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Geoff Dyer
Vagabonding
Artists
are part of a tradition even if they are oblivious to it – even if
they do not consider themselves artists and are actively hostile to
being regarded as such. Photography is a particularly broad and
welcoming church in this respect. You don’t disqualify yourself by
claiming to be interested in the medium only as a lobbying tool, as
part of a larger agenda of social activism. By making this plea for
exemption, you’re actually enlisting in a regiment with a
particularly distinguished and proud photographic history. Commit
yourself to the wider, non-ideological role of bearing witness and
providing visual testimony, and you move still closer to the
mainstream of that history. But what if you’re a self-proclaimed
vagabond, if you not only refuse to consider yourself an artist, but
are adamant that you are ‘not a photographer’ either1? Then step
inside, please, you will meet many kindred spirits and fellow
refuseniks with whom you have much in common.
In 1975, in a bookstore in San Francisco, Jacob Holdt chanced upon –
and stole – a copy of How The Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis. Holdt
was otherwise unaware of – or, at the very least, indifferent to –
the fact that he might be treading in the footsteps of earlier
photographers, but for anyone with basic photo-forensic skills their
prints are easy to find and follow. Temperamentally and technically,
Holdt may have nothing in common with Robert Frank but – whether he
cares about it or not – both are part of that mini-tradition of
Europeans crossing the Atlantic and, to borrow the title of Richard
Poirier’s book of essays, “trying it out in America2.”
Part of the fascination of what Holdt found and photographed in
America lies in its unconscious relation to work that has gone
before or that was being made at roughly the same time. A tacit
dialogue insists on being – if there is a visual equivalent of
overheard – overseen. The black-and-white sign above the gas pumps
in Frank’s The Americans urged us to S A V E; the one snapped by
Holdt urges us, red-and-yellowly, to S ELL.
Holdt did not share Frank’s devotion or debt to Walker Evans but
elements of the America catalogued by Evans form an unavoidable
backdrop to Holdt’s project. In terms of what they sought to
accomplish and how they wished their work to be viewed the two men
could not have been more different. Evans wanted his photographs to
be seen without any ideological filtering. ‘NO POLITICS whatever’3,
he insisted, though of course this disavowal of political intent did
not mean there was no political content. There may have been
something a bit disingenuous about Evans’s claim (he was even more
vehemently opposed to the “screaming aesthete” Stieglitz) but the
description of how he ‘kept his white gloves on’ while photographing
slums has the ring of critical as well as anecdotal truth4.
However starkly and unsentimentally Evans recorded the poor
sharecroppers of Alabama, his pictures have, over time, acquired a
stone-washed glamour of their own. Free of the vulgar trappings of
modern poverty, those 1930s shacks now look quaint and clean. Like
some high-intensity detergent, black-and-white smartens a place up,
gets rid of dirt in a gradual flash. Concerned that his pictures
might be doing something similar, Holdt was adamant that his
experience of the shacks of the rural African- American poor “was
far, far worse than they appear in photographs. In such pictures you
can’t see the wind which whistles through the many cracks making it
impossible to keep warm in winter. You can’t see the sagging rotten
floors with cracks wide enough for snakes and various vermin to
crawl right into the living room5.”
This may be true, but few photographers have made the day-to-day
poverty of an affluent society – plenty of TVs; a huge fridge,
filthy, and crammed with nothing that looks safe to eat – look more
impoverished. So much so that his photographs of people and their
homes look like they were made not in the 1970s but seventy years
ago, as if they were a recently exhumed part of the stash of colour
pictures taken under the auspices of the Farm Security
Administration, FSA – minus the bright, uplifting imperatives
encouraged by the organisation’s director, Roy Stryker, who planed
the photographic documentation of the countryside of America. Like
many petitioning photographs, Holdt’s depend on an initial
reluctance to accept what they show, to reject what they seek to
prove: surely people could not be living like that in the 1970s, in
America. By then, by the 1970s, Evans’s pictures had acquired a
texture and glow that brought about a retrospective improvement to
the lives he had recorded. Roughly the same amount of time has
already passed since Holdt made many of his best-known pictures and
it seems unlikely that they will ever undergo a similar kind of
upgrade. It looks like it might be quite nice to sit on the stoop of
one of Evans’s shacks and suck down a cold one with Floyd Burroughs,
but you’d never want to sit on one of the sofas in Holdt’s places,
let alone sleep in one of the beds. But that’s being too solemn and
snooty. Put it this way: If Holdt was showing us these images as
holiday snaps (which, in a sense, they are) we’d have to say, “Man,
you stayed in some shit holes!”
