Semiotics Of Photography: F

F is for Fish (and Photography)

I maintain there remains a place in the multiple, myriad histories of photography for a history of fishing, fish and photography. . .

Image from M Haworth-Booth, 1997, Photography: An Independent Art, London: V&A Publishing, p56. (Royal Engineers US/Canada Border Survey, Columbia River Salmon Caught at Kettle Falls, 1860-1.)

Song Of The Undressed Crab

I'm yet to get dressed,
I'm safe in my shell.
Don't consider me sadly;
I'm feeling quite well.

I'm legless, I'm stranded;
The tide is now out.
But, the sea will return,
Of that, there's no doubt.

And, while some may deem
I appear denuded.
Let me venture a thought.
(Please don't think me deluded.)

Of course, there are problems
Incurred by separation
Of the limbs from the torso,
But, I call it liberation.

(Encore)

So, I'm yet to get dressed
But, I'm free from the swell.
Don't believe me depressed,
I'm feeling quite well.

Somewhere Between Tress' Fish Tank Sonata and Sekula's Fish Story Lie A Few Fish Tales.

'Her tender feet felt as if cut with sharp knives, but she cared not for it; a sharper pang had pierced through her heart.'

From: Hans Christian Andersen, 1836, The Little Mermaid

Another Fish Out Of Water

Poisson D'Avril - Two Good Kisses

Photography And Fish (Fingers)

'Mirroring the way in which Lux dresses her models and fixes them in front of a background of her own choice, we cloth these figures in our own fantasies, and superimpose our narratives of childhood onto the backdrop they provide.'  J L Fletcher (2005) Loretta Lux: Spellbound in Portfolio Magazine No 42, , pp 4-11

Loretta Lux is well-known for her 'uncanny' images of children; digitally-manipulated, with limbs and features stangely enlarged or elongated. The pictures are certainly intriguing, even if the reasons for their popularity may be potentially disturbing and disconcerting.

Take The Fish (2003).  It is a desolate and desperate image. Dirty walls and filthy floor tiles: the water in the stained and grimy bath-tub is a cold slate-grey. The child's lilac frock is also stained, on the collar and close to its hem.  Somnambulant, her eyes are closed; soft-skinned and puppy-fat, she holds her pose and her breath as well.

Loretta Lux, 2003, The Fish

The Buhl Foundation is home to collection of over 1000 photographs by seminal and little-known photographers. Ranging in date from 1840 to the present day, what unites this seemingly disparate array of images is the motif of the hand; Buhl's first purchase, made in 1993, was Alfred Stieglitz's photograph of Georgia O'Keefe entitled Hands with a Thimble (1920). Buhl's rationale for collecting is not so different from Dyer's approach to writing the history of photography.

In her catalogue essay accompanying an exhibition of Buhl's collection at the Guggenheim Museum, Jennifer Blessing cites Michel de Montaigne, who asks in An Apology for Raymond Sebond: '[A]nd what about our hands?' Montaigne then lists all that our hands express, including how they can 'lament; show sadness, grieve, despair, astonish, cry out, keep silent . . . '.

The cruelly-clawed and crippling tension in the hands of Diane Arbus' Child With a Toy Grenade is far more powerful than the grimace on the boy's face.

Diane Arbus, 1962,

Child With A Toy Grenade, Central Park, New York

The hand that holds the fish in Lux's image registers nothing of the pain and anxiety that we read into Arbus' photograph, but the potential trauma of childhood still signifies: in the motif of the fish. A fish out of water very quickly suffocates and dies.

Photography And Fish - This Is Not A Fish

R. T. Crawshay, c.1870, Untitled

Photography And Fish - A Slow Market

From Things: A Spectrum of Photography, 1850-2001 (2004) London: Jonathan Cape

R T Crawshay, 1868, A Slow Market, Albumen-silver print from wet collodion negative

'Robert Crawshay was the fourth 'Iron King' of the Cyfarthfa Iron Works, Merthyr Tydfil.  In 1867 he became a member of the (Royal) Photographic Society.  A Slow Market was probably taken during spring 1868. It is beautifully made and carefully observed; the tear in the tablecloth echoes the open mouth of the nearest salmon. The photograph combines the popular genre motif of fisherfolk with a tradition of still life, and a Victorian predilection for dressing up. Beneath the shawls and skirts is Crawshay's daughter, Rose Harriette. She wrote in her diary (23 March 1868): "Papa came in with the ugliest, dirtiest, nastiest old straw bonnet that ever existed and a cap (thank goodness it was clean) for me to be photographed in as a fish woman which lasted till lunch time".'

