Stolen Spirits

0. Introduction

Years ago, I bumped into a friend, midway through reviewing a photography show in Vancouver. When I told her what I’d been up to, she replied that she knew nothing about photography. “Neither do I,” I thought immediately, her candor making me realize just how little I really knew.

By the time I was invited to write this piece—a reflection on the evolution of photographic art, since BlackFlash’s 1983 founding—not much had changed. But although I’m still not an expert, that friend’s comment has hung around in my head, as a reminder of how elusive understandings of contemporary photography really are: an eighteen-year-old’s understanding of the medium’s potential is certainly proportionate to any academic’s understanding of its history. Reading through 34 years of BlackFlash back issues, it was heartening to find the magazine reflecting these contingencies. The editors have consistently strived to balance critical appraisals of photography with more adventurous, narrative, poetic tracings of the medium and its effects.

With this in mind, the following essay drifts between narrative and reflective modes. In producing a fragmentary picture of the photographic history of which BlackFlash has been an integral part, it attempts to follow the artists through this curious and confusing human pursuit.

1. Stolen Spirits 

First the flashbulb flooded his retinas, finishing the blinding job of white winter. Two strides carried him towards the photographer, as his arching hand sent the box camera to the numb December sidewalk, where it became a constellation of plastic, metal and glass. Then it was over; one confused encounter among thousands, sparked by the new photographic technology. In many ways, the walker and photographer were similar. But whereas the former was returning home from his taxi dispatcher’s office, the latter was approaching the most lucrative time for a busker of pictures: twilight, magic hour, prelude to l’heure bleue. Now, the photographer would spend the evening re-gathering his shattered tool.

A century later, the street corner image peddler is gone. Likewise the small photo studios, established at the turn of the century (some only metres from the location where BlackFlash’s former host organization, The Photographer’s Gallery, would later establish itself) that once vied for our attention with quipping newspaper ads. Now we have selfies. More over, we have prosthetic arms that simulate an external photographer: providing the illusion that we have not captured our image alone. Our rapacity for self-portraiture raises a lot interesting questions. Most interesting to me: has our nervousness about being photographed—that strange fear that the camera might be a soul thief—also vanished for good?

A kind of folk rumour has long floated through the white-dominated academic world, that describes a fear felt by some tribal people, that the camera will capture their spirit. Two years ago in America, I watched a university professor speak about his collection of Victorian “spirit photographs:” images haunted by gossamer wraiths. The entities were delivered into the frame not by a rip in the boundary of life and after-life, but by deceitful double exposures. In tribal places, the speaker continued, to speak of photographing spirits would be to issue a threat, and by extension to invite a violent response. I’ve seen too many photos of tribal people posing for the camera—even if coaxed or bribed—to fully swallow this story.

Still, the trope maintains. Writing about an episode of Futurama, one blogger recounted the show’s characters debating “whether their souls or their ‘life force’ was sucked out of their bodies by a photographic print.” So maybe there’s truth to the cliché, if only as a projection of some latent understanding of the consequences that follow compulsive self-portraiture. One year ago, Teen Vogue reported studies linking social media use to depression. Around the same time, George Monbiot implicated social media technology in his definition of neoliberalism as “war of everyone against themselves.” As we project and compare our images online, self worth is subjected to a vicious bait and switch: inflated and emptied in the same gesture. All of a sudden, the old superstitious seems a lot less far-fetched.

Meanwhile, artists continue to work this ether of desire: making it into a theatre of images, whose conflicted players are the things and surfaces that both draw us into and decorate us within this contemporary image world. Remembering Sara Cwynar’s show “Rose Gold” at New York’s Foxy Productions, last spring, details are washed out by the exhibition’s intense chromatic atmosphere, and the rigorous structure within the artist’s pictures and videos. But though Cwyner’s works are hypnotic, they are never indulgent. Products and costumes abound, staged in rich mis-en-scènes, with smaller images often chopped and taped over their larger hosts. When a pastel-clad model is surrounded by collaged photos of people and the products they love, the artist conjures surfeiting desire, without promoting it in the way of so many glossy ads.

The politely academic way to finish this thought would be to emphasize Cwynar’s criticality. But this work is too implicated in its subject for that; it is self-reflexivity without judgement.

