Traditional photography, as we seem destined to refer to daguerreotype or digital or anything in between, records something captured in what immediately becomes the past. That doesn’t mean a photograph represents a historical truth — there are many ways, including deliberate fakery, by which the camera can lie. But however much an image may trick or mislead us, we can still be confident that it has its roots in history, that something happened, even if that something was designed to fool us.

That is what is changing. AI images fundamentally challenge the relationship of the image with the past. It is true that AI image-making (or AI-assisted, as some would more carefully express it) does in one sense depend on the past, in the form of the vast number of extant photographic images that AI draws upon to do its work. But the resulting “photography-like” image is indeed new — the person, the object, the event that it depicts did not exist. Nothing, so to speak, happened.

Given the way the ground is shifting, it isn’t surprising that we are witnessing an upsurge of interest in telling photography’s story so far. The huge stocks of photographs held by galleries and libraries and museums, sometimes deliberately collected but often accumulated almost by chance, are increasingly being brought to the forefront, as curators and historians of photography grapple with the most effective ways of displaying and contextualising examples from the vast stocks of images at their disposal.

Three current exhibitions — one at the National Gallery of Victoria, the others at the State Library of New South Wales and the National Archives of Australia — reflect this upsurge of interest. In the words of David Campany, a contributor to the splendid catalogue of the NGV exhibition, Photography: Real and Imagined, photography “finds itself centre stage again.”

The NGV first began collecting photographs more than fifty years ago with a brief “to acquire both Australian and international photography.” The collection began with an emphasis on documentary photography but moved rapidly into what, to use the shorthand, is generally termed art photography. This distinction may once have seemed clearer than it does now, when we are much more likely, as Susan Bright writes in her catalogue essay, to see photographs as belonging “on the spectrum,” somewhere between the polarities of reality and imagination.

Whether a photograph is seen as real or imagined, as documentary or art, amateur or professional, these categories are in fact “intertwined,” to use Bright’s term; whatever its status, whether as snapshot or artistic triumph, the photograph is evidence of something that happened in the past.

Among the exhibits at the NGV is German photographer Thomas Struth’s well-known image Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (2001). It shows a group of gallery visitors posed in the act of viewing the Telephos frieze in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. For all kinds of reasons, including scale and complexity of composition, Struth’s image announces itself as art.

Thomas Struth’s Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (2001). National Gallery of Victoria

We are hardly surprised by this — it is part of an exhibition, and it is in an art gallery. The past of 2001 — a group of people arranged around a room in a gallery — is shown in contemplation of the past of more than 2000 years before, suggesting how any photograph, whatever its primary intent, also acts as a record of the time it was made. That photographic record may be as open to interpretation as the surviving fragments of an ancient frieze, but both photo and frieze qualify as history as well as art.

In looking at photographs on display on the walls of a museum or a library, as opposed to a public or private art gallery, we are very much primed to read the images the other way, as history first and art, if at all, second. The exhibitions currently at the State Library of New South Wales and the National Archives of Australia take different approaches to the question of photography’s role in illuminating the past, and of how we should read photographs on display as history — but also, sometimes, as art, depending both on the innate qualities of the image and the institutional setting.

Shot: 400 Photographs, 200 Photographers, 3 Centuries inaugurates the State Library’s new photography gallery, a subterranean space created out of an old storage area once filled with “empty filing cabinets and the like.” It is difficult to think of a more striking metaphor of how photography has assumed a much more prominent role in our public collections, pushing its way forward by way of adaptive reuse.

The role of photography as historical record is emphasised by the organising principle of the exhibition — at least one photograph from nearly every year from 1845 to 2022. The library holds something in the order of two million photograph images; 400 are on display in Shot. This disparity in these numbers gives some idea of the curatorial task involved in choosing what to include.

The library’s inauguration of a dedicated space for displaying photographs is to be applauded, but it is hard not to notice, when descending into the former storage area, how limited that space is. The walls feel crowded, with some images mounted so high that details are almost out of visual reach. They can be examined more closely, however, on one of the wall-mounted monitors that have been distributed around the display area.

This combination of physical and electronic display seems deliberately to be raising the question of how we most effectively comprehend the vastness of Australia’s archive of photographic history. The viewer is being encouraged to see the images on the walls as a starting point, an encouragement to engage in further exploration online. “These 400 works,” we are advised in the useful if all too brief booklet that accompanies the exhibition, “convey some of the rich rewards to be gained by examining the archive as a whole,” suggesting how the role of curator is moving speedily through a process of democratisation — just as photography itself has undergone a similar process over many decades.

On the evidence of one moderately busy morning, that strategy is working: the monitors in the room were all taken up by people zooming in on details of the image — or seeking out further background information, or comparing one image with another — while others patiently waited their turn.

Shot explicitly challenges any distinction between “art” and “documentary” photography, consigning that distinction, not altogether convincingly, to history, to the twentieth century when “the ‘art-hang’ was a popular method for exhibiting the work of artist-photographers.” The library doesn’t abide by that distinction, instead choosing a middle way between a gallery-style “art-hang” and what might be called a documentary-hang. “If they’ve got visible sprocket holes, for example, that’s how we reproduce them.”

The many photographs in the library’s collection have been “sourced from official documents,” from shoeboxes and mantelpieces and from the archives of newspapers and portrait studios, but there are also images that we would conventionally think of as being more at home on the walls of art galleries. Max Dupain’s The Sunbather is there (in two versions) along, for example, with a beautiful autochrome Still Life (1912–20) by an unknown photographer, and Anne Zahalka’s 1988 Cibachrome print The Sisters, which also, as it happens, includes a still life, in the bottom right hand corner of the frame. Zahalka’s is a brilliant image, its forthright compositional techniques — its multiple references to framing, for example — and its combination of visual formality and domesticity inviting reflection on what a difference a frame makes.

Anne Zahalka’s The Sisters (1988). State Library of New South Wales

The inclusion of works by Dupain and Zahalka emphasise the fact that, in addition to their status as photographic art, these images are also part of Australian history and of the time in which they were made. The exhibition makes the further point that all manner of photographic output — studio portraiture, holiday snaps, photojournalism, police mug shots, “art photography” — documents the past, and indeed that examples of all those genres have a place in the library’s collection.

“Most of the Library’s photographs,” remarks curator Geoffrey Barker in the exhibition booklet, “have been acquired for their documentary value rather than for their artistic or aesthetic value, but… when visitors look at these photographs they will realise that often there’s not much between them and art photography.”

Some images, rather more than others, bear out this contention. Photo Kiosk (1949), for example, by the little-known Brian Bird, captures a moment in history, but it would also look perfectly at home displayed among the work of the world’s great mid-century street photographers. As an indication of the richness and variety of the library’s holdings — and by extension of the country’s photographic heritage — the exhibition is best seen as it suggests we see it, as an incentive to look further, to explore and curate these collections for ourselves.

Brian Bird’s Photo Kiosk (1949). State Library of New South Wales

The selection criterion for Focus: Australian Government Photographers at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra, is quite different. This is a selection of the images produced by the professional photographers employed, in various capacities and under various departmental headings, by the federal government. This system of direct employment lasted from its inception in 1939 until 1996, when it gave way to outsourcing.

The job of these photographers was, as Martyn Jolly puts it in his introduction, to “show off” Australia, its landscape, its industry and way of life. The photographs were destined to be printed in brochures and departmental reports, often without attribution. “They weren’t,” says Jolly, “taken for the gallery wall.” And yet here they are, framed and attributed and looking very much like art.

Many photographers worked for the government in this way. Eighteen are represented in the exhibition, complete with names and brief biographical details, the recovery of which in many cases required diligent research. Only one, the pioneering Aboriginal photographer Mervyn Bishop, could be described as widely known outside professional circles.

The names of the other seventeen will almost certainly be less familiar, including that of the sole woman among them, Jocelyn Burt, for whom entry into the world of professional photographers was no easy task. “I ran headlong into male chauvinism before I even started to work professionally,” she says in her laconically knockabout memoir Shutterbug in the Bush (1981).

Seeing these works displayed alongside one another gives an idea of the tightly encompassing brief to which the photographers were working. The human subjects look happy or purposeful or occasionally pensive, with few images of suffering or deprivation and only occasional ones of delicately implied sadness. People are typically arranged in groups, working on some common task or engaging in sport or leisure activities in a spirit of cheerful competitiveness. (Buildings, meanwhile, are shown as modern and clean-lined, embodying Australia’s commitment to the future.)

We cannot help but be conscious of how people have been directed to stand here or there or hold their heads just so. In John Tanner’s Workers at the BHP Steelworks (1956), for instance, a trio of men in hard hats gazes towards the future. One of the men is shown with his arm draped over the shoulder of his colleague, looking very much as if this is the first time he has ever done such a thing. And yet the image works. It conveys both the social constraints and the essential optimism of the time, suggesting by the bright-eyed way in which the men look into the distance that, those social constraints notwithstanding, the future is open.

John Tanner’s Workers at the BHP Steelworks (1956). National Archives of Australia

While the emphasis is on the vitality of youth, the relatively fewer images of older people treat them with an amused affection. In Jim Fitzpatrick’s Fruit Connoisseurs Assess the Produce (1968) three elderly women in complementary hats look balefully at a display of apples, determined not to be fooled by anything less than the best, while in Keith Byron’s Veteran Punter Outsmarts the Flies (1969) the veteran of the title, with netting draped over his hat, conveys a similarly robust resourcefulness.

It is Byron’s work, along with Mervyn Bishop’s, that most stands out among these resonant images; Bishop’s for his ability to capture both social disadvantage and genuine spontaneity in his pioneering photographs of First Nations people, and Byron for his instinct for unshowily combining documentary and art. Byron’s Tensions Run High Among Brokers at the Melbourne Stock Exchange (1968), with its multiple visual cross-references, is one to keep coming back to.

Given that the national stock of photographs is almost unimaginably vast, it is not realistic to think that more than a very small proportion can ever be displayed on the walls of cultural institutions. Just as we are all photographers now, so we are being encouraged to become curators too, exploring and researching the national collections for ourselves.

We don’t yet know where artificial intelligence is taking the practice of photography itself but, as Martyn Jolly points out, AI can already assist immeasurably in productive searching, finding links and illuminating correspondences that might otherwise emerge only by chance. Whatever its implications for the future of photography, when it comes to getting the most out of the photographs we already have, AI could well be a good thing. •

Photography: Real and Imagined
The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, until 4 February 2024

Shot: 400 Photographs, 200 Photographers, 3 Centuries
State Library of New South Wales until 3 November 2024

Focus: Australian Government Photographers 
National Archives of Australia until 10 June 2024

The post What a difference a frame makes appeared first on Inside Story.

As the film opens, a young priest walks urgently across the frame. He is heading towards a meeting with his superior, where he is to receive final advice before embarking on a journey. It is the end of the nineteenth century and Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) is being despatched from Denmark on a mission. He is to travel by sea and then by arduous overland trek to a remote settlement on the southeast coast of Iceland, where his task is to oversee the building of a church and lead the congregation in worship. He will be travelling to another country and, crucially, to another language.

Lucas’s gait, bent forward in his haste, suggests his determination to leave no room for doubt or hesitation. He is indeed on a mission. His pace suggests too the importance of getting started, for as his superior, Vincent, makes pragmatically clear in this farewell briefing — delivered in tones both avuncular and forbidding — the church must be completed by the winter. There must be no delay.

The briefing over, Lucas is shown fussily setting up a cumbersome wet-plate camera in preparation for taking a photograph of Vincent, an image intended to serve as a memento and a marker of the occasion. Vincent might be the subject of the photograph, but it is the photographer who is more clearly revealed, as both a traditionalist and a modern man. Lucas is a servant of God and a keen amateur photographer, in thrall to the new technology. We can already see that the two don’t sit easily together.

Vincent is played, in a small but resonant part, by the distinguished Danish actor Waage Sandø, who incidentally gives a masterclass in talking while shelling and eating a boiled egg (a scene that rivals Robert De Niro’s famous boiled egg scene in Alan Parker’s 1987 film Angel Heart, to which it surely alludes). He poses authoritatively in front of a patterned backcloth, his formal neck ruff appearing to separate his head from his body, in the manner of a portrait. In a series of subtle gestures, he adjusts his clothing and his expression as he waits to adopt those necessary seconds of stillness when his image will be captured. There is an atmosphere of theatrical significance. It is indeed an occasion, a moment of enforced calm before the urgent departure.

As we gradually learn throughout the course of the film — including in one brilliantly underplayed and comic scene at its midpoint — Lucas’s commitment to the urgency of his mission is compromised by his propensity for delay and deferral. His bulky camera and equipment also serve as an impediment, a literal burden (a publicity still shows Lucas, about to collapse under the weight of the camera on his back, arriving on the Icelandic shore) that weighs on him and slows him down.

Lucas displays a combination of confidence and uncertainty, of urgency and willed delay, that grows ever more starkly contradictory. It is a theme that permeates the entire film, embodied in the complex series of steps involved in wet-plate photography, which requires the right combination of perfect stillness, as the image is taken, and controlled urgency, as it is developed.

Starting out on his journey across the formidable Icelandic landscape, Lucas struggles to control his horse. The guide, Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurðsson), impatiently demonstrates how he must handle the reins more confidently, judging when to apply force and when to let up, to show the horse who is in charge and to control its pace. “Pull a little, then release,” Lucas is advised later on, but he never quite learns a comfortable balance, whether in making a photograph or riding a horse. In everything he does, the strain shows.

We are told during the opening credits that a mere seven of Lucas’s photographs have survived, from which, it is implied, the story of his journey and eventual fate have been constructed and imagined. It is one of many instances in which Pálmason subtly explores the role of photography in helping us to understand ourselves and our place in the world. Just as Godland brings those supposedly historical images to life, so the extraordinary cinematography of Maria von Hausswolff, Pálmason’s frequent collaborator, repeatedly alludes to still photography.

Von Hausswolff’s camera shows characters frozen (sometimes almost literally) in moments of inaction or contemplation. A shot of the Icelandic landscape will appear as if all is unmoving, until a horse or a bird or a small human figure wanders into the frame to remind us that what we are looking at is indeed a moving image rather than a photograph. This intermingling of the two genres, photography and cinema, is characteristic of Pálmason’s and von Hausswolff’s work. A White, White Day (2019), for example, begins with an extended series of near-still shots of a stark and isolated building as it appears in different weathers.

These allusions to photography are reinforced by Pálmason’s habit of centring the subject — a building or a person or a natural object — in the manner of traditional portraiture. We are constantly being invited to pay attention, to look closely at what is before us. This effect is further reinforced, as many commentators have pointed out, by Godland’s 4:3 aspect ratio, with rounded corners, which seems to echo the proportions and appearance of Lucas’s wet-plate photographs.

The decision to deploy that historical cinematic ratio to capture the look of nineteenth-century photographs is immediately convincing, but when it comes to similarly capturing the imposing dimensions of the Icelandic landscape, and forcefully conveying the relative smallness of the people within it, it seems counterintuitive, a rather odd directorial decision.

Yet both the director and cinematographer felt, as von Hausswolff has commented, that “framing Godland in 4:3 aspect ratio on 35mm film created a real connection to the landscape,” as well as to “the portraiture of the people.” That “real connection” is very effectively established by implication as well as directly through the camera. The audience is encouraged to imagine what lies beyond the frame as well as what is within it.

Because the screen’s borders don’t suddenly expand to modern dimensions to take in the landscape, as they might have done, we both see and imagine its vastness through the confines of the more traditional 4:3 framing. The frame seems to say that the vastness and disorienting visual experience of the Icelandic landscape — an experience W.H. Auden likened in Letters from Iceland (1936) to “walking the wrong way on a moving staircase” — cannot be fully captured by the camera.

As if to emphasise this point, Pálmason further plays with frames and framing throughout the film, experimenting with different ways of capturing what cannot be fully contained. We see the landscape through the lens of Lucas’s camera, through the triangle of open tent flaps, through windows and doorways, in near darkness and in the obscurity of fog. We are constantly reminded of how difficult it is to see it all at once.

The vulnerability of humans within this landscape is shown in painterly long shots. Lucas and his party cross the frame on horseback, their slow, deliberate pace ironically echoing the opening scene in which the eager, nervous priest bursts across the screen. Later, nature’s dominance is demonstrated in one slow, impressive 360-degree pan across the landscape, as the focus ever tightens until it lands upon the supine figure of Lucas, lying still, with his eyes closed. Were it not for the sound of his breathing, he could be dead. He could almost be posing.

Stay perfectly still, the ship’s crew are instructed as they assemble for a group photograph earlier in the film, their faces overlaid with white to ensure more effective contrast in the final image. Keep still, they are told again, “as if you’re dead.” We learn almost nothing about this ship’s crew. Similarly, the men and one woman who accompany Lucas on his overland journey, apart from the leading guide, Ragnar, remain virtually unknown, as do the members of the small coastal community when the party arrives at its destination.

We know these subsidiary characters almost exclusively by their faces, and by the attention the camera pays to them, not only in Lucas’s photographs but also in the lingering, portrait-like focus of the cinematography. Almost entirely by visual means, we get a strong impression of their individuality — they are not just figures in a landscape.

The individual and group portraits that Lucas makes — of his priestly mentor, of the crew of the ship taking him to Iceland, of his unnamed translator, of the young woman he seems destined to marry, and of her father — all seem to offer their subjects proof of their existence within an unforgiving world. Meanwhile Lucas, who might nowadays be described as short on social skills, approaches his most meaningful, if fleeting, connections mediated by the camera.

In the film’s most striking instance of this kind of mediated intimacy, Lucas and his unnamed translator (Hilmar Guðjónsson) are seen striding into the landscape, camera and equipment on their backs, to “take a picture.” Lucas photographs the translator posed against the landscape, and this seems to lead directly to a greater understanding and connection between the two men. We next see them standing, bare-chested and apart from each other, facing the spray of a waterfall. They jointly raise their arms, if not in worship of nature, then in something close to it.

In another instance of the power of nature, the party of travellers comes to a swollen river that must be crossed if they are to continue their journey. Rivers are “difficult to read,” Vincent has warned Lucas earlier, and Ragnar, the Icelander who knows the country as no other, advises strategic withdrawal. They will try again in a few days, when the waters will have subsided. But Lucas insists on proceeding, putting himself and his companions in danger. At the crucial moment, rather than pausing — easing up on the reins — he plunges forward.

Lucas comes close to death during the gruelling journey. “I want to go home,” he cries in despair. But he then undergoes a kind of resurrection, brought back to life first by the dour Ragnar and then by a Danish widower, Carl (Jacob Lohmann) and his two daughters — Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne), born in Denmark, and Ida (Ída Mekkin Hlynsdóttir), born in Iceland — who house and care for him. Lucas, in return, makes a portrait of each of them.

In preparing to photograph Anna, Lucas gently gently smears white powder on her face to make her ready for the camera, later calling her over excitedly to the makeshift developing tent to witness the emerging image. I look old, says Anna as her face starts to appear in the developing tray (a reaction that subjects often had to their wet-plate portraits when the complex pattern of contrast had not quite worked to their advantage). Young and beautiful, responds Lucas, uncertain whether to look at Anna or at the image he has just made.

Photography, which tantalises with its apparent promise of facilitating his connection with others, ultimately fails Lucas. In a cruelly dramatic scene towards the end of the film, Ragnar, the man who has guided him across Iceland to his destination and has saved his life along the way, asks Lucas to take his photograph. He wants to own an image of himself. Lucas refuses, rejecting any possible connection. For him, Ragnar is an animal, a “swine.” Much more than language separates them.

Ragnar has earlier had the opportunity to be in a group photograph. But he has moved at the crucial moment, spoiling the image — your dog moved less than you, Lucas mutters angrily — and Lucas destroys the plate in frustration. The failure of the photograph embodies the failure of the relationship — with Ragnar, with Iceland. In a film replete with foreshadowings and visual parallels, it foreshadows the tragedy at the end.

Of all Lucas’s human subjects, Ida, the younger, more carefree daughter, is the only one to adopt the characteristic photographic postures of our time — rather than formal and submissive, obedient to the camera and to the photographer, she is ironic, self-aware, cheeky. She is not at all intimidated. Others sit perfectly still, as instructed, looking “straight into the eye.” Posing with her horse, she stands on its back, then seats herself the wrong way round, then turns her face away from the camera. Lucas allows himself the beginnings of a smile at this performance, while Ida’s horse ambles away with her, out of the frame.

Surrounded by failure and thwarted ambition (“we are all very small and fleeting,” says her father to Lucas), Ida is nevertheless optimistic. She is the only character to be entirely comfortable in both Icelandic and Danish. The rest speak only one language, or speak the other one imperfectly, or are reluctant to speak it at all. Even the unnamed translator sometimes struggles to understand what Lucas is getting at. But Ida slips easily between the two languages, confidently demonstrating, by passing her hand across her face in the manner of a slow camera sweep, how she can move smoothly from one to the other. In a film rather short on optimism, it is a small sign of hope and of faith in the future. •

The post In the frame appeared first on Inside Story.

When the winning entry in a small Australian photo competition was revealed as “fake” earlier this year, there was much debate over whether technology was taking over from people. What purported to be a drone photo of a beach had been generated using AI. Not long after, followers of another photographer’s Instagram account were dismayed when he revealed he had used AI to create images.

Some react angrily to revelations like these, expressing outrage at a fake photo masquerading as real; others claim that its fakeness was always obvious. The waves are going in the wrong direction, as more than one person said of the beach photo. “If you know what to look for, you can spot these fakes at a single glance,” say the founders of the website Which Face Is Real? (“For the time being,” they add.)

Given that photographic experimentation and manipulation dates back to the very beginnings of the medium, it is hard to understand why this kind of stunt generates such dismay. The cry from doubters over the direction AI is taking us in overlooks the fact that judging the realness of an image has never been straightforward.

Ambiguity over authorship has been part of the world of photography since the beginning, with anonymity and attribution coexisting for the most part comfortably. That world contains works by professional photographers, some of them with stratospheric reputations, alongside “found images” made by amateurs and unknowns, quite possibly created by accident and involving the very minimum of human agency.

The success of a photographic image, its ability to strike a chord in the viewer, has never depended on its place on the spectrum of authorship. We might seek out further images by a photographer we admire because experience tells us that it will be likely to work its magic on us. But we can equally value images whose provenance we will never know.

Such has been the proliferation of photographic images in the digital, “pre-AI era” — that is, up until yesterday — that we are already well attuned to the difficulty of keeping up with the images themselves, not to say with who made what. Anonymous images blend with attributed ones, and if individual images stand out from the crowd we don’t always understand why.

A significant number of practitioners in these early days of AI photography are dealing with this complicated relationship by using handles rather than names. “What led you to choose anonymity,” a Vogue Italia interviewer asks Str4ngThing, an “AI artist of fashion,” to which the answer is “to leave room for interpretation.” This is a neat device for having it both ways — allowing the image to speak for itself while being credited at one remove with whatever success and approbation it may enjoy.

Approbation as a photographer was already running up against the fact that it has become increasingly difficult for an image to stand out not only because there are so many of them, but also because so many closely resemble one another. It has long been the case that certain themes have their moment, with photographers coalescing around those themes — portraiture with the face obscured in some way, photographic re-enactments of the old masters, moody shots of abandoned buildings.

The popular Instagram account, Insta Repeat, has great fun pointing out the unoriginal nature of so much photography, not only by displaying clusters of sunsets and waterfalls, but also by showing how specific subjects — the photographer’s feet dangling over a precipitous cliff, for example — are suddenly everywhere.

Yet all those sunsets also point, in an exaggerated way perhaps, to one of the more attractive aspects of photography as a creative art — its ability to foster collaboration and cross fertilisation, and to encourage emulation. Just as copying the old masters is a way of building painterly skills and confidence, so is making yet another image of a sunset or a girl with a pearl earring a means of mastering the capacities of the photographic medium.

AI is the beneficiary of this profusion. By mining the online datasets, image generation tools such as Midjourney and DALL-E and Stable Diffusion draw on untold numbers of extant, humanly created images, out of which new, AI-generated images are built.

According to Jaron Lanier, among the most illuminating chroniclers of the technological age, these tools “mash up work done by human minds… illuminating concordances between human creations.” Crucially, they are facilitators rather than independent creators. They are not in themselves new minds, Lanier says with confidence.

The philosopher and neuroscientist Raphaël Millière similarly emphasises the primacy of human artistic creativity in the face of this current whirlwind of technological advancement. The nature of artistic creation will change, he says, as it has often changed in the past, but the artist will remain in control.

The key to this artistic control lies in the text, the “prompts” used to instruct the program to produce an image. “This means that visual artists can now craft their art with words, much like poets,” says Millière, forming “a new bridge between linguistic and visual forms of artistic expression.”

The French filmmaker and artist Alain Astruc posts similarly stimulating reflections on the nature of AI image-making on his Substack. He is pleased to discover through his explorations of the new tools what he calls “a certain poetry of the prompt.” Astruc sees prompting as being both an art in itself and a new and exciting means of image creation. It is no surprise, given the power of the prompt, that instructional guides to effective prompting now abound on the internet, following on from the legions of tips on how to get the best out of your photo-editing software.

It is not only emerging young practitioners who are embracing AI. Hailing from an earlier, post-war generation, American photographer Laurie Simmons is well known for her innovative practice, and in particular for her staged scenes of domesticity involving carefully placed dolls and dummies. These images, borderline cute in a deeply unsettling way, have a distinctly proto-AI look to them.

Simmons has recently moved, by her own account quite seamlessly, into exploring the capabilities of AI. The tools can produce unexpected and even unwelcome results, but this only encourages greater deliberation and thought in her choice of prompts. “I feel like an AI whisperer,” she has said.

But perhaps a certain amount of wishful thinking is going on here. Judging by the prompt sequences AI explorers share online, few if any are raising the bar of poetic expression. Nevertheless, the sentiment expressed by Millière, Astruc and Simmons rings true: there is something essentially poetic about the art of prompting, of playing with words to produce the most satisfying result.

It is far too early to tell whether these various expressions of optimism are well founded. The question remains, do the various tools for AI image generation genuinely foster creativity, or do they stifle it? So much is being produced, so much experimentation and playing around is going on, that nobody quite knows.

A further, even more difficult question is whether these images are any good. Do they strike a chord? The critical vocabulary for assessing photography, never very robust, is at a loss when it comes to AI images. The standard online response to an individual AI image is along the lines of “impressive,” “wow” or “ground-breaking,” and from there the eye moves on in an instant.

The only meaningful form of validation so far comes from the collector, occasionally a museum but more often an individual, someone who is “comfortable in the space” and confident enough to pick an NFT image or two from the latest collection, transfer however many Ethereum in payment, and wait patiently to see if their investment pays off — in financial gain, growth of the artist’s reputation, or both.

In that sense, old-fashioned connoisseurship is back with a vengeance. The collector’s eye has become at least as important as the photographer’s in ensuring the continuing life of the image.

This leaves photography seemingly poised between the past and the future, but this is nothing new. Photography has always embodied the transitional state. Even the most “realistic” photograph captures an unrealistic stillness, an artificially stopped moment between the past and the future.

The New York activist photographer and filmmaker of the 1980s, David Wojnarowicz, in his memoir Close to the Knives (1991), suggests that this affinity with transitional states is what drives him as a photographer. “I hate arriving at a destination. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.”

In our current cultural climate, where we are especially fascinated by states of transition — with the spaces between fixed identities, between points of departure and points of arrival — it is not surprising that AI photography should be so heavily preoccupied with the “disconnected and unfamiliar.” Images produced with the aid of AI typically dodge questions of origins and destinations, mixing up the past and the future in a single frame, so that we have little sense of beginnings and endings.

When a human-like figure appears in the frame, they will often have a lost or bewildered expression, as if they don’t quite know what they are doing there or where they have come from. The Canberra-based artist Lilyillo, who describes herself as “collaborating” with AI, places her mock-human subjects in ways that parody conventional studio portraiture, covering them in bright harlequinesque patterns and giving them dreamy, spaced-out expressions, as though they have dressed themselves up and have nowhere to go.

Her images — and those of many other AI artists — suggest that whoever came up with the name of Midjourney for the popular image-generation tool was on to something. Either that, or it constitutes an outstanding instance of nominative determinism. For the great majority of AI images do indeed occupy a middle space, blending past and imagined future by means of a kind of retro-futurism, in which recognizable if distorted figures are placed within fantastical, quirky or off-kilter settings.

The result is unsettling, or “uncanny,” to use the most frequently deployed descriptor for this effect. Freudian notions of uncanniness have long been associated with photography and many past practitioners have deliberately sought to explore and highlight this effect. But the overwhelming emphasis of AI image making on this quality of strangeness is something new.

According to the online platform Fellowship, which displays curated examples of AI photography, “much of the ethos of AI work we have seen so far,” its visual language, can be summed up in the words “uncanny, surreal, fantasy and otherworldliness.” In other words, they’re not real.

Instead, AI helps the artist to create “complex, uncanny, neo-surreal images that can shift artistic styles seamlessly,” says Jess Mac, whose work (including this image) appears in Fellowship’s first group show of emerging AI artists, posted online in April. “This allows for a queering of the imagery,” they say, “undoing normative representations of gender, kinship, and embodiment with ease.” Alain Astruc’s forthcoming exhibition (which might well include these images), to be held in June in Cahors in southern France, has as its title “In the Valley of the Strange,” which is perfectly on point.

Taken as a whole, across the range of AI image production, this preoccupation with uncanniness can feel suffocating. It seems paradoxical that a technology that promises so much creativity and variety can produce so much sameness of approach, but that could fairly be said of the camera too — think of all those sunsets. The capacity for repetition and sameness has never precluded the emergence and the recognition of images that stand out and that strike a spark in the viewer, and something similar will increasingly happen with AI photography.

In contrast to the dispiriting idea that the exciting times, photographically speaking, are over, that all the good photographs have been taken — that the golden age of mid-century photography isn’t coming back — the advocates for AI as an image-making tool have launched a counter-narrative, in which the creation of “photographic” images is being reinvented and re-energised.

Like it or not, the term AI photography is doubtless here to say, even as some persuasively maintain that it’s not photography at all — that it would be more accurately if less sharply described as photography-like. Some favour the term “synthography” on impeccably logical grounds, but it has a bit of a robot-generated ring to it and is unlikely to catch on. AI photography could also be described as AI illustration, in that it is the rendering of text as image, but that hardly sounds cutting-edge.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of AI imaging, at least in the department of cultural change, is its dependence on words. We are even told that tools will soon become widely available that link directly to our thoughts. We will be able to think an image, which others will then view and perhaps admire.

But for the moment it is words, or prompts, that deliver the picture, by means of a technical miracle that most of us can barely comprehend. Just as we have long been familiar with the idea that every picture tells a story, so we will soon unquestioningly absorb this new iteration of the relationship between word and image, in which every story tells a picture. •

The post Every story tells a picture appeared first on Inside Story.

It didn’t come as a surprise. The previous fifty or more years had seen many attempts to produce colour images. Some had achieved encouraging if fleeting results, but the images either could not be fixed, or survived only for a brief time.

By the early twentieth century, progress was such that a good many rivals were competing to come up with a process that was accessible, relatively affordable, and able to represent the world as it is — in colour. The Lumière brothers won that race. Autochrome was, in the words of the influential photographer and critic Alfred Stieglitz, “a dream come true,” a marvel of modern technology.

Thanks partly to the unrestrained enthusiasm of early-day influencers like Stieglitz, autochrome was an immediate success. Photographers with sufficient means were keen to try the new system. It was felt that, in some profound sense, the capacity to produce images in colour would unequivocally establish photography as no longer an ambitious interloper but an art form in its own right, one that would stand on equal terms with its elders.

For J.M. Bowles, who wrote extensively on art and photography, “the modern photographic print needs colour in order to make it a complete work of art.” The need had long been identified; now at last it was being met. For many of the self-styled Pictorialists, for example — those photographers who took an avowedly painterly approach to their work with the camera — colour offered the means to justify their claims for photography’s status.

In the October 1907 edition of his journal Camera Work, Stieglitz was unreserved in his vision of the future. Not only would the practice of colour photography become widespread, it would also provide new creative opportunities for those with the necessary talent to take full advantage of its potential. “The photographer who is an artist and who has a conception of colour will know how to make use of it.”

Not every photography enthusiast felt this way. The critic and editor Dixon Scott, for example, lamented that the “lilliputian Frankensteins” — a reference to the tiny, coloured dots, made from potato starch, that coated the plate and formed the bedrock of the colour image — would render it “impossible for the human hand to interfere.” The dots would make the photograph on their own, limiting the ability of the photographer to manipulate the image to create effects of the kind that could be achieved with monochrome. For this reason, Scott declared, photography’s “true sphere must always be the world of monochrome.”

From excited to despondent, these differing reactions were united in the certainty that the invention of the autochrome image heralded a revolution. It just wasn’t clear where the revolution was headed. Whether the new world of photographic colour would turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing remained to be revealed.

As Catlin Langford shows in her fascinating account of the rise and fall of autochrome, Colour Mania, the enthusiasts initially triumphed over the doubters. Drawing on the V&A’s considerable collection of some 2500 autochromes, and aided by excellent reproductions, Langford shows how the best of these early colour images, with their characteristic combination of realism and other-worldliness, “are as alluring today as when the process was first made available.”

In 1907, the future of colour photography seemed assured. Processes would inevitably improve, and before long colour rather than black-and-white would become the dominant medium. And yet it did not quite happen that way. Within only a few years some of the most prominent of the initial enthusiasts, including Stieglitz, had largely abandoned the new method for the more familiar and more flexible “world of monochrome.”

The portraitist and fashion photographer Adolph de Meyer, who declared in 1908 that he “no longer had an interest in monochrome photography,” returned to black-and-white a mere two years later. Although he was initially excited by colour’s possibilities, that excitement waned after a brief period of experiment. For de Meyer, monochrome continued to be where the real technical and artistic possibilities lay.

Adolph de Meyer’s Four Trout (1909). Victoria and Albert Museum

And yet de Meyer’s experiments with colour in those two years captured much of the promise and potential of autochrome. Langford includes half a dozen of de Meyer’s works in Colour Mania, all from the period 1908–09, all of them still lifes in which he explores the impact of various colour combinations. In one particularly effective example, Four Trout (1909), the fish of the title are arranged in a vertical row, one above the other, on a similarly arranged bed of waterweed.

Because of its highly patterned nature, this exercise in geometrical composition could also be extremely effective in monochrome. Indeed, the stippled trout look at first glance almost to be in black-and-white. It is the pale green of the background leaves that provides the dominant colour, causing the eye to focus as much on the backdrop as on the fish of the title. Four Trout is a fascinating exploration of colour’s ability to make a difference to how we see, yet it was an exploration that de Meyer felt he could take only so far.

In retrospect, it is not surprising that the initial enthusiasm for autochrome faded away. Autochromes took photography backwards as well as forwards. While improvements in monochrome cameras and associated processes had made it easier to travel light and respond more readily, autochrome revived more complex methods of preparation and display, and set back progress towards the highly desirable goal of capturing the moment.

Monochrome photography in the early twentieth century was rapidly being democratised. By contrast, the new colour process recalled a time when the practice of photography required considerable money and time and was an occupation for the few. The relatively cumbersome business of making a colour image seemed to belong to the past almost as much as to the future. Not only was making an autochrome demanding, but the result was uncertain and fragile.

In a detailed account of the process itself, Langford points out that while no specialist equipment was required — “any plate camera could be used” — the business of preparing and developing the plate involved many steps and left considerable room for error along the way.

Long exposure times, sometimes of a few seconds and often much longer, were required, obliging the photographer to minimise movement of the subject. Flowers, for example, were often brought inside to avoid any hint of wind that might ruffle the petals. After all this effort, an autochrome was difficult to reproduce effectively on paper. It needed to be backlit for display, and then for only short periods lest the plate be damaged and the image ruined.

Autochromes had their own mortality built into them. Langford quotes an estimate that fifty million autochromes were created during the twenty-five years in which the plates were commercially produced. Few have survived. Yet to view an autochrome in those early days, briefly backlit in a darkened room, must have been a thrillingly theatrical experience.

As more and more professional photographers returned to favouring monochrome, an opening was left for the supposedly less talented, “these people with their silly little enthusiasm and their inability to appreciate the niceties of colour,” as the photographic portraitist Alvin Langdon Coburn unkindly put it. The French Pictorialist Robert Demachy meanwhile resigned himself “to the inevitable atrocities that the over-confident amateur is going to thrust upon us.”

Yet for those who stayed the course of colour, gifted and persistent amateurs with the necessary means, it was also an opportunity for a further blurring of the distinction between professional and amateur, a blurring that had always existed and has never really gone away.

It is one of the most fascinating aspects of the history of photography in the twentieth century that colour, from its first commercial appearance in 1907, did not sweep the board, at least as far as art or what might be called serious photography was concerned. With major exceptions, particularly in areas such as fashion and travel photography, black-and-white retained its artistic dominance for many decades.

This was not only because of the difficulties, complexities and cost of making autochromes, nor of the challenges in producing an easily viewable image. It was also because the effect of colour, while immediate and striking, was felt by many to be ultimately unsatisfying, the equivalent of popular fiction. Monochrome was more literary.

The introduction of Kodachrome in 1936, which would help make colour photography both simpler and more affordable, reinforced this effect. Colour went on to become the medium for recording family occasions and holiday outings rather than the preferred medium for artistic expression. It was not until the 1970s, with the rise of photographers such as William Eggleston and Joel Meyerowitz, that colour photography finally began to be recognised and appreciated for its full artistic capabilities.

Colour now dominates our view of photography. To many eyes, images in greyscale, which speak of the past, need colour to become truly alive. Hence the boom in colourising, by which the dead past is reanimated for contemporary eyes. The digital artist Marina Amaral, for example, has built a huge following by colouring black-and-white photographs, thereby “breathing life into the past.”

Amaral’s most recent book of colourised images, A Woman’s World 1850–1960, co-authored with historian Dan Jones, follows two highly successful earlier volumes in which Amaral and Jones focused on colourised images of key historical events and of war. A Woman’s World is described as offering “a strikingly fresh perspective on the female experience during an era of extraordinary events,” by which “these women and their lives are brought wholly to life.”

Autochrome, seen in this context, was a false start. It offered the means of bringing the world “wholly to life,” but it was not until half a century later that colour was kickstarted onto its path to dominance. Colour Mania takes us back to the beginning, providing an opportunity to assess the achievements of these early experimenters with colour, and to understand why they did not lead at once to the revolutionary change that many expected.

Making and then viewing an autochrome entailed a good deal of effort. Autochromes were advertised as rendering photography “true to life,” but arriving at that truth required considerable creative deception. Autochrome recorded the artificially static, not life as it was lived. Spontaneity was out of the question. Langford records the advice of one contributor to the British Journal of Photography: “rose trees that are rather bare may have a few blooms wired on for the occasion.”

Photographers were obliged to take particular care in selecting their subjects, avoiding overly sharp contrasts and incompatible colours (which could cause a “fried egg effect,” rendering the centre of the photo darker) and instead favouring certain colours, for example red, which reproduced particularly well and contributed to a striking yet harmonious whole. The ability of red to anchor the image can be seen in Mervyn O’Gorman’s dramatic and justly famous portraits, from 1913, of Christina, dressed in red and photographed against a coastal background.

Of the photographers represented in Colour Mania, the one to best show the full potential of autochrome was the one who stayed loyal the longest. F.A. (Friedrich Adolf) Paneth was a quite remarkable man. His day job, so to speak, was as a chemist, a field in which he achieved great distinction. On leaving Germany with his family in reaction to the rise of Hitler, he worked principally in Britain and America before capping a brilliant career as director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz.

Paneth brought the same intelligence, inventiveness and precise eye for detail to his hobby of photography as he did to his profession of chemistry. Rather than being frustrated by the constraints of the autochrome process, he seemed to relish the challenge of working with them to maximum effect. Langford describes how Paneth even stockpiled a supply of autochrome plates to use against the inevitable day when production would cease. When that day came, in 1932, he continued to produce autochromes until, reluctantly, he switched to newer technologies. It seems that even then he would sometimes process his images in ways that would cause them to resemble autochromes.

A.F. Paneth’s Lutz, Otto, and Myself at Semmering, Austria (1908). Victoria and Albert Museum

As Langford rightly notes, Paneth’s scientific mind and methodical approach, though they resulted in highly composed images, “nevertheless convey a sense of immediacy” and of “intimacy.” This is particularly noticeable in his group photographs — of friends, family, colleagues and students.

It is difficult for any photographer to capture in such an image a genuine sense of equality and companionship. Certain faces or figures will tend to dominate and demand particular attention. Paneth, however, had a talent for distributing our attention equally across the figures in the frame.

In one striking image, Lutz, Otto and Myself at Semmering, Austria (1908), Paneth is shown photographing his brother and their friend Otto. The men are formally dressed in the manner of the time, and rather stiffly posed. Yet the image relays an impression of mutual affection and of collaboration in this new way of making images, an impression reinforced by the vitality of colour. Paneth, whose work was never exhibited in his lifetime, was both a conservative — he stuck to his last — and an innovator, pointing the way ahead, never losing his faith in the bright future of colour. •

Colour Mania: Photographing the World in Autochrome
By Catlin Langford | Thames and Hudson | $90 | 238 pages

The post Autochrome’s intimate legacy appeared first on Inside Story.

Still Pictures, Malcolm’s just-published final work, is a collection of twenty-six short chapters, or meditations, on this relationship. It amounts to a fragmented yet highly evocative autobiography, a genre of which she also remained wary to the end.

Most, though not all, of the chapters begin with a photograph. A few contain no reproductions at all, a few contain several, but mostly there is just one photograph, acting as a starter culture for the reflections that follow. The illustrations as they appear on the page are small and of low resolution; they don’t seem to have much of a life or significance of their own. Some come, we are told, from a cardboard box marked “Old Not Good Photos,” clearly signalling their lack of aesthetic value. They certainly don’t leap from the page, demanding our attention. It is Malcolm’s words that make them.

The title, Still Pictures, refers to the essential quality of photographic images, their status as frozen moments in time. The subtitle, “On Photography and Memory,” provides a bit more of a hint of what to expect. Are photographs, these frozen moments, the embodiment of memory, or at the very least stimulants to memory (whether those memories are collective or private), or do we accord photographs a status and power they don’t really merit?

Which takes us back to the main title, and its subtle ambiguity. Photos and snapshots, made with the greatest care or taken casually and unthinkingly, may well provide keys to the past. Or they may, in the end, still just be pictures.

Malcolm repeatedly approaches this question, before feinting and dancing away from it. We are not to be treated to conventional or indeed unconventional analysis of why this or that image works or doesn’t work, of why it might qualify as art. This is no surprise, given that she became, over many decades of engagement with photographs and their impact on our view of the world, increasingly uninterested in the theoretical exploration or artistic appreciation of photography.

In an email exchange with fellow writer on photography Geoff Dyer in 2014, published in the journal Aperture, she asserts her complete lack of interest in that trio of giants of photographic theory, John Berger, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag. Their “writings on photography have meant almost nothing to me,” she tells Dyer in characteristically take-it-or-leave-it style.

Malcolm does however directly follow the Barthes of Camera Lucida in her insistence on the essentially private nature of our response to photographs. In Still Pictures, her readings of the photographs she has selected are partial, tentative and very personal. Our interaction with a photograph is “always, at bottom, a private reading,” Barthes wrote, a reading in which the subject of the photo intertwines with our own past and our own memories. It is not the photo that we see, but what it says to us, the memories it evokes.

Malcolm differs from many a speculative and freewheeling reader of photographs in that even what is for her a very personal image, one with an earlier version of herself in the frame, may not offer very much in the way of material. Photos, like memories, possess a natural resistance. “I am in the front row, third from the left,” she says of a class photo, but beyond that “the picture brings back no memory.” Another image, of Malcolm, her sister and “three people I don’t recognise,” is dismissed as “barely readable… It has no artistic merit and summons no memories.”

This is one of many comments Malcolm makes on the failure of photographs — photographs in this case related directly to her own life — to deliver in the memory department. I remember nothing, she will say of a photograph, yet paradoxically Still Pictures is packed with memories. Even as she tells us that, memory-wise, this or that photograph is a disappointment, the memories take off — usually in unpredictable directions, but memories all the same.

“Barely readable.” Janet Malcolm

In that image of a young Janet, her sister and the three women she does not (at first) recognise, the figures are variously arranged, in a row, against a car. The woman on the left of the frame is half standing, half leaning behind and against the driver’s open door, her face full on to the viewer, framed by the car window. A frame within a frame.

But Malcolm — and this is a sign of her dismissive brilliance — gives only the most cursory nod towards this rather obvious piece of compositional analysis. Instead, she mimics the process of looking more closely at a photograph and of a memory suddenly coming back to her. She does, after all, remember this woman in the window, but then the memory begins to fade. “There may have been some tragic story, or there may not.”

“I have a memory,” she remarks in a further reflection, and the memory sounds from her telling of it to have many of the qualities of a photograph. It is from her teenage years. Leonard and Sue are “standing together at the back of an assembly hall.” It is a highly romantic, evocative image. Both of them “exceptionally good-looking.” They form a composition on their own, apart from their “unformed” fellows. Their apartness, Malcolm says, has “stayed with me through the years.” But it isn’t a photograph, she reminds us — it’s a memory.

In this retained, unphotographed memory, Malcolm resists what can often seem to be the inevitable takeover of memory by physical and digital images. Images from our personal archives pop up unbidden on our screens and we have rapidly learned to call them what they call themselves, “memories.” Advertisements for cameras and smartphones exhort us to “make memories.” We frequently ask ourselves whether it is the event, the person, the landscape that we remember, or the photos we have of them, and we can be forgiven for suspecting it’s the photos.

In defiance of photography’s takeover bid, Malcolm makes the case for memory as memory, rather than slave to photography. In pursuit of this objective, her repeated failures to remember the events captured in a photograph can sometimes seem almost too insistent — a way of putting photographs in their place.

Yet time may be on her side. We now have the capacity, by means of AI and image-generation models, to turn memory into image using text commands, upending the balance between the two. Malcolm’s memory of Leonard and Sue, standing at the back of the assembly hall, can now be turned into a photographic image, stealing a march on the camera.

For Malcolm, Leonard and Sue notwithstanding, “most of what happens to us goes unremembered,” either by us or by photographs. When photographs of past events do exist, they don’t necessarily help in the process of recall. Rather than acting as memories on our behalf, photographs from school and holidays and family occasions can unsettle us, exactly because we may not remember anything about the event, or the people recorded in the photographic moment. A photograph, even one in which we recognise ourselves, can leave us questioning our own capacity to remember much at all.

We will sometimes look at a photograph of our past selves and be unsettled by how long ago it seems. Even or perhaps especially if the image comes with a date-stamp, we can feel disoriented. The date just doesn’t seem right. The photograph could easily belong to an earlier period of history, before ours. Instead of bringing back our youth, a photograph can push it further away. “I am struck,” Malcolm says of that school photo, “by how different the girls look from some of the girls of today, as though they were living in the nineteenth century and being photographed by Mrs Cameron.”

At the same time as she identifies the gaps that separate photography and memory, Malcolm also emphasises their similarities. She likens the events of our lives to photographic negatives — “the few that make it into the developing solution and become photographs are what we call our memories.” The photographs we retain in our heads are the ones we have developed, curated and stored. The others have been discarded with the contact sheets.

Strikingly, Malcolm compares the creation and retention of memories to a photographic process that is now outdated, one of analogue cameras and darkrooms and developing fluid; it is an old method for old memories. But this metaphor has a notable absence: there is no mention of the photographer, no human hand placing the negative in the tray. In the same way, the images that Malcolm reflects upon in Still Pictures are by photographers unknown or unsung.

Occasionally, a professional, named photographer does intrude. Decades after they were taken, a small bundle of photographs turns up unexpectedly in the mail. They are part of a set by Marjory Collins, one of the remarkably gifted photographers deployed by the Office of War Information to document American life during the second world war. Malcolm’s family, as Czech immigrants, was selected to be photographed as part of a “propagandist” project designed to show America’s rich and welcoming social variety.

Young Janet Malcolm with “Slečna.” Marjory Collins/Library of Congress

The photograph that begins the chapter shows Janet’s teacher of Czech in pedagogical pose, pointing at the blackboard, while Janet herself, not yet tall enough to do so with ease, reaches up aspirationally with her chalk, her back to the camera. What follows on from the image is a moving reflection on the teacher, known to her pupils only as “Slečna,” or “Miss,” about whose life Malcolm knew and knows little. She can speculate, but can’t in any meaningful sense remember, either the events depicted in the photograph or the specific moment in which it was taken.

The unexpected package contains only a dozen or so photos — the one of “Miss” at the blackboard and other moments involving her childhood self — but there must, we infer, have been a good many more. Indeed “must have” becomes a brief refrain. Marjory Collins “must have” spent several days on these photo sessions. She “must have” sat in that empty chair after taking her photos of the family at table.

By this stage, a third of the way through the book, we are already unsurprised as Malcolm distances herself from these photos of her and her family: “I have no memory of the sessions with Marjory Collins.” In Malcolm’s memory, Collins as photographer is near to invisible.

“Outstandingly terrible.” Janet Malcolm

In her final chapter, “A Work of Art,” Malcolm returns to this question of authorship in photography. She recalls the publication in 1980 of a collection of her photography pieces, Diana and Nikon, pieces that had previously appeared, without illustrations, in the New Yorker. To support her text, Malcolm selected examples, by prominent practitioners, “of a new kind of avant-garde photography that took its inspiration from — and to all intents and purposes was indistinguishable from — the home snapshot.” The provocativeness of that word “indistinguishable” foreshadows what comes next.

Among her examples of “artless” photography, Malcolm includes a bit of mischief — an “outstandingly terrible snapshot” of unknown provenance that her husband had long ago chanced upon and kept for its very awfulness. She connives to attribute the image to her husband, thereby identifying him as creator rather than mere collector. With gotcha delight, Malcolm describes in Still Pictures how this interloper of an image, with its newly assigned authorship, assumes an afterlife of reiterated artistic merit, solely because she has deemed it such.

In her study of the impact of social media on memory, The End of Forgetting (2019), Kate Eichhorn argues that the ubiquity and digital longevity of photos mean that “the ability to break away from the past is severely compromised.” How can we move successfully into the future, she asks, “carrying an archive of past images?”

Photographs are everywhere, their numbers increasing daily to reach yet further unimaginable heights. Everyone takes them, looks at them, exchanges and archives them. They are in danger, we fear, of overwhelming our lives, substituting recorded memories for the real thing, for what we have come to defiantly call our “lived experience.”

For Janet Malcolm, this is to exaggerate the power of photography. Her personal, randomly retained collection of largely undistinguished images is not so much a burden as a mystery. These photos stimulate memories, again often at seeming random, but they don’t substitute for them. Sometimes we connect with the past our photos represent, sometimes we don’t. The memories contained within the photos are anything but simulacrums of her own — the most she can expect is that if she looks at an image long enough, a connection will form, and something in the frame will “begin to speak.” •

Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory
By Janet Malcolm | Text Publishing | $29.99 | 155 pages

The post Taking it or leaving it appeared first on Inside Story.

We see how Melbourne was made and remade, from the years leading up to the vibrant, anything-is-possible 1860s through to the long (and not yet complete) postwar enthusiasm for destruction and reconstruction, with buildings, streetscapes, urban centres, gathering places and green spaces disappearing only to reappear in markedly different form. We follow — by means of archival footage, photographs and the part-passionate, part-laconic commentary of a small group of highly engaged experts — how the city got from there to here.

In one sense it is a tragic tale, a story of how nineteenth-century commercial vitality could combine with a commitment to beauty and ornament and aesthetic pleasure, and how that happy combination was abandoned in favour of an equally commercialised faith in the clean and functional yet soulless lines of modernism.

In the later nineteenth century in particular, Melbourne was the most modern of modern cities, but by the early twentieth century the city seemed to be stuck in an earlier version of what it meant to be modern. Extending over many decades, the drive to keep up and go up is now commonly regarded as having got out of hand — a view that will only be reinforced by watching archival clips showing the wrecking ball repeatedly making short work of sandstone and brick and other materials supposedly meant to last.

Towards the end of the film, the tone changes, if not quite to an acceptance of what can’t be undone, then to an acknowledgement that lamentation alone serves no purpose and that we should focus instead on appreciating and celebrating those buildings that have, whether by chance or design, escaped the wrecking ball and now stand isolated or in short, nostalgia-inducing rows.

Buildings that were once imposing are now imposed upon, surrounded by newer and higher structures. From vantage points across the city, we can see architectural history in a single frame, with the metaphor of continuous change and growth made real by the contrast between the squat and solid, satisfyingly proportional yet fancifully decorated buildings of the early days, and the ambitious, straight-up, no-nonsense towers of more recent times.

Not everyone will be convinced by the attempt at balance. The film, with its wealth of archival clips of urban destruction, makes it difficult to understand how wreckers and citizens could have been quite so gleefully enthusiastic about it all. But the urge to knock down and rebuild, which started small, took earnest hold in the immediate interwar years and became rampant from the 1950s through to the 1980s, was not simply the result of philistinism gone mad.

Those statement buildings of earlier times — the insurance offices with their soaring ceilings and abundant curlicues, the lowering hotels with grand public spaces and small, draughty, unplumbed bedrooms, the multi-floor cafes with chandeliers and murals, the picture palaces that later sprung up all around suburban Melbourne — all of them were, in that phrase guaranteed to strike dread into the hearts of architectural conservationists, “no longer fit for purpose.” Replacement seemed the only option.

The fact that Melbourne was always changing, forever being built and rebuilt, meant it was constantly being filmed and photographed. Change attracts the camera, creating a number of distinct golden ages of Australian urban photography, most notably in the 1860s, when the newness of both Melbourne and the photographic medium combined to document the process of urban creation. Mid-century photographers like Wolfgang Sievers and Mark Strizic captured, sometimes in the same image, the excitement of re-creation along with the regret it entailed.

And film of course chronicled these changes in real time: the crowds bustling by Victorian work sites as buildings made their way to unprecedented heights of five or seven or eight floors, right through to Whelan’s ubiquitous wrecking balls making short work of a now-redundant building once expected to last forever — “forever” turning out to be little more than half a century, and frequently a good deal less.

We can’t escape the images’ elegiac tone. And no doubt there were many who at the time regretted the passing of a building they associated with their own youth and optimism, a personal landmark perhaps, one that they were used to making their way by. But regret, by and large, is not what we see on the faces of the witnesses to this assertion of energy and optimism.

The mid-century period of peak demolition was also a time when the most agile and acrobatic of the wrecking crews became urban celebrities, performing breathtaking balancing acts for lunchtime crowds of city workers. Clips from the time capture something of the excitement of looking on as the proudly unknockdownable was swiftly and comprehensively knocked down. Just as people were irresistibly attracted to those makeshift viewing windows that allowed them to peer in at the process of construction taking place, so they could gather to watch the building being demolished, then watch while the whole process started over again.

That was then. Now, the signs everywhere are that, architecturally speaking, we are falling out of love with modernity. Those who long for a return to classical design principles were until recently regarded as hooked on nostalgia, advocates for recreating what could not be recreated except as pastiche. While our fascination with statement buildings and starchitecture continues unchecked in many ways, something has changed.

Organisations and lobby groups that advocate a return to classical design principles (as variously defined) are cropping up all over the place. They appeal, with their accompanying images of medieval hill towns and height-restricted town centres, to what is described as our often unconscious responses to fractals and proportion and ornament. In this traditionalist version of the ideal city, buildings should attract the eye but not stand out — or up — too much. The elements of an urban landscape should go together to form a visually satisfying whole.

Stolen skyline? The Crown Casino building at Sydney’s Barangaroo. Phillip Elwin/Flickr

Ultimately, this is about our unresolved attitudes to density and height. How much should we try to fit in the frame before the composition becomes unbalanced, with the new overshadowing rather than complementing the old? A series of articles last month in the Sydney Morning Herald, assessing the relative success or failure of Central Sydney’s ambitious Barangaroo development project, hardly comes close to resolving this question. The commentaries land heavily on one side or the other, as indeed did the many hundreds of readers who felt moved to comment.

The centrepiece of the Barangaroo development, the Crown Tower — visible from points all over the wider urban area — is either a testament to vulgarity of massively inappropriate scale (“Barangaroo stole our skyline,” in the judgement of journalist Margot Saville) or a bold architectural statement of international significance. The Barangaroo development itself is a missed opportunity (a now standard criticism of any architectural or design endeavour, big or small), just one more example of the triumph of profit over public benefit — or the bold transformation of a redundant eyesore into an instantly iconic destination, a major civic asset.

