Working the Room. Geoff Dyer
yep, that’ll do. He would have endorsed, wholeheartedly, the title of Garry Winogrand’s 1975 book of street shots, Women Are Beautiful. Some of the critical flak aimed at Winogrand might have been dodged if lines written ten years later had been available as a contextualising epigraph. ‘Women are beautiful when young, almost all women,’ says the elderly female narrator of John Berger’s Once in Europa. ‘Whatever the proportion of a face, whether a body is too skinny or too heavy, at some moment a woman possesses the power of beauty which is given to us as women. Often the moment is brief. Sometimes the moment may come and we may not even know it. Yet traces of it remain.’ This is Tichý’s equivalent of the decisive moment – a moment which, for all the reasons outlined above, cannot be reliably captured. It’s hit and miss. ‘When I do something, it has to be precise,’ Tichý has said. ‘True, the lens was not precise, but maybe that’s where the art is.’
That Tichý’s art is inseparable from the technical limitations and imperfect state of his pictures is manifest at many levels. At least until the eponymous film came and slightly spoiled things, Bob Dylan’s song ‘I’m Not There’ was the most cherished of all the bootleg recordings – in spite of and because of the lyric being incomplete and, in places, inaudible. The effect is movingly evoked by composer Michael Pisaro: ‘It’s almost as though he has discovered a language or, better, has heard of a language: heard about some of its vocabulary, its grammar and its sounds, and before he can comprehend it, starts using this set of unformed tools to narrate the most important event of his life.’ Or, to translate this back into visual terms, to capture the most important moments in his life on film – but since these moments lack clarity and definition they could, as easily, be any man’s or everyman’s.
The value of ‘I’m Not There’ is also a function of its rarity: the song is almost not there, exists only in this incomplete take. The production of images gathered pace throughout the twentieth century and then, with the spread of digital, the idea of scarcity or any economy of production simply disappeared. Tichý’s pictures – he seems not to have made multiple prints – have the quality of relics that have survived some kind of visual holocaust, when only these decrepit traces (that Berger word again) remain. They share with the earliest pictures by William Henry Fox Talbot the sense of wonder that a thing such as photography has actually come to pass. Hence the peculiar temporal compression of Tichý’s work. It is as if one of the pioneers of photography, instead of taking slow pictures of flowers or statues, was somehow able to snap chicks in bikinis! So they are like premonitions and memories. ‘Memory has a spottiness,’ writes John Updike, ‘as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.’ The chemical stains, bleaches and other defects make Tichý’s pictures seem like highly personal memories of universal longings – but memories in the process of fading so that they are indistinguishable from desires that may never be realised.
As a species we have remained physically unchanged for millennia. This accounts for the primal pull of Tichý’s images. But this biological imperative has been refined, recalibrated, mediated and – at times – challenged by the long history of art. Patched-up equipment notwithstanding, the ageing voyeur and former art student was conscious of the gestures catalogued by this tradition so that his pictures, at their best, have the delicacy and poise of a smutty Vermeer.
Or, to get to the quick of the matter, the indelicacy of a certain Courbet. In 1866, at the request of a Turkish diplomat, Courbet painted a tightly cropped close-up of a woman’s stomach and genitals called The Origin of the World. The first Tichý photographs on show at the Pompidou are, in representational terms, near-failures. In some you can make out the shape – elusive and suggestive as the constellations – of what may be a woman. Others are just blurs and protoplasms of light emerging from infinite darkness. If you were able to travel back to the dawn of time, as the universe writhed into existence, this, perhaps, is what you might see.
2008
It makes sense to talk about Todd Hido’s approach. Roaming shows roads taken and not taken, some peering back into the photographic past (right back, in fact, to the murky dawn of pictorialism), some blurring into obscurity, others hinting at visual possibilities that might lie ahead. House Hunting reveals where some of these roads lead, the homes at the end of the street. Occasionally Hido enters the premises and finds signs of discarded life: a stained mattress, a towel on the carpet. But never people. It’s as if something is missing from the title. All the vowels are present except the absent ‘a’, which lurks, unseen, tacitly between the ‘h’ and the ‘u’ of Hunting. This sense of the pictures being haunted by what is absent is integral to their effect.
These exteriors, with their brightly lit windows, are reminiscent – in a modern, democratic, American way – of the paintings of Victorian mansions at twilight by Atkinson Grimshaw. Grimshaw’s work depends on a paradox of domesticity: the best way to appreciate being inside is to imagine what it might seem like from the outside (that’s why people leave their curtains open). Step through the doorways of Hido’s photographs and any promise of cosiness is broken – as is much of the stuff we see lying around.
The relationship between a particular exterior (which serves as a kind of establishing shot) and a neighbouring interior is suggested but never verified. Instead of confirmation there are further doubts and, as often as not, more doors. The lines from Whitman, used as an epigraph to the catalogue of Walker Evans’ 1971 retrospective at MoMA, are hard to avoid: ‘I do not doubt interiors have their interiors, and exteriors have their exteriors, and that the eyesight has another eyesight …’
The inhabitants of the buildings are finally – if fictively – revealed in Between the Two. The threshold we have crossed appears physical but it is also a subtler one separating documentary record from psychological construct. The interior in which we find ourselves is the photographer’s head. Put it another way. Stepping inside Hido’s buildings is like finding a drawer, once stuffed full, now empty except for a photograph that got left behind when everything else was chucked out (a negative definition of editing, I guess). Inevitably, this photograph has about it the quality of a secret. Not just any secret but, specifically, of a sexual secret. What are the defining qualities of sexual secrets? That, with the odd variation – a preference for one shade or style of underwear – they are pretty much the same as everyone else’s. Another name for such universal secrets is the unconscious.
This is not to diminish the importance individuals attach to achieving their own peculiar ends. Wear this wig, Hido tells his models. Put these shoes on. Move your leg over that way. Approach an ideal I have in my mind. The photos that result simultaneously record both this ideal and a failed distance from it. The degree of contrivance required to realise this vision – i.e. to fall short in exactly the desired way – is considerable: the artificial nature of the set-up (hired models sort of acting like hookers, in the service not of sex but of art); location-scouting a hotel because it is redolent of nowhere in particular; high-end camera with a tripod, large negative and inconvenient exposure times. The pictures, let’s say, have to work overtime to achieve a heightened idea of the tawdry.
It was almost inevitable that Hido would take things a stage further (those signature images from Roaming, of telegraph poles receding into the uncertain distance, serve as a visual incitement to do just that, to keep going) and supplement the large-format, meditative images of Between the Two with pictures snatched with the kind of camera anyone could use, to replace the careful modulation of natural light with the unforgiving glare of the on-camera flash. (There are precedents for this kind of low-spec investigation: the most significant would be Evans using a Polaroid camera – or ‘toy’ as he first thought of it – to make thousands of pictures in the last years of his life.) The results are like accidents that couldn’t wait to happen.
The scenario is so familiar, from both the point of view of the women (the models) and the men (the photographers) as to be almost archetypal. The narrator of Lorrie Moore’s novel Anagrams recalls a number of episodes that could double as captions for pictures like these: ‘Three times before, my husband had asked me