The european response: Laurie Haynes

Photography as Contemporary Art

The European response.

(contrasting the emergent Art Photography movement in Europe with that of The United States)

 In many respects the title of this essay is a misnomer, as there was not an actual intellectual response to the American school of Art Photography, but rather a continuation of a pre-war mindset that located photography firmly in the camp of the social documentary. The war in Europe had essentially deconstructed social order. The fundamental need to survive, rebuild, and re-discover the threads of social connection taking precedence,over the language of Art. But Art is indestructible, or rather the need to create Art. So from the ruins of Europe a damaged, but reborn child emerged. The image of American society portrayed in the post war years was, when compared to life in the major cities of Europe, the stuff of fantasy, a lifestyle, a society economically so advanced, that it was almost unrecognisable to the European audience. But the indomitable human spirit shone through, and in so doing provided a liet motif for the camera.

Robert Doisneau, a young photographer, before the war, returned to the streets of Paris with an objective lens and Eye. Specialising in an almost photo-journalistic style that celebrated the humour that enabled the people of France to battle through. Historically Doisneau’s work was seemingly etched with an heroic optimism that simply recorded those intimate moments that show a triumph of hope over adversity. Franks ability to record the frank and often humorous depictions of Parisian street life has secured him a prominent place in photographies hall of fame, and whilst his images sit uneasily amongst the ‘Art’ of the American period, his work is in many modern Art collections. During the 1970’s many of franks images were re-presented to the public as works of Art by the art poster company ‘Athena’ Among his most recognizable work is Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville(“Kiss by the Hotel de Ville”), a photo of a couple kissing in the busy streets of Paris. Who the couple were was a mystery until in 1993, when Denise and Jean-Louis Lavergne took him to court for taking the picture without their knowledge. This action forced Doisneau to admit that he actually ‘posed’ the shot in 1950 using actor/models Françoise Bornet and her then boyfriend Jacques Carteaud. Françoise was given an original print as part of her payment. In April 2005 she sold the print for 155,000 € at an auction.

  Doisneau’s work gives unusual prominence and dignity to the culture of the streets, in particular the activities of children; returning again and again to the theme of children at play in the city, unfettered by parents. His work treats their play with seriousness and respect. In terms of his artistic heritage Frank was very much the Art apprentice gathering the skill of Lithographer and sculptor on his journey to becoming a photographer. It is interesting to note the Frank served as a soldier in the army of ‘La resistance’ during the war as photographer and printer. His first hand knowledge of the horror of both war and occupation perhaps leading him to celebrate the french spirit in later years. 1912 Born in Gentilly, Val-de-Marne 1929 Graduated from lithography school l’Ecole Estienne in Chantilly 1930 Camera assistant to sculptor André Vigneau 1932 First photo story in Excelsior (French magazine) 1934-39 Publicity photographer for Renault; fired for truancy 1939 Drafted into the French army (“la Résistance“) during World War II, where he acted as a soldier, photographer and printer 1946 Joined the Rapho photo agency 1949-52 Photographer for French Vogue 1992 Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford 1994 Died in Montrouge  Another photographer who rose to prominence during the post war period is willi Ronis. Born in Paris, Ronis’ father was a Jewish refugee from Odessa who opened a photography studio in Montmartre and his mother was a refugee from Lithuania who gave piano lessons. Ronis’ early interest was music and he hoped to become a composer. Returning from compulsory military service in 1932, his violin studies were put on hold because his father’s cancerrequired Ronis to take over the family portrait business. The work of photographers, Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adamsinspired Ronis to begin exploring photography. After his father’s death, in 1949, Ronis closed the studio and joined the photo agency, Rapho, with Ergy Landau, Brassaï, and Robert Doisneau.Ronis became the first French photographer to work for LIFE Magazine. In 1953, Edward Steichenincluded Ronis, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Izis, and Brassaï in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art entitled Five French Photographers. In 1955, Ronis was included in the The Family of Man exhibit. The Venice Biennale awarded Ronis the Gold Medal in 1957. Ronis began teaching in the 1950s, and taught at the School of Fine Arts in Avignon, Aix-en-Provenceand Saint Charles, Marseilles. In 1979 he was awarded the Grand Prix des Arts et Lettres for Photography by the Minister for Culture. Ronis won the Prix Nadarin 1981 for his photobook, Le fil du hasard.Ronis’ wife, Anne Marie was the subject of his well-known, [1949] photo, Provencal Nude. The photo, showing Anne Marie washing at a basin with a water pitcher on the floor and an open window through which the viewer can see a garden, is noted for its ability to convey an easy feeling of provencal life. Late in her life, Ronis photographed Anne Marie suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, sitting alone in a hospital yard. Anne Marie died in 1991.Ronis continues to live and work in Paris, although he stopped photography in 2001, since he required a cane to walk and could not move around with his camera, and now works on books for the Taschen publishing company.

