After life; the paradox of the photographic portrait in south africa

After Life; The Paradox of the Photographic Portrait James McArdle La Trobe University, Bendigo.

1. Visages.

Who really are our gods, our devils? We find ourselves living amongst them, they are 'ordinary' people. The everyday assumes epic significance as the mythological arises from our human experience. Many artists have the ambition to portray their friends as gods in their glory and their enemies as incarnations of evil. But as a practising photographer one must confront the nature of the medium, which is particular, rather than idealising in its representations.

This paper arises out of a personal experience of the desire to make photographs that are both a document and a theatre of the self in which my subjects pose as themselves and are recognised by others, the viewers, who have never met them, just as I recognise the personae of some photographs. Through the process of analysing this visual and practical research I draw inferences that are relevant to the discussion of South Africans who photograph people now and for whom the portrait has an urgent objective.

Most photo-portraits concentrate on the face, the instrument of most human expression and communication.

However, without a shared context, it is in fact difficult to read all but the most obvious signs on the face.

How much can we read there of the personality of another human being which is undoubtedly the most complex entity that we can comprehend? How much can the face tell us? We try to read the faces of people we meet, but there is always something disguised under this masquerade.

What is the importance of the mask - the face - in the portrait?

Consider St. Veronica. According to legend she was the woman of Jerusalem who handed her head-cloth to Christ on His way to Calvary. He wiped His brow and returned it to her. The image it was seen to bear is supposed to be the likeness of Christ and it was called Vera-Icon (true likeness) and the woman consequently became St. Veronica. This legend has become confused or compounded with the Turin Shroud, argued, by believers, to be a proto-photograph.

The paradox of the portrait lies in the premise that a ‘true likeness’ has some continuous and true connection with the soul and that it is the face which reflects the soul. Without a face - who are we?

We are faceless, our vision of our selves a series of transient bodily experiences and fragmented views of our own body, the face an absence. The fate of Ovid’s Narcissus hangs upon his failure to see the connection between his face and his reflection. In Roland Barthes’ view, in Camera Lucida, the portrait image has a compulsive fascination for the subject through its ability to represent an entity or entirety that the subject lacks.

Our faces are in the domain of others, while to us they are invisible and in the same way as the photograph as Barthes suggests, ' ... is always invisible: it is not it that we see'. But what of the viewer other than the subject? ∞In Georges Franju’s classic mystery film 'Eyes Without a Face' the father, a murderous plastic surgeon, steals from another girl a face for his daughter whose face has been destroyed. The actress performs in a plaster mask. With nothing but the immobile face of a mannequin, she manages to convey a personality and the range of emotions attached to that person. It is the cinematic and narrative context that provides her with this personality. But the operation fails and this living mask festers.The mirror image, in this instance to the face of Dorian in Oscar Wilde's A Portrait of Dorian Gray, the breakdown of this face is seen to be the result of another’s moral wrongdoing and divine vengeance for a violation of Beauty and Goodness. Redon and Wilde embellish, with melodramatic emphasis, the myth of the face as seat of the soul.

Where is the site of the portrait? How can a visual image possibly convey the spiritual dimension of Ìa human life? Can manifestations of the ideal be found in the real, the sacred discovered in the mundane? I argue that it is the environment of the portrait, the theatre occurring within its architecture, rather than the mask, that contains the metaphysical substance of the true portrait.

2. The Photographic Portrait Colonises Everyday Life

The portrait, once relatively rare and restricted to the wealthy, powerful and famous, has proliferated since the invention of photography to the point where it is ubiquitous. Photojournalists’ and documentary photographers’ subjects are mostly human beings, and portraits and images that look like them predominate amongst the pages of newspapers and magazines. Tracey Derrick has explored a range of subjects that have not previously been documented. One is the Zionist Church. Her sense of the environment of her narrative is emphasised in her images through the use of slow shutter speeds the wide angle lens, demonstrating an energetic involvement with„ her subject. A swirling of forms bursts from the images as she strives to keep pace with the action. The results very often look like portraits snatched from the midst, but our understanding of the people in the images is not as individuals but as participants. We are immersed in the waves with a group of newly baptised church members or experience a spirit manifested in dazzlingly exposed blurred forms amongst dancing figures. Her work demonstrates photojournalists’ new concerns beyond apartheid and South African nationhood, as they uncover previously neglected subjects and new markets for their stories.

