Category: photography

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Whatever else we might say about the crooked path of American history, it seems beyond doubt that the growth of the continent (and, indeed, of the nation) has tended inexorably westward, away from the Old World and toward the New, so that if the east coast is indelibly connected to the past, building on a legacy of cosmopolitan habits and relations, the west is (or was, at least) wide open, a place where fortunes might be gained and lost, where a man could make something of himself, regardless of who he was or where he came from. The history of California perhaps most exemplifies this trend – along with the cost of sustaining the restless energies that drove it. In a sense, then, it is no accident Gregory Halpern chose ZZYZX as the title for this work. It is not only the unpronounceable name of a western town development, purported to be the last word in the English language, perhaps little more than the fever-dream of some long-forgotten speculator, but it is also a point of linguistic exhaustion, where there are no more resources to play with, not even words.[i] It is a fitting, if admittedly rather oblique epitaph for the human and material consequences of America’s failed utopian premise.

Halpern’s California is an idea, a set of experiences, rather than an actual place. One would be hard pressed to identify landmarks or get any concrete sense of its geography from the pictures. This seems like a deliberate strategy to suggest the dream-like quality of the place, where even its physical outlines are open to question, its identity a continual work-in-progress, lacking any real centre. The topography is all about movement, pictured in the form of streets and freeways, even the repeated motif of stairs; or, conversely, of arresting movement – we also see a lot of fences and barriers, shuttered buildings. The result is a kind of stasis, tendencies that pull is opposite directions and get nowhere. This is, of course, not a literal commentary of the conditions of the place, such as those that define the regulation of its public spaces and so on, but is rather about using its built fabric as a way of reflecting the kind of experience it produces, which is, in turn, the consequence of forces at play in the wider social sphere. The pictures are a metaphorical recounting of those forces. But this social landscape is also fundamentally an affective one, as it defines how we relate to ourselves and to others. The work operates, then, on the level of feeling, on an intuitive sense of how one moment connects to another, and also on the very real dilemmas that underlay the social framework – even as they are furthered by its inadequacies.

The book has its own kind of movement too, out of the desert, into the city and on to the sea, tracing the historical expansion that preceded it. From the outset we are introduced to a setting, light blasted and stark, along with a cast of characters to populate it, beginning with a man who holds a small metal globe in his eye socket, faintly reflecting back the landscape that surrounds him. Perhaps he is a stand-in for the photographer himself, whose singular eye fulfils much the same function, so that this picture also clues us into the fundamental subjectivity of the narrative, which is surely unfolding in the confines of one eye, one point of view; nothing here seems intended to be definitive, and this mood of ambiguity is perfectly suited to the territory that is being crossed – and indeed, imagined – in the work. But even as its trajectory becomes apparent, the narrative still takes a decidedly episodic approach, joining together people and places as if the journey we go on (with Halpern) is following its own logic in each particular moment, outside of the destination itself. This makes sense for a place that was constructed piecemeal, a history and a culture formed from whatever was easily to hand, a notion that is alluded to in a number of subtle ways, such as the cobbled together layers of white-painted boards covering up an empty shop front. No-one and nothing stays very long.

The quality of light is another defining feature of the pictures, but even this tends to extremes, its dazzling brightness exposing every vulnerability of Halpern’s subjects, or its sudden lack immuring them in darkness, which is broken only by the searchlight of a police helicopter or the glow of a raging forest fire; shades in between, though soft and golden, are occasional and seem to pass quickly. The contrast between these opposing states only serves to make the darkness seem darker and the light more painfully lucid. There are no crowds here either, mostly just individuals, alone and isolated. This is perhaps symptomatic of a society than can no longer sustain the bonds that once defined it, or that never even formed them in the first place. And yet, what we call ‘society’ is in fact the sum of those bonds, so the lack of them helps to explain the ruined landscape that we see here (if not what caused the ruin to begin with). The animals Halpern encounters are also often alone and vulnerable, at odds with the urban setting in which they find themselves, cut-off from contact with the natural world even as it presses in on the edges of the city.

In fact, Halpern spends almost as much time observing what lies beyond the urban centres as he does life on the streets, in the process emphasising the way in which these places seem to have been erected haphazardly on top of what is basically an inhospitable wilderness, which often breaks through the surface, or necessitates an uneasy accommodation, such as with the several rows of pink terraced houses seemingly built into a cliff. It’s hard not to feel these dwellings are on borrowed time, a flimsy charade compared to the rock that appears to enfold them. What stands out above all is the seemingly provisional quality of the places that Halpern has photographed, which is perhaps a measure of how the society they support is, in itself, a somewhat tentative arrangement, without the deep roots of a long, shared history and only the semblance of a ‘community’ structure. It is the sense that, for all the energy and enterprise they supposedly represent, the culmination of a centuries-long trend in national development, these places are only sketchily outlined on the landscape, clinging to the present for whatever little can be had out of it, with no past and no future, just quick-fixes and motel living.

