Tuesday 28 August 2012

Being Isn't Always Believing



Take the Countess of Castiglione. She knew a thing or two about photography: the power of the image. Famously, she manipulated portraits of herself in later years to appear more svelte and nubile than her middle-age spread allowed. A nineteenth-century kind of 'nip and tuck'; a Prima Donna of celebrity imaging,  pre-Madonna.


According to Malcolm Daniel, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York:

'Toward the end of her life, following a hiatus of some twenty-five years, the Countess di Castiglione resumed her sessions with [the photographer Pierre-Louis] Pierson. The pictures reveal her mental instability and loss of all critical sense'. (http://www.metmuseum.org)

Or more simply(sympathetically) . . .

This woman's world had been turned upside down: circumstances out of her control.

It takes some time, some doing - a lot of being without really believing in it - to regain one's perspective on life.

Saturday 11 August 2012

Guest Lecture




I conceded, ultimately.
Gave the lecture.
Told what Barthes had said
About photographic portraiture.

'The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art.' (Barthes, R, 1982, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, London: Jonathan Cape, 13)

A bit like life, really. Only, life is mostly artless. . .

The class didn't last long.

Image from (ed) Jay, B (1994) Some Rollicking Bull: Light Verse, and Worse, on Victorian Photography, Germany: Nazraeli Press

Monday 6 August 2012

After William Henry Fox Talbot's 'The Open Door' (1844)



Consider this
Something of a mystery;
I've just been invited
To teach photo-history.

The invite was really
Terribly formal.
Polite: a far cry
From the cursory normal.

But, it's just for a day,
And, they're happy to pay
To hear what it is
That I might have to say

On Roland Barthes.

Mais, oui. C'est vrai.

My own place of work
Would like to conjecture
If I'd care to give
A theory guest-lecture.

Of course, I declined.
It no longer seems right.
To remove
The dark-cloth;
Come into the light.

To move
From the dark-room
Into the sun. Forget
Camera Lucida
It's over. I'm done.

Heliotherapy failed;
The shadows are cast.
While in pursuit of
The punctum,
I got lost in the past.


Images from:  Sale, C (1959) The Specialist, London: Putnam & Co Ltd


Friday 3 August 2012

Summer Time Improvisation



'Well I thought, with the summer, things couldn't get dumber; the semester was over and done. When the truth be told, last term was a bummer but at least, now, the students were gone.

'Holiday. . .

'So, we packed up our laptops, our pencils and pens. We made dates to catch up with significant friends. We dreamt of the sea, sandcastles and all. But, it transpired we were going nowhere until we'd taught summer school.

'I say 'all' but let me make this very plain; our superiors were evidently exempt from the game.

'I was saddened but aimed to be professional and mature; entered the studio considering the politics of photographic portraiture. But, alas, I'd underestimated my assistant.  My anathema: seems he was determined to perpetuate puerile forms of erotica.

'Instead of re-interpreting Old Masters' paintings - Cindy Sherman style - we re-hashed feminine stereotypes: with coyness and guile.

'Forget narrative photography, or, trying to be 'arty'; our would-be students learned how to act tarty.

'Apparently, the feedback was very positive.'