Saul Leiter: An Unfinished World

To Milton Keynes Gallery for another photography exhibition – this time by Saul Leiter (1923-2013), a New York photographer and artist who captured his corner of the city for almost 60 years. He never photographed the obvious: he tended towards abstraction, with lots of blank space and puzzling perspectives/reflections, and was brilliant in making something strange from the familiar. Over the course of the exhibition you got to know what pressed his buttons: umbrellas, hats, canopies, the views from the elevated railway or through steamed-up windows.

The full quote of his from which the exhibition title is taken is:

Photographs are often treated as important moments but really they are little fragments and souvenirs of an unfinished world

which I rather liked. Of course, I had to take my own photos!

Photography at Leighton Moss

It’s slightly milder – but still cold – and the sun has disappeared completely. It’s still icy at Leighton Moss: fewer ducks than usual on the iced-over ponds, but great for spotting glass “snakes” beside the path. I was on a morning wildlife photography course, which included wandering around with a camera. I didn’t learn anything new, but I was motivated to look and frame with care. It was too cold to fiddle about with camera settings: I just used a long lens, a high ISO and a wide aperture and pressed the button.

I really like the ice photos!

Yevonde

The current exhibition at the Laing is on Yevonde Middleton (1893-1975), a London-based photographer who started with society portraits and later experimented with colour processing, producing some wonderfully vivid/garish images. I came out feeling a bit “meh”, which was unfair of me. It was just that, after the intriguing compositions of Vivian Maier and Evelyn Hofer, Yevonde seemed so glossily conventional and studio-bound. So many Tatler covers, so many debutantes . . . and the oddest of the lot: “Goddesses and Others”, a 1935 exhibition of society beauties dressed as characters from Greek mythology. It was too frivolous (IMHO) to provoke any profound thoughts on the “modern rendering of powerful female mythologies”.

However, Yevonde was something of a trailblazer. There had been women photographers before her; Yevonde herself was apprenticed to one and then set up her own studio in 1914. She was innovative in composition and production, and there was a playfulness in her early work which I liked. Her colour equipment was so large that it really didn’t lend itself to “street photography” (but but but . . . Herbert Ponting) but she pushed the boundaries of what could be achieved in the studio and dark room.

I came out intending to look at other paintings but got buttonholed by someone coherent but garrulous in front of the Stanley Spencer, so I made my excuses and left. Newcastle looked great in the winter sunshine – so much better than Manchester the other week, the thought of which still brings on a sense of gloom.

London

A couple of days in London to visit the National Portrait Gallery and the Photographers’ Gallery (to see the Evelyn Hofer exhibition).

The Hofer exhibition was brilliant. Not just the technical aspects, which I know little about (large format, dye transfer printing process), but composition, clarity and the sense of real people (Schiaparelli amongst her odd clutter, the unflustered Garrick waitress in contrast to Mrs Cibber behind her, the warehouseman with string for a belt and the foreman distinguishable by his bowler) and beautifully composed/observed still lifes. It inspired me to stop and photograph an old dairy warehouse I spotted on the way back, and – after seeing Hofer’s portrait of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I had to return to the NPG to compare it to John Singer Sargent’s pile-up of WWI top brass.

Abbot Hall

The Great Picture, possibly by Jan van Belcamp, c 1646 – the life and history of Lady Anne Clifford

I’d been intending to visit Abbot Hall again – it’s been closed since my last visit – and the Laing exhibition earlier in the week, with its reminder of Ruskin’s watercolours spurred me to finally go.

I was disappointed to find that practically the whole gallery was taken up with a single exhibition – “What is it that will last?” by Julie Brook – so my hopes of variety were dashed. However there was a Ruskin sketch of a peacock feather – detailed and exquisite. Moreover Brook had selected some works from the collection that had inspired her, and I was very much taken with a landscape by John Piper – a landscape which far surpassed any of Brook’s sloppy watercolours, IMHO.