Between these opposing views is one piece of common ground, and that is the ground on which none of Barangaroo’s buildings stand. A renewed enthusiasm for green space — parks, gardens and landscapes returned to their natural or near-natural state — reflects a long-overdue recognition of the intimate connection of First Nations people to the land, the dangers of climate change, and the boost to physical and mental health that comes with access to nature. But green space has the added advantage of being an increasingly rare focus of consensus, free of public debate’s almost automatic polarisation.

The villains remain, of course — the rapacious developers who push back against the greenery in their aim to create more saleable floor space. But even the most cartoonishly profit-seeking developer will generally grasp that a bit of greenery goes a long way towards enhancing perceptions of liveability in the minds of prospective buyers.

One of the common criticisms of skyscrapers, and the race for the next one to be taller and shinier than the last, is that like all bigger and better feats of design and engineering, they are monuments to excess, to the display and performance of wealth and power. In Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat’s 2021 film Official Competition, a wealthy and now elderly businessman longs to leave something more behind than his rather prosaic achievements in the world of commerce. “I want to do something that lasts,” he says. “A bridge, for example, designed by a famous architect.”

That he opts instead to finance a film, with a great director, famous actors and the likelihood of critical acclaim, underlines the link between monumentalism and performance. Skyscrapers may be monuments to excess and display, but so were many of the buildings they replaced — the grand merchants’ houses, the imposing and richly decorated insurance buildings, the cafes and hotels with their imported chandeliers, built to last only to give way in their turn to the next performance.

The Lost City of Melbourne asks important questions about the urban landscape, about how we look at it and what we see. What has been lost, and does the knowledge of past loss spoil irredeemably our appreciation of the present? Should we try to replace the past, always assuming that we can? The cycle of demolition and construction has been part of the public identification of Melbourne, and hence of Melburnians, with modernity. It was a particular brand of modernity, one that coexisted with social conservatism, but powerful for all that.

The rush to glass and steel, and the loosening of height restrictions that occurred in the postwar years derived from a fear that Melbourne’s claims to be modern, recently so well founded, were under threat. Perhaps today’s ragged skyline — a jumble of the old and the new — is a new version of modernity we can learn to love. We can see those older survivors as evocative relics in sadly reduced circumstances, just hanging on, or as scrubbing up rather well, all things considered, in the dusk with the height behind them. •

The post Re-creation and regret appeared first on Inside Story.

These images come to us in atmospheric monochrome, street after Parisian or provincial street, defeated office workers dozing on park benches, women of the night, sad and trapped, bourgeois burghers, struggling to keep up a pretence of prosperity and contentment. It is a world beyond depressing and yet it draws us in until we want nothing so much as to be there, observing the lives of the world-weary, the frustrated and the disappointed, and luxuriating in it all.

Although Simenon was clearly influenced in his novels by the newer arts of cinema and photography — he was for a time a keen and talented photographer — he was not unduly bound by their already well-developed conventions. One of the best and most psychologically penetrating of the Maigret novels, Maigret and the Headless Corpse, begins with a standard opening scene, the discovery of a body (or in this case, a detached arm), but doesn’t quite follow the trajectory we might expect.

A river bargeman makes the gruesome find, hooking it up from the sludge at the bottom of the Canal-Saint-Martin. “It was a human arm, intact from the shoulder to the hand. In the water, it had taken on a pallid colour and the texture of a dead fish.” Contrary to what we might expect, there is no cinematic reaction shot. We are given no clue as to what the bargeman might be thinking. How to respond, and to imagine the horror of the scene, is left entirely to the reader. It is one of many small instances where Simenon establishes and maintains a direct connection between narrator and reader and helps to create that sense that we are part of his world.

Immersed in this world, we might join Maigret for a bistro lunch and a bottle of wine, typically shared with a colleague, while taking note of the habits and quirks of strangers. We can then head back to the Quai des Orfèvres in a regulation black Citroën, complete with suicide doors, perhaps for a restorative snooze before returning to the case. Or instead follow Maigret home for lunch, for something substantial prepared by Mme Maigret in their cocoon-like flat, finishing with a fruity digestif, a rustic prunelle perhaps.

These images come not only from Simenon’s novels but also from the countless film and television adaptations of the Maigret novels, and of some of the one-off romans durs, the hard novels, of which there are hundreds. (No one seems to know how many.) Some of the most recognised directorial names in French cinema — Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, Claude Chabrol, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Bertrand Tavernier — have responded to the source material to considerable effect, while Maigret has been brought to life by some formidable actors — Michel Simon, Harry Baur and Jean Gabin among them.

Many other actors, some with the status of icons, some lesser known, have had a go. What is perhaps surprising is how many of them are good in the role, suggesting something about the character of Maigret that brings out the best. Choosing the “winner” has become a bit of a game among Maigret fans. Some favour Harry Baur’s early incarnation (too old for the part, was Simenon’s comment, which seems a bit harsh as Baur was fifty-three at the time) or Jean Gabin, whom he acknowledged got the language right.

Overall, Simenon is reported to have favoured the performance of the less stellar but entirely convincing Rupert Davies, in the BBC television series of the early sixties, so well received that it ran for four seasons and fifty-four episodes, and recently cheered fans old and new when the entire run was released on DVD.

Georges Simenon (second from right) in 1966 with three actors who played Maigret: British actor Rupert Davies (left), Dutch actor Jan Teuling and Italian actor Gino Cervi. Mondadori Portfolio/AAP

As adaptations moved from black and white to colour, something was lost. Black and white just seems truer to Maigret and his world. It speaks directly to images we as readers already have in our heads. Two of the most recent adaptations, the television series with Rowan Atkinson and the 2022 film Maigret, directed by Patrice Leconte and based on Maigret and the Dead Girl, with the great Gérard Depardieu in the title role, are among the least satisfactory.

Disappointed viewers have tended to focus on what are seen as their one-note performances — Atkinson too distractingly deliberate and lugubrious, Depardieu too glacially cerebral. But this is deflection. The real culprit is colour, that and the deadening accuracy of sophisticated twenty-first-century set and costume design.

The novels rely on a bedrock of realism, but the overwhelming impression is atmospheric, a quality that in general is more successfully rendered in monochrome. When the plot of a Maigret novel doesn’t quite make sense, as occasionally it doesn’t, it seems like a trivial criticism compared with the power of the atmosphere that remains with the reader. It is a remarkable achievement, to create a world that resonates so strongly, by means of “simple” prose and what Simenon himself described as deliberately restricted vocabulary.

Among the seventy-five novels that make up Penguin’s recent republication project is one that is not quite a novel at all. Maigret’s Memoirs, in a new translation by Howard Curtis, directly addresses the elision that formed quite early in the public mind between Maigret and his creator. Maigret recalls how his acquaintance with Simenon began, and how it evolved over the years into a wary friendship. He tries hard to provide instances in which his personality, appearance and policing methods have been manipulated and even falsified by Simenon in the interests of creating a character who purports to be him.

Yet for all his questioning of Simenon’s methods, Maigret is repeatedly if reluctantly obliged to acknowledge the point of Simenon’s creative alterations. “The concern for objectivity falsifies the truth,” the creator explains patiently to the literal-minded creation, adding that “the first quality of the truth is to be simple.”

Simenon freely acknowledges the discrepancies between fiction and “real life.” He is fully aware, he assures Maigret, “that a chief inspector… doesn’t run around the streets in person questioning concierges and bar owners.” His objective, he says again, is to simplify in the interests of truth, and Maigret must admit to himself that this is logical. Simenon’s hero is given his own direct voice in the Memoirs, but this merely serves to confirm that it is not a relationship of equals, but one of leader and subordinate.

For someone with a reputation for being unknowable, Simenon talked and wrote a lot about himself. When I Was Old is an absorbing account of his life in the years between 1960 — when he realised that at the age of fifty-nine he was now undeniably old — and 1963, when he achieved some sort of accommodation with this uncomfortable fact and the journal abruptly stops.

Here, his advocacy of simplicity becomes something of a mantra, couched in almost comically simple terms. “I don’t like big words,” he says, justifying his approach by his confidence that reality is “less falsified in the simple.” Yet Simenon is also playing with the reader. He knows that there is a disingenuousness to this apparent forthrightness. He is fully aware that his version of reality “trembles on the brink of unreality.” To put it another way, it’s all about the atmosphere.

Along with the novels, Penguin has also turned its attention to the short stories in which the inspector appears. Many of them, the exact number of which is again difficult to quantify, have not appeared in English before, including three of the five that are included in the recently published collection Death Threats and Other Stories, translated by Ros Schwartz. In the story that gives the collection its title, the plot hinges on a distinction that appears frequently in Simenon, the unbridgeable gap between the young and the old. The young are “healthy, muscular, lively,” they are “normal” and “carefree.” At some point, though, they become old, sometimes disconcertingly early, and in doing so they ruin “beautiful materials, a beautiful life, infinite possibilities.” It is both a highly romantic notion and a gloomy prospect.

This distinction between youth and age underpins much of Simenon’s work, both in the Maigret novels and the non-Maigret. One of the best of those available in English is The Strangers in the House — a novel with a detective of sorts at its centre, albeit very much a reluctant one — published in 2022 in a translation by the indefatigable Howard Curtis.

Hector Loursat is a disappointed man. His career as an attorney barely sputters along, his wife has left him long since and he is virtually estranged from his daughter, even though they live under the same roof. As so often in Simenon, the course of his life is dramatically altered by a sudden, disruptive event. A murder is committed, on the top floor, a part of his house which may as well be in another world, one where he never ventures.

Slowly and painfully Loursat drags himself out of his customary torpor and devotes himself to finding the truth, at the same time saving his daughter’s reputation and the life of the young man accused of the crime. In the process, Loursat recaptures, at least for a time, something of the optimism and energy of youth. The young had adventures, he laments, while their parents “pretended to be alive.”

The key to this reinvention and to solving the mystery is the rediscovery of simplicity, of clearing away the debris and getting to the essence. When the examining magistrate waffles on and on, circling round the point, Loursat interrupts him midstream by blowing his nose, “loudly, cynically, just to get it over with.” In pursuing the mystery, he finds that “it was indispensable to translate every sentence into plain language,” to discover what people are really saying.

The murder that takes place under his own roof offers the prospect of adventure, of the opportunity to play detective. In his dogged quest to get to the truth, Loursat “had the impression he was descending into life.” At the end of the novel, after he has succeeded in more or less resolving the case, we are left uncertain as to whether he will remain in life or once more withdraw. We last see him seated “all alone, still dignified, in a bistro, over a glass of red wine,” leaving the question of what happens next entirely open.

Numerous attempts have been made to capture what it is about Simenon that makes him so sheerly readable, that makes it difficult to read just one or two novels, get the flavour, and stop. The prolific commentator on crime fiction and noir, Barry Forshaw, has recently taken on the task in his Simenon: The Man, the Books, the Films, with rather mixed results.

A large proportion of this book, more than half, is devoted to a varyingly annotated bibliography, which goes as far as can reasonably be expected towards the unattainable goal of comprehensiveness. It includes all the works in which Maigret appears, a generous sampling of the non-Maigret novels, and a particularly useful itemising of the film and television adaptations of both categories of novels, stretching from 1931 (sometimes listed elsewhere as 1932) with Jean Renoir’s Night at the Crossroads, to 2022 and Jean Becker’s The Heart of a Man, based on the hard novel Les Volets Verts and starring the ubiquitous Gérard Depardieu. Patrice Leconte’s Maigret, however, arrived too late to make the list.

Among the more obscure and hard-to-obtain film versions, Forshaw makes an intriguing reference to a Franco-Australian co-production of 1958, The Stowaway, set in Tahiti and featuring a range of well-known Australian and European actors including, improbably, the incomparable French icon Arletty.

More rewarding are the companion chapters on aspects of Simenon and his world, including one on Maigret’s Paris, another on his influence on other writers and, most interesting of all, a chapter on translation that makes extensive use of Forshaw’s interviews with three of the distinguished translators assembled by Penguin to see through its Maigret project. Ros Schwartz, who has by her own count translated sixteen Simenon titles, points to the need for the translator to also be something of a detective in accurately representing the period detail. “In one description of a woman sleeping with ‘épingles’ in her hair at night, I eventually found the exact bobby pins advertised on eBay.”

Schwartz also refers to the real difficulties in replicating Simenon’s “extraordinarily economical” language. The other two translators make this same point. Howard Curtis scotches any thought that Simenon is an easy author to translate. “Time and again,” he says, “you come across beautifully turned phrases that sum up a character, a setting, a mood in the minimum of words, and it’s often a struggle, for a translator, to find equivalents in English.” Siân Reynolds phrases it with appropriate simplicity: “they are hard to translate because they are written simply.” These comments go to the heart of Simenon’s continuing and wide-ranging appeal — his unmatched ability to convey complexity, nuance and, above all, atmosphere in the seductive guise of simplicity. •

Maigret and the Headless Corpse
By Georges Simenon | Translated by Howard Curtis | Penguin | $19.99 | 192 pages

Maigret’s Memoirs
By Georges Simenon | Translated by Howard Curtis | Penguin | $22.99 | 149 pages

When I Was Old
By Georges Simenon | Translated by Helen Eustis | Penguin | $22.99 | 452 pages

Death Threats and Other Stories
By Georges Simenon | Translated by Ros Schwartz | Penguin | $22.99 | 181 pages

The Strangers in the House 
By Georges Simenon | Translated by Howard Curtis | Penguin | $22.99 | 217 pages

Simenon: The Man, the Books, the Films
By Barry Forshaw | Oldcastle | $29.99 | 256 pages

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But when fire was followed by pestilence, the question of how to convey the pandemic’s full impact was more complicated. For one thing, in a very literal sense, there was nothing to see — no orange flames to make the visual point, but rather an invisible virus accessible only to the most specialised branches of photography.

The question persists — a question, essentially, of where to point the camera — as photographers continue to explore ways of capturing the essence of what it has meant to live through the pandemic and witness, either from close-up or further away, its effects on our lives. When it comes to recording the physical effects of the virus, and the possibilities of hospitalisation and death, even the most intrepid of photographers has faced daunting restrictions, both ethical and practical.

Access to intensive care units, for example, is no straightforward matter, particularly in a time of heightened hygiene protocols. When granted, the effect can be powerful, as in Kate Geraghty’s series of photographs of the ICU ward at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, taken earlier this year for the Sydney Morning Herald. Here, seriously ill patients are shown being monitored by watchful staff and multitudes of screens.

Other, more day-to-day, obstacles are perhaps insignificant in themselves but cumulative in their effect. In many cases they are largely psychological, a consequence of the new climate of boundaries and protocols and rules, and of a new wariness of intruding on other people’s privacy and space.

But sometimes the restrictions can be more substantive. The Greek-Australian photographer Angelos Giotopoulos recalls his time in quarantine during a recent visit to Australia for urgent family reasons. “I opened my door to photograph the corridor and immediately received a stern phone call reminding me that I was only able to open the door to pick up food, sheets or laundry.” In this case the photographer is being photographed to ensure that he doesn’t step outside the new boundaries.

In the early days — way back in the first half of 2020 — many images invited us to look anew at scenes of everyday life, and particularly at spaces both empty and occupied. Photographs of rows of empty seats — in buses and planes and theatres and restaurants — began to appear in force, signifying how ordinary life, where people routinely travelled to work and ate out and went to the cinema, had dramatically slowed down and even in some cases come to a halt. Outdoor crowd scenes, by contrast, captured at concerts or in parks, carried a new hint of threat lurking in all that human proximity, though their impact lessened over time as we became more aware of the relatively low risk of transmission in the open air.

If they are to count as commentary on the pandemic, images of spaces, empty or crowded, rely for their impact on context. In normal, non-Covid times, theatres and cinemas are empty for long stretches, even during hit runs, and buses continue to operate outside the busy peak hours, often with only one or two passengers. By the same token, crowded beaches were and will continue to be part of everyday life. It is the context of the pandemic — the explanatory caption — that makes the difference to how the image is perceived.

The impact of these photographs, or rather their impact as pandemic photography, may lessen over time as the scenes they depict become “re-normalised” and the images themselves come to be seen as insufficiently distinctive as a record of the uniqueness of living through the pandemic.

Given that a pandemic is difficult to photograph directly and straightforwardly, many Australians recognised early the importance of encouraging a varied visual record derived from a wide variety of photographers with differing perspectives and emphases. Local and regional competitions sprang up all over the country, inviting photographers — a category that nowadays is coincident with pretty much the entire population — to submit their own takes on the impact of the pandemic on themselves and their communities. Libraries established distinct projects, and galleries commissioned works and staged exhibitions, contributing to what is now already a vast archive for future generations to explore and ponder.

If one common theme emerges across all these photographs, it is the theme of isolation: hands placed up against glass, people sitting alone on park benches or wrapped Christo-like in masks and protective clothing, children learning from screens, and people queueing just too far apart to comfortably strike up a conversation.

Mass Isolation Australia, a project launched in early 2020 under the auspices of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, was quick to pick up on this emerging theme and to “invite Australians to share photographs of their experiences in isolation.” Of the almost 13,000 images submitted to the project, 500 have been selected by curators Amelia Saward and Shaohui Kwok and may be viewed via @massisolationaus on Instagram. Several hundred of these images will appear in a new book, Mass Isolation Australia, to be released in January, and a selection are on view in Ballarat until 9 January.

The project’s title alludes somewhat self-consciously to the culturally influential Mass Observation project initiated in Britain in the 1930s, which sought the written observations of volunteers on a wide variety of topics coming under the rubric of ordinary life. In tune with our visually oriented times, Mass Isolation invites photographic rather than written contributions, and its subject is more specific than the original project to which it refers. But the emphasis on ordinary, daily life is the same. This is not a visual record of high-end laboratory research or the back and forth of meetings and briefings that go towards formulating pandemic policy. It is a record of daily impacts as experienced, either directly or at a remove, by everyone.

Lisa Sorgini’s Matilda, Indigo and Beck at Their Front Door.

The curators divide the photographs into categories including Empty Streets, which is self-explanatory, and the New Normal, which embraces images of queues, masks, grounded planes, admonitory signs and yes, rows of empty chairs. People are frequently captured in moments of reflection, as they sit at tables alone, or at their windows, “gazing through the glass longingly,” their expressions betraying feelings of uncertainty and of disconnection from the ordinary flow of life.

It is no surprise that the view through glass features so prominently in the photographic record of the pandemic. The architectural critic Tarō Igarashi, director of the splendidly named Windowology Project at the Window Research Institute in Tokyo, has spoken of how windows, both metaphorical and literal, have played such a crucial part in our experiences of being governed by the new rules and restrictions, fuelling a surge of photographic images based on the metaphor of looking through windows.

“‘Windows’ of the new era, such as our personal computing devices” provide an alternative form of connection in times of social isolation, says Igarashi, while “actual windows have also played a unique role in the crisis,” allowing us to communicate safely and to look out on a world that we are constrained from entering freely. These same windows also allow the photographer to look in.

Included in the Mass Isolation book are several examples of this focus. In Lisa Sorgini’s Matilda, Indigo and Beck at Their Front Door, three women convey by their poses and expressions a complex mixture of proximity and separateness as they gaze out through the glass door of their home in distinctly different directions. Sandy Scheltema’s Hugs on Hold, Alice Sarah-Lay Greets Her Grandmother Margaret Wheeler at the Trentham Aged Care Facility presents a more deliberately affecting, highly composed image that speaks to the many people who found themselves suddenly and unexpectedly cut off from direct contact with their families. And Viki Petherbridge plays with the long line of storefront photography from Eugène Atget to Vivian Maier with her Self Portrait with Vandalism During Lockdown, an image of disorientation and uncertainty that conveys something of the personal and social stresses imposed by lockdown-induced isolation.

Viki Petherbridge’s Self Portrait with Vandalism During Lockdown.

In their different ways all three images reflect on the limitations of individuality and self-reliance, and work best not as isolated artefacts but in relation to one another. It is not surprising that more than one commentator has noted that a genuinely iconic image of the pandemic has yet to emerge, and may indeed never emerge, in contrast to the single, dominant images that have come to stand for the Spanish civil war or the Vietnam war, for example, or for a variety of other disasters and events of international significance. It is not simply a question of there now being too many photographs and too many photographers for one single image ever to stand out above all the others. This absence of the truly iconic photo lies in the nature of the subject itself.

The organisers of the Mass Isolation project acknowledge this reality when they effectively pass the whole question of iconic status down the line, inviting prospective contributors to “please share an iconic photo.” The word “iconic” here does not mean the singular image that will stand the test of time; it means good or striking or the best of the burst. It suggests the kind of image that will complement and interact with other images of similar intent, together creating a more complete picture.

This is another way of saying that no single photograph is likely to stand for the experience of the pandemic, even within a single country or community. A thoughtfully assembled exhibition like Mass Isolation Australia instead shows how images sourced from a variety of image-makers can together tell a coherent and evocative tale of what it was like to be there. •

The post Through a glass, longingly appeared first on Inside Story.

The review will explore questions of “context,” Arthur stresses. The weight of the task ahead falls very much on that word, and on the extent to which historical and situational context can be reconciled with what she calls “evolving standards.” This challenge is hardly unique to Magnum, so it is not surprising that the organisation has been aware for some time now of the need to engage with its vast collection of historical material, and with the complexity of interpreting past ways of seeing.

Recent articles on the Magnum website with titles such as “Old and New: Working with and Responding to the Photographic Archive” and “Breaking Out of the Archive Trap” have tackled the status of the individual image by emphasising the importance of the context in which it was made and the context in which it is seen. Magnum has also encouraged photographic projects that revisit and interrogate its own work, applying a contemporary perspective to Magnum’s trove of images of China, for example, or Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous “Man and Machine” series from 1968.

The agency has devoted particular attention to highlighting the process by which its photographs were and are created. The substantial volume Magnum Contact Sheets, published in 2011 and edited by Kristen Lubben, shows in absorbing detail, complete with mark-ups and annotations and recollections from photographers, how published images were selected from the reams of “contacts” that characterised photographic practice in the pre-digital age. “Unique to each photographer’s approach,” writes Lubben, “the contact is a record of how an image was constructed.”

A rather different “process” can also be seen at work in a series of Magnum-sponsored Live Labs held in collaboration with a variety of cultural institutions around the world over the past two years. Here, says the agency, the “process of making, editing, printing and curating the work is performed in full view of the public.” The audience “is invited to ‘join’ the journey,” and in doing so to “highlight the collaborative nature of production at the heart of the Magnum Photos cooperative.” It’s an ambition that, at this stage of the journey, doesn’t sit entirely comfortably with the culturally persistent trope of the star photographer that is at the heart of Magnum.

What these varying approaches to photographic history and practice have in common is a recognition of the overriding importance of context — using the word in the broadest sense — in allowing the viewer of today to form a judgement. An image that may once have been accepted at face value may now raise questions in the mind of the viewer: questions about the ethical issues involved in breaching privacy, for example, or photographing controversial subjects, or undertaking the kind of photographic manipulation that masquerades as spontaneity. And beyond that is the question of when the questions stop. When does the revelation of process, of what goes to make a photograph, stop being explanatory and start being overwhelming?

Magnum Photos was founded as a cooperative in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, “Chim” Seymour and George Rodger, all of whom had built significant reputations, and reached vast audiences with their images of Spain in the 1930s and of the second world war and its aftermath. With the gradual involvement of newer recruits such as Eve Arnold, Inge Morath and Werner Bischof, Magnum cleverly combined its brand of humanistic, engaged photography with the business savvy needed to seek out new clients and deliver a product according to a brief.

A lot of photo agencies have come and gone since those years, but Magnum — despite changes in technology, distribution and consumption — remains a major cultural force. Its unusual model of cooperative entrepreneurship appears to have survived pretty much unscathed, with Magnum members exercising complete authority over admission to the ranks. And ranks there are, with an ascending hierarchy of nominees, associates and, finally, the elusive and desirable category of member, from which, like monarchs, only a very few have abdicated and none, as Magnum attests with some pride, has been dethroned.

In this impressively researched study of the early decades of Magnum, Nadya Bair uncovers the complex interactions of artistic ambition and business acumen that somehow produced a kind of order out of chaos, and shows how an organisation that inspired intense loyalty and commitment was able to balance the image of the lone, intrepid and in most cases male photographer, so important to its profile, with the realities of entrepreneurial endeavour.

Bair highlights the role played by marketers and picture editors and other behind-the-scenes staff, many of them women, who managed the processes of picture-making, from identifying photographic opportunities to setting schedules and not infrequently selecting, on behalf of the photographer and from a vast array of contact prints, what would work best on the page. While never detracting from the artistic and professional achievement of the photographers themselves, Bair shows how the organisation conspired, in effect, to downplay the role of its backroom staff in order to keep the photographer in the foreground.

As individual Magnum photographers became increasingly well known and in demand, so it became more important to emphasise their unique visions and minimise the role of the apparatus that kept the show on the road. Cartier-Bresson, ever a dab hand at self-mythologising, increasingly let it be known that his success in the postwar years was more in spite of than owing to Magnum, but if anything this kind of public lament only enhanced the overall brand. The idea of the lone artist resisting the constraints of capitalism, all within a framework that brought recognition and financial reward for the individual, for the agency and for the commissioning organisation, suited everybody.

Magnum was equally successful in managing and exploiting a further contradiction, between the idea of the photographer as a silent witness whose personality and presence are minimised in the interests of giving full weight to the subject, and the photographer as artist, adventurer and active mediator between the world and the viewer. This romanticised notion of the fearless photojournalist, simultaneously distanced and engaged, continues to exert cultural force today, in fiction and in film. It didn’t hurt that those early Magnum photographers were often highly photogenic themselves — George Rodger, the “handsome young photographer,” or Robert Capa, with whom every woman in the Paris office was said to be in love.

The contradiction between being apart from the action and embedding yourself remains inherent in the profession. Magnum continues to embody this tension, even as viewers have grown more alert to its implications. The agency remains culturally significant, not because membership is essential to professional success but because of how it has set the cultural parameters for what it means to be a photojournalist — concerned, humane, fearless, truthful. And successful.

Magnum photographers made an astonishing number of images during the postwar period, the vast majority of which were never published. These unseen images were referred to as “dead” material, in the manner of the 7000 or so pictures, taken by George Rodger for the Economic Cooperation Administration, that “were mostly filed away in the ECA archives.” The oversupply of visual images — and the difficulty of telling them apart — is regularly cited today as a function of the digital era. But as Bair shows, the portable camera and overproduction have long gone together for the professional photographer, as well as for many an amateur. Indeed, as she has it, “if the medium in which the agency worked had any single defining quality, it was overproduction.” The editorial eye — that indefinable instinct for what would be the right, and most striking, image — was vital to the success of the enterprise.

With the advent of digital photography, the process of selection has devolved more and more to the photographer. But in the early days of Magnum, when photographers were often working on assignment in remote areas without access to photographic laboratories, they might not be able to see their own work. Rolls of unopened film would be sent off in the post, to be dealt with back at base. Many people might then be involved in the process of editing and selecting what to publish or to offer for publication. This was no simple matter: in late 1948, as Bair notes, “the entire Magnum staff in Paris spent November and December editing Cartier-Bresson’s 300 rolls of film” brought back from an assignment in the Soviet Union.

It was Cartier-Bresson who famously coined the term “the decisive moment” to describe his photographic method, a phrase that by extension seemed to capture something essential about Magnum. It suggests a rare ability to spot the potentially iconic scene or subject in a moment, and to capture it with a click. It plays down the processes of pre- and post-production in favour of the inspired instant. Contemporary art photography has rather turned away from and in some cases actively rejected this idea of photographic genius, favouring instead an emphasis on overt staging rather than spontaneity, on exploiting the ever-expanding options for post-production effects, and on celebrating technical artifice.

But for all that, the idea of the decisive moment retains enormous power. While the term has always been misleading in the sense that it airbrushed out the role of the picture editors and all the others involved in the chain of production, it was accurate in the way that it caught the importance of the photographic eye, the quality that made a photograph instantly recognisable as a Cartier-Bresson or a Werner Bischof or an Eve Arnold. It was part of the Magnum style.

Bair catches something of this essential contradictoriness within the Magnum enterprise in her clever title, The Decisive Network. The moment of capturing the image was decisive, but so were the processes and the interconnections surrounding that moment. She shows, for example, the surprising extent to which a photographic assignment was framed and specified beforehand. Rita Vandivert, working from Magnum’s New York office in the late forties, instructed photographers working on the major magazine project “People Are People the World Over” to “cable before shooting” should they ever feel an overwhelming need to deviate from their detailed brief.

In a fascinating chapter on Magnum’s collaboration with the influential travel magazine Holiday, Bair notes how such instructions sometimes became superfluous because Magnum photographers “learned to gravitate towards florist shops filled with bright bouquets, ‘pretty girls’ dressed in red, and particularly bright blue skies and pools of water.” As for the other end of the production line, that was when the real business of making a photograph began, at least according to John Morris, Magnum’s most senior administrator throughout the 1950s, who was known to remark that “shooting is only the beginning.”

A strong streak of idealism accompanied the commercial savvy of those foundation years. There was an emphasis on “the cultural unity of the world,” on the role that photography could play in bringing people together and leading them to recognise commonalities across cultures. Magnum images featured prominently in the famous Family of Man exhibition that opened in New York in 1955 and subsequently toured to more than sixty countries. The exhibition, which drew massive visitor numbers, has been criticised, not least by Roland Barthes, for its naivety and sentimentalism, with its emphasis on the family as humanity’s unifying commonality. Morris, who was instrumental in ensuring the agency’s involvement, represented the time’s prevailing view that the exhibition showed that “there are really no foreigners any more.”

Morris’s remark was accurate as far as it went. Foreignness could be captured and also made less foreign by photographs, particularly if images appeared under such harmonising rubrics as “youth” and “family.” But Magnum photography could promote the ideal of inevitable progression towards a harmonised world while simultaneously highlighting difference — even in The Family of Man, or in “People Are People the World Over,” published in the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1948 — by showing stark discrepancies in social relationships, living conditions and implied political backgrounds.

In “People Are People,” eleven families from different countries were selected to have a visual record made of their daily lives. The shooting schedules were highly choreographed to ensure direct comparability from family to family. “The pictures of women, standing or sitting at their stoves, were astonishingly similar,” notes Bair. But, as she also points out, this does not entirely override the discernible differences in material wellbeing and notions of domesticity and privacy.

By highlighting the paradoxes inherent in the making of a documentary image, Nadya Bair makes an important contribution to the growing reassessment of photographic history. In doing so, she shows Magnum to have been an organisation creatively built on paradox. The idea of the decisive moment coexisted with the often drawn-out processes of pre- and post-production; the lone and intrepid photographer coexisted with the realities of teamwork and cooperative endeavour; and the humanistic worldview coexisted with a sure grasp of commercial reality.

In her introduction Bair highlights the particular difficulties photography poses for drawing clear boundaries between recording a subject and manipulating or even, by implication, exploiting it. She notes how the phrase “small baby crying over rations” appears in a Magnum shooting script as an example to the photographer, capturing images of postwar damage in Europe, of a suitable “tear-jerker” to transmit back to base. Whatever else this tells us, it is a reminder that any ethical failings we may now discern in photographic images were not simply attributable to the photographer, or to the commissioning director or the backroom editor, but to the demands and expectations of the viewer. There is no escaping context. •

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A lot went into getting everything just right with Teacup Ballet, as Helen Ennis makes clear in this absorbing biography. Ennis provides an illuminating insight into a version that Cotton rejected, in which the arrangement of the cups and saucers, more precise and regimented, failed to suggest interaction in the way the final, almost but not quite symmetrical version so triumphantly does.

With their angular handles and clean lines, these teacups are very much of their period, loudly proclaiming their modernity. At the same time they speak of more traditional, unrevolutionary pursuits, of afternoon tea in lengthening shadows and of someone taking the trouble to lay everything out just so. In one of a number of suggestive asides that gently hint at the influences on Cotton’s artistic development, Ennis notes that Olive’s mother was fond of china painting. It is recorded, for instance, that she “decorated a set of sweet dishes with images of flannel flowers.” The strength of Teacup Ballet lies in how it combines something of this sense of domestic order and civilised pursuits with a more adventurous meditation on the relationship between animate and inanimate, traditional and modern.

Geometric vitality: Olive Cotton’s Teacup Ballet (1935). National Gallery of Victoria

Cotton was to live for almost seventy years beyond Teacup Ballet. During that time she achieved early success both artistically and commercially, first in the company of husband and business partner Max Dupain and then very much on her own account. Separation and divorce from Dupain, followed by her marriage to Ross McInerney, brought a sharp change in direction, and decades raising a family under often difficult conditions meant that there was little time for photography. Only later in life did Cotton re-enter the commercial world by opening a photographic studio in the central west NSW town of Cowra. There she produced wedding and graduation portraits for the local community while tentatively seeking again the kind of wider recognition that she had briefly enjoyed many years earlier.

Although Cotton established herself independently during the war, attracting some important commissions, it was only in later life that she began to be redefined as one of the crucial pioneers of modern photography in Australia in her own right, rather than primarily in the context of her formative relationship with Dupain. Interest in the history of photography had grown, and neglected female artists were receiving overdue recognition. When that second wave of recognition came, as it did with a flurry in the 1980s, it was not so much for her recent work, then hardly seen outside the reach of her own domestic circle and her local client list, but for the images dating from the 1930s and 40s, the period when Cotton’s technical mastery and artistic range grew with remarkable speed.

Cotton always acknowledged the importance, in professional terms, of her early relationship with Dupain. Family connections combined with a shared enthusiasm for photography and the natural world drew them together from an early age. The careers of professional photographers can often be traced back to the chance gift of a camera, or of the means to buy one. In Cotton’s case it was a present from an aunt, while Dupain in his mid-teens bought a Kodak Folding Brownie with money given to him by his great-grandmother. They had both demonstrated an early artistic talent but, judging their own skills harshly (Cotton felt that any ability she may have had in drawing was far outmatched by her sister’s), they were irresistibly attracted to this newer artistic medium.

As they grew closer and spent more and more time together during their adolescent years, Olive and Max must have struck all who knew them as, to use the old phrase, made for each other. Ennis allows for the possibility that they began themselves to feel that the story of their lives had already been written, and that they were being carried along with it. Indeed in another universe we might now be reading their joint biography, the tale of a couple united by love and a shared talent who built successful and mutually reinforcing careers. But that is not the way it turned out.

Max Dupain consciously embarked on a career in photography even before leaving school, taking advantage of the opportunities for experience and advancement available to him as a man. Olive quietly absorbed his knowledge and kept pace with him in their increasingly sophisticated understanding of the capacities of the medium. But while Dupain was fast-tracking himself as a professional photographer, Cotton studied English and mathematics at the University of Sydney, reflecting “her family’s dual interests in science and the arts”; it was a fitting duality, as it transpired, for a career in photography.

The mathematics stood her in good stead: in later years, under financial pressure, she took a job teaching maths at Cowra High, where she was regarded as a gifted teacher right up until when, lacking a qualification in education, she was forced out by the rise of credentialism. At university she had also taken a course in anthropology, which was not a success: “I was too prim and proper for anthropology,” she recalled. “You had to talk about all sorts of things and I couldn’t bring myself to do it.” By her own account, she had “dodged the big questions, the things I didn’t feel I could talk about comfortably.”

This delicate allusion to her own youthful unworldliness contrasts strikingly with the freedom Cotton felt only a few years later to tackle such matters visually. Her photograph of Dupain, Max after Surfing, dates from 1939, the year of their marriage. It shows Dupain as handsome and, despite the cigarette in one hand, impressively fit-looking (his mother fed him celery biscuits, Ennis tells us, in one of many examples of her eye for the fascinating detail). Notwithstanding Cotton’s reticence in anthropology seminars, the image conveys a striking and unembarrassed eroticism. The subject poses, but it is a low-key, undemonstrative performance. The result is both subtle and frank — an extraordinarily difficult combination to achieve.

Subtle and frank: Olive Cotton’s Max after Surfing (1939). National Gallery of Victoria

But against the power of the photograph is the strong likelihood that their relationship was already beginning to disintegrate. Ennis deals sensitively with the reasons for the breakdown, acknowledging how little is known for certain and how much has to be inferred. A later, glancing comment by Olive, made in an interview in 1983, is allowed to bear much of the weight. “You grow up together,” she remarked, as “good friends. But marriage doesn’t work.” By 1941 Olive had acted on this conclusion and taken her leave.

There are many aspects of Olive Cotton’s life that we cannot really know, about her attitudes and priorities and what really lay behind her determination to pursue photography regardless of the many obstacles. “As a biographical subject… Cotton has surprisingly little weight,” Ennis says, in the first of several such references. A friend describes Cotton as by nature a “background figure,” and Ennis herself echoes this description, calling her a “distant figure.”

Her second husband, Ross McInerney, was to claim, rather implausibly, that he “never heard her speak ill of anyone, not once.” While it is clear that she was liked and loved and admired by those who knew her, there is the sense that even those closest to her detected something unknowable. She retained the manner of an observer, rather than a central participant, an essential quality perhaps for any successful photographer.

As biographer, Ennis must deal not only with the elusiveness of Cotton herself but also with the larger-than-life personalities of the men she married. It is a balancing act to give these two talkative and often charming men their place in the story while keeping Cotton very much in the frame, ever alert to the danger that she will slip into the background. One of the fundamental strengths of Ennis as biographer is that she achieves this difficult balance, giving both men their due and never rushing to simple judgement, while at the same time ensuring that the main light falls consistently on her central subject. As she reminds both herself and the reader at one point, “this is Olive’s story.”

Olive Cotton “did not travel far during her ninety-two years.” She never went abroad, or indeed ventured beyond the eastern states of Australia, essentially confining herself for the most part to Sydney and the central west of New South Wales. This apparent preference for staying close to home would have been driven, as it was for many of her generation, by circumstance as much as choice and doesn’t necessarily reflect a lack of desire or interest. In fact, within these geographical constraints, Cotton was by nature a roamer who loved the beach and the bush and who never tired of exploring familiar ground, alert always to the possibility of coming across something previously unnoticed, or noticed anew in a different light.

For most of their long marriage, which lasted from 1945 until her death in 2003, Cotton and McInerney lived on land at Spring Forest, outside Cowra, initially in a simple two-bedroom weatherboard cottage, and later in an adapted construction workers’ barracks that still stands, preserved by the family. Ennis notes, with pointed restraint, that “on some of the bedroom doors” of this “new” house, “small Dymo labels are attached” bearing the names of some of the previous occupants who had been workers on the construction of a dam at nearby Carcoar.

Ennis can’t quite conceal her surprise at the fact that Olive and Ross, despite occupying the house for decades, never once took a moment to remove the labels, even though they could have torn them off in an instant. Whether this was deliberate on their part, as Ennis implies, or merely a decades-long oversight is impossible to say. Whatever the explanation, it suggests a shared reluctance to tamper unnecessarily, and a preference for leaving things as they are.

Olive Cotton as stay-at-home, as the kind of person who would leave other people’s names on the doors of her own home for decades — who would put up with a wobbly step or a leaking roof for year after year — suggests a photographer who would favour framing and recording and preserving, but otherwise leaving the subject to speak for itself. But while for the most part Cotton avoided what might be termed technical interference with her images, they are often nevertheless highly organised, considered, arranged and complex in their apparent simplicity. She could return repeatedly to the same vantage point and wait patiently until the light she was looking for was just right. When it came to photography, as distinct from houses, she was not necessarily one to take things as she found them.

Photography for Cotton consisted of the entire process, from set-up to darkroom. In the years when she was trying to maintain her commitment to her art against the demands of domestic life, it was particularly frustrating to take a photograph and then to have to defer the development and printing of the final image until she had the time and the means and the necessary access to equipment. The taking and the making of the image were inseparable. “I like to do everything myself from start to finish,” she later explained.

If a long life spent together is an indication, Cotton’s second marriage was a success. As with many long-lasting marriages, it was never quite clear to outsiders why that should have been so. Olive and Max had seemed made for each other, Olive and Ross less so. He made too many cups of tea, his sister recalled, a sharp but not unsympathetic comment that calls up an entire postwar world, of men who returned from active service knocked sideways by the experience, who could never quite settle to anything afterwards, who began tasks with enthusiasm and stopped halfway through, who had moods and could, as the saying went, be difficult to live with.

Ross was concerned that by marrying him and moving to the country Olive would have to give up too much, “just when you have made a name for yourself.” Olive McInerney did indeed give up her name, and in more ways than one, but there is no real evidence that she felt the price of marriage and family was too high. Despite occasional storms, she remained devoted to Ross and their children, but the price was real. After 1946, when Olive and Ross moved as a married couple to the country, Ennis notes starkly, “little of Olive Cotton’s photography would appear in public, in either publication or exhibitions, for the next three decades.”

The key phrase here is “in public.” It might have been tempting to see Cotton’s career in terms of an early and a late period, punctuated by a long interregnum in which she concentrated on other things. That may be true as far as it goes, but Olive Cotton: A Life in Photography shows that beneath the surface Cotton never really wavered; it was indeed a life in photography. During her long period of isolation from the world of magazines and commissions and of contact with fellow practitioners, Cotton adapted to the circumstances, turning her photographic eye towards her own family and her immediate surroundings, which meant that when she did open her studio in Cowra she was far from being out of practice.

Towards the end of her life, when she was in her mid-eighties, Cotton created an image that shows how her fundamental preoccupations — with the effects of light and shade, with the interactions of elements within the frame, and with how pattern and a strong sense of composition can also suggest vitality and movement — never really changed. Unlike Teacup Ballet and Max after Surfing, no such vitality or movement is implied in the title of this late image. It is called simply Moths on the Windowpane. There are dozens of them, captured as they cling to the window, attracted by the light inside. Ennis convincingly places this image of these short-lived creatures in the context of Cotton’s approaching death. The light will go out and the moths will move on, but for the moment they are fixed, in a mutually reinforcing pattern that recalls those early teacups.

Near the end of this illuminating and moving account, we visit Olive Cotton’s graveside. If you are looking for Cotton here, says Ennis, you will not find her. The name on the marker instead reads “O. McINERNEY,” a subtle echo, which Ennis does not labour, of those Dymo labels on the barracks doors. It is unlikely, however, that Olive Cotton would have been unduly bothered by this brief form of identification, even with her professional last name overwritten and her first reduced to an initial. At the end of her life she could balance this version of herself with her ever-rising reputation as Olive Cotton, no longer in the background but now a figure at the forefront of Australian photography, the determined artist who, when she resumed her professional life in Cowra, had arranged for a replica of her signature, “Olive Cotton,” to be painted in bold above the entrance to her new studio. •

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Monkhouse’s two-liner is a fitting epigraph to Terry Eagleton’s Humour, an enquiry into the labyrinthine question of what makes us laugh. The distinguished literary critic and cultural commentator navigates through this minefield with elegance, skill and quite a few good jokes to break up the journey. He is open-minded about what is funny and what is not, and equally open-minded about the many theories that seek to explain humour. In the end, though, he decides that the incongruity theory is “the most plausible.”

Incongruity is admittedly a big tent — it contains disparity and dissonance and disruption and bathos — and ambiguity, as Eagleton points out, is also a form of incongruity. No doubt it can be argued that irony is too. Common to all the best jokes that exemplify the theory is a moment of delay — it can last from a nanosecond to what seems like forever, depending on how on the ball we are — before the incongruity clicks and we get it. That’s how we experience Monkhouse’s joke about an audience that is both laughing and not laughing.

In many ways “incongruity” seems exactly the right word for the moment we are living in, which perhaps helps to explain why comedy is currently riding a wave. In fact, once you start looking, incongruity is everywhere, fuelled by the information revolution and its capacity to generate contradictory evidence or an opposing opinion about just about everything.

In the face of this dissonance and disruption, it’s tempting to double down, ignoring or blocking anything that disputes our preferred view. But comedy, with its reliance on contradiction and incongruity, offers another way of dealing with situations that otherwise seem immune to resolution. We can acknowledge the contradictions, and laugh. Which is all well and good, but can comedy actually change anything?

Eagleton is clearly attracted to the idea of comedy as a form of reconciliation, of people as well as contradictions. Jokes give us pause, inviting us to take another look, both at others and, often, at ourselves. Wit dissects and potentially disarms. Humour, “if it can censure, debunk and transform… can also dissolve essential social conflicts in an explosion of mirth.”

But as Eagleton’s reference to that rather temporary-sounding “explosion of mirth” implies, just how long conflict dissolves for depends very much on its nature and intractability. Humour may unite, but it can also divide. You might find that joke funny, but I don’t. The language of comedy can just as easily be used to shut out alternative views as to admit them, and getting it or not getting it can be regarded as a clincher in any ideological dispute. They get it, as we say approvingly of the people who agree with us, and the others just don’t get it.

Whether comedy unites or divides is very much a live issue. Every so often a small storm erupts when a comic is accused of going too far, by advocating violence perhaps, or mocking the vulnerable. But what does “too far” mean when comedy, or a characteristically contemporary version of it, thrives on exaggeration and excess? These small storms are nevertheless significant, not so much in themselves but because they go to the question of context. What may be funny in one setting is not necessarily funny in another.

The problem today is that context has become rather more free-floating than it once was, in line with the unstoppable blurring of public and private. What may be funny between friends or colleagues is not so funny when the video is posted on YouTube. A joke can provide “a brief vacation from the oppressiveness of everyday meaning,” as Eagleton puts it, but if given a public life beyond the private moment it can seem callous and cruel and unfunny in the extreme. Black humour, for instance, a source of much-needed if momentary relief for those toiling on the front line of life, doesn’t generally withstand wider scrutiny.

Much is now made of how offence, allegedly anyway, is more easily taken. New sensitivities, or old ones more confidently expressed, are said to be hobbling the practice of comedy and circumscribing what it is possible to make jokes about. Some will argue that this tide of sensitivity must be resisted — that the best comedy should cross boundaries, and if it isn’t offending somebody then it isn’t working.

Eagleton seems to see this as the trickiest issue of all. It may be that the whole sensitivity thing is exaggerated, but even so, what if the “solidarity of the audience” — all laughing as one at the comedian on the stage — depends on the knowledge or indeed the hope that others outside the circle will be hurt or shocked or outraged? There is no shortage, for example, of online clips showing audiences falling about at the hilarity of the Holocaust.

Then again, the audience for comedy is often made up of people who are moving along with their society in the direction of a more sympathetic (indeed more sensitive) approach to difference, whether of gender or ethnicity or species, and their ideas of what is funny are changing too. If we accept, for example, that animals have feelings, then a creature trained to ride a bicycle is no longer funny, or at any rate not as uncomplicatedly funny as it once was.

Whichever way you look at it, the question of what is or isn’t appropriate to laugh about is ultimately political. In his final chapter, “The Politics of Humour,” Eagleton zeroes in on Trevor Griffiths’s 1975 play Comedians, which is set in an evening class of aspiring comics taught by a retired professional, Eddie Waters. Through Waters and his students, Griffiths tackles questions that anticipate current preoccupations. If the objective of comedy is to be “transformative,” to encourage the audience to view the world, and themselves, more sympathetically, then comedians, according to Waters, must have the courage to look at themselves rather than to go for the easier laughs that come from mocking others. Noble thoughts, but as Griffiths demonstrates and Eagleton allows, “there is no easy opposition between humour as transformation and humour as vilification.”

The current climate of uncertainty over what it is legitimate to joke about may impose constraints, but, like many constraints in art, those restrictions can lead to new creative directions. In the world of contemporary stand-up, some of the most successful practitioners have responded by incorporating a strong line in ruthlessly autobiographical, even confessional narrative to their routines, in effect telling their own stories with jokes, allowing others to see themselves in those experiences or at least to make connections they might not otherwise have made.

Theories of humour have limits, says Eagleton. No study of comedy can ever completely satisfy, because something always slips the net. For the jokes that get away, as it were, the ones that escape categorisation or that we find funny when none of our friends do, or that are funny one day and not the next, or hilarious when told by one person and a damp squib when repeated by another, an endless supply of explanatory clichés can be drawn on, stretching from it’s all in the timing to you had to be there.

Unlike tragedy, as it’s often said, comedy dates, but another way of putting it is that comedy evolves in tune with the times. We instinctively know that a good joke can tell us what is going on in the world more effectively than many a sober tract. That may be why, in the words of the influential comedy producer and director Paul Jackson, whose multiple television credits include The Young Ones and Red Dwarf and who knows a thing or two about comedy, “people follow the funny.” •

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Colourisation has been around for a long time and has had a chequered history, from the kind of hand-tinting first attempted at the end of the nineteenth century to the strange effect of coloured filters applied to silent film — suddenly turning the screen from black-and-white to a vertigo-inducing red or blue — and the lame colourisation of black-and-white classics in the first days of VHS, which gave Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, among others, a disconcertingly vampiric look. Those fads didn’t last; and notwithstanding the success with audiences of They Shall Not Grow Old, it is unlikely that a new enthusiasm for colourisation will take off, not least because of the height of the bar. These days our expectations of what constitutes “living” colour are far more demanding than they were in the 1890s or 1920s or 1980s.

Leaving aside the question of whether the process, however sophisticated, can ever be entirely convincing, there is no doubt that the colourised footage in They Shall Not Grow Old has had a tremendous impact on those who have seen it. The point in the film at which old black-and-white footage morphs into colour and the image simultaneously expands to fill the entire screen, a point that comes about twenty minutes in, does rather take the breath away, even on repeated viewings. When, towards the end of the film, the process happens in reverse, and we are taken back to the smaller, black-and-white world, it feels as if the reanimated soldiers are once again moving away from us, back into history.

The long central section of the film, much of it in newly applied colour and focusing on the front itself, is thus bookended by a more old-fashioned-looking, historical-feeling introduction and conclusion, covering the war’s build-up and aftermath. These beginning and concluding sections are carefully counterbalanced, the latter taking up and repeating themes, and sometimes reusing footage, from the former.

The common humanity and fellow feeling of the British and German troops, for instance, is highlighted at both the beginning and the end of the film. A voice recalls being at a dinner following a game of football with an opposing team from Germany when they received word that war has been declared. By common consent, the two teams agreed not to spoil things but to continue with their evening’s enjoyment. “As far as we were concerned, the war was going to start tomorrow.” Towards the end of the film, when the Germans are surrendering in numbers and peace is in sight, we see soldiers from the opposing sides laughing and trading helmets, posing for the cameras.

They Shall Not Grow Old makes inventive use of audio archives too, stitching together extracts from interviews with survivors, recorded some half a century later, to form what is in effect a commentary on and elucidation of what we see unfolding on screen. The film’s sound design seems to have been influenced by the phenomenon of podcasting and its emphasis on the natural-sounding, apparently untutored voice. Interestingly, some of these interviews were also recorded on film, but we hear only the voices. Moreover, these voices remain unattributed, at least until the final credits, and even then we are unable to link a particular name with a particular voice.

Instead we are encouraged to hear the voices as a collective interpretation of the war, more than as a series of individual comments and recollections. The archival sources — footage and still images from the time, together with the later audio material, some of it recorded for the BBC’s influential series The Great War (1964) — have been meshed with remarkable delicacy and sensitivity, to complement and illuminate one another. Jackson has been quite explicit in interviews about his intention. “I didn’t want individual stories about individuals. I wanted it to be what it ended up being: 120 men telling a single story.” (For those interested in hearing more, all fifty-six episodes of the BBC’s compelling radio series, the recently broadcast Voices of the First World War, drawn from the BBC’s own archives and those of the Imperial War Museum, are available as a podcast.)

Occasionally, when forensic lip-readers have been deployed to determine what silently moving lips are actually saying, the voices of actors have been dubbed in, lending the smoothed out, colourised footage a greater and even eerier immediacy. The voices illuminate the images, and the images illustrate what the voices are describing, whether it be food or latrines or what it was like to be gassed.

Remarkably, though, Jackson manages this process while never allowing us to make simple connections between the voices we hear and the faces we see. Apart from the use of superimposed background noise — explosions, indistinct chatter, a laugh — and those few instances where we can see that the person on screen is actually speaking and that what he is saying has been cleverly dubbed in, apart from those we remain clear in our minds that the voice does not belong to the face. It is a universal experience that is being recreated, by implication of other wars as well as of this one.

“It was a different war from year to year,” says one of the first voices we hear, and the film follows that cue, the tone growing progressively darker as more and more men are wounded and killed. In that sense, it is a conventional narrative of the war, conforming to the modern understanding of its progress that we have derived from numerous other sources. Yet it is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that all these young men, who are made so alive with the help of technical wizardry, were shortly to die in battle, even as we know that this cannot be true, given that we are hearing the voices of some of their comrades as recorded half a century later.

The names of these comrades are likely to be recognised now only by their descendants, if indeed they are remembered at all by anyone still alive. Occasionally, though, a name among the final credits strikes a chord: Australians of a certain age, with very retentive memories, may just about recognise the credit to the splendidly named Captain Frank Officer, later Sir Frank, who served with the Australian Imperial Force and went on to crown a distinguished career of public service as Australia’s ambassador to China and then to France. In other words, for those who survived, life went on, and often it was a very successful life, by all external measures at least. Even so, the experience of the war was always there in the background, corralled from the trajectory of ordinary life, difficult to talk about and impossible to forget.

Recent years have seen a huge revival of interest in the documentary form. While it remains unusual for a documentary to go mainstream — in the sense of enjoying wide cinematic release and high box-office returns — there are everywhere signs of its renaissance, not only in dedicated streaming sites and film festivals but also in the active participation of big names like Netflix and HBO in funding new work in this earliest of cinematic genres. If we stretch a point and include reality television, the phenomenon is even more noticeable.

This is happening alongside another sea change, the full significance of which is still barely discernible, namely that we are increasingly inclined to distrust performance in favour of an elusive authenticity (itself a kind of performance, but that’s another story). To say, for instance, as a few loudly do, that a particular character should be played only by an actor who can lay claim to a matching background and experience of life seems to contradict our most basic understanding of what it means to perform a role. But it is also a sign that we are in the midst of a complicated process of reassessing the dominance of performance in our culture.

How “real” then are these colourised Tommies, and how far have they been reformatted as actors? Purists will argue, and are already arguing, that They Shall Not Grow Old is not a documentary at all, but a fictionalised version of the front line, deploying the wonders of contemporary technology to compromise the integrity of the archive, by reanimating and colourising and smoothing out, and also by zeroing in on faces, returning to some of them again and again, and in the process giving them starring roles.

You can see their point. Some faces do stand out, and the camera accordingly and lovingly notices. In many cases its attention seems to be caught by teeth, and more than one commentator has been struck by the images of soldiers smiling for the cameras, revealing the appalling state of their mouths — teeth missing, blackened, almost theatrically misaligned, and thus markedly out of step with our current, obsessive quest for dental perfection.

It is a risky business, venturing into history. As many have noted, some in passing and some in a huff, the film’s title is almost but not quite the first line of the fourth stanza of Laurence Binyon’s famous poem, “For the Fallen,” which reads in the original “they shall grow not old.” In rendering the line as the more vernacular and more modern “they shall not grow old,” the film-makers are perhaps doing nothing more than reflecting the way in which most of us are inclined to retain that culturally iconic line in our heads. To use the original and self-consciously poetical word order for the title of the film would have sounded a jarring, artificial note in a project that sets out to reveal the essential ordinariness, and the extraordinary ordeal, of the men who served.

But amending the original line was the right call for other reasons too. The full text of Binyon’s poem, seven stanzas long, now reads as turgid in the extreme. “Death august and royal/ Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres” gives the general flavour. Only the lines from which the film’s title is very nearly taken retain the power to move: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:/ Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.”

Crucially, the poem was written and published in 1914, only a few weeks after the outbreak of the war. The seeds of doubt had not yet been sown; belief in the justness of the cause and the value of sacrifice were very much in the ascendancy. It is the mood that is captured in the introductory section of Jackson’s film, the twenty minutes of largely monochrome, mostly small-screen sequences, some bucolic — sheep in a field, young girls dancing round a maypole — most detailing the process of recruitment, the enthusiastic rush to join up. We had to go, the voice-overs tell us.

Binyon’s lines are in tune with the time in which they were written. The men will grow not old, but they will grow in other ways, despite but also because of their deaths in battle. They will continue to acquire stature and significance. It is the ones who are left behind who are condemned to a slow and unremarked decline, rendering the fallen almost to be envied. To a twenty-first-century reader, this is likely to seem perverse, glamorising the real tragedy, namely that these men were not given the chance to live out their lives in peace.

In that sense, the film’s revisionist title is more in accord with the mood of the closing minutes of the film, when it reverts once more to black-and-white and to the small- screen format, as the war becomes the past and the survivors return from the front to a world that would prefer to forget what they went through, and move on. Indeed, one of the cruellest effects for survivors was how the war permanently divided participants from those who had remained behind. Fellow soldiers understood; non-combatants didn’t and never would.

They Shall Not Grow Old is, among other things, a celebration of the backroom arts of cinema, of the work of editors, sound technicians, compositors, matte painters and voice artists, restorers and researchers, all of them masterfully orchestrated by Jackson. Whether this elaborate and passionate exercise in restoration and modernisation brings us closer to the people and the time, closer to understanding what they went though, is infinitely arguable. It may be an indelible feature of war that to understand the sheer intensity of what it was like you really had to be there.

Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich shows this to be a phenomenon common to all armed conflicts in her haunting collection of interviews with veterans of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and their loved ones, Boys in Zinc (1989), a book that in many ways foreshadows Jackson’s technique. “We were suspended between life and death,” says one of her informants. “Is there anything stronger than that feeling?” •

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It is a distinguished career that began, in a sense, with volleyball. As a competition player in his youth, and keenly interested in sport, Berehulak became increasingly fascinated with how photography could capture the action of the sporting arena. Sports photography gave him his start in the profession — “I learned photography by shooting sports.”

Curiously, Berehulak (born in 1975) is not the only Australian photojournalist of his generation who covers conflict and displacement but began with sport. Trent Parke (born in 1971), the only Australian full member of the iconic Magnum Photos agency, and Ashley Gilbertson (1978), a member of the prestigious VII, both began by taking pictures of people playing sport — initially, the sport they themselves played. For Gilbertson it was his teenage obsession with skateboarding that got him started, his kinetic images of fellow skateboarders gradually tipping him in the direction of a career as a professional observer. Parke, a talented cricketer, was headed along the path of a professional sportsman, but photojournalism won out in the end.

It may seem a long way from an aptitude for skateboarding or cricket or volleyball to this level of international success in photojournalism, yet each of these photographers has in different ways acknowledged the crucial role that his early experience in sport and in sports photography played in developing photographic technique, methodology and approach. One of the fundamental rules for a sports photographer is to know who and what you are photographing. The names of the players and the time and location of the event are not merely supplementary to the image, they add meaning to the image, locating it in a particular time and place.

More crucially, perhaps, the “photographic moment” in sport is not simply there to be captured when it comes along. It must be anticipated. And to anticipate the moment requires a knowledge of the sport itself, of technique and game plans and the multiple quirks and predispositions of individual players. Just as the street photographer must develop an extra sense of what may be about to happen, of who is about to make a sudden movement or enter or depart the frame, so the sports photographer must be attuned to what might be coming next.

“Everyone is different,” Berehulak has observed of what sports photography taught him. “Their techniques are different, so in order to get a certain photograph, you need to understand their movement and motion” — you need to understand your subjects as individuals and to anticipate what they might do and be ready for it. Trent Parke has made a similar point arising from his own experience of photographing cricket: “In sports photography, if you wait until you see something happen, then, by the time you take your shot, the moment has passed.”

Berehulak has remarked several times on the trouble he takes to record, wherever possible, the names and relationships of the people in his photographs, however difficult or dangerous or merely confusing the circumstances. In 2010, when he was photographing the impact of the floods in Pakistan for Getty Images, one photograph in particular, of a boy and a man walking through the floodwaters with their shoes in their hands, seemed to embody that impact. At the time he could only caption it as “man and boy,” but Berehulak’s need for explanatory context was such that he returned a year later to try to discover his subjects’ identities. He was successful in his quest, thanks to a man who recognised the two figures in the image as a grandfather and his grandson, Ghulam Qadir, fifty-two, and Mueen Ibrahim, ten.

For Berehulak, rather than a picture being worth a thousand words, it is as if a picture needs at least a few words to anchor it in reality, to tie it to individual rather than representative lives, and to avoid the sin of romanticisation, by which the photographic subject, however ugly or distressing the original context, becomes merely beautiful. In his best work so far, the photo-essay for the New York Times that won him his second Pulitzer, Berehulak is careful to record the names of the victims of Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drugs campaign as he photographs their bodies sprawled in the street.

“Killed at Home”: The blood of Florjohn Cruz staining the floor in his family’s living room, next to an altar displaying images and statues of the Virgin Mary, among other items. Daniel Berehulak for the New York Times

The heads of the victims are sometimes shown wrapped in tape, their identities disguised by persons unknown, a visual reminder that they have ceased to exist. “What I was trying to do,” says Berehulak in a podcast accompanying the photo-essay, “was to give these people a face and a name.” As we scroll over the images, we can click on a link to read more. The “more” turns out to be not very much — a sentence or two giving the victim’s name, and perhaps a reference to his, or occasionally her, family. But it is enough to powerfully reinforce the effect of the image and ground it in biographical fact.

In many of these images we are shown the sprawled bodies as if on a stage, surrounded by onlookers — witnesses, police, mourners. The onlookers seem to act as an analogue of the camera and its capacity to witness and record. In one particularly striking image, “Killed at Home,” the body of Florjohn Cruz, thirty-four, has already been removed, leaving only his blood behind to stain the living-room floor. At first the room seems quite empty, until the eye goes to the collection of images and statues of Jesus and Mary and various saints, huddled together on the top of a bookcase, the point from which they watched it all happen. •

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The gallery has issued a small, well-produced catalogue in identical format for each of those ten years, and the works of all the finalists (numbering around fifty per year, some years rather more, some years rather fewer) can be found on the gallery’s (excellent) website, along with an essay by a member of the three-person judging panel summarising trends and making an effort, not always entirely successfully, to refer at least in passing to individual finalists. Several additional features have been introduced over the years – interviews with judges and finalists, a people’s choice award – but by and large the format has remained helpfully consistent for anyone interested in digging deeper into photographic history in the making.

The judging panel – two NPG staff members and an outsider ­– varies from year to year, but certain names recur, including that of Sarah Engledow, senior curator at the NPG and one of the 2017 judges. In her years as a judge, Engledow has also contributed the accompanying essay. Her commentaries – acerbic, witty, informed, and deeply sympathetic to both photographers and sitters – make essential reading for anyone contemplating submitting an entry in future years; so, too, does her piece in the current issue of the gallery magazine, Portrait, in which she reflects on the decade and selects some of her own favourite photographs.

Engledow is not one to pull her punches – tattoos, she records with evident relief, are now too commonplace to be automatically edgy or interesting. “In the early years of the prize, there were many photographs of tattooed people, but now there are so many tattooed people that photographers have no reason to seek them out.” Other popular tropes – people posing with their pets, for example – continue to abound, but as Engledow freely acknowledges, simply choosing a common theme doesn’t rule out success. Janelle Low won the prize in 2013 with her beautifully composed image of Yhonnie and her cat Indiana, Yhonnie looking serenely contemplative and Indiana looking both contemplative and, interrupting the otherwise serene mood of the image, slightly constipated.

Among the works currently on display, the entry by Daniel Sponiar, an image of Luke the heavy-metal musician, his tattooed arms holding his pet Pomeranian Nacoya, shows that it is possible to combine several repeated motifs of contemporary portrait photography – not only tattoos and pets, but also nudity (Nacoya plays a strategic role here) and hipster beards – and still come up, against all the odds, with a portrait that is both affectionate and genuinely affecting.

This is a dilemma confronting anyone charged with judging a photographic portrait. How do you deal with the repetitiveness of certain themes and counter the criticism, often levelled at competitions like this one, that there are just too many photographs of young men “on the cusp” with their shirts off, or young women in Vermeer- or Rembrandt-like poses, stunningly lit, or people half-submerged in water, or twins. (“If someone enters a picture and it’s a wonderful image of twins, we’re not going to exclude it just because there have been pictures of twins before,” said the curator of photographs at London’s National Portrait Gallery in 2015, responding to general criticism of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize.)

On the other hand, certain trends are under-represented. Rare among ten years’ worth of finalists is an image that questions the medium itself, overtly or implicitly, or highlights how a photograph is made. For that, one has to look elsewhere, for example to the finalists for the NPG’s own 2016 Digital Portrait Award, recently on display in the gallery and still available to view on the website, and particularly to Lucas Davidson’s engaging if overlong video portrait – “13 minutes, 50 seconds (looped)” – entitled “Body Emulsion Detachment.” The artist “aims to challenge the conventions of the photographic self-portrait… [by presenting] the body as an ever-changing image held together by a thin film of photo emulsion.”

More strikingly, perhaps, very few images here are selfies or allude even faintly to this latter-day phenomenon, and few have the look of having been taken spontaneously or “on the run.” For that, it may be argued, there are now competitions in mobile or smartphone photography. In the recently announced results of the international Mobile Photography Awards, Brisbane photographer Glenn Homann won the People category for his photograph of a laughing dancer in mid-leap, caught at a point where she is superimposed on a background image of a “partner” while suspended above her own shadow. It is a complex photograph, one that implies an immediate “before” and “after” in a way that the portraits in the NPG exhibition ­­– alluding much more deliberately to established conventions of portrait photography – tend not to. Daniel Sponiar’s Luke is a case in point, with his otherwise unconventional subject posed formally against a plain cloth backdrop in the manner of an early twentieth-century studio portrait.

You can sometimes sense the underlying tension created by the need to present a single defining image while recognising that a single image can never be the full picture. This tension sometimes emerges from the titles and the accompanying text, in which finalists can be at pains to point out that the photograph on display is one of a series, or part of a bigger project. For this year’s National Photographic Portrait Prize, and for the first time since the competition’s inception, the judges chose two works by each of three photographers: Charlie White, Brett Canet-Gibson and Peter McConchie. Each of the six images stands on its own merits, but their selection does nevertheless represent a departure – a nod, however tentative, to the growing preference for favouring portfolios over the single, striking image as embodying the essence of a photographer’s work.

Over ten years of portraits by some 500 finalists, one thing is noticeable: you can clearly see the faces of almost all the subjects. This may come as no surprise, given that this is a portrait competition. Yet it does rather gloss over the fact that the practice of obscuring the faces of subjects with veils or shadows or vegetation or the subject’s own hands – or for showing cut-out holes where the faces should be, in the manner of the found polaroid images collected by Dutch photography curator Erik Kessels – is now so widespread as to be a convention in itself, a convention that for good or ill has largely passed the National Photographic Portrait Prize by.

Not entirely so, of course. There is usually one and sometimes several examples each year of the technique of obscuring to reveal. This year’s display, for example, includes Chris Budgeon’s “Ricki,” who sits shirtless with his back to us. Budgeon, here a finalist for an impressive fifth time, cleverly exploits conventions both old and new; his portrait of Ricki alludes, in pose and tonality and lighting, to the practices of nineteenth-century Australian art and art photography while referring equally strongly to more recent conventions. This serves as a reminder that photography is a creature of convention, whether the conventions date from a century and a half ago or from last week. The trick in portrait photography is not to circumvent those conventions – they are too powerful and will outwit you in the end – but to acknowledge and exploit them, and by doing so to convey the unique eloquence of the individual subject. •

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Among the “special projects” is a display of images and objects by Melbourne’s Patrick Pound, an artist who anticipated the rapid rise of curatorship from a kind of backroom service for the “real” artist to an assertive act of creativity in itself. For the past twenty years, Pound has been selecting “found” photographs (“when I click BUY on eBay – for me that’s the equivalent of taking a photograph”) and grouping them thematically, reassigning value to the often anonymously created image by linking it to similar images, and thus creating a kind of order out of overwhelming abundance. At the other end of the spectrum is a display, originated by London’s National Portrait Gallery, of one hundred works by the great American photographer William Eggleston. By means of his distinctive use of colour, Eggleston creates images of people and objects that in their combination of informality and eerie formality seem to exist in perfect isolation.

And somewhere between these two poles – Patrick Pound’s emphasis on the role of selection and context; the unrepeatability of Eggleston’s singular photographs (their Eggleston-ness, in fact) – is a display of works from 2008 to 2012 by Bill Henson. Here, the man with a claim to be Australia’s best-known and most immediately recognisable living photographer very much catches the cultural moment, assuming the roles not only of creator but also of curator of his own works.

As curator, Henson presents each image as individually striking and “stand-alone,” while at the same time encouraging the viewer to see them as commenting on and illuminating one another in a complex dialogue. Large and imposing, the pictures announce themselves as meticulously composed and hard-won.

“I am not one of those photographers who wanders around waiting for something to catch their eye,” says Henson in an interview included in the latest issue of the NGV’s Gallery magazine. He favours deliberateness over spontaneity, creating the photographic moment rather than waiting for the right photographic moment to come along. Like a number of contemporary photographers, he compensates for the sheer ease of modern photography by replicating what was once an essential part of the process, namely immense time and effort invested in pre- and post-production.

These images, drawn from a gift to the gallery by William Bowness and chosen by Henson to represent his recent work, range from portraits and nudes to highly patterned landscapes and studies of museum interiors. The museum photographs, in which blurred gallery visitors (Henson is a master of the blur) circle and observe and sometimes just walk past items of classical statuary, are in a sense the core of the exhibition, establishing a relationship between viewer and object that leads us, as gallery visitors ourselves, to consider our own relationship to the images on display.

The statues that Henson chooses to photograph – the much-imitated and immediately recognisable sculpture known as the Spinario, for example, which depicts a boy pulling a thorn from his foot – are themselves formal representations of informality and naturalness, a relationship that Henson echoes by playing on the contrast between the seriousness and formality of the museum environment and the striped polos and comfortable-looking cardigans worn by the museum visitors. The museum references extend further, to the portraits and studies of the human figure that are included here, in which the unclothed models have been directed to adopt classical or quasi-classical poses.

For many people, both admirers and detractors, these studies of youthful models are the essence of Henson’s reputation and standing. But the current display provides an opportunity to see the latest iterations of the human figure in the context of the artist’s other preoccupations: our relationship to landscape and to art, the role of light and shade in defining the subject, and the interplay of modernity and history. For all their classical allusions and formal placements, these are also very contemporary photographs. An image of a young woman with her hair trailing across her face, for example, speaks several languages at once, including those of advertising and fashion.

The most successful of the studies of the human figure shows a boy in the Spinario pose, examining his foot as if for a thorn. Of all the “posed” images, it is the most directly classical in its references, and at the same time the one that seems most human and natural and, on the part of the model, unselfconsciously engaged. It is a photograph in which the composition dominates, inviting admiration for the skill involved in achieving perfect balance. In a masterful touch, Henson captures a small oblong of light on the boy’s hair, positioning it with classical appropriateness at the golden mean.

In the exhibition catalogue, splendidly produced by the NGV, Michael Heyward provides a short, impressionistic commentary, in which he notes of the studies of the human figure that “the body in the photograph becomes the sculpture it resembles.” Yet it might equally be said that the real source of the photographs’ impact is the failure of these young models to entirely become those sculptures, and the way that their modernity shines through the formality of the pose.

Just as he does in his museum interiors and landscapes, Henson in his portraits and his studies of the human figure exploits the contrast between formality and informality, the posed and the natural, to show how they interact and complement one another. Into this visually serious space he can, very occasionally, inject a joke. In one of his museum shots – titled, like all the others, “Untitled,” which serves to emphasise the interconnectedness of the images – a visitor’s floppy sunhat in the upper right of the frame echoes a sculpted helmet in the upper left, as if to draw an affectionate connection between life and art. It is the same connection that animates all Henson’s work. •

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There was no cause for alarm, the worriers were assured. The site would remain live and searchable, even while accepting no new posts. “Vine will always be Vine,” said a company representative. Not entirely convinced, various internet archiving sites are planning their own rescue missions, but they may yet prove unnecessary: there are reports that Vine may not be cryogenically frozen after all, but will find a buyer who will keep it both alive and active.

Other users and former users of Vine are more sanguine. Concerned less with history than with what will happen next, they see the likely demise of Vine as simply part of the organic, ever-morphing development of social media. Vine came, it flourished for a while, but it didn’t respond quickly enough to changing demands – for new functions, for opportunities to monetise – and so its time was up; other platforms, Instagram and Snapchat prominent among them, have taken the baton and are running with it. But neither Snapchat nor Instagram is running particularly hard in the archiving direction, the worriers might respond. Both of them – Snapchat as part of its core appeal, Instagram via a recent addition to its functionality – instead embrace the notion of disposability.

Snapchat has disappearance built in (although images can be retained and recovered if desired; disappearance is simply the default). Interestingly, this core function didn’t play well with focus groups in the early stages of development in 2011, but it quickly became the brand essence. Now Instagram, as of a few months ago, has introduced, Snapchat-like, a Story function that allows users to post a sequence of images or videos that automatically disappears after twenty-four hours (even though, once again, it is possible for users to retain their stories if they decide they can’t bear to let them go).

And so, even while museum workers and record keepers all over the world ponder what they should (and can afford to) preserve from the vast amount of social media activity and visual exchanges via the internet, the entire concept of the value of preservation is being bypassed, in favour of routinised disappearance. Or, to put it another way, we are told, sometimes reassuringly but more often with a hint of menace, that the internet never forgets. That may be so, but it does seem as if it is becoming increasingly and very deliberately absent-minded.

@caxmee, from Life on Instagram 2017.

Instagram, perhaps more than any other comparable platform, raises the question of what constitutes the life of the image. The answer, in theory, and as long as a “disappear” button hasn’t been switched on, is forever, but as every photographer and image-maker knows, it doesn’t mean much to say that your image is discoverable and viewable if nobody is discovering and viewing it. Unless an image is tagged, found, liked, re-posted, recommended and otherwise picked out from the crowd – according to latest estimates, Instagram has 500 million active monthly users, with over ninety million photos and videos being shared each day – then the life of the image is not much of a life.

Instagram started its own life in 2010, when it presented itself as a way of displaying the moments between the moments – not the “decisive moments” so closely associated with SLR and other forms of pre-digital photography, but spontaneous, catch-the-moment photography, supercharged snapshots taken with a smartphone that individually or in short sequences or “grids” imply a story, offering a closer connection with life as it is lived. A lot has changed since 2010, and the aura of spontaneity that still surrounds Instagram (post an image, wait a while to see who likes it, post another one), its dual emphasis on both recording and moving right along, has come to seem much more complicated, not least because, as is the case with every form of creative endeavour, achieving the effect of spontaneity can be hard work.

In 2014 (or, in social media terms, generations ago), Steve Crist and Megan Shoemaker’s The Instagram Book: Inside the Photography Revolution sought to capture, using selected images from the work of selected Instagrammers, what it was about mobile photography, and the platform provided by Instagram, “that was pushing photography forward into a new era.” But, as The Instagram Book demonstrates, this is far more easily said than done. “We selected,” say the editors, “a small cross section of photographers who reflect the spontaneity, joy, playfulness, poetry and beauty that we feel are so prevalent in the photographic world that is Instagram.” This attempt at definition, in both its generality and tentativeness, reflects the difficulty, not just for Crist and Shoemaker but for all observers of and participants in the photography revolution, in defining just what about it is so revolutionary.

The photographers included in The Instagram Book are each given a chance of their own, in a paragraph or two, to define the revolution, and their responses are for the most part astute and revealing. Despite the frequent use of the word “memory,” and the instances of the now widespread habit of referring to images themselves as “memories,” few of the sixty or so Instagrammers describe the actual images – the ones they themselves have taken in the near or distant past – as repositories of or stimulants to their own memories.

The Russian photographer Zhenya Aerohockey (@aerohockey), who has a definite talent for capturing the geometrical shapes and patterns of architecture, describes the value of being “able to look at a picture taken ten years ago and remember.” But he is an exception. Much more often, the capacity to stimulate and preserve memory is vested not so much in the images as in the process of photography itself. For anyone who questions the value of habitually taking photos of what you have for dinner, for instance, these attempts by Instagrammers to explain their “addiction” offer another side to the story.

In essence, mobile photography – smartphone in the hand, ever at the ready – offers a way of seeing, a defining frame around everyday experiences. Approached from this perspective, critics who berate the Instagrammers for substituting photographs for real life, for opting for the image in preference to the reality, miss the point. Mobile photography is life: for those who willingly succumb to its embrace, mobile photography provides a way of mediating, understanding and getting the most out of the world. In The Instagram Book, Yoshito Hasaka (@_f7) refers charmingly to the “happiness” that mobile photography brings him. The act of photography allows him to look at his home city of Tokyo with new eyes. “Every day and night, I shoot ordinary Tokyo scenes as if I’m travelling the world.”

The Instagram habit leaves little time for ferreting about in the archive. On the contrary, it is striking how often the focus of these photographers is on the future rather than on the past, and on the way that photography helps them to go forward and to make sense of what they are seeing along the way. Just as the grid function of the iPhone camera helps the photographer to balance and level the image and to highlight the interconnections of the objects within the frame, so mobile photography itself can provide a sense of the structure and order that underpins the apparently random, ordinary event.

Two years on from The Instagram Book, and the tone of Instagram has changed somewhat. Though you might not necessarily think so from Life on Instagram 2017, edited by Penguin art director Jim Stoddart and intended as the first in a series of Life on Instagram annuals. In his foreword, Stoddart defines the Instagram phenomenon, and by extension mobile photography in general, as being “about you and me recording the spectacle and nuance of our own lives and imparting our experiences, joys and sometimes our sorrows as they happen.”

Instagram is about spontaneity, about living in and simultaneously catching the moment, says Stoddart. It is an essentially democratic phenomenon, open to anyone with a smartphone and a willingness to master how the phone’s camera and the Instagram platform work. “Even when taken by experienced photographers,” he writes, “these are images that anyone could potentially capture, in the right circumstances on the right day.” Instagram images need to have that slightly serendipitous look, which is why loading images via smartphone that have actually been taken with DSLR or other kinds of cameras is not seen, by the strict adherents anyway, as quite playing the game.

What, then, is the role of chance, both in the creation of the stand-out image (“that anyone could potentially capture”) and in the selection of that image and the image-maker for inclusion in Life on Instagram, or on any of the vast number of “best of Instagram” lists that can be found online? As Stoddart acknowledges, curatorial comprehensiveness is an impossible ideal. You simply cannot look at everything. “There are so many million images uploaded every day that there is no way to see – let alone appreciate – all the content on Instagram (though we did try).” Any selection of these images can’t claim to be much more than an indication of what is good or quirky or interesting online, an encouragement to explore further and to make your own curatorial selections – which means, in effect, choosing who to follow.

@piergiuliocaivano, from Life on Instagram 2017.

Life on Instagram captures something of the experience of exploring the site online by presenting its curated images both as single pages and in Instagram’s characteristic grid pattern, which encourages the viewer to detect a theme or a narrative. It also acknowledges the repetitive nature of Instagram, by including several examples of popular subjects – not just the familiar tropes of sunsets and cats and doors, but also people jumping into water, or lone figures caught against a background of looming man-made structures.

One of the main criticisms of mobile photography is that these same kinds of subjects recur and recur, yet it is difficult to see why this should create any more of a problem than the sameness of Russian icons or Aubusson rugs. The pleasure for the viewer lies in detecting what might be especially skilful or fortuitous about a particular take on a familiar subject, and the more icons or rugs or photos of doors that you see, the more adept you become at spotting the ones that stand out from the others.

Though Life on Instagram emphasises the platform’s essential and continuing quality of spontaneity, in practice Instagramming is more and more a deliberate and calculating art, at least if your aim is to get as many people as possible to like what you post. Editing tools are packed with options for giving your images and grids a particular feel and style, and the photographer’s own selective eye is applied to the camera roll in the same way as a pre-digital photographer would pore over a contact sheet with a magnifying glass.

Rather than posting unthinkingly all the shots of the day, there is increasing emphasis on curating in advance, thinking ahead as to what the overall impact of the feed will be and how as many viewers as possible will be drawn to it. To say nothing of hash-tagging, which qualifies as an art in itself. In photography as in other art forms, self-curating is the new creativity, more creative even than the making and the editing of the photograph itself, activities that have become increasingly foolproofed by technology.

But curation, of your own or somebody else’s work, may already, like editing, be in the process of surrendering its quirkily human touch to technology. The company EyeEm, for instance, offers photographers the opportunity to monetise their passion, licensing photographs “from a community of eighteen million creatives, curated by artificial intelligence.” The system of “aesthetic ranking” developed by EyeEm holds out the possibility of being able to sort and rank unimaginably large numbers of images, many more than could be assessed by the human eye. (If you’re aiming for a high aesthetic ranking under this system, the human figure is good, and water, particularly if it is blue, is good too, making all those images of people jumping into water an instinctively smart choice.)

EyeEm technology lies at the heart of the recently launched app The Roll – “find your best photos,” runs the tagline, and all with the assistance of AI. “Trained using millions of curated photos, EyeEm Vision learns and replicates the choices of professional curators and applies scores to photos from 0 to 100.” For now, The Roll concedes final choice to the human eye. It identifies your best shots, after which the individual image-maker, according to personal “aesthetic taste,” chooses the best of the best. But it is surely only a matter of time before that clunky second step is eliminated, and the technology takes over altogether.

If the editing and curating of images are increasingly guided by technological applications rather than by the eye of the individual, what happens to the part played by human creativity in the making of the image? The gloomy view is that it will gradually succumb completely to the authority of the machine, but that doesn’t account for the extraordinary adaptability of photographers and their ability to stay on top of their apps. Far more likely than the gloom scenario is one where innovations like automatic aesthetic ranking will join the growing repertoire of tools to be cleverly managed, manipulated and exploited by individual photographers keen to make their marks.

The stylist and Instagram star Aimee Song (@songofstyle) – who has an impressive 4.1 million followers – offers a surprisingly engaging take on how this can be done, in Capture Your Style. The key, according to Song, is to understand the self-contradictory nature of Instagram. It is, she says, “both organic and curated at the same time. While I always try to show real, inspiring moments throughout my daily life, I want to capture them in the best possible way, which means thinking about what I am putting out there and planning in advance.”

@songofstyle (Aimee Song), from Capture Your Style.

Song has thousands of images on her feed, but in a sense the old ones have already half-disappeared into the little-visited world of the archive. Song’s focus is relentlessly and cheerfully on the future, on what images she will make and post in order to continue consolidating her brand, her way of life, and not least her commercial success. With her instinct for tightly controlled variation (one photo in twelve should be a selfie, she advises, certainly no more and ideally no less), Song is full of tips on how to document “your incredibly cool life” by controlling the technology rather than allowing it to make every choice for you. Not all mobile photographers want to have four million followers, or turn themselves into a brand, or keep constant tabs on their selfie ratio, but they might still want to emulate something of Song’s determination to stay in charge of their chosen medium.

What is still hard to gauge about mobile photography is the full significance of the ways in which it differs from “old” photography and old ways of distributing images. Mobile photography is not just another way of making a photographic image – it is a whole other way of thinking about photographs and the role they play in our lives. We persist in referring to photographs as “memories,” even as we forget them in droves. In fact, Snapchat recently introduced a category called Memories, meaning essentially photos you can keep, and iOS 10’s revamped photo app has a Memories tab, which will automatically generate a slideshow movie of photos it selects from categories like Events or Locations. There is something of the rearguard action about all this, rather like the parallel fashion for retro photography, which has emerged in response to everything rushing so determinedly forward.

If mobile photographs are indeed analogues or reminders of our memories, then we are remarkably casual about them, carelessly letting them disappear into fathomless archives or off the grid altogether. With so many posts on Instagram and elsewhere, it remains relatively rare for an image, created under online rules for an online world, to be given an “old-style” home, to be extracted from its natural, online setting and hung, Cartier-Bresson-like, on a gallery wall or published in book form.

But whatever the ultimate fate of the individual online image, mobile photography continues to offer a way of seeing and understanding the world that for its many practitioners is immensely satisfying and rewarding. To carry a camera-phone at all times is to be ever on the alert, capturing images that will help you understand and learn from today’s experiences and anticipate tomorrow’s. But as for yesterday’s? Well, no, not really, not least because when there is so much in front of the camera to photograph, there just isn’t a lot of time left for looking back. •

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When sixteen-year-old Brooklyn Beckham was chosen last month to photograph the new Burberry campaign, the protests from professional photographers came as a brief flurry. Almost anyone can take impressive-looking photographs nowadays, particularly with a little help from the sidelines. While he lamented Burberry’s blatantly commercial decision to employ young Beckham, the professional photographer Jon Gorrigan was philosophical about the likely outcome. “People who are undertrained can get a good result with an Instagram filter,” he remarked in the Guardian. You don’t really have to be a photographer to be a photographer.

Meanwhile, the most surprisingly unsurprising photographs, made with the aid of a repertoire of professionalising tricks, can achieve a new kind of iconic status, if iconic means fetching a million dollars or more. In 2015, the Australian-born photographer Peter Lik – “I just want to see the beautiful side” – reportedly sold his odd-looking image Phantom to a private collector for US$6.5 million, though this record-setting price has been difficult to verify. What hasn’t been hard to confirm is the outrage among all kinds of people who are serious about the practice of photography. Since then, the celebrity photographer Kevin Abosch’s photograph of a potato – Potato #345 (2010) – has been bought for a reported $1 million, once again by a private collector. Potato #345 shows a self-contained and confident-looking potato posed against a pure black background, its knobbly surface lit to lend it a vaguely galactic air. It might be a nice photo, but a chorus of “I could do that” can be heard echoing away in the background.

When a single photograph can be singled out for no obvious reason by a collector prepared to pay a lot of money, there is something exhilaratingly old school about the exhibition currently showing at the National Gallery of Australia. It nails its monochromes to the mast and aims to demonstrate, using about a hundred images drawn from the gallery’s impressive collection, that certain photographs have a certain something that can’t be easily replicated, a certain something that continues to have a powerful impact on generations of viewers. They are images that deserve to be called iconic.

The exhibition title, The World Is Beautiful, might easily be taken as referring to the increasing sentimentalisation of photography, to the exponential growth not only in selfies but also in images of sunsets and waterfalls, or to the routine glamorisation, in genres such as “poverty porn,” of otherwise distressing subject matter. But it is in fact a reference to the influential book of that title, produced in 1928 by Albert Renger-Patzsch, in which the German photographer sought to increase “the joy one takes in an object” and to demonstrate the ability of photography to elicit satisfying patterns of order from the natural and constructed worlds.

Divided into three main parts, “Near,” “Middle Distance” and “Faraway,” according to the distance between the subject and the photographer, this exhibition emphasises the role of the individual behind the camera in making photographic decisions and photographic choices. It “takes the viewer on a journey,” says Shaune Lakin, senior curator of photography at the National Gallery and lead curator of the exhibition, “beginning with extreme close-up views of botanical specimens, and then moving further and further away from the subject until, after one hundred or so photographs, we are looking at images of the open sky and of transcendental phenomena.” There are no found photographs here, no images plucked from anonymous collections discovered on eBay or at suburban garage sales, no unacknowledged and unnamed geniuses. These are iconic photographs by name photographers.

In the photograph used to publicise the exhibition, Robert Doisneau’s Un Regard Oblique (A Sidelong Glance, below) from 1948, we look out of a shop window and see a couple looking in. The implied presence of the photographer, lurking within the shop in order to catch his window-shopping subjects unaware, is just one aspect of the extraordinary complexity of the composition and the fact that the photo constantly gives us more to see. A great deal has been written about this photograph over the years, much of it in the kind of late-twentieth-century-speak that has not survived nearly as well as the photograph itself. But the reason a lot has been written is that there is a lot to see and a lot to say.

Robert Doisneau’s A Sidelong Glance (1948, printed 1990), gelatin silver photograph, 24.1 x 29.5 cm, purchased 1991. National Gallery of Australia

The relationship of the man and woman in the right foreground can be read in multiple ways, their middle-aged formality and their hats (where would photography be without hats?) contrasting with youthful, hatless life going on in the background, all played out within an abundance of oblongs that serve to frame pictures and windows and doorways. The slight tweeness of the title, the man sneaking a sidelong glance at the racy picture to his right while the woman looks at another picture that we can’t see, doesn’t really do justice to the image’s depth of humanity and to its ability, like all good photographs, to suggest life outside as well as inside the frame.

From its very beginnings, photography has divided itself into genres and sub-genres – from capacious categories like portraits and landscapes, or street and studio photography, to more defined areas of focus such as scientific or architectural or even wedding photography. And somewhere alongside all these categories, occupying a kind of parallel dimension, sits avant-garde or experimental photography. The World Is Beautiful draws its selected images from many of these categories. The exhibition includes several of the many precursors of Abosch’s potato, for example, chosen from the long historical line of photographic close-ups of vegetables and flowers and plants. Renger-Patzsch himself, the source of the exhibition title, is represented by two images, one of them of Sempervivum Percarneum, a genus known commonly and unromantically as “houseleek,” or rather more romantically as “liveforever.” This image has a cool, scientific beauty, but it would be a confident observer indeed who, without the benefit of any other information, could look at Renger-Patzsch’s leek and Abosch’s potato side by side and pick the icon. Knowing the date makes a difference – 1928 for the Renger-Patzsch image, 2010 for the Abosch. Getting in early is important – which is only to say that the stature and standing of the image comes not only from the image itself but also from its place in the development of photography.

The images grouped under the heading “Near” demonstrate the capacity of the close-up to both unsettle and enlighten the viewer, while at the same time evoking the person behind the camera. That sense of an intelligence behind the image can be felt strongly in the photograph Skeleton Leaf by Olive Cotton (below), made in 1964 in Cotton’s home near Cowra in New South Wales. The leaf, its pulp stripped away to reveal the skeleton, has been carefully positioned, with the natural world blurred but visible through the window in the background. The image is a pleasing combination of the scientific and the pictorial, but most striking of all is how the leaf has been prepared and then photographed in such a way as to imitate the tree from which it came.

Olive Cotton’s Skeleton Leaf (1964), gelatin silver photograph, 50.4 x 40.8 cm, Purchased 1987. National Gallery of Australia

This fascination with pattern and repetition, characteristic of so much of Cotton’s work, is also characteristic of many of the photographs in the exhibition. It can be seen to startling effect in Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Lucia at the Breakfast Table from 1926, with its elaborate arrangement of crosses and circles and shadows, or in one of the images displayed in the “Middle Distance” category, Christmas Shoppers, Near Macy’s, New York (1954, below), by the great William Klein, with its repeat motifs of window frames and spectacle frames and collars and corsages, to say nothing of the splendid hats worn by the shoppers of the title.

William Klein’s Christmas Shoppers, Near Macy’s, New York (1954), gelatin silver photograph, 29.7 x 40 cm, purchased 1993.
National Gallery of Australia

The patterns in Cotton’s and Klein’s images speak to the viewer without the need for explication and explanation. In the case of Moholy-Nagy’s breakfast table or the French artist and photographer Annette Messager’s Mes Voeux (My Vows), made in 1989, it does help to know rather more than the image alone is able to tell us. With Lucia and the Breakfast Table, some knowledge of the “grammar” of the art movement Suprematism and the symbolism of its various shapes, while not exactly essential, will add an extra dimension. The work by Messager, however – a photograph of an installation that is in turn made up largely of photographic fragments depicting body parts – will not rise very far on the impact scale without resort to the gallery’s explanatory notes: “The bodily fragments in Mes Voeux are intended to recall ex-votos – objects, often in the shape of limbs or torsos, left as offerings to saints in fulfilment of a vow or in gratitude for recovery from an illness or injury – that Messager encountered as a young woman in southern European churches.” It is, in other words, a photograph of an icon, but the kind of over-contrivance involved in producing it does not necessarily make for an iconic photograph.

Messager’s is one of the relatively few images in the exhibition to deploy colour. When it comes to achieving iconic status, monochrome rules. Even today, when colour is pretty much universal in vernacular photography and almost universal in art more generally, there is nothing quite like black-and-white for conveying seriousness and weight. Monochrome emphasises pattern, and seeing these photographs together, with each photographer represented by only one or perhaps two images, brings home the extent to which so many great photographs derive their force from the kind of visual pattern and counterpoint that black-and-white so effortlessly underpins. Colours, on the other hand, are naturally assertive, a quality recognised by that most influential of colour photographers, William Eggleston.

In Eggleston’s Greenwood, Mississippi (1973), sometimes known as The Red Room, colour and pattern fight it out – it is an unrelaxing image. Eggleston deliberately tackles the most competitive colour of all, red (a colour that is “at war with all the other colours,” he once remarked in an interview), using a dye-transfer process to capture the creepily rich red of a ceiling criss-crossed by rather dangerous-looking wires. The white wires and the ceiling’s coving (painted partly black and partly white) struggle to impose a pattern on all that redness. In Eggleston’s “iconic image,” as it is often described, black-and-white is no match for red.

The exhibition’s emphasis on the physical position of the photographer – close to the subject, or a little or a long way away – highlights how important stance is to the way we see the photograph. Close-ups, for instance, draw us in – we know that what we are looking at is only part of a whole, but at the same time we are led to take the part for the whole. Eggleston’s image of the garishly coloured ceiling is a clear example, its alternative titles suggesting something larger and more comprehensive than what we actually see – a town, “Greenwood, Mississippi,” or simply a “red room.” In fact, what we do see is a mere fragment of these larger things. But the strength of the image lies not in its representation of these larger things but in its status as a subject, a close-up, worthy of attention in its own right.

Something happens, though, when the photographer steps back. As the exhibition notes have it, the “further away we move from a subject, the more it and its story open up to us.” Photographs shot from the “middle distance” have a way of encouraging the viewer to look for stories both within and beyond the frame. As the selection of images makes clear, this is a particular characteristic of the golden age of American street photography from the fifties, sixties and seventies, where the viewer is quite deliberately led to look outside the photograph’s rectangular border.

In Helen Levitt’s wonderful image from 1972, for example, titled simply New York (below), of children playing on a New York street, a young boy gazes off beyond the left-hand edge of the frame, his eye following along the line of his pointing elbow. In another famous and, yes, “iconic” New York image, Garry Winogrand’s World’s Fair, New York (1964), a row of people sit on a long bench. The man on the right is cut in half, suggesting that the bench, with people sitting on it, extends forever. “As always in Winogrand,” says Geoff Dyer in The Ongoing Moment (2005), “there is a sense of other photos going on elsewhere.” In both the Levitt and the Winogrand images, one in colour and one in monochrome, the human subjects manage to appear both randomly positioned and posed in a pattern, implying a repeating motif that extends further than we can see.

Helen Levitt’s New York (1972), dye-transfer colour photograph, 23.9 x 36.2 cm, purchased 1984. National Gallery of Australia © Film Documents LLC

When it comes to the final category of photographs, long shots, the rationale underpinning the three divisions within the exhibition seems rather to fall apart. “Faraway” is taken here to mean not only the distance between the subject and the photographer but also the geographical remoteness and unknowability of the subject. Photographs taken at a distance, or of subjects that are remote or inaccessible, may well have the “capacity to make faraway places accessible to us,” to quote the exhibition notes, but that is not the overall effect of the images on display. Instead they tend to emphasise the monumentality, the inherent drama and the essential strangeness of their subjects. They are the kinds of characteristics that can, in the case of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Radio City Music Hall (1978), for example, or Trent Parke’s powerful image of technology meeting the outback, A Rally Car Leaves a Trail of Dust (2003), be reinforced by the use of long exposures, resulting in images that lead us to see differently.

The World Is Beautiful is predominantly and unabashedly an exhibition of individual “great photographs” at a time when the so-called democratisation of photography has made many people sceptical of photographic greatness, and particularly the greatness of the individual image. There is much more emphasis now on the cumulative impact of photography, on the way in which a set or collection of photographs, whether by a named or an unnamed photographer or group of photographers, can provide insight into individual lives or political events or simply into aspects of the way we live now. The contemporary prevalence of what might be called “project” photography, in which the photographer pursues a theme across multiple images, invites the viewer to respond to the interconnectedness of collections rather than to an individual, standout photograph. But the works on display in The World Is Beautiful, drawn from the National Gallery’s impressive collection, make a powerful case for the continuing relevance of the iconic image, the one that among all the others really does deserve to stand out. •

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The exhibition at Arles, Total Records: The Great Adventure of Album Cover Photography, emphasised the historical link between the illustrated sleeve and the disc inside, both of them physical objects, the one contained within the other, the aural within the visual. The curators decided to show the album covers, some 600 of them in all, complete with overprinting and artwork, rather than the images alone, thus making the point, if it needed to be made, that the covers are artefacts from another age. The message on the archived website is clear – the age of the LP cover, the second half of the twentieth century, was a time when “photography mattered more than anything else,” and when there was a clear and mutually reinforcing link between the image and the sound: “looking at an album cover, you can almost hear what you see.”

It’s a definition of music photography – the image evokes the sound –that raises as many questions as it answers. Indeed, the very term “music photography” contains an implied question mark. How, in the end, do you photograph music? The implication of the Arles exhibition is that the direct link that once existed between photograph and music, so characteristic of the late twentieth century – when you could look at an album cover and hear what you saw – is now lost among a complicated mix of new technologies, new business models, new ways of listening, and changing notions of stardom, both photographic and musical.

In London, We Want More: Image-Making and Music in the 21st Century concentrated on the originality and inventiveness of the past fifteen years of music photography. As the exhibition’s website notes, “The traditional frameworks that once upheld a distance between photographers, fans, stars and their labels have collapsed to allow for new routes and territories in which music photography is produced, shared and consumed.” Musicians now routinely commission or enter into direct partnerships with photographers, not simply recording or ratifying a musical identity controlled from elsewhere (typically the record labels or that catch-all category of “management”) but rather partnering with the photographer to take charge of building and regularly rebuilding the visual brand. In contemporary music photography, the image does not so much evoke the music as concentrate on the endlessly fascinating subject of performance itself, on what it means for a musician to create and sustain a visual, as much as an aural, identity.

While some would lament the disappearance of a traditional system of financial and creative support for photographers – magazines buying and commissioning photographs, labels using images to create identities for their music – We Want More sees the change as essentially a good thing, empowering photographers, musicians and audiences alike. Instead of being bound to the commercial priorities of the magazine or the label, photographers “are now more in control of context and creative direction.” It’s a new world, in which everyone – the musician, the photographer and the audience – has a share in creative control.

Writing in the August issue of the British Journal of Photography about her experience of putting the exhibition together, the curator Diane Smyth notes how the final display seemed to fall of its own accord into two halves, one containing images of musicians and the other images of fans. As photographic access to musicians becomes ever more controlled, aspirational photographers turn their attention, almost by default, to photographing the audience. Rather than leading to second best, there may be a sense in which audiences are the new big subject, as photographers, almost invariably fans themselves, explore the nature and the attractions of fandom. Just as Lady Gaga, to take an obvious example, dresses up, then so – crucially – do her fans, turning themselves into photographic subjects.

In other words, the golden age of music photography is over and isn’t coming back, or another golden age has just begun, fuelled by the shifting relationships of musicians, photographers and audiences. Take your pick. At first impression, What a Life! Rock Photography by Tony Mott seems to plump squarely for the former. Along with a comprehensive photobook, Tony Mott’s Alphabet A–Z Rock ’n’ Roll Photography, published to coincide with the exhibition, this enjoyable and lovingly constructed overview of Mott’s work makes clear that there was indeed a golden age, that it peaked during the 1980s and the early 1990s, and that Tony Mott was very much at the forefront.

Less convincingly, the notes to the exhibition adopt an elegiac tone that sits rather oddly with the life and energy of the photographs themselves. For the curator, Louise Tegart, Tony Mott’s highly successful four-decade career has been due to a happy conjunction of talent and the times, and the times have been changing. “Rock photographs,” she remarks in the free broadsheet catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, “have become harder to sell now that everyone at a concert has a digital camera or a mobile phone. The scene has become more competitive, and skill levels have gone down.”

The rock journalist Toby Creswell puts the same sentiment more trenchantly in an entertaining essay in the catalogue. “Now everyone is a photographer,” Creswell laments. “Perhaps there is a Tony Mott app. Music is everywhere. Everyone is a critic and everyone is a musician so the world has become flooded with amateurism.” It is a familiar argument – photography mattered once, but it doesn’t quite matter any more, largely because everyone is doing it and standards have slipped. Against this gloomy assessment is the belief that there will always be opportunities for talent to make a mark, no matter how many people are taking photographs or making music (or writing, for that matter, another creative activity in which the lines between amateur and professional have become increasingly blurred).

Tony Mott was born Anthony Moulds in Sheffield in 1956. By the early 1980s, after a peripatetic decade working mainly as a chef, he settled in Sydney and began spending all his free time combining his twin interests of music and photography. “On Monday nights,” Tegart tells us, “an unsigned band, the Divinyls,” featuring the then pre-legendary Chrissy Amphlett, “had a regular gig and twenty-eight-year-old Tony started to take photos of the band in action.” Mott recalls of this period that “for four months, I practised, on Chrissy Amphlett, the art of rock ’n’ roll photography.” One of his images of Amphlett – in Mott’s judgement, “the greatest female performer in the world” – was taken up and used by the Divinyls as a publicity poster, and Tony Mott was on his way from being an enthusiastic amateur to an in-demand professional.

To mark the happy conjunction between his twin obsessions of photography and music, he changed his surname to Mott, after what was and still is his favourite band – Mott the Hoople. By this act of homage, Mott was signalling his own fandom, marking himself as someone who could record the world of rock music from the outside while simultaneously being totally immersed in it. What this has meant in terms of recognisable style is an approach that is deferential in the best sense, allowing the personalities of the subjects to come through without the art-directed look of much rock photography of the 1970s and 80s.

The digital revolution, when it came, had little initial effect on Mott’s practice. When he did embrace the new way of doing things (if embrace is the right word), it was an unsettling experience. Speaking of images he made of Rihanna in 2008, he recalls that it “was the first gig I shot with a digital camera. I was shocked I got so many great shots that I had a sense I was cheating.” Elsewhere, he has referred to digital photography as “too easy,” rather reinforcing the idea inherent in the construction of the exhibition that something irreplaceable about photography has been lost.

And yet, by providing this opportunity to look at Mott’s work as a whole – a mood-lifting mix of album and magazine covers, posters and flyers, interspersed with a large sampling of individually mounted images – the exhibition also shows how Mott’s work prefigures the casual, seemingly accidental approach that is characteristic of much digital photography. And on the evidence of the more recent images included in the exhibition, Mott has not lost his touch. He has responded to changes in the industry by taking on more work in film and television, but he also continues as a practising music photographer. The recent in-concert shot of P J Harvey (2011), fighting back against the visual weight of her guitar and the microphone, keeps drawing the eye, and an image of Daniel Johns, taken this year against a characteristic background of blurred, post-industrial grime, is a model of sympathetic portraiture. “He looks wise,” Mott comments of Johns in this image and he’s right, he does.

But simply being sympathetic, and involving subjects as collaborators, doesn’t always work. In Mott’s offstage photographs, there can sometimes be a bit too much face-pulling on the part of the subjects, which is meant to signal spontaneity but can come across as contrived. Mott is aware of the risks. He aims for naturalness and a strong sense of the individuality of his subjects, and can be hard on his own work if he feels that it does not meet these criteria. His portrait of the Clouds from 1999 has an intriguing air of formality that contrasts with the majority of the images on display, the backdrop curtain evoking a photographic studio – unusually for Mott, who generally prefers “found” locations. (Taken “at Central Railway Station,” he says of his 1996 image of Smudge, “as good a location as any.”) The plain, unpatterned clothing worn by the two members of the band in the left of the frame forms a satisfying visual contrast with the two on the right, both of whom sport more striking patterns. Yet for Mott, this image, perhaps because of its suggestions of deliberate construction, doesn’t quite work. “I shot the Clouds many times for Australian and US record companies,” he remarks in the wall notes, “but never felt I captured the essence of the band despite my love of ’em.”

Like all professional photographers, Mott had clients to please. In a funny and self-deprecating talk delivered at the State Library of New South Wales during the opening weeks of the exhibition, he referred to the standard and clichéd shot, often favoured by magazines, of the musician’s hair swirling in the air, the kind of shot he has taken on more than one occasion. His photograph of Lenny Kravitz (1994), displayed in the exhibition in larger than life-size format, in which Kravitz’s expression seems to suggest a high degree of self-consciousness about the hair, is a good example. “A bit of a Hendrix wannabe,” says Mott, in an unusually astringent comment. On the other hand, in that early image of Chrissy Amphlett from 1983 (“the first photo I ever sold”) the wildness of Amphlett’s hair seems at one with her look of total, unselfconscious absorption in the song. The thing about standard shots is that sometimes they work.

Mott’s photographs eschew glamour. Certain kinds of backgrounds occur again and again. Often they seem random in the extreme – a security grille, a brick or a sandstone wall, a sick-looking shrub. For location shots, he favours empty theatres or run-down railway stations or the disused warehouses that were common in the former industrial areas of Sydney in the 1980s. “Taken in a derelict warehouse in Chippendale,” says Mott of his 1997 image of the band Front End Loader, a warehouse “that was destined to become another block of flats like so many buildings I’ve used as backdrops.” Often the background, in the onstage and offstage images alike, is so blandly unglamorous as to be unidentifiable, appearing either blacked out or blurred. When Mott uses recognisably iconic structures – the Harbour Bridge or the Opera House or, in the case of a 2010 photograph of Angus and Julia Stone, the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House – these photogenic feats of architecture and engineering are made to seem ordinary, somewhere on a par with a brick wall.

Mott’s world is almost exclusively urban, but he does occasionally photograph his subjects against a natural background. “It is a dramatic setting,” he says of a 1988 shot of the Venetians in which the band is standing in front of the Kiama blowhole, but in fact this dramatic setting looks more like a painted backdrop, against which the band members stand out all the more. “We were waiting for a beautiful sunrise,” Mott comments laconically in Alphabet, “but it never happened.” This characteristic downplaying of the background encourages the viewer to concentrate on the main subject.

In his group shots, Mott elicits the personalities of each of the band members, who will often be positioned at some distance from one another. In some of the images – The Vines (2003), for example – each individual occupies a different depth of field. Yet despite this internal distancing, these images still manage to convey a strong sense of interconnectedness. In the Vines’ portrait this effect is enhance, as in many of his other images, by Mott’s use of a favourite device, the fisheye lens, which helps to link the band members by placing them on a continuous curve and enclosing them within the same visually distorted space.

For Mott, the photographic encounter is generally a positive experience. As we learn from the wall notes to the exhibition and from the captions in Alphabet, the musicians Mott photographs almost invariably impress him as likeable and funny and charming, even on the occasions when he doesn’t necessarily expect it. Lou Reed, for example, is “surprisingly pleasant company.” There is no reason to doubt these positive assessments, but they also suggest something about Mott’s manner as a photographer and his ability to put his subjects at ease. Unlike actors or professional models, musicians may not feel comfortable with the camera, or even like having their photograph taken at all, particularly when they are starting out on their careers. “Relaxing them is imperative,” he says in Alphabet.

Mott’s capacity to draw the best out of the musicians he photographs is evident; the exceptions all the more striking for their rarity. “My father always told me,” he says in the wall note to his 1992 image of the Beastie Boys, “if you have nothing positive to say about someone say nothing, so what I’d like to say about the Beastie Boys is…” The ellipsis is Mott’s. Yet even without the benefit of the commentary, the effect of the image is less than warm. A stretched-out, sneakered foot takes up the bottom half of the frame; the Beastie Boys themselves adopt poses that are both defensive and aggressive. And yet, for all that, it is an effective composition, demonstrating that a bit of tension, between difficult subjects and a photographer who maintains his equilibrium, is not necessarily a bad thing.

One of the many inspiring aspects of this exhibition is how Mott’s vast portfolio of photographs reflects the many definitions of success. His subjects range from superstars to musicians whose fanbase never extended much beyond inner-city Melbourne or Sydney. “Why, oh why are they not bigger?” he asks of You Am I. The same question could no doubt be asked of many photographers, then as now. By his own account, Tony Mott did not set out with a deliberate strategy of becoming a successful rock ’n’ roll photographer. Instead he set out to pursue his twin enthusiasms for music and photography, and by a combination of commitment and good fortune and, of course, talent, was ready to grab the opportunity, when it came along, to turn himself into a professional.

He didn’t so much fall into photography (an expression commonly used by people when reflecting on their successful careers, and almost never exactly true) as throw himself into it, becoming so absorbed in the intricacies of his chosen medium that it took somebody else to show him he could make a successful living out of it. It is probably the case, as the exhibition catalogue suggests, that there is little chance of quite such a scenario developing today in quite the same way, when the competition is greater and ambition is more conscious and more overt. Yet there are still many photographers who manage to break through from amateur to professional, navigating new commercial realities and distribution platforms to get their work out there. And in that respect, though the times were different then, Tony Mott’s work provides a template. •

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There is a further note of triumph in those first few words. They seem to contain a reference to her earlier critics, usually photographers themselves, of the kind who value details and accuracy and precision and were not at all impressed by someone who seemed unconcerned with any of these. For such critics, the phrase “Mrs Cameron’s Photography” would typically preface a condescending reference to her inexpert handling of light or focus, or to her very evident mistakes with the photographic process itself.

Julia Margaret Cameron was born in India in 1815 and educated in France and England. In 1834 she returned to India and four years later married Charles Hay Cameron, who was employed in the Law Commission in Calcutta. Hay Cameron, who was twenty years his wife’s senior, retired in 1848 and the couple returned with their children to England. There, they were immediately introduced to the literary circle surrounding Julia Margaret’s sister Sara and her husband, and to luminaries such as Browning, Darwin, Tennyson and George Frederic Watts. Cameron was thus both outsider and insider, brought up mostly abroad but rapidly absorbed, in her early thirties, into London’s most exalted literary and artistic circles, an aristocracy of intellectual and creative endeavour.

Cameron exploited her connections to become one of the first celebrity photographers. But she also subverted notions of celebrity and entitlement by choosing housemaids and porters as her models, demonstrating that nobility of face and bearing were not necessarily confined to a particular social class. “Boatmen were turned into King Arthur,” her grand-niece, Virginia Woolf, remarked, and “village girls into Queen Guenevere.” Order was inverted in the interests of the image. “The parlourmaid sat for her portrait,” added Woolf, “and the guest had to answer the bell.”

When Cameron wrote that the viewing public had validated her work – had given it confidence and power – the “it” is clearly intended also to be read as “me.” Julia Margaret Cameron certainly acquired greater confidence – in herself and her technique – as her career progressed, but she seems to have started out with a fair measure too. From the very beginning she was able to rise above her literal-minded critics, partly because of her own innate determination and strength of character but partly too because she had the backing of those prepared to see the new medium as capable of producing art rather than being solely an instrument of record. In the same article, Cameron refers to photography quite simply as “the art,” but as to where the artistic impulse resided she was never exactly clear. Sometimes it seemed to come from her, sometimes from the camera – “it has become to me as a living thing,” she famously said of that cumbersome instrument – and sometimes from happenstance.

Cameron was fond of playing up the role of accident in the making of her photographs, sometimes telling stories against herself, of overexposures and smudges and scratches on the negative image, of printing the wrong way round and inadvertently coming up with something better, more evocative and more alive than the unsmudged, unscratched, right-way-round “original.” She recalled accidentally effacing her first attempt at a portrait “by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass.” Just as Julia Margaret Cameron continues to give inspiration to late starters everywhere – she began her career at the age of forty-eight, after receiving her first camera as a gift from her daughter and son-in-law – so she continues to inspire the less technically assured of photographers by her demonstration of how it is possible to make a gloriously successful photograph without knowing, quite, how to make a photograph.

With this rather casual approach to the details of photography, Cameron was also deflecting attention away from technical matters, away from the importance of predetermined process, in favour of highlighting the role of chance in abetting the artistic eye. She gave due acknowledgement to chance because she understood, in a deeply instinctive way, that it is the very stuff of creativity.

In her catalogue of the exhibition of Cameron’s work showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Julia Margaret Cameron from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, curator Marta Weiss makes clear that where Cameron’s photographic practice is concerned, there are accidents and there are accidents.

In a letter of 1869, Cameron expressed concern “about the problem of the ‘honey comb crack’” that had appeared on certain of her negatives and was, by a process “beyond any power to arrest,” relentlessly compromising them. Weiss points out that the cracks are visible in two images included in the exhibition, The Guardian Angel and The Dream, while noting drily that in the case of The Dream, Cameron, although “distraught by the cracking that befell the surface of the negative… seemed not to be bothered by the two smudged fingerprints in the lower right, which form a kind of inadvertent signature.” But Cameron’s interventions could also be deliberate: as an example, Weiss draws the viewer’s attention to So Like a Shatter’d Column Lay the King (below), one of Cameron’s illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, in which the photographer has stepped into the development process and scratched a moon onto the negative.

Julia Margaret Cameron’s So Like a Shatter’d Column Lay the King, from a series of illustrations to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, taken in 1975. Victoria and Albert Museum

It is this interplay of chance and deliberation – did she mean it or didn’t she? – that helps to give Cameron’s photographs their power and depth. In her portraits and studies and tableaux, her subjects are posed and lit to emphasise stillness and continuity, dressed in costumes that evoke the past or in cloaks that evoke no particular time at all. We sense the director behind the camera, dictating the pose and the expression and keeping her subjects to their marks. The expressions are serene and contemplative, the eyes looking into the camera, or into the space to the right or left of the frame (Cameron returned often to profile studies – like that of Mary Hillier as Sappho, reproduced above), or downwards, as if to highlight the subject’s temporary withdrawal from the busyness of life.

