Enigma

A new photographer compared to some older ones

Views of Niagara Falls; British Portrait Painters by John Russell; Alec Guinness by Kenneth Tynan; Images of War by Robert Capa; The Americans by Robert Frank; Photographs, The Face of Asia, An Inner Silence and The People of Moscow by Henri Cartier-Bresson; Sleeping with Ghosts, Hearts of Darkness and Don McCullin by Don McCullin; Photographs by George Crews McGhee, Tokyo Lucky Hole by Araki; London, Public Appearances, Stills and Sittings by the Earl of Snowdon; HotHouse by the editors of Rolling Stone; Photographs by Annie Leibovitz; When the Borders Bleed by Ed Kashi; 48 Recent Photographs by John MacLean; City Stories by Norman McBeath; Complete Prose and Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen; East 100th Street by Bruce Davidson; Barcelona by Alejandro Bachrach; Uncovered by Thomas Allen; Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles by Elizabeth Ward and Alain Silver; Erotica Universallis by Gilles Nèret; Very Similar by Frank Horvat; Terryworld and Lady Gaga x Terry Richardson by Terry Richardson; Wheels and Curves, compiled by Walter Hönscheidt and Uwe Scheid; Pin-Up, edited by Dian Hanson; County Fair: Portraits by Mikkel Aaland; The Family of Men; The Mammoth Book of Erotic Women in Photographs, edited by Maxim Jukabowski; Early Erotic Photography by Serge Nazarieff; Girls Standing on Lawns, Hurry Up and Wait and Why We Broke Up by Maira Kalman and Daniel Handler; Chicken Soup, Boots and Max in Hollywood, Baby by Maira Kalman; (un)Fashion by Tibor Kalman and Maira Kalman; Nudi by Paolo Roversi; Kim by Kim Harlow and Bettina Rheims, translated by Paul Gould, and Female Trouble by Bettina Rheims; Sex by Madonna; Obsession: Marlene Dietrich by Henry-Jean Servat; Idols by Gilles Larrain; From Where I Stand by Mary McCartney; Photobook by Rrkwr; Études Complete by Jesse Ponkamo; Come Over, We Can, and We Will by Tyko Say; Kuya by Yameen; and American Electric, Out Now and Abandonment by Chloe Paul

American Electric by Chloe Paul is the product of an academic project. Shot on location in the parts of the country where no one visits and where nothing ever seems to happen, Paul hopes to show that these places are alien and strange and hostile, in a manner of speaking, when night falls. In the daytime, they are the left-behind, the slowly decaying. There are a lot of temporary fences strewn about, enclosing things that once, once upon a time, someone had hopes of fixing. Phone numbers for child-minding services — are they real? who knows? — are spray-painted onto concrete.

People drive around in trucks with over-high suspension and comically fat tyres. Parking lots are empty, picnic tables unused. A lot of places are gently overgrown. Driveways collapse as weeds push through the ground with determination, swallowing ancient cars. Homes butt up against cooling towers from a power station that can’t be serving too many people locally. These are the places where nothing ever happens, where nothing can be expected to happen.

Signs cut in half.

Woody Allen (if we were permitted to find him funny) would find that funny.

Figures on the move in landscapes where they have nowhere to go. A small sign, dwarfed by a junction with no cars waiting at it, which directs people to a nearby ‘Dungeon of Doom.’ A bar’s fluorescent sign suggests that patrons might play video games to while away the evening hours. This is a little like some of what Robert Frank wanted to show of America and the Beats claimed to write about, in their day.

But then, night falls, and the strange early-twentieth century angles in old construction looks more and more like horror film set-dressing. Security lights flare into the lens, blinding photographer and reader while people are silhouetted somewhere in the frame.

You can’t hear the neon signs, but you can see them. People seem bizarre, almost spectral, when they are framed through small, tight windows, their rooms illuminated by low lights and by the TV. It’s almost orthodox, like Cartier-Bresson happening upon a Soviet machinist in his factory, hammer in gigantic, muscular hand.

American Electric was shot in Michigan City, Indiana. And Antioch, Manhatten, Harvard, Fox Lake and Zion — those all in Illinois.

When I was younger I wandered around Nottingham — a bigger city than those places, but just as much a jungle of urban desolation — in the early hours of cold mornings. I saw then something Paul has also noticed: that traffic lights are remarkable sources of illumination. That they give great J. G. Ballard sense to a scene of spilt engine oil, where small pools of rain water mix with fallen leaves. Some acting can have the same effect; Ken Tynan seemed to believe Alec Guinness could do anything. For photographers, there are other routes to grot: Araki has approached most of them. Dian Hanson or Gilles Nèret or Serge Nazarieff has edited them.

In Abandonment, Paul notices some of the structures left to the care of time near her. There is, as her camera catches, nothing gentle about inviting in decay — although giving up the fight might seem like less effort. Out Now, meanwhile, is street life — demonstrations, movement, action. Activity which, this decade at least, so many have confused for activism.

In Kuya, meanwhile, an American photographer travels to the Philippines to meet his wife’s family for the first time. He sees what many people see: bright colours, ramshackle housing, tending to the crops, ubiquitous vehicles, roasted pigs, in whole or in part. What raises this collection from the merely average is the capturing of an interesting family situation, with an ancient nonagenarian matriarch, with a fair number of children running around. With movement and colour and style.

In his books, meanwhile, Terry Richardson succeeds in getting quite pointedly across his point of view: that of a man whose appreciation of sleaze and rejection of artifice. But, the pose itself becomes artificial and standard. His pictures are sometimes beautiful, often energetic. But once the reader notices the style, it no longer seems unaffected, or in the moment, or real. The old photographers knew that even if they arranged and contrived and posed their famously spontaneous photographs, they had to leave enough room for doubt, enough to permit a little debate, for eighty subsequent years.