles II, from Holbein to Van Dyke, are rich in emblems of moral virtue, majesty and authority.
In the ‘Armada Portrait’ of Elizabeth I (1588; George Gower attrib.), for example, the Queen, draped in pearls (virginity) and countless golden suns (power over all life), turns her back on the darkness, wreck and storms of the Armada with the entire world in her grasp.
The Royal Museums, Greenwich, where the painting hangs (Queen’s House), describes the portrait as:
“ … an outstanding historical document, summarizing the hopes and aspirations of the state as an imperial power, at a watershed moment in history. But the Armada Portrait transcends this specific moment in time. Scholars have described it as a definitive representation of the English Renaissance, encapsulating the creativity, ideals and ambitions of the Elizabethan ‘Golden Age’.”
Whatever their status as documents or as representations that go beyond mere appearance, there is often still an expectation that a portrait should be a likeness. This is both eased and complicated by the fact that likeness is relatively easy to achieve photographically, unlike for the fine artist. It is context that presents more of a challenge for the photographer, especially when considered compositionally. As Berger (1968) noted,
“Every relation between forms in a painting is to some degree adaptable to the painter’s purpose. This is not the case with photography. (Unless we include those absurd studio works in which the photographer arranges every detail of his subject before he takes the picture.) Composition in the profound, formative sense of the word cannot enter into photography.”
Berger’s comments would seem to suggest that while portrait painters may readily rely on formulae, conventions or stylisations, including a managed ‘environment’, to extend the likeness, photographers cannot, compositionally, other than through ‘absurd’ studio techniques. The work of Arnold Newman would suggest otherwise.
Arnold Newman (1908-2006), an American photographer, is often referred to as the ‘father of environmental photography’; that is to say his work is typified by portraits taken in a carefully controlled setting that reflect the sitter’s life and cultural standing – usually in the context of their work or profession.
Many of Newman’s iconic images are of cultural celebrities, perhaps his most famous being those of Stravinsky, Bacon, Lichtenstein or his muse, Piet Mondrian.
Igor Stravinsky, 1946
Francis Bacon, 1975
Roy Lichtenstein, 1976
Piet Mondrian, 1942
In these examples, unconventional composition places the subject in a carefully contrived environment that locates him (sic) in a context that extends the portrait well beyond mere likeness. Stravinsky is dwarfed by his piano and the giant note it seems to strike; Bacon, like many of his fictional characters, is caught in in the space between the bare wire, electric glare and the darkness from beneath; Lichtenstein’s geometric framing contrasts with Mondrian’s altogether more serious and austere lines.
These are not ‘absurd’ studio shots (to quote Berger) nor are they simply photographs of celebrities. As Newman said in 2000,
I used the example of royal portraiture earlier to specifically connect portraiture not only to the symbolic, carefully crafted environment in which it may be set but also to political power. Newman made many portraits of politicians from JFK to Hailie Selassie to King Bope Mabinshe of the Congo and it is from his pictures of the politically powerful that my interest in his work stems. In particular, I find his 1979 work The Great British compelling, not only as an exercise in portraiture but also as a commentary on the England of the period.
This is an account of a parallel world to those shot by Tony Ray Jones or Marin Parr, for example, but it remains an important narrative that has been obscured by photography’s rush to the street, the dispossessed and the abject and photography’s apparent reluctance to look behind closed doors at the comfortable and the powerful. It is to The Great British, I will turn next.
Reference: Berger, J. (1968) ‘Understanding a Photograph’ New Society 17th October 1968. Reprinted in Dyer, G (Ed.) (2013) Understanding a Photograph: John Berger London: Penguin Classics
