Working the Room. Geoff Dyer
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to the ‘deep conviction’ – as Cormac McCarthy puts it – ‘that nothing can be proven except that it be made to bleed. Virgins, bulls, men. Ultimately God himself.’
This is why faces of the people in Metinides’ photographs have a look of shock or astonishment but never of disbelief. His photographs, in fact, are of believers. The catastrophes visited upon them actually confirm people in their belief in the bloody way things are, have been and always will be. If this were not the case then the world would be a truly terrible place – because then there would be no room left for miracles.
The causes of the bleeding obsessively recorded by Metinides are ridiculous as often as they are tragic. By explaining and giving meaning to the permutations of random disaster, the pictures’ captions offer the viewer an empirical equivalent of the faith that consoles the people in them. Knowing what happened stands in for the need to understand why it happened.
Most of the photographs take place after the fact – after the stabbing or crash – but the outcome can rarely be assumed. A plane ploughs into a field, killing everyone on board. A plane crash-lands on the Mexico–Puebla highway and no lives are lost. What can we deduce from the forensic-artistic evidence offered by these twinned images of hazard? In Metinides’ view an accident is both inevitable and avoidable in the sense that it could have been avoided if it hadn’t happened. Out of this emerges the intermingling of chance and logic otherwise known as fate. Metinides shows us not only what it looks like but – and this is the twist of the artist – how to recognise it.
2003
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’ either? 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 America’.
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 – over-seen. 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,’ he insisted, though of course this disavowal of political intent did not mean there was no political content. 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 room.’
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 FSA – minus the bright, uplifting imperatives encouraged by the organisation’s director, Roy Stryker. 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’ 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’ 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 shitholes!’
There is a qualitative technical difference too between Holdt and Evans. Made by a man assured of his vocation, Evans’ 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 practitioners. 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 Casby, 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