There is a qualitative technical difference too between Holdt and
Evans. Made by a man assured of his vocation, Evans’s work aimed at
deep permanence. His prints are luminously beautiful. Shot with
cheap film, Holdt’s photographs were notes made in passing, ‘a kind
of diary’ or visual journal of a man who abjured all sense of
vocation and purpose other than hitching a ride or finding a place
to sleep. There’s minimal disjuncture between what he was
photographing and the means with which he recorded it.
As with homes and furnishing, so with people. FSA-style photography,
especially in the magisterial images by Dorothea Lange, meant that
even when stripped of everything else the Okies retained their
dignity. So much so that the Depression became a form of visual
attrition, stripping people down to their essential dignity. There
are occasional traces of this in Holdt’s work. The woman that he
finds in Florida – haven’t we seen that deeply lined, dried-out,
life-ravaged face before? We have, of course; it is the stoically
defiant face of the Great Depression, but whereas Lange’s Migrant
Mother cradled her children, this woman nurses a cigarette over cans
of Budweiser in a bar; and it’s not her helpless children, it’s a
husband or boyfriend who is sidling drunkenly up to her. His neck
might be red but the face of the guy Holdt meets in a bar in
Mississippi has the battered charisma of a Johnny Cash song – and
his shirt’s nice too. Around the younger women photographed by Holdt
there sometimes lingers the possibility, not just of a place to stay
but the dangerous allure of cross-racial romance.
The deprivation witnessed by Holdt often robbed people of
everything, including their dignity – with the coming of junk food,
poverty tended to bloat, physically, rather than erode – but this is
balanced by the way his pictures lack the single-minded pride that
Evans, Lange and others took in their medium and in their own status
within the pantheon of its greatest practi-tioners. The disconnect
between what is recorded and the way in which it is recorded is at
its starkest and most blatant in Richard Avedon’s photograph,
William Caseby, Born a Slave, 1963. It’s a great picture, an
unflinching depiction not just of a man’s face but of the very thing
that obsessed Holdt: the psychological and historical residue of
slavery, of internalized powerlessness. Unlike Caseby, the picture
of him is absolutely confident of its power, of its self-evident
right to rub shoulders with works by any of the masters of
portraiture from the entire history of art. While Avedon called the
shots, as it were, Holdt addressed his subjects – like Charles
Smith, a former slave – more modestly, on their own terms and in
their own homes. As vagabond and photographer he depends upon and
graciously accepts people’s hospitality. That’s the advantage of the
vagabond-artist method: Everyone – black, white, rich, poor,
racists, junkies, hookers, pimps, Klansmen, gun nuts, rednecks –
extend their kindness and trust to Holdt and, as a result, are seen
at their best, at their most American.
Unobtrusively, almost incidentally impressive, Holdt’s photographs
have – as we have seen – ended up in a museum in spite of their
maker’s declared intentions. It was only recently, after a
quarter-century wait, that they took their place alongside the work
of his contemporaries and successors. As soon as they did, certain
resemblances were so striking, the feeling of kinship so strong,
that it was as if a prodigal had finally agreed to show up for a
long-postponed get-together. The 87-year-old woman Holdt drove all
the way from Alabama to Arizona, the one brandishing the gun in the
doorway of her shack, meets up with the old guy sitting on a bed
with his gun (photographed by William Eggleston) in Morton,
Mississippi. Actually, once you make adjustments for some variation
in palette, there is evidence of a whole generation of interbreeding
between Holdt and Eggleston, especially if we bear in mind the
latter’s declared intention to photograph ‘democratically’.