In this sense, Cameron’s photographs seem to reject the bustle of the contemporary in favour of a dreamy, out-of-focus, semi-historical world where the women are beautiful and demure and the men are authoritatively thoughtful. And yet, with a combination of assertiveness and accuracy, Cameron would frequently annotate the printed image with the words “From the Life,” or variations on that phrase.

This quality of aliveness is what distinguishes Cameron from many of her contemporaries, and continues to underpin her reputation today as one of the greats. A photograph is inherently melancholy and backward-looking – it has been made in the past and it records the past. In a way, Cameron seems to embrace this quality in the way she poses and dresses and lights her subjects – almost invariably, they look pensive and vaguely sad. And yet we know they are acting, that these subjects have lives and preoccupations of their own, that they are not mere “subjects” but participants in a creative project. They are neighbours or nieces or friends of the photographer, elements in a network of connections that includes us as viewers.

Just as we know that actors have their own lives outside the play, so Cameron’s photographs remind us of lives outside the photograph. The very absence of accompanying visual detail concentrates the viewer’s attention on the face and the imagined life of the sitter, who has been captured in a moment of remission from that life, posing for the photographer and playing dress-ups. Cameron’s “mistakes” – the thumbprints and the smudges and the scratches – may have been accidental and may have been deliberate but either way they reinforce rather than detract from the overall impact of the images. (Marta Weiss quotes an early comment by the poet Coventry Patmore: “her mistakes were her successes.”) They contribute to the paradox that these formally composed photographs manage somehow to speak forcefully of the random exigencies of life.

Cameron’s Annie; ‘My First Success’, 1864. Victoria and Albert Museum

Cameron was ambivalent about giving due credit to her actors. In what she called her “first perfect success,” Annie Philpot, the young ward of temporary neighbours of Cameron and her family, is pictured in a coat that seems a bit too large for her. She has the look of having been firmly buttoned into it, ready for her close-up. Her hair looks hastily and imperfectly brushed. (Cameron, like so many of the great portrait photographers, paid close attention to hair and headgear.) The light on the child’s hair and face is balanced by the glint of the second button on her coat. Annie and her coat dominate the frame; the background is a blur. The individuality of the girl is striking; it is a remarkable image, made all the more so by the knowledge that when Julia Margaret Cameron made it, in January of 1864, she had owned and operated her camera for less than a month.

In this sense, Cameron began as she was to continue; her early work includes some of her finest pictures, so much so that a mere year and a bit after she took up photography, the South Kensington Museum, predecessor of the V&A, purchased sixty-three of her images. That was in May of 1865, and was soon followed by the acquisition of a further seventeen a few months later and a further thirty-four a few months after that. Many of these images are included in the current exhibition.

Annie Philpot – the eternal child and “my best and fairest little sitter” – had a special place in the pantheon, a place which she retained, in Cameron’s eyes, throughout the ensuing years. Writing of Annie a decade later, Cameron went further. “I felt,” she recalled of that exciting day, “as if she had entirely made the picture.” Cameron seems here, if only for a moment, to relegate her own role to something analogous to the indifferent mechanism of her camera. But only for a moment. Weiss, in quoting this remark, goes on to balance it by referring to another assessment by Cameron of a favourite sitter, this time the dramatist and man of letters Sir Henry Taylor, who had also been a neighbour of the Camerons and with whom they remained lifelong friends. Sir Henry sat for over thirty portraits, evidently with patience and good humour. “He consented,” writes Cameron, “to be in turn Friar Laurence with Juliet, Prospero with Miranda, Ahasuerus with Queen Esther… and to do whatever I desired of him.” Virginia Woolf put it rather more astringently, describing Sir Henry, ever amenable to direction, as being habitually “covered in Tinsel.”

Sir Henry Taylor, a favourite sitter of Cameron’s, with Mary Ryan and Mary Kellaway in King Ahasuerus and Queen Esther, 1865. Victoria and Albert Museum

In his illuminating study Photography and the Art of Chance, Robin Kelsey devotes a chapter to Julia Margaret Cameron and her complex relationship to happenstance. In a world in which photography was becoming ever more regimented and rule-bound – “the mid-century portrait studio was engineered to subdue all forms of accident; head clamps and supporting stands limited unwanted bodily movement, and mirrors concentrated lighting to minimise obscuring shadows and permit sharp focus” – Cameron opened the image up to possibility, posing her clamp-free subjects for so long that they were bound to move, creating small shivers of vitality and aliveness in the final image.

Most persuasively of all, Kelsey identifies the central paradox of Cameron’s work, by which images of nostalgia and play-acting engender in the viewer, “despite the antimodern air of her sad madonnas,” feelings of hope for the future and confidence in the “irrepressibility of life.” Cameron seems to have anticipated, moreover, how crucial performance was to become as a way of negotiating modernity, how play-acting would increasingly be a means not of suppressing the self but of defining it. (Not that Cameron’s subjects always saw it that way; one child described her as a “benevolent tyrant” concerned only with extracting the best possible performance from her subjects.) Kelsey quotes a comment by the critic Janet Malcolm that will strike many viewers as true to the experience of looking at Cameron’s photographs: “we are always aware of the photograph’s doubleness – of each figure’s imaginary and real persona.”

Cameron was modern in other ways too, anticipating many of the characteristics and practices that were to be essential for a successful career in the new art of photography. She was relentlessly self-promoting, ensuring not only that the V&A would acquire examples of her output from early on in her career, but nudging, often quite hard, friends and acquaintances to praise her in public and preferably in print, thereby helping her to attract new clients and, even more importantly, enhance her reputation. She joined the Photographic Societies of London and Scotland to bolster her professional identity. She curated her own work, producing albums of her prints for presentation to friends and possible patrons.

Although she took pains to distinguish herself from the world of commercial photography, she understood the importance of endorsements, of competitions, and of having her work included in the international exhibitions that were held from time to time in various parts of the world – including in Australia, where photographs by Cameron could also be seen by visitors to Government House in Sydney. A guest in the 1870s, fortunate enough to get as far as the drawing room, would have been able to admire twenty or so of Cameron’s images belonging to the governor, Sir Hercules Robinson. Robinson also sat for Cameron; his portrait survives as a gold-bordered carte de visite, the miniature format that she was fond of using to advertise her wares.

Cameron understood the importance of copyright. The Copyright Act of 1862 had ensured that photographs were eligible for registration. “From May 1864 to October 1865,” Marta Weiss notes, “Cameron registered 508 photographs.” Even as her reputation, whether among her critics or her admirers, rested on her preparedness to overlook or simply bypass the “rules” of photography, when it came to asserting her rights as an artist, including her right to be identified, she was scrupulous in her attention to detail. When she wrote, on the day she completed her photograph of Annie Philpot, that she was her “best and fairest little sitter,” she also took time to note down the details of the image for posterity, and in the process unequivocally staked her claim to authorship. “This photograph,” she wrote, “was taken by me at 1pm January 29th Printed Toned – fixed and framed all by me and given as it now is by 8pm the same day Jan 29th 1864. Julia Margaret Cameron.”

Cameron may have occasionally left an inadvertent signature on her images – caused by her thumb, perhaps, or the brush of her clothing or her elbow against the plate – but she would also intentionally mark the plate to achieve a particular effect or, in at least one case, highlight her Madonna’s eyebrows with ink on the finished print. By her habit of intervention Cameron would in effect impress herself on the image, just as she would record her name on the plate or the print or the mount. In that sense, her signature was very advertent indeed. •

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The result is that photography seems almost to exist in two parallel universes. In one, we are being overloaded with images to the point that it is all becoming a bit of a blur, and we find it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish one image from another. In the other, photography is being talked up as an ever more collectible art form, a sure bet for the astute investor. The inaugural photography fair Photo London, for instance, which was launched in May this year as a declared rival to Paris Photo and the Los Angeles Photographic Art Exposition, aims to open up new audiences, showcase new talent “and promote the concept of photography as an asset class.”

These “new” audiences must be drawn from the existing one, of course, to which we all belong – an audience practised at taking in images at a glance, perhaps making a judgement or perhaps not, and then moving on. We have grown accustomed to seeing photographs as a stream rather than in an album or hanging, painting-like, on a wall. The slide show of the olden days, which might have taken up a whole evening of quiet (and growing) desperation, now rushes by in a matter of moments. The arrow on the right hand side of the screen warns against lingering to award any single photograph primacy over the others. Accompanying these new ways of making photos (smart phones always at the ready) and looking at them, often referred to as the medium’s “democratisation,” is a certain democratic impatience with the idea of the “name” photographer and the iconic photograph – exactly the kind of photographer and photograph that slots comfortably into the asset class.

Something of this increasing disjunction between art photography and vernacular photography can be seen in an exchange between two of the best and best-known writers on the subject of photography, Janet Malcolm and Geoff Dyer, in a recent issue of Aperture magazine. During their back-and-forth of comments on the state of the medium, it becomes increasingly clear that they are approaching the subject from quite different angles. The conversation eventually turns to a major retrospective of the work of influential street photographer Garry Winogrand, whom Dyer greatly admires and Malcolm, it transpires, does not. In being awarded the accolade of a touring exhibition on sequential display in five of the world’s major venues – including the Met in New York and the Jeu de Paume in Paris – Winogrand seems in no danger of losing his star status, democracy or no democracy.

And yet, says Malcolm, exaggerating no doubt for emphasis, “I have to confess that over the years, I have changed my mind about Winogrand’s photographs,” to the point where she now finds them “consistently and uniformly uninteresting” and difficult to distinguish from “any snapshot.” In expressing her scepticism, Malcolm catches a mood, the same mood that is reflected in the current revival of interest in “found” and archival photography – all those snapshots and family photos that have somehow become detached from their families to survive without history or much in the way of identifying notes, including any record of who actually took them in the first place.

On these questions, the 2015 Head On Portrait Prize, currently on show at the Museum of Sydney, manages to have a bet each way. Since its inception in 2004, the competition has specified that all entrants will be judged anonymously – that the names and details of the entrants won’t be available to the judges until the conclusion of the judging process. This must be treated as more of a statement of intent than a guarantee; after all, photographers have their signature styles. And besides, many of the submitted images will inevitably have appeared elsewhere, online or in exhibitions, or in some cases in earlier photo competitions. Yet the highlighting of anonymity in the selection process has a way of setting the mood and extending itself to the photographers’ choice of subjects, who are typically “unknown” in the sense that they are not the kinds of people already visible enough to bring with them the trappings of other images we may already have seen.

This turns out to be quite important. Where photographic portraiture is concerned, it can be very different looking at an image of a celebrity taken by a star photographer and at an image of someone we don’t know taken by someone we haven’t heard of – when, in other words, we have minimal information on what Geoff Dyer refers to, in that exchange with Janet Malcolm, as “the old who by/what of.” Among the forty photographs selected as finalists in this year’s competition, the subjects of only a handful could be described as well-known figures – an image by Paul Green of Madam Lash, for example, looking like a racier version of the robot woman in Metropolis, and George Fetting’s strong, straightforward portrait of the artist and photographer George Gittoes (below).

Fetting has made something of a specialty of celebrity photography, sometimes producing images in which the subject seems to have been given too much leeway to pose in a way that suggests a contrived sense of fun or daring or difference. But here the pose works – Gittoes’s arms are held awkwardly and protectively across his chest and torso, suggesting a vulnerability that is belied by the strength of his expression and the directness of his gaze. That strength is emphasised by Fetting’s decision to place his subject against a blank canvas, unencumbered by quirky props or anything that might divert the viewer’s attention.

One of the great challenges facing any portrait photographer is whether to use props and, if the decision is yes, what form they might take. Hats have been relied on since the very beginnings of portrait photography, or indeed of portraiture generally, but even so, what are the odds against two of the forty finalists in this year’s exhibition choosing to capture their subjects wearing hats and veils of the kind favoured by beekeepers? (A third such image, Beekeeper 1 by Neil Bailey, is included in a slide show of commended entries that didn’t quite make the final cut, and is part of an appealing series of Bailey’s showing beekeepers in full regalia posed to resemble space explorers.)

In Craig Proudford’s Rolf (below) we see the subject, “a retirement-home resident in Sydney,” wearing the trademark headgear of his hobby, posed casually and self-effacingly with his hands in his pockets, in a mauve polo shirt and crumpled trousers. Rather in the manner of Fetting’s Gittoes, Rolf is relatively prop-free compared with others of Proudford’s portraits viewable online. Rolf is posed well back in the depth of field, surrounded by a plain grey floor and plain cream walls that suggest an institutional setting. The hat and veil seem to add to the understated warmth of the portrait, emphasising rather than obscuring the personality of the subject.

The veil works in a similar way in Matthew Abbott’s double portrait of John and Julie (below), taken in Lightning Ridge, in which he succeeds in making his subjects seem both comic and sympathetic. “It took me three days to convince John and Julie to allow me to take their portrait,” explains Abbott in the wall notes. “I was drawn to their unique solution of wearing mosquito nets as headdresses to combat the relentless flies.” Abbott has tended to concentrate on photojournalism and documentary photography, winning favourable attention for a series taken in Arnhem Land, which led to a Sydney Morning Herald scholarship as an emerging documentary photographer in 2013. The Arnhem Land sequence required considerable patience – it was a year, by Abbott’s own account, before he felt sufficiently established there to begin photographing the people and the landscape. These attributes of patience and persistence serve him well in John and Julie – there is a quality of complicity in John and Julie’s expressions, with each other and with the photographer, that seems to make them partners in the enterprise rather than merely subjects.

A number of the common tropes of contemporary portrait photography appear in this exhibition, some more than once – subjects photographed in the pose and attire of classic paintings, or shown with their faces and features either partially or completely submerged in water, or obscured by a splayed hand held in front, or illuminated by rays of light filtering through branches and leaves. Each has assumed the status of a convention – making it difficult to play successfully on the convention and to reanimate it. Eva Christina Schroeder’s rendering of Girl with a Pearl Earring, entitled Girl in a Plastic Bag 1, is one of many such homages to Vermeer’s painting made in recent years, instances of which can be seen in Awol Erizku’s photograph of the Girl with a Bamboo Earring or in the ambitious series by Dutch photographer Hendrik Kerstens. Schroeder’s version only half succeeds – the black and white image of her daughter wearing a plastic bag as a headscarf doesn’t quite convince as an ecological statement about “the current trend to recycle.” But for all that, the young girl’s contemporariness and individuality are more than a match for the constraints of the costume.

In another re-creation of a classic painting, Ben Scott’s Girl at the Bar, a kitsch and clever reworking of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergères, the aesthetics of advertising are proudly displayed; the image stands out as the only one among the forty finalists to openly glamorise its subject. The second place-getter in the competition, student of photography Glyn Patrick, also confidently reworks photographic convention – in her case the use of light filtered through trees to illuminate the subject – in her portrait of John, who has recently undergone facial surgery and who consequently “turns his back on the sun he loves.” Despite the fact that he is facing away from it, the image links the subject to the natural world. In fact, John seems to be standing in a kind of illuminated crop circle, lending the image an otherworldly quality and an aura of serenity.

Patrick takes a sympathetic, even protective approach in JOHN (shown at the top of this page). Others among the finalists are more interested in exposing imperfections and searching out vulnerabilities in an attempt to identify the essential humanity of the subject. None more so than the winner of the first prize in the competition, Molly Harris, with her portrait, Being Sandra (below). This initial photograph in a projected series shows Sandra, formerly John, a veteran of thirty-seven years in the Air Force, as she prepares in front of the bathroom mirror prior to leaving home to attend an Anzac Day commemoration. We are given something of Sandra’s background and perilous state of health in the wall notes, but in some ways these notes are superfluous.

This photograph’s capacity to convey both vulnerability and an uncertain future comes in large part from its confident handling of light, a light that seems here to derive entirely from the bathroom cabinet, creating a powerful and unsettling mood even as it fights an unequal battle against the gloom. Other portraits by Harris, who has already received significant recognition in her short photographic career, are viewable on her website, and show a similarly sophisticated way with light and its capacity to engender atmosphere and suggest complexity of character.

One of the great mysteries of portrait photography hinges on whether we can successfully read character and biography into a single image. Or perhaps the more important question is whether we believe that we can. It is partly a case of the right subject taken at the right moment and in the right light by the right photographer. But it is also the case that photography favours the old, in the sense that personality and character seem to be more discernible in the lines and infirmities of age, if only on the grounds that lines and wrinkles betoken experience, and experience, by one definition at least, is character.

It is more complicated with photographs of children. When we look at childhood photographs from the past we sometimes know what happened next – what happened when the child grew up – but more often we do not. And in the case of contemporary childhood portraits, such as the ones included in this exhibition, it is in the nature of things that we can’t know the rest of the story – character and personality, in their fully formed state, lie in the child’s future and also in ours.

Samantha Everton, in Sawat (above), from her Sang Tong series, which has been awarded third place in the competition, alludes to the formation of biography and character in her carefully staged photograph of a young child who, we are told in the wall notes, has been adopted from Thailand into an Australian family. In this and other images from the series, Everton takes as her theme

children who live in two worlds. They identify themselves as Thai but they’re also everyday Aussie kids. I wanted to show both the harmony and the tension between their dual realities.

The elaborate and sophisticated way in which this photograph has been designed, with its careful and precise use of colour and pattern, and with the child suspended dream-like among familiar or beloved objects, renders it both child-like and grown up, which may well be true of all the best photographs of childhood.

And so the Head On Portrait competition begins in anonymity and ends by naming a small number of photographers who could one day become – or may already, like Everton, be well on the way to becoming – “names.” It is one of the many such competitions, in Australia and internationally, that attract thousands of entries. Which shows that the democratisation of photography does not necessarily mean its standardisation. It just means that there are many more photographs, and many more photographers, to choose from. •

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The static composition and its clear purpose as an ethnographic document are of a piece with the elaborate and very un-immediate process by which the image came into being. Everything we learn about the creation of this photograph points away from immediacy towards artificiality and distance. In fact it is not, strictly speaking, a photograph at all, but a lithograph based on a daguerreotype made by the French studio photographer Louis-Auguste Bisson and his brother Auguste Rosalie Bisson in the early 1840s.

Louis-Auguste had the adventurous spirit – he famously climbed Mont Blanc, followed by a string of porters charged with carrying his cumbersome photographic equipment – but he didn’t get as far as the Torres Strait. Instead his daguerreotype captures not the men themselves but life-casts produced in the late 1830s by Pierre-Marie Alexandre Dumoutier, a phrenologist who accompanied the French explorer Dumont d’Urville on one of his Pacific voyages. Dumoutier’s moulds were sent back to Paris to be turned into impressions, to be photographed, and to then form the basis of an easily reproducible lithograph.

The image on the gallery wall is thus a lithograph of a daguerreotype of a life-cast, itself an impression from a mould – image built upon image. And yet, despite the many removes between the subjects in the frame and the contemporary viewer, the expressions on the men’s faces convey an individuality that no amount of formality and process can contain. Their eyes are closed but we know they are not asleep. They are thinking and wondering and waiting for it to be over, for the gypsum to be removed so that they can resume their lives. And in this imposed stillness the man on the left, in particular, appears mildly amused at the absurdity of it all.

The curator of this fascinating exhibition, Judy Annear, has divided the display into four main themes – settler and Indigenous relations, exploration, portraiture and transmission. Their breadth belies the extent to which we are led – or nudged perhaps – into drawing all kinds of connections across eras and genres, and into seeing quite disparate photographs in the context of one another. We are also led to question the sharp distinction still routinely made between “documentary” and “art” photography, and to see how these categories can overlap or simply swap places, according to the context in which the image is presented to us – in a scientific database or on a gallery wall, for example – or perhaps just to our mood on the day. The exhibition includes a number of images that were originally made in the interests of scientific documentation but here assume a parallel life as aesthetic objects inviting contemplation. “Hand,” a very early X-ray photograph made in Launceston in 1896 by Frank Styant Browne, demonstrates the way in which photography could not only document the visible but also show what was previously unseen.

Double act: Gerard Krefft and the Alfred Manta, Manta Alfredi (1868), by Henry Barnes, holotype. © Australian Museum

By including scientific photos, The Photograph and Australia alludes to photography’s status as the most mechanical of the arts, and to the way it marries the scientific and the aesthetic, often to the point where they are barely distinguishable. In some of these “scientific” images, we can quite clearly see how the photographer has consciously invited an overlapping perspective. In the extraordinary set of images by Henry Barnes entitled Gerard Krefft and the Alfred Manta, Manta Alfredi (1868), Krefft and the manta ray perform a double act, each adopting quite different poses in each of the four frames. As Kathleen Davidson points out in her essay on colonial scientific photography in the exhibition book, the fact that we see the manta ray from front, back and both sides is perfectly in accordance with the conventions of scientific documentation.

Rather less scientifically, Krefft appears in a variety of poses that seem to have been thought up on the spur of the moment, thereby emphasising the quirkiness of the object of interest – the manta ray – and the strange incongruity of this vast sea creature appearing as it does, preserved and carefully placed on the stone floor of a room that barely contains its full span. The modernity of the images derives not only from Krefft’s showy informality but also from the fact that he, as a museum curator, is present and on view, a reminder of the role the curator plays in determining what we see and how we see it.

Indeed, the curatorial function is inherent in the practice of photography itself, in the sense that all photography involves selection, from choice of subject to choice of final print. “I find 99.9 per cent of the frames on the contact sheet are mistakes one makes while photographing,” says the New York photographer Leonard Freed in the absorbing, recently reissued book Magnum Contact Sheets, a reminder that every photograph we see has typically been chosen from an array of other contenders that we do not see but that survive somewhere, in physical or electronic form.

In one of two photographs by Robyn Stacey in The Photograph and Australia, Chatelaine (2010), the curatorial and photographic impulses combine to convey the essence of an historical collection of objects and artefacts and the lives it represents. The nineteenth-century world of Vaucluse House in Sydney, former home of the Wentworth family, is conveyed through an arrangement of objects belonging to or associated with the house. The title of the photograph points the viewer to the chatelaine in the bottom left-hand quadrant, the “feminine version of a Swiss Army knife” that belonged to Sarah Wentworth and was designed to be worn around the waist, its scissors and other handy household devices being easily available if required to modify or trim or otherwise enhance the overall domestic display. The flowers, also selected for their association with the house and with the gardening fashions of the time, are reminders both of life – somebody cut the flowers, somebody arranged them – and temporality. The way in which these “old-fashioned” flowers have been arranged, in a more casual-seeming contemporary way, seems to link the present day to the formality of an earlier time.

Arrangement and understanding: Chatelaine (2010), by Robyn Stacey, from the series Tall Tales and True, type C photograph.
Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased with funds from the Photography Collection Benefactors Program 2011. © Robyn Stacey. 

Robyn Stacey has built a significant reputation on her practice of photographing collections, not as a comprehensive, “scientific” process of documentation but as a process of arrangement and distillation. Her beautiful, dramatically lit images, with their allusions to the fashion for staged photography, position the essence of a much larger collection within a single frame. Stacey applies to Australian history a methodology that early Australian photographers applied to the contemporary sights and subjects that confronted them, collecting and placing and arranging as a means to understanding. Examples of “arranged” photographs abound in the exhibition: in Fred Kruger’s artfully organised collection of Victorian Aboriginals’ War Implements, Coranderrk (c. 1877), for instance, or Charles Bayliss’s Eight Lawrence Hargrave Flying Machine Models (1885), in which Hargrave’s models are grouped together for their family photograph, like bugs in a cabinet of curiosities.

By contrast, in the several examples of composite (or mosaic) photography in the exhibition, we can see how this process of arrangement followed by photograph – line up your subjects and then take the picture – is reversed. First comes the image (or rather images), then the arrangement. In 1867, Patrick Dawson photographed, in his Warrnambool studio, the members of the first Aboriginal cricket team to tour England. He then arranged the individual oval images within a larger oval, which is further contained within a conventional rectangular border: frames within frames. Some of the men are in cricket whites – one man bowls, another bats. Others are shown in a variety of sporting gear, holding a boomerang perhaps, or a spear. The poses seem highly staged to the modern eye, the visual references – to Indigenous culture, to Europeanisation, to cricket – are all over the place, but for all that Dawson’s Aboriginal Cricket Team of 1868 is among the most successful of the composite images of the period.

New South Wales Contingent. Soudan Campaign. 1885 (c. 1890), by Barcroft Capel Boake. Australian War Memorial

The variations of costume and pose emphasise the individuality of the men, while the formality of the arrangement points to their interconnectedness. We can see they are a team. A more ambitious, and more overwhelming, example of this composite or mosaic technique can be seen in Barcroft Capel Boake’s elaborately over-the-top concoction made up of individual photographs of members of the NSW military contingent to the Sudan campaign of 1885 (above) or, even more startlingly, in Henry Jones’s arrangement of oval portraits of Old Lady Colonists, completed in 1871. Jones has placed “hundreds of tiny paper photographs” of these pioneering women in rows of varying length, one above the other. The process took years. The final, composite image is both celebratory and anonymising. The effect is of a very early example of concrete poetry, in which form competes with content for the viewer’s attention, with neither quite gaining the upper hand.

These early composite photographs highlight, in a rather theatrical way, the natural human impulse to group photographs, and to use photography as a way of imposing order. Settlers in a new and unfamiliar landscape would have been particularly susceptible to this impulse to document and define, to capture individual moments and create pattern out of them. Indeed, the exhibition as a whole places a welcome emphasis on the interconnectedness of photographs, raising the question of whether a single image can ever really be seen in isolation. In an essay in the exhibition book, Martyn Jolly considers the extraordinary popularity of the photograph album in nineteenth-century Australia. Collections placed in albums were a means by which the owners also placed themselves, summarising their lives and their interests in order to be seen as they wanted to be seen. The global phenomenon of the photograph album became a means of locating its owner in the new world.

The images so carefully displayed in albums were typically in the form of cartes de visite. These small photographs, stuck onto stiff card, were originally intended as calling cards but rapidly become collectible for their own sake. Images of friends and family members, or of people one admired, envied or just liked the look of, interspersed perhaps with landscapes or architectural photographs, were combined between hard covers to form a curated version of the album’s owner. But just as photostreams and Flickr albums and Instagram accounts can’t hope to organise and contain all the images available online, so only a proportion of the vast numbers of cartes de visite would end up trapped in albums – the rest floated free, subject to no particular organising principle.

Here, on the gallery walls, surviving examples of these small images from the second half of the nineteenth century are displayed in grid formation, with the viewer left to make connections and comparisons as the eye is drawn to one image or another from among the many to choose from. Seen in this way, it is clear how the size of the images serves to contain the subject – individual portraits, family groups, landscapes and buildings, all are effectively miniaturised. It is no surprise that in this form they were eminently collectible.

At the same time as photography was capturing the Australian landscape and the resulting images were being stuck onto small pieces of card, it was also showing how vast and uncontainable that landscape could be, and how easily it could be imagined as extending well outside the frame. This effect can be seen in scientist and photographer Walter Baldwin Spencer’s wonderfully evocative View of Roper River, Northern Territory, Australia (1911), in which the river dominates the lower two-thirds of the frame as it can be seen extending to vanishing point in the background, or in the American Melvin Vaniman’s Panorama of Fitzroy Vale Station, Near Rockhampton (1904), in which the positioning of the trees suggests a repeat pattern that will stretch on forever on either side, far beyond the metre-long print. In the Spencer image, the landscape is in its natural state. In the Vaniman, it has been improved. Trees have been felled and houses built. Yet the serenity of the image suggests the full meaning of the word “improvement” – it is nature made even more aesthetically pleasing by human intervention.

Monumentality: Spirit of Endurance (1937), by Harold Cazneaux, gelatin silver photograph. Art Gallery of New South Wales, gift of the Cazneaux family 1975

Other, chronologically later photographs show a very different relationship to the landscape. Harold Cazneaux’s Soil Erosion Near Robe (1935), with its baldly factual title, demonstrates its theme by means of an aesthetically pleasing composition. A group of shells, appearing out of their natural element “forty to sixty feet above sea level,” is shown in sharp focus in the foreground, as if the shells have been brought there by a combination of natural forces and artistic intent. In one of Cazneaux’s most famous photographs, also included in the exhibition, we are clearly directed by the title – Spirit of Endurance – to see the huge gum, its roots exposed, its trunk hollowed out and its monumentality emphasised by the angle of the shot and the severe cropping of the image at the top, as an analogue of the resilience required for human habitation of this land, even as it may also lead us to reflect on the damage that human habitation can inflict. To the contemporary viewer, Cazneaux’s dramatically anthropomorphic image of the Australian landscape may seem to be overdoing it rather, particularly in the context of more recent work by artists such as Anne Ferran and Rosemary Laing, who aim to elicit a more reflective and cumulative response in the viewer.

Anne Ferran’s five large-format, monochrome photographs, taken from her 2008 series Lost to Worlds, show repeated views of a minimally differentiated patch of ground that occupies almost the entire frame. It is not certain that we would understand even this much without the benefit of the information in the exhibition book. We could, perhaps, be looking at the moon. What we are looking at, in fact, is the ground on which stood the Female Factory in Ross, Tasmania, which evokes the presence of the “women and children who lived and died there” between 1847 and 1854. Just as we are led by Cazneaux’s title, Spirit of Endurance, to see his photograph in a particular way, here we are led to infer the human presence that once occupied this site, and the reality of the suffering that was endured by those who were consigned there; the shadowy shapes on the ground become traces of that suffering. Ferran’s work reminds us of how difficult it can be to interpret an image based on the image alone.

Devoting more than passing attention to any single photograph will prompt us to wonder what happened before and especially after the photographic moment. Sometimes, with images of famous people or iconic landscapes, we roughly know the answers, but for the most part we do not. In that sense, photographs naturally encourage speculation. “When we look,” writes Judy Annear, “we inevitably compare – what a place or person was like then, with what they are now.” We imagine other photographs, in the form of a sequence that focuses on the same subject and stretches over time. Or, as Annear puts it, “we consider how these things might be next time they are photographed.”

Nowadays, putting that consideration into practice couldn’t be easier. The Everyday app (“life goes fast – capture it”) will remind you that it’s time for that daily selfie. Progression videos or flipbooks abound on YouTube and other platforms, compiling daily self-portraits that show the subject ageing over time – a year, two years, ten years. (The record so far seems to be twenty-seven.) Given that these compilations do answer our question about what happened next, to say nothing of next and next and next, it is curious how difficult it can be to resist the temptation to jump ahead and get it over with. The sequences lasting two minutes seem to run for a very long time and the five-minute ones feel like eternity. They tell us we are getting older, which does not in the end seem quite enough for a photograph, or a series of photographs, to say.

Sue Ford’s series Self-Portrait with Camera, comprising forty-seven images of herself made at intervals between 1960 and 2006, must be seen now through the prism of this current fashion for regular visual updates. Given the speed with which the practice of re-photographing has become a cultural cliché, it might be expected that Ford’s sequence of self-portraits would suffer as a result, but in fact her work gains by the comparison. It would not convert easily into a flipbook; instead, it is a meditation on the photographer’s relationship with the camera, with family and friends and subjects, and with her own photographs. In many of the images Ford’s face is obscured, by vegetation, by her hand or her hair, by her camera, and once by a joker from a pack of cards that she holds up in front of her face. The poses suggest a combination of self-deprecation and determination, of the blurred lines between photographer and photographed. The process of ageing itself seems secondary to the project – it is something both more complicated and more satisfying for the viewer, an autobiography in pictures.

Certain photographic genres are under-represented in this exhibition. Photojournalism, for instance. Not to mention glamour shots, mug shots (there are two, both of a certain Edward Kelly, one with beard and one without – “scar top and crown of head, eyebrows meeting”), aerial shots, or snaps of families and of holidays and of families on holiday, untold examples of which are held in archives across the country. Some might find that these relative absences, together with the emphasis on the nineteenth century, and on nineteenth-century portraiture in particular, unbalance the story of how “photography invented Australia.” But another way of looking at it is that a keen curatorial eye and expert knowledge of Australian photography have rebalanced the picture.

In our current fixation with the ubiquity of photography (updates on the total number of images in existence are now given in the trillions), we can forget that photography has tended towards over-production from quite early on in its history. The exhibition’s coverage of the carte de visite phenomenon provides a clear example. All of which makes choosing difficult. An exhibition that looks at the relationship between Australia and the photograph cannot possibly be comprehensive, or anywhere near comprehensive, but it can, as The Photograph and Australia successfully does, make new and illuminating connections across the full range of Australian photographic history. •

The post Framing Australia appeared first on Inside Story.

The photographic image, once created, belongs immediately to the past. But aftermath photography adds further layers to this quality of pastness, inviting the viewer to pause, and to acknowledge and reflect on events that once, a little or a long time before the photograph was taken, caused great suffering and are still, in a variety of ways, causing suffering today. Images of the precipitating event – the battle or the bombardment or the natural catastrophe – rarely appear in aftermath photography; attention is paid instead to the results, which may be obvious from the subject of the image – a ruined building, for example – or may be elusive and even impossible to discern without accompanying explanation. Even with the benefit of additional information, the import of many aftermath photographs may remain oblique, to be inferred or guessed at or imagined. Such photographs often work by inviting us to compare the apparent ordinariness or serenity of the subject with what we are reminded once took place on that spot – the effect of the image is thus significantly altered by what we are told, in the exhibition captions or catalogue notes, or in some cases in text that is included in the image itself.

Aftermath photography capitalises on another inherent quality of the photographic image – its stillness. In contrast to the destructive action that has occurred at some point in the past, the aftermath photograph typically captures the stillness and the silence of what came next, whether that “next” is, to adopt the organising terminology of the exhibition, moments or decades later. Conflict, Time, Photography includes several images that were made just moments after the main event, among which is Luc Delahaye’s US Bombing on Taliban Positions from 2001. The title suggests action, but in fact it is if anything a landscape picture, its stillness and bare beauty enhanced and even exaggerated by the size of the print. Made with a large-format camera, the print stretches almost two and a half metres across the wall, the landscape it depicts bisected on a semi-diagonal by a trench that runs the full length of the frame. It is an aesthetically satisfying image, formal, composed, restrained. In the upper centre of the frame is the “aftermath,” the plume of residual smoke that betrays the bombardment that has just taken place. The sky behind is streaked with cloud. To the right, and far back into the exaggerated depth of field, are several more wispy plumes rising from the plain.

Luc Delahaye, US Bombing on Taliban Positions, c. 2001. © Luc Delahaye

This photograph from 2001 marks a deliberate change of direction for Delahaye, a Magnum affiliate who had been dashing from trouble spot to trouble spot as a successful photojournalist and war reporter. In an exhibition of his more painterly, post-conflict images, held at the Getty Museum in 2007, he was described as being newly focused on the “long-term implications of current events that go well beyond their initial moments in the headlines.” It is not an uncommon story, the action photographer whose interest turns to outcomes. At the same time as the action photograph was progressively ceding ground to film and video – from which, after all, a screen grab can always be extracted as required – photographers like Delahaye were looking to reinvest the still image with its capacity to hold the viewer’s attention over time, and to encourage contemplation. In this respect, the increasing popularity of aftermath photography is a function of the changing technology over the past fifteen years, and of professional photographers’ desire to retain the power of the still image to keep us watching. The moving picture does this – keeps us watching, that is, at least for a little while – almost by default, as it dances around on the screen. The photograph has to work harder to capture and retain our interest.

Other factors have also been at play, as suggested by an image in the “Moments Later” category of Conflict, Time, Photography, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s The Press Conference, June 9, 2008, The Day Nobody Died (2008), part of a sequence with the overall title of The Day Nobody Died. Broomberg and Chanarin travelled to Afghanistan in 2008 as photographers embedded with the British armed forces, a process widely believed to have left the practices of conflict journalism and photojournalism irretrievably compromised. “Embedding,” according to the exhibition notes, “is a system invented by the army to control the way journalists report from the theatre of war, and has led to a far more sanitised reporting” (a charge that has assumed the truth of repetition, without necessarily having being proven). Yet in reading Broomberg and Chanarin’s commentary on their own work, it is not always clear whether it is the practice of embedding that is the problem in this case, or the super-saturated age we live in, by which images that might once have been expected to shock or discomfit are no longer capable of evoking sympathy, even when, or perhaps particularly when, that is the clear intention. For Broomberg and Chanarin, “images that are constructed to evoke compassion or concern, pathos or sympathy” have become “increasingly problematic.”

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, The Day That Nobody Died, 2008, installation view. Broomberg & Chanarin

Of all the photographs in the exhibition, The Press Conference, June 9, 2008 is the most removed visually from the events it is inviting us to acknowledge and to reflect on. Viewed in isolation, it offers the fewest clues to the nature of its subject. In fact it is not a photograph at all in any conventional sense, but the result of exposing, in the burning Afghan sun, a roll of light-sensitive photographic paper. “On the first day of our embed,” the photographers recalled not long afterwards,

a BBC fixer was dragged from his car and executed and nine Afghan soldiers were killed in a suicide attack. The following day, three British soldiers died, pushing the number of combat fatalities to 100. That was followed by a suicide attack on a group of Afghani [sic] soldiers killing all eight. On receiving the news of his brother’s death in that ambush, another Afghan National soldier turned his M16 to his chest and pulled the trigger. The title of the project refers to the fifth day of our embed, the only day in which nobody was reported to have been killed.

In responding to these and other events, Broomberg and Chanarin “removed a six-metre section of light sensitive paper from our box, in the back of an armored vehicle which we had converted into a mobile darkroom, and exposed it to the sun for twenty seconds,” resulting in an image that almost, if not quite, creates itself, by relying not on the photographer’s eye but on “the temperature of light on that day, at that moment, in that place.” The image that was made by this method, on the day that nobody died, consists of bands and blobs of blue and white and orange stretched out across the gallery wall; it represents not so much a response to an event as a response to its absence. By Broomberg and Chanarin’s own account, the image constitutes an act of resistance against their official status as embedded photographers. It is an “invitation to contemplate,” an injunction “to look harder.”

During the period of their embed, Broomberg and Chanarin produced a half-hour video, also called The Day Nobody Died. It follows the journey of the box of photographic paper from London to Afghanistan, as it is first of all loaded on to the baggage travelator in London, then retrieved from the carousel at Baghdad airport, then lifted and transported by serving soldiers from one conflict zone to another. The journey of the box is described, in tune with the times, as a “performance,” and as a component in a kind of “Dadaesque stunt.” At the same time, it is clear from their commentary on the entire Afghan experience that Broomberg and Chanarin were not simply detached observers, playing games with the system, but were moved and unsettled by the events they witnessed, and stuck for an adequate response.

Their answer is, essentially, a political one. Faced with the much-remarked fact that there are an awful lot of photographs around these days, competing for our attention, Broomberg and Chanarin stress the need “to realise that even though so many are made, they are still so carefully controlled, by newspapers, by news agencies, by the state. We see very little of what’s really going on unless we look hard.” The Press Conference, June 9, 2008: The Day Nobody Died, to give it its full, deceptively precise title, encourages us to see what is really going on, ironically enough by showing us an image that could, without the context that the photographers provide, be about almost anything. It is the context, including the display of the image in an exhibition called Conflict, Time, Photography, that sets us thinking. Looking hard at the bright colours of the image, it is not entirely fanciful to see a blue sky overlaid by a white cloud, an analogue of the clouds and the plumes of smoke in Delahaye’s US Bombing on Taliban Positions.

Toshio Fukada, The Mushroom Cloud – Less than Twenty Minutes After the Explosion, 1945. Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo

Clouds and smoke recur frequently in aftermath photography, as embodiments of the traces left by the cataclysmic event, traces that have already changed and re-formed and that will continue to change and re-form over time. The Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, in memorialising the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sixty-five years later, photographs the sky every morning from the balcony of his apartment. In an image taken from Araki’s series “Tokyo Radiation August 6–15, 2010” (2010), date-stamped in the bottom right-hand corner, we are encouraged to read, in an otherwise unremarkable image of a cloudy sky, allusions both to the cloud of memory and to the immediate aftermath of the bombing itself, when a huge cloud, described by survivors as pink and orange, dominated the sky. This “late photograph” by Araki alludes to predecessor images by Toshio Fukada, made shortly after the bomb was detonated over Hiroshima. The Mushroom Cloud – Less than Twenty Minutes After the Explosion (1945), seems to pack all the consequences of the destructive force of that day into the thick, dense cloud that fills the frame.

The images on display in Conflict, Time, Photography span almost the entire history of the medium, underlining a contradiction in the exhibition as a whole that is never quite addressed. Aftermath photography is presented both as something new – a genre about consequences that is itself a consequence of recent changes in technology and the changing way we interact with images – and as something old, with roots in the early days of photography. As is the case with almost all photographic genres, examples of aftermath photography appeared very early on. Several of the images in Conflict, Time, Photography date from the mid nineteenth century, when photography was a laborious business, involving heavy equipment and delicate, time-consuming processes of image capture and development, with the prospect of rapid action shots still very much in the future. These limitations meant that photography was largely confined to recording stillness rather than action, the aftermath – or the prelude – rather than the event.

Aftermath images of the Crimean war, made by the photography pioneer Roger Fenton, continue to exert their influence on practitioners of the genre today. Fenton’s images of Valley of the Shadow of Death (1854–55), taken “two months later,” show a desolate, unpeopled road that had been relentlessly bombarded by Russian cannon. In one of the photographs (below), cannon balls are scattered across the road and alongside it. In a companion image, the cannon balls are largely absent, with only a relative few lying in the shallow ditch beside the road. Which of the images reflects the scene as it was? Had either setting, or both, been “dressed” beforehand? Were some cannon balls deliberately added between times, or some taken away? Such questions, when applied to photojournalism or street photography, genres that are predicated on the overriding importance of catching the true and “decisive” moment, continue to be urgently debated. Yet when applied to aftermath photographs the questions seem less urgent, even irrelevant. Indeed the exhibition contains many images that have been manipulated, amended or elided in some way in order to engage the viewer and elicit a response.

Roger Fenton, Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1854–55. Victoria and Albert Museum

Meanwhile Fenton’s road, extending as it does through the valley and on into the middle distance, continues today as a powerful trope of aftermath photography and the complex and never quite finalised outcomes of war and conflict. In Don McCullin’s The Battlefields of the Somme, France (2000) or Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s images from her series Train Stations of the Hejaz Railway (2003), we can see newer versions of Fenton’s early work, where the events that took place on this spot must be reimagined, and some sense made of what has happened since. Similarly themed photographs, not included in the exhibition, such as Paul Seawright’s Valley, taken in Afghanistan in 2002, can be read as direct homages to Fenton. Seawright’s image is both a prelude and an aftermath, alluding to violence that has happened and, in its depiction of ordnance on the ground, violence still to come. In all these photographs the sky, whether cloudy or clear, takes up the top third of the frame, suggesting our capacity to acknowledge and remember past catastrophes while looking beyond them, past the clouds and the smoke. But when the sky is excluded or squeezed out or almost entirely darkened over – as it is in the images derived from Sophie Ristelhueber’s series Fait (1992), a project she undertook seven months after the end of the first Gulf war – the effect is more claustrophobic, less reassuring, as if we are deluding ourselves if we think that we have learnt anything or that the future offers better prospects.

Looking at aftermath photographs, one thing is clear: with a few exceptions, they do not work by themselves. When they do, it is partly because of their iconic status – we already know the story without having to read the notes – and partly because the image is so strong in itself that the “story” is contained within it, without the need for explication. Don McCullin’s Shell-shocked US Marine, Vietnam, Hué (1968), included in the “Moments Later” section, meets both these criteria. It conveys its powerful impact without the need for explanation or context, without even the need for the caption. Shomei Tomatsu’s 1960s photographs of the aftermath of Nagasaki, particularly those showing the keloid scars on the faces and bodies of survivors, have a similar, stand-alone impact. And the same might be said of Pierre Antony-Thouret’s Reims After the War (1927), with the ruins of Reims Cathedral on stark display, the contrast between the building’s still obvious grandeur and its subsequent destruction making its own powerful point. But for the most part some context and explanation are required, if the viewer is to successfully make the link between the unseen, singular event – the conflict of the exhibition’s title – and the depiction of its aftermath.

Don McCullin, Shell Shocked US Marine, Vietnam, Hue, 1968. © Don McCullin

In this respect, many of the photographs, and the series of which they are often a part, smack too much of an idea, a thought-up project that meets the definition of aftermath photography but fails somehow to involve the viewer, as we feel we should be involved, in the process of memorialisation and remembrance and regret. Extracts from two projects by Taryn Simon illustrate the risks of this approach. In one of them, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters (2011), Simon documents the “impact on one bloodline” of the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. Some of the many components of what is in effect an installation are listed in the exhibition notes: “the large panel on the left orders members of one family directly related by blood.” Interspersed among small-format portraits are “images of bone samples and the reassembled remains of those who were killed,” followed by text and footnote panels, and film stills. Simon travelled the world for four years, pursing the aftermath of the massacre, researching bloodlines and the stories that arose from them. Her website lists some of the disparate subjects that came out of this period of intense and comprehensive research: “test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India.” In contemplating these disparate yet connected narratives, we are invited to also contemplate “the space between text and image, absence and presence, order and disorder,” which in the end seems almost too general and sweeping, too remote from the specific and terrible event.

Where aftermath photography is concerned, the space between intention and result is a particularly difficult one to bridge. Sometimes an aftermath photographer will articulate his or her personal passion for the project, as though something of that articulated passion might transfer itself to the images and heighten their impact. In the notes to Sophie Ristelhueber’s photographs of the aftermath of the first Gulf war, when the desert had been turned into a “scarred and damaged landscape,” we learn that Ristelhueber had “become obsessed” with her subject. Similarly, we are told in the catalogue how Paul Virilio “became fascinated by the monumental concrete bunkers” that remained as evidence of German coastal defences from the second world war. Photographs that Virilio made between 1958 and 1965 of these massive, proto-brutalist structures went on to form the sequence Bunker Archaeology, published in 1975 to accompany an exhibition at the Pompidou Centre. Not everyone is equally fascinated. For Alex Danchev, reviewing the exhibition in the Times Literary Supplement earlier this year, “‘bunker archaeology’ is boring,” suggesting how difficult it can be to transmit fascination, or obsession, from photographer to viewer.

On the other hand, the archaeology of the photographs themselves can hold its own interest. Virilio’s bunkers are monumental and a bit scary, even if the scariness is rather like something out of early Doctor Who. The distance in time between the end of the war and the taking of the photographs, some fifteen to twenty years, is not very great, not even half a generation, not long enough for these evocative structures to lose entirely their air of threat and danger. But in a much more recent photographic rendering of the same subject, arising out of what can be assumed to be an equal fascination with coastal defences, Marc Wilson’s photographs from a 2014 exhibition show these second world war bunkers and other oddly shaped, assertive concrete structures in a more benign, even nostalgic light, as they seem to be relaxing their vigilance and folding slowly back into the landscape.

Many of the photographs in Conflict, Time, Photography are drawn from longer sequences, which might have first appeared in books, for example, where the impact of the images is typically both cumulative and complementary. Isolated from their fellows on a gallery wall, they do not always work as well as they might. Others lose nothing, and perhaps even gain, from being singled out. Two photographs by Chloe Dewe Mathews, for example, are part of a larger sequence entitled “Shot at Dawn” (2013) in which Mathews records the sites where Allied soldiers were executed for desertion and cowardice during the first world war. Even without their companions, these two large-format images strike a note of high drama that fills the gallery space. On the other hand, Walid Raad’s My Neck Is Thinner than a Hair: Engines (2000–03), a composite image of one hundred photographs complete with notations, which harks back to the Lebanese civil war of 1975–91, gets a bit lost, despite its size. The individual photographs that make it up, hung together on the wall, are too small and too far away.

Atlas Group, Walid Raad My Neck is Thinner than a Hair: Engines, 2000–03. © Atlas Group and Walid Raad, courtesy of Anthony Reynolds Gallery

When we look at My Neck Is Thinner than a Hair in the gallery, we are looking at an idea rather than a complete and realised work. But look at it online and the impact is quite different. The installation as a whole still seems a long way away, but when it is displayed digitally we can zero in on each of the hundred components and expand it to fill the screen. Raad has culled from the files of contemporary newspapers images of tangled metal and destroyed engines, the mechanical detritus of the epidemic of car bombs that plagued Beirut during the civil war. By the side of each photograph, the name of the photographer, if known, is recorded, and the date of first publication. In many of these photographs we see groups of men gathered round, half looking at the wrecked engine, half posing for the camera; the engines seem to act as surrogates for these men, foreshadowing their possible fate.

The individual photos, recovered from daily newspapers, were first collected and deposited with the Atlas Group, an online archive founded by Raad and others for the purpose of storing documents connected with the history of modern Lebanon. Included among the group’s digital files are some photographs taken by Raad when he was a teenager. Following the invasion of west Beirut by Israel in the summer of 1982, he set out with his mother to photograph the aftermath of the initial action. “I was fifteen in 1982,” he recalls, “and wanted to get as close as possible to the events, or as close as my newly acquired camera and lens permitted me.” In aftermath photography there is the crucial gap between the event and the making of the photograph. But there can also be a gap between making the photograph and making sense of it. “This past year,” Raad wrote in 2002, “I came upon the negatives from that time, all scratched up and deteriorating. I decided to look again.” In one striking image, its surface faded and damaged, we see a row of bombed-out buildings, with a plume of smoke rising from behind and up into the sky.

Raad’s anecdote suggests how the word “aftermath” can be applied not only to the period between the event itself and the time the photograph was taken, but also to the photograph’s continuing life, and our continuing propensity to respond differently and with greater understanding, according to how much time has passed. Against the increasingly common cultural perception that photographs are disposable – they are of the moment and the moment moves on – aftermath photography makes the case for the capacity of certain images to re-engage us over time. In that sense, the decision to arrange the photos in Conflict, Time, Photography according to how soon after the event they were made also has the effect of inviting us to reflect on what it means to “look again.” •

The post What happened next appeared first on Inside Story.

With the centenary this year of the beginning of the first world war, the subject of memory and memorialisation – what should we remember and what should we forget? – has been very much in the air. The story of Hubert Rochereau’s bedroom has played directly into that debate. It has been picked up by news outlets around the world and continues to appear in a variety of publications and on social media. In one of a number of clips viewable on the web, we can see a television reporter from the BBC entering the room and being struck by the way it evokes a life. She smells the cigarette tin that contains cigarettes once rolled by Rochereau, and marvels that the odour of tobacco is still present. In a video clip from the London Telegraph, the present owner of the house, Daniel Fabre, speaks of this unusual legacy. When Rochereau’s parents reluctantly gave up the house, in 1935, they tried to impose a condition on all future occupants, that Hubert’s room would be preserved exactly as it was, for 500 years. As Daniel Fabre points out, the condition has no legal standing. But he abides by it all the same, just as his predecessors have done. “Whatever happens after me, I couldn’t care less,” he says at one point, but it is clear from the expression on his face that he does indeed care.

Wherever it appears on the web, this story tends to attract a lot of comments. Apart from the usual instances of comment-humour – is that a flat-screen television I can see in the corner? – most by far of the contributions from readers are reverent, reflective, a touch sentimental. The creation of this memorial to a son’s death may be untypical and extreme, but at the same time it is ordinary and perfectly understandable. What is 500 years, after all, in the face of so terrible an event? (This private and, until recently, little-known memorial echoes a more famous one to be found not far away, in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, where 642 citizens were murdered by the Waffen-SS in 1944; the village has been left exactly as it was, a memorial to the dead, the only changes being the slow and often imperceptible ones wrought by the elements.)

In several of the many photographs and videos of Hubert Rochereau’s room that can be found online, we can see, hanging above his undersized bed, an oversized, full-length photographic portrait of Hubert in the uniform of the Dragoons. He has that quasi-confident pose typical of such photographs, his moustache making him look, as was the point, older than his years. Such photographs were intended for the families and loved ones left behind, to function as reminders and mementoes during long absences and, should the worst happen, as memorials. The photograph, presumably placed in that resonant spot by his parents after his death, serves as a memorial within a memorial, linking the adult’s fate to the unfulfilled promise of childhood. The cigarettes and the items of military uniform draped around the room coexist with those schoolbooks neatly arranged in the bookcase, and the child and the adult merge. The purpose of such memorial spaces – arising from a need to keep things looking just as they were – is not so much to freeze time; not even in the extremities of grief is it easy to believe that time can be stopped. It is rather to force and reinforce the act of contemplation and to ensure that the past and those who lived in it remain meaningful and immediate in the present.

The photograph and the untouched room function in similar ways – they preserve the past and invite us to contemplate it. Indeed a photograph is a kind of analogue of an untouched room – the two seem to go naturally together. The Melbourne-born photographer Ashley Gilbertson, best known for his images of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has taken this conjunction as the subject of his most recent work, which has appeared in a number of exhibitions in the United States and Europe, as well as at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney, and has now been collected in book form as Bedrooms of the Fallen. After a career spent in documenting action, Gilbertson has chosen to focus on inaction, on the stillness of the space that the dead soldier has left behind, never to return.

In this transition from action to stillness, Gilbertson is tracing in particularly clear lines a path that is followed in one way or another by many who pursue photography as both a profession and a calling – it is a path designed to regain for photography the quality of stillness by creating an image or images that give the viewer pause and demand something more than a glance. It is not so long ago that action photographs – the kind that Gilbertson himself took many of in Iraq and Afghanistan and other conflict zones – could achieve that arresting quality, but that time is passing rapidly. The action shot now typically creates not contemplation and imaginative entry into the scene, but rather an expectation of the next frame, as if it is just one frame in a film or a video sequence.

Gilbertson has articulated this dilemma directly, even to the extent of calling into question the validity of his own earlier work. In a brief but revealing interview he gave in 2011 to the New York Times, the paper for which he has worked consistently for over a decade, he responds candidly to the question of where his idea for a series on “bedrooms of the fallen” came from. “The whole project” – of photographing the preserved bedrooms of young soldiers and other military personnel who have been killed in action or otherwise died as a result of war – “was in response to my failed work in Iraq.” Gilbertson’s “failed” work in Iraq had by this stage received numerous awards, including Time’s Picture of the Year in 2004 and the Robert Capa Gold Medal, the latter placing him securely in the pantheon of photojournalism. Yet, as he says in the same interview, “I have a book called Whiskey Tango Foxtrot from the war, and I have trouble connecting with the images myself… and I shot them.”

When Gilbertson laments the fact that “as time went on, people became less and less engaged with pictures of war,” he is referring not only to his own pictures but also to the genre of war photography itself, and to the difficulty in an image-overloaded world of saying anything new, or of having any meaningful influence on outcomes. A few years earlier, in 2007, in an essay written with Joanna Gilbertson to accompany a sequence of his Iraq images that appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, he was already expressing disillusionment with his own work, while continuing to look for some greater impact in the future, expressing the hope that “people who don’t recognise it now may one day look back at my pictures and see the war for the mistake-riddled quagmire that it was.” But in Bedrooms of the Fallen he is placing his faith in another kind of picture, one that forgoes action for consequences.

Given that Gilbertson began with action as his subject, and it made his career, this is a significant departure. During his teenage years in Melbourne in the nineties, he photographed what he knew – the world of skateboarding, of young life on the street – developing all the while a strong if unworked-out sense of vocation and a determination to travel to the trouble spots of the world to document oppression and injustice. There was a stint in Kosovo, and then another, clandestine one in Irian Jaya. And then, by a process that he has described as accidental, he found himself turning into a war photographer, a transformation that occurred at the very moment when the nature of war and the nature of photography were both undergoing profound and irreversible changes.

The bedroom of Army Private First Class Karina S. Lau, 20, who died when her helicopter was shot down by insurgents on 2 November 2003, in Falluja, Iraq. She was from Livingston, California. Her bedroom was photographed by Ashley Gilbertson in December 2009.

By 2002, at the age of twenty-four, Gilbertson was in Northern Iraq, focusing more and more on photographing scenes of combat. His work from that period quickly drew wider attention and by 2003 he was employed by the New York Times, from where he rapidly established a reputation as one of the best contemporary combat photographers. He returned repeatedly to war zones, principally Iraq, risking injury and death on many occasions. And yet, by the account contained in his afterword to Bedrooms of the Fallen, Gilbertson was already questioning the validity of a twenty-first-century career as a war photographer. He saw himself as following a model from the past, one that no longer applied. “As I worked through Iraq over the years, I thought of images by photographers like Matthew Brady, David Douglas Duncan, Capa, and James Nachtwey, and the impact they had made.” But times had changed – it was now the age of the “embed,” of the photographer not as free agent and impartial witness but as just another actor in the drama, controlled and manipulated by “the system” much like everyone else. “I was the next generation of photographer trying to act like one from a previous era.”

