Dayanita Singh - Go Away Closer, Hayward Gallery

The OCA study tour on December 7^th to the Hayward Gallery was interesting and enjoyable.  I had not been aware of Dayanita Singh’s work up until now but I found her images to be very appealing and quite inspiring. 

Singh, who was born in New Delhi in 1961, describes herself as a bookmaker who just uses photography as her medium but she is clearly an accomplished conceptual artist. The show is technically a retrospective but it seems to be a result of Singh’s habit of constantly sorting through her contact sheets; filtering, juxtaposing, re-grouping her captures.  This repurposing creates new narratives and she seems to take delight in the unexpected relationships that the images form with each other.

Although very time-consuming, it strikes me that doing this very consciously would be an excellent way to help a student find their “voice” as a photographer.

Before we went into the gallery, tutor Robert Enoch suggested that we think very much about the way the images are grouped and displayed as well as the images themselves. The words ‘elliptical’ and ‘whimsical’ were used a lot throughout the day and it was clear that some students found the work to be frustratingly difficult to categorise (or “pointless” in one person’s view). 

The first room is set up as a traditional gallery with framed pictures on the walls and sample photo books over by the large window.  The second room features the three dimensional ‘museum’ pieces, large wooden structures with many dozens of prints framed in panels, which are interchangeable.

There was some interesting discussion about labelling and captions. Singh has said she is reluctant to do this for fear of being patronising and would rather work with what is happening outside the frame: “If I were to put any kind of date or place or caption it reduces the image from what I wanted it to be,” she said. “The where and when is a burden on photography. If people know why and where it was taken, they think they understand the image and they can move on.”  [Source: http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/the-worlds-of-dayanita-singh/?_r=2&]

With this in mind I tried to read the Myself Mona Ahmed images without thinking about what I had already learned about the subject (ie that Mona is a Hijra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)) eunuch and had had an an adopted child taken away from her. The photographs have really captured the sadness and the loneliness as well as a mixture of Mona’s feminine and masculine gestures. Some of the compositions reflect the subject’s status as an outcast (emphasised by the gravestones) but we also see her place within a community and the happy moments with family.

The next set of photos appeared to have been grouped by colour (reds in this case) but we could also see some links in texture, strong verticals, a face on TV in the first image matching with a painting of a woman and a camera on the third.  The images were well composed and quite appealing me but may well have been throw-aways if that had not sat well as a group. This led to an (inevitably) inconclusive discussion about what is a valid photograph.

Many of the pictures we saw explore spaces without people. Singh admits being attracted to rooms and corners and doors, which she thinks have secrets and surprises. We can feel the lingering sense of human presence and traces of existence in the shadows but we get some sense of alienation and voyeurism.

Robert observed that many of the images look as if they could be movie stills, particularly from the French/Italian new wave (eg Antonioni’s ‘Blow Up’, which I have yet to see).  They also have a very timeless quality and evoke a nostalgic sense of a country I have never visited.  We see a very different, darker side to India compared with the usual colourful busy street scenes that are so familiar.  It seems that this is more authentic and reminds me a little of Tokyo through Moriyama’s eyes.

Comparisons were made with Nan Goldin [http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/nan-goldin-2649] and Larry Clark [http://larryclark.com/] and Robert also told us about the rather fascinating Sophie Calle, with particular reference to creating elliptical portraits of a person [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Calle]. Really interesting ideas in there.

Some of the photographs we looked at were very ordinary and quite boring but as a collection they achieved a new resonance and it was quite an adventure to contemplate the various ‘museums’ she has created.  The display looks like huge contact sheets and it is fascinating to try to second-guess why certain images have been juxtaposed or included at all.  Her work slows the viewer down. It demands a reading.

We almost all agreed that the Sent a Letter accordion-fold booklets were gorgeous and that this is a wonderful way to present images.

http://www.dayanitasingh.com/sent-a-letter

The ‘moving still’ video of Mona was rather mesmerising but I felt as if we were intruding on a very personal, intimate moment between Singh and her friend.   The photographer said she felt this was the fist capture that did justice to Mona’s uniqueness and, of course, we can learn more about a person even in a short video portrait than with a single frame. I liked this device and may have to try some moving stills of my own.  Robert mentioned that Thomas Struth has also experimented with this. 