Another consequence of the penetration of the everyday by the medium is that photographs of faces often become part of other photographs. The phenomenon of the picture within a picture emphasises the capacity of the space of the photograph around the face to signify complex ideas.

Lifetimes: Under Apartheid, is a compilation documenting three decades in South Africa’s divided¯ society by photojournalist David Goldblatt incorporating the In Boksburg exhibition which when it appeared in the late 70’s at the National Gallery in Victoria, Australia, they provided a controversial insight into apartheid by providing evidence of its personal impact. It is that this photographer eschewed the 'action' shots of breaking news events of the struggles, superseding them with a humane inspection of people’s experiences from their perspective, that made the work so significant to the outsider.

Amongst this collection, it can be argued that only a quarter of the sixty images are portraits, but four of his photographs contain portraits within them. One photograph holds the other, caught by the camera's panoptic vision, in parentheses. This co-incidence changes the capacity of both images, and is uniquely photographic.

In Ballroom dancing Teacher Ted Van Rensburg watches two of his pupils swinging to the music of Victor Sylvester and His Orchestra in the old Court House, Boksburg, 1980Ò the internal image, on its own, framed centrally within Goldblatt’s photograph, presents us with a soldier emblazoned with the symbols of military power. Here is an example of what John Berger would consider to be the predominant function of the portrait in Western art . It is that which is evident in the image by Eli Weinberg of Nelson Mandela in tribal regalia (who even in the degraded state of this third or fourth generation copy is recognisable as an authority figure). A portrait is a nomination for the praise of powerful men where the most innocent reading of the portrait is that it exists because the importance of the original subject justified it and whose authority it reinforces.

Ted van Rensburg is not he only person watching middle aged ballroom dancers. His stance seems to echo the authoritarian, condescendingly benevolent gaze of the General, who in reality is merely a photographic presence and probably unnoticed by the dancers or their teacher. Through the device of re-photography he comes to occupy the same space/time in the viewers’ eyes. These are people dancing the tune of white supremacy, obeying the constrai÷nts of a society based on command and control.

This is the context of one type of the portrait where the portrait equates with political power. The photograph within a photograph codifies a person in relation to other frames of reference and imposes hierarchies of significance. It becomes an icon.

Within the context of the book's double page spread the scale of political relationships escalates. On the opposite page, in another hall in Boksburg (In the mayor’s parlour, at the Town Hall, Boksburg, 1980) a group of mayors in their robes regards a semicircle of chairs, setting up the unfulfilled anticipation of a subject, an unsettling presence or phantom that pervades the space of Goldblatt’s unpopulated images.

“On the sideboard of Dining Room Randburg, 1974” in this detail is another instance of the photo within a photo. This time the 'photo within the photograph' is simply a wedding photograph of a young couple.

Resting against the untouched wedding cake, the image here has a condensed 'factuality' with connotations of being 'past', bringing together two different levels of reality, the photograph captions the still-life. On its

own this double portrait is nothing amongst millions of such photos, but in this context, amongst the mundane clutter of the sideboard, amongst this whiteness, it is transfigured. The now mute wedding photograph has become as much an emblem of time as the clock beside it. A portrait can be more than a name.

Q The title of “George and Sarah Manyani at home, Emdeni Extension, Soweto, 1972” belies the evidence of invasion that pervades space in which we find this couple. One breach in the defences of this heavily guarded space is a calendar photograph, perhaps from a tobacco company, in which a young white woman averts her profile from George and Sarah’s existence in their cramped, fastidiously ordered dwelling. It is a space so small that an initial impression is that we are looking at the pendular figures of an old-fashioned novelty weather indicator. The other presence in this photograph is Goldblatt himself, who becomes a vibrating tenebrous cipher reflected in the gleaming paint work of the end of the partition that separates the two stolid figures. Other heirachies of power are at home here.