On the other side of the channel another photographer with a unique vision was coming to the fore. Contrary to legend, Bill Brandt was born not in London, but in Hamburg, Germany, on May 3, 1904. The asthmatic son of a banking family, he came to his own country for the first time in 1931, having lived in a sanatorium in Davos and in Vienna and Paris, where he was Man Ray’s assistant.

His ambition was to become an independent professional photographer. His first book, The English at Home, appeared in 1936. Based on the portrayal of types and stereotypes, this was a kind of manifesto of British society, through which Brandt undertook to show the British their real faces. The complete opposite of the ideal motherland of his dreams, he discovered a divided people, a stratified society with a well-defined caste system, in the grip of economic crisis. Two years later he published A Night in London; in the same way as his friend Brassaï, Brandt enjoyed the uncertain, magical lighting effects of the night. Prowling around almost invisibly, he recorded London, revealing social inequality. He did not hesitate to ask his close friends to pose for him for certain situations.

In 1937 Bill Brandt travelled north, where he undertook at his own expense a photo reportage on the economic and social situation in the great cities of the Midlands and Tyneside. There he took his most memorable instantaneous photographs, such as the one of the emblematic figure of a scavenger for coal returning home, a modern myth of Sisyphus.

During the war Brandt was employed by the Home Office to show how well Londoners taking refuge in air-raid shelters were coping with air raids. He was also commissioned to produce a major photographic inventory of the capital’s important buildings. The work was carried out during the black-out, without flash, rather in the style of Atget. This reportage, notable for its use of light and shade, was published in Picture Post and emphasized Brandt’s interest in social documentation.

During the second half of his career Bill Brandt devoted himself to portraiture, landscapes, and nude photography. It was his revolutionary treatment of the last category which brought him notoriety. His first nudes were photographed with an old wooden plate camera which the police had formerly used, lacking a shutter and equipped with a wide-angle lens. These photos seemed inspired by Balthus, Hitchcock, and Orson Wells. Their dramatic atmosphere is enhanced by the unusual viewpoints of the architectural backgrounds, imbuing them with a menacing atmosphere of murder or suffocation, perhaps connected with the asthma from which Brandt suffered all his life. These unnatural perspectives, which shocked people at the time, based on the enlargement of volumes and close-up treatment of details, may be compared with the experiments of Picasso, the forms of Henry Moore, and, of course, the distorted work of Andre Kertész. Increasingly turning to abstract photography, from 1951 to 1960, when he gave up nude work, Brandt undertook exterior views (on the beaches of East Sussex, Normandy, and the south of France), in which he brought together the eternal themes of women and the sea, birthplace and symbol of creation.

At the same time, Brandt was taking portraits for Lilliput, Picture Post, and Harper’s Bazaar of the artists, intellectuals, and writers whom he admired. He detested naturalism. Rather he sought to decipher enigmas, and in his work portraiture is combined with a quasi-judicial chronicle of events. Going beyond external appearances, he tried to decode the mysteries concealed behind a face, as in his intriguing portrait of Francis Bacon (1963), far from a straightforward rendering of the subject.

His passion for literature led him to illustrate Literary Britain(1951), which unfurls naturally with romantic, tortured scenes evoking Wuthering Heights. At Stonehenge, or on Skye, Brandt demonstrated his fascination for untamed sites, those providing a sense of majesty, the sublime, the infinite. The cult of nature fostered the attraction that open spaces had for him, allowing him to bring out the emotional appeal of the landscape. This aspect of his work reached its high point when he chose 200 twentieth-century photographs for “The Land”, a project completed shortly before his death in London on December 20, 1983.

In the context of the art of his time, whose aesthetic experiments are reflected in his work, Bill Brandt was one of the first photographers to have created an individual style. While allowing the vocabulary of his art to evolve, he consciously worked at creating a personal photographic language. Based on the alliance between form and content, the fruit of experiment, exploration of the imaginary and an ever deeper investigation of the same themes, his work is notable for its splendid use of strong contrasts and densely printed images.

 

As legitimate subject for the European Photo-Artist the almost sub-cultural hinterland of the inner cities and its attendant nefarious night-life has been a source of inspiration and fascination. In continental Europe and the United states of America there were artists at work who seemed most comfortable when working at night. E.J Bellocq  reverently photographed the prostitutes of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, in an almost magical parallel with the paintings of Henri Toulouse Latrec. Both drawn to the darkness because their miss-shapen appearance was essentially masked, both men found both comfort and inspiration from the ladies of the night. When viewed side by side there is a familiarity and sense of belonging that was in part due to the acceptance by the models of their particular difference. Another photographer who seemed at home on the streets was Gyula Brassai. born Transylvania, 1899-1984

Brassai took his name from the town of his birth, Brasso, in Transylvania, then part of Hungary, later of Roumania, and famous as the home of Count Dracula. He studied Art at the academies of Budapest and Berlin before coming to Paris in the mid-twenties. He was completely disinterested in photography, if not scornful of it, until he saw the work being done by his acquaintance André Kertész, which inspired him to take up the medium himself. In the early thirties he set about photographing the night life of Paris, especially at its more colourful and more disreputable levels. The result of this project – a fascinatingly tawdry collection of prostitutes, pimps, madams, transvestites, apaches, and assorted cold-eyed pleasure-seekers – was published in 1933 as Paris de Nuit, one of the most remarkable of all photographic books.