What Brook did very effectively though, through her land art, was focus on the elements. Her firestacks combined earth, air, fire and water; watching the film of them burning brought to mind various emotions (cold, warmth, the feel of the rocks, the feeling of being soaking wet) and thoughts (transience, physicality vs frailty, the human habit of ritual to make sense of something not understood or mark time that will not stand still). The film of her building a stairway (“Ascending”) in a Japanese quarry – mostly, it suggested, alone – made me think of the weight and feel of the rock, the muscles required to lift it, the callouses on fingers at the end of the day. For me, it appeared a more informed, philosophical way of gazing into the coal fire or up at the clouds (a childhood habit) and making pictures from what I saw.

I spent some time looking at the triptych of Lady Anne Clifford. From L to R: as a studious, talented girl; in her mother’s womb with her father and brothers, who died young; as a lined and careworn woman (in her 50s!) after her decades-long struggle to claim her family’s estates, her books in disorder and a rather creepy-looking cat hiding behind her skirts. The more I encounter her (Skipton Castle, Brougham Castle, Appleby Castle), the more significant the painting becomes.

Greenwich

Finally, a morning when it wasn’t raining so I went to Greenwich. I have a good view of St Paul’s from my hotel window, so there was a pleasing symmetry in seeing Wren’s old Naval Hospital as well.

I visited the exhibition of astronomy photographs in the Maritime Museum: quite wonderful. At times I had difficulty in comprehending exactly what I was seeing: the nighttime scene taken with so long an exposure that it looked like daytime; the constellations with colours that human eyes could never actually see; the single photograph of the sun that was composed of a year’s worth of daily shots. My head hurt so much that it was a relief to turn back to the beautiful photo of Glastonbury Tor – which is a single image with no filtering to represent “unseen” colours.

The abstract beauty of some of the images was breathtaking: the Northern Lights looking like fairyland, the moon looking like a water biscuit, the sun’s surface looking like a fluffy hearth rug at risk of sparks from an open fire. Jackson Pollock, eat your heart out.

Chris Killip

To the Photographers’ Gallery for an exhibition of photographs by Chris Killip, whom I encountered in Liverpool. (I think I may also have seen his shipbuilding photographs in the Laing a couple of years ago, but I’m not sure.) He tried to photograph those “who’d had history done to them”, and he succeeded wonderfully. There were some from the early 1970s Isle of Man (where he was born): another world. Even the placenames were strange: “Interior, Cooilslieu, Greeba”. The hand-knitted cardigans with buttons the colour (I imagined) of boiled sweets. Dirty fingernails and darned clothes. Girls and women photographed in doorways, one destined to be transformed into the other. I liked the identical earnest expressions of both the whippet fancier and his whippets. The Wallsend photographs (with the tanker “Tyne Pride” being constructed in the background) documented the demolition of the streets. Later photographs from the 1980s didn’t suggest that the replacements were any better.

It was in the Skinningrove and Lynemouth series that Killip was most interesting, for he followed the lives of the fishing village and sea coal gatherers respectively over a long period, and the same faces crop up at work and in their free time. You get a sense of individuals within their community, with the physical work, risks and harsh weather that they endured. (Yes, I was fully aware that I have clean fingernails, nice clothes and a comfortable life as I looked at images of children picking over washed-up coal in a biting north-easterly.)

And then the couple at Askam-in-Furness. 1982. 1982! It looks more like 1952.

Vivian Maier

I came to Milton Keynes to visit an exhibition of photographs by Vivian Maier – mostly taken in 1950s, 60s and 70s New York and Chicago. The passage of time and changes since then made for a fascinating exhibition: wonderful B&W square prints and then the sudden jolt to rectangular colour prints where Maier used colour almost as the subject, and finally to some very shaky film. Each print in the exhibition cried out to be looked at carefully – whether it was in the composition, capturing a moment, the hint of a story or the technical brilliance. I wrote down several adjectives as I wandered around: witty, abstract, tender, detached, unflinching, driven, nosy. Maier was taken with reflections, formal composition and juxtapositions. (I like the LIFE headline below the dozing newspaper seller.) It must have taken some nerve (in both senses) to photograph some of her subjects: some look as if they’re about to tell her to get lost.

With children, she was brilliant: they are natural as they look at her camera. Portraits of wealthier people are taken from behind or at an angle, as if she had to catch them unawares, whereas it looks as if ordinary people were willing to be addressed by and pose for her. She also photographed those who were down on their luck. Her gaze doesn’t waver here: she documents the hardship, even though the photographs were never seen. There seemed something pitiless in her gaze until I read that she was outspokenly liberal, which changed my view of her.