Many of the great photographers of war and conflict, of both the present and previous generations, have worried out loud that in the end their photographs have no real impact – that the wars go on regardless. What is newer is the link Gilbertson draws between the failure of impact and the changing nature of photography itself. The world is awash with photographic moments, many of them depicting much the same thing, slightly different versions of photographs that have already been taken. Gilbertson has lamented that during his time in Iraq he was increasingly feeling as though “I was doing … the same picture over and over again.” Not only, by his own account, were his photographs too much like other people’s, too much in the shadow of past masters, but they were too much like one another. It might equally be said that Gilbertson is doing the same picture over and over again in Bedrooms of the Fallen; the difference here is that the sameness is part of the point. The sameness does not diminish the impact but heightens it. The similarities of the rooms, and of the way they are photographed, encourages us to look more closely and to uncover in the details of the compositions the differences in the lives the soldiers have left behind.

“Today, photographers often prefer to wait until an event is over,” says David Campany in his study of the shifting relationships between still and moving pictures, Photography and Cinema (2008). Far from capturing the fast-moving moment as it happens, “they are as likely to attend to the aftermath.” In Bedrooms of the Fallen, Ashley Gilbertson is attending to the aftermath. It is one of the characteristics of “aftermath photography” that, from the photographer’s perspective, most of the effort is expended before the photograph is actually made. It can take years to set up a shot. Bryan Adams’s candid images of British servicemen and women who have suffered terrible injuries, for instance – published in Wounded: The Legacy of War (2013) and currently on display at Somerset House in London – were in preparation for five years. Many of the subjects “were hesitant,” recalls Adams, “and understandably so… For many of these people it was the first time they had ever been photographed, never mind exposing their wounds.”

For Gilbertson, it was the parents of the dead soldiers who needed to be certain of the wisdom of the project, and in order to provide that certainty he needed to be patient. By contrast, the actual business of capturing the images amounted by Gilbertson’s own reckoning to only “5 per cent of the process.” Indeed it sometimes seems as though he is dismissing altogether the operational aspects of taking the photograph – he can be vague, for instance, about the equipment that he uses or prefers to use, as though that does not really matter all that much. For Bedrooms of the Fallen, he says only that he “decided to use a panoramic camera and an extreme wide-angle lens.” And, he adds, he also decided to present the images in black-and-white, in order to emphasise his own neutrality, though this neutrality did not preclude a capacity and a willingness to intervene and to set the rules.

From the time when the idea for a series was first mooted, in 2008, Gilbertson determined that he would photograph only the bedrooms of people who were still “at home” at the time of their deaths, rather than those who had gone on to have homes and families of their own, and only bedrooms that had not been substantially altered, or given over to siblings, or remade for other uses within the home. Importantly, they would only be bedrooms where the custodians – the parents – understood and supported what it was Gilbertson was trying to do, and were willing to make the necessary leap of understanding and to give permission for their child’s life to be documented in this way. The result, in Bedrooms of the Fallen, is forty double-spread photographs, most of them of the rooms of American servicemen – and two women – with a leavening of others from coalition partners: the United Kingdom, Italy, France, the Netherlands. One from Germany, but none from Australia; even though Gilbertson is on record as hoping to have included an Australian component to the series, it has not eventuated here. (Though we do glimpse a possible Australian connection in the room of Dutch Soldier First Class Timo Smeehuijzen, where a boomerang perches high up on a wall.)

The panoramic lens makes the rooms seem both spacious and squashed up. Where windows are included in the shot we cannot see very much out of them. When it is not completely blocked out by drawn curtains or blinds, the outside world usually appears as white light, with perhaps the faint impression of a tree branch just discernible. The rooms have a safe but claustrophobic air. In most of the photographs we cannot see the doorway. Where we can, the door is closed or opens onto darkness. An exception, the image of the bedroom of Airman First Class Carl L. Anderson, appears first in the series. Here the doorway is open, and we can see the hall and another door beyond. The hall is brightly lit, and within the bedroom the two portrait photographs we can see of Anderson, one on the wall and the other on his dresser, show him smiling broadly.

We get a strong impression here of the energy and adventurousness that led him out the door, but in most of the companion images any such impression is outweighed by the evidence of lives suddenly stopped, right on the border of youth and adulthood. The photographs, most of them taken between 2007 and 2012 (sometimes after years of back and forth with the families) already have an historically dated air – as dated in their way as the images of the bedroom of Hubert Rochereau. The technology, predictably, is what most clearly gives the game away. The televisions, computer monitors, boom boxes, speakers, all of them contemporary or nearly contemporary with the time when the rooms were last occupied, now seem squat and unfashionably clunky. CD and DVD towers (Stargate SG-1, The Shield) likewise speak of a world already in the past.

In many of the rooms there is at least one soft toy, alluding to the childhood of the room’s occupant, and placed carefully on the bed or visible on a bookcase or a desk. The soft toys most clearly contribute to the generally arranged impression that the rooms give, an impression that seems to complicate any idea that these bedrooms have literally been left “just as they were.” Not only the parents but also the soldiers themselves are likely to have contributed to this effect. Gilbertson speaks of the practice of “editing,” whereby those about to leave home on active service will, in preparing for any eventuality, edit or curate their rooms to ensure that families will not come across anything embarrassing or distracting; to ensure, in other words, that they leave behind the best impression. Each of these rooms, once lived in, is now on display – the items we can see, from uniform jackets to trainers to talcum powder, are functioning as exhibits, representing a life. We are invited as viewers to conjure up that life, its reality and its potential. The arranged stillness of these rooms does not, paradoxically, make them lifeless – instead it helps to put the life back into them. •

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Such is the case with the photographs that make up the exhibition Remember Me: The Lost Diggers of Vignacourt. The exhibition draws on a vast collection of glass-plate photographic negatives – as many as 4000 of them – taken during the first world war in the small village of Vignacourt in northern France by a young man called Louis Thuillier and his wife Antoinette. It was in Vignacourt that Allied troops, many of them Australian, were granted brief respites from the relentless fighting just a matter of kilometres away.

The story of how Channel Seven’s Sunday Night program discovered this treasure trove, which lay largely undisturbed and surprisingly undamaged for almost one hundred years, fits the traditional pattern of such quests for hidden treasure. The moment of revelation, when the chest (in this case, three of them) is opened and the jewels are found glittering inside, came only at the end of a long and arduous journey, full of disappointments, false leads and obstacles strewn along the way. Ross Coulthart tells the story in The Lost Diggers, a book that includes many of the photographs developed from the rediscovered plates, together with biographical information on some of the men whose images have been preserved, in such astonishing detail, by means of emulsion on glass.

As an experienced journalist, Coulthart is alive to the story’s inherent drama. It is a classic tale of loss and recovery, with resonances that go far beyond the photographs themselves to the lives and deaths of the people depicted in them. For the most part, it is soldiers we see, although civilians, including women and children from the village of Vignacourt, appear in some of the shots – as do, in an intriguing subset of perhaps half a dozen images, men dressed as women, actors from a visiting theatrical troupe.

Always implicit in the story Coulthart tells is the possibility that the photographic plates could have been lost forever – that their survival can be put down to a series of chances. Coulthart describes the moment when he and his colleagues opened the three chests that had been stored, as lost or forgotten treasure often is, in the attic, waiting to be discovered, long after the original owners had died or moved on. “We could hardly believe what we were seeing,” Coulthart recalls. “The battered boxes were filled with glass negative photographic plates, and for hours we held them up to the attic window light, revealing often perfectly preserved ghostly negative images… of Australian diggers, British Tommies, Indian Sikhs with massive turbans, and French, Canadian and American soldiers.”

Fittingly for a story about the recovery of lost photographs, this moment in February 2011 is itself captured on film. Coulthart – along with colleagues from Channel Seven, and with specialist help from Peter Burness, a historian from the Australian War Memorial, and other experts – had by this time been on the trail for two years, ever since his interest had been stimulated by an article in the London Independent describing the unearthing of another, if far smaller, cache of photographs from the first world war that included several images of Australian troops. The story of what Coulthart and his colleagues found and how they found it, told in a pair of documentaries screened on Sunday Night in 2011 and now relayed in The Lost Diggers, turned out, as such stories usually do, to involve far more than following a map and, in due course, finding the missing treasure.

For one thing, the treasure had already been found, some twenty-five years earlier, by an enthusiastic young Frenchman named Laurent Mirouze, a businessman, part-time journalist and history buff. Mirouze had tried by various means, including direct contact with the Australian embassy in Paris, to stimulate wider recognition of the significance of what he had come across. No one appeared particularly interested. “Laurent never heard back from anyone at the Australian embassy,” Coulthart records, registering, in an understated way, his surprise that such a potentially significant find could fail to attract even a nominal response. But perhaps it is not so surprising. A quarter of a century on, as the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war approaches, there is a new and ever-growing interest in the war and Australia’s part in it, together with a comparable growth in people’s interest both in family history and in revisiting the photographic past. Perhaps buried treasure is successfully unearthed only when the times are ready for it.

Recognising this mood of public readiness, Channel Seven made much of the discovery. In addition to the documentaries, it created what became and remains a popular Facebook page, on which the images were posted and comments – particularly comments that might help to identify some of the men in the photographs – were invited from the public. The response, records Coulthart, was overwhelming. Kerry Stokes, chair of the Seven Network, lent his personal support to the project, as a result of which “the entire Thuillier collection of around 4000 glass photographic plates was purchased from the living descendants of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, the couple who had supplemented their farming income during the war by selling pictures to passing Allied soldiers.”

Stokes has given 840 of the plates – most of them directly related to the Australian involvement in the war – to the Australian War Memorial. Of these, almost all, with the exception of forty or so that are too silvered or otherwise damaged to produce discernible images, can be viewed on a large touchscreen mounted in the exhibition space, as well as online at the War Memorial’s website. Many more images can be seen on Sunday Night’s website, which links to the Lost Diggers Facebook page. But the heart of the display at the War Memorial – and what makes a visit so worthwhile – lies in the seventy-four prints taken from the plates, impeccably conserved, developed (using mainly traditional methods), framed and hung. Presented in this way, on fibre-based paper that contributes to the extraordinary level of clarity and sharpness of the images, the prints communicate with a directness that is difficult to replicate on the screen.

IT’s important to remember that the images we see, whether online or displayed on the walls of the War Memorial, are not the images as they were seen by the subjects of the photographs, or by the friends and family in Australia who received their copies in the post. The original prints were in the form of postcards, hastily and cheaply produced before being sent on their way, sometimes with a brief annotation, sometimes without. While the photographic plates have survived remarkably well, the postcards have not; a few of those that do survive, yellowed and faded, are included in the exhibition, serving to emphasise even further the remarkable quality of the newly printed versions.

The postcards were proof that the men pictured on them were alive and well, at least at the time of dispatch. In an article about the exhibition in the spring 2012 issue of Wartime, the Australian War Memorial magazine, curator Janda Gooding notes how soldiers also “collected and traded photographic postcards as mementoes of friendships, and perhaps of mates lost.” In later wars, the men would take these kinds of photographs themselves. (As it happens, the article preceding Gooding’s in Wartime gives an overview of the vast number of photographs, official and unofficial, taken during the Vietnam war. “There were a lot of cameras in Vietnam,” we are laconically informed in the article’s sub-heading.) In France during the first world war, however, Australian soldiers were specifically forbidden, on security grounds, from carrying their own cameras. For any enterprising young French photographer, it was a ready market.

Louis and Antoinette Thuillier fitted the bill; they were enterprising in the manner required, and Louis in particular knew enough about photography for the couple to set up a courtyard studio and supply their customers with photographic postcards. First, they photographed the French troops who were billeted in the town or passing through; later came Allied soldiers granted their brief reprieve from the front. At some point, the Thuilliers introduced an added touch of professionalism: a painted canvas backdrop that has, miraculously, survived along with the glass plates, and is now hanging among the printed photographs, an exhibit in itself. The canvas backdrop, which appears in so many of these images, shows a double set of arches, lending a classical and even vaguely ecclesiastical air. The combination of the classical backdrop and the startlingly modern faces of the soldiers pictured in front of it acts as a visual embodiment of how we have grown to understand the first world war as an overwhelmingly disastrous clash, not just between opposing sides, but between the forces of tradition and modernity.

Most strikingly of all, and unusually for the substantial sub-genre that is studio portrait photography, in many of the images we can see the canvas backdrop in its entirety, with the floor of the courtyard and the brick or stuccoed wall against which the backdrop has been pinned acting as a kind of additional border. In some images, we can even see a doorway to the right of the backdrop, echoing the archways on the canvas, and leading who knows where. (This effect, of a backdrop against a background, generally found its way from the plates to the postcards without being cropped out or otherwise disguised.)

For reasons that are hard to specify, the images in which we can plainly see the boundaries of the backcloth against the workaday background of the Thuilliers’ farmyard studio are among the most moving and effective of all. The canvas functions as a kind of frame within a frame or, in several of the images, as a curtain, its left edge curling inwards and on to itself as if the whole thing, in its classical serenity, is about to be pulled aside to reveal the chaos and the bloodshed that is going on behind.

In many cases, the subjects of the photographs, sometimes on horseback or perched on motorcycles, sometimes grouped together in fours or fives or in even larger numbers, extend well beyond the borders of the backdrop, as if poised to burst out of the picture itself. The men on motorcycles seem to be emerging from the archways behind them, caught by the camera in a momentary pause in their journey from the past to the future. In one arresting image (above) – of a trio of soldiers, one sitting and two standing, and each of them wearing the sheepskin vests that were issued to soldiers to combat the severe winter of 1916–17 – we can glimpse, to the right of the main subject and beyond the canvas backdrop, the blurred outline of another soldier, presumably waiting his turn to be photographed.

OCCASIONALLY, what seems to be an upturned chair or a jumble of furniture lurks in the near-darkness, ready perhaps to be brought on as a prop for the next photograph. Farm animals and small children – including in some instances the Thuilliers’ young son – are sometimes drafted in to complement the composition, lending an extra element of informality. As is the case with many, perhaps all, of the best photographs of people, we get a sense of life beyond the frame. Here, the effect is complicated by the knowledge that, for many of these young men, there was not much remaining of their lives to be lived outside the photograph.

The composition of the images suggests a mixture of the professional and the amateur, a concern for some level of artifice and artistic control coming up against pressure from customers and the commercial imperative to just get on with it. For the Thuilliers, the lines of people waiting their turn must have severely limited the thought they could give to each composition. Yet, by a happy chance, this combination of professionalism and pragmatism, the artisanal commitment to doing the best job possible while still meeting the realities of the production line, seems entirely appropriate for capturing something essential about the Australian soldiers they are engaged in photographing. Image after image has an energy and a life to it that are not characteristic of studio photography of the period, as though the formal constraints imposed – or half-imposed – by the Thuilliers were not quite enough to damp down the personalities of the individual subjects.

The small repertoire of formal and fairly conventional “art director” touches – a chair here, a jardinière there – does not dominate; the overall impact remains one of naturalness and immediacy. This must be partly because the photographs were taken quickly, without elaborate preparations or set-ups. And while the exposure times necessary to complete the capture of an image would not have been counted in the nanoseconds of today, neither would they have been significantly longer; not time enough anyway for the poses to freeze into woodenness and immobility. A large element of spontaneity remains, as well as a discernible quality of fellow feeling from within the double portraits and the group photographs.

We do not get the impression that the participants have been thrown together at the last minute, as a way of making the queue move faster. Instead we get the sense – confirmed in some of the surviving correspondence to families, in which friends already mentioned in earlier letters are identified from within the same group portrait – that they have chosen to be photographed together. This is so even when the composition looks especially contrived, as it does in a photo in which five Australian soldiers, complete with apparently unlit cigarettes as props, act as a semi-circular frame or border to a smartly uniformed if slightly uncomfortable-looking Frenchman seated in the middle. Even here, despite the contrivance, a powerful air of good humour and goodwill emanates from the entire group.

The solitary Frenchman in this photograph acts as a reminder that the Thuilliers’ clientele was much wider than the prints at the exhibition can fully show. As Coulthart points out, their subjects came from across the full range of Allied troops and support personnel (including, for example, members of the Chinese Labour Corps, recruited by the British to undertake manual work). Remember Me acknowledges this aspect of the Thuilliers’ work by including among the printed images a small but representative sampling of these more “international” group photographs, and others can be seen as reproductions in Coulthart’s book and online. Looking at them alongside the images of the Australians raises questions about the extent to which we see photographs on their own terms and the extent to which we bring our own histories and preconceptions to the experience.

When we look at the portraits of the Australians, do we detect – beyond the obvious differences in clothing and appearance that tell us (usually) that they are not British or French or Indian or Chinese – a distinctive Australianness of character and bearing, or are we imposing it? The answer is probably more of the latter than we would generally care to acknowledge; but for all that, there is definitely something there, both in the way the Australians relate to one another and in how they present themselves to the camera, professional and soldierly on the one hand and yet faintly humorous and even a touch self-mocking on the other. Sometimes the humour is quite overt, as in the picture of the man with a duck on his lap; this droll soldier is identified as Private Herbert Alexander Mouat, 6th Battalion, who was destined to die, on 28 September 1918, of wounds he incurred in action.

The kind of humour explicitly displayed by Private Mouat, or implied in many of the other photographs, is not always present, of course; in some cases, the horror of what has been experienced is just too dominant in the men’s expressions to allow room for anything else. But overall, the Australian photographs do have something that is uniquely characteristic, distinguishable from the immediate impact on the viewer of the other national groupings – the splendidly uniformed dignity of the Sikhs, for example, or the quiet reserve and stoicism conveyed by the pictures of Nepalese soldiers, or the elegance and élan of the French.

Portrait photography – or, more specifically, pictures of people whose identities have been lost, rather than of historical figures or celebrities – encourages speculation. Who was that person, where did he come from, where did she go? (Many of the comments on vintage photography websites ask these often unanswerable questions, or versions of them.) This is particularly true of a Thuillier photograph, where, as Coulthart puts it, “the sharpness and clarity” of the image, “as well as its informality and good humour… invites the viewer and draws you into the story behind the faces.”

Yet the answers, the details of the story, where they do come to hand, can be strangely unsatisfying, perhaps because they can explain only so much. Coulthart’s The Lost Diggers includes a deal of biographical information gleaned both before and after the posting of the images on Facebook, yet as important as this process of identification and elaboration is – important for adding further to the historical record, for giving the men their full due, and for providing their descendants with as much information as possible – the real and lasting impact lies with the images themselves and the way that, individually and together, they encourage us to imagine ourselves into past lives.

LOUIS and Antoinette Thuillier appear to have given up photography after the war. Their life stories are as elusive as those of most of the people whose photographs they took, and as likely to remain so. Coulthart reveals that Louis died in 1931; echoing the violence of the war, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Unlike other famously “discovered” photographers, the Thuilliers are not likely to be raised to the pantheon of photographic genius; not in the manner, for instance, of Vivian Maier (1926–2009), documenter of Chicago street life over more than forty years, or the studio photographer known as Disfarmer (1884–1959), both of whose works were made known, and whose reputations were established, only after their deaths, and after their archives had come dangerously close to disappearing altogether into irretrievable obscurity.

But nor is the output of the Thuilliers of interest solely because of its subject matter. There is more to it than that. The Thuillier collection, created by chance and preserved by chance, is an example of what can result from a mutually supportive conjunction, in a particular place at a particular moment, of artist and subject, photographer and sitter. Louis and Antoinette Thuillier’s work suggests a combination of professional discipline and relaxed goodwill, both maintained under undoubted pressure. Their sensitivity to their subjects’ humanity emerges clearly from within the accepted conventions of a commercial photographer of the time, paralleling the same kinds of characteristics that coexisted within their subjects – that mixture of military professionalism and frank irreverence that so many observers of the Australian troops commented on at the time. Thanks to the Thuillier photographs, that mixture can still be seen, powerfully coexisting today. •

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Partly as a result of this striking photograph, McCullin’s early work was noticed and taken up by the London Observer. His career moved quickly from then on. First with the Observer, and later with the Sunday Times, sometimes on his own initiative and sometimes on assignment, McCullin travelled to many of the world’s trouble spots throughout the following two decades – Berlin, Cyprus, Biafra, Lebanon, Vietnam, Cambodia, to say nothing of many other sites of natural and manmade disasters, the names of which were not always familiar then and are largely forgotten now. But times changed, and he found that he could not go everywhere after all. He missed the Falklands war, for instance, when he was denied accreditation by the UK Ministry of Defence on the grounds that by the 1980s, with his career and reputation as a documenter of conflict now solidly established, he was too wily and experienced a professional for the ministry to be confident of keeping him under control.

It was an act of exclusion that continued to rankle for years afterwards. “I was heart-broken,” McCullin recalls in his autobiography, Unreasonable Behaviour. His reputation for getting at the visual truth had begun to count against him. In the 1960s and 1970s McCullin had been the man who, through a combination of courage and talent, could be entrusted with the task of penetrating conflict zones and bringing back images of what it was really like. In fact, he would bring them back quite literally, typically carrying the rolls of film himself and developing them when he got home, thus continuing through the whole process of producing a photograph and remaining physically close to the images of cruelty and suffering he had captured. “Even my darkroom is a haunted place,” he says in Jacqui Morris and David Morris’s revealing film of 2012, McCullin, in just one of many references he has made, in interviews and in his own writing, to his inability to let go of the horrors he has witnessed.

Having thrived throughout the golden age of photojournalism, McCullin has continued to bring a distinctive eye to scenes of human tragedy and resilience using a larger range of photographic genres, including landscape, portraiture and social documentary. Over 150 examples of McCullin’s work, taken between 1958 and 2011, can be seen in the exhibition Don McCullin: The Impossible Peace, curated by his friend and colleague Robert Pledge and now showing for an all-too-brief period at the State Library of New South Wales. It is the first time that McCullin’s work has been shown in Australia as part of a curated exhibition. The images on display also appear, with accompanying text, in a book of the same name, published in 2012 to coincide with the staging of an earlier version of the exhibition at the Palazzo Magnani in Italy, itself a sign of the increasing regard in which McCullin is now held.

This recognition comes at a time when the impact of the photographic image, and particularly images of violence and inhumanity, is much discussed. On the one hand, we now almost routinely question the capacity of the single image to hold our attention or to influence us one way or the other beyond, at most, a small moment of engagement. We are entirely overwhelmed by images – so the argument goes, and has gone for some time now – to the point where it is difficult to distinguish one from the other, or to retain any of them in our heads. A never-ending photostream rushes on, leaving no residue. “It has become a cliché of the cosmopolitan discussion of images of atrocity to assume they have little effect,” wrote Susan Sontag in 2004, going on to express scepticism over an opinion she had once held herself. On the other hand – runs the counter-argument – the single, stand-out image can, on occasion, and despite all the competing images that we come across every day, still have the power to shock and to motivate into action.

Yet even accepting that images, or certain images, can “have an effect,” it is difficult to define exactly what that effect might be, and what action it might lead to. Viewers can be moved enough by photographs to become donors, for example, to organisations providing disaster relief or support for refugees and for people displaced by conflict. They might even participate directly in relief programs and, in some cases, dramatically change their lives in the process. And an image can, if it strikes enough people in the same way, be a spur to political action. It is widely assumed, for instance, that Nick Ut’s photograph of a young girl fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam war helped to end that war. But such instances are not common, and are arguably less common today than they were then. And even when it can be shown that a photograph has had an impact, the impact is not always positive. In very recent times we have seen the disturbing ways in which photographs and videos, shocking in themselves, can be both created and deployed by combatants – participants in conflict rather than professional observers – to frighten and provoke their ideological enemies.

Watching: An East German soldier looks back at a West Berliner over the newly constructed Wall, West Berlin, August 1961. Don McCullin/Contact Press Images

McCullin has always been very aware of the question of what difference, if any, and in particular what positive difference, a photograph can make – of whether a picture of human aggression and suffering can play any part in preventing such aggression or alleviating such suffering. He has given voice to these doubts even as he has been repeatedly drawn to document scenes of violence and conflict. “I wouldn’t like to go through a year without being in a war,” he said in an interview earlier on in his career. (Sontag, a great admirer of McCullin’s work, said something very similar about herself: “I guess I go to war because it is my duty to be in as much contact with reality as I can be and war is a tremendous reality in our world.”) McCullin is also very aware that not everyone will see his photographs in the same way, that some will feel compelled to look and some to look away. As one who is himself compelled to look, McCullin often describes how his photographs are almost drawn from him, by subjects wanting to make contact, to have their often life-threatening predicaments recorded – and perhaps, in doing so, to prevent the inevitable, the moment of death that the photograph tells us is just about to occur.

“In the corner of my eye I could see the albino boy,” he says of the subject of one of his most unsettling photographs, taken in a Catholic mission in breakaway Biafra in 1969, where nuns and medical personnel were struggling to help the injured and starving victims of the civil war. “He was haunting me, getting nearer,” recalls McCullin, until the boy got close enough to touch the photographer’s hand. Only after that, when he has given the boy a sweet from the small stash in his pocket, and the boy has moved away, does he photograph him. It is the kind of story that McCullin often tells, of a physical or emotional connection that he feels with his subjects, and from which he derives a kind of unspoken permission to capture them on film. Human sympathy combines with professional determination, out of which comes the photograph. But to what end? “I would like to think” he said of the pictures he took in Biafra, “that these images brought help to the beleaguered hospitals with their dying children,” but he thought then and continues to think that whether they did have that effect is an unanswerable question.

McCullin is of course far from being the only “photographer of conscience” to wrestle with these issues, and to question his own motivations and practice. The Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas, for instance, asks if we can “really point to things that have actively changed because photographs were made.” Her own answer to that question amounts to an expression of hope for the future, that we will get better at using photographs to influence social policy and encourage political involvement, that we will get better at using photographs “to create possibilities for engagement,” a phrase which in its hopeful vagueness seems to taper off into the unknown. McCullin has offered various answers over his long career, but in recent times he has favoured almost religious terminology in trying, retrospectively, to define what he was after in photographing people in extremity. “My ultimate aim,” he says in an interview included in the book of The Impossible Peace, was “to show the shame of the destruction of human beings who have committed no offence, no crimes. I wanted to portray the dignity of their suffering.”

McCullin’s interest in photography began when, as a national serviceman in Kenya during the time of the Mau Mau uprising, he was assigned the routine task, back at base, of operating a bulk-processing machine to develop aerial photographs that would provide RAF crews with detailed and up-to-date information about prospective targets up country. “The intelligence people used these pictures for next day’s offensive against the rebels,” he explains in Unreasonable Behaviour. The dilemma, which he has faced throughout his career, was thus there from the very beginning, even before he recognised that a life as a photographer was where he was heading, namely that photography is quite as capable of facilitating human suffering as it is of exposing and alleviating it. It is an issue on which he has shown some sensitivity. In interviews he has bristled at the possibility that people might think that, by his presence in places where terrible things happened, “I was okaying it,” or that the presence of the camera around his neck might in fact produce an event that would not otherwise have taken place.

These are the kinds of impossible questions that McCullin has returned to again and again over the decades. This has had the paradoxical effect of focusing attention even more closely on what is, after all, only one aspect of his work – the photographs of war – while the other genres he has worked in have received relatively less attention. “I am always trying to throw off the cloak of this title of ‘war photographer,’” he says. Yet even here, in relatively less controversial, “safer” genres, he gravitates towards subjects – famine, homelessness, displacement – in which suffering is exposed (as in his 1969 photograph of the homeless Irishman, which appears on the cover of the book of The Impossible Peace), or violence and threat lurk beneath the apparently placid surface. It seems that, even in the classical beauty of his unpopulated photographs of ancient Roman sites, the thought of war and human suffering is never far away. “While I was admiring these amazing monuments, extraordinary, fantastic, romantic spots, I was feeling that beneath the sands there would be the souls of people who had been felled, or starved in the fulfilment of a dream.”

Seeing numbers of McCullin’s photographs together, in an exhibition or in one of the many book collections of his photographs, is a reminder of how structured they are, how thoughtfully if instantaneously composed. McCullin’s photographs often play on a kind of double perspective, whereby we the viewers are watching somebody else engaged in watching. The act of looking is present within the photograph itself, emphasising our own distance as viewers – standing in a gallery, gazing at a framed image on the wall, or paging through a book or a slide-show – from what is going on in the photograph. He is particularly strong at photographing small groups of people, often with one or more individuals visually separated from the others, either looking or being looked at. These photographs appear as both spontaneous and staged. We might be tempted to see one of his most arresting images, from Northern Ireland – of two women, half shrouded in what appears to be their own doorways, watching riot troops storming past their houses – as a lucky accident, a moment in time that could not have been anticipated, were it not for the fact that the structure of the photograph carries McCullin’s signature within it, whereby people are caught watching, often in trepidation, events over which they have no control.

It is sometimes said, of McCullin and other photographers who document human suffering and vulnerability, that the effectiveness of an image will depend on its capacity to pull the viewer into the photograph and convey something of what the inhabitants of that image must have felt at that moment. But the great strength of McCullin’s photographs is that they do not play to our capacity for sentiment or easy emotional identification – if anything, they emphasise the distance between the reader of a newspaper or browser in a gallery and the documented event. They challenge us with the difficulty of making connections. McCullin, while avoiding fatalism, manages to imbue his photographs with a kind of realism that runs against any idea that things can somehow just be fixed. In three otherwise quite different examples from the 1970s, all included in the exhibition – of people in deckchairs sunning themselves on the promenade in Eastbourne, of children in a bedroom of a rundown house in Bradford, and of two Catholic boys being arrested in Londonderry – the composition is strikingly similar. Four figures in a row, with one of them to one side, slightly separated from the others.

Whether danger is obviously present, as in the photograph of the boys in Londonderry, or present only in the shadows and the clouds in the otherwise benign shot of people relaxing in Eastbourne, the eye goes inevitably to the separated figure, the one who does not quite seem part of the group. It is this fact of separateness, of what it might take to bridge the gap between ourselves and others, that animates McCullin’s work. He is on record as objecting to having his work defined as art, fearing perhaps any implication that he has seen the people he has photographed merely as subjects, facilitators of his own artistic vision. But in a passage in his autobiography he seems more comfortable with the definition, if being an artist means bringing to people’s attention the things they need to attend to. “I felt,” he says of the photographs he took during the Cyprus conflict, “as if I had a canvas in front of me and I was, stroke by stroke, applying the composition to a story that was telling itself.” •

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Now in her late eighties and with her memory fading, Bown nevertheless retains her eye for the telling detail. Early on in Looking for Light she recalls a visit she made to Paris with a friend when they were both in their mid-twenties. Her friend “wore a green hat,” Bown remembers, “and I wore a red hat.” Later in the film she recalls, with a mixture of stoicism and regret, her youthful presence at her mother’s funeral. Again she retains in her mind the telling detail, and again it is a hat. “I was wearing,” she says, appearing to conjure up the scene in her mind, “a little black beret.”

Hats and hair have always fascinated Bown. “She loved the tops of people’s heads,” says the photography scholar Patricia Holland in one of a number of illuminating comments she makes in the film. Hair, in Bown’s images, whether luxuriant or sparse or somewhere in between, frames and crowns and defines the face underneath, appearing in some cases almost to have a life of its own. Individual strands are discernible, the light bouncing off them to convey texture and substance. For many years Bown used the same Rolleiflex camera, long after that particular model was superseded, for “its remarkable capacity to capture every little detail and texture,” including the detail and the texture of hair. (In 1964 she changed to an Olympus SLR – “I take two cameras and indoors I generally have them set at 1/60th at f/2.8,” she said in 2000, in one of her typically spare comments on the technical details of what she did for a living. She hit it off with Elia Kazan because he knew immediately, by watching the way she prowled the room looking for light, what settings she would use.)

Occasionally, the sitter in a Bown photograph appears wearing headgear of some sort. It may be a fanciful observation, but it often seems that the hatted among Bown’s many subjects – as distinct from the hatless majority – are the truly super-sized personalities, the self-created and the very much larger-than-life, the ones who required something extra to hold them within the frame. Among these are the images of Boy George (1995) in an outsize black hat, decorated with bejewelled horns, or Eartha Kitt in a headband (1970), with her trademark stern yet sultry expression, or Cecil Beaton looking arch and manipulative in an astrakhan (1950), some of them viewable in full-screen mode at the Guardian webpage dedicated to “Jane Bown: A Life in Photography.” Hats can be seen as a component of the personality of the sitter, and Bown clearly saw them that way, but when it comes to what might be called external accessories – chairs, for example, or mirrors – she only rarely introduces them into the frame. She does quite often make use of the subject’s hands, however, in rather the way that she uses hats to position or help to define the head, as in her famous portrait of Björk.

Jane Bown’s portrait of the singer Björk. Hot Property Films

The portrait, which is lingered over in the film and also appears on the cover of Bown’s book Faces: The Creative Process Behind Great Portraits (2000), shows the singer’s head in extreme close-up, with only her eyes, and of course her hair, visible. The remainder of her face is covered by her hands, the freckles on her nose visible between splayed fingers. In Faces, Bown provides a brief paragraph of commentary on this photograph, as she does on each of the 300 or so portraits included in the book; often these comments are rather flat and suspiciously academic-sounding, as though channelling someone else’s analysis of what Bown herself has instinctively just gone ahead and done. The comments on her photograph of Björk, however, do seem to carry her tone of voice, modest with a hint of steeliness, providing an insight into the contradictory – and splendidly productive – nature of her methods.

On the one hand, she says, Björk “did all the work.” This is the kind of phrase that is characteristic of Bown when commenting on her own output – the idea that the photographer is there simply to catch the right moment, that it is in fact the subject who will “produce” the image for the photographer to capture. The journalist Andrew Billen, who often worked with Bown on assignment, recalls in Looking for Light that “her great phrase was ‘ah, yes, there you are,’” as if to say that her methods – calm and patient, exploratory but efficient – would unearth what was already present and make it visible. But even in the brief paragraph of commentary on the Björk photograph in Faces, we get the distinct impression that it was rather more complicated.

“You could take a hundred pictures of her and every one would be different,” she says, going on to describe the singer, with acerbic affection, as “very unusual and theatrical.” Bown sensed, when she took that shot of Björk, that it would be the one. It was “quite obviously the best,” she says in Looking for Light, suggesting that she recognised how going some way towards anonymising her subject was the key to revealing her; by dampening down Björk’s theatricality she would uncover something more natural and unforced, something more real.

As with all great artists who claim that what they do is really very simple, Bown’s simplicity – the unassuming woman who turns up to photograph a celebrity, spends ten minutes on the task, shooting one or two rolls of film at most before leaving as quietly as she arrived – seems less and less simple the more you look at it. “I was self-effacing and apologetic,” she recalls in Looking for Light; “I wasn’t threatening.” Friends and former colleagues speak affectionately of how, particularly when she became something of a celebrity herself, she often had no idea who the famous people were whom she was photographing, or what they were famous for. No doubt this version of Bown is accurate as far as it goes, but there is also a strong impression of a myth being built up and reinforced until it takes on its own life.

Other comments, by Bown and others, suggest an approach that was rather more deliberate, a feigned unworldliness designed to lower the defences of her subjects. “She was good at putting people at their ease,” says the journalist Polly Toynbee, recalling the occasions when she worked in tandem with Jane Bown in the seventies. “She lulled them into a sense of false security,” says Gary Woodhouse, who was picture editor at the Observer during much of Bown’s tenure. But however deliberate she may have been in her strategies, the “sense of security” that Bown instilled in her subjects was not false.

They were right to trust her. Her portraits do not trap people, or trip them up. Neither do they flatter; instead they convey the sense that we the viewers are seeing them truly, whether or not they are looking directly into our eyes. (Only two people, she says, ever objected to her version of them; the novelist and journalist Martha Gellhorn, and Svetlana Stalin, who felt Bown made her look like a frog.)

Though much is made of Bown’s quality of human sympathy, and her ability to connect with her subjects even in the brief time that was frequently allocated to her, it is something of a paradox that some of her best images were obtained when the session did not go at all well. Her most famous portrait, the one that appears at the top of this article, is of Samuel Beckett. Taken in 1976, it shows Beckett full-face, with lips set, his eyes looking not-quite-directly ahead. The picture glows with the multiple tonal variations of Bown’s beloved black-and-white. Beckett’s silver hair seems almost over-lit, giving the impression of some kind of natural geological formation rather than mere hair. The Auden-like creases in his skin make him if anything more rather than less handsome. He was, Bown recalls, deeply uncooperative and ungracious, allowing her time for only three shots – in the end she managed five before her time was up. With one of those shots she hit what she sometimes refers to when discussing her photographic methods as the “jackpot” – the Björk-like moment when she knew at once that she had what she was looking for. It is both her best-known photograph and the photograph that defines Beckett.

As the title of Dodd and Whyte’s film suggests, light was everything to Bown, as perhaps it is for most photographers. But she pursued light with an unusual degree of single-mindedness. Famously, Bown never used a light meter, instead checking the available light by looking at the way it fell on the back of her hand. If she was concerned that it might be getting dark by the time she arrived at her assignment, or that the location might not have access to sufficient natural light, she might take along a 150 watt bulb to fix into an obliging table lamp. Or she would, according to Andrew Billen, sometimes bring along her own Anglepoise lamp, thrust into a shopping bag to be drawn out as required. These stories of the bulbs and the lamps seem to sum up her approach – artisanal and low-tech, responding to the moment.

She would buy her cameras secondhand and keep them for ages, feeling no particular need to upgrade or to try out the newest model. In a way she kept on taking the same sorts of pictures for fifty years or more, eschewing phases or periods or distinct shifts in photographic direction or any tendency to adopt the latest technical breakthrough. Bown stuck to the rails, in the words of photographer Don McCullin, doing what she knew best, resisting any temptation she might have felt to seek out new and radically different kinds of subject matter. The co-director of Looking for Light, Luke Dodd, who has spent recent years helping to collate the vast repository of Bown images as archivist for the Guardian/Observer, recalls in his introduction to a book of her photographs, Exposures (2009), that “she once told me how she thought it impossible to take a bad picture abroad.” Dodd interprets the comment as “acknowledging the easy exoticism of images from other cultures.”

It is also a kind of coded warning on Bown’s part, not to take too literally what she has often said elsewhere, that the subject makes the photograph. Sometimes too much choice – the availability of ever more interesting or unusual subjects to photograph, using ever more inventive methods and techniques – is a constraint on creativity rather than an artistic liberation. It was important to Bown’s success as a photographer that she rarely chose her own subjects – most of the time she was on assignment, photographing what she was told to photograph. This regular but not overly demanding pattern of work – two assignments or so a week, often in people’s homes, or in hotel hospitality rooms that became very familiar to her over the years – seemed to fire her creativity rather than dull it.

She had her methods – her rails, as McCullin calls them – and she stuck to them, sometimes repeating devices or motifs to get what she wanted. Her superb portrait of the actress Diana Dors, for example, taken (or “made,” to use Bown’s preferred term) in 1970, echoes a studio portrait of a “Mrs Gestetner” from twenty years earlier. In each of the portraits (they both appear in Bown’s book Faces) the subject is shown touching the end of a string of pearls she is wearing, as though she is actively participating in the creation of the composition.

The impression of human depth in these photographs of women in pearls comes partly from the combination of artifice and naturalness. Dors has adopted a pose, holding on to those pearls with forefinger and thumb, in a way that conveys deliberateness and forethought. Yet the overall impression is one of naturalness and vulnerability. In photographing celebrities, Bown was engaging with people who knew the rules of the game, people who were difficult to catch “off guard.” It is one of her great strengths as a photographer: the fact that she did not attempt anything so underhanded as to trick her subjects. As Patricia Holland puts it, she does not look for “that crude moment of exposure that some photographers go for.” Rather she is able to draw out, in image after image, the qualities of naturalness and humanity that can be found within the poses that all of us, celebrities or not, instinctively adopt when we know we are being photographed.

In Looking for Light and elsewhere, Jane Bown refers to her career as having come about by accident. The stories, as such stories do, hone themselves by repetition. In recognition of her wartime service in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, she was offered a grant to study for two years in order to gain a professional qualification. Unsure what she wanted to do, she took up the suggestion of a friend to “try photography,” studying under Ifor Thomas who was, along with his wife Joy, an inspiring and influential teacher at the Guildford School of Photography in the postwar period. A picture editor admired Bown’s portfolio, particularly a disconcertingly close-up photograph of a cow’s head, in which an eye dominates the frame rather like the eye in Buñuel’s early surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (1929). Before long, says Bown with typical self-depreciation, “I found myself working for the Observer.” Her long association with the Observer, and those increasingly regular assignments to photograph famous people that it entailed, has inevitably come to define her work.

But the people Bown photographed during her career were not always famous, and often the photographic subject did not include people at all. “When I first started I used to photograph funny things,” she has said, “like cabbages and snow.” In 2007 the Guardian staged an exhibition of Bown’s lesser-known work entitled, a bit cutely, The Unknown Bown, using images drawn from its Bown archive. In her introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Germaine Greer remarks admiringly that “it goes without saying that Bown never uses flash,” the clear implication being that Bown herself is never flash, never one to be seduced by special effects or tricksy lighting – nor, by extension, by the easy lure of celebrity, in herself or in others.

Her early, non-portrait work, much of it dating from the 1950s, is particularly effective at conveying a kind of romantic down-to-earthness, the cabbageness of a cabbage, the leekness of a leek or the snowiness of snow. This quality remained in the portrait photography that, from the early sixties, she was increasingly to concentrate on. “She has no truck,” says Greer, speaking of this later work, “with the generation of glamour images, and hence her portraits seem truer than those of other photographers.” One of Bown’s great strengths is the ability to photograph people – people whose biographies lay claim to some kind of distinction – in such a way as to humanise rather than either glorify or undermine them, to take her subjects, as it were, at face value.

Looking for Light captures Bown’s self-effacing single-mindedness as a photographer, to the extent perhaps of over-emphasising her lone way of operating. In fact, as we learn from snatches of interviews, her early and complex family life – she was “illegitimate,” without knowing for many years who her father was – led her to place a particular value on relationships and particularly on family life, her own and other people’s. One of the reasons she stayed so long at the Observer – her entire career, in fact – was that she regarded it as family.

An aspect of her approach to photography that is not much explored in the film is the effect on her work of the practice of working “in tandem,” the journalist and the photographer sent out together on assignment. Often Bown had to stake out her ten minutes where she could, at the beginning or the end of the interview. (Though as Bown’s own fame grew, people’s attitudes changed; her colleague on the Observer, Nobby Clark, tells a tale of being sent as a last-minute substitute for Jane Bown, only to be greeted with extravagant disappointment by the judge who was the subject of the shoot.) Sometimes, if the journalist and the interviewee were both agreeable, Bown would sit in on the interview and catch her subject in mid-flight. Her portrait from 1977, of Mick Jagger laughing, was obtained in this way. “Shots of people laughing do not often work,” she commented, “but I like this one.”

Among Bown’s professional partners at one stage of her career was John Gale, a former foreign correspondent who was later assigned to duties closer to home, including background features and celebrity profiles. Gale, referred to briefly in Looking for Light as “a big, jokey man,” was, like Jane Bown, someone for whom, despite his wild ways, family was paramount. His account of a half-year-long journey through Africa, Travels with a Son, was published in 1972, only two years before his death by suicide. Travels with a Son – the “a” in the title hints at Gale’s quirky point of view – is a movingly unsentimental depiction both of Africa and of his own relationship to his family.

Earlier, in 1965, Gale had produced an autobiographical volume, Clean Young Englishman, which chronicles among other things his flights of derring-do as a foreign correspondent, and the later onset of madness. It contains, towards the end, a single reference to Jane Bown, with whom he had been sent on an otherwise unexplained assignment to Blackpool. (“You knew,” says Gary Woodhouse in Looking for Light, “that if you sent them out together you’d have got something”):

One sunny afternoon we walked down the pier and watched fishermen catching plaice.

“See that man over there in a baseball cap and glasses?” I said to Jane. “He looks just like Epstein, doesn’t he?”

Jane agreed. She had met Epstein several times.

We walked back from the end of the pier, and by the turnstiles we saw an evening paper hoarding: “Epstein dead.”

The man that looked like Epstein had vanished.

In Jane Bown’s beautiful portrait of Jacob Epstein, taken in 1958, not long before he died, the sculptor is shown in his studio, where he is kept company by a variety of heads in progress. He is wearing a cap, as was his habit. It would be nice to have on record more of the conversations that Bown and Gale engaged in while on assignment together, of likenesses and caps and the art of catching the essence of someone before they vanish. •

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Google Street View, by now a way of life, made its first appearance on our screens in 2007. In the company’s characteristically casual and upbeat account of those early days, things just sort of happened. “We packed several computers into the back of an SUV, stuck cameras, lasers and a GPS device on top, and drove around collecting our first imagery.” Those pictures of thoroughfares and laneways and suburban streets, captured in overlapping sequence by cameras stuck on cars, now account for nearly half the world. In more recent times they’ve been supplemented by increasing numbers of images from other sources: on- and off-street views contributed by members of the “street view community,” and images created through partnerships between Google and organisations both public and private, thereby allowing us to click on multiple views of the same street and in many instances to penetrate the street façade to see what lies behind.

This unimaginably large cache of images, each one morphing into its successor as we make our virtual way down the online street, forms a seemingly endless series of panoramas, allowing us to look up, look down, and swirl around places we have never been to, and may never see, other than on the screen. We can pause at any point, in effect creating a still photograph, ready-framed by the computer. (And if accessed via Google Earth, these views of the street can be toggled back and forth from 2-D to 3-D, a slightly unnerving experience.) We can embark on guided tours – of Angkor Wat, or Marseille by night – or we can just drift where the mood and the street take us, our perspective that of an SUV or a hatchback or perhaps a snowmobile or a launch. In many ways these self-guided walks, with no particular destination in mind, seem to echo what the great champion of urban studies, Jane Jacobs, saw as the essential quality of the ideal city – that there would always, just up ahead, be a corner, and around that corner would be a visual surprise. With Street View, there is always something new up ahead.

Many locations on Street View have now been photographed more than once. As of last April, we can “time travel,” comparing the differences between earlier and later views, spotting the obvious and the subtle changes that have occurred during this compressed aeon we all inhabit, this latterday common era that began in 2007. We could see the progress towards completion of the 2014 World Cup stadium in Brazil, suggested the Google Street View blog (and, as of this month, Google provides “360 degree street view access to all twelve stadiums”) or we can just as easily check on the rate of growth of that tree that the neighbours planted a few years ago, and try to predict how long it will before it is overshadowing our front garden. Or we can trace the differences between screenshots of the same location, differences that might be attributable to the weather or the season or the light, or to the presence or absence on the day when the photograph was taken of people and vehicles, or merely to the fact that, by the very nature of things, every view is new.

New, yet after a while, not so very surprising. Street View images, whether created in-house or outsourced, tend towards a very similar look. (This is not entirely by chance, given that “trusted photographers and trusted agencies are trained and certified by Google.”) The more corners you turn, the more the street in front begins to look like the one you’ve just left. Rather as one selfie, despite the infinite variety of human faces, can very quickly begin to look much like all the others – same expressions, same tilt of the head – so these streets can begin to blend into one another, making it difficult to retain any memory of their distinctiveness. The parallels between the rises of the Street View and the selfie don’t end there. Together they embody much of our confused thinking about the opposing impulses towards privacy and display.

Something new up ahead: Google Street View at the World Cup.

In the selfie, it is all about the face. Its owner is recognisable, even if the face is a deliberately silly one, while the background setting is mostly blurry or non-specific. It’s exactly the opposite with Street View – the background is sharp, sharp enough to assume the foreground, but any people who happen to have been caught in the shot are simply there as extras, placed like the little figures in architectural models, dropped in to suggest an approximation of scale. And thanks to technology deployed by Google since 2008, the faces of anyone likely to be identifiable have been rendered as essentially featureless. “If one of our images contains an identifiable face (for example that of a passer-by on the sidewalk),” runs an undertaking from Google, “our technology will automatically blur it out.” And if the technology slips up, there is a mechanism by which the identifiable individual can apply to be made faceless. You can, in effect, opt for an unselfie.

A long session spent scrolling through images on Street View is like watching one of those real-life documentaries, the ones in which every so often a face, usually of someone in the background who is visible only for a moment, has been blanked out. The difference is that on Street View the blanked-out faces are the norm rather than the exception. Street View, in fact, is all about anonymity. Even the images are created anonymously, the cameras sitting alone on the vehicle roof taking pictures automatically at preordained intervals.

What does it mean to photograph a street? Can a street be a street in the full sense of the term if the people have had their faces blotted out? For contemporary practitioners and aficionados of the genre known as “street photography,” the answer would almost certainly be no. “Street photography” means something a long way from the kind of images that appear on Street View. To begin with, the street is the least of it. The “street” bit has instead become code for something else, for a way of capturing the human face as it appears in a (usually) unguarded moment, for the determination of the photographer to catch that moment when private expression and mood interact with the camera to produce an arresting image.

A street photographer needs to be ever alert for that moment, and for that he or she must travel fast and travel light, and be ready to shoot regardless of location. The Wikipedia entry for street photography puts it baldly. Street photography, we are told, “does not necessitate the presence of a street.” It might once have done, but street photography has moved on from its origins in depicting the urban landscape, with or without human figures, to become a way of photographing people wherever they might be, on or off the avenue.

Meanwhile, the street, no longer an essential component of the photographic genre named after it, has sought refuge elsewhere, under the umbrella of what is more often called urban (or urban landscape) photography. Here, the focus returns to the built environment, an environment in which people are present, if at all, as extras rather than leading players. The urban photographer also seeks to capture mood and expression, but in this case it is the mood and expression of the city and its streets, rather than of individual inhabitants.

The distinction between street and urban photography is also a distinction between different kinds of photographers. Street photographers often have, and just as often cultivate, something of a frontline image, presenting themselves as confident and fearless, prepared to enter dangerous places and potentially volatile situations on our behalf in order to send back images to those of us who spend rather a lot of time inside. Websites dedicated to street photography will typically provide advice on how the would-be practitioner should approach people who might potentially be subjects, emphasising the importance of behaving in a self-assured, professional manner and not as a diffident bumbler, weighed down by too much equipment.

The alternative, to photograph the city and its actual, non-metaphorical streets while steering clear of anyone who might prove difficult and who might object to your intrusiveness – to be, in other words, an urban photographer – is by implication seen as a lesser calling. After all, photographing a street without people in it, or without people as the intended subject, is something that a car, with a camera on the roof and its shutter set to automatic, can easily do.

But urban photography can be risky too, particularly if you change the point of view from ground level to somewhere much higher. Which might explain why there are so many aerial shots around nowadays. Not only does the aerial shot provide a perspective that is not part of normal everyday experience for most people, thereby leading us to look anew, but also recent iterations of aerial photography will often emphasise the daring and the danger involved in capturing these images from above.

The photographer George Steinmetz, for instance, a contributor to National Geographic, takes pictures from a motorised paraglider. The first time he went up he was nervous. “It was really quite petrifying. And I thought, wait a minute, I’m up here, I’m really determined to get this picture, so I better take the fucking picture! If you’re going to die, at least get the picture first. Don’t die for nothing.” A picture, in other words, is worth dying for, which is certainly setting the paraglider very high.

Steinmetz’s aerial shot of the remains of Leptis Magna, the largest Roman city in Libya, clearly delineates the layout of the streets below and provides a perspective that could never be captured by a camera on the ground. Added to that, and in the back of our minds, is the knowledge that the image was taken, not by a satellite or aircraft-borne device set to auto, but by a man hanging in the air in a flimsy machine, above a land in the midst of post-revolutionary turmoil.

Yet the fact is that we can also zero in on Leptis Magna via Google Earth, where we will be presented with both satellite images and links to other photographs taken at ground level, and thus with the opportunity to create our own composite view of Leptis Magna. For the moment the satellite images cannot quite match the quality and resolution of one taken by a professional photographer from a paraglider, but one day soon they will, and then an awareness of how the images were created – by a satellite or by a man in a paraglider – will become an even more important element in the overall impact of the individual, photographic image.

But then it has probably always been the case that the story around the photograph is an essential component of the story that we make from the photograph. “A photo becomes fictional on the basis of the text beside it, or the photos that precede it or follow it,” says the novelist and photographer Teju Cole, discussing his photographic novel on life in Lagos, Every Day Is for the Thief. Context is everything. The photographs taken in the early 1850s by one of the first and the greatest of urban photographers, Charles Marville, recently on exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, derive much of their continuing impact from our knowledge that their subject, the streets of pre-Haussmann Paris, were soon to be swept away and their inhabitants unceremoniously forced out.

The images created in the 1940s by a much less well-known photographer of the urban landscape, Fredrik Bruno, show, in quietly contemplative and bleached-out colour compositions, the streets of various Swedish towns and cities, some with people and some without, as they appeared during the years of the second world war and immediately afterwards. The serenity of these streets takes on a more complex cast because we know that, in neutral Sweden, they were an exception among the devastation that was taking place across the rest of Europe. In both cases, our knowledge of context helps us to animate the still image, and to imagine the lives of the people whose streets they were.

Amid the devastation: Fredrik Bruno’s “Vasagatan street towards Tegelbacken in Stockholm city” (c. 1943). Swedish National Heritage Board

For aspiring urban or street photographers today, a large part of the context for their work is the ever-growing presence of Street View, Google Earth and Apple Maps, and other applications that depend for their raw material on huge numbers of automatically generated images, taken from satellite or aeroplane, car or Google Trekker, and how this multiplying mass of images makes it ever harder to claim attention for an artisanal, distinctive and distinguishing view of the urban landscape, or indeed of any landscape.

For increasing numbers of photographic artists, the answer is to mine these seams of images, selecting carefully from the vast array and putting their stamp on a chosen few. Benjamin Grant produces Daily Overview, where he posts enhanced aerial images derived from Apple Maps that chime with ideas or themes that he wants to explore, concentrating, as he explains in an interview, “only on the areas where humans – for better or worse – have impacted the landscape.” Grant likens himself to an explorer, searching Apple Maps for just the right images, which he then manipulates, changing the angle of perception and enhancing the depth of colour and, it could be argued (though he does not), making them his own.

Something more: From Jon Rafman’s series, Nine Eyes of Google Street View. Ars Electronica/ Flickr

It’s the same on the ground. “Who’d have thought,” asks the novelist and photography writer Geoff Dyer, “that you could be a stay-at-home street photographer?” But as he points out, you could and you can, by searching Street View for just the right image to appropriate, re-format and even to rephotograph. Practitioners of this sub-branch of the photographic arts, like Jon Rafman or Michael Wolf, will look to draw something more from the house style of Street View, with its mechanical recording of architecture and topography, than it initially seems to offer. Sometimes what they are looking for is the Street View image that suggests a theme, such as urban decay, but more often it is the occasional shot that, despite the blanked out faces, still manages to bring to the foreground the human element that underpins the character of any street.

These occasional images might be of a couple embracing, or having an argument; they might be of an individual collapsed in the gutter, or a prankster who has spotted the approaching car and is acting up for the camera. What is required of the rephotographer is not so much a spirit of derring-do as the capacity to spend the long hours required to sift the archive, always with a highly developed curatorial eye open for those images that, with a bit of help, will stand out from the crowd. •

The post What does it mean to photograph a street? appeared first on Inside Story.

Sam Hood began his photographic apprenticeship in the mid 1880s, when he was barely into his teens. He was still working as a photographer on the day he died, at the age of eighty-one. That adds up to a long career, and it made for a lot of photographs, many of which can be seen on the websites of the State Library of New South Wales and the Australian National Maritime Museum, among others, and on Trove and Flickr. The State Library’s Hood archive alone – evocatively described in the catalogue as “Sydney streets, buildings, people, activities and events” – comprises some 11,400 images. This sounds like a large number, and if Sam Hood had been a painter rather than a photographer, it would have been a very large number indeed.

But photographic legacies routinely run into the tens and even the hundreds of thousands. The recently rediscovered Chicago street photographer Vivian Maier is survived by an archive of 100,000 images, saved from probable destruction by sheer chance. The photographer and photographic historian Jerry L. Thompson, in his recent polemic Why Photography Matters, tells us that the archive of Garry Winogrand, whom many would nominate as the best of all twentieth-century street photographers, runs to almost a million items, not a few of which Winogrand has never seen.

Yet archives of even these astonishing proportions can blend, unremarked or overlooked or passed over, into the vast cache of photographs already in existence, or about to be brought into existence by people whose careers are photography and by the many more people who just like taking photographs. And as we take more and more photographs, on our compact cameras and our smartphones, so we are taking less time to look at them. The contemporary photograph is no longer so much a record of the moment as a part of the moment itself, an integrated component of whatever it is we happen to be doing. Taking a photograph is something you do when you’re already doing something.

At the other end of the photographic spectrum is the singular photograph, the work of art that might hang on a gallery or a loungeroom wall. It is made with the intention of engaging us, persuading us to pause and reflect on its content, to look at it more than once, and to remember it.

Unlike the smartphone photo, which typically favours for its subject the spontaneity (or apparent spontaneity) of the fleeting moment, the photograph-as-art will often highlight its own contrivance, by being elaborately and obviously staged, for example, or by juxtaposing people and objects in ways that emphasise the stylised formality and artificiality of the image. This kind of juxtaposition can be seen in the work of the many contemporary photographers whose elaborate “sets” and staged incongruity seem designed to distance the work from the smartphone culture and the inherent forgetability of the typical digital image.