2. The photographing Corpus

In a small room in an old Pennsylvanian home, a young photographer set her camera on a tripod, in pursuit of the soul in transit. As the apparatus’s three legs rested on the deeply grained floor, its spider shadow fell over horsehair plaster walls.

Scanning through the blurry portraits that Francesca Woodman shot in this house—mostly female, often of herself—what stands out is how the corporeality of photographers often escapes our attention. Like a ventriloquist, the camera throws attention away from itself and the body behind it: thinking, fidgeting, pulsing, breathing.

Often smudged by long exposures, Woodman’s square, medium format photographs compel comparison with the Instagram photographs that now fastidiously register our own lives. But more interesting is the thought of Woodman as a figure who tried to outmanoeuvre and transform the dual forces that motivate self-portraiture: a fear of disappearance, and the photograph as synthetic cure for that bodily and social erasure. In her photographs, the subject is fixed in time, but also seems to dissolve through that fixing.

Although Woodman’s images literally picture their ephemeral author, there have been other instances when photographers seem to be encoded in images, irrespective of the picture’s superficial subject.

One such instance began on a Paris street around 1932, as a couple took a walk. We can still see them walking, thanks to a film cameraman who followed quietly behind. A few seconds into the film, now available on YouTube, the cinematographer’s real subject enters the frame’s edge. Having overtaken the lovers, this interloper lifts his back foot, like a child skipping. As one leather toe holds the cobbles, the man’s torso twists, revealing a glancing lens. Here is Henri Cartier Bresson, the Frenchman whose photographs—acquaintances recall—depended on their maker’s dancing movement. By the photographer’s admission, most of his negatives were unremarkable. But the frames he saved find an abstruse compositional intelligence gathering and fixing fugitive dramas between human and non-human agents: bodies, buildings, animals, political circumstance, light, shadow.

In Cartier Bresson’s Alcante, Spain, 1932, three middle-aged women trisect a horizontal black-and-white image. At the same time, they lattice the picture with a choreography of arms and hands, the sartorial alliance of their cotton garments, and a triplet of incurious gazes. Because one white woman’s hand compresses the curled tuft atop her black friend’s head, it seems that we’re looking at a hair-dressing. But as the other hands touch inexplicably, this too-easy narrative melts. With that, the photograph seems to question itself, as all worthwhile images do.

At the same time, we are obliged to ask where the image’s subject begins and ends. This unstable picture only exists, after all, because the photographer managed to catch it before it calcified into pose, or disappeared altogether. So the image’s oscillation through meaning testifies to its status as a portal adjoining self and other: between a scene and its participants, and the image-maker’s hidden movement. As such, it’s become set in my memory as a kind of inverted reflection to the hollow feedback enabled by so much contemporary self-representation.

3. Liquid

On a sunny winter day in 1997, the artist Lori Blondeau—a frequent subject, contributor and supporter of this magazine—drove with a friend to the South Saskatchewan river’s snow crusted edge, just south of Saskatoon. Because Blondeau is Cree, Salteaux and Metis, the frames she exposed during this trip have become comedic, piercing rejoinders to so many representation of First Nations people: images that could be written off as bizarre fantasy play, if they weren’t so damaging.

In a snapshot titled Lonely Surfer Squaw, 1997, Blondeau beams at the camera. She is backed by strips of snow-covered ice and nearly frozen water. Strangely, her arms are naked and wrapped around a pale surfboard; the artist seems to have become a pin-up model. But unlike so many manufactured sex-goddesses, her sensitive parts are covered not by cotton or lace, but faux-fur – the stuff of primitivist fantasy.

The image’s critical line is clear; it’s a parody of so many racist and masturbatory media constructions of First Nations women. But Blondeau’s picture works on me because it contains a multivalence that burns more slowly than any punch-line reading. First, there’s the pictures basic materiality; slightly washed, the picture presages Hito Steyerl’s later defense of “the poor image”: pictures that do not rely on fetishized surfaces and presentation technologies for their effect. Looking further, the snow and river are responsive elements within the work—especially for a viewer who knows that this is the same cold landscape wherein police officers systemically abandoned many First Nations men, in the dead of night; men who for many years, have lived with their families not far from Blackflash’s current office in Saskatoon’s now gentrifying Riversdale neighbourhood. For us white kids growing up nearby, these banks hosted fantasy and adventure. Now, even 20 years after it was made, Blondeau’s image crashes over these pining memories.