Maier earned her living as a live-in nanny or carer, and she seems to have been alone in the world from an early age. One senses this in the self-portraits: a kind of proclamation that says “I exist and this is my proof”. She sounds eccentric, secretive and even obsessive: she left over 100,000 negatives but rarely showed her photographs to anyone. But, my goodness, what an eye she had and what single-minded purpose she showed. I can’t pick out a favourite: I loved the abstraction of the bed springs and the torn netting, but equally the tenderness of the linked hands and the little girl holding onto her mother’s skirts moved me. In a more detached frame of mind, I would pick out the woman walking alone under the stoa: a single human figure dwarfed and duplicated by monumental architecture.

After lunch (on the fourteenth floor: I rise and rise), I cycled to Bletchley for a nostalgic visit. Each time I find myself further from my moorings: once these were streets of working-class family houses, but now they are inhabited by working-age adults who turn gardens into car parks and lean-tos into living spaces. The only trace I could find in my parents’ old house were some Japanese anemones. Almost twenty years ago I planted some from my own garden into their front garden and they thrived. I will assume that these are the very same flowers, since nothing about the house now suggests that the residents tend to anything other than their own business.

Radical Landscapes

An exhibition at Tate Liverpool, looking at landscape from the early twentieth century onwards in relation to history, identity and dissent. It didn’t really sound like my kind of thing and on entering I was immediately put off – as I am more and more these days – by the competing soundscapes that greeted me. John Berger (always worth listening to) on a loop competed with a dreary reciting voice, a bank of TV screens (like a cut-price Radio Rentals) and a 1950 MAFF information film advising farmers what to do in the event of a nuclear attack.

I found the exhibition incoherent but occasionally stimulating. The poor British landscape! It seemed on this reading to exist to promote wellbeing and validate identity, host raves, provide a living, represent an Earth Mother and inspire acts of creativity. Can it bear the weight of all these expectations? There was plenty about land ownership (Berger is brilliant on that) and resistance to it, but nothing about non-anthropocentric nature or beauty. There was an air of disappointment that Constable’s Flatford Mill said nothing about the enclosures, which is . . . OK, whatevs. But to say that it depicts the countryside as a place of leisure when a boy is clearly leading the horse towing the boat is off beam. He’s not doing dressage: he’s working.

Yes, of course my attention was caught by some exhibits. Tacita Dean’s oak, Eric Ravilious, John Nash, the discovery of the odd-sounding Kibbo Kift, and even, momentarily, Ruth Ewan’s ”Back to the Fields”. This was a representation of the French Republican calendar, with its ten-day weeks et al. I was ready to yawn but didn’t. The installation itself – 360 agricultural objects representing a rural alternative to the saints calendar (a day for barley rather than St Barnabas) – was underwhelming until I focussed on two or three objects, moved away from the visual, and thought about the aims behind the restructuring of the calendar: a desire to sweep away all religious references, to rationalise the way time is counted, to focus on the essential rural labour that feeds us all. The fact that the installation had been plagued with fruit flies was ironic: art having no idea of the messier side of nature.

Moore’s sculpture invited touch (I didn’t) and sent me thinking about mushroom clouds and brains (the Mekon) and war (a Spartan helmet).

What remains, however, are Chris Killip’s black-and-white photographs of seacoal gleaners in Northumberland. Magnificent and bleak, they captured perfectly what the rest of the exhibits had overlooked: the rawness of the natural world and how being a part of it is discomforting as well as elemental.

Liverpool

Liverpool: you can see why it’s lost its UNESCO world heritage status

To Liverpool in the rain to visit the Walker again and to see the Don McCullin exhibition at the Tate. I had actually seen most of the photographs before in Manchester, so I skipped most of the war reporting. McCullin prints his own B&W photos, so there was an element of (perfectly acceptable) artifice in his later landscapes: the dazzling reflections and the very black shadows. The reportage photos were mesmerising, mixing the human with the humorous and the horrible. The photo from a Finsbury Park café brought to mind Dix’s portrait of a hostile-looking boy.