‘Eggleston’ has become a kind of shorthand or metonym for colour
photography generally and, in Holdt, there are glimpses of the kind
of stuff that fascinated another renegade colourist, Stephen Shore
in American Surfaces. What Luc Sante said of Nan Goldin – that she
was able to ‘take the most squalid corner of the worst dump and find
colours and textures in it no one else saw’ – almost holds true for
Holdt6. Whereas she finds ‘oceanic’ blues and ‘crepuscular’ oranges,
Holdt sees the same, unexceptional colours as the rest of us but –
like Helen Levitt in her colour work – coaxes an understated harmony
from the muted maroons, pale greens and (in one of his best
pictures, of a girl on a bed, watching telly) dullish purples,
grey-mauves. What he shares with Goldin is an absolute lack of
distance or inhibition between photographer and subjects. In
Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (which, like Holdt’s
American Pictures, enjoyed it’s first incarnation as a slide show)
we get an hermetic account of a community with a fairly fixed cast
of characters within a city at a particular historical moment. The
same is true of the grey rush of Larry Clark’s Tulsa (1971). With
Goldin it’s transgressives, bohemians, and druggies on the Lower
East Side; with Clark it’s teenage speed freaks shooting up in
Oklahoma. Holdt’s project is inherently less circumscribed. His
readiness to go along with whatever happens and to get along with
whoever he happens to run into makes for a sprawling odyssey of
serial intimacies and random proximity. Along the way he
occasionally gets to watch a bit of TV (there are a lot of them
about) or to watch people watching it (or, on one occasion, to watch
them stealing it). In the image of Baggie feeding her baby while
Nixon is beamed into the room, the political irony is implied
silently. In others there is the sense, observed by Lee Friedlander
(in photographs) and later verbally corroborated by Jean Baudrillard,
that a television might be broadcasting from ‘another planet’ or
showing ‘a video of another world’7. In this world, meanwhile, Holdt
accidentally witnesses the scenes of violent death sought out by the
Mexican Enrique Metinides, another photographer only recently
promoted to gallery status.
That Holdt’s pictures did not go knocking on the doors of museums,
as it were, did not plead for institutional recognition or
art-critical approval is a prime reason why they deserve admission.
As more and more people use cameras as a way of gaining acclaim not
as photographers but as artists, so the status of this surrogate
medium is in danger of becoming somewhat overblown. Literally. The
question one asks repeatedly in gallery shows of 6 x 10 prints
(feet, I mean, not inches!) is: Does this work earn its size? Would
this photograph be able to make the grade as a work of art if it had
not been pumped up with the growth hormones of the artist’s huge
aspirations and ambitions? The paradox is that some of the most
artistically valuable contemporary photographs are content with
being photographs, are not under the same compulsion to pass
themselves off – or pimp themselves out – as art. The simple truth
is that the best exponents of the art of contemporary photography
continue to produce work that fits broadly within the tradition of
what Evans termed ‘documentary style’8.
Holdt’s movement from the photographic fringes to the walls of a
museum – and the corresponding shift of emphasis in any assessment
of his career, from activist to photographer – is not just deserved,
it is historically inevitable. Records of moments in time, these
photographs have outlived their time in a way that the words
surrounding them in the book, American Pictures, have not. Perhaps
this conforms to a more general truth about the relative longevity
of words and images when paired together in this way, for the same
thing happened to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) by Evans and
James Agee. Gore Vidal wittily scorned the ‘good-hearted,
soft-headed admirers of the Saint James (Agee) version of poverty in
America’8 which, over time, has come to seem at odds with the
enduring value of Evans’s ‘austere’ photography. Holdt’s engaging
naiveté saves him from the kind of Scandinavian omniscience that
becomes wearisome in Sven Lindqvist’s later, polemical writing, but
the text of American Pictures would not be reprintable today except
as a historical document or exhibit, like one of those mammals found
preserved in a glacier. The enduring vitality of the photographs, on
the other hand, is evident in two, apparently contradictory, ways.
First, they wouldn’t look out of place in Claude Brown’s Manchild in
the Promised Land (1965), a firsthand testament to the problems of
addiction, poverty and deprivation that pre-dates Holdt’s arrival in
America. Second, they could readily be inserted into more recent
accounts of the drug-ravaged American ghetto, such as Richard
Price’s novel Clockers (1992) or David Simon’s and Ed Burns’s
masterpiece of ‘stand-around-and-watch’ reportage, The Corner
(1997)9. Holdt photographed Ronald Reagan in 1972, ‘long before he
became president’10; Simon and Burns quote him years later, saying
that “we fought a war against poverty and poverty won”, a line that
could serve as a caption for any number of pictures in this
exhibition11. The so-called war on drugs, the authors insistently
remind us, actually became a war against the poor. Holdt, in this
sense, was a combat photographer, embedded in the frontline. His
experience renders him more, not less sympathetic to those caught up
– or actively engaged – in the conflict, visually affirming Simon’s
and Burns’s claim that “if faith and spirituality and mysticism are
the hallmarks of any great church, then addiction is close to
qualifying as a religion for the American underclass12.” The issue,
as always, is one of precision and detail which the pictures provide
in deliberate and accidental abundance. (Strangely, the hair-styles
and clothes date the pictures in the sense of identifying them with
a period – Jacob Holdt was working at the same time as Garry
Winogrand, obviously without confining their relevance to that
time.) There is a good deal of rhetoric in Holdt’s writing, almost
none in the pictures. This is partly because some of the pictures
are not about anything; certain moments or events just happened to
catch his eye. And partly it is because some are about so much more
than what they are ostensibly about.
