I am not looking at photographs, I’m looking at people
looking at photographs of people (and writing this). I’m at Only
in England a collection of the works of photographers Tony Ray-Jones and Martin
Parr at the Walker Gallery.
Which is considering it’s a damp Tuesday is quite busy. People
gather around images of other people, people caught in a moment. Can’t put my
finger on it but there’s a strange voyeuristic feeling about the process. As if
each photo is a window onto a private section of a life.
I quickly notice that many people are approaching the
photographs and pointing calling attention to a certain detail or aspect of the
image. Often this action is connected with a memory or nostalgia, responses to
the images include “Do you remember?” or “..on Thrusdays you could get tea and
cake..”
It begs the question, what are people seeing when they look
at these photographs? Is it more than the deadpan recording of light on
chemically treated paper. Or a number of moments, deemed important by the photographers’
eye. A selected fraction of a second of a life caught for ongoing examination. Again
where back to voyeurism.
Due the photographs themselves act as a mirror in which the
viewer can see a reflection of themselves. Not the whole self but fractions
which allow aspects of memory and expectation to be released.
As the viewer’s more from image to image, there reflections
form some can of judgement or conclusion on the figures which inhabit that two
dimensional plain. Look at their faces, their dresses, their behaviour. Perhaps
a strange disconnect occurs between the present and the past, or in this case a
captured past.
Regarding the photographs as a captured past, brings me to
consider that these photographs somehow provide us with an eternal present. The
places, people within the photographs are free from time and have no past,
present or future.
Of course this offers the viewer the opportunity to look, to
stare, to gawp, to really lean in. In ways that is usually socially unacceptable.
The people in the photographs aren’t here, like were here in the gallery space
and therefore the social rules do not apply.
All part of the cameras ability to create a distance between
subject and viewer. The distance is
compounded by the fact the photographs are in black and white and seem to be
produced by analogue means. This plus the subject matter cement these images
into a collective idea of the past, they mark an undefinable difference between
then and now.
This idea of the difference between a then and a now leads
me to what maybe an obvious question. How do these images relate to the current
proliferation of photographs throughout the likes of the internet?
What are we attempting when we snap and post that image of
something strange, funny, a cat? Are we somehow attempting a freeze a moment? To
disconnect and remove ourselves from that moment in order that we can look
externally upon that moment and spark the sensations and motivations which created
the image in the first place.
Within the act of snapping a photo is this idea of
spontaneity of capturing a moment, though that is often
untrue. Even though that idea has attached itself indelibly to photography
no matter who is controlling the lens.
Equally the photograph is shorthand for the past. As I said
they become a collective memory of the past. Yet the physically photograph
becomes no more immune to the passing of time, no more than we are. For once the photographs in this exhibition whereas
achingly modern as any selfie.
Only the people and places that once reflected light that
shone on treated film remain untouched by time.
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