It’s such unmanageable flows of resonance that are suggested in Jeff Wall’s canonical essay Photography and Liquid Intelligence. Meaning moves through images in surges and tributaries. And Wall has not been alone in his use of this liquid metaphor, made viable by photography’s long-time reliance on fluid.

In her 2011 essay Les Godesses, photographer and writer Moyra Davey wrote of a mysterious force called “the Wet.” Like myself, Davey is white and Canadian. With Blondeau’s picture in mind, her words—written hundreds of kilometres away, with an altogether difference subject in mind—seem to open a vacuum, where our intertwined histories live in choking despair: “Another problem for me now is the welling up of the “Wet,” the insistent preoccupation with certain narrative aspects of the discredited past, things I may never be ready to tell.”

Can photography assist us in telling the stories we can’t form in words?

4. Memory Keepers

It’s probably a fool’s errand to attempt an account of photography’s largest effect on us: the way pictures constantly and often brutally remind us of the many worlds simultaneous to our own. These worlds used to pass in and out of attention via rumours and books. Now they course through us by means of photos, like an electronic IV drip.

There is a parallel world to that conjured by Francesca Woodman’s photographs. Since about 2001, it has been unfolding in the pictures of Latoya Ruby Frazier. The rooms in Ruby-Frazier’s world also house people, and although these people are sometimes also blurred, most are still: standing, laying, sitting. Born in the once industrialized town of Braddock Pennsylvania, the artist has spent her career picturing hollowed north-eastern American cities, and their people. Where her pictures find human beings in crumbling rooms, they also find dreamy melancholy scoured by cruel economic circumstance.

In 2009, the artist placed her camera on a tripod, in her grandfather’s emptied bedroom. She then moved across the room, and stood. Her body was clad in loose gingham pyjamas. Her bare feet risked puncture on the splintering floor. Her face hung a faint degree beneath stress-tightened shoulders. Her black hair escaped a tight ponytail in quick sprays. Her calcium gaze met the camera’s lens, as her dark skin reminded that every economic calamity is striated with the contingencies of race.

This work, Self-Portrait in Grandpa’s Room, is only one picture in body of work called “The Notion of Family.” It is joined therein by images of Ruby-Frazier’s loved ones and broken cityscapes that, while broken and emptied, find proof of being loved in the artist’s rigorous gaze. With their mis-en-scène surreality, Ruby Frazier’s self-portraits breach the category of social documentary, making realism into an arduous dreamworld. She is thus that rare artist who threads biting social reflection with the ineffable spirits of those being reflected.

As pictures hop time and space more and more effortlessly, I feel an urge to grasp for the material. I know it’s kind of reactionary. But I’m also pretty sure that I’m not alone. And I’m not only talking about the materiality of photos, but also that of the world which beckons and hosts them.

If you drive two hours north of Braddock, you will run into Lake Eerie, and the town named after it. In 1951, a couple of Polish and English descent gave birth to Allan Sekula, who would later become a photographer and writer, kin to Ruby Frazier in his broadly comprehending socio-economic vision.

For many years before his passing in 2013, Sekula gave his life to a quasi-documentary analysis of the maritime shipping industry. He rode hulking freighters, photographing and filming them and deepening his project through writing. His final work, “Ship of Fools,” constituted over 130 photographs­—framed and in slide shows­—of one journey for which a ship called Global Mariner was out-fitted as a waterborne maritime museum. As the vessel criss-crossed the ocean, its workers kept up their routines. So did Sekula, capturing both candid and posed photographs. These images never uphold briny mythology. When pictured alone, the workers stand still or mug, dead centre in the frame. In this way, the images are resolutely democratic. But with so much white-painted steel fading into the cotton sky, they’re also replete with pictorial magic.

Certainly, Sekula’s images are more enigmatic than his reputation as a “critical realist” might suggest. It is the artist’s writing that moors the images to social struggle, and positions them antagonistically to the hermeticism of so much contemporary art. Presented in printed essays and wall-mounted panels, these texts crimp and twist nautical fantasy with the pummelling conditions of itinerant labour aboard these ships: the iron bloodstream of capitalism.