Jane Fletcher, National Museum of Photography, Film & Television

The Ongoing Moment Revisited - Photography And Fish

R T Crawshay, c.1870, Untitled

In 2005, Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment (London: Little Brown) appeared on book stores' bookshelves in Britain.

The Observer described it as 'odd and illuminating' suggesting that, while it was less than rigorous, it 'may yet [take] its place among the classic works' on photography (16.10.2005).

Geoff Dyer's publisher describes it thus: 'With characteristic perversity . . . Dyer looks at the ways that canonical figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Andre Kertesz, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston have photographed the same things (benches, barber shops, signs, roads)'.

The result is a new, if eccentric and skewed, perspective on the history of the medium.  A history harnessed to the 'form of writing that Dyer has made his own: the non-fiction work of art'.

Around the same time, a curator of photographs approached me in his role as co-editor for a new series of photography books, interested to know if there were an angle on photography that I would care to write about.

I said, 'yes, photography and fish'.

But my passion for the poisson in the history of photography was received like a damp squib.

My suggestion was rejected.

The Point of 0.6

Basking Sharks

'There's something fishy going on here,' she hissed through clenched teeth to the colleague beside her who kept tapping his feet.  

She assumed from a distance that her snarl looked like a smile.  Last week she'd seen her dentist; it was for the first time in a while. She had feared periodontitis (or a filling at least), as her jaw and ears had been aching and her teeth felt sensitive.  Instead, he told her not to grind and clench so hard. He suggested yoga, hot baths or, if they failed, a tooth-guard.  Then, he'd flossed her and polished her, and, despite her molars wearing down, her incisors remained incisive; she had the sharpest incisors in town.

Her colleague turned towards her.  He shook his head to show he hadn't heard.  'Fishy', she enunciated rather loudly; as a consequence of uttering the word, two professors from Humanities who sat in front of her suddenly turned.  As the newly-graduated strode and tottered, swaggered and swayed across the stage, the academics sat blank-faced, straight-laced.  In their gowns and their mortar boards, and a few post-graduate caps, they slumped and slouched their shoulders, giving intermittent claps.

'I say, there's something fishy here, something fishy going on.  I failed her.  Yes, her just gone, the portly, long-haired, mousey one.  Yes that one there, in the red stiletto shoes.  I failed her, I am certain, yet they've just awarded her 2:2.'

The Dean had reached the end of his list; he was no longer reading names.  Her colleague turned to her and said, 'yes, I observed the one with the shoes that are red.  But if you failed her, then how come she passed?'  As an aside: 'So, the Dean has finally finished.  Thank God: at last.'

'Well, I'm damned if I know, but I guess it's a lark.  You know the slang for a brilliant student?  The word is 'shark'.'

'Of course I know that definition, I am Head of Linguistics. Please forgive me for being pedantic or somewhat soliloquistic.  But, I quote from the OED (I'll omit the etymology): 'shark n. Long-bodied, lateral-gilled, inferior-mouthed elasmobranch sea-fish, esp. if large and voracious; rapacious person, swindler'.'

'Well, that told me,' she whispered loudly, unintentionally baring her canines. Then she gave a sudden bark. 'Just remind me, will you, did God deign to let sharks onto Noah's ark?'

'Well, it wouldn't have been necessary. The shark, or course, can swim. Given the vessel's limited capacity, why let oceanic creatures in?'

'Silly me.  So, from that one could deduce, that when God rained down his vengeance and his favourite verb was 'sluice', that he still quite liked the fish stock and with them he had a truce? And, again, from that it's possible, inevitable, to tentatively infer (excuse the split infinitive), that out of all of his creations he preferred those that were inferior.'