Working the Room. Geoff Dyer
got wind of the idea that I was interested in Rebecca West or Richard Avedon or whoever and gave me the chance to get between the covers of a shared volume with them. This seems to me the greatest privilege that can be afforded any reader (even if it slightly undermines the idea of being – as I claim in a piece to be found later in this volume – a gatecrasher).
Booksellers and customers often complain about the difficulty of knowing where to stock or find my books. A similar problem crops up here. There is, inevitably, a fair bit of seepage between the various categories on the contents page – Visuals, Personals etc. – but, overall, this seemed the least unsatisfactory way of organising the material. To make things a little less rigid these category headings are not indicated within the pages of the text itself, so that the very personal piece on ghost bikes is followed, without warning, by the first categorically Personal piece. Like this there are only invisible, ghostly residues of division in the unfolding continuity of the book.
There is also, inevitably, a bit of repetition. I see I keep coming back to Rebecca West or John Cheever or D.H. Lawrence when I’m writing about other people: they constitute the core of my personal canon, the writers I can’t do without. The fact that Robert Frank keeps coming up as a point of comparison when I’m talking about other photographers might be a symptom of the author’s inadequate frame of reference; or perhaps it shows that there is no getting away from him (I meant Frank but perhaps the same is true of the author).
I originally intended using ‘My Life as a Gatecrasher’ as the title for the whole collection but discarded it for the reason mentioned above. The current title crops up in the essay on Susan Sontag – ‘Critics are always working the room’ – but although it was absolutely perfect I couldn’t use it because Jonathan Lethem had told me, a couple of years earlier, that he had the phrase laid away as the intended title of a future collection of his critical writings. I dropped him a line anyway and asked if he would consider loaning it to me. He agreed, and I’m extremely grateful to him for that characteristic bit of generosity.
G. D., London, June 2010
Jacques Henri Lartigue and The Discovery of India
‘You can hardly expect me to fall in love with a photograph.’
Jawaharlal Nehru
This photograph was taken by Jacques Henri Lartigue on the Cap d’Antibes in 1953. He was almost sixty by then, had been photographing for half a century. The picture is of a woman – I don’t know who – propped up on a lilo or lounger on the terrace of some presumably luxurious hotel or villa. She’s wearing a swimsuit and one of those fun wigs made of strips of coloured paper that you can buy in party shops. You can’t see her eyes, she’s wearing a pair of big plastic sunglasses, but there’s a hint (and this is the lovely flirty thing about the picture) that she is glancing up at the photographer – which means that she is also glancing up at me, at us – rather than reading the unbelievably serious book in her hands: Nehru’s The Discovery of India! It looks like it’s about 800 pages long and weighs a ton. It wouldn’t be anything like the same picture if she was reading Bridget Jones’s Diary which, obviously, hadn’t been published back then – but that’s another thing about the picture: it could have been taken yesterday, it could have been taken today (especially now that white sunglasses are in vogue again).
The book is a touch of genius – either the genius of contrivance or of the moment – but, actually, if any element of the picture were removed (the wig, the glasses, the painted nails or lipstick) it would be thoroughly diminished. That’s the thing about all great photos, though. Everything in them is essential – even the inessential bits. It occurs to me that the things that are not in the photographs are also important. The inclusion of certain things can not just diminish a photograph but destroy it. In this case – all the more remarkable in a photograph taken in 1953 – the absence of a cigarette (so often considered an accessory of glamour) or ashtray is crucial to its allure and its contemporaneity. A cigarette would ‘date’ or age the photograph as surely as it ages the faces of the people who smoke them. If there were any evidence of smoking I would have to look away. As it is, I can’t tear my eyes away. I can’t stop looking at her.
So who is she?
But there I go, forgetting one of my own rules about photography, namely that if you look hard enough a photo will always answer your question – even if that answer comes in the form of further questions. Well, whoever she is, she’s beautiful. Actually, I can’t really tell if that’s true, for the simple reason that I can’t see enough of her face. But she must be beautiful, for an equally simple reason: because I’m in love with her. Lartigue, too, I suspect. Now, plenty of men have photographed women they love but this picture depicts the moment when you fall in love.
That’s why the suggestion that she is looking up, meeting our gaze – the photographer’s, mine – is so important: this is the first moment when our eyes meet, the moment that each subsequent meeting of eyes will later contain. If this picture is of a woman Lartigue has been with for ten years it actually proves my point: that look, that meeting of the eyes, still contains the charge of the first unphotographed look from way back when. As for me, since I’ve only just seen the photo, it’s a case of love at first sight. And that, I think, is why Lartigue became a model for so many fashion photographers. The most effective form of subliminal seduction – the best way to sell the dresses or hats featured in photos – is to make men fall in love with the woman wearing them, and photographers are all the time trying to emulate or simulate that feeling. With Lartigue, though, it’s for real, and the accessories on offer are what? A daft wig, some zany sunglasses and a hardback of The Discovery of India! That’s the charm of the picture, its magic.
As I said at the beginning, they’re all crucial, these ditzy accessories. The book lends a hint, at the very least, of the exotic. And the wigs and glasses give the picture its faint but unmistakable touch of the erotic. If you want to see her without the wig and glasses then you are already starting to undress her. Not that there is anything explicitly sexual about this – it’s more that you want to see what she really looks like. In other words, you want an answer to the question the picture insistently teases us with: to what extent is it posed, contrived? I’d love to know. It would probably be possible to find out by consulting one of the many books about Lartigue currently available but I prefer a less scholarly, more direct but – I hope – not too intrusive approach. ‘Excusez-moi, mademoiselle. J’espère que je ne vous dérange …’
2005
Photographs depict a moment but they can contain years, decades. Few, however, are as saturated with history as Ruth Orkin’s picture of the crowd gathered in Times Square on VE Day, 8 May 1945.
To release this history from the image we need to go back at least to 1914, to the photographs of the ‘long uneven lines’ of men queuing up to enlist. For Philip Larkin, in his poem ‘MCMXIV’, the grinning faces make it all look like an ‘August Bank Holiday lark’. Photographs like these are complemented by the ones taken in 1919, when an army of the surrogate dead marched past the Cenotaph in London in acknowledgement of the cataclysm that the lark had turned into. In another sense, though, the catastrophe was not complete: the ending of the First World War created the conditions for a Second. The treaty at Versailles merely closed a phase of a war that would last, with rumbling truces, until 1945.
The end of the Second World War left Britain militarily victorious but economically ruined. America, meanwhile, was unequivocally victorious. Power crossed the Atlantic. ‘The United States’, Churchill conceded, ‘stands at this moment at the summit of the world.’