This image is a powerful manifestation of the architectural in Goldblatt’s images and relates in its frontality to two early images A barber’s chair of mining timbers, near a compound for black miners, Luipaardsvlei Estate Gold Mines, Krugersdorp, 1965 . The Barber’s Chair is a portrait without a sitter; the object a place where one “constitutes oneself” and is not unlike the device that was used to pose people in the days of the lengthy studio exposure. Its distorted form creating a gestalt that reinforces an inferred human presence not unlike the ambiguous Picasso portraits of his dealers.

The Corner House, head office of a mining corporation, Johannesburg, 1965 is made a sepulchre, framed four-square in Goldblatt’s photograph, cropped short of its heavy neoclassical cornice to elicit a dark browed malevolence in full consciousness of the role of the mining companies at the nadir of apartheid. The spatial disclosure of presence in Goldblatt’s images is significant. The portrait photo inside the photograph is inferred through his use of emphatic framing devices such as the doorway that reveals, behind the stoep of the farmer, the other (political) space occupied by the black farm worker.

At other times he reveals that the sense of enclosure or framing is an illusion. Man in Plastic, King George Street, Johannesburg, 1972 takes shelter in a doorway. His covering, surroundings, all is transparent, transient, luxury and warmth encased beyond his reach, and yet layers of political illusion are poised to be shattered in this image. In Mother and Child in their home after its demolition...1982, the architectural form is its absence, the very framework of the image is evidence of past and continuing violence against privacy.

This would be a formalist Modernist concern, not unlike the drawing and redrawing of the boundary between persona and its surrounding void that occupied the life work of Giacometti, were it not for its political and documentary impulses, it is a manifestation of the reconsideration of the portrait that occupies much of South African photography. David Goldblatt’s oevre does not centre on the conventional portrait, but his publications are fervently subjective. It is a lesson in the way the photographic portrait colonises life, how life, consciousness, in turn infiltrates the image. Contextualisation allows the world and the image to flow together.

I have spent some time investigating the architectonics of Goldblatt’s portraits and the extent to which he enfenestrates the surface with images within images. I would like to turn away now from this giant reputation to see how these issues are in the nineties and within a new order.

Identity, identification, the photograph and the portrait share restless ground. The ID photograph validates identity. To a degree the replica shares the same identity as the original subject. The extent to which the portrait is identified with the subject implies that the portrait carries with it far more of the subject than mere surface appearance. In the South Africa of apartheid, identity is dangerous. If you have a face/home it can be obliterated. Witness this destruction (Fifteen year old youth after release from detention. 1985). A mask is a form of protection. It is a commonplace to say that we all use our face as a mask.

Jean Brundit’s Lesbian couple in Cape Town 1995 (1995) is particularly relevant to developments in South African photography since apartheid in which images of 'facelessness' have a new resonance in new arenas and are particularly addressed through a reevaluation of the portrait in her work.

A couple is posed against a bulwark or bench that partly obscures a benign and identifiably South African landscape, but cut into the image are masks that conceal the identity of the couple, rendering them with a

blank paper white that would seem to detach them irrevocably from the photographic surface. However, this is contradicted by the trace of a shadow projected by the ‘real’ couple against the wall, which sets the mask in relief, hovering above the surface. This elision of two alien surfaces, blank emulsion and modulated tonal image, is supported by the flat focus of the background pinhole image that makeså it so difficult to determine the relative scales of the image elements. Are these giants or dolls? That this effacing device, the ‘white-out’, is more than disturbing is evidenced by the dispute between Okwui Enwezor and Brian Keith Axel over the "Ghost" series of Candice Breitz. This is not a case of imitation but is a coincidence that underlines the questions and sensitivities of identity in this country that go beyond black and white. Reactions to Brundit’s lesbian agenda by right-wing church groups has been vitriolic.