Making photographs in the dark bistros and darker streetspresented a difficult technical problem. Brassai’s solution was direct, primitive, and perfect. He focused his small plate camera on a tripod, opened the shutter when ready, and fired a flashbulb. If the quality of his light did not match that of the places where he worked, it was, for Brassai, better: straighter, more merciless, more descriptive of fact, and more in keeping with Brassai’s own vision, which was as straightforward as a hammer.

When Paris de Nuit was published, the great photographer and theorist Dr. Peter Henry Emerson, then approaching eighty, wrote Brassai in care of his publisher, asking Brassai to please send his proper address, so that Emerson could send him the medal that had been awarded to him for his splendid book. It is an interesting comment on the chaotic incoherence of photographic history that Brassai had never even heard of Emerson, but Emerson act of kindness and respect acknowledges Brassai as a ‘matre’.

 

If one had to classify the fundamental skill or objective of the European photographers, it would be the ability to suggest or imply that there is a nobility in almost every strata of society.

The collective genre, shows that cohesive strand that humanity that is fundamental to the function of society. At its core is a rhythm, first of all, the rhythm of the organism, ruled by the heartbeat and circulation of blood. As we live in a pulsating, vibrating world, we respond to it and in turn are bound to its rhythm. Without giving much thought to our dependence on the systoles and diastoles of flowing time we move through sunrises and sunsets, through the sequences of four seasons. Repetition enables us to form habits and to accept the world as familiar. Perhaps the need of a routine is deeply rooted in the very structure of our bodies.

In a city or a village which we have known well since our childhood we move in a tamed space, our occupations finding everywhere expected landmarks that favour routine. Transplanted into alien surroundings we are oppressed by the anxiety of indefiniteness, by insecurity There are too many new shapes and they remain fluid, because the principle of their order through routine cannot be discovered. What I am saying is perhaps just a generalization of my own experience but I hope to be understood as that experience has been shared by many especially in this century.

Among the misfortunes of exile, anxiety of the unfamiliar holds a prominent place. Whoever has found himself as an immigrant in a big foreign city had to cope with a kind of envy at the sight of its inhabitants engaged in purposeful occupations, confidently going to definite, known to them, shops or offices, in a world weaving together a huge fabric of everyday bustle. It is possible that such an observer from the outside would have recourse to special strategies in order to diminish his feeling of alienation.

 

I offer this direct quotation from Brassai, that explains ‘reason d’etr’ for the Photographer Artist

 

‘Living in Paris, I was for a long time drawing a line around a few streets in the Latin Quarter, so that I could call a certain area mine.” A restaurant at the corner, a small bookstore, a laundry, a cafe succeeded each other when I was taking a walk and would give me some assurance through their presence at the points expected in advance.

To be lost in a foreign city. Perhaps something more is involved here than a mere inability to find one’s way. It once happened to me, also in Paris, a city of my many joyous moments and many misfortunes, when I stepped out of the Métro in a part of the town with which I was acquainted, but not too well. I started to walk and suddenly I noticed that there was not even one spot to serve me as a guide mark and I was seized by a sort of fear of height. The houses seemed to turn around and threaten to fall. I lost orientation. And I was quite aware that my indecision of which street to take reflected my loss of orientation in a deeper sense. Exile deprives one of the points of reference that helped us to make projects, choose our goals, to organize our activities. In our native countries we maintained a peculiar relationship with our predecessors, with writers if we were writers, with painters if we were painters, etc., and that was a relationship of both respect and opposition; our driving force was to better them in one or another manner and to add our name to the roster of names remembered by our village, our city, or country Here, abroad, nothing of that is left, we have been catapulted out of history, which is always the history of a specific area on the map, and we have to cope with, to use an expression of an exile writer, “the unbearable lightness of being.”

The recovery is slow and never complete. There is a period when we refuse to recognize that our displacement is irrevocable and no political or economic changes in the country of our origin can bring about our return. Then slowly we come to the realization that exile is not just a physical phenomenon of crossing state borders, for it grows on us, transforms us from within, and becomes our fate. The undifferentiated mass of human types, streets, monuments, fashions, trends acquires some distinct features and gradually the strange transforms itself into the familiar At the same time, however, the memory preserves a topography of our past, and this dual observance keeps us apart from our fellow citizens’. As a cultural signpost the photograph is without parallel, presenting the viewer with an infinite opportunity to appraise, and re-appraise the scene set before.

The work of the photographers mentioned here share a heritage and a legacy. The ability to mark that moment in time and place.