Manchester Bombing - After the Attack

Erin in her bedroom, from series After the Attack, 2018 © Richard Ansett

Erin in her bedroom, from series After the Attack, 2018 © Richard Ansett

Shot just before the first anniversary, this image of Erin is from a series of portraits of the young girls affected by the Manchester Arena bomb. The series attempts to capture something of the emotional and psychological impact that a traumatic event can have on the present for a survivor as they attempt to move forward with their lives. The effect of PTSD is unique to every person but a common reaction to this particular event has been a fear of returning to any large public space and in these studies the otherwise innocuous bedroom locations acknowledge that in many cases survivors can find leaving the house difficult. Part of the healing process is a need to withdraw.

In photographing vulnerable subjects a circle must be squared; an instinct to protect with an equal and opposite responsibility to capture something of their struggle in the moment. Empathy is both inherent and learned and is an essential component in the process towards any potentially great portrait but sympathy can limit the necessity to press a subject towards a representative state.

When attempting to capture any expression that reflects complex humanity we must be vigilant of the conventional rules of engagement and resist the instinct to treat the contract between artist and sitter as normative. It is important to be constantly aware when photographing a subject that they are equally aware of us and any emotion we capture is a response to that relationship as evidence of the complex relationship the subject has with the wider world.

To evolve in the pursuit of an atypical genuine and complex emotion is to continually feed new experience and education into practice. The self awareness that comes from learning about the hidden forces that motivate behaviour leads to an evolution in every aspect of external persona that attracts the projection of the feelings of others. We can literally (and often silently) become a vessel to receive the emotions of others by recognising (and in some cases) removing the obstacles to our emotional progress. Humans are incredibly sensitive readers of each other on a subconscious level, certainly in trusting someone with our most difficult feelings but a cognitive understanding of these signals free of infection and denial can only be learned.

To capture something genuine that offers insight into the subject, ourselves and something representative for the human experience is the holy grail and requires great commitment which may very occasionally be rewarded.

Erin in her bedroom was shortlisted for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize and showed at the National Portrait Gallery London.  

August ends in October

The great curation of the collection of August Sander prints as part of the exhibition at Tate Liverpool ended last week. It explored the relationship alongside Otto Dix to the Weimar Republic but was much more than the sum of its parts.

The presentation of the Sander archive in one room reminds me that the deliberate nature of portraiture can existentially challenge established notions of reality. Although Sander is working with a much more conventional creative process, the relentless presentation of the prints had the effect of working as an illustration of 'the rejection of a perceived logic and reason' espoused by the Dada movement of his time. The curators found evidence that Sander wished his work to be viewed and presented along side a timeline of events from the humiliation of Germany through to the rise of National Socialism. Sander's images are so solid and certain in their structure that they interrupt the timeline to create these pastiches of humanity; the subjects captured in amber like mosquitos. 

The 'subject experience' of entering into a contract with an objectivist is to consider our relationship to the world and at a time of extreme political polarisation (sound familiar) there is a documentation of the human response to events in the faces and body language of the sitter. Sander offers us something close to ambivalence, walking a fine line (as does Dix) between acceptance of status quo and mockery. He uses convention to challenge convention and speaks to an esoteric audience in one language that may be read entirely differently by another. The portrait of Dix himself and his wife is without doubt and for no good reason, genius; it is brimming over with powerful, unidentifiable memes as well as acting as a vital record of when both artists were present in the same timeline.

The answer to the argument that it is impossible to be objective is that the artist as objectivist must always be open to that impossibility as part of their practice. As a portraitist I observe and record a subject but I must always keep in mind that I am capturing the sitter as they observe me with the same scrutiny and we see this relationship in the eyes of Sander's subjects. In these formal poses there is evidence of the pressures and fears of the time, which communicate a different historic insight than traditional documentary record.

With the volume of work in his archive, the 'sitter' becomes less relevant than the message..the immediate narrative of 'portrait of farmer' or ''portrait of artist' is an excuse to explore a wider demographic response to the era. There is a reminder of the value of a single human existence equal to each other as the the timeline moves relentlessly towards the worst imaginable outcome.

Today it seems every personal statement by photographic artists discuss the paradox of photography and reality but rather than seeing this as some trite, collective plagiarism, it could be an indication of the constant of 'our' modern times; we find ourselves in a phenomenological existence even if we don’t know what it means.

There is something to be said for the relentlessness of a practice, the dogma is unwavering in the face of encroaching catastrophe. Applying objectivity to the human condition does reveal a truth in the subject relationship to that dogma. I am observing the fearful defiance of the oppressed leftist intellectual and the equal but terrifying self confidence of the far right, they are both responding to the same events. I am standing in front of a portrait of an SS officer and imagining what it might be like to be in the same room as someone who has the power of life and death over me.

As we might consider Mahler as the father of modern music, in terms of photographic portraiture, perhaps we should consider Sander in a similar light.

The Painter Otto Dix and his wife Martha circa 1926-6 August Sander

August Sander at Tate Liverpool

Poverty Porn

‘Migrant Mother’ is one of the most famous images in the world taken from a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in 1936. I have been reminded of it during a shoot with Karin a victim and survivor of child sexual abuse and viewing an archive portrait of a mother and child discussed recently with Guardian Weekend Magazine picture editor Kate Edwards.

I suppose I am comparing the literal starvation and suffering of Lange’s subject with the emotional malnourishment I felt from my contemporary sitters.

Migrant Mother resonates with contemporary society more so now during our own version of what depression is but our austerity is only felt by those not often placed in the spotlight and when we do see those who suffer, they are often categorized as somehow complicit in their plight. My images of the underclass in this country as represented here by the image of a mother and child (below), shot for the notorious ‘Benefit Street/CH4’ have been accused of objectifying poverty, whilst the same images of suffering from abroad seem more palatable. Perhaps we are a little uncomfortable facing up to the reality that there is genuine poverty here (literally and emotionally) when we appear to have so much and we are often quoted as being the 5^th largest economy in the world.

Update 24/09/2018 after Barbican retrospective 'Politics of Seeing'  - Lange was commissioned by the visual encyclopaedia of American life in order to promote the New Deal, the images were presented in context of a single narrative to persuade the country of a political argument. The plight of white Americans particularly shocked the country and contributed to change. The images of the hardship of white people only previously reserved for 'other communities' must have been shocking at the time. The focus on white as opposed to the expectation of black suffering in images, I suggest, drew attention to the plight of the country in a way that images of other races would not. The tragedy here is in the expectation of the representation of black poverty in images as 'not as shocking' as white. The humiliation is real and exaggerated if the expectation that as white you have an inherent advantage. Lange is not so brutally objective and her politics masks this unique image of white humiliation with some sympathy and is presented by curators as 'stoicism' but I suggest the expression in Migrant Mother is despair.

I wonder how this would be received now. The definition of 'poverty porn' (an accusation levelled at my work) is "any type of media, be it written, photographed or filmed, which exploits the poor's condition in order to generate the necessary sympathy for selling newspapers or increasing charitable donations or support for a given cause". End

Sometimes I am brought into contact with an emotion exuding from a subject that is so powerful and complex it changes the physical nature of the space in that moment. As they face the camera there is an exchange of mutual needs; to be seen and recorded. I never quite know when it will occur but it is the Holy Grail.

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet.” – Dorothea Lange.

Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange, 1936

Mother & Daughter, from Benefit Street/CH4 © Richard Ansett 2014

Karin with Cat © Richard Ansett 2016