Gymnastics on Parsley Bay beach c. 1929, photographed by Sam Hood. State Library of New South Wales

Contrivances like these are an attempt to give substance to our casual, and often misleading, habit of describing photos as “memories” by staging and photographing an event that is not part of the flow of life but a deliberate and striking intrusion into that flow, something that will be remembered for its very intrusiveness. Sometimes this can work to undeniable effect, as in Richard Renaldi’s photographs of complete strangers – strangers to him and to one another – who have been persuaded to pose in attitudes of intimacy, with arms linked or wrapped around shoulders or encircling waists, in imitation of a relationship that does not exist. It sounds faintly gimmicky but it can also produce some affecting – and memorable – images.

Not everyone would agree. Jerry Thompson, for one, has little patience with this kind of consciously artistic or staged photography. He dismisses those photos that imitate iconic paintings as “decorative self-indulgence,” for example, which seems a bit harsh, but the question he then asks is one that goes to the heart of our expectations of photography and of photographs. “Shouldn’t photography – which began as a hyperdetailed record of our shared visible world – provide a close, critical examination of that world, the kind of jarring irritant able to rouse viewers out of a complacent, forgetful slumber, and into a wakeful regard of what is?”

It is a plea for the kind of photograph that sits – perhaps somewhat uncomfortably these days – in the middle of the photographic spectrum, with the smartphone snap at one end and the photograph of complete strangers touching one another or the super-saturated tableau of people dressed up in renaissance costume, at the other. It’s the kind of photograph that manages to bring an artistic eye to the world as it is – or was, at the time when the photograph was taken. It assumes a world that can never be completely contained or managed by a photograph or a photographer, however skilled he or she may be. Chance always plays a part. “Pictures by even the greatest photographers,” observes Thompson, “insist on containing elements of the outside world that just happened to be there.”

Sam Hood was that kind of photographer – perhaps the most common kind in the history of photography – the kind who brought a photographic eye to the “world as it is.” As Alan Davies describes in his 1991 book about Sam Hood and his work, Sydney Exposures, he grasped whatever opportunities there were to take photographs and be paid for it. He photographed ships in Sydney Harbour and sold the images to sailors as mementoes of their voyage. He took studio portraits, and he supplied images to a dozen or so different newspapers in the twenties and thirties. He undertook commissions to document buildings and events – public ceremonies, sporting matches, first nights, weddings. In all this, it is doubtful that Hood ever thought of himself as an artist rather than as a working photographer whose work was his life.

Two young girls holding hands, c. 1920. Australian National Maritime Museum

And yet in many ways he behaved like an artist. He was obsessive about every aspect of photography, overseeing the entire process to ensure that the final image was as it should be. He survived many setbacks, including the prospect of reestablishing his studio after it was burnt down on two separate occasions. He pressed on, inseparable from his camera – the same one for forty years, as Davies reports, despite opportunities to upgrade. It reached a point where the camera had been repaired and patched so often, and had acquired so many tics, that “no one else could use it.”

It is difficult to know how to “read” Hood’s photographs today, just as it is difficult to know how to approach any photographic collection or archive. We are caught between our habit of scrolling through the albums on our screens – usually so quickly that it can almost be like watching a film – and the demand of the single iconic image that we pause and contemplate in isolation. But there is also a middle way. Sam Hood, and photographers like him – artisanal rather than consciously, or self-consciously, artistic – are best appreciated and understood by means of a hybrid of these two extremes, a kind of slow scrolling.

Individual photographs by Hood don’t generally stand out immediately, at least not in a way that invites us to brand them as particularly representative or “iconic,” as we might brand a Max Dupain or a David Moore, for instance. They need to be taken as a whole or, given that tens of thousands of images are difficult to take in as a whole, in chunks, further defined and refined by sub-categories of chronology or genre or subject. In this way, we can build up a sense of a particular time and place, as captured by a particular photographic sensibility.

Admittedly, not all of Hood’s photographs encourage us to scroll slowly. There are, for all but the most enthusiastic of maritime enthusiasts, only so many ships one can look at in one session. Hood also had a weakness for photographing people with animals – women with cats, men with elephants, a girl with an angora rabbit, images that fit neatly now with the web’s fascination with cuteness, but don’t encourage us to linger.

On the other hand, Hood had a special talent for observing and photographing people, and especially people in groups; sometimes in their hundreds, lined up in quasi-military formation or squashed together at a town hall hop, but more often in compositions of two to a dozen figures. The photographs are posed, reflecting the technical capacities and photographic conventions of the time, but for all that they convey a sense both of natural intimacy and of an occasion shared, while preserving the individuality of the people who make up the composition.

In the photograph of “two young girls holding hands” (above), which forms part of the Samuel J. Hood Studio Collection at the National Maritime Museum, the young girls of the caption, who are clearly twins, are posing face-on to the camera. In his characteristic way, Hood conveys naturalness within formality, individuality within likeness. The background is quite geometric – a long strip of an unidentified and unidentifiable building forms the upper border. Below that is a hedge and some vegetation, carefully clipped and tamed, that stretches across the frame. In the foreground, in contrast to these vaguely modernist horizontal lines, are the two girls, barely containing their exuberance and enjoyment of life. Most strikingly, and against the long tradition of photographing twins and look-alike siblings that owes so much to Hood’s near contemporary, the great August Sander, who emphasised likeness and encouraged the viewer to spot the subtle differences, the girls here, while dressed alike and, as far as we can guess, identical, have quite different facial expressions. They are together but also themselves.

Politicians lolling on the grass at Canberra (1927). State Library of New South Wales

The same mixture of naturalness and formality is struck in Hood’s photograph of “politicians lolling on the grass at Canberra,” taken in 1927 and now held by the State Library of New South Wales. At first and perhaps even second glance it is not an especially remarkable or distinguished photograph. And yet, in looking beyond its undoubted historical interest – the figure second from the right is the Indian politician Sir R.K. Shanmukham Chetty, who was visiting Australia as part of a Commonwealth parliamentary delegation and only a few years later became India’s representative at the League of Nations – we can see a number of Hood’s characteristic touches.

These politicians lolling on the grass of Lanyon Homestead – particularly the two in the middle – have clearly been directed, but for all that there is a relaxed if sober conviviality about the scene, and a humanising contrast between the important business that brings them together and the fact that they are sitting on the grass, chatting, staring into space, smoking a cigarette or drinking tea.

As is often the case with Hood, the background is formal, with a structured, almost geometric feel to it. The view of the verandah is divided, along classical lines, into three panels; there is even a column two-thirds of the way across to break the horizontal flow, in a way that is pleasing to the eye. In the middle panel, seated on a sofa, are two men, observing the main subject of the photograph from behind. Their presence sets up a mild visual joke, as these two rather more conventionally seated and suited figures observe their comparatively frivolous (these things are relative) colleagues lolling on the grass. The right hand panel contains a set of French doors; we can see nature reflected in the glass.

Against the formal background and complex perspective, we can also spot, to the right of the frame, a detail that seems to have crept in unnoticed: a lone briefcase and a hat, also lolling on the grass but bereft of their owner. No one is looking directly at the camera, or indeed at one another. And yet the overall impression – reinforced by the domestic touch provided by the teacups – is one of amiability and professional goodwill.

Charles Parsons & Company, 1935. State Library of New South Wales

Hood’s way with photographing groups can also be seen in an image (above) featured in Alan Davies’s monograph. It shows six men, all quite formally dressed, engaged in their work at a fabric warehouse in Sydney in 1935. The long line of a cutting desk stretches diagonally across the bottom third of the frame. In the upper background we see more long lines, in the form of rows of shelves extending into the left hand distance, each shelf piled high with neatly wrapped bolts of material that rise to the very ceiling and threaten to push their way through. In front of the shelves are the men, going about their business.

What strikes us first in this photo is that none of them is looking at any of the others.  They are shown engaged in their various tasks – measuring and cutting material, making entries in a ledger. One man is retrieving a bolt of material from the top shelf. Another man – a buyer, a customer? – appears to be examining a sample. Some elements of the photograph’s composition seem to work against any suggestion of intimacy or camaraderie, and yet that is precisely what is conveyed. This impression is helped, perhaps, by the fact that on the faces of three of the men, particularly the one who is cutting material, there are signs that laughter may not be far away.

This sense of enjoyment, or ease, in one another’s company is characteristic of Hood’s group photographs. Sometimes the enjoyment and the relaxation are palpable, sometimes implied. Either way, we as viewers don’t feel as if we could enter easily into the group, becoming its next member. Instead we witness, and almost envy, its cohesiveness, which seems to spring from the kind of naturalness and lack of affectation that is difficult to replicate in these more knowing times. There is nothing “knowing” about Hood’s photographs, despite the often sophisticated nature of his compositional sense. For that reason alone, they belong quite clearly to another age.

This is not simply a function of the times in which the photographs were made; old photographs can sometimes feel surprisingly contemporary. Hood’s photographs, however, do not give us a clear line to the past. If anything, they announce their pastness, if only because they come so clearly from an age in which people’s self-consciousness in posing was an essential part of their naturalness. In Hood’s world, people seem connected with each other rather than with us as viewers; groups provide consolation; individuality is downplayed. Although Hood’s portraits of individuals can sometimes express uncomplicated good cheer, as in his engaging photograph from 1938 of the wrestler Jack Gacek (below), it is also noticeable how often the individual in a single, observant portrait by Hood will seem lonely and uncertain, displaying rather less of the strength and vitality that seems to come from being photographed in company.

Jack Gacek, wrestler (1938). State Library of New South Wales

In one of Hood’s better-known photographs (below), a portrait of a woman standing in the doorway of her corner shop, the woman is almost secondary to the shop itself, which takes up most of the frame. Her stance is a combination of assertiveness and defensiveness – she has one hand on her hip; her other hand rests protectively against her neck, in a once-common social gesture that betrayed anxiety.

The inside of the shop behind her is in near darkness, while the outside, including the windows and even the footpath, is covered with hand-written signs, advertising the goods within. All this visual chatter threatens to dominate the image, quelling the figure of the woman who, despite her squared-on stance, seems in danger of being overwritten by the words that have her surrounded.

Riley & Fitzroy Streets corner grocery store, 1934. State Library of New South Wales

But if we move on, continuing to scroll slowly through the photographs of Samuel Hood, we will soon tack away from such sobering thoughts. In his group photographs in particular, Hood’s subjects appear with a kind of awkward confidence, their general optimism, and ease in one another’s company, captured by a remarkably humane and sympathetic eye. •

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MARCH is Art Month in Sydney, which this year comprises over 200 exhibitions and events intended to “celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of contemporary art in Sydney.” In line with recent trends, Art Month focuses not only on art and artists but also on the roles of curators and collectors, and on the relationships between art and such cognate fields as design, fashion and film. Meanwhile, in what could be mistaken for a parallel universe, Sydney has just hosted, on 7–9 March, the sixth Australian Tattoo and Body Art Expo, in which local and international tattoo artists showed what they could do, often on the skin of willing canvasses.

Much can be made, and sometimes is, of the category of artists who have a foot in both of these universes, the fine art one and the tattoo one. But in reality it is a very small group indeed. There are occasional examples, like the New York artist Scott Campbell, of tattooists who have crossed over successfully into non-skin art, and many more instances of tattooists who began at art school or trained in illustration and design before embarking on what is still essentially an apprenticeship. Of the many who cross over in this way, few return.

Some might argue that the “artist” bit of “tattoo artist” is a misnomer, a piece of professional credentialism that obscures the fact that tattoo designs, far from being original, are typically repetitive, derivative and uninventive. The same kinds of motifs – mythical, botanical, anatomical – recur and recur, filling folders with templates for the consideration of the prospective client. And yet there is much in the tattoo world that the art world can legitimately envy: the strength of the relationship between artist and client, the willingness of the client to stick with the artist in building up a portfolio, the sense of an art-loving community that crosses boundaries of gender and class, and the knowledge on the part of the artist that the work will remain on display – or potential display, depending on how rugged-up the “canvas” is at any given time – for many decades to come. Tattoos literally unite the work with the owner. And for the viewer, the reaction to the work is mixed up with the reaction to the personality of the canvas. Most importantly of all, tattoos are moving pictures, in an age that values movement over stillness. Unlike paintings that hang on a wall, tattoos get about, constantly changing location, constantly acquiring new viewers.

More and more people are getting themselves tattooed, but not all tattoo owners are happy with their choices. In 2011, the actor Mark Wahlberg began the long and painful process of having his tattoos removed. Among the images acquired in his youth were a misaligned shamrock on his ankle, which he first tried to deal with by having it inked over with Tweety Bird, and one of Bob Marley on his upper arm. Years later, and as the father of four children, Wahlberg felt that the tattoos spoke too loudly of a less responsible past. “I’ve taken my two older kids to the procedure so they see how painful it is and what I have to go through,” he said. “It’s like getting burned with hot bacon grease… Hopefully that will deter them.” By means of erasure – an expensive and painful process involving repeated laser treatments or in drastic cases surgery – or else by means of so-called cover-up tattoos, the supposedly indelible past is consigned where it belongs, to the past.

Yet tattoos don’t necessarily speak of irresponsibility or of a past that belongs in the past. The Sydney Morning Herald recently carried an eye-catching and in its way inspiring report of another father, Tony Hilton, who has been working as a bricklayer on the new building designed by Frank Gehry for the University of Technology, Sydney. Hilton regards the opportunity to help realise Gehry’s daring and complex vision as the best thing that has happened in his working life so far, and to celebrate he has had his arm and shoulder tattooed with one of the several unusual bricklaying patterns that are being deployed on the structure. The names of his wife and three daughters have been incorporated into the design, explicitly linking the two most important parts of his life, his family and his work.

Meanwhile, the NSW Police Service is banning neck tattoos – or “job-stoppers” – on new recruits, although exceptions can be made for those already employed. The Body Art and Modification Policy, approved in late 2013, proscribes “any form of body art or modification that is on the face, neck, ears, scalp or hands.” It comes down to a question of community relations. “Some of the older generation don’t like tattoos,” explained assistant commissioner Carlene York when the policy was announced, navigating her way with PR professionalism through a cultural minefield. “They feel a bit scared.” And yet, as York allows, not all older people are worried by tattoos. They might be tattooed themselves, or quite like the idea of getting one done, preferably on a part of the body less likely to be showing the adverse effects of age, given that skin, like canvas, bulges and sags over time. The veteran British broadcaster David Dimbleby, aged seventy-five, was photographed recently having a tattoo – of a scorpion – inked onto his right shoulder. It was something, he commented at the time, that he had “always wanted to do.”

The aura of permanence surrounding tattoos affects people differently – what puts one person off is the very thing that attracts another. For the cautious, an awareness of how you might feel in the future, as opposed to how you feel now, will seem to be a useful attribute, preventing all kinds of “mistakes.” On the other hand, you can think too much about that sort of thing. What prospective bride or groom wants to be told, for example, by a Jeremiah masquerading as a friend, that X per cent (insert a very high number here) of marriages end in divorce within Y years (insert a very low number)? In the same way, who wants to be told that you and Lisa or Ben, whose name you are planning to have tattooed on your arm or your leg or your lower back, may no longer be an item next month, never mind in ten or twenty years? A tattoo sends a message to your older self, a reminder of something important that should not be forgotten. It’s an expression of faith in the present, defying the future and daring it to do its worst.

ON THE FACE of it, the continuing popularity of tattoos is something of a paradox. We generally think of anything fashionable as having a use-by date built into it – the whole point of fashion being that it changes. A designer jacket remains in vogue for a season, maybe two, and after that, if put away and kept in reasonable condition, it will qualify one day as retro-fashion. In the meantime it will be defined not as retro (good), but as yesterday (bad). Yet tattoos, which have never, despite what the naysayers say, been more popular, cannot be so easily put aside. They can be disguised – a sleeve tattoo by a shirt-sleeve, for instance – but they are still lurking there, underneath, a fashion that never dies. Even when the tattoo is removed or over-stamped, traces remain.

Commentary on the fashion for tattooing, whether for or against, will often focus on the state of mind of the people getting tattooed. They may think about it for ages – will I, won’t I? – but when they finally make the decision it must have been because they were drunk at the time, or under the malign influence of something or someone, or in some way or other not their true, autonomous selves. They just weren’t thinking clearly. Or, runs the counter-proposition, they were living “in the moment,” as the confident, unworried, spontaneous self they would like always to be. The tattoo will go on reminding them of that freer version of themselves, whatever other embarrassments it might call to mind.

And as for the embarrassments of the past, who cares? They’re moments in time, and moments in time have their own validity. The advantage of a tattoo is that, unlike those ever-accumulating images on phones and Facebook, images that can soon spin out of the individual’s control, a tattoo is personal in the most literal sense. People will often comment on the way that a tattoo represents a stage of their lives, its emotional significance fully apparent only to the wearer of the tattoo. “My body is like a scrapbook,” says one interviewee in a recent Guardian feature on the growing number of women with tattoos. “Tattoos are markers on my body,” says another, “ to show how I was feeling at the time. They don’t have to have huge symbolism.”

In the digital world, we can keep on posting images and observations – markers of “how I was feeling at the time” – for as often and as long as we wish. There are no limits. By contrast, each of us has only so much skin. In the first episode of the first season of the UK series My Tattoo Addiction, one of the seemingly dozens of reality television programs that revolve around the tattoo culture, there is an unsettling encounter with a man who has, after going through a difficult divorce, fallen in love with Miley Cyrus. He has sixteen tattoos of Miley – her face or her name or the title of one of her songs or albums – when we meet him and is about to acquire his seventeenth. (He has since, apparently, acquired several more.) The tattoos make him happy, but he has two main fears, and both of them, we can’t help recognising, are founded securely in reality. One is that he will run out of space, and the other is that he or Miley will change, that she will no longer be the girl of his dreams. “I’m scared,” he confesses, “that this obsession might just leave me.” It is indeed a prospect to be dreaded. Instead of, for example, the name of a former girlfriend with Cupid’s arrow through it – a relatively minor embarrassment – he will be lumbered, forever and a day, with seventeen more or less indelible reminders on his skin of the woman he no longer loves.

As any collector will testify, it is hard to stop once you get started. One of the recurring motifs of what might be called tattoo literature – the abundant supply of commentary and reflection on what the tattooing fashion is really all about – is the observation that one tattoo is never going to be enough. “It’s all about coverage,” says the American fashion and style guru, and keen acquirer of tattoos, Nick Wooster, thereby downplaying the aesthetic role of the tattoo-ee. Leave that to the experts, he more or less says. Even if the tattoo artist – the expert – is not in fact particularly expert, the finished work will still say something about you, because it’s the coverage, the entire display, the story, that counts. Tattooists are artists, and artists have certain privileges, including the privilege of determining what in the end the finished work will look like. Just as the portraitist traditionally does not allow the sitter to see the painting until it is finished, so the tattoo artist is typically able to hold off until the big reveal. (The practical realities of tattooing help here – it’s hard, even with mirrors or display screens, to keep track of what someone is inking onto your back.)

All this suggests that, in a very traditional sense, the real power remains with the creator, whose vision is being realised on the canvas. But just as the supremacy of the artist is increasingly challenged in the art world, so it is in the world of tattooing. Patrons, collectors and curators are the new pretenders to the creative laurels in fine art, and the same holds true for the world of tattoos. What is more, the patron who commissions a tattoo holds a couple of extra cards that the art curator or collector doesn’t – he or she is also the canvas, and the exhibition space as well. The canvas, moreover, is quite capable of talking back. In another example of tattoo television, Ink Master, the success of the various tattooists, competing against one another to produce the most successful design, is judged not only by a team of experienced tattooists but also by a “canvas jury” – a case of the medium quite literally sending the message.

The web abounds with examples of tattoo disasters – the phrase or character in a foreign language, for example, that turns out to mean something quite different from what you thought it meant – but this has done little to slow the rate of increase. Celebrities celebrate – an occasion, a milestone – by getting tattooed together, as do classmates and teammates and family members. The story of the celebrity’s tattoo, how it was acquired and why, is an item of general interest. Spelled out step by step on Twitter, it forms a genre in itself, a tale for the times. Where celebrities lead, others follow, to the point where, for some time now, not getting a tattoo has required decisiveness rather than inertia. To remain a cleanskin is no longer the clear default position it once was. “See the amazing untattooed man,” exhorts a fairground sign in a cartoon by Michael Heath, recently reproduced in Private Eye: A Cartoon History (2013).

THE RISE of the tattoo as a lifestyle statement is explored in the second number of the new, lively and London-based photography journal The Quarterly, which features articles, and numerous images, devoted to the practice of tattooing as both art and fashion, and to the way tattoos now sit somewhere on the boundary between edgy and mainstream. Among the interviewees – and photographic subjects – is the comprehensively-inked Billy Huxley, who has, in a short space of time, gone from unemployed roofer to highly successful model, something that would have been unlikely even just a few years ago.

Huxley is keen to counter the idea that tattooing is all about consciously getting what everyone else has (a skull, a dragon), even though you might well end up doing just that without even knowing it at the time. He’s dismissive, too, of the idea of getting a tattoo just “to look cool.” It’s all about your tattoos in toto, about building a collection that works as a whole. It’s about curating your own individuality, creating over time your life story on your skin. (He is rather disdainful of an unnamed fellow model who has embarked on an accelerated inking strategy, all the better to capitalise on the trend for tattooed models – it’s just all too deliberate and fake.)

For Huxley, the meaning of his own body art lies in the way the images have been accumulated, and in what they uniquely say about him. “A girl once told me,” he says, that “having roses tattooed on your body means you’re a prostitute. I’ve got twenty-four roses tattooed on me, but it’s not like I charge for sex.” The subject defines the art, and not the other way around. Nor does Huxley see his tattoos as limiting his career prospects, for the very good reason that the career he is currently engaged in – modelling – already has a pretty inflexible age limit on it. The tattoos won’t make much difference to his professional end-date, about which he is philosophical. Which raises yet another paradox. The permanence of the tattoo (whether it’s under your clothes or on your face or hands) offers to separate you from the permanent – for “permanent,” read endless and dreary – side of life, from the dullness of being a time-server, in thrall to the organisation. “People call them job killers,” says Huxley in another interview, referring to his hand tattoos. “I call them office killers.”

But for how long will tattoos remain office killers? Tattooing has embraced age and class and gender to the point where no one – no grown-up anyway – can now be considered ineligible for canvas-hood. As Deborah Hill points out in the introduction to her photographic anthology Body Art, published recently by the National Library of Australia, the attraction of tattoos is that they take self-expression to an irreversible extreme. You put your money where your tattoo is, or something like that. But it won’t always be that way. Though the time has not quite arrived yet, it seems certain that one day soon tattoo technology will provide us with images that, while convincingly mimicking the real thing, will also be easily erasable or changeable, or will slowly fade away to nothing, leaving space for something that more accurately reflects the new you. The element of risk and daring, a gamble on the future, will be lost. But then again, perhaps it is already being lost. As tattoos are progressively mainstreamed – no longer the province of particular social groups but open to everyone – the element of risk declines. It is harder to be edgy when everyone else is edgy too. •

The post Moving pictures appeared first on Inside Story.

The Trial of Sören Qvist, recently reissued by Swallow Press, is based on actual events as conveyed by surviving records and in accounts written many years afterwards. It explores the ways in which the normally distinct qualities of guilt and responsibility can, under certain circumstances, slowly elide into one another and become indistinguishable. Sören Qvist, an innocent man accused of murder by a malevolent neighbour, at first resolutely defends himself against the charge but, over time, comes to believe in the circumstantial evidence arrayed against him, and to find himself not only responsible for certain of the incidents and actions that led to the murder, but guilty of the murder itself, the one being impossible to separate in his mind from the other.

The description of this murder and the trial that provided Janet Lewis with the inspiration for her novel came from a volume compiled and written by the nineteenth century legal writer Samuel March Phillipps, who had an eye for the intriguing and unusual among the records of criminal trials from the near and distant past. In his Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence; with an Introduction on the Theory of Presumptive Proof, Phillipps declares the detention, trial and execution of Sören Qvist to be the “most striking” of all the cases he describes, not least because “the testimony was altogether fabricated by his accuser.” Phillipps’s summary of the fall of Sören Qvist, pastor of Vejlby in Jutland in the early part of the seventeenth century, has all the ingredients of a classic tale of revenge (ingredients that the Danish writer Steen Steensen Bilcher used as the basis for his novella The Parson of Vejlby (1829), a work often credited as being among the first of modern crime novels.)

It is hardly surprising that the sufferings of Sören Qvist have, in the manner of other, more widely known instances of false or trumped-up accusations, guilty verdicts, and later vindications – the trials of Joan of Arc, for example, or Alfred Dreyfus – been recounted many times and in many forms. What Lewis brings to this particular retelling is a cool eye for the way in which Sören Qvist comes to recognise, in the face of the vengeful hatred directed towards him, that he has by his very nature helped to bring his fate upon himself, that if he has not committed the particular offence of which he is accused then he has escaped committing similar offences only by good fortune and the grace of God. Qvist is compelled to draw lessons from his own predicament, because to see it as essentially random and meaningless – a piece of very bad luck – is more than he can contemplate. “He is one of a great company of men and women,” says Lewis in her preface to the original edition, “who have preferred to lose their lives rather than accept a universe without plan or without meaning.”

Samuel March Phillipps’s version of the tale presents the parson and his nemesis – a local landowner called Morten Bruus – as direct opposites. Qvist, says Phillipps, “was a man of excellent moral character, generous, hospitable, and diligent in the performance of his sacred duties.” Bruus, by contrast, was “a self-seeker” and “an oppressor of the poor.” But Phillipps also acknowledges one defect in the good pastor, and it is this defect that drives the action on and seals his fate. “He was also a man of constitutionally violent temper.” Lewis makes much of this characteristic, having Qvist recall the reckless fighting of a duel in his youth, in which he could so easily have killed his opponent. And displaying a mid-century fascination with the roots of psychological motivation, she has Qvist hark back to an incident from his childhood, in which he killed his beloved dog in a fit of temper.

When Qvist angrily rejects Morten Bruus as a suitor for his daughter Anna, Bruus devises a scheme that capitalises on his enemy’s weakness, and turns his temper against him. He insinuates his lazy and impertinent brother Niels into the pastor’s household as a servant, and encourages him to provoke the pastor and to test his charitable principles to the limit. When the pastor reaches the point of ungovernable rage he beats Niels with a spade, and even thinks for a moment that he has killed him, before Niels jumps up and runs away, not to be seen in Vejlby again for another twenty years. Morten Bruus has in fact bribed his brother to disappear, but not before obliging him to exchange clothes with the body of a man who has recently committed suicide, turning the dead man into his brother, a victim of Sören Qvist’s murderous anger.

The Trial of Sören Qvist is the second of the three novels that Janet Lewis wrote under the rubric of Cases of Circumstantial Evidence. The third in the series, The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, is based on a complex case from the late seventeenth century, in Paris, that remains little-known today, but the first, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), was one of the key sources for the popular 1982 film starring Gerard Depardieu. The film, together with the historian Natalie Zemon Davis’ influential account, The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), to say nothing of a long list of versions based on versions, has helped to transform the surviving historical records of this case into the quintessential tale, for modern audiences, of impersonation and unmasking.

In The Wife of Martin Guerre, as in all the retellings, the false Martin Guerre is a central character, very much alive until the end. But in The Trial of Sören Qvist – which, like The Wife of Martin Guerre, hinges on the consequences of impersonation – the impersonator is dead when we meet him, and we never learn his name. The dead body, dug up and dressed up by Morten Bruus to be posed, in a freshly dug grave, as his brother Niels, is merely the catalyst that leads Sören Qvist to question his own identity and his understanding of himself, to question, in effect, the extent to which he is acting the role of kindly and devout pastor. All this is told by Lewis in clear and limpid prose, set in a world in which nature – and one’s true nature – is inescapable. The natural world behaves simply and instinctively – “the candle flames steadied themselves,” “the leaves had spread themselves” – but human nature is more complicated and more inclined to deceive itself and others. When Niels Bruus, supposedly dead, returns to Weibly, two decades after the trial and execution of Sören Qvist, he is challenged over his true identity. “It is a serious matter,” he is warned, “to represent yourself as someone other than you are.” •

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IN THE early years of the twentieth century, the NSW Bookstall Company – a pioneer, incidentally, of the mass-market paperback – began producing a series of picture postcards under the general heading of Past & Present. As the example below shows, a picture from the early days of the colony – based perhaps on a line drawing or an engraving – was set beside a present-day photographic image of the same scene. The postcards were popular, documenting as they did a satisfying tale of improvement, of muddy streets paved over and dark ones illuminated, of the formerly blank walls of buildings being more lately overhung with signs and awnings, behind which shops and businesses could be imagined, contributing to the general air of progress and prosperity. A similar series, called Old & New… (followed by the name of the town or city), was issued in Victoria by the stationer Robert Jolley. These early postcards show how, from its very beginnings, photography has offered a way of comparing the present with the past, of comparing the way the world looks now to the way it looked then. Not only that, but they also imply a narrative for the new country: of creativity and resilience, of a world in which things are better than they were.

The once “new” photographs from the early 1900s are now very old, but the genre of “past and present,” or “old and new”, is still with us. It is more commonly referred to these days as "then and now" or "now and then", and it is once again catching the collective imagination. In one popular variant on the traditional format, an old photograph, typically of young siblings or youthful friends, is restaged and reshot, down to the details of clothing and backdrop and facial expressions. The crucial difference is, of course, that everyone in the newer version is ten or fifteen or thirty years older, a fact of life emphasised rather than disguised by the replication of setting and props. Beginning in 2010, the Argentinian photographer Irina Werning has produced several series of photographs in this then-and-now style, which she calls Back to the Future. They have become hugely popular on the internet, and remain distinguished from the legions of similarly constructed photos, submitted to sites like Young Me/Now Me, by their greater attention to the details of art direction and composition.

It’s not entirely clear why this genre within a genre – in which we scroll through sets of images of adults behaving like children, set against images of their childish selves – can have such a hypnotic effect. Any more than it is clear what prompts a grown man to take off his clothes at the instigation of the photographer (in this case, Irina Werning for her second Back to the Future series), lie down on a rug, arch his back and mimic for the camera the expression captured in his baby photo of forty-one years earlier. It is a bit of fun, of course, and the resulting side-by-side photographs raise a smile, but there is also something unsettling about these stories of irretrievable childhoods. Missing from Werning’s photos, or from the many others that employ essentially the same method, is the confidence in progress that marks those postcards of one hundred years ago. The implied narrative that links the two photographs is not as much one of progress as regret for the disappearance of the past represented by the earlier photograph, tempered perhaps by the satisfaction of seeing how visual traces of the younger self, traces that go beyond the poses and the props, do indeed survive in the elder, and that the past may therefore not be quite so lost after all.

The contemporary fascination with then-and-now photography can be seen as part of a wider photographic trend in which the demarcation lines between films and photographs, between the moving and the still image, are becoming increasingly hard to define. In all kinds of ways, photography is highlighting its capacity to be cinematic, to suggest movement, and with it a narrative that continues over time. From the photographer’s point of view, says photographer and commentator Taylor Davidson, the trajectory is away “from ‘editing’ individual images and toward editing series of images, or in an easier-to-understand sense, toward storytelling.” In one sense this focus on storytelling is nothing new. Photographs have always told stories, and there are plenty of contemporary examples in which movement – or action, or narrative – remains, in the time-honoured way, implicit in the single, still image, but increasingly it is being made explicit; not only by the pairing or sequencing or “curating” of images to suggest a story, but also by the use of such hybrid forms as the cinemagraph and other methods of subtly animating a still image.

The possibilities for this kind of photographic storytelling now go well beyond the side-by-side format favoured in the early 1900s by the NSW Bookstall Company, or today by the creators of “young me/now me” photographs. They include photographs in which one image is superimposed on the other (old on new, or new on old), sometimes without evidence of human agency, sometimes with a hand inside the frame holding one photograph over the other. And there are photographs that have been blended and morphed and otherwise combined in ever more ingenious and seamless ways, to say nothing of creative versions of those “before and after” or “makeover” shots familiar from design magazines, or the increasingly inventive use of stop-motion and time-lapse photography.

A huge proportion of the then-and-now photographs we see today, the ones that invite us to compare one image with another, are following these newer, more inventive patterns. The Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov, for instance, has attracted a lot of attention recently with images that combine photographs from various second world war archives with his own contemporary location shots. Nazi or Soviet troops from the “original” photographs inhabit the same space as modern-day tourists (often seen with cameras around their necks), or urban citizens going about their ordinary business. “I take all the modern images myself,” says Larenkov, “because the most important part is finding the desired point to shoot… It’s very interesting to find the point where another photographer once stood. Suddenly, you see an old world with your very own eyes. You are transported back in time; it’s almost as if you’ve stepped into a time machine. Sometimes, this is scary.” By Larenkov’s definition, photography itself becomes a kind of re-enactment, an attempt to enter history not directly through the archival image but through imitating the photographer who was there before him.

IT IS a technique that has caught on. The Anne Frank Museum has produced a mobile app intended primarily for children which includes among its functions an introduction to Anne Frank’s Amsterdam by means of blended images created by the digital media organisation LBi. “It is a powerful way in which the past and present come together,” we are told, but as is the case with all such mergers of images from both the present and the past, the effect can be to keep them apart as much as to bring them together. The declared intention of these photographs is to encourage people – viewers – to journey into the past, to see Amsterdam through the eyes of Anne Frank, and to match it against what we could see now, on the same spot, with our own eyes. But the contrasts that compete within the frame, between monochrome and colour, between men in uniform and people in civilian dress, tend to highlight rather than bridge the gaps. In fact, the underlying point of then-and-now photography is that there should be a gap, a disjunction between the two component images that provides the buzz of interest and engagement.

For other kinds of then-and-now photos, the differences between the two images need to be highlighted rather than minimised. ABC Open’s Now and Then project, which ran from 2010 to 2012, invited contributors from regional Australia to send in images in which an old or vintage photograph is held up and rephotographed against a latter-day view of the same scene. Whatever the similarities between the two photographs, what counts is the change, because change is what delivers the story. But it is a fine line, because if the change has been too great, if there are no longer any clear markers from the original, the entire point evaporates. There are no links to make a story. The objective is not simply to recover the past, but also to reflect on what has happened since, and to make connections. Rephotography is a form of re-enactment, and it is the process of re-enactment, rather than merely looking, that provides a key to understanding. “By holding a historical image in its present day location and rephotographing it, you can create a window into past events and the lives of people who’ve stood on the same ground as you,” says a contributor to the site. This is photography defined as a warm medium, one that draws you in and changes your perceptions of yourself and your neighbours.

Inspired by the Flickr group Looking Into the Past, the project has gone on to inspire local communities to mount exhibitions of their photographed history and its relation to the present day, in centres from Hay to Hobart, Wagga to Warrnambool. The ABC’s own exhibition of then-and-now photographs, selected from public submissions to series 1 and 2 of the project, was mounted at the Museum of Sydney in 2012 and has recently been seen at the gallery of the Newcastle Region Library. The project’s top contributor, Pete Smith from Metford in the Hunter Valley, has spoken of his enthusiasm for the project, and for the way in which it prompted him to revisit and sort through the family’s store of photographs taken by his grandfather, selecting some superbly evocative examples with which to begin the process of rephotographing the past. “When I saw how my first now-and-then photo turned out, I felt really connected with the image that my grandfather had taken,” says Smith. “Before the Now and Then project these photos were just photos, they didn’t sort of have another dimension. Using this method, it brings them to life again.” By superimposing the past on the present, “you can see into the past.”

This is a common theme among practitioners and admirers of this form of photography: the image that results from holding an older photograph up in front of the original location, and capturing the visual conjunction in a second, composite image, is the route to understanding the past, and is presented as more successful and more satisfying than, for instance, the less technologically driven act of examining the vintage photo in isolation and imagining your way into it. The method emphasises the nostalgia inherent in looking at old photographs, and indeed the overriding impression that comes from contemplating a group of twenty-first-century now-and-then photos, like those that make up the ABC project, is one of loss, or regret for a simpler time. (The Chilean-born, New York–based Camilo José Vergara, widely acknowledged as one of the pioneers of the art of rephotography, describes himself on his website Tracking Time as “an archivist of decline.”) An Eden contributor to the ABC project, Peter Whiter, makes that sense of decline and loss eloquently explicit: the practice of rephotography reminds him of “how shameful it was for us to lose [Eden’s] Customs House built in 1848, demolished to make way for the Mobil fuel depot… Thankfully the hideous tanks are gone… but worst of all we lost a signature building.” Similarly, a photograph showing Les Lewis from Hay waterskiing down Lachlan Street after a heavy rain storm, taken by local photographer Gavin Johnston in the sixties and rephotographed by an anonymous contributor, includes the laconic note that the original image was taken “outside the Hiberian Hotel which was burnt down.”

BUT the optimism apparent in the NSW Bookstall Company’s postcards of one hundred years ago is not altogether absent from these more recent comparisons of past and present. A now-and-then photograph submitted to the ABC Open project by members of Hunter–Central Rivers Catchment Management shows an image of a derelict building – the schoolmaster’s house on Ash Island in the Lower Hunter River – overlaid on a latter-day rendition of the same building, now fully restored, including “its cedar doors and architraves, baltic pine ceilings, tallowwood floors, and Italian marble fireplaces.” The image is disconcerting at first because we have come to expect, as viewers, that the narrative of these composite photographs will be one of decline, yet here we see the ruined building as belonging to the past, and the pristine one as belonging to the present. Perhaps because it works against these expectations, it is somehow less convincing as a composite. It is the older, tumbledown version of the building that holds centre stage and sticks in our minds.

Then-and-now photographs can, like the one showing the rehabilitation of the house on Ash Island, be created by placing one image on top of another, larger one, and photographing the result. But the methodology preferred by the ABC project is to physically hold the old photograph up in front of the original location, and snap. This can be tricky, because the photographer is also having to concentrate on lining up the two elements so that the “markers” – the things that the two scenes have in common – match as accurately as possible. (“This is really hard,” concedes the ABC’s tip-sheet, “if you’re trying to hold the camera in one hand and the photograph in the other!”) There’s another option, but that creates more problems with lining up your markers: “you could get a second person to hold the photograph, but you’ll have to direct them carefully for positioning.” What this means, whether it is the photographer’s hand or a friend’s holding the older photograph, is that the final image has a winningly low-spec, low-tech quality to it, the hand holding the photo an overt and deliberate visual reminder of the presence and personality of the photographer, and the part he or she is playing in linking the present with the past.

In contrast to this (literally) hands-on quality, other then-and-now photographers are taking full advantage of technical innovation – sleight of hand, if you like – to highlight and dramatise the contrast between old and new, between before and after. Various clever means of transitioning or “sliding” or eliding one image into another, (methods which in many cases have roots that extend far back into the history of photography and more particularly of cinema), are deployed to establish both connection and contrast between present and past. In a Photography Then and Now series recently introduced by the Guardian newspaper, “you can leap through time as if by magic. Tap or click on the [historical] image to reveal the modern view, and drag or swipe to control the speed of its transformation.” The overall impact is different from that of viewing the two images side-by-side, or looking at a then-and-now photograph in which one image has been superimposed on another. Instead we watch as the first image, at a speed designated by us, slides into the second.

A purist might say that the sliding adds little, that the story is already there, in the individual photographs and in the viewer’s act of comparing them, and that to create a sense of movement and the passing of time by eliding one into the other is superfluous and even distracting. The Czech photojournalist Jan Langer embarked on a project, culminating in an exhibition held earlier this year in Vienna, in which he photographed, individually and in black-and-white, a group of centenarians, and compared his version of them with studio portraits taken in their youth. Langer shows the photographs side by side on his website, but they can also be seen in a format that blends the past and present images together. By means of a wipe effect, for instance, we can move a vertical bar back and forth across the frame, revealing more or less of the subject’s younger and older selves as one appears to grow out of and then subsume the other. We can stop the bar in the middle of the frame to create a composite portrait of young and old, a technique which probably now qualifies as a photographic genre in its own right, rather than a mere sub-branch of then-and-now photography. Yet in the end it is the stillness of the two photographs, placed side by side, that invites us to imagine the story of what happened in between. The process of eliding the two – the old photo of the young subject with the new photo of the old one – speeds up any biography we might imagine, and turns a 100+ life into a kind of instant makeover.

Whatever form it takes, then-and-now photography can be seen not just as a way of understanding history via a third party – photography – but also as a response to the problem of originality, of how to be new in an overcrowded and intensely competitive field. It is a problem that is probably starker in the practice of photography than in any other branch of the creative arts. A photographic idea, an idea like the one of combining younger and older selves into a single image, is no sooner thought of than copied, often within nanoseconds, making it impossible to establish who thought of it first. Then-and-now photography tries to bypass this disappointing fact by openly conceding originality to the earlier photograph. Instead it takes as its real subject the contemporary photographer’s response to that originality, of trying to see things as someone else saw them while knowing that the image – of the face, the street, the trees – can never be replicated, because time has moved on. Meanwhile, we as viewers are invited to fill in the spaces in between. •

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Accompanying Fleming on his journey was the extraordinary Ella “Kini” Maillart, a traveller and a journalist like Fleming, though unlike him a former captain of the Swiss women’s hockey team. Fleming and Maillart were already known to each other, as seems not unusual among the intersecting pathways of adventurous travellers in the 1930s, but it was by chance that they joined forces for their “escapade” in what was then more commonly referred to as Chinese Turkestan. Fleming is full of admiration for Kini, for her “courage, her endurance, her good-humour and her discretion.” A chapter describing Kini as she faces off and eventually triumphs over a group of menacing officials is given the simple title of “Heroine.” Maillart wrote her own account of their shared travels, Forbidden Journey, which appeared at about the same time as News from Tartary; while well enough received, it was rather over-shadowed by the work of her higher-profile travelling companion. Maillart was undaunted, either as traveller or writer. Her best-known book, which has recently been reissued in paperback by the University of Chicago Press, is an account of a remarkable journey she made a few years later, with a very different companion – or two companions, if you count the car they travelled in.

The Cruel Way first appeared in 1947, after Maillart had spent the war years somewhat improbably seeking enlightenment in India, and after her travelling companion had died, in odd circumstances, back home in Switzerland. The knowledge of those intervening events lends the book an added touch of nostalgia, not just for the threatened civilisations and ways of life depicted in the book, but also for the past lives of the travellers themselves. As travelling companions go, Annemarie Schwarzenbach provides something of a contrast – to put it mildly – with Peter Fleming. The daughter of a wealthy, conservative (and by some accounts pro-Nazi) Zurich family, she rebelled at an early age, adopting a bohemian way of life and beginning an association with the children of Thomas Mann that included a lifelong, and unrequited, infatuation with Erika Mann. Schwarzenbach tried her hand at photography and journalism and travel-writing and fiction and, to her eventual cost, at morphine. She provided Maillart with the car (a gift from her father), companionship and, contrary perhaps to the impression given in photographs of her frail, androgynous beauty, with practical skills of considerable value to the expedition. Maillart reveals at one point in The Cruel Way that it is Schwarzenbach (called Christina in the book in deference to the sensibilities of her mother) who knows how to double de-clutch, a skill she herself never quite mastered, despite her friend’s patient instruction. On the other hand, Schwarzenbach also loses the car keys in an incident that almost puts paid to the journey before it has really begun.

The Cruel Way begins with its own still moment, placed with a certain inevitability in the second paragraph of the book’s opening pages. “We were both looking through the small window-panes of [Christina’s] house in the Engadine,” Maillart tells us, when Christina revealed that her father had promised her a Ford. Maillart disrupts the stillness and springs into action. “A Ford!” she cries. “That’s the car to climb the new Hazarejat road in Afghanistan.” And so they do, after a long and eventful journey through central and southern Europe, Turkey and Iran, to arrive eventually in northern Afghanistan. Annemarie’s own version of the journey, consisting of newspaper articles and some rather self-consciously poetical pieces she wrote at the time, was published in book form in Switzerland in 2008, and in a translation by Isabel Fargo Cole entitled All the Roads Are Open: an Afghan Journey 1939–40, in 2011. It is interesting to compare that book with Maillart’s franker and more detailed version of their shared experiences on the road. Schwarzenbach, speaking perhaps from a greater sense of social privilege, or at least of social entitlement, tends to gloss over the difficulties of the journey in favour of a more airy and more worldly tone. She is impatient with those who question the wisdom of two women travelling alone through harsh and dangerous terrain, claiming that they experienced “just one unpleasant incident.”

As Fargo Cole notes, Maillart is significantly more straightforward about unpleasant incidents, which were often caused by the very male escorts who were assigned, by various officials along the way, to protect them. In fact it is Maillart’s straightforwardness – her willingness to question herself and her motives, and to acknowledge her own conflicting views of the scenes she encounters and the people in those scenes – that enlivens the book and keeps us reading on through the occasional chunks of undigested “background” and some clumsily rendered dialogue. Peter Fleming astutely remarks in News from Tartary that his friend Kini was “not a born journalist,” but in place of precision or style we get a clear sense of a remarkable woman trying to come to terms with herself and with the relationship between East and West. She is certainly tough – when she burns her hand in a rather nasty accident with a petrol stove, her response is to sprinkle some powder (“tannic acid every fifteen minutes”) on the wound and press on, holding her hand outside the car all the while “to let the lymph drip on the road.” She devotes herself heroically to her friend, with the objective of rescuing her from her addiction, but when she eventually has to acknowledge that she has failed in that particular quest, true to character she presses on. “I was tired of Christina,” she says towards the end, with bracing honesty.

Underlying every aspect of The Cruel Way is the question of gender, and the complex attitudes of both Schwarzenbach and Maillart to what would have been regarded at the time as their adoption of purely masculine prerogatives, not least among them the prerogative of travelling from Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford. It is not always clear to the people they meet that they are in fact women. Maillart is amused when Christina is mistaken for her chauffeur, and on another occasion for her son. Her own toughness seems to unsettle many of the men she encounters, who expect rather less confidence and self-assertion from a woman. While generally dismissive of officials of all kinds, Maillart is captivated by the Afghan tribesmen (as indeed is Christina), often describing them in language that is overtly sensual. On several occasions she uses the phrase “radiant manhood,” and in one of her more successful set pieces she watches admiringly as a group of tribesmen breaks into a spontaneous and uninhibited dance.

By contrast, the travellers’ rare encounters with other women – or perhaps more accurately the absence of such encounters – are unsettling, both for Maillart and for the reader. Maillart lyrically describes a market-day scene of bustling activity, in which “the white of turbans and the red of kaftans vibrated joyfully as if in a composition by a master-painter,” before adding, whether laconically or critically is difficult to tell, “as usual, not a woman to be seen.” (“We seemed to be in a land without women,” says Schwarzenbach in All the Roads Are Open.) Maillart is fully aware of the irony of the situation. The underlying reality of their journey – of two women travelling “in a land without women” – is one that she returns to repeatedly, from different and sometimes contradictory angles. The way from Switzerland to Afghanistan is cruel not least because it presents Maillart with a problem she cannot solve: how to reconcile her rejection of the suffocating and “suicidal” West (and, by implication, her final parting with the equally “suicidal” Christina), and her gratitude for the freedom the West (and, again by implication, Christina) has given her, a freedom she describes as “more necessary than life.” •

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The Mandelbaum Gate was first published in 1965, but it is set four years earlier, in 1961, in the swirling complexity of a Jerusalem divided between Israel and Jordan, a world of “sides” that are personal and emotional as well as geopolitical and religious. Named for the crossing point between the two countries, the novel is populated by a large cast of characters who seem stuck on to the backdrop and only tangentially connected to one another, people who are just visiting, or there for a finite time, or waiting apprehensively for something to happen, people who are forever crossing back and forth, or anxious to leave altogether and try somewhere else. They are people whose real stake in this part of the world is never clear, even to themselves.

It was in 1961 that the Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann was committed to public trial in Jerusalem for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Spark makes several passing references in the first half of the novel to the trial, foreshadowing a set-piece that comes just over halfway through, in which her heroine, Barbara Vaughan, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, attends the trial at the urging of others – a cousin and some recent acquaintances – who are keen that she should take the opportunity to see history being made. Barbara arrives in the courtroom at a point where proceedings have “entered a boring phase.” The period of gruelling personal testimony from eyewitnesses and survivors is over, and Eichmann, encased in the bulletproof glass booth that became one of the defining images of those years, is being examined “by his own counsel, in a long drawn-out routine, document by patient document.” Barbara is suddenly struck by the recognition that “this dull phase was in reality the desperate heart of the trial.” Picking up on faint echoes of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil,” coined in respect of Eichmann’s bureaucratic and dutiful efficiency as a mass murderer, Barbara is confronted by the impossibility of understanding. She switches to other, simultaneous translations – “French, Italian, then back to English” – to no avail. “What was he talking about?” she asks herself.

Vaughan is, by her own estimation, “a spinster of no fixed identity,” a woman who embodies contradictions – a half-Jewish Catholic convert (like Spark herself), prim but sensual, serious as well as frivolous, wavering yet determined. In fact, “Barbara Vaughan was in a state of conflict, like practically everyone else,” a phrase that has a special resonance in the context of Palestine, of disputed histories and disputed identities. Her motives in travelling to Israel are equally contradictory. She is coming to meet her lover, an archaeologist who is conducting a dig across the border in Jordan and who is subjecting himself, at her behest, to the arcane processes of the Catholic Church as he tries to seek an annulment of his first marriage. The annulment is necessary because Barbara, in deference to her faith, cannot bring herself to marry him without it, and indeed he does in due course gain the Church’s approval. But, in a manner typical of Muriel Spark, there is twist upon twist. The annulment is granted on the basis of a document that, unbeknownst to either Barbara or her lover, is a forgery. And besides, Barbara in effect declares, she would have married him anyway. It turns out that faith governs rules, rather than the other way around.

If Muriel Spark’s novels are lined up on a shelf, it is easy to spot The Mandelbaum Gate, even from the other side of the room. It is the one with the spine that is two or three times wider than any of the others. The novels that came both before and after are short, allusive, funny (and often macabre), formally inventive, perhaps even “experimental,” yet a breeze to read, the kinds of novels that are sometimes characterised, in a phrase that comes across as dismissive while pretending not to be, as “deceptively slight.” When it appeared, The Mandelbaum Gate seemed to be an exception, not in terms of its readability, which is equal to Spark’s other fiction, but in the way it suggests a deliberate attempt to write a (literally) substantial novel of a more conventional kind, with characters and plot set against the background of recent events, where figures who defined the era came and went – not only Eichmann and the judges and lawyers at his trial, but others too, like the smiling Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin who, as it happens, completed his orbit of the earth the day after the Eichmann trial began. There is even, in a rather different register, a passing reference to Australia’s objections in the early 1960s to Britain’s attempts to join the Common Market. (“Australia should keep her nose out of it,” says the British diplomat Freddy Hamilton sharply.) Yet for all these trappings of more conventional fiction, it is hard to see how, as Muriel Spark’s biographer Martin Stannard describes it, her publishers could have greeted the completed manuscript as a “rattling yarn with a ‘big’ central character and no stylistic tricksiness.”

Spark was always above tricksiness, but that does not mean that The Mandelbaum Gate is conventional in either structure or narrative. Part of the compelling readability of Muriel Spark’s fiction comes not from plot, which in the case of The Mandelbaum Gate is confusingly complex, nor from character, which is often shown to be contradictory and unpredictable, but from the feeling she instils of lives and events having a preordained course that they must follow, in response to a sense of inevitability and even destiny rather than mere chance or authorial whim. Information is withheld by Spark and then suddenly released, the future is revealed before the present or the past, the plot spins out into the realm of absurdity while remaining fixed in a recognisable world of actions and consequences. Violence, which is so embedded into the fabric of the contested territory that forms the novel’s background, but which seems quite remote from the experience of sojourners like Barbara Vaughan or Freddy Hamilton, can impinge just as easily on these visitors from far away. “I’ve got a premonition of bloodshed,” says Freddy, a refrain that echoes throughout the novel. But what Freddy with his premonitions does not foresee is that when, by means of an extravagant plot device, blood is indeed shed, it is not in the political maelstrom that is Jerusalem but somewhere that is, for Freddy, much closer to home. •

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Johnson foreshadowed a world – ours, in fact – in which information is infinitely accessible and infinitely seductive, there to be pursued for its own sake and for the brief satisfaction of knowing. “The exact height of Claremont Square escapes me for the moment,” says the narrator of Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, “though I could look it up.” And he does, leaving a blank space within the surrounding text to indicate that he is off somewhere, looking it up. We learn, as a result, that Islington’s Claremont Square is a hundred and fifteen feet above sea level, “but of course that is not really relevant for our purposes.”

B.S. Johnson is the best remembered of a group of British novelists who were writing in the 1960s and 70s – “we do not form a ‘school,’” said Johnson at the time, “the things we have in common are mostly generalities” – and who consciously played with and manipulated the form of the novel, rejecting what Johnson called the kind of “neo-Dickensian” fiction that continued to rely on “the crutch of storytelling.” Other names – Ann Quin, Rosalind Belben, Alan Burn, Eva Figes and the dauntingly inventive Christine Brooke-Rose, among others – are less well-known today, even though several of them have continued to publish into the twenty-first century and to receive admiring critical notices. (As Jonathan Coe puts it in his biography of Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, “they were not as good at putting their names about.”)

While there are signs that interest is reviving in these writers, they remain very much associated with a particular period, the late 60s and early 70s, when Johnson, extraordinarily prolific in journalism, drama, film and television as well as in fiction, was leading the experimental charge. (“I object to the word ‘experimental,’” he said, partly it seems because it suggested unsuccessful or half-baked.) When he died, by his own hand, in November 1973, shortly after the publication of Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, it seemed that a line had been drawn under the cause of formal invention, and that the realism – the “story-telling” – that Johnson so vocally despised was set to regain the upper hand, if indeed it had ever lost it. In 2013, on the fortieth anniversary of his death, with the re-issue by Picador of several of his novels and a selection of his prose and drama, as well as a compilation by the British Film Institute of “the films of B.S. Johnson” entitled You’re Human Like the Rest of Them, there is an opportunity to look again at works with an oddly anticipatory quality.

Johnson can be very funny, in ways that link him as much to the new humour of the late 60s and early 70s – in particular Monty Python – as to his fellow experimental novelists. In Python mode, the humour can range from cringe-making one-liners to the inherent comedy of a basic, underlying premise. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry is founded on such a premise, and it is a brilliant one. Christie, a young accountant, determines to apply the principles of double-entry bookkeeping not only to his work but to his life. This idea, of applying more widely the “sublime symmetry of Double-Entry,” comes to him in a flash of inspiration when, on his way home from work, he finds that his path is dictated by the presence of a giant, “no doubt speculative,” office block. In double-entry terms, this constitutes a debit to Christie for the offence received, and a credit to the office block for offence given. The books must be balanced. Christie “stopped and took a coin from his pocket and, keeping close to the wall whilst holding the coin down at arms length, he scratched an unsightly line about a yard long into the blackened portland stone facing of the office block.” Christie is credited; the world of business, as represented by the office block, is debited. “Account settled!”

As the novel progresses, the offences against him mount, as does Christie’s unquenchable anger, and so his “balancing” actions grow more extravagant and more extreme. Soon there are bodies everywhere. The outlines of a comedy, a political thriller, a love story, and a human tragedy are all contained within a novel that is barely 20,000 words long. “Who wants long novels, anyway?” asks Christie. Who wants description, or character, or plot? “Physical descriptions are rarely of value in a novel,” announces the narrator pompously. We are constantly being reminded that it is a novel that we are reading, that a writer is making all this up, that Christie does not exist other than in the mind of the novelist. It is quite an achievement therefore that, with all these reminders of the artificiality of what we are reading, Christie should emerge as such a powerful, and powerfully affecting, character. Johnson understands the paradox and, typically, plays with it, reminding us that he controls Christie’s fate and that, 150 pages in, he is keen to wrap things, and Christie, up.

For all Johnson’s railing against character and plot and the trappings of the traditional novel – why write that kind of novel, he asks, when it’s the sort of thing that can be done much more effectively on television? – he has a very traditional approach to the standing and authority of the writer. Not for him the participatory reader, the postmodern co-creator who brings himself or herself to the text. On the contrary, says Johnson in his combative introduction to the collection of shorter pieces Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973), “I want my ideas to be expressed so precisely that the very minimum of room for interpretation is left.” He goes on to issue a challenge: if a reader “wants to impose his own imagination,” says Johnson bluffly, “let him write his own books.” It is a challenge which, in the intervening years since 1973, many people have taken up; writing their own books, keeping their own web journals, taking their own photographs or making their own films, and in the process significantly complicating the relationship between writer and reader, creator and consumer. It is not the kind of relationship that Johnson is likely to have found comfortable or congenial.