In his 1931 text Little History of Photography, Walter Benjamin wrote that, “the caption must step in, thereby creating a photography which literarises the relationships of life…” There is a kind of smoldering restlessness in the way Sekula puts Benjamin’s admonition into practice: a nervous acknowledgement that photographs alone might not be enough on their own. Structurally, the mimetic quality of his work resides in this gesture and the questions it implicitly asks: what should our role in the world be? Do we need help?

These are queries played out each time a person grinds away at a caption for some inconsequential snapshot, searching for the perfect linguistic armature for their carefully constructed self.

5. The Good Pretenders

Our discipline is a game of make believe: a process of cobbling meaning both latent in the work, and projected into it.

Despite their indexical relationship to lived reality, photographs don’t escape this condition of half invented meaning. On the contrary, photography’s claim to truth throws its reliance on make-believe into vivid contrast. This dynamic has become clear and present lately, as old mechanisms for truth telling—the news and its images—falter. It follows that a sense of prescience has fallen over the many artists who have spent their careers playing pretend with pictures: mimicking the way images play with us.

In 1979, a young American artist found herself standing on the shoulder of a dark country road. Horror and suspense films have taught us that good things don’t often happen in such situations. But in this case, the artist ended up producing a kind of keystone for practitioners of photographic make-believe.

The resultant work was called Untitled Film Still #48, 1979. In it, the artist Cindy Sherman stands with her back to the camera, at the edge of a double striped highway. Her hands are clasped over a gingham skirt, her white blouse is rolled to mid-forearm, matching socks bundled above Keds sneakers, while a black suitcase dissolves into photographic grain and shadow. The image has been etched into the memories of thousands of artists and students. But strangely, it was recorded in my own memory incorrectly. I recalled Sherman’s face not turned away but staring into the camera, brightly illuminated. Additionally, the image is lighter than I remember: more so dusk competing with artificial light, than inky black.

This faulty memory probably results from the other photographs that dominate the Film Still series, wherein the artist gazes, preens, sulks and wonders, her made-up face almost always facing the camera. But I have to believe that it also reflects the cementing of a stock Hollywood scene into my own imagination. In this scene, a lonely motorist is careening along a dark highway when a person or ghost suddenly appears. As this nightwalker turns toward the driver, a shriek lets out, and the scene changes. Does Sherman’s reflecting of Hollywood’s inscribing of our memories still have consequence, in 2017?

I think so. Now more than ever, we are stranded in a mimesis of pictures. Still, age-old human concerns proliferate around us, and images clamber to keep up. Chief amongst these is war. It was global war that preceded and produced the eerie 1950s atmosphere in Sherman’s image. And as censors have become more adept at screening our eyes from conflict, and as our eyes have become acclimatized to violence, the challenge of depicting war grows. Enter another pretender, who has invested the practice of pretending with deceptive bite.

This past October, in the grey-carpeted auditorium of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the artist Rabih Mroué finishes his introduction of Walid Raad by requesting that the audience make no recordings: no audio, no videos, no photos. It’s as if he knows that Raad’s presentation will be constituted of some fragile essence that might be corrupted if channelled through cables and routers, en route to Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook. For any artist cognizant of the elitist power dynamic of so-called authentic experience, Mroue’s admonition must have been suspect: only a privileged few can make the trip to Berlin, New York, or wherever. And yet the admonition had a purpose; in his lectures, Raad undergoes an almost imperceptible transformation. It’s nothing mystical; there is no sudden plume of smoke; visually, he does not change. But the audience’s perception of him does, by way of a simple conspiracy of narrative and photograph.

A few minutes into his talk, Raad starts to speak in the collective pronoun “we.” From 1989 until 2004, he worked as The Atlas Group, collecting tangential and fragmentary evidence of the wars in Lebanon. Though fascinating, the evidence presented often seems too good to be true.

Case in point is the Atlas Group’s collection of archive material, from one Dr. Fahdi Fakhouri, a Lebanese historian so exquisitely peculiar that he could only be fictional. Chief amongst these dubious fragments is a notebook labelled #38. On this book’s white pages, photographs of cars have been collaged: sometimes floating alone, often tipping and turning in tandem. On the same pages, winding stacks and columns of handwriting describe both the make and model of each car, and the death toll incurred when a version of the same was used as a car bomb. Re-presented by the Atlas Group, the notebook pages become a work called Already Been in a Lake of Fire.