Jean Brundit’s use of the pinhole camera images soft and painterly screen direct identification or naming of the subjec¥t. It is this problem of reference which Brundit raises after a century in which Modernism has torn apart the signifier and the signified of the portrait. Her invention of methods and the variation of her technical repertoire are true to her medium but at the same time critique its premises, particularly when applied to questions of identity, achieving a communication of her own concerns that transcends her associates. In the words of Destiny Deacon: “An art that brings objects loaded with associations or effectively simulates events in real time and space, momentarily bridges the gap between modes of reception normally engaged by representations as opposed to direct experience. In {the suspended state this induces the spectator may assimilate more readily an insight as their own.”

Valued Familes 1995 sets a mesh of interconnected names against an image of enfolded female figures.

Faces are omitted but it is clear from the body language that the subjects candidly address the viewer. The pinhole image here blurs much individuation but produces a vibration in the image that reinforces the emotional warmth between the bodies and the occilation of the observers eye as it scans the between names and bodies and between the strata of the image. Identity here is a factor of the network surrounding these figures and the text is also rendered through a pinhole so that there is a fusion of figures and words.

Cardiac Arrest 1996, and Post-Pubescent, non pregnant, non-lactating 1997, maintain a separation between the temporal pinhole image and the ideographic diagrams imposed on them. Again, despite the appearance of a face in Cardiac Arrest that is as artfully posed as a police photograph, identification of the subject is evaded through the movement in the image and is interrupted by the linear diagrams. These are rendered with an autographic energy that is at odds with the anatomical information they should contain. Oversize and misplaced, the rendering of the cardio-pumonary system becomes a fountain that pours from the eyes of the subject.

Zwelethu Mthethwa describes himself, with a candour uncommon amongst photographers as having had to learn the vocabulary of the medium as if it were a foreign language ...“[photography] demanded one to have a special language to understand it, a special way of decoding the symbols that come with photography and I was pretty bad. I was so bad!” In fact his photographs are an adjunct to his drawing and share their concern with colour and flatness which forms the stage set for images that deal with heightened relationships between people. The photographs are formulaic; the subjects, photographed in their homes, are set against the corner of a room so that their environment is given maximum impact, the panoramic perspective of the wide-angle lens that Mthethwa uses enveloping the viíewer with the drenched colours and vigorous patterns with which their space is decorated. This is an ongoing project that, while it certainly provides source material for the drawings, has become an obsession with its own impetus that has resulted in large numbers of images that threaten to overpopulate Mthethwa’s oevre. Here, it seems, the portrait follows a reproductive urge, a desire to convince the world of the existence of this overwhelming subject matter.

3. Apparitions

We flow through time and are not frozen as a photograph is frozen. A river is an archetypal analogy for life. If Narcissus were to look at his image, not in a river, but in a photograph, he might not find any representation of this process of dynamic change that is himself. The mirror changes with us, the photograph does not. We inhabit a space, our place, not the flat two-dimensional surface we see on photographs.

It has been said that it is the task of the portraitist to represent a whole life-story at one moment of that life by means of condensation.

When the image is made in a ritualistic way, as snapshots are, the result is predictable, preordained by established concepts of the family and its roles and the well established conventions of family snaps. In fact they deal in myths, not real lives. But they always show more than intended, and when we look at them from the future we can see they are prophecies.

What you might see about to happen in my photographs too, has happened. They often look like family photographs. Marriages have failed, children been born. I can know this because I know the people. But the photograph comes before, it is 'Before', and because the subjects are anonymous the viewer cannot know what comes after any more than I can tell you what they will do tomorrow. In this way, what starts as a document ends looking as much like fiction as a predictive biography might, if there is such a thing.

