The Unseen on Tuesday
Tuesday Talks at the Photographer's Gallery 1998
Tony Mayne
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Three talks at the Photographer's Gallery over three months looked at photographic work which revealed the previously unseen - the smallest, fastest and farthest.
David Spears is a zoology graduate cum photographer, working mostly for television, who is at the cutting edge of microscopic photography, film, video and computer imaging. He produces very high quality optical- and electron- microscope work with digitised/ computerised colouring, frequently done frame by frame. His work was not only remarkable, but aesthetically pleasing. I found him to be as good as they come in his field, and an artist to boot.
He came over as a conscientious and charming man, and had obviously spent quite a lot of time preparing his talk, bringing showreels - some made especially for the evening lecture - and stills. He was remarkably frank about his methods of working and any budding microscopist attending would have had his £5 back in gold dust. The thrust of his talk was about working 'at the edge' - overcoming technical difficulties to produce quality, creative images.
Colin Osman, who (with his shock of white hair and beard) resembled a cross between an Old Testament Prophet and Captain Birdseye, and was the founder and former editor of Creative Camera (and The Racing Pigeon!), talked about early speed photography. His delivery was relaxed and knowledgeable, challenging some of the common assumptions about Muybridge and explaining that history has been unkind to Marey (since the History of Photography tends to have been written mostly by Americans).
He argued that Muybridge was something of a showman, giving lecture tours/lantern slide shows of his field trips to places as far apart as Alaska and Guatemala. Muybridge's movement photographs were originally commissioned by his patron, millionaire horse-fancier-financier, Leland Stanford: their purpose being to settle a bet as to whether a galloping horse's feet are all off the ground at any one time. This work was done in California. The strings/tripwires setting off the cameras (which I had assumed to be use in all his work) proved to be unsuccessful, and electric shutters were responsible for most of the work. The later work involving people (who were mostly unpaid students, and Muybridge was shrewd enough to use attractive young women) was done under the aegis of the University of Pennsylvania. Osman quoted the photographs of handicapped males, getting on and off a seat, being dropped by Muybridge from his lectures because they were not crowd-pleasers.
He said that Muybridge met Marey on a trip to Paris, and was extremely influenced by him. Marey was principally interested in photographing birds in flight and developed the gun camera for this purpose. He was not interested in 'showmanship' - he was the equivalent of an RSPB enthusiast (like pigeon-fancier Colin Osman); Muybridge was more like P.T.Barnum. At the Chicago World Fair, Muybridge found himself upstaged by Edison's film camera and the game was up.
The evening was given an extra charge by the presence of Stephen Herbert, who was curating a newly-found collection of Muybridge's photographs and equipment at the Kingston-upon-Thames museum. Muybridge (born Edward Muggeridge at Kingston) retired to Kingston and stipulated that his work must stay there.
The thrust of Osman's talk was a shrewd reassessment of the known historical facts. One element of his assessment - its influence on art - resembled that of the final speaker. Marey did composite (overlapping) exposures of birds flying. Osman convincingly argued that the tradition of representing movement and time in a two-dimensional frame has continued down, via Duchamp's Nude descending a staircase, to David Hockney's 'joiners'.
Jeremy Millar, talking about space and lunar photography, concentrated on the influence of the NASA photographs on American Art. Unlike the other speakers he was not overly interested in the technical aspects of their production.
He argued that the NASA-speak about photography (and everything else) reads like Conceptual Art proposals. The journey to the moon led to the discovery of the Earth - some desert photography and its theoretical underpinning (e.g. by Lewis Baltz and the New Topographics Movement) echoed the lunar photographs - especially the scientific and geological moon examples.
The three lectures were as good as any that I have been to, but I have to ask, Why were they so poorly attended? The first two only attracted only 15 punters each (half, I estimate, being students - members of neither L.I.P., the R.P.S. Contemporary Group, nor the Photographer's Gallery), and the final lecture only twice that number. A symposium Is there a Crisis in Photographic Education?, scheduled for March 8th, had to be cancelled because it could not even attract 15 people. None of the three evenings can have paid its way. This lack of interest in discussing photography does not augur well for the future of the appreciation of photography.
For the last two lectures, benches replaced chairs in the room. They resembled school 'forms' and actually felt the same (the lecturer became the headmaster) and revived all the memories of backache at school assemblies. The only people who had a good word for them were the people who had to clear up afterwards. The bench's sole virtue seems to be that they are quicker than the chairs for the staff to stack! A triumph of form over content.
Was this a badly conceived set of lectures for the Contemporary Group, the Photographer's gallery and L.I.P.? Was it perceived by absentees as too technical? I understand that it was advertised in the main R.P.S. journal, so the more technical sections in the R.P.S. must have seen it advertised without attending in numbers. I feel particularly sorry for Janet Hall, the organiser. You could not have asked for a more diverse set of speakers or better content, yet this bold experiment is unlikely to be repeated. Thank you to all concerned, and at least one of your audience appreciated your efforts.
Tony's picture shows the new seating set out for use.
Book now at the Photographers' Gallery (0171 831 1772) for the forthcoming talks by:
27 Oct - Stevie Bezencenet Photography, Performance and Narration
3 Nov - John Stathatos The Territories of the Medium
8 Dec - Richard Cork An Art Critic's view of Photography Today.
A separate even not to be missed is the talk by Judy Dater on her work over the past 30 years. Further details of all events are in the LIP programme leaflet sent to members.
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