Because these collages about war feel so playful, Dr. Fakhouri seems a little sick. Upon learning the back-story of these cars, I have been trying to track down and describe my own feelings, which tumble through void space like too-clean analogues for so many decimated bodies. But I can’t do it. I can’t hold the story still long enough to get a hold of my own response to the images.

And this is of course the point. In Raad’s project, it is less death than many layers of reportage, narrative and obfuscation that come to the fore. There is clarity to this work’s constructed narrative, which only emphasizes the swirl of myth and absence that is our relationship to war. It’s incredible to think that this disorienting an encounter could be staged with nothing more than words, and a few pasted photographs

6. Over and over and over again now?

These days, as BlackFlash Magazine celebrates it’s 35^th anniversary, it seems the real challenge of photographers is in bridging such real human concerns with the runaway pace of their technology: in using and reflecting upon that technology, without getting swept up in its innovations, like any other helpless consumer.

Upon opening the September 2017 issue of Texte zur Kunst, titled Identity Politics Now, I was met with a small image from Anne Imhof’s widely contested and wildly ambitious work, Faust, 2017. The piece was a multi-hour immersive performance that showed at this summer’s Venice Biennale. Therein, gaunt fashion kids chanted and moved en masse, like so many millennial zombies. Many who defend Imhof’s work consider it an exquisite reflection of our time, so hollowed by the narcissistic feedback loops of social media. This argument gains traction from the way that the piece, being so perversely photogenic, coaxes viewers to participate in the exact phenomenon it seeks to critique; the image printed in Texte zur Kunst shows dozens of viewers descending on one of Imhof’s performers smartphones poised to capture their images. In this way, the German employed photography but left the camera in her viewer’s hands. The resultant images are eerie. In them, iPhone wielding art viewers flock around performers like vultures. But instead of carrion, they pursue evidence of having once existed in this most rarefied corner of the international art world.

Still, the cynicism of Imhof’s project has prevented me from mustering interest; it seems merely to feed the same beast critiqued. More compelling is work that dares to move away from the safe subject matter of an obviously self-obsessed culture class, and closer to the bone of lives more widely lived experience.

In the opening seconds of Sondra Perry’s video Netherrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr 1.0.2, 2015,—a relatively short work available on her Vimeo channel—an English voice explains how to deal with The ‘blue screen of death’, a malfunction common to any Windows user. This technical glitch is “just a fact of life…” we learn, as the blue screen fills the frame. Those words slip from hyperbolic to grim, as a computer voice cuts in, narrating the Wikipedia entry for the Blue Wall of Silence: the unwritten brotherly code which prevents police officers from squealing when one of their own behaves badly: accepting a bribe, say, or murdering an unarmed black person. Meanwhile, found photographs of police firearms exercises are intercut with captures of the Windows blue screen and cheap photographic portraits of officer’s victims. All are photographs, though of very different orders.

The deep implication of Perry’s piece is that police brutality is to society what glitches are to computer users: just a snag to be temporarily sorted out, so that the machine can keep running as usual. It’s true that the painful coincidence of language which links the blue screen of death to the Blue Wall of Silence, might not have been perceived by a person who is not black, and not as attuned to such odd coincidences as this artist is. But the idiosyncrasy of Perry noticing this parallel, and using it to deepen and humanize the resonance of banal images of violence, does not dull the gesture’s socially incisive edge: quite the contrary. It in fact deepens it, through the creeping power of cryptic meaning: a power no less present in Blondeau’s photograph taken on the South Saskatchewan riverbank, so many years ago.

Subjective projections and the meanings they produce have long been the true medium of photography. As Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida: “suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it.” The trick is avoiding vacuous animations, and tending towards those that throw off an illuminating light. Should that illumination stun us for a moment, so much the better. It means our souls haven’t disappeared into the image just yet.

Mitch Speed is an artist and writer based in Berlin. A contributing editor at Momus, he writes regularly for Frieze, and has contributed to Flash Art, Camera Austria, Artforum, and Turps. He was co-founder and editor of Setup, a journal of contemporary art and writing published by Publication Studio. His work can be found at www.mitch-speed.com.

Title Image: Lori Blondeau, Lonely Surfer Squaw, 1997, lightbox with Duratrans print, 105 x 80 x 17 cm. Photo credit, Bradlee LaRoque. The Mendel Art Gallery Collection at Remai Modern. Purchased with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, 2008. Image courtesy of the artist and Remai Modern.