Johnson was able to anticipate the rise of technology and the dangers inherent in the anonymity it confers. He detected too the essential fault lines inherent in the worlds of banking and business that have since become so glaring. (“Despite the modernity of computer-based accounts,” Christie observes sardonically, “the original investment in mahogany, marble and brass had been so great as to make it impossible to sweep it away and think about banking all over again.”) He also anticipated something else that the internet culture, a culture that he did not live to see, has fostered and encouraged; the rise and rise of anger and grievance. There is something very modern about Christie’s anger, and his escalating demands for recompense for all the wrongs – the debits – he is forced to incur. The world is out to get him and he must fight back, even though the world will win in the end. •

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Opera was a departure for Schwartz, whose prolific career had been up till that point focused on musical theatre and music for film. Following the spectacular success of Wicked on Broadway in the early 2000s, he had felt the need for a change of direction. His executive producer, Michael Jackowitz, recalls, in appropriately fourth-dimensional terms, what happened next: “I have a prediction to make,” he told Schwartz at the time. “I believe you are going to write an opera.” Schwartz had formerly considered Séance on a Wet Afternoon as the possible basis for a musical, but rejected the source material as too dark. Opera, on the other hand, seemed the ideal medium. It is clear from the opera itself, however, and from comments made by Schwartz on the opera’s website and elsewhere, that the key text that he looked to for inspiration was the 1964 film rather than the original novel, not least, perhaps, because of the somewhat operatic – and chillingly effective – performance of Kim Stanley in the film’s leading role, as the determined and increasingly deranged medium, Myra Savage.

Schwartz’s version of Séance on a Wet Afternoon was scheduled for inclusion in Opera Queensland’s 2012 season, but the production did not eventuate. Which is a pity, really, because an Australian production would have constituted, metaphorically at least, a kind of homecoming for Mark McShane, and with it an opportunity for him to be recognised as the original creator of the spookily memorable Myra, an achievement that has been almost entirely overwhelmed by the weight of subsequent adaptations. A kind of homecoming because, while having lived most of his adult life in Spain, on the island of Mallorca, Mark McShane was born, in 1930, in Sydney, where he spent at least part of his childhood and, as far as can be gleaned from the scant biographical details that are both publicly available and unambiguously expressed, a further period in young adulthood. The dust jacket of a later novel, And They Say You Can’t Buy Happiness, first published in 1979 under his alternative pen-name of Marc Lovell, has him rather coyly referred to as having been “born on an island north of Tasmania,” then travelling until the age of thirty, before settling “on another island – Mallorca.” As if to reinforce this impression of someone not quite of the mainland, and keen to emphasise his own distinctive, slightly off-centre trajectory in life, McShane has also laid claim to “Gypsy roots.”

McShane’s move to Mallorca from London, where he was living at the time, came at the very beginning of his literary career. His first novel, The Straight and the Crooked, appeared in 1960, to be succeeded in turn by one and sometimes two or three novels a year for the following three decades, with comedy, mystery, horror and the occult deployed in various combinations. Writing as Marc Lovell, McShane had some success in the seventies and eighties with a light-hearted series featuring a very tall detective called Appleton Porter. Donald Sutherland played Porter in the 1987 film The Trouble with Spies, directed by Burt Kennedy and based on a 1983 novel from the series. (The title of the novel, Apple Spy in the Sky, gives a flavour of McShane in more humorous mode.) But despite some fun involving stalwarts such as Ruth Gordon and Michael Hordern and Robert Morley, the film’s reception was muted and no sequels followed.

There is not much humour or fun in Séance on a Wet Afternoon. It is, apart from the occasional and mordant authorial aside, claustrophobically grim. Myra Savage is a medium who is convinced by her own special talents and who chafes at the lack of recognition. “Myra was a sensitive, a medium, a para-normal. And a genuine one; she believed in what she did.” But Myra, despite the genuineness of her self-belief, is not without theatrical instincts. In the past she has worked in “show business,” as assistant to a mind reader, party to all his tricks and deceptions. The experience serves her well when her deferential and devoted husband comes up with the idea that will grow into the Plan. Bill will kidnap a child – “borrow” is Myra’s word for it – and over the next few days they will extract a ransom from the distraught parents. Then Myra, displaying the gift of second sight, will lead the police to the money and the child, who will be found safe and unharmed. Myra’s reputation as a medium will be assured. “The fact that her reputation would rest on a fraud didn’t disturb her. It was cheating for an honourable end.” It all goes wrong, of course, but it is the way it goes wrong, and the way McShane succeeds in establishing a tightly ordered world that is doomed to fracture, that gives this short novel its considerable force.

Myra’s sparsely furnished home is a monument to geometrical precision. “In the centre of the hardcord carpet was a dining-table and four chairs; in the centre of the table was a wooden fruit bowl which held one shrivelled apple.” Myra is precise about language, too. “I think you had better change lock of hair,” she tells Bill as he compiles the ransom note from newspaper cuttings. The word “lock,” reasons Myra, suggests “curly,” and the hair of the little girl they have kidnapped is straight. “Better to say piece.” The couple argues over whether the ransom – twenty-five thousand pounds in cash – will fit into the particular kind of holdall bag they specify. They agree that ten thousand in fivers, and the rest in ones, should do the trick. As it transpires, the ransom doesn’t fit, but by then the whole scheme is well on the way to unravelling and it hardly matters.

In the Forbes film, the character of Myra communes with the spirit of her dead son, emphasising the link between her loss – a permanent one, were it not for the spiritual connection – and the temporary loss that she and Bill set about imposing on the parents of their chosen victim. The dead son is also incorporated into Schwartz’s opera, but he does not figure at all in the original novel. McShane forgoes this kind of dramatic highlighting, which seems in any case to sit more comfortably on the screen or the stage, in favour of a subtler and in its way quite moving evocation of the state of childlessness. Myra, who displays no aptitude for motherhood, sees the kidnapped child as a kind of miniature adult, a rival to be controlled and bested. Myra had “had little to do with children… and could never understand why they behaved so childishly.” Bill, by contrast, slips rapidly into paternal mode, worrying whether the little girl will be warm enough in the spare room they’ve prepared for her. Bill and Myra become a parody of parenthood, one indulgent, one stern. Bill tries to take their prisoner a cup of tea and a “slab of cake” but Myra prevents him. “She does not really deserve this,” says Myra.

A decade later, in 1972, Mark McShane produced a sequel to Séance on a Wet Afternoon called Séance for Two, in which the character of Myra Savage also appears. McShane goes to considerable lengths in Séance for Two to establish continuity with the earlier novel, rehearsing its plot in some detail, but by 1972 Myra’s moment had passed. She seemed then and seems now to belong naturally to that crucial moment when the fifties turned into the sixties, when conventional structures of domestic life were giving way to new ideas about family and careers and about the relationship between parents and children. Séance on a Wet Afternoon, with its hauntingly euphonious title, creates a drab and airless world in which frustration and resentment have nowhere to go. The adaptations have taken McShane’s plot and characters and redrawn them in bolder lines, but there is something about the flat matter-of-factness of the original novel’s tone, and of Myra and Bill’s capacity to view their crime as merely a logical and essentially harmless way of displaying Myra’s talents to the world, that retains the power to unsettle and disturb, and also, when the ending does come, to shock. •

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In his 2008 biography of Lewis, Semi-Invisible Man, Julian Evans reveals that the village of Farol is based on the marine enclave of Tossa de Mar, where Lewis and his family spent postwar summers and where he became progressively more immersed in and fascinated by local life and custom. The family members who accompanied him – his almost-estranged wife and their two young children, together with Lewis’s older son by an earlier marriage – do not appear in this volume of recollections. Instead Lewis is alone, observing, occasionally forming associations and even friendships, particularly with the enigmatic fisherman Sebastian, while attempting to emulate the stolidity and fatalism and sense of tradition that he so admires, even as he sees it slipping further away with each passing season.

Norman Lewis is one of those writers who, identified by admirers early on in his career as “underrated,” seems destined always to be so. Evans calls him “the best non-famous writer of his generation,” a man who, unusually, managed to build a successful career in business, selling cameras and photographic equipment and, from time to time, luxury cars, while also taking extended breaks in order to travel and to gather the raw material for his writing. The constant tension between the old and the new, the very subject of Voices of the Old Sea, is apparent in his own life – the cameras and the fast cars on the one hand, the fascination with pre-modern cultures on the other, explored in fiction and in the travel writing for which he is now best known. For Lewis, the old ways are doomed, and it is hard not to feel that this is part of their attraction.

Farol is “a village under the threat of death.” The fish are getting harder to find; people’s tastes, under the influence of tourism and urban fashion, are changing (a preference for the “cosmetic” means that customers are preferring a tasteless fish that looks good on the plate to one that is flavoursome but ugly); and jobs at the new hotel pay more in a few weeks than the fishermen can earn in a season. Meanwhile, in the rival, inland village of Sort, nature and circumstances are no kinder. The oak trees are dying, and with them will go the ancestral trade in cork. Tourism, an industry that thrives on appearances, is overtaking the traditional harvesting of the land and the sea. Yet Carmela, the woman who cooks Lewis’s daily lunch, who regularly performs the “miracle of the transmutation of whatever repellent materials she had come by into a delectable dish,” persists in the belief that it is not the appearance of the food that matters but its taste. “Don’t look, sir, whatever you do,” she warns Lewis as she prepares the ominously unnamed ingredients. “Appearances don’t count.”

It might be expected that the villagers of Farol and Sort, faced equally by the threat of modernity, would be natural allies. But they are in fact bitter and traditional rivals, each contemptuous of the other’s customs and ways of earning a living. The Sort people keep dogs and the Farol people cats (“Doesn’t an obsession with cats offend you?” asks a patriarch of Sort rhetorically), all of them in a state of semi-starvation. When a pack of dogs attacks and kills the chickens of Farol, the citizens take revenge. They fry sea-sponges in olive oil, then set them out to tempt the dogs. The dogs eat the sponges, their stomachs swell and rupture, and they die. In a poetic touch, one dog, arriving too late for the feast, is “castrated and sent home with a black ribbon around its neck.” It is the language of survival, a warning to stay away if you know what is good for you.

But the age-old battle between Farol and Sort is a mere sideshow, a diversion from the real battle between progress and tradition, between now and then. It is here that Lewis does rather load the dice. The modern world intrudes most spectacularly in the form of Jaime Muga, a vulgar gangster who proceeds to turn Farol into a temple of tourism and to take its people along with him. When the grown-ups resist his blandishments, he concentrates on the children, bribing them with toys and treats in the certain knowledge that they will do the work of converting their parents for him. Muga is fat, “with a massive torso and pendulous stomach underpinned by insignificant hips and bowed legs.” By contrast, the old world is represented by Don Alberto, an aged aristocrat who is ascetically and admirably thin. Like the fishermen, Don Alberto clings to the old rituals, even as the basis for them has been long forgotten. Some of these rituals he is alone in observing; he is in effect the last man standing. Lewis discovers when he visits him that “there was no bell or knocker on the door, and visitors were forced to stand there and call out in a loud voice “Ave Maria purisima,” this being an ancient custom of this part of the world observed by no one but Don Alberto.”

Voices of the Old Sea, appearing as it did in the mid-eighties, seemed to be of a piece with the widespread resurgence of travel writing evident in works by newer and younger practitioners such as Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin and Redmond O’Hanlon. Lewis’s eye for the quirky and surreal seemed very much in accord with this latest, postmodern iteration of the genre. He describes, for example, without further explanation, how a village courtesan’s “discreetly managed love-life now involved her with a dozen suitors, most of whom presented her with umbrellas, the best of which she always carried with her when herding her goats.” And Don Alberto, who blames the change and decay that he sees all around on the rise of cinema and “the widespread consumption of tomatoes,” is, in best eighties postmodernist fashion, a largely fictional character inhabiting a supposedly nonfictional world.

But Voices of the Old Sea is also very much a work of the fifties, based as it is on extensive notebooks kept by Lewis during that time. Lewis records the nobility – along with the cruelty – of the old ways, even as they are disappearing. There is prosperity to look forward to, but no happy ending. Even the Grandmother bows to the times, raising her accommodation tariffs and installing a flushing toilet to please the incomers. She plans an extension to her house that will, notes Lewis mordantly, “wreck the natural unplanned charm of the building and convert it into a blot on the landscape.” For readers in 1984, the blot on the Spanish landscape, created by tourism and rampant overdevelopment, was all too apparent. And for readers of this latest reissue of Voices of the Old Sea, the recent collapse of the Spanish economy is another blot, one that adds further resonances to Norman Lewis’s humane but gloomy observations from sixty years ago. •

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Arakcheev: Grand Vizier of the Russian Empire, appeared in 1969. Jenkins, who had learnt Russian during the war and studied it further at Cambridge, undertook his research for the biography while on post in Moscow, when he was still in his twenties and when the restrictions placed by the Soviets on embassy staff meant that he had time at his disposal. For a man whose professional duties required a certain self-effacement, Arakcheev was an interesting choice of subject. Military supremo under Alexander I, Arakcheev, who had a reputation for ruthlessness and cruelty (and formidable efficiency), was anything but self-effacing. But despite the larger-than-life nature of its subject, the book did not really find its mark. For scholars, it was not scholarly enough (“light and unsubstantial” was the judgement of one academic reviewer) and for the general reader the name Arakcheev itself was unlikely to stand out on the biography shelves. Arakcheev has thus gone the way of much historical biography, noticed on first appearance, but soon overtaken by the next wave, to be relegated in due course to the category of books available secondhand for a notional sum, one that hovers just above zero, plus postage.

It was three decades before Jenkins published again, and this time it was a memoir. A House in Flanders recalls the postwar summer he spent as a fourteen-year-old with an oddly assorted family in northern France, in their grand if faded country house that stood splendidly alone on the Flanders Plain. The mysterious connection between his own family – his parents, who are hardly present in the narrative, are described, as far as they are described at all, as cold and overly intellectual, and we discover only in passing that he has a younger brother – and the French family with whom he feels immediately at home, lies at the heart of the book, raising in an unforced way all kinds of questions about what it means to belong to a family, and what exactly is the nature of heritage.

A House in Flanders, which first appeared in 1992, was reissued in hardback (“with the addition of new material”) in 2010 by the publishing arm of the journal Slightly Foxed, resulting in a sufficiently encouraging reception to justify this new paperback edition. It is now getting on for ten years since Slightly Foxed began as a beautifully produced quarterly consisting of articles about unjustly neglected or forgotten books. Printed on cream paper and with commissioned illustrations on the cover, Slightly Foxed, with its knowingly retro yet up-to-date feel, caught the beginnings of what has become an ever-growing interest in recovered works, in books that have been pretty much buried by the ever-increasing tide of newness and are now in need of rescue. In tune with this trend, reissues have become another form of newness, supporting one of the major platforms of publishing, from Classics lists issued by the major imprints, to print-on-demand options, right through to facsimile editions of out-of-print works, churned out by companies with odd names and made available through Amazon. In the gaps are the smaller publishers, looking to build a loyal following through a combination of literary discernment and high production values.

In supplementing its periodical base by entering the reissue market, Slightly Foxed has chosen to focus in much of its list on a certain kind of autobiographical voice – elegiac, observant, stoical, quietly humorous. It is a voice that runs counter to the continuing fashion for misery memoirs (a fashion that seems to have been as much fuelled as checked by revelations surrounding the “truth” of many of these harrowing accounts of blighted lives) and it is a voice that is easy to get wrong. The quotation on the inside cover of A House in Flanders, taken from Dirk Bogarde’s over-egged review of the original edition, does not bode well in this regard: “a radiant book, a whole spectrum of colours and lights, of delights and elegances, of wistfulness and love.” Yet for all its dreamlike evocation of a long-ago summer, A House in Flanders is not the escapist son et lumière that this description suggests. Jenkins alludes to misery aplenty – to thwarted lives, to unhappy marriages, to the cruelties of war and the inevitability, for those whose lives are not cut short by violence, of mental and physical decline. Even within the comforting walls of the house in Flanders, there is, rising from the underground cesspit, a “weak but identifiable stench, inadequately masked by scent.”

A House in Flanders is tightly structured, each of the fourteen chapters concentrating on a particular inhabitant or familiar of the house, many of them elderly, and all of them presided over in one way or another by the matriarchal but childless Tante Yvonne, who is given both the first chapter and the last. The narrator’s younger self gains access, in an unobtrusively contrived way, to the thoughts and the behaviour of all these people; he is around when the crucial words are said or looks exchanged between lovers, he is invited along as a companion on private errands, he catches glimpses over a hedge or through a doorway, he is entrusted, in the manner of the young boy in L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953), with the delivery of secret messages. A House in Flanders is a book about the attractions and impossibility of keeping things as they are, and the attractions, in the face of the many ways in which life can go wrong, of routine and predictability. “I would have given everything,” says Jenkins, “for time to stand still.” (It is a sure hand that places “everything” rather than “anything” into that sentence.) Everyone has a book in them, it is said. Michael Jenkins had two, and one of them, A House in Flanders, is a real find. •

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Here were photographs that recorded a “life and culture” – most notably the life and culture of the goldfields of Hill End and Gulgong in western New South Wales – that had become part of the remote past, a kind of ancient civilisation. Here, wrote Burke, “were incredible numbers of negatives, records that were in due course to disclose every detail of the lives of our goldfields pioneers – the men, the women and the children, their homes, their business enterprises, and their mining shafts, their populous towns and larger cities.” In 2013, sixty years after Burke first entered that Egyptian tomb, photographs from the trove, newly and painstakingly brought to life from the glass-plate negatives using high-end digital scanning techniques, form the core of the State Library’s restored collection.

From the beginning, even before Bernhardt Holtermann came on the scene as patron and financial supporter, the photographs were intended to be a comprehensive record – of Australia, of a new landscape and of a new way of life. The primary motivation was, of course, commercial. Merlin, having tried his hand as an actor and a theatrical entrepreneur, had latched onto the new art of photography in the 1860s and, assisted as the business grew by the youthful Bayliss, established the American and Australasian Photographic Company. (In addition to adding an alliterative touch, the “American” appears to have served the same purpose as “international” or “global” would today, implying a broad sphere of activity and a worldly clientele.) Under this banner the two men travelled throughout southeastern Australia, lugging their cumbersome equipment and photographing people and places as they went.

Stealing a march on Google Street View by a century and a half, Merlin had the brainwave of documenting the streetscapes and individual buildings of Melbourne and the country towns of Victoria, and later of New South Wales, building up a portfolio of images that could, for a fee, provide would-be settlers and investors with an idea of what they could otherwise only imagine. “You could go into their studio in Sydney,” says the State Library of NSW’s Alan Davies, “pay a shilling, and look at their photographic library of Goulburn.” For the people who had no need to imagine Goulburn because they were already there – or in one of the many other towns that the photographers visited – these images, generally produced in the small, carte de visite format, were a record of the lives they had made and the buildings they had built, the success they had found or, standing upright for their portraits in their best Sunday suits or borrowed outfits, the success they hoped to find.

While Merlin and Bayliss were travelling and taking pictures, Bernhardt Holtermann, a young emigrant from Prussia, struck it lucky on the goldfields of Hill End and made his fortune almost overnight. A man with an eye to posterity, he began to think of ways to celebrate the country that had made him rich, and to encourage others to follow his example by leaving the old world for the new. It just so happened that Beaufoy Merlin was in town, plying his trade to the goldminers and shopkeepers of Hill End, Gulgong and surrounding areas, and so one of the great patron–artist relationships in Australian history was born, between a man who instinctively understood the power and potential of the new medium, and a man who understood exactly how it worked.

What became known as the Holtermann collection was intended at least partly for an international audience. Photographs taken by Merlin and Bayliss, at the behest and often the specific direction of Holtermann, were exhibited to considerable acclaim at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and the Paris Exposition Universelle Internationale in 1878. For all his focus on the future, it seems clear that Holtermann was also aware that the rapid changes he was part of – and that his project was so comprehensively documenting – were rapidly becoming part of the past.

Not only would many of the people captured in the photographs die early from accidents and illness and lack of available or competent medical care (indeed, Merlin, Bayliss and Holtermann were themselves all destined to die in their forties) but also the streetscapes and urban panoramas that formed a substantial part of the collection would very soon be historical documents. In the case of Hill End, the buildings that went up quickly to service the new gold town went down again almost as quickly, after the rush was over and the caravan had moved on.

Despite the rapid pace of change, what strikes a viewer now is the quality of stillness in the photographs, the way time seems to have stopped to allow the images to be captured with such sharpness. The deliberate and posed nature of early photographs can be unsettling, not least because we have gotten out of the way of stillness and have become used to the kind of photography, whether of wars or weddings or the natural world, that puts us into the middle of the action and invites us to continue animating it in our minds. The capacity of modern digital photography to record the instant has meant more and more photographs of more and more instants, sometimes staged, sometimes drawn from nature.

Add to this the popularity in recent years of such innovations as the cinemagraph, in which a portion of an otherwise static image can be made to move continuously (hair blowing in the breeze, champagne bubbling); or the one-second video (contestants in the Montblanc Beauty of a Second competition of 2010–11, which ran under the oversight of film director Wim Wenders, were invited to “seize the moment”); or the up-to-six-seconds format of the recently launched Vine, a visual companion to Twitter “that lets you capture and share short looping videos.” This blurring of the distinction between still and moving pictures seems like a logical extension of our expectation that the photograph should convey a sense of movement, a sense that everything is going unstoppably forward.

The formal pose has come to seem artificial, or a deliberate aesthetic choice on the part of the photographer, rather than being dictated by the limitations of the medium. At the most basic level, there is no longer any need for the sitter to sit still. Keast Burke admired Merlin for his ability to capture his subjects with “little sense of strain” in their bearing or expressions, despite the requirement for them “to ‘hold it’ for five or ten seconds.” (Burke put this down to Merlin’s habit of being “always gentle, persuasive, artistic and confident.”) To achieve that level of composed stillness today, to recapture something of the insight of the traditional studio portrait by exploiting or perhaps bypassing the self-consciousness of the modern, media-savvy sitter, calls for increasing inventiveness on the part of the photographer. Indeed, some of the best contemporary photography does just that, reworking the portrait and reinventing stillness – by echoing older practices of dressing the subjects in costumes or arranging them in tableaux, for instance, or by catching the subject unawares, as in Tim Hetherington’s Afghan war photographs of sleeping soldiers.

IN HILL END, in the early 1870s, this quality of stillness was inherent in the very business of producing a photograph. These photographs were made rather than taken, by means of a long process that stretched from the coating of the glass plate, itself a delicate and laborious business that was not always successful, to the development in sunlight of the final image. It was taxing work, requiring enormous skill and patience on the part of the photographer. In one such composition, a wedding portrait (below) of the seventy-one-year-old Dr John O’Connell, medical officer at Hill End Hospital, and his twenty-four-year-old bride Theresa, née Cummins, the figures seem pasted onto the background, unconvincingly linked to one another by means of the bride’s hand resting lightly on the groom’s shoulder, their pose of intimacy and physical connection telling us that this portrait shows not a father and daughter, as a first glance might suggest, but a couple about to embark on married life.

Dr John O’Connell, medical officer, and his twenty-four-year-old bride Theresa, née Cummins, at Hill End. State Library of New South Wales

Because blue or very light-coloured eyes did not reproduce well in photographs of the day, Theresa has something of a blank, almost frightened and otherworldly look, in contrast to her husband, whose darker eyes and fixed stare suggest self-confidence and purpose. That impression is almost certainly false: the library’s label quotes an item in the Hill End Observer lamenting O’Connell’s professional shortcomings, including the “lack of ‘a firm, steady hand.’”

While the doctor appears nailed to the floor, Theresa’s otherworldliness is compounded by the fact that she seems on the point of floating upwards to the ceiling – an effect that probably derives, ironically enough, from the lack of a ceiling to float up to. The absence of a roof meant that natural light, all-important to the making of a photograph, could stream in unimpeded. In what was in effect a pop-up studio, there may even have been reflectors in use, or some kind of device that allowed the intensity of the light to be managed according to whether the day was sunny or overcast. The result is an almost over-illumination from above of Theresa’s face and a corresponding darkening of the area below the hem of her dress, producing the impression that, rather than holding onto her husband, she is about to let go. Theresa was to die seven years later, at the age of thirty-one, following a stillbirth.

So important was it for the subjects of the photographs to remain still for the duration of the exposure that they were literally clamped to the spot, by means of an instrument that resembled a hatstand. The device can be seen most clearly in a portrait of Bernhardt Holtermann (below) from 1875, in which he stands proudly beside the height-adjustable device, his hand gripping and thus obscuring the small padded wings that fitted to the back of the subject’s head to hold it firmly in place. A second set of metal feet is visible behind him, presumably part of the contraption holding up the background screen but also, it is tempting to think, helping to hold up Holtermann. The photograph was part of a dummy run for several montage images of Holtermann standing, with proprietorial air, next to the so-called Holtermann Nugget. The actual nugget had long since been crushed and dispersed but not before it had been photographed for posterity shortly after its discovery by employees of Holtermann’s mine.

The wealthy, larger-than-life visionary Bernhardt Holtermann, who funded much of the two photographers’ work. State Library of New South Wales

By substituting the nugget for the head-clamp and adding a more impressive background – the veranda of Holtermann’s North Sydney mansion, built with the proceeds of his success on the goldfields – Holtermann’s permanent association with the nugget was assured. But in the context of the making of the entire collection, it is not so much this proto-Photoshopped image of Holtermann and his nugget that commands our attention, as the original template of Holtermann and the “hatstand,” which serves as a reminder of the effort – on the part of both photographer and sitter – that went into these photographs.

Nowhere else in the collection do we see the head-clamp so clearly and entirely, but there are occasional hints and glimpses. Sometimes the device is covered by drapery; more often it can be inferred as lurking behind a false skirting board. A gap between the board and the wall served to accommodate the feet of the device; sometimes this gap is made visible by the angle at which the subject – the diminutive Miss Jeffree, for example – is viewed by the camera. And sometimes, as in the portrait of the young August Godolf on his top-of-the-range tricycle, or that of On Gay, a snappily dressed Hill End shopkeeper – shown with one hand holding an umbrella, thus affording himself additional stability –  the trunk of the clamping device can just be seen, not quite hidden by the human subject in front of it.

Children, then as now, found it particularly difficult to keep still, whether clamped or unclamped, to the extent that many studios of the time charged double for photographing anyone under the age of four. For parents, the price was worth paying, not least because the resulting photograph acted as a kind of hedge against the real possibility that their child would not survive into adulthood. The State Library exhibition that launched the restored photos included a greatly enlarged digital image of the children of Hill End School, taken in 1873, the year after the school was built; the resolution of the photograph is so fine that it is possible to zero in on the faces of individual children, separating them from their fellows and singling them out from the crowd, leading us to wonder what became of them, and whether they survived into adulthood.

All 3500 images from the Holtermann collection can be viewed online. Many are of buildings or open country rather than people, but a surprising number combine human figures with views of the built and the natural environments, something of an innovation by Merlin. People are photographed outside their homes or shops or pubs, or pausing in the middle of the street; in the latter case, when there was nothing handy for the townspeople to lean on, it was harder to keep still and the faces as a result are often blurred. The facades of buildings, on the other hand, could serve as a kind of outdoor head-clamp, as shopkeepers and customers leant for support against the structures behind them. In the Hill End and Gulgong photographs in particular, the people and the buildings seem almost to be propping each other up.

AFTER Beaufoy Merlin died, in 1873, Bayliss stepped naturally into the role of lead photographer. With Holtermann’s encouragement, he became even more adventurous technically, producing large and sometimes gigantic glass plates of up to a metre by a metre-and-a-half, the largest ever made. The urban and harbourside panoramas of Sydney and other places that Bayliss, often actively assisted by Holtermann, captured with these super-sized plates still have the power to thrill today, with their comprehensiveness of detail and their extraordinary level of resolution, impressive even by the standards of twenty-first-century digital imaging technology. The collection itself, including these startling panoramas, nevertheless represents a mere fraction of the images that were made by Merlin and Bayliss. The vast majority have disappeared, and it is highly unlikely that there are any more garden sheds.

But the images that have survived make up a remarkable resource, for historians not only of photography but also of economics, agronomy, architecture, manners, costume and food, as well as, more generally, for anyone interested in Australia’s past. For that we should thank Holtermann, as the enthusiast and visionary and provider of crucial funds; Bayliss, who progressed from a sixteen-year-old apprentice to Beaufoy Merlin to an outstanding photographer in his own right; and most of all Merlin himself, who was the one who started it all. He died before the jumbo plates and the panoramas brought international attention to the enterprise, but the entire project grew out of his talents as an entrepreneurial, an artistic and a technical wizard. It is no wonder that after toying early on in his career with various spellings of his name – Murlin, Merling, Muriel – he settled on Merlin as the one that seemed the best fit. •

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These two worlds might have remained quite separate, at least on that particular weekend, but for a chance meeting at the estate swimming pool, where Astor and his guests, taking an evening tour of the grounds, came across Ward’s party as they splashed and frolicked in the water. In the recently published An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, Richard Davenport-Hines describes John Profumo’s first, crucial sighting of the attractive, dark-haired woman who was shortly to become famous; she “had just lost her swimsuit or the bra part of her bikini in a prank, and had swathed herself in a towel. Forty years later, and not reliably, Profumo recalled that Astor slapped her backside playfully and said, ‘Jack, this is Christine Keeler.’”

As Davenport-Hines makes clear in his bleakly entertaining account of the scandal that arose from this chance meeting between a young girl and a middle-aged man who hadn’t grown up, the Profumo affair, as it unfolded over the next few years, marked the final, very public collapse of many things: of faith in the status quo and confidence that one’s betters know best, of routine deference to authority, of trust in institutions and the people who run them. The origins of the collapse could, of course, be traced back far beyond that Saturday evening in July 1961, to the general ham-fistedness and consequent humiliation of the governing classes over the Suez crisis, or to the social upheavals occasioned by the second world war, or to the sweeping away of Edwardian certainties occasioned by the first. Indeed, looking back now on the Profumo affair, it seems almost ordained that the agent of this explosive exposure of the weaknesses and hypocrisies of “the system” should, following in the footsteps of those earlier conflicts and conflagrations, have been the war minister.

For many writers of the period, the story of the twentieth century was already a story of things going wrong, of vast disparities between public and private behaviour and between the larger political sphere and the messy business of human relations. There was something of a fashion for looking at these questions through extended sequences of novels; in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy (1952–61), for instance, or Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy (1960–65) or Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet (1957–60) or, a little later, Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet (1965–75). Mixing history and fiction, broad sweep and sharp detail, the focus of these multi-volume works is on individuals participating – often from the sidelines – in great events, their own loves and lives taking precedence over social movements and historical processes they do not properly understand and cannot in any case control. Among the less well-known of these forerunners to the boxed set – less well-known, perhaps, because it never got past the second of a projected three, four or possibly five volumes (reports vary) – is The Human Predicament, by Richard Hughes, the first volume of which, A Fox in the Attic, was first published in 1961 and has now been re-issued by Atlantic books.

Richard Hughes was then, and remains today, best known for his first novel, A High Wind in Jamaica, published in 1929 when he was not quite thirty. A High Wind in Jamaica tells of a family of schoolchildren who are travelling unaccompanied from Jamaica to England when their ship is attacked and boarded by pirates. Deploying a complex set of narrative devices, Hughes creates a world that upends our expectations both of children and of pirates. To the consternation of many readers at the time, Hughes depicted the children as essentially amoral and ruthless, more than a match for the pirates. Hughes retained all his life a special affinity for children and for the child-like qualities in grownups, but it was a cool kind of affinity through which he also displayed his own streak of ruthlessness. His daughter Penelope Hughes begins her 1984 memoir of her father by recalling a game he played with her and her companions in a stream near where the family lived in Wales. “My father would hold his breath and count to sixty while we sat ourselves on arms and legs, and crowded onto his back. Then the earthquake would begin. He would roll us into the water brushing us off like gnats.” It’s an image, of human interaction and isolation coexisting with one another, of the kind that recurs repeatedly in The Fox in the Attic.

We first see the hero of The Fox in the Attic, Augustine Penry-Herbert, in a brilliant opening scene in which he is tramping across the Welsh sea marshes, carrying the corpse of a child over his shoulder. Augustine is twenty-three years old, of an age with the century. When news of the girl’s death by drowning spreads abroad, the mere fact that Augustine has discovered the body makes him, in the minds of the nearby villagers, somehow responsible; their hostility, and Augustine’s native restlessness, cause him to leave behind the great house he has inherited and travel to Germany to stay in the Schloss of his relatives, the von Kessens, where the fox that lives in the attic cries out unnervingly in the night, and where his visit coincides with the Munich putsch of November 1923.

Put baldly like that, The Fox in the Attic sounds like a historical novel of a fairly straightforward kind, but in fact it is anything but. Hughes did indeed go to extraordinary lengths to get the historical details right, blending actual people – including, in a memorable characterisation, Adolf Hitler – and events seamlessly together with invented ones. But the result is a series of interlocking vignettes rather than anything like a linear narrative, in which characters come and go, sometimes attracting our sympathy and attention and interest, only to drift out of the frame, never to return, or else to pop up again many pages later, when they have been forgotten by all but the most alert reader.

The tone of the novel’s narration varies wildly, from portentously philosophical (“each knows his own I-ness”), to lyrically violent (“blood, running in its fine gold, running down till it crimsoned the snow”), to absurdist (“Aneurin was a coasting-smack skipper whose ships always sank and who had now set up as a dentist”), to arch (“the dog’s name I forget”). Yet the overall effect is both precise and panoramic, painting a picture of a world on its way to an unhappy ending, driven there by the “diseased” (Hitler and his cohorts) and the deluded (young Nazis trapped by an idea), unconsciously abetted by the idealistic and the naive. A successor volume, The Wooden Shepherdess, which takes the action to the brink of the second world war, appeared twelve years later, in 1973, but Hughes did not live to continue the projected sequence to its conclusion.

Yet even without the successor volumes, actual or planned, The Fox in the Attic stands impressively on its own as a despairing and humorous chronicle of how adults behaving as children (Augustine remains a kind of perpetual adolescent throughout both volumes), combined with the dominating role of chance in our lives, will lead, more often than not, to tears before bedtime. We see Augustine fall self-absorbedly in love with his German cousin Mitzi without ever registering that her mind is on other things. Despite his determination to declare his love, circumstances conspire against him and he keeps on missing the opportunity to speak, until it is too late. Which is, the novel suggests, probably just as well. These youthful or youth-like impulses can have unforeseen and unwelcome consequences. In a version of the butterfly effect, an impulsive action – a chat with a girl by a swimming-pool, for example – can turn out to be very consequential indeed. •

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Andy McSmith, in his sharp-eyed chronicle of the 1980s in Britain, No Such Thing as Society (2010), points to the way in which the characters in The Young Ones behaved “like a dysfunctional family.” There was “a father figure whose plans for self-betterment never worked, a put-upon housewife and two uncontrollable egocentric teenagers,” but this “family” was in fact made up of four students from “Scumbag College,” trapped together in a shared house. “The mother figure,” notes McSmith, “was a depressed hippie named Neil… forever preparing meals of lentil stew.” The Young Ones took Monty Python-like outbursts of furious irrationality and made them the dominant theme. Moments of connection or affection between characters were occasionally and briefly glimpsed, only to be ruthlessly squashed, often literally, by collapsing walls or exploding objects or other self-inflicted disasters.

What strikes a viewer now is the sheer, unfocused anger of it all. Whether it is in the flamboyant tantrums of the self-styled anarchist-cum-revolutionary Rick (Rick Mayall), who manages to be anarchic but never revolutionary, or in the brilliantly portrayed passive aggression of Neil (Nigel Planer), these embodiments of rage are all contained within the framework of a parodic family, a framework its members resent but cannot bear to break away from, not least because they have nowhere else to go. It is all very eighties. The traditional family seemed, to many people, to have outlasted its natural span, but it wasn’t at all clear what, if anything, was going to replace it.

Lessing’s The Good Terrorist, which is being reissued, along with others of Lessing’s works, by Fourth Estate, also focuses on a shared house and on a dysfunctional, cobbled-together family, whose members span the full range from ineffectual revolutionary to passive-aggressive housemother and who are, to a man and a woman, very, very angry. The housemother is Alice, her name redolent of childhood and innocence, of Alice in Wonderland, alice bands, and “they’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace/ Christopher Robin went down with Alice.” Alice lives in a wonderland of her own making, in which she combines an almost supernatural perceptiveness about some things with a wilful obtuseness about others. “You just don’t understand,” says Alice’s mother with weary exasperation, as she tries for the hundredth time to force some admission from her daughter of the leading part Alice has played in the downward spiral of her mother’s life.

Alice, we are told in the first few pages, is “full of the energy of hate,” though we never quite discover the cause of this hatred, other than a childhood and a family life gone wrong. She is thirty-six, a forensically precise choice of age on Lessing’s part. She is young enough (just) to be seen as youthful, depending on who is looking and on how Alice is feeling on the day, but older by far than the housemates among whom she lives; “nearly all were under thirty.” She is surviving on borrowed credibility; it won’t be long before the childlike Alice is too old for the part she is playing. Among the more youthful housemates is Jasper, Alice’s partner in a kind of revolutionary mariage blanc. (Alice is not interested in sex, and anyway Jasper prefers men.) Like Alice, Jasper is angry. In one resonant episode, Alice imagines him at the scene of a picket, “as she had seen him so often, his pale face distorted with a look of abstracted and dedicated hate.”

It’s a hate directed at the general “shittiness” of everything, an expression of the need to sweep away all the filth. Shit, indeed, is almost a character in the novel, appearing in several set pieces that remain, even in these unshockable times, difficult to read with complete equanimity. When Alice first enters the house, planning to move with Jasper in to one of the spare rooms, she discovers that the council has blocked the cisterns with cement, and that the top floor is being used by the existing occupants as a toilet.  The smell is overpowering. Alice, almost single-handedly, carries the buckets of waste down the stairs and buries the contents in the garden, before organising for the plumbing and other services to be restored. When you’re plotting the overthrow of the existing order (Britain “is ready for the bulldozers of history”), Alice reasons, it is best not to draw too much attention to yourselves.

In exploring the origins of terrorism and the impulse to tear everything down, to sweep away this “shitty life,” Lessing suggests the ways in which these young and youngish comrades are trying to recreate something that has, in its earlier incarnations, deeply disappointed them: to create a more effective, more successful version of family life than the ones they experienced as children. Lessing is not so unsubtle as to trace the actions of all terrorists and revolutionaries back to an unhappy childhood, but she does show how the urge to destroy is as much, if not more, about trying to recapture a lost ideal as it is about creating a new one. And so Alice gradually turns the filthy squat into a family home, to the point where it becomes an iteration of its former self, from a time when a real family lived there. Not only does she bury the shit in the garden, she cleans the floors, dresses the windows (with curtains stolen from her mother), and places flowers artistically in the kitchen.

Like Neil in The Young Ones, Alice also cooks endless soups and stews for the household. The comrades go along with Alice’s domestic efforts and even help out from time to time. They appreciate the hot water and the flushing toilets. But all this comfort and domesticity has its downside; it is a seductive lure, one that could deflect them away from revolutionary action. “This business of having a nice clean house and a roof over our heads is beginning to define us,” worries one cadre. Meanwhile, Alice chats with a neighbour over the fence, in a conscious approximation of suburban normality. Lessing acutely conveys an Alice who is acting and not acting; she is impersonating a suburban housewife, without being able to acknowledge how close her own idea of her ideal self is to the part she is playing.

“I think it’s quite a funny book,” Lessing volunteers, seemingly as an afterthought, in an interview with the Paris Review conducted in 1988. The interviewer’s reaction is recorded in the transcript. “Really?” he says, the question mark suggesting that “funny” may not, for him, have been the first word that sprang to mind. Yet the novel is, in a way, a comedy of manners, in which the characters self-consciously play parts, act out the revolution, make up stories about themselves, and put on voices. Alice, almost uniquely among her comrades, usually speaks with her own voice; it is “basic BBC correct, flavourless.” But even Alice sometimes adopts her “meeting voice,” which she has learned is “necessary to hold her own.” Meanwhile, the unbalanced Faye, the only one of the group who has actually read anything very much (she’s “particularly well up on Althusser”) speaks with a bewildering variety of voices. “What accent was that?” Alice asks herself at one point, as Faye gets into her histrionic stride.

Roberta, Faye’s lover, also uses a made-up voice, this one “modelled on Coronation Street, probably.” The dim-witted Bert, who leads Jasper into several humiliating encounters as they try to offer their services to the IRA and then to the Soviet Union, has adopted a working-class accent, but Alice is not fooled. “Alice could hear in it at some moments the posh tones of some public school.” Slowly but surely these apparently harmless revolutionaries, busily playing vocal dress-ups and being angry, find themselves travelling down the road towards irrevocable action, with Alice, half-perceptive and half-blind, trailing along behind them.

Since The Good Terrorist was first published, the IRA has come to the table and the Soviet Union has long collapsed, and the word terrorism is now more closely associated with other kinds of anger than that expressed by Alice and her friends. Yet despite these geopolitical shifts and the passing of the decades, it remains one of the essential guides to the meaning and motivations of modern terrorism, a study in the potentially explosive mixture of anger, frustration and human frailty. •

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Maurois’s novel Climates, recently reissued by Other Press in a new translation from the French by Adriana Hunter, has something of the same, contradictory effect. It first appeared in 1928 in France, where it was a huge popular success, and then, in various translations, throughout Europe. The emphasis of Climates is on the interior life and on romantic love, rather than on the daily demands of work (a character is airily described, in one of the novel’s passing references to earning a living, as doing “a bit of everything” – “phosphates, ports, mines”), of friends and family, of social and political action. It is not difficult to see how the novel could be read as a form of escape from these less rarefied concerns. Yet Climates manages to be both escapist and serious, with serious things to say about love and desire and realising your romantic ideals, topics that are almost impossible to write about today without being more explicit, or more ironic, or funnier than Maurois would ever have dreamt of being. In a sympathetic introduction, Sarah Bakewell, best known for her splendidly individual life of Montaigne, How to Live (2010), declares Climates to be one of those “miniature masterpieces” of a genre in which French writers have always excelled. “Ever since Pierre Abelard’s twelfth-century Historia Calamitatum, they have been writing lucid, passionate first-person accounts of their loves.”

The title of Climates refers to the atmosphere that prevails as love takes its course; the atmosphere or climate is what makes the difference, and the climate never seems to be quite right. The novel is structured in two halves. “Part One: Odile” is in the form of a letter written by a young man called Philippe Marcenat, the son and heir of a wealthy businessman, in which he describes his great love for his first wife. It is addressed to Isabelle de Cheverny, the woman who is about to become his second. In part two, written some years later, Isabelle responds. By this time, the marriage roles have reversed; Isabelle is obsessively in love with Philippe but his attentions are elsewhere. In telling her side of the story, Isabelle quotes from time to time from Philippe’s journals so that we continue to hear his voice. Throughout the book we hear Philippe reflecting on himself, as he tries to write himself towards an understanding of his conflicting emotions. But writing, rather than leading him towards this understanding, just seems to get in the way.

Philippe’s emotions, his understanding of the nature of love, are themselves derived from the writings of others, from the ideas he has formed from literature and art. As a boy, he is given a storybook called Little Russian Soldiers, in which “a gang of schoolboys… choose a fellow pupil as their queen.” He spends the rest of his life trying to capture the idealised image of this regally beautiful girl, to find a real rather than an imagined woman who embodies it. It is an uphill task, a continuing conflict between art and life. Philippe is a great one for aesthetic order and for the expression of good taste. He not only reads books, he arranges them. In his room, as a young man, he has a book by Spinoza on his mantelpiece, along with one by Montaigne. “Was that out of a desire to surprise,” he asks himself, “or a genuine love of ideas?” The more we learn of Philippe, the more we see that he is constrained by his own self-consciousness and by his inability, however much he desires it, to see beyond himself. Philippe, says the observant Isabelle, is “one of those readers who look only for themselves in what they read.” He is quite unable, despite his best efforts, to grant the objects of his admiration – a book or a painting or a woman – their own independent existence.

Philippe wrestles with this problem, sometimes in terms that are spectacularly arrogant and self-regarding. “It seems,” he muses, that “women’s minds are made up of the successive sediments laid down by men.” Coming so early in the novel, this idea might well be enough for many readers to condemn Philippe to the reject pile. In fact Philippe inhabits a world in which desire is as much cerebral as physical, in which both men and women maintain their love by pretending that the object of their affections is something that he or she is not, someone who can be moulded into an ideal. Art (or artifice) and love are inextricably tied together, and not necessarily in a good way. “We all like naturalness, especially in love, and we seldom meet it,” Maurois later lamented in his collection of essays Seven Faces of Love (1947). Art influences the way we love, just as love does for art. Philippe’s first wife, Odile, whom he has half-suffocated by insisting on seeing her as someone she is not, falls in her turn for a caddish naval man. Inevitably, she loves him more than he loves her. It changes how she looks at both life and art, clouding her judgement. What infuriates Philippe more than anything is the way Odile, in her infatuation with the dashing mariner, will admire “the most banal engravings if they happened to be of water or boats.”

The younger characters, and in particular Philippe and Isabelle, are contrasted with members of the older generation, who follow strict rules of engagement and do not allow their feelings to interfere unduly. Some of the best passages focus on Philippe’s parents; his father, he records, “abhorred sincerity” and the giving way to emotions. “In our house,” recalls Philippe of his childhood, “it was taken for granted that all conventional feelings held true, that parents always loved their children, children their parents, and husbands their wives.” His parents inhabit a nineteenth-century world in which thinking makes it so. Philippe, on the other hand, is a child of modernity, and a slave to overthinking, an affliction that ensures that nothing ever stays fixed and defined for long, but is always changing according to the climate.

In his memoirs, Maurois expressed some surprise that of all his books, including his many literary and political biographies, Climates should have proved to be the most popular. This must be partly because of the way in which Maurois identifies the fault line between the old and the new while recognising, for an audience that wasn’t sure itself, that new is not necessarily better. Philippe, the modern man, is doomed to find love elusive and to remain forever dissatisfied; whereas, he notes ruefully, his “father’s marriage of convenience… had become a marriage of love.” •

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It was not just the settings that reminded readers of the work of Shiva’s elder brother, V.S. Naipaul. There was – and is – something about the tone of urbane weariness, of the assumption that nothing good will come of it, whatever “it” might be, that suggests, if not exactly imitation, then a kind of familial deference. Patrick French, in The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul (2008), puts it rather more strongly. “He was a gifted writer,” says French of Shiva Naipaul, “but his books reverberate with the echo of his brother’s voice.” It is a harsh judgement, made harsher by the elegance of the formulation and the preliminary concession that Shiva was, after all, gifted.

And there is an extra sting: that Shiva Naipaul, who focused in his novels on the dilemma of those obliged to imitate, to strive from the colonial margins for a metropolitan authenticity that will forever elude them, might himself have been just such an imitator, never quite finding his own voice. There are those who will put the opposite case; Christopher Hitchens, for instance, reviewing the Patrick French biography in the Atlantic, took the opportunity to identify Fireflies as “one of the great tragicomic novels of our day,” though it is perhaps significant that the opportunity arose in the context of discussing the other Naipaul.

Shiva Naipaul died, of a heart attack, in 1985, at the age of forty. He had published one more novel, and a volume of short stories, in the twelve years between The Chip-Chip Gatherers and his premature death, but for the most part he focused on journalism and non-fiction – on travel writing and caustic commentaries on the Third World and what he saw as the determination of Western liberals to romanticise the distinctly unromantic. In Black and White (1980), he wrote about the Jonestown massacre, the induced suicide in 1978 of almost 1000 adherents of the People’s Temple, who had followed their leader from California, where their activities were attracting unwelcome attention, to the remote reaches of Guyana, where they would build a socialist utopia. Echoing a theme from the novels, such notions of escape are merely delusions.

In the 1970s, when Shiva Naipaul was making his reputation, it was not uncommon for the two writers with the distinctively euphonious surname to become mixed up in the public mind. Such confusion is unlikely now. V.S. Naipaul is a Nobel Prize winner, a writer whose extraordinary achievements are widely acknowledged, even by those who condemn the man for his alleged sins, of ruthlessness and ingratitude and exaggerated self-regard. Shiva is the other one, remembered largely for his first two novels, which have now been reissued as Penguin Modern Classics. Of the two – novels, that is – Fireflies is the funnier, even if the fate of its central character, Baby Lutchman, is overwhelmingly sad.

The Chip-Chip Gatherers (“a truthful, compelling, tragic, painfully comic masterpiece,” says the review quotation on the cover), is a more complex blend of comic and tragic. It is also a more original novel, forsaking any thought of a hero or a heroine or even a central character, skipping instead from one member of the large cast to another, as if to emphasise the arbitrariness of fate. You can be in the spotlight one minute, and consigned to the wings the next. The novel questions the value of much of what modernity takes as a given – the value of education, of ambition, of the will to better oneself, to take control. Such determination ends up being rather a waste of time. “Most of us don’t have a choice in the way we live,” says Sita, a young girl with grand plans who gradually abandons them in favour of going with the flow. “We’ve simply got to make do with what we have.”

The novel’s spotlight focuses initially on Egbert Ramsaran. (He changes his name to the antique and unmusical Egbert in the mistaken belief that it is a name that “nobody could laugh at”; and besides, he reasons, it is much easier to pronounce than his given name, Ashok.) Through application and hard work, Egbert escapes not only his birth name but the small backwater – “the Settlement” – to which fate has initially confined him, moving first to Port-of-Spain and then to Victoria, where he establishes a trucking business and achieves his goal of independence and prosperity.

Heroic determination does not, however, make him a hero. He is and remains selfish, self-obsessed, obnoxious and cruel. His wife, Rani, who suffers most of all from his cruelty, tries in vain to hold a life together. She collects stamps and clay ornaments. If one of her clay ornaments gets broken, she does not try to repair it. She simply keeps the pieces. Whatever grace and elegance there is in Egbert’s and Rani’s life belongs to the flies; as Egbert sits down to dinner, the creatures circle expectantly and “balletically round the naked electric light bulb,” a phrase repeated later in the novel as a kind of mocking refrain.

The focus shifts and shifts again, taking in, among others, Egbert and Rani’s son Wilbert, who is destined to take over the trucking company and who – it seems to be almost by chance – is chosen to carry the novel through to its conclusion. Wilbert falls, like his father, into marriage, because it is the thing to do. The wedding ceremony, described by Naipaul in a brilliantly comic set-piece that occupies much of the last chapter, takes place in the “‘Marriage Room’ of the Registry Office.” The Marriage Room, we are told, is “sandwiched between the ‘Births Room’ and the ‘Deaths Room.’” This characteristically reductive note – marriage is something that happens between birth and death – together with Naipaul’s apparent favouring of quiescence over self-assertion, of inaction over action, can seem altogether too contemptuous of human aspirations and of people’s capacity to change themselves and their circumstances for the better.

Naipaul’s obituary in the Times described Fireflies as “striking but misanthropic” and The Chip-Chip Gatherers as displaying “an outdated social Darwinism in which only the most unpleasant were allowed to be the ‘fittest.’” A response was published a few days later, objecting to this unsympathetic assessment, emphasising instead Naipaul’s unusual capacity for “detachment” and for telling the truth. Perhaps these apparently contrasting views are merely aspects of one another; one person’s misanthropy might well be another’s detachment. What does seem clearer now, reading The Chip-Chip Gatherers forty years after its initial appearance, is an underlying thread of authorial sympathy for the characters, a sympathy that persists in spite of Naipaul’s ruthless chronicling of their faults. The most effective expression of this comes at the very end, when the reader – or rather the reader who is not already familiar with the details of Trinidadian life and culture – discovers what chip-chips are, and how the gathering of chip-chips involves a great deal of effort for very meagre reward. •

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In a strange mixture of cinema, fiction and reality too complex to untangle, Isherwood’s name was put forward as the man for the job by a friend he had met during his time in Germany in the 1920s, Jean Ross. Ross was not, as it happens, a little friend so much as a larger-than-life one. (Her larger-than-lifeness was destined to reappear in the striking and enduring character of Sally Bowles, in Isherwood’s best-known and most successful work, Goodbye to Berlin, published in 1939). Ross gave Viertel The Memorial to read, as a way of demonstrating her friend’s qualifications as a wordsmith. Viertel liked the book, and he also liked the author when he met him. Isherwood was duly employed, first as a kind of script doctor and later as dialogue director, a combination of duties that highlighted the paradoxical nature of the film world – there might be a night without sleep, working frantically with Viertel to fix the actors’ lines for the next day’s shooting, or there might equally be a long morning of pointless inactivity. During one such morning, Isherwood later recorded, his only task as dialogue director “was to say the German for knitting.”

Ten years on, and Isherwood was mining the experience of working on Little Friend for his short and deceptively slight novel Prater Violet, which was duly published in 1945. It appeared first in America, where Isherwood had been living since the outbreak of the war, and in England the following year. The title of the novel echoes the title of the film on which the narrator, “Christopher Isherwood,” is engaged to work. The year is 1934 and Friedrich Bergmann – a character based closely, and accurately by all accounts, on Berthold Viertel – is enticed from Vienna to London to direct a film called Prater Violet. In the Prater district of Vienna, during the first years of the twentieth century, a handsome student who is really a prince meets and falls in love with “a girl named Toni, who sells violets.” Such is the plot. The other-worldliness of the film, and its apparent irrelevance to anything of importance or substance, is occasionally counterpointed in the novel with brief descriptions of the increasingly dangerous political climate of mid-thirties Vienna, the details of which Bergmann follows closely through letters from home.

Prater Violet has now been reissued as a Vintage Classic, along with All the Conspirators and The Memorial, to be followed next year by several more of Isherwood’s lesser-known works. Of all of them, Prater Violet, which fell rather flat when it first appeared, is the one that most merits another look, partly for what it says about the often fraught relationship between literature and film. Christopher feels a certain resentment at being relegated to a supporting role, joining the ranks of screenwriters who must spend their days developing treatments from bad books and delivering lines to order. (“I was betraying my art,” he says, with a combination of pomposity and self-mockery.) It is not, Isherwood seems to say, only writers who risk being pushed lower and lower down the creative hierarchy, but writing itself, in deference to the increasingly comprehensive gaze of cinema. The young Christopher, who is labouring unconfidently away on his next novel when he is recruited to work on Prater Violet, seems to pale against the formidable Bergmann, who is master of his medium.

“I am a camera,” says the Christopher Isherwood character in Goodbye to Berlin, as though challenging cinema at its own game. It is a phrase that has long since taken on a life of its own, signifying many things to many people. For Isherwood, the idea of writer as camera seemed to capture something of the ambivalence that is crucial to all his work. On the one hand, the camera, like the writer, stands outside the action, recording what is in front of it. On the other hand, it defines and manipulates the action, and is impossible to ignore. “The problem of camera noise is perpetual,” Christopher, newly wise to the ways of film-making, informs us in Prater Violet. “To guard against it, the camera is muffled in a quilt, which makes it look like a pet poodle wearing a winter jacket.” For most of the novel, the character of Christopher, quietly recording what he sees, also takes care to keep himself well muffled up. In a clever, extended scene, he likens himself to an extra on the set, a player who doesn’t really belong but has managed to slip in unnoticed. Dining one day with Bergmann and other studio bigshots, he orders the cheapest item on the menu. A friendly waiter suggests he try the lobster newburg instead, at no charge. “The other gentlemen have ordered it,” the waiter whispers. “There’ll be enough for one extra.”

Isherwood understands very well that this kind of self-effacement is really egotism by another name. In a series of lectures he gave in the 1960s on the theme of “A Writer and His World,” he nominated Prater Violet as probably “his most successful use of the ‘Christopher Isherwood’ method” – the method, that is, of deploying a version of himself as both character and narrator, and giving that character his own name. The method works, says Isherwood disingenuously, because Bergmann, like Viertel, “talked so much that really nobody else got a word in edgewise… I was just nothing but a kind of straight man for all the anecdotes, jokes, carryings-on of Viertel himself.” In other words, in Prater Violet, Bergmann is the larger-than-life character, and Christopher is the little friend. But of course, it is not so straightforward. The self-deprecation never really convinces. “As a sort of added little joke at the end,” Isherwood continues in his lecture, “I suddenly reveal that I have a whole private life of my own.” Christopher does indeed assert his own independent identity at the end of the novel, from which we learn that he is not just an extra after all. •

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For others, the new technologies have already won; the current renaissance in book design will be brief, a last flowering before the inevitable triumph of the e-book, a format which is already, according to some reports, outselling old-style hard copy. Only last month, Amazon launched the Kindle Paperwhite, offering a more “paper-like” – or better – reading experience and faster page-turning times. (How fast, when it comes to page-turning, is fast enough?) It may well be, though, that in the end these two views converge; that the e-book will indeed triumph, but only after it has mastered the capacity to mimic not just the look and feel of paper but the look and feel of the book as a designed object, an object to be kept and even on occasions displayed and admired, its appearance serving as a continuing reminder of the experience of reading it. In such a scenario, the role of the book designer, so recently revived and recognised anew, will not fade away again but will continue to be central to both a book’s initial impact and its long-term survival.