Many of Halpern’s subjects are also people on the margins of society, with few resources and seemingly little control over how they are represented in the pictures, a fact that has not always been adequately addressed in the conversation around the work. However beautifully realised it might be – and it is – there remains something dissonant about the idea of real poverty and suffering being aestheticized for the delectation of an ‘enlightened’ audience. It is not the case that these people can’t be photographed or that they themselves can’t engage with the process in a conscious way; though often startling in their intimacy it is likely that most of these pictures are the result of some kind of conversation between the photographer and the people photographed. But this engagement, on the part of the photographer and his subjects, is not really made explicit enough in the work. Similarly, the decision to concentrate so much on the lower-end of the socio-economic scale without providing much sense of context for the disparity of wealth (and race, for that matter) at its root risks naturalising the situations that are depicted, suggesting they are without a very real set of causes. Of course, there is no obligation for an artist to provide ‘balanced’ commentary and Halpern is hardly sugar-coating the issues at stake, but not to try find some way to acknowledge his own position is, at the very least, naïve.

As a result, some aspects of the work – and some images – tend to feel a bit forced. One of the most telling examples in this respect shows a calloused, grimy hand holding an iPhone that displays the Warner Bros. logo on its screen, a neat summary of what it seems like the work should be about – the contrast of reality and illusion, the atomizing effects of contemporary life – that actually ends up breaking the spell that has been so successfully established elsewhere, not least because it relies for its effect on a symbolism that is in many ways external to the work itself. Another image of an African-American woman looking through some kind of eye-piece or optical finder is rather too pointedly followed by an image of what is presumably a police helicopter sweeping the darkness below. This stands out as a rare misstep in what is an otherwise accomplished narrative. More successful are the repeated references to mark-making and writing, tracing an arc in the pictures from that descends from an opaque but still somewhat recognisable reference to the systems of the Kabbalah that in a later image is rendered as a crude mess of crayon scribbles. Language and sense, the very means of social exchange, seem to have broken down.

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This is clearly a subjective work, then, and one whose existence appears to depend on the idea that the social and historical forces now shaping the world we live in can only be approached in a round-about way; they are simply too intangible to be seen directly, even though the pressure of those same forces has resulted in a painfully riven social landscape, the majority of its inhabitants adrift in the shadow of inaccessible wealth. If the West (and California, in particular) is America’s Promised Land, the end of its wandering, both practically and, as it were, spiritually, then the failures encapsulated by the manifest impossibility of that utopian aspiration can’t help but undermine the coherence of its national identity. Halpern has witnessed the consequences of this fracturing at ground level and he has fashioned a powerful account of its legacy, by no means confined to the recent present, but stemming from years and decades of public need not being met, of suffering not assuaged, of favouring the pathologies of private profit over the common good. He does not pretend to offer solutions for these problems, or even a concrete diagnosis of what they might be, but the sense that something is wrong with the world he depicts is obvious, the sense, perhaps, that some once-vital component of our humanity has been recklessly squandered.

Gregory Halpern, ZZYZX, Mack, 2016.

[i] Allegedly pronounced zye-zix, but you can make up your own mind about that. The derivation of the name is mentioned nowhere in the book, which seems a like a bit of a missed opportunity, but presumably arises out of desire to not identify the work too closely with any single location.

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Ron Jude, Lago, 2015

It will make this discussion a bit clearer if we consider an example of photographic narrative and briefly examine how it works, as a narrative. Ron Jude’s Lago seems like it would make an excellent case-study for this purpose.[i] Jude is an artist heavily invested in the potential of narrative – the relationship between images – to create a complex meaning that perhaps could not be achieved in any other way. His works are often oblique accounts of a specific place and Lago is no exception, being centred on the distinctively atmospheric desert region around the Salton Sea in Southern California.[ii] So even at the outset we have established the thematic grounding for the work, a place, that is also more or less the subject of the pictures. Jude progressively modifies this theme by combining different views (and different kinds of picture) in the sequence of the book, which could of course function equally well on the gallery wall. The work is perhaps not ‘about’ a place, a distinction we will explore more fully soon, but the pictures do revolve around it thematically. It’s clear that the information accompanying the work has a role here, but it is the consistency of the pictures that really tells us ‘where’ we are. This is the ground on which Jude will build his narrative.