I like Singh’s relationship with the world. I like her playfulness and the way she approaches ideas and her use of language. I like how she leaves stuff out – the ellipsis – and how there is always another path to go down.  She is interested in stories and secrets and chance and indications of the human. “It’s the dream, it’s that time between waking and sleeping when things collide.”  Dark but never depressing and it has given me lots of food for thought.

William Klein + Daido Moriyama Tate Modern Study Tour

It seems apt that the opening room of the Klein + Moriyama show featured the screening of a film, as this was the first official – in my mind anyway – day of my new OCA course on Digital Film Production.  I shall take it as a good omen. And I am going to try to be more disciplined about writing up my notes promptly, while I can still vaguely decipher my scribbles.

Having just landed at Gatwick from a(nother) holiday in Havana, I was lucky enough to be offered a place on this study tour due to a last minute cancellation.  My small disclaimer is that, as I had no idea I would be attending, there was not time for research and I have not yet had chance to follow up on the OCA recommended films or any reviews.   So here are my uninformed ramblings….

We began outside the Tate Modern, in the chilly London air, by briefly discussing the link between these two photographers.  Tutor Rob Bloomfield and various students pointed out some of the connections, such as their use of photobooks, shooting mainly in black and white and their approach to street photography, particularly in New York and Tokyo.  Moriyama has also cited Klein as a major influence on his own work.

The exhibition is brilliantly curated (by Simon Baker) – very nicely paced with a mix of large-scale images, film, smaller prints, paintings and books (mainly from Martin Parr’s private collection, it seems) in vitrines.  Room Three of each retrospective is half open to the other, which emphasises the relationship.  Klein was born in NYC in 1928 but has spent much of his life in Paris.  Moriyama was born in Osaka in 1938 but moved to Tokyo in the early 60s. Both are still working.

Klein’s Broadway by Light film (1958) shows New York, initially through abstract neon signage at night then panning out to buildings in daytime, with an experimental jazz soundtrack.  It is quite disorientating as the close-ups of the signs don’t make much sense in isolation. The music is like that of a Hitchcock thriller and the images seemed to mirror the sounds – pulsating lights and tense human movements.  There is no obvious journey for the viewer – it is more just an experience of sight and sound, which conveys some of the intensity of Manhattan.  I was left with a sense of unease and I noticed most people did not stay to watch the whole film.  An interesting portrait of NYC though, and presumably quite avant-garde at the time of making.  I wondered how much Tom Waits was inspired by Klein – this felt like it might have had some influence on the movie Big Time.  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094743/

This exhibition was my first proper exposure to Klein’s street photography and I was blown away.  He is very provocative, deliberately getting up close to his subjects. Someone is looking directly – and often suspiciously - at him in almost all the shots with crowds.  These are messy wide-angle images, over-spilling the frame, powerful depictions of the chaos and claustrophobia, the parade of humanity in New York.  Some images include fashion models or dancers that the artist deliberately placed in urban settings but it is difficult to see what has been staged and what not. 

The four massive images on the right hand side of Room Two are very commanding and set the tone well for the show – blurry, grainy, heavy use of contrast, eccentric.  The narrative is inexplicable, intriguing (the man with two hats!) and each could be the still from a movie that I would really like to watch.  His lack of concern with technical standards is liberating and works well, even on the larger prints.  Klein really seems to capture the culture of the age and yet his work has a timeless quality, as he presents so many fascinating human stories. 

This kind of up-close street photography always makes me wonder how much you can tell of the personality of the photographer from the images.  Is he charismatic, funny, charming? Über-persuasive or just a ballsy chancer?  There are a few pictures of kids pointing toy guns at him, and many with extreme expressions, which again adds to the in-your-face dynamism of the work.  He uses continuous shooting techniques and various abstractions/experiments such as photograms and exploring different mediums.

Klein talks about his photobook sequencing as being like editing a film.  “I saw the book I wanted to do as a tabloid gone berserk, gross, grainy, over-inked, with a brutal layout, bull-horn headlines.  This is what New York deserved and would get.”

I was very happy that the images did not have descriptive titles (mostly just place names) and it was interesting to see when they had been printed (although I don’t really have the technical know-how to make any deductions from this).  Klein is clearly fascinated with signs and advertising, typography etc and the result is almost collage-like images.  Here is a human figure or two, some glass reflections, a bit of a building and a billboard, a street sign, the hint of a car – these could all have been pasted together from different scenes.  I found the raw energy to be very appealing and inspiring.