Thàe people in front of the camera and those inside the camera are not replicas of each other. Those outside are people, those inside are ghosts. Obvious, but so often confused. To make images that are as telling as portraits are supposed to be, is only possible if the photographer is aware of this distinction and aware that the ghost in the camera poses as the person. This becomes obvious when you look at the ground glass at an image inverted and reversed. I am using a large format camera, a Sinar, that is actually intended for studio work. Instead of the traditional dark cloth I strap onto my head a close-fitting mask attached to the ground glass screen via bellows. Physically I am in the camera. One looks at the subject as an image, not framing it as through a viewfinder. After some moments of concentration the inverted image rights itself but it is always laterally reversed, as in a mirror.1 I get out of my camera and stand beside it to expose the film you cannot view the ground glass at this point because the film is put in its place - and I try to see as the camera sees. Waiting tensely, I am embarrassed, nervous and trying to vanish so as not to affect what goes on between my 'sitters'. It’s the almost unbearable tension one feels watching a good mystery film. What is going to happen, can I predict, am I wrong, have I seen the clues? The only way to cut the tension is to leave the cinema or endure till the end.

I am moved to make portr≤aits of the people I know. I cannot make these people up - they must exist in order to for me to photograph them. The faces they present to me, to others, to the camera, conceal and reveal themselves, their selves. In order to portray them I must know them, otherwise all I, or they, can show you is a hollow 'likeness'. Between the known face and what it reveals, and the possibility of knowing someone only from their face in a photograph. Should faces, and photographs that contain only faces be trusted?

A life-story, portrayal, is a form of detection, like the mystery film, and linked to death. So often the portrait photograph is is compared with the corpse. How can this be when irt is so easy to believe in the life in the photo? But the act of portrayal through photography is close to death in that it is like a eulogy that is at the same time a conversation. People in portraits are speaking to us, but at the same time they are being represented. The representation can be honest or dishonest, portrayal or betrayal - it is an exchange or a promise or a contract. In a photograph the 'moral dimension' becomes a visual exchange using as currency all the metaphor that can be assembled in the image.

In photography the image can contain a great deal more than just the face - the 'likeness' - there is an embarrassing wealth of space in a photograph with which to do this and the medium will almost automatically create a likeness of everything in that space. Attempts are made to cover that 'everything' with background paper as in Richard Avedon's fashion zshots and portraits, or hide it in darkness, or move in so close that the 'everything' is cropped away, or to import metaphors (objects, costumes, colours, historical or political references etc.) into the orbit of the studio photograph as Clegg and Gutmann or Farrell and Parkin do.

Conversely, retaining the ‘everything’ provides for the possibility of the literal becoming metaphoric, that the ideal might be found in the real, the sacred in the mundane.

We do not exist in isolation, yet so many photographs, supposed to be portraits, show us alone. I photograph in an environment full of found topographical detail. In planning and arranging one of these photographs, my main concern is searching out the right place, of visualising the couples or friends or families together there.

Views from different positions, as from among the human relationships to be portrayed, are unique sights.

Through their relationships the people will focus each other and the place. Just as the couple, about to

separate, and their son do in 'Arrangement' The camera is placed in relation to the focal point they create.

Clues, names for emotions, interactions, rapports, intimacies, histories, alliances or betrayals are somewhere in this space. They may take the form of a balancing rock, a dead dog, a kind of light, or a shadow that looks like a wing. Their discovery is an intuitive one for myself in producing the image, as much as for the viewer. In this way, in a still photograph which in itself has no beginning or end, mystery and discovery co-exist, overlap and fold out.

Focus, the device I use, becomes a visual meta-language, a voice-over, an image of and about the image, ~indicating the signs of detection. In the ground glass, with the aperture wide open, focus seems to be a tangible substance that can be physically moulded by movements of the camera panels. A plane of focus is a fourth dimension, an overlay that makes space tangible or creates voids, that coalesces the chaos of time and space to produce meaning.

What is known and what is unknown are here together.

You see these apparitions before you. These are relationships that I know, that I love and try to comprehend. Here in these photographs they are anonymous but not without naming. If they are not themselves, then who else are they?