A ‘prelude’ sequence that appears before the title page.

The book opens with a short ‘prelude’ of three images that appear before the title page. In many ways, these encapsulate the preoccupations of the work as a whole. The first is a view of a darkened plain rising to hills beyond, while a ring of lights from some small urban centre glows weakly against the blackness. We can’t help but feel how tentative any kind of settlement must be out here. The second is a near horizon-less view of what must be the eponymous lago (Spanish for lake), that deprives us of any clear orientation, while the last image in the sequence shows large chunks of discarded masonry, the flotsam of attempted habitation, accompanied by a pair of running shoes left to rot in the sun. So here we have a group of images, very different in subject – except for supposedly being made in the same place – that are also quite different stylistically, but that function together to shape a particular understanding of those subjects (or the relationship between them) thematically. The theme of the work is what it tells us about the subject of the pictures, how it modifies our understanding of that subject, or indeed brings us to an entirely new understanding of it. Narratives like the one that Jude has fashioned in this work create a dense, interlocking network of references between different motifs, repeated with significant variation throughout the sequence. These echo back and forth between the pictures, making the ‘world’ in which the work exists, a world that, in Jude’s case especially, is not a literal one, but a kind of imagined place, mapped on the actual places that he has photographed.

This use of repeated motifs is an inherently flexible strategy; within the thematic framework the images elaborate, the variations that can be employed are nearly endless. In some instances, the picture simply repeat a subject, albeit shown in a different way. Jude often uses the ubiquitous palm trees of the region in this fashion. They establish place, but also serve as a barometer of mood, sometimes rising up defiantly, but more often drooping or truncated. The images of barriers and fences work in the same way, metaphorical reminders of how the boundaries that have been put in place here are, at best, precarious. The line dividing the man-made from the ‘natural’ is increasingly frayed. At other times the variation is a formal one, so that the echo is between the disposition of dissimilar or even unrelated subjects. This is not simply a visual conceit. It actually serves to hold the narrative together, or to push it forward, by linking these subjects visually through a sort of rhyming that, while it doesn’t transcend the nominal subject of the picture, isn’t bound to it either. Jude also introduces another variation that is perhaps not unique, but that does seem specific to his interest in the relation between place and memory, or rather the difficulties of that relationship. He makes frequent use of lens flares and other artefacts to break up the images; this is seen often enough to count as a deliberate strategy in the work. It is an example of a thematic variation that does not depend on either subject or style.

An example of using particular motifs in a sequence.

A short group of images toward the middle of the book demonstrates these formal resonances in action. The first image shows a telephone pole tightly framed against a blue sky from which several strands of wire have become disconnected and so the hang down in a whiplash pattern, perhaps moved by the wind. The following image serves to place the one preceding it in some kind of context. We see a far wider view of a bunker-like house, which in Jude’s account at least seem to be endemic in the region, surrounded by rough ground and scrub. This is presumably where the phone lines run to (or don’t, in this case) and we can see similar poles in the distance, which the now familiar palm trees echo as well. It is the proximity of the images that reinforce this impression and Jude follows them with one of the several impromptu still-life images that populate the work, a curving line of empty cans on the sun-baked ground, a clear variation on the linear motif introduced by the photograph of the pole. He then cuts to another view of a house (or the same house) from a different angle, again linking the images with the motif of utility pole and palms. The sequence then moves to an entirely different scene, showing the circular pattern of a tire burnout, with the Sea in the background. Surely this completes the motif established in the earlier image of the pole and disconnected wires, a suspicion that is confirmed when we see the following close shot of a record standing on edge in the bare earth, another telling echo.[iii]

Different motifs: fences, (small) dogs, spiders.
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Variations on a theme: in this case, oranges (and that spider again).

This idea of narrative as variation on a theme can also be seen in the case of pictures that share a subject, but that don’t otherwise seem connected visually. This is especially true of the pictures showing different animals, such as the large spider first seen in close-up and that is later confined to a jar. Similarly, there are several images of small dogs, their size emphasising how inhospitable the surrounding landscape is, (and not forgetting the bag of Pedigree dog food that features in a luminous image of wind-blown rubbish gathered in the corner of a fence). Another especially satisfying example is the motif of oranges that we first encounter as they hang heavily on the tree in one picture, which later becomes a single orange withered on the branch, and later still, toward the end of the book, peeled and lying in the sand, covered in ants. Similarly, people are almost entirely absent from the pictures, though their presence is intimated everywhere, and the exceptions are equally significant. The first leans tiredly against a gate, his face averted, while the other floats in the lake, his expression somewhat unreadable. Neither could really be described as portraits, the people are just elements in the picture. Women are also nowhere in evidence; the abandoned shoes that crop up on several occasions all look to be men’s, even the porn DVD cover caught in a fence shows only men in various combinations.

