Last Men
What’s photography for?
Money Mantra by Juan Patino Herraiz
This is a picture book, or rather a book of photographs, about the things beyond the surface. Of course, surfaces matter. Let’s not lie to ourselves about it. We all have faces. Most of us have eyes. We look at things. At other people. At art and film and TV. We see advertisements, everywhere we go. They’re part of our lives. They’re part of the places we inhabit and travel through.
The surface is inescapable. And you can, even if you can’t with a hundred per cent accuracy, judge a book by its cover. You certainly can, if you try hard enough. We all do it all our lives.
The problem of photography is that, the better it becomes, the more it comes into its own, the harder it is for those who know what they are doing to see beyond surfaces. Photographs become too beautiful, too composed. They’re not rough like the early photobooks of a century or more ago. And the photographer’s subjects get wary, conscious of the camera’s tricks. While the technology ever schemes to make us look better, to get us more and more in focus. To flatter all who permit themselves to suffer from flattery.
Photographs can, no doubt, still find the rats in the gilded staterooms, the cockroaches in the kitchens of the five and six star hotels. Photography can do this. But is this art or mere journalism? Photographers can peer into people’s pores and scrutinised their ageing and ruined faces. Photography, like the still life, can scatter some wilting flowers and a skull on a table. Can make us forcibly stop and, discomforted, think.
But that problem emerges again. How can a medium which is all about making interesting images — and putting them before people who the photographer intends to attract — show the reality of the world? The reality of a world of boredom. How can a medium which thrives upon immense selectivity produce a feeling not of selection but of artlessness? Even the most productive human painter can only make so many finished works. But you could take more photographs than you could look at with any care. How to make them truthful and not hand-picked, your own art par excellence? Uncontrived. How to find the truth behind the lie?
You must admit it is a problem.
Some European photographers and some Americans and quite a few in Japan in the latter half of the last century decided to scare and to shock. That was the way, must be the way, to win the game. Some, like Araki, shocked with remarkable, almost guileless, candour. The breaking of taboos. The documenting of sleazy real life. Some like Frank, from America, tried a different tack; treat the homeland like a warzone. Like you’re on assignment from some magazine. Like it’s ‘Nam, baby. Shoot the freak show. Shoot the rodeo. Shoot the circus.
Show the public what they’re really, truly like. What they seem to want. What excites them, makes them happy. What they spend their time and money on. Mapplethorpe’s pictures of the leather scene are like this. They’re too much for me. I can’t look at them. In that way, surely he’s succeeded. I lost and he won. That’s some statement to make of the truth of your art.
More photographers try another tack. They, too, will migrate towards the extreme, but they will only approach it obliquely. If you wanted to make the most cutting, the most violent, the most extreme and destructive comment on the emptiness of modern society, you may just photograph ordinary people, their heads down, walking past a poster board or piece of advertising. I don’t even need to tell the reader what the subtext of all of that might be.
You just need to show the inside of someone’s fridge: all the cans and the nothing that are in there. They’ll get the message well enough.
A lot of what passes for street photography, at least in the latter half of the last century, was just photographing weirdos. Some of them would be delighted by your interest. They’d walked around looking like that for quite a while, hoping someone else would care. Other weirdos, alas, are on their guard. They might not sign your release forms, were you for a moment considering offering them one. Those people have to be captured unaware, like dangerous animal species destined for Denver Zoo.
A subtler approach — a more precise, stiletto way — is to photograph quite ordinary people doing ordinary things. Get them on a not-too-busy commercial street. Photograph the backs of their heads, not the front. Capture them in their workwear: their heavy, cheap button-ups, the jackets bought off the peg. The dresses that there are a million of in some warehouse. Those shoes that are professional but not pleasant. That shirt someone (no telling who) spilled a cup of coffee on.
Then you might see some of the horror of modern life. Not that it is all horrible. We have indoor plumbing. And though war will surely come again, not everyone currently living will perish in the next one. Things are boring yet. Check your pension on occasion, look at local house prices.
The horror, then, is perhaps in the banality. The films of a quarter of a century ago tried to say the same. It’s dull working in an office, going nowhere. It’s dull buying furniture. It’s dull walking about, aimlessly, consuming advertisers’ ideas of what you ought to want.
We can agree or disagree. Diehard Nietzscheans might see Last Men everywhere. Last Men on every street corner. Like taxis waiting to be hailed. Like sailors awaiting the beating to quarters, the never-arriving call to man the guns.