The colour work (Contacts) was less interesting to me, possibly as the style is over-used in our modern culture. I found it hard to imagine how exactly it would have been received at the time of creation as it seems so familiar to me.

I am definitely now a big fan of William Klein.  His edginess and multi-media profile as a painter, film-maker and graphic artist alongside his photographic instincts result in some extraordinary images. 

For my own work, this part of the study tour has encouraged me to ….

• Be more bold with the use of contrast
• Feel free to be a bit messier with my still photography compositions (lopped off heads, hands and feet are not always the end of the world) – my erstwhile tutor Clive White has said this all along, of course!
• Be less worried about blur or blown-out highlights (in fact I should experiment more with how little detail can be included while still conveying a message)
• Think about grouping my images together more (last night I discarded some images from Cuba which were blurry or where the people had their back to me which may have worked well in a set with a B/W, grainy treatment)

Moriyama says: “My approach is very simple – there is no artistry, I just shoot freely. For me, photography is not about an attempt to create a two-dimensional work of art, but by taking photo after photo, I come closer to truth and reality at the very intersection of the fragmentary nature of the world and my own personal sense of time.”

I actually felt that much of his work did not feel as if it had been shot freely and I would have surmised that he was in fact obsessed with create two-dimensional art, at the expense of telling stories in the way that Klein does.  I generally found Moriyama’s images to be much more flat, lifeless, uninteresting – all about a 2D aesthetic but individually unmemorable.  I wonder if it is because I have never visited Japan and have no real affinity with the culture or maybe that he conveys too well a sense of isolation and anonymity, a “nightmarish dislocation” as Clive suggested?  Maybe some of his abstractions/disassociations are just one step too far for my taste. I was largely left cold.

It all lead to some interesting discussions with fellow students and tutors though. We were intrigued (and a little surprised) by the image of a foetus – I wondered how far Moriyama had directed its positioning to create the right aesthetic? Clive talked about the archeology of understanding, the layers of time and experience and how much of this has been flattened by the Internet and our modern approaches to learning.  Gareth brought up the point that photography is not a universal language.   I also considered (silently) whether blurry images are a bit more acceptable when shooting with film rather than digital?

I do not believe that Moriyama has really captured the eroticism of Tokyo as he claims. I fact, I found his imagery to be depressingly devoid in that respect – even the pictures of curvaceous body parts.  His approach is sensuous but I found the results lacking.  Perhaps with the exception of the close up of the legs and crotch in fishnet stockings as part of the series How to Create a Beautiful Picture (1987)… I have to confess that I enjoyed watching people getting very close to the image to work out what it was and then jumping back as they realised where they were putting their face.

Room Five saved the day for me – this featured a slideshow of stills taken on the Japanese island of Hokkaido in 1978 when Moriyama was going through some serious personal problems.  He promised himself that he would go out and take pictures everyday and the result is a powerful portrait of the ordinary, the beautiful, the sad, the cold, the loneliness of that moment in his world.  This is where I could really see just how freely he shoots.  No artistry is necessary as it all comes from his simple, wonderful vision.  The Polaroid/Polaroid mosaic (1997) is superb too – gorgeous textures and tricks of scale and perspective which create a new symbiotic interior landscape.

Another highlight of the show was learning that Moriyama has a signature photograph - a stray dog, photographed in 1971.  According to the guide, “It is an image of solitude, disengaged from society and living on the streets, abject, wild and even threatening.  But it may be the intensity of the dog’s gaze, warily assessing its surroundings, that allies it so closely with the photographer.”  It seems that Moriyama has reworked this image obsessively over the decades and has also presented in other mediums such as silk screen prints.  “It has also come to embody his own restless creativity.” 

So what have I learned…. ?

• I want to have a signature image! 
• This part of the exhibition encouraged me, like the Klein work, to think about how I can group my images together – how they speak to each other and work as a set
• The scale and positioning/juxtaposing and repro of prints can make a massive difference to how people respond to them
• Shoot ‘freely’, shoot a lot – get out into ordinary places and find extraordinary things to photograph without worrying all the time about the technical execution

All in all, I found the work of these two incredible men to be very inspiring – a great exhibition experience and, as always, a pleasure to get chance to speak with my student friends and tutors.  It has been a great start to thinking creatively about digital film and using moving images and sounds to convey an artistic vision.