Brief glimpses of a human presence, almost always male.

The whole narrative is built up from variations like this, that cross between the pictures, creating echoes and a larger, cumulative meaning. Of course, the interpretation of any sequence does not entirely depend on what the pictures are of or even the relationships that I have noted between then, but actually requires both to function, along with our impression of the overall narrative. The linkages here can operate in a number of different ways, as we have seen. They are essentially what the work is about – what it ‘means,’ and that meaning is created by the relationship between the images. The subjects of the pictures serve as motifs that direct the viewer to a particular understanding of what the work is about. Rather than showing a real place, here they serve more to describe the experience of place, invoked as an experience – and also as a history, a layering of events that have left some trace. The effect the narrative has, or rather what it does, as a narrative, is in this case to form a decidedly pessimistic mood in which communication is thwarted, fruit dies on the vine and people waste their days with curtains shut against the incessant glare of a sun that can sometimes render even what is right in front of us unintelligible. This is a landscape of memory and of metaphor where the instability of meaning rests, somewhat paradoxically, on a finely calibrated relationship between the images that make it up.

An example of structural variation in the narrative.

The progression of the images is, of course, equally, structured. The rhythm created by the different motifs as they emerge, the size and placement of the images on the page, the breaks between different sections, these all count in realising the impression that defines the narrative – indeed, the narrative is that impression, although Jude prefers a distinctive irresolution to any kind of neat ending. Instead, he implies progression in other ways. One particularly distinctive example of this approach occurs about three-quarters of the way into book, where he inserts a break consisting of a blank spread, and the following images move the narrative forward by making us aware of specific themes that have been latent so far – and putting to effective use a variation on the motifs that he has already established. The first image after this break is a kind of reverse view, looking out from one of the many windows we have seen, glimpsing sunlit trees through a crack in the curtains. Literally and metaphorically this is an interior image, perhaps intended to remind us that the territory the work inhabits is as much psychological as geographical. The following images help to reinforce this idea. Here we have two successive views of the churning grey water in a sandy creek, one closer than the other and also slightly blurred. These are followed by an image of palms so dark as to be almost unreadable. The result is to suggest something violent but inexpressible behind what is visible, so that this seemingly anomalous sequence actually reconfirms the thematic preoccupations of the narrative, not least because of its subtlety articulated structural relation to the whole.

There are, of course, many other ways for a narrative to work. This is just an example, and a partially examined one at that. Ron Jude’s Lago is, nonetheless, a sophisticated work that amply demonstrates the potential of the narrative approach. That it isn’t the only strategy for a project should also be obvious, however; the distinction I have made between photographic narrative and a photographic series is just one possible alternative for a myriad of ways to realise a body of work. It should be clear as well they all in some measure depend on the relationship that comes to exist between the pictures, whether that is thematically, in terms of subject matter, or some other way. I would argue, however, that it is the specificity of this relationship that defines a narrative approach to the medium, where the basis for the work itself lies precisely in how the pictures interact, the network of shared meaning and formal resonances that the photographer has created from the pictures, but that does not, in the final analysis, depend on any one of them alone. It is this aspect of narrative that makes it such a potent tool for producing work of substantial complexity, regardless of how the narrative is framed, not least because of how it overcomes the limitations of the single (or singular) photograph. Pictures don’t really tell stories, but maybe they can do something that’s even more interesting.

(Part 1 of this article can be found here).

 

[i] Ron Jude, Lago, Mack, 2015. The book is also accompanied by a sound work from Joshua Bonnetta that is an ambitious attempt at expanding the photobook (and narrative) form, but that is also unfortunately a bit outside the scope of our discussion here, so I won’t be mentioning it in what follows.

[ii] Not really a ‘sea’ of course but a large in-land lake that has, nonetheless, very high saline levels. Its history is a fascinating mix of geology, disaster and failed hopes. Formed when a massive dry lake-bed was flooded by over-run irrigation canals in 1905, there was some attempt to develop the area as a resort in the 1950s, but this came to nothing, largely because of declining environmental conditions in the region.

[iii] According to the label it’s C.O.D Polka by Bill Gale and his Orchestra. Admittedly, a further image of palms falls between this one and the photograph of the circular tire burnout previous to it, but if anything this just demonstrates my point, as well as Jude’s decidedly filmic sense of pacing.