For a photographer whose interest is primarily documentary or
polemical, Holdt’s work is surprisingly rich, psychologically. The
people in his pictures are never just representatives of the fallen
condition in which they find themselves. The stories implied by the
photographs are often more subtly individualized than the ones set
out by the text of American Pictures. As with Eggleston – again – a
tacit narrative seems poised to unfold within each frame. Some are
tense with expectation, like a Jeff Wall tableaux, almost, frozen in
the act of time. But even off-the-cuff ones condense an unexpected
amount of time into the split second of the photograph’s creation.
Take the picture of the woman in the green halter-neck dress, eating
a lobster and smoking a cigarette at a lavish dinner in Palm Beach.
The photograph is neither caustic nor judgemental – how could it be
when the man seated between the woman in green and the fellow in the
related green blazer, is wearing one of the funniest jackets ever
seen? – but its overt message or social meaning has to do with the
gluttony or vulgarity of someone eating and smoking at the same time
(weirdly, the one thing she does not seem to be doing is breathing).
The fact that these two activities – eating and smoking – normally
occur successively rather than simultaneously suggests that the
exposure has taken twenty minutes (i.e. the time it would take to
tuck into the lobster and then smoke a cigarette) while the guy
swigging momentarily from his champagne shows the real speed of
time. Perhaps that’s why there is a sense that she has slid out of
the shared time of the table and into some kind of private trance
(technically a result of Holdt’s flash?) as if she might actually be
one of the undead, the unbreathing, or an alien in human form, some
kind of Stepford Wife who found that those two lines of coke before
dinner had really put the kibosh on her appetite. When Deckard
subjects Rachel to the Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner it takes
far longer than usual to establish that she is actually a Replicant
– because she is under the illusion that she is a human being. Holdt
here photographs, or suggests, someone during a moment when she gets
an inkling that all the things that make her life humanly meaningful
might actually be illusory, false. Or maybe we’re being too solemn
again: Could be she’s really feeling that coke, so intent on
appearing to listen to whatever the (unseen) guy across the table is
blahing on about that she’s not heard a goddamn word, even though it
seems like he’s been talking at her since the dawn of time and no
punch line is yet in evidence. Either way, the condensation of time
in the image means that this moment lasts for both a 100th of a
second (shutter and flash, sip of champagne), twenty minutes (eating
and smoking) and, extrapolating from there, a lifetime.
1 J.H., quoted in Deutsche Borse Photography Prize 2008, edited
by Stefanie Braun, The Photographers Gallery, London, 2008, p. 72.
2 Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York, 1999.
3 Quoted in Walker Evans at Work, London, Thames and Hudson, London,
1984, p. 112.
4 Quoted in Belinda Rathbone: Walker Evans: A Biography, Thames and
Hudson, London 1995, p. 114.
5 American Pictures, American Pictures Foundation, Copenhagen, 1985,
p. 64.
6 “All Yesterday’s Parties”, in Nan Goldin, I’ll Be your Mirrror,
Whitney Museum of Art/Scalo, New York, 1996, p. 101.
7 America, Verso, London, 1988, p. 50.
8 quoted in The Camera Viewed: Writings on Twentieth Century
Photography, Volume 1, edited by Peninah R. Petruck, , Dutton, New
York, 1979, p. 127.
9 Quoted in United States: Essays 1952-1992, André Deutsch, London,
1993, p. 632.
10 new edition, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2009, p. 611.
11 United States 1970-1975 Steidl, Göttingen, 2007, p. 187.
12 The Corner, p. 99.
13 The Corner, p. 81.
Geoff
Dyer (b. 1958) Is the author of many books including But Beautiful
(winner of the Somerset Maugham prize), The Ongoing Moment (winner
of an ICP Infinity Award for writing on photography) and, most
recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, a novel.
Copyright © 2014
AMERICAN PICTURES
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