STRUGGLING WITH AVANT-GARDE
Photographs by Martin Parr (Vladimir Birgus Martin Parr) and by Alain Balmayer (Bogdan Konopka Alain Balmayer: Ameryka z drugiej ręki / Second-hand Account of America) published in Kwartalnik Fotografia (Photography Quarterly) (19/2005) prove that there is something inherent in photography the realistic novel has always dreamed of – the inner imperative truth, the ease of conveying suggestiveness of reality. A novel aspiring for such effectiveness in convincing the reader of the authenticity of the story has to work really hard. It is because its medium – the word – is a sign different from its meaning, only arbitrarily assigned to emotions, behaviours and events. The illusion of identicality between the signifier and the signified, to achieve which a writer has to work like a trojan, is created effortlessly and naturally by photography. The mediation of a camera does not change the fact that the effect is still an illusion. But that is not the point, after all with some effort one can call the impression one gets of reality an illusion (cf. Berkeley and Descartes). The point is that photography has a predilection for veracity, veracity in a phenomenological not positivist sense of the word. It tells the truth about the experience of reality, not the objective reality itself, as it is an animal extremely difficult to grasp and bred by naïve scientists. Anyway, photography had this inclination but only to the point in which it started the career of an art. Since then it has focused on itself, blushing at the memory of its predilection. Photography got absorbed into the avant-garde movement and under the threat of exile the young technology was forced to abandon bourgeois dogmas of realism and truthfulness and thus earn the rank of a high art. The urge for experiment and revolt, the terror of novelty and searching for a new form withered with time making the repertoire of ideas and devices unbearably predictable. Novelty was gone. And while painting and sculpture shook off the ghost of Avant-garde, in photography it has persisted to this day, replacing the iconoclastic passion with convention. This inertia is connected with a certain complex of photography that makes it continuously fear that its status of an art may be undermined. I do not have to add how much this fear is nonsensical as the avant-garde movement itself, (e.g. Dadaism, futurism) attacked any form of art and aimed at bringing it down to life (ready-mades, collage, object trouve, conversational poems etc.). All in all, the tangled sequences of events lead to the fact that in photography mimetic simplicity is still being stigmatized and one values above all formal sophistication, novelty, originality of expression, not just honesty and truthfulness. That is why I was touched by the sincerity and directness emanating from the work of British photographer Martin Parr, whose strikingly naturalistic photos set a scene for an authentic drama of the modern man. A garden party, somewhere in England; an ugly British lady with something sadistic in her face looks at her friend (outside the frame) hardly masking her aloofness and weariness. Right behind her a married couple in smart suits trying with all their might not to yawn. Their weary, haggard faces express the desperation of monotony, claustrophobia and listlessness of well-off middle class existence. In the next picture, retaining the same formal simplicity and tendency to shock, one is presented with a close-up of an elegantly dressed woman, welcoming her acquittance with an affected kiss. Her face is more of a waxen replica than anything else, her false, stiff smile simulates “I'm so glad to see you” with a hypocrisy that makes you sick. The title of the whole series is Cost of Living. In a photo form a different series titled Common Sense there is a quasi-portrait of a suntanned elderly lady – golden necklace, golden earrings, eyes demonically peering from behind of the blue plastic 'blinders' and irritated red wrinkled skin. It is an essence of emptiness, hopeless banality and moral ugliness. Or a photo of a group of tourists on the lawn in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa – everybody independently from one another makes the same gesture of propping the tower. They seem to think of themselves as extremely original but when looked from a side they are appallingly serial. Not only gestures are the same, but also faces with the empty-looking eyes. An automaton-like uniformity of touristic experiences and ecstasies. Parr abandons the beauty of fiction (even though he has practiced it) and turns to the rotting meat of banal and not infrequently appalling human existences bred under the shelter of consumerism. Parr has one objective: NO LYING and the result is shocking as it draws a picture of the modern man, flesh and blood, just what he actually is. Quoting Czech art theorist Jindrich Chalupecki, there is nothing more difficult for a modern man than admitting before himself who he really is. Parr moves away from the stylisation and high form back to the roots of photography, when it was but a mirror with memory. I truly admire the way in which he combines this rudimentariness with a high sensitivity for the specificity of the current reality, which is not only a bare matter but has a network of symbols incorporated into it by means of visual patterns of advertising, TV and the Internet. The photographs of tourists mentioned above bring to life not only the tourist themselves but also their mental schemata of visualisation (a group photo in front of a historical building, obligatory smile etc.).
Besides Parr's works, the issue of Kwartalnik Fotografia described here includes also photographs by Allan Sekula, Alain Balmayer, Wojciech Wilczyk and Anna Warzkowicz, all in the spirit of photo-realism and suggestiveness characteristic of Parr (compared to the high standard of these works, eclectic and trivial 'pictures' by Tomek Sikora, to be found in the issue, come out rather poorly). Alain Balmayer's, however, were the works that made the strongest impression on me.
Balmayer focuses on the reverse of the world that interested Parr. Balmayer's US and Parr's UK photographs share the same approach to reality, but while Parr's are about epiphany, Balmayer's are about the apophatic, his narration focusing on the absence of modern man and civilisation. Balmayer wanders through places where a modern man does not venture to go, not because they are inaccessible but because they have already been exploited to the limit. North American deserts, empty beaches, strange wilderness and ruins. A waste land with no malls, cinemas, advertising boards, banks, highways and restaurants. This emptiness and the feeling of absence tells a greater tragedy than Parr's works as it highlights the epidermisity of civilisation, a civilisation which seems a complete misunderstanding among the starkness of these landscapes. In these wildernesses the wind of eternity blows, ancient daemons prowls and germs of myths ferment, ready in any moment to go out from their concealment and devour the mimosa of culture and civilisation. Silent dignity and eternal power of the places chosen by Balmayer point to the futility of human efforts and dreams of power. From their ruthless perspective, the boastful world of modern civilisation changes into a comedy of ants, a masturbation of some injured and retarded creature.
Igor Kędzierski
Translated by Anna Skrajna
Discussed journals: Kwartalnik Fotografia