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.

Some Jobs About Which The School Careers Officer Failed To Inform Me (2)

Para-psychology


The Edinburgh College of Para-Psychology is a 'non-denominational charity organisation' which aims - among other things - to 'provide a better understanding of life after death'.


In addition, it offers a 'Paranormal Investigations' service. Led by trained mediums, this service discreetly explores the possible cause behind 'strange events and unexplained noises' - from lights flickering to inanimate items moving independently of any identifiable form of intervention. (http://www.parapsychology.org.uk)


The most alarming thing about this website is that, when cutting and pasting quotations from it, the words remain invisible on the page until you 'preview' the blog; though the spirit of the words is there, the body of the text is not. Even more unsettling: any subsequent text remains unseen too, until published.


This means that I am currently writing this post 'blind'; relying on my touch-typing skills; an option I took at school because I was too poor at Physics to be entered for the 'O' Level examination in 1985. 


Now, I was going to say that I wish someone had told me I could have been a Para-psychologist. I am genuinely interested to know if there is life after death, though I really don't know what scares me most: the inevitability of mortality or the promise of eternity. But according to the Society for Psychical Research website, careers in Para-psychology are few and far between. For most, including those with a doctorate qualification in the discipline, research remains but a leisure-time pursuit.


Unless, perhaps, you belong to the Paranormal Investigations Squad. I, for one, am about to contact them . . .  

Some Jobs About Which The School Careers Officer Failed To Inform Me

According to The Telegraph (All Fired Up: The Future of Pottery, 26.01.2011) Emma Bridgewater arrived in The Potteries (Stoke-on-Trent) in 1985.  Desperately seeking a manufacturer for her own pottery designs, she found the pottery industry on its knees: the consequence of 'bad 1970s-style management'. Though she managed, at that time, to find a manufacturer, that particular maker of pots went bankrupt in 1992. Bridgewater, in turn, bought the factory and, in doing so, secured the jobs of the 35 members of staff already employed there.  Bridgewater now enjoys international success with what David Nicholls, Design Editor of The Telegraph, calls her 'friendly, sponge-painted tableware designs'. Her 'signature piece' as Tiffany Daneff writes in Patterns of Success (see Saga website, 20.02.2012) remains the polka-dot mug, 600 of which 'leave the factory in Stoke-on-Trent every week'.  Apparently, every mug 'goes through 54 different hand-applied processes before it’s finally ready'.  


I neither know, nor care, what the other 53 processes are, but what about the person who gets to place the dots on the tableware? Reading between the lines of the Saga article, it helps if you're a local; the author claims that Bridgewater has saved for the nation - and the international dinner-set market - skills that would otherwise have been lost. I concur; dabbing a sponge on a piece of biscuit-fired earthenware doesn't sound as accomplished as some of the previous decorative endeavours enjoyed by The Potteries.  I'm thinking Wedgwood and John Flaxman. But, it's a continuation of a regional tradition. (It would seem all professions have experienced some form of dumbing down.)


I want that job. Five colours placed seven times on each mug - randomly (which means 'unique'). The mug-painter even gets to initial her work.  


What is 'Art' but an identifiable image by an identifiable person with an identifiable style?  I refer you to Michel Houellebecq's latest novel: The Map And The Territory ( 2011): 'the great painters of the past were considered such when they had developed a world view that was both coherent and innovative, which means that they always painted in the same way, using the same methods and operating procedures to transform the objects of the world into pictorial ones'. (19)


Dots have served the art world well, from Pointillism to Baldersari to Damian Hirst.


And, of course, Hoeullebecq and Bridgewater both owe something to Hirst. If the careers officer had told me about the possibility of painting polka dots for a profession, I could have been an artist.  

The Point of 0.6 (8)

eBay

So, finally her unorthodox views had held sway. The change had occurred since that carnival day. Within 24 hours they had all quit the fray. Cast off their masks, thrown those damned piccolos away.

And, the weather had turned; the sky was now blue. The blossom was out, and the daffodils, too. Little baa lambs frolicked on the hillsides nearby. (It would be months before they were turned into shepherd's pie.) Daylight took longer to turn into night. Her colleagues now embraced a sense of well-being, that all would come right.

But this change of heart, she knew for sure, was because they had reached the end of their tether; they cared no more. They were no longer prepared to fight the good fight. They sensed they could change nothing, try as they might. The might of the senior management team would always succeed. For managerial matters were driven by greed. (If managers can't get what they want they at least get what they need.) By acknowledging this, the workers were suddenly freed; from any obligation to compromise or please. They were sick of genuflecting, being brought to their knees. Not caring was starting to feel like a breeze.

At which point she suggested they all go 0.6. But for some this would result in a financial fix. They had mortgages to pay and cars to run. (These material concerns ensured life ceased to be fun.) So she suggested that rather than work, why not play? How better, she suggested, than to start selling on eBay?

It wasn't easy, it took quite a while, before they all got it and started to smile; at the thought that while they sat at their desks, instead of sorting emails they could dismantle the domestic nest, by auctioning on-line all the clutter they had accrued. She put it to them thus: 'you will feel re-newed. Re-newed and relieved to rid yourself of clutter.' (She ignored the guy in the corner who'd begun to dribble and splutter. He was evidently not worth saving, he was too full of dread, too scared to see his bank balance shift into the red.)

But the majority was game, the majority saw the light. Her colleagues regained their passion for their subject: their pleasure, the delight. They had looked into their souls and understood what they stood for. It wasn't Higher Education; that's not what they'd studied for. They had all turned to art because they believed they were creative. That they needed a visual medium to express themselves with. They needed 'Art' in order to negotiate how to live. Teaching was but a by-product, a generous impulse to give. But teaching had recently become about something other. They were now of the opinion, 'why should we bother?'

So, while senior management continued to plot and scheme, ensuring that all they did would serve only their team, the workers sat at their desks all day (and in doing so they ensured they would get full pay), but they no longer cared what the students had to say. They were too busy engaged in their own form of play; tracking the value of their belongings at auction on eBay.

'THE END'