For this seven-volume set of “designer classics” Vintage commissioned work not from specialists in book design but from people who have made their creative reputations in other, related fields – advertising, architecture, interiors, textiles. Among them is the fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, now in her early seventies, who has been paired up with Iris Murdoch’s Booker Prize winner from 1978, The Sea, the Sea. Rhodes’s Hokusai-like cover, with its near-repeat pattern of crashing waves, echoes the repetitive structure of the novel, and the ways in which things, however much you try to escape them, will just keep on coming at you – in waves. (“Hokusai would love it,” says one of the novel’s more enigmatic characters, as he contemplates the boiling sea.) The would-be escapee is Charles Arrowby, a luminary of the theatre who chooses in his later years to leave worldly success behind and retire to a house by the sea, to think and write and cultivate detachment. Among the complex web of past relationships that preoccupy and in some cases pursue him, the novel increasingly focuses on his rediscovery of his lost, first love, a woman called Hartley Fitch.

In a novel that flaunts its use of improbable coincidence, the reappearance of Hartley in Charles Arrowby’s life – she’s living just down the road – is especially startling. Hartley, now in her sixties, is no longer the beautiful young girl with whom Charles was infatuated. Studying her with forensic care, he notes that “the eyes were thickly encased in wrinkles, the eyelids were brown and pitted as if stained, the cheeks were flabby,” only to conclude “how really unchanged that dear face was, and how little it mattered to my love that she was old.” Among the many, many things that this novel is about – some of them, such as the idea that we are all performers, acting our lives, have become, if anything, over-familiar as cultural themes – is the nature of old age, and what it means to reconcile the old self with the younger version, “to blend the present with the far past.” Charles Arrowby tries to recapture the past he remembers, going so far as to kidnap and imprison a reluctant and frightened Hartley, but he cannot direct real lives as he would a play, and must confront the fact that the past cannot be remade, or re-enacted in ways that change the ending.

In 1978, when The Sea, the Sea was first published, the e-revolution was just beginning. Murdoch herself wrote all her novels by hand, continuing to resist the lure of keyboard and screen. The characters in the novel communicate by letter; Charles Arrowby’s house is not connected to the telephone. Friends and acquaintances from the past are reunited by the boldness of the plot and Murdoch’s extravagant way with coincidence and not, as they would more plausibly be today, by means of an internet search or a reunion organised through Facebook. With its descriptions of forbidding rocks and dangerous waters, The Sea, the Sea has an almost pre-industrial air about it – shades of Gormenghast – and yet it strikingly anticipates a key dilemma of the digital age, the problem of how to deal with the increasing accessibility of our own pasts, and the tendency for those pasts to pop up unexpectedly. We need no longer rely on chance and coincidence to reintroduce us to our earlier selves. Technology will do it for us. To quote from another and more recent meditation on this theme, Jennifer Egan’s brilliant A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the US National Book Critics Circle Award for 2010, “the days of losing touch are almost gone.”

In the face of all this connectedness, of the inescapability of our own autobiographies, The Sea, the Sea speaks up for the twin virtues of pressing on and letting go. Hartley’s husband Ben, who may or may not be a war hero and may or may not be abusive to his wife, puts it bluntly. “You don’t have to see people now because you saw them once or went to school with them or what.” As with all Murdoch’s fiction, it is of course rather more complicated than that. “How can old people be happy?” Charles recalls himself wondering as a youth. Perhaps by accepting that loose ends “can never be properly tied,” that “one is always producing new ones” and that, moreover, “time, like the sea, unties all knots.” Or perhaps by the traditional method of setting off for Australia, as Ben and Hartley do, in what reads like a parody of a new start. “Sydney harbour,” imagines Ben, “Sydney opera house, cheap wine, kangaroos, koala bears, the lot, I can’t wait.” Or perhaps, more realistically, by continuing to live and work and participate, without becoming overly preoccupied with opportunities missed and loves lost and paths not taken. Which makes Zandra Rhodes, still going strong, an even more appropriate choice as cover designer. •

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THE primary biographical interest of certain lives derives from the way they overlap with great events, so great and so overwhelming in their nature that they can best be understood through the eyes of the participants. That is one of the assumptions behind the Swedish historian Peter Englund’s The Beauty and the Sorrow, first published in its English edition late last year and shortly to be released in paperback. “I didn’t want to write a book following the standard format,” Englund has said, “with an over-arching grand narrative that contains snippets of individual experiences.” The over-arching grand narrative is sacrificed in favour of a mosaic of individual perspectives – twenty in all – that taken together give a sense of what it was actually like to be there, wherever “there” might be: the Western Front, the Balkans or Palestine, viewed from the land or the sea or, as is the case with the Belgian pilot Willy Coppens, from the air. Coppens ends the war with his leg amputated, his chest covered in medals and, in common with many other survivors, his mind “beset with anxiety about the future.”

With its varying points of focus, Englund’s book is part of a noticeable trend in biographical writing, in which our understanding of individual lives is enhanced by seeing them in the context of other lives. These lives share the spotlight both with one another and with the events they witness, rather than conceding that spotlight to one central narrative. “My cast of characters,” Englund says in a note to the reader, adopting the tones of a novelist or a dramatist, “has been chosen with a view to providing an all-round picture of the first world war, both as an event and as an experience.”

The pattern of such lives – the kind where all the drama and the excitement and the primary sources are packed into a few short years, leaving the decades on either side visible only in outline – can present particular problems for a biographer. The outline of the life of Olive King, for example, one of Englund’s cast of twenty, has her born in 1885, the daughter of a wealthy Sydney entrepreneur who doted on her, as she did on him. Her schooling was completed in Germany – she would have acquired, among other things, the skill of painting on porcelain – and afterwards there followed what seems to have been a restless, peripatetic period of travel and chaperoned adventure. In a small vignette of those travels, routinely quoted when her name has been mentioned over the years, she was the third woman to climb Mount Popocatepetl, and the first to venture into its crater. There is something about being the third woman to climb Mount Popocatepetl that sums up another kind of biographical dilemma. It is an impressive feat, and gives some sense of King’s intrepidity and zest for life, but its main effect is to leave us wondering about the lives of the two women who got there before her. The fact that King was the first of them into the crater does not, somehow, compensate; nor does it satisfy the contemporary preference for outright winners.

In later years, when she had returned to Australia and settled back into Sydney, King, who remained unmarried, devoted herself to public service. She was assistant commissioner in the Girl Guides Association from 1932 to 1942. She wrote poetry and stories, largely for her own amusement, and, in a touching detail from her entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, compiled by her much younger half-sister, the historian Hazel King, “she took up bookbinding in leather.” Olive King died in 1958. For the most part it was, as far as the evidence permits such conclusions, a good life, but the stuff neither of legend nor of biographical fizz. What makes the difference, and makes both her life and the complexities and contradictions of her character so fascinating, is the bare decade from the outbreak of the first world war to the early 1920s, a period in which she served as an ambulance driver, first with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in France and Serbia, and then as a driver and subsequently an officer with the exiled Serbian Army, based in Salonica in Greece. For her bravery and commitment under often appalling conditions, both during the war and in the immediate aftermath when she organised relief operations inside Serbia, King was twice decorated by the Serbian government. It was all rather a long way from bookbinding.

The sources for King’s life during those adventurous years are found in her correspondence and in the only one of her diaries, from the year 1917, to have survived. Of the letters she wrote, some seem never to have reached their destination; others to have vanished with the passing of time. Yet much remains. “I’m afraid you’re going to get very little tonight,” King says at the beginning of a letter to her father dated 29 August 1917, continuing on, with several stops and starts, to fill twenty-two pages. Selections from her surviving letters appeared in print in 1986, in a fascinating if rather under-annotated edition by Hazel King. As the editor acknowledged in her sympathetic preface, her half-sister was full of contradictions. She was a wanderer yet deeply attached to home and to her family; courageous and strong-minded on the one hand, frivolous and almost child-like (“credulous” says Hazel King) on the other; patriotic yet keen to distance herself from the kind of Australianness of which she disapproved. “Why can’t we send people who’ll be a good advertisement?” she asks after spotting a group of newly arrived Australian nurses in downtown Salonica and immediately dismissing them as “poisonously plain, in perfectly awful uniforms.”

Englund found himself with a wealth of lives and material to choose from. “Many different actors… could have played a part, for vast quantities of letters, journals and memoirs are preserved from the war years.” With each successive edition of The Beauty and the Sorrow – from the original version in Swedish, which appeared in 2008, to subsequent translations into English, French and German, and progressively into other languages – Englund has taken the opportunity to vary the cast slightly, deleting one perspective, and with it one biography, and substituting another, as if to emphasise the ranks of understudies who could be called upon to step up and play a role. “The book could have easily been ten times, or even a hundred times as thick,” he has said in an interview.

It is this sense – of biographies lying behind biographies, perspectives behind perspectives – that gives The Beauty and the Sorrow its remarkable qualities of humanity and depth and makes it so much more than a collection of extracts from diaries and letters. Indeed, direct quotation takes up a relatively small proportion of the overall text, which consists far more of Englund’s own summaries of the testimony of his chosen witnesses, through which he conveys a sense not only of what they saw but also of who they were. In the twenty or so pages, all up, that are devoted to the perceptions and experiences of Olive King, for example, he manages to convey a great deal about her personality, her strengths and weaknesses of character, and her complex motivations – to provide, in short, a kind of biography.

Englund is impressively well-organised. In a long series of date-stamped entries – 227 in all – beginning on 2 August 1914 and ending on 13 November 1918, we briefly and successively enter the world of a Belgian pilot or a French civil servant or an Australian ambulance driver, and see it from their point of view. The effect, compounded by his use of the present tense throughout, is both fragmentary and connected, delivering immediacy and impact while reinforcing the truism, which Englund notes in his prefatory remarks, that “to be right in the middle of events is no guarantee of being able to understand them.” By following a conventional chronology but eschewing conventional notions of what was strategically important to the course of the war and what was not, Englund uses his largely secondary sources to build up what he calls “a collective diary.” Among the twenty voices are Laura de Turczynowicz, the American wife of a Polish aristocrat; Elfriede Kuhr, a German schoolgirl; the extraordinary Rafael de Nogales, a Venezuelan cavalryman in the Ottoman army; Alfred Pollard, a British infantryman; and William Henry Dawkins, an Australian army engineer who is the first to leave the stage, killed by shrapnel at Gallipoli on Wednesday 12 May 1915, at the age of twenty-one.

By drawing his cast from both sides of the conflict, Englund emphasises their common humanity, and the way that other, pettier conflicts – often at the local level, among supposed allies, where personalities and cultures clashed – can assume as much, if not more, importance in the daily lives of his subjects as those defined by the meta-narrative of the origins and progress of the war. Sometimes Englund is almost diffident in introducing references to the wider context, as though wary of shifting the focus too far away from his main subjects. On the day that William Henry Dawkins is “sitting by the Pyramids, writing to his mother,” Englund adds in a footnote that “it is perhaps worth a mention that on this day three of the men involved in the assassination at Sarajevo at the end of June 1914 were hanged.”

Collective biography is a balancing act. The common theme that holds the joint biographical subjects together – family connections, a shared background or education or cause, a life-changing experience – must be strong enough to justify the enterprise, while not so strong as to obscure altogether individuality and difference. In the case of The Beauty and the Sorrow, the unifying factor, the common theme, is the Great War, one so broad in scope that it is capable of accommodating a cast of millions, most of whom are destined to remain largely unknown and unknowable. What further unites Englund’s chosen twenty, beyond the fact that they were there at the time and wrote about what they saw and so have, in that sense, survived, is how they are refracted through Englund’s presentation of them and their points of view, lending a consistent tone even when the individual experiences are so different.

Englund will often conclude his summary of a particular character’s particular day – Saturday 1 May 1915, for instance, when Florence Farmborough, an English nurse in the Russian army, “hears the breaking of the front at Gorlice” – with an after-image of an isolated figure caught up in the frightening and the incomprehensible. As Farmborough joins the retreat from Gorlice, a wounded patient, too ill to travel and desperate at the prospect of being left behind, clutches at her skirt. Florence Farmborough “twists the hand loose and disappears down the uneven road along with the others.” Meanwhile, “the oil tanks outside the town have started burning and the air is filled with oily black smoke.” It’s a vision of an actor making her way off-stage, unsure of where she is heading, and without benefit of visible markers or recognisable props.

WHAT we learn about Englund’s cast of characters is largely a function of their wartime experiences. Their pasts and their futures – seventeen of the twenty live on, many into old age – figure only in so far as they provide a necessary context. Even for those seventeen survivors, it is as if their lives – their biographies – end with the war. In Ross McMullin’s Farewell, Dear People, this is literally the case, in that all of his ten subjects are killed in action. McMullin focuses on telling – “retrieving” is the word he uses – the stories of these ten men who served in the Australian forces during the first world war and whose biographies, full of promise, were suddenly cut short.

Like Englund, McMullin contrasts his approach with other, broader narratives of war, narratives of the kind in which “the emphasis has usually been on the collective effect of the numbing number of losses” and the details of individual lives have been deployed simply to illuminate the larger picture. The lives he retrieves are all of men whose futures stretched invitingly before them – the youngest to die is twenty-two, the eldest thirty-five – and in the eyes of friends and family and colleagues those lives are full of foreshadowed achievements in the worlds of politics, sport, business, science. And again like Englund, McMullin sees these ten lives as both unique and representative of other life stories that could, in cases where the evidence survives, just as fruitfully be told. Indeed, as he indicates in his introduction, McMullin is already at work on a second volume.

William Henry Dawkins, the young Australian engineer who is one of the twenty “dramatis personae” (Englund’s own term) in The Beauty and the Sorrow, has a small part in Farewell, Dear People. McMullin notes that Dawkins died while “gallantly attending to his primary task, the provision of water for the landing force” at Gallipoli. He contrasts this fate with that of a fellow officer, a malingerer who “seems to have masqueraded as a ‘brave Anzac’ while minimising his time at Anzac” and who, McMullin notes drily, lived to be almost one hundred years old. Although he doesn’t figure prominently in the narrative, Dawkins fits squarely into McMullin’s “lost generation,” a group of the talented and energetic and committed whose deaths proved “a calamity for the nation.” In the meantime, others, less talented, less selfless, survived.

This is a stark contrast, perhaps too stark to be really effective. To emphasise the lives that these clever young men might have lived is an attempt to give their biographies what they can never have, a middle and an end. McMullin’s more telling point is that we need to understand in detail the years they did have if we are to comprehend what was lost. As personal connections with the war fade and disappear, the names on honour rolls come to mean less and less, triggering few memories even in their descendants. “Posterity has ignored Tom Elliott,” McMullin laments of one of his biographical subjects, a man of many gifts who seemed destined for a distinguished military career. “His story has never been told until now.”

In telling these ten life stories, McMullin is also telling other stories by proxy. Another of his subjects, Geoff McCrae – his niece’s distinguishing memory is of “the most handsome man she ever saw” – died on 19 July 1916 at the Battle of Fromelles on the Western Front, one of more than 1800 casualties from his brigade alone during a span of twenty-four hours. McCrae’s death was witnessed and documented. “His body,” wrote his brigadier Pompey Elliott to McCrae’s father, “was recovered in the face of much difficulty and danger.” Many bodies were not individually retrieved or identified, however, and were instead subject to common burial.

In 2009, under the auspices of the inter-governmental Fromelles Project, the remains of 250 Australian and British soldiers were recovered from six recently located burial pits. With the benefit of modern DNA techniques and the participation of descendants, the identities of many of these soldiers have been progressively established. In July this year, at a ceremony at the Fromelles Cemetery at Pheasant Wood, headstones were dedicated to the nine most recently identified Australians, bringing the total thus far to 119. In many, probably most of these cases, further biographical information, other than what is already available, will not be forthcoming. The record of these men’s lives is likely to remain elusive and fragmentary.

The significance of the Fromelles Project lies in confirming their identity as individuals by identifying their remains; they are no longer, in that sense, “unknown soldiers.” But to understand more about them, about what they experienced and how they thought, we must rely on the recovered stories of those for whom the evidence does survive. In the case of Geoff McCrae, a cache of letters home, addressed for the most part to his devoted father and his wider family, provides insights into his development and personality, from which we can infer those aspects that might apply more widely, to other lives.

One of the hazards of group biography is that the similarities in the lives of the subjects and the experiences they share can be so close that they blur into one another, making them hard to distinguish. This is particularly so when the shared experience is of the magnitude of the Great War, and when the conventions of the time – and, in the case of letters home, the fact of censorship – placed so many constraints on what could be said. Geoff McCrae prays to “come through alright,” but if things don’t go well, he writes in his final letter home to his family, “I will at least have laid down my life for you and my country, which is the greatest privilege one can ask for.”

In its patriotism and its emphasis on honour, the line represents a (if not necessarily the) collective voice of the time, together with an understanding on McCrae’s part of what his audience expected and needed to hear. But it can be hard to get beyond that, to the individuality underneath. The sentence that follows, and from which the book’s title is taken – “farewell, dear people, the hour approacheth” – with its touch of the mock-heroic, hints at a more complex attitude, to himself and to the events he is caught up in. Earlier, McMullin quotes McCrae lamenting the life he could have lived, were it not for the war. “My hopes of becoming an architect are daily becoming fainter. I am tired of things military.” These kinds of reminders – of other, alternative biographies – recur throughout Farewell, Dear People, lending an even greater poignancy and force to the lives McMullin has retrieved.

THE process of retrieval, of how far it is possible to recover an individual life from the chaos of war, is at the heart of Tom Keneally’s The Daughters of Mars, his fictionalised account of the role of Australian nurses in the first world war. The Durance girls, Naomi and Sally, sisters from the Macleay Valley, volunteer as nurses and serve, in differing capacities, in Egypt, on the island of Lemnos, and in France. “It was said around the valley,” we are told in the opening paragraph, “that the two Durance girls went off but just one bothered to come back. People could not have said which one… There was confusion even in the local paper.” By exercising the novelist’s privilege of access to innermost thoughts, Keneally establishes the individual characters of the two nurses, and to a lesser extent of some of their friends and colleagues, but he never lets go of this theme of confusion – of the difficulty of distinguishing one participant from the other – for long. In the aftermath of the sinking in the Aegean of the Archimedes, a troopship on which Naomi and Sally and their fellow nurses are being transported, along with soldiers and munitions and horses and mules, it is difficult to tell who is who among the immediate survivors as they struggle and drift in the water. People simply disappear from view. A soldier or sailor clinging to a life raft “would let go as if he had seen a better prospect nearby.” Sally and Naomi and their “clique” do survive, but many of their colleagues – the ones who belong to other cliques, who are little more than names to them – do not. “In novels,” Sally thinks, “it’s the ones the writer does not let you know well who perish first.”

The sinking of the Archimedes has its historical counterpart in the fate of the Marquette, which was struck by a torpedo on 23 October 1915, resulting in the loss of thirty-two lives, including those of ten New Zealand nurses. In Peter Rees’s evocative The Other Anzacs: Nurses at War 1914–1918 (2008), which is listed among Keneally’s sources at the end of The Daughters of Mars, there is a brief image, culled from the report of the enquiry into the sinking of the Marquette, of a nurse clinging to the neck of a mule. “Sucked under when the ship went down, she caught hold of the animal and rose with it to the surface.” Keneally takes this startling image and turns it into a metaphor of emerging identity. A woman suddenly appears out of the watery chaos, holding on to the mane of a horse. Sally recognises her fellow nurse, who strikes her for the first time as an individual. Her face “no longer looked an indefinite thing as it had in Egypt and Archimedes’ wards.”

In recovering singular lives from the chaos of great events, it is difficult to say which approach works best – the historical or the fictional. Individuals, grouped together under a set of common experiences to form a group biography, have a way of merging, however hard the writer works to keep them distinctive and apart. Perhaps this is inevitable. Keneally, who is both an historian and a novelist, seems to think so. In The Daughters of Mars, the lives of Naomi and Sally are given alternative and interchangeable endings, as if to emphasise, by this blurring of their ultimate fates, how representative they are. •

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Henning Mankell is one of the many exponents of the new Scandinavian crime fiction to have traced the genre’s origins back to the Swedish writing partnership of Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall, who between them produced ten novels – one a year between 1965 and 1975 – featuring the lugubrious detective Martin Beck and a cast of flawed, uncooperative but, in their own idiosyncratic ways, effective colleagues. Wahlöö died, at the age of only forty-eight, in 1975, shortly after the publication of The Terrorists, the novel that completed what he and his co-author described as a “Decalogue.” Today, Sjöwall continues to write and to undertake translations; she has also served as a consultant on the long-running series for Swedish television, Beck (now available, incidentally, on DVD, with subtitles).

“I think,” says Mankell of this influential literary partnership, “that anyone who writes about crime as a reflection of society has been inspired to some extent by what they wrote.” The Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø is equally happy to assign credit where it is due. “Everyone in Scandinavia who writes a crime novel,” he said in a recent interview, “whether they know it or not, they are influenced by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.” The influence goes beyond Scandinavia. The British writer Lee Child provides the introduction to The Abominable Man, the seventh in the series and among the latest to be re-issued by Fourth Estate. Child describes Beck, with his rumpled determination, “as the grandfather of practically all current Scandinavian detectives, as well as foreigners as far-flung as Ian Rankin’s John Rebus and Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko.”

Sjöwall and Wahlöö both had backgrounds in journalism and in radical politics, and Wahlöö had already published several books on his own, when the pair met and became lovers in the early 1960s. Together they developed, with a kind of mathematical precision, a plan to produce ten (and only ten) novels under the general heading of “the story of a crime.” The crime in question referred not to the anchors of the plots – the murders and assaults and acts of terrorism that feature in abundance – but to the generic crime perpetrated by the state against the individual, and to the ways in which ordinary and in particular disadvantaged lives are manipulated and very often discarded by those who have chosen, or been seduced into, exploiting the structures and mechanisms of the state for their own ends. What Sjöwall and Wahlöö identified in the Swedish political landscape was the way in which the focus of daily life was shifting from the local community to the overarching state, a process exemplified for them by the nationalisation of the police force in 1965. What might be referred to today as community policing became what the two writers saw as a mechanism for accumulating power over individuals too weak or too weakened to fight back.

It is difficult to know quite where the character of Martin Beck stands on all this. He is a policeman, and to that extent part of the system. But he often seems to be as much on the side of the criminal as of the victim, particularly as we witness his growing understanding of the motivations that lie behind the mysteries he is required, along with his colleagues, to solve. The Abominable Man opens with the brutal and bloody murder in his hospital bed of Chief Inspector Stig Nyman. The weapon is a carbine bayonet, and by the time the murderer is finished the chief inspector is virtually unrecognisable. “Whoever did this must be raving mad,” observes Beck’s colleague as he and Beck contemplate the body. “Yes,” says the more circumspect Beck, “it looks that way.” His reservations turn out to be prescient. Nyman, it transpires, had a reputation for corruption and intimidation and violence. He was, in fact, an abominable man. It is not surprising, therefore, that someone might have wanted to murder him.

Beck has these occasional flashes of intuition, but he is far from being the all-seeing detective supremely confident in himself and his own judgement. He is no Hercule Poirot, whose closest brush with an existential crise is when he spies a speck of dust on his patent leather shoe (though Beck does, like Poirot, suffer from a delicate stomach; in detective fiction, there are always unbroken lines to be found, descending from even the most unlikely ancestors). Beck is neither outstandingly clever nor very brave. “Yes, he was a coward,” he muses in The Abominable Man, describing himself as if from the outside. Indeed his ordinariness is established from the very beginning. In Roseanna, the first novel in the series, he is introduced as “thin but not especially tall and somewhat round-shouldered. Some women would say he was good looking but most of them would see him as quite ordinary.”

Over the ensuing novels Beck seems to become, if anything, even less prepossessing. He often has a cold. He is always tired. In The Abominable Man, his marriage has failed and his social circle has become even more limited. He “suffers from claustrophobia and aversion to crowds.” And yet, in contrast to Nyman, for whom other people are there simply to be exploited and crushed, Beck retains a sense of “responsibility for human beings.” As further details of the victim’s life unfold, he feels “something growing stronger and stronger in his mind.” It is a sense of guilt, not for the murder itself, but for participating in the society and the organisational culture that allowed Nyman to do what he did, to destroy so many lives, including that of his eventual murderer.

As the “Decalogue” progresses, Sjöwall and Wahlöö grow politically more outspoken. By the time of The Abominable Man there is an unresolved tension between their characterisation of the police as “a private army,” intent only on increasing its power and looking after its own – “when a member of their own troop meets with misfortune,” the authors comment sardonically, “the police seem to acquire many times their usual energy” – and their sympathetic understanding of the reality of day-to-day police work “built on realism, routine, stubbornness and system.” What Sjöwall and Wahlöö seem to admire most, and what for them stands most effectively against the anonymising power of the state, is the commitment, exemplified by Beck and by certain of his colleagues, to sheer, methodical persistence. Beck accepts that “most of his work was in fact pointless,” but every so often he gets a result, and more of the pieces start to fit together. His hobby is building model ships. In The Abominable Man, he is working on the Flying Cloud, with only the rigging left to do. The rigging, we are told, “is the most difficult and trying part” but we are left in no doubt that Martin Beck will complete the task. •

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Stoker’s novel seemed to hark back rather than forward, perpetuating a fictional form that like the vampire had lived beyond its allotted span. And Stoker did indeed owe much to the past. His vampire was an adaptation rather than an invention, derived not only from his literary predecessors but also from the Central European and other folkloric traditions that dwell with fascination on these frightening figures, whose modus operandi varied but who typically left as their calling card two subtly ominous bite marks in the softer regions of the neck, and who could be truly killed only by a stake driven, resolutely and without hesitation, straight through the heart.

And yet with time Stoker’s creepy Count has come to seem not just another vampire in a long line of vampires and similar creatures of the night, but a true original, the first of his kind; a vampire for the modern world. In the years since Stoker first introduced the mysteriously ageless man with the pale skin and wispy hair, vampires and modernity have continued to keep pace with each other, developing in the process an increasingly complex and interdependent relationship. From the perspective of 2012 – the centenary, as it happens, of Bram Stoker’s death – we glimpse the figure of Count Dracula as it is refracted through the vast overlay of imitations, reinventions, homages and spin-offs that he has inspired.

For today’s readers, Dracula comes not at the end of the line but at the beginning, as the instigator of a never-ending chain of versions and sequels, in which the successive components are – like Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” novels, to take just one of many recent and spectacularly successful examples – themselves made up of self-generating sequels. It’s a population explosion of the UnDead. And it is with the Un-Dead – the creatures who, once bitten, become vampires themselves, hovering forever between life and death – that Stoker so accurately caught the spirit of modernity and its problematic relationship between progress and tradition. Dracula’s bite condemns the victim to be, like Dracula himself, marooned for eternity between the competing calls of the future and the past.

The characters in Stoker’s novel who, under the direction of Professor van Helsing, “one of the most advanced scientists of his day,” challenge the vampire and eventually defeat him – the young solicitor Jonathan Harker, his devoted wife Mina, Professor van Helsing’s former pupil Dr John Seward, together with Seward’s boon companions, Quincey Morris and Lord Godalming – are all children of the newly emerging technological age, determinedly up with the latest, committed to logic and rationality and scientific method. By deploying a narrative form that combines the direct or indirect commentary of all of these characters, Stoker depicts a world of continuous technological invention and improvement. Mina composes her journal entries and transcribes Jonathan’s shorthand notes on her typewriter, which travels with her everywhere. Jonathan, in addition to writing everything down, also takes pictures with his Kodak. Dr Seward dictates his thoughts into a phonograph. Recording is a way of coping with the ever-changing world, of rendering it logical and manageable and under control, even as this new world surges forward at a pace that makes it difficult to keep up.

Yet for all the efforts made by Stoker’s cast of vampire hunters to document and record and understand what they are up against, the unmanageable has a way of defying rational explanation. In the long first section of the novel, in which Jonathan travels on business to Transylvania at the request of Count Dracula only to find himself made a prisoner in the Count’s castle, the young man comments self-mockingly on his own shorthand skills (Pitman’s system of shorthand made its first appearance in 1837) as being “nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance.” But being up-to-date is no protection against unexplained influences from the past. “Unless my senses deceive me,” muses Jonathan, “the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.” On the one hand technology and human inventiveness seem to hold out the prospect of a brighter future; on the other, “we seem to be drifting to some terrible doom.”

It is this fascination with ambiguity and contradictoriness and the borderlands between ostensibly definable states – not only between the past and the future, but between death and life, instinct and reason, masculinity and femininity, tradition and innovation, hope and despair – that makes Dracula, despite the many characteristics that identified it as old-fashioned when it first appeared more than a century ago, a truly modern novel. When the good guys can say of the unfortunate Lucy Westenra, who has been lured by Dracula into joining the ranks of the Un-Dead, that not only must they drive a stake through her body in order to save her soul, but also “cut off her head and fill her mouth with garlic,” we know we are in the midst of a morally unsettling and contradictory universe.

This latest edition of Dracula appears as one of 100 classic works of fiction in the new Penguin English Library, a series that first appeared in the sixties and has now been reworked for the twenty-first century. With strikingly-designed covers by Coralie Bickford-Smith, employing repeat motifs that allude strongly to wallpaper (“So, which cover have you settled on for your digital wallpapers and backgrounds?” asks the English Library Twitter feed), and block-coloured spines that stacked together have the look of a Bridget Riley painting, the series makes a claim for the virtues of reading – and possessing – the physical, aesthetically pleasing object rather than the digital download. As Bickford-Smith suggests in a recent interview, the rise of new technologies can stimulate the old technologies to do better, which is partly what accounts for the massive revitalisation of book design in recent years. “If it’s cheaper and more convenient to read a novel on your phone,” says Bickford-Smith, “then books have to justify their presence and expense by accentuating the qualities of the physical object.” They do so, you might say, by demonstrating “powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.” •

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Foodjects: Design and the New Cuisine in Spain is a small, cleverly put together exhibition currently showing at the Craft and Design Centre in Canberra. Curated by Martin Ruiz de Azúa (himself an established designer whose imaginative prototypes include an inflatable house for carrying around in your pocket) and supported by the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the exhibition assembles various examples from the range of cookware, tableware and related products created by Spanish designers to complement and support the new Spanish style of cooking – a style indelibly associated with the master of “molecular cuisine,” Ferran Adrià. When put to their intended use, the “smooth organic shapes” of “Bliss,” a dinner set designed in 2003 by Gemma Bernal for Adrià’s elBulli restaurant, seem not merely to complement but to blend into the cuisine itself; as we are told in the catalogue, the individual pieces – plates, bowls, receptacles of various kinds – mimic the “ductile qualities” of the delicacies they hold and “the plates become a prolongation of the food.” It marks another step in the contemporary process of turning food into art; what began in the 1970s and 1980s with nouvelle cuisine, when those vast plates-cum-bowls acted as a kind of frame for a rose-pink quail breast and a few peppercorns, has now reached a point where the plate is not merely a frame, but an integral part of the picture.

You could say that things have come full circle. In medieval times, the plates were likewise inseparable from the food. In fact, they literally were the food, in the form of trenchers made from bread that could, theoretically at least, be set upon by unsatisfied diners looking to fill up the corners after the main dish was despatched. The difference now is not so much that the plate imitates the food it holds as that the food – the new Spanish cuisine that first began to be noticed a decade and a half ago and relies heavily on technology to transform it into something that is and is not the food we know – imitates the plate, taking on a designed and manufactured aspect that makes us wonder whether we should be eating it or simply admiring it, as we would a painting or a sculpture or an Eames chair.

As if taking this idea to its logical conclusion, there are a couple of objects in the exhibition that are fabricated to look and smell like food but aren’t food at all. A scented ceramic sponge cake and a virtual bonbon – the latter infused with natural cacao and Bulgarian rose essence – are “designed to be smelt only.” These faux foods call to mind the pièces montées of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, visual extravaganzas assembled by the great Marie-Antoine Carême and others out of a flour-and-sugar paste and designed to sit in the middle of the table, to be looked at, admired, but not eaten. The main difference being that the pièce montée was food got up to mimic something else – a Grand Chinese Summer House, for instance, or a Turkish Pavilion, both of which featured in Carême’s repertoire – whereas the virtual bonbon is something else, got up to mimic food. You could, if you were so minded, snaffle a piece of a pièce to eat afterwards, but it would be unwise, as that cautionary note in the Foodjects catalogue reminds us, to try tucking into a ceramic sponge cake or a virtual bonbon.

As a counterpoint to the virtual bonbon, the exhibition catalogue provides a recipe for a real one, made from olive oil. The bonbon is savoury this time, rather than sweet, and is given as an example of the kind of (edible) food that these “foodjects” are designed to accompany. Making olive oil bonbons is not for the fainthearted, involving as it does dropping a small amount of olive oil down a tube while ensuring that a thin film of melted isomalt remains adhered to the end, ready to encase the oil as it luges its way down to the bottom, turning it magically into a bright golden bauble. Well, that’s the idea, anyway. “If the first one doesn’t work, don’t be discouraged… Just try to do it faster next time,” says the recipe, reminding us in effect that the new cuisine retains quite a lot in common with the old: all that fun in the kitchen is actually hard work. In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the famously influential guide to the pre-nouvelle way of doing things first published in 1961, Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child sound a strikingly similar chord: if the egg yolks need to be beaten into the sauce drop by drop, then that is what you must do. “You may be slow and clumsy and first,” they say in their stern but encouraging preface, “but with practice you will pick up speed and style.”

The style of the new Spanish cuisine derives from a paradoxical combination of the earnest and the cheeky. Two of the more intriguing objects in the exhibition, both of them designed by the Swiss-born, Spain-based Luki Huber in 2005, emphasise the cheeky by having fun with spoons. “Spoon with Pincer,” which looks pretty much like a peg with a teaspoon stuck on the top, “allows a diner to smell one thing and eat another,” by trapping something aromatic – a sprig of rosemary perhaps – in the pincer, leading the diner to smell it on the way to whatever is waiting in the bowl of the spoon, a game of sensory mix and match. In the case of the “Strainer Spoon,” the bowl is a miniature colander, ideal for those who, for example “like to eat the cereal first, then the milk,” or the vegetables then the broth. It is essentially an update of the slotted spoon, made for the eater rather than the cook. It facilitates an active deconstruction of the meal on the part of the person eating it, echoing the fashion for chefs to break down traditional dishes into their constituent parts and lay the workings bare. Huber, with his quirky spoons, hints at how the diner can be something more than a passive consumer of one spectacularly inventive and original dish after another. The chef may be the undisputed star, but the diner can be allowed a small supporting role.

The “foodjects” in this exhibition oscillate between naturalness and artifice, between the twin poles that characterise this cuisine for the technological age. They emphasise how the new cuisine, with its “deconstructed dishes, foams, spherications,” which may seem complex and fussy and just too damn clever, is in fact aiming for the essence of taste, for a direct connection with pure flavour. José Andrés, an early colleague of Ferran Adrià whose name is now closely associated with the international spread of “small plates” dining, is quoted in the catalogue enjoining us to listen to the ingredients we use. “Have you ever had a conversation with a carrot?” he asks. “Or a tomato? You should sometime. They have a lot to say.” This kind of new-age, I-talk-to-the-carrots-and-the-carrots-talk-to-me characterisation of cooking is intended to plug us straight into what we eat, but at the other end of the spectrum is the way in which the new high-tech cuisine intellectualises the business of eating, making the food in front of us and the plates the food sits on intriguing, amusing, fascinating, part of a game rather than something we must engage with in order to stay alive.

The contradiction is resolved, if it is resolved at all, by the idea that food is nourishment for both the body and the mind. Whatever makes us pause and think about food, about how it has been prepared, how beautiful or striking or odd it looks on the plate, about how the composition of the dish alludes to something else – a painting perhaps, or a scene from nature, as in some of the signature dishes of René Redzepi’s Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, where mock grass sprouts from mock soil that has been made out of breadcrumbs or hazelnut flour – contributes to our enjoyment of food and the benefits it confers on us. The new cuisine is not, as its critics would argue, about extravagance and self-indulgence, but is a genuine attempt to get us to think about one of the most important relationships we have, to the food we eat. It is here that the “asymmetric and somewhat unstable” cutlery, designed by Javier Mariscal in 2007, can help. The irregular borders of the soup spoon, for instance, complete with an attractive but otherwise unexplained bight cutting into the bowl, are intended to “make people think.”

ALL this inventiveness notwithstanding, there are signs in the wider world that the new cuisine is running out of puff, that the emphasis on the role of technology in preparing the food, and the role of the intellect in leading us to appreciate it, has gone too far. The dates attached to some of the designs in this exhibition – the earliest is from 1999 – are a reminder that the new Spanish cuisine is not so new anymore. A lot has happened since the nineties – to cooking, to Spain, and to our general confidence in experts practising arcane arts – and a new simplicity is, at least ostensibly, back in vogue. It can be seen, for example, in the rise of American cook and food writer Tamar Adler, who models herself consciously on the formidable M.F.K. Fisher and who is all for getting back to basics. An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace questions all this emphasis on technology and cleverness and on people trying to bamboozle us with complex formulae. Cooking, she says, “has in recent years become a complication to juggle against other complications,” whereas it is in fact “both simpler and more necessary than we imagine.”

By the reckoning of Adler and others like her, the intellectualising and the relentless inventiveness of recent years just gets in the way of enjoying good food cooked well. Do we really need all the new products like Lecite and Algin and Gellan and Kappa and Iota – sample tins of these and similar aids to the production of “hot gelatines, airs, melon caviar or spherical raviolis” are included in Foodjects – in order to eat well? “Most of us,” Adler points out, “already have water, a pot to put it in, and a way to light a fire.” Our batterie de cuisine need not run to a “plastic tube of 1.5 centimetres in diameter,” as advised in the recipe for making olive oil bonbons, when we can choose to skip these space age amuse-bouches altogether and instead serve, as Tamar Adler recommends for those occasions when friends drop in, “little halved radishes, chilled in the refrigerator, a dish of salt, and another filled with softened sweet butter.”

The problem is that freshly picked radishes in crisper drawers, lying ready to spring into action when the doorbell rings, belong as much to a world of culinary fantasy as do olive oil bonbons and pincer spoons. That is not to say that radishes aren’t at a given moment, somewhere in the world, being chopped in half and served with sweet butter and a pinch of salt to unexpected callers (a process made easier by the fact that unexpected callers, having texted ahead, are more generally expected these days). And equally there are people, not all of them commercial chefs and restaurateurs, who serve olive oil bonbons too, and who prepare them with speed and skill. But neither is a common or everyday practice, and it is unlikely that they ever will be. The real difference between what are, for most of us, two idealised and unattainable culinary worlds – the low-tech one of split radishes, and the high-tech one of golden globules – lies in the differences they represent between two profoundly different ways of looking at food and its place in our lives.

Sometimes, it is true, these worlds will happily combine. Adler is quite prepared, for instance, for her low-tech practice of instinctive cookery to include an electric blender, though she draws the line at microwaves. “Use yours as a bookshelf,” she counsels, “or to store gadgets you don’t use.” And it’s fine to keep tins of artichokes and tomatoes in the cupboard for those days when you can’t get out to the shops, just as M.F.K. Fisher was not above resorting to a packet of dried onion soup when supplies of fresh alternatives ran low. But these are occasional examples that don’t disprove the general rule, which is that the Adler and the Adrià approaches to cooking are based on radically opposed philosophical precepts and are unlikely ever to become, in the manner of tomato and basil, two complementary halves of the same flavoursome whole.

What these two approaches to cuisine really do have in common, though, is the idea of food – the making, the presenting, the eating – as performance, complete with the occasional allowance for audience participation. (“Let everyone spread the radishes with a smear of butter and sprinkle them with salt,” says Adler, or let them use a specially designed slotted spoon to start with the cereal and end with the milk. Either way, the diner can become, however tangentially, part of the creative process.) Cooking and eating also entail thinking and imagining and reflecting. And writing. “I like to read descriptions of food in books,” says Adler, but “I will only read a cookbook if it is one in which the poetry of food comes alive on the page.” By and large, she meets her own benchmark, demonstrating that characteristic of all successful food writers, an elusive and ineffable way with recipes that makes you want to try them, along with a nice line in useful tips, including a chapter on rescuing culinary missteps called “How to Snatch Victory from the Jaws of Defeat.” If anything, though, Adler can sometimes overdo the poetry bit; her characterisation, for example, of a “perfect solitary sybaritic breakfast of pasta eaten directly out of a cold bowl, in bewilderment and utter presence,” betrays rather a heavy hand with the lyrical seasoning.

Tamar Adler makes the case for writing and reading about food as being an integral part of the pleasure and satisfaction of cooking it and eating it. The Foodjects designers, as might be expected, take things a step further, from writing about food to writing with it and on it. Julia Mariscal’s 2006 design for a “Writing Spoon” specifically acknowledges that “eating is a creative act,” the point being that rather than depend on a trained and talented barista to draw a picture on your cappuccino, you can do it yourself, with your own writing spoon. It’s a joke, of course, but a clever and sophisticated one, touching on the contemporary need to participate in the creative process rather than simply to witness it, to take what we are given and mash it up (a curiously culinary term) so that it’s just the way we like it. The writing spoon, with its nib-like tip, can also be used to draw pictures with foodstuffs; there’s an oddly hypnotic clip on YouTube of a disembodied hand repeatedly dipping the Julia Mariscal writing spoon into a cup of black coffee and using it to build up a picture on a plain white table cover. Designing, looking; writing, reading; cooking, eating. They all go together. •

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We follow Samba Diallo, a young Muslim boy, as he is plucked, at his family’s instigation, from the Koranic school where his teacher had never, in more than forty years, “encountered anyone who… in all facets of his character, waited on God with such a spirit.” He is to be sent instead to the French school, where he will be trained in the ways of the new world – a world in which “the woodcutters and the metalworkers are triumphant.” The major force behind this decision is the Most Royal Lady (“La Grande Royale”), a formidable member of Samba Diallo’s clan and one who, though devout, knows which way the wind is blowing. “More and more,” she says, “we shall have to do things which we hate doing, and which do not accord with our customs.”

The Most Royal Lady sees clearly what must be done if her people are to survive; they must compromise with the colonial power, and learn its ways. For Samba Diallo, this means being despatched first to the French school and then to further study in France, just as Cheikh Hamidou Kane himself studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. The Most Royal Lady is wise in the ways of the world, so wise in fact that, her gender aside, she resembles an ur-version of the Ancient Wise Man, the stock figure identified by the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina in his angry-but-funny compendium of notes on “How to Write About Africa,” which appeared in the journal Granta in 2005. “The Ancient Wise Man,” observes Wainaina sardonically, “is close to the earth” and “always comes from a noble tribe.”

Samba Diallo’s father defers to the view of his wider family that his son should be sent to the French school, but he is not really convinced. “The world is becoming westernised,” he laments, and instead of taking the time “to pick and choose, assimilate or reject,” his fellow countrymen are rushing headlong into the future, eager to embrace the “new egotism which the West is scattering abroad.” What is being left behind in this headlong rush is harder to define; it is a combination of Islamic faith, cultural identity and affinity with family and place. Samba Diallo learns his new lessons well. He becomes confidently familiar with Socrates and St Augustine and Descartes, but at the same time grows increasingly anxious that he has taken the wrong path. “I have chosen the itinerary,” he laments, “which is most likely to get me lost.”

Samba Diallo returns home without finishing his degree, but it is not entirely clear to him or to us just what he is seeking by retracing his steps: his country, his faith, or merely the past. At one point he seems to dismiss the entire quest as simply an exercise in nostalgia. From the distance of Paris, he muses on whether “it may be, after all, that what I regret is not my country so much as my childhood.” The novel doesn’t end with any easy accommodation between the materialism of the West and the certainties of faith, between the promises of mechanical progress and the wisdom of ancestors. Ambiguous Adventure, as its rather treatise-like title suggests, is not in the business of providing solutions. Nor is it a particularly easy read. It has passages of extravagant mysticism in which it can be difficult to work out just what is what and who is who. And yet it leaves a strong impression of a writer who has thought deeply about questions of modernity and tradition, for whom the very existence of ambiguity, and the impossibility of finding clear answers to the questions he asks, is ultimately intolerable.

AS AN intellectual who is both African and occidental, Samba Diallo has many successors in African writing, which has long been concerned with what it means to be educated into Western notions of modernity and how far that involves the sacrifice of one identity in favour of another. He can be seen in secular and sceptical form in the character of Julius, the narrator of Teju Cole’s recent novel Open City, which has been shortlisted for numerous awards and received the 2012 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished first book of fiction. Julius, who is half-Nigerian and half-German, wanders the streets of New York, recording the people he meets and the thoughts and memories they trigger.

His African-ness, and the part it plays in influencing his perceptions, emerges only gradually, as he proceeds to document the city’s present and past. Crucially, though, Julius is no innocent abroad, marvelling at the strange and the different, but a man steeped in the history of Western thought, who belongs but does not belong and who puzzles over what it might mean to have an African-influenced view of the world and a shared African identity. Can there even be such a thing, when there are so many ways of being African? “The way you came into my car without saying hello, that was bad,” a cab driver says to Julius. “Hey. I’m African just like you.”

Samba Diallo has a similarly unsettling encounter, when he meets the daughter of a fellow countryman who, despite the fact that she has been born in France, seems to echo his own sense of aridity and dissatisfaction, as though she does not belong. Is she really like him? “Would she really feel ‘exile’ – this girl born on the banks of the Seine?” he asks himself. But he comes to understand from his meeting with the young girl that there is more to his sense of exile than the fact of geographical displacement. It’s not that his roots are in another country, but rather in another universe – “the reality of a non-Western universe.” •

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In an interview published in the Paris Review in 2005, Shirley Hazzard – another whose writing career Maxwell fostered – recalled their first meeting. It was in New York, some forty-five years earlier, shortly after Maxwell had accepted a story of hers for publication. “When I saw him, I knew that ‘everything’ – whatever that is – would be all right.” Hazzard is speaking of Maxwell’s subsequent impact on her life as a friend and mentor and of his positive influence on her work, but she could equally be describing something more abstract, the impact of his fiction on the reader. It is not that he glosses over things or pretties them up or makes them generally more rosy – everything is never all right in that sense. But his novels do carry with them a quality of acceptance, a recognition that connections between people sometimes work and sometimes don’t, that lives can be thrown completely off track by small events, and that other events, equally small, can provide some compensation for the inevitable tragedies and disappointments.

Like much of Maxwell’s fiction, The Château, first published in 1961, is based on events from his own life, in this case an extended visit he and his wife made to France in 1948, when tourism was only just beginning to revive after the war. Harold and Barbara Rhodes are in love with the idea of France well before they embark on their trip, and although that love is tested it remains essentially intact when the time comes for them to return home. In place of a plot, we follow their itinerary, at the beginning of which is a fortnight at the Château Beaumesnil, where Madame Viénot, in reduced circumstances as the result of some unspecified family “drama,” is obliged to take in paying guests. The novel is essentially the story of Harold and Barbara’s attempts to connect with foreignness; their serviceable but limited French means that to a large extent they must rely on their own instincts and on the kindness of strangers. Indeed “kindness” is a word that recurs throughout the novel, almost as a refrain, an acknowledgement of how differently we can view the world according to whether or not it treats us with consideration.

Maxwell captures the heightened senses of the traveller, the way that intense sympathies can form in an instant only to fade away just as quickly, or else be disrupted by circumstances and by the need to move on. Travel is the accumulation of experiences, and Harold is an accumulator. “He tries to attach people to him,” to make them a part of his life. For Harold, “the landscape must have figures in it.” But then, in a kind of proviso that is characteristic of his style, Maxwell goes on to define the limitations of this approach in a way that strikes a reader today as having a particularly contemporary edge. “It never seems to occur to him,” he notes in an admonitory tone, “that there is a limit to the number of close friendships anyone can decently and faithfully accommodate.” There are too many potential experiences and relationships for one life to cope with, and most of them must be left out.

Harold and Barbara’s itinerary, which by and large they stick to, takes them on to Austria and Switzerland and Italy and the south of France, and then back to Paris where they reconnect with the friends – though they remain unsure whether “friends” is the right word – they made at the Château Beaumesnil. Yet within the overarching structure of this itinerary all is fluid and unresolved. Madame Viénot’s son-in-law Eugène, who at first seems so warm and even affectionate towards Harold and Barbara, suddenly and inexplicably turns cold, and we are left to infer the reasons from a complex set of hints about his personality, his upbringing, and an underlying resentment towards the visiting Americans, whose country has not been invaded and whose expectations of life have not been dashed.

Maxwell is acutely aware of how a combination of chance and obligation governs almost everything we do. We have “dozens of lives to choose from,” says Harold confidently to a young Frenchman who has just explained that his own life will be an exact replica of his father’s and his grandfather’s. “Pick another,” he tells him. But it isn’t as easy as that. In a brief but moving passage, Maxwell describes a meeting between Harold and Barbara and a young Danish man who is taking the opportunity to see Europe before he has to return home to his medical studies. He is “as talented and idealistic and tactful and congenial a friend as they were ever likely to have” but after only a few hours in his company their itineraries take them in different directions. They copy down the young man’s address in Copenhagen but a letter they send to that address is never answered, and they never see or hear from him again. We do indeed have the possibility of dozens of lives, Maxwell seems to be saying, but very few of those possibilities are within our control.

The foreign world in which Harold and Barbara find themselves has something of the quality of a photograph; a photograph “with figures in it.” This world provides the viewer, as photographs often do, with the illusion of being able to step into the frame, of being able to cross boundaries of language and culture and make contact at some deeper and more instinctive level. France, like a photograph, draws the couple in while at the same time shutting them out, reminding them that they come from another world. In their desire to understand the people they meet – not just the subtleties of the language they speak, but what motivates them and what accounts for their quirks of behaviour – Harold and Barbara keep coming up against mysteries they cannot solve.

In a final chapter, to which Maxwell gives the half-mocking title “Some Explanations,” certain of these mysteries are revealed, including that of the “drama” behind Madame Viénot’s need to take in paying guests. But these explanations are not satisfying, not for Harold and Barbara and not for us as readers. “When you explain away a mystery, all you do is make room for another.” What remains with the couple, long after they have returned home and forgotten much of their foreign itinerary, are not explanations but certain experiences – “with a French family, and the château” – which they didn’t really understand at the time and don’t really understand now, but which have become part of them. •

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These transparent amendments did little to diminish the impact of the book, which struck its many readers, particularly those who had served in the war or witnessed its after-effects on their loved ones, as being true to the actual experience of modern warfare in ways that nothing else had managed to be. In the judgement of many of his admirers, Manning’s achievement has not really been surpassed even now, many decades and many wars later.

The titles of both versions of this extraordinary book – The Middle Parts of Fortune and Her Privates We – derive from the same brief passage in Hamlet, in which the young prince engages in sexually charged banter with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern over their relationship to Fortune and the careless control she exercises over their lives. “On Fortune’s cap we are not the very button,” says Guildenstern. It is a nice irony that it is the title of the second, expurgated version of Manning’s masterpiece, Her Privates We, that is the one that most directly alludes to the earthiness and the companionable vulgarity that Manning quietly celebrates in his half-novel, half-autobiography. It would be even nicer to think that the irony was deliberate.

Times and sensitivities change, and the unexpurgated version has long been restored as the standard text. It appears again here as one of the inaugural thirty volumes in Text Publishing’s new series of Australian Classics. The series itself has been presented as something of an antidote to the apparent neglect, by both readers and the academy, of Australia’s literary heritage, and of the part these key works have played in helping to define us. Whether we are, as nations go, particularly forgetful when it comes to our literary heritage, or whether we’re simply following global trends that have us focusing more squarely on the next app, the inclusion of The Middle Parts of Fortune on the list does raise another question, this time with particular relation to Manning: in what meaningful sense can he be regarded as an Australian writer at all?

Born in 1882 into one of Sydney’s most prosperous and prominent families, he first left for England at the age of sixteen, and although he returned several times for visits and maintained close contact with his family throughout his life, he barely refers to Australia in any of his published writings. It was not his subject. In his informative introduction to this current edition, Simon Caterson quotes from an early review by Nettie Palmer, in which she says of Frederic Manning that he would be “in the front rank” of Australian writers “if we could really claim him.”

Up until the appearance of The Middle Parts of Fortune, the claims would have seemed slight indeed. Manning, prodigiously well read, conservative by temperament, with a refined sensibility and a delicate constitution had, with the financial support of his family, slipped into the role of Edwardian man of letters, partly through his own efforts and partly through those of his well-connected friend and mentor Arthur Galton, who relentlessly put him forward. Manning achieved some success, and perhaps more importantly for him the attention and interest of fellow writers, in 1909 with a collection of historical dialogues, Scenes and Portraits – beautifully written and a struggle to get through – which T.E. Lawrence, who became a friend, later claimed with characteristic hyperbole to have read fifty times.

Nothing in Manning’s personal or literary background suggests an adequate preparation for life as an army private, still less for writing about that life. According to one observer, he had the hand of a “mediaeval scrivener,” which hardly seems suited to the recording of industrialised warfare. And yet one of the most striking aspects of The Middle Parts of Fortune, one that helps to ensure its status as a classic by any standard, is not that Manning abandoned his Edwardian detachment and his air of intellectual refinement in order to write an entirely different kind of book, but that he retained those very aspects of himself, both within the tone of the narrative and in the central character of Bourne.

Bourne, who stands as a version of Manning himself, is acutely conscious of his own difference. He feels isolated from his fellow soldiers: “He was not of their county, he was not even of their country… He felt like an alien among them.” It is hard not to read into this the perspective of a writer who was twice a foreigner, in England and in France. And yet this self-declared sense of isolation coexists with a deep sympathy with his comrades, a sympathy that seems by implication to question the value he places on other, more rarefied qualities.

Manning lived for writing and for intellectual pursuits, yet The Middle Parts of Fortune balances those pursuits, and the kinds of human relationships they engender, against the raw and instinctive fraternity of the Somme. The act of writing – whether it be letters home or the typing duties that Bourne reluctantly undertakes in a brief assignment to the orderly room – is made to seem oddly beside the point, especially when compared with things of substance: a parcel containing a plum cake, or a bottle of whisky secreted for safety inside a hollowed-out loaf of bread, gifts from home that he can share with his fellow soldiers.

There is a remarkable passage in which Bourne, who knows French, agrees to write a letter for a young woman to her English lover, a soldier who has since moved on. He translates her words, phrase by phrase, the writing itself “a somewhat mechanical business.” Yet in the process he feels himself becoming the other man, of whom he knows nothing but his name. “In fact, the relation in which he stood to this unknown man was in some ways closer and more direct that that in which he stood to the girl beside him.”

This reissue of The Middle Parts of Fortune includes the original dedication, “to Peter Davies who made me write it.” It would be fascinating to know what prompted Davies, a young and ambitious publisher and himself a veteran of the Somme, to badger Manning until he succumbed, and to know what he saw in the anglicised aesthete, with the perfect manners and wealth of learning quietly worn, that convinced him that he was the man to write the book about the war that needed to be written, the one that would see the conflict through the eyes of the foot soldier.

The answer can only be that he saw something else in Manning, an underlying energy and a natural human sympathy coupled with the odd angle of vision of the outsider. It was a complex vision, one that Manning, half-Australian and half-not, probably did not fully understand himself. His surrogate, Bourne, while he recognises the cruelty and waste of the war, does not really question why it should have happened, just as he does not really question the rigid social hierarchies that the military life both replicates and reinforces. Yet at the same time he envies the casual disregard for military protocol displayed by a passing Australian, “driving a horse-drawn lorry, with a heavy load whereon he sprawled, smoking a cigarette.”

Recalling the incident afterwards, Bourne succumbs to a rare moment of anger. “You want a few thousand Australians in the British Army,” he says to his companions. •

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This contrast, between a static, routinised home-life and the dangerous unpredictability of events, is a defining characteristic of the Simenon universe. In the Maigret novels, the two are nicely balanced; domestic life (or rather the kind of domestic life as lived by the Maigrets), serves as a welcome refuge from the constant reminders of the cruel and unpleasant things that people can do to one another. In the romans durs, however, domestic routine cannot be relied on to offer any such refuge.

In Simenon’s The Train, now reissued by Melville House in the 1964 translation by Robert Baldick, we follow an unassuming tradesman, Marcel Féron – he repairs radios for a living – as he flees south with his family ahead of the German invasion of 1940. Their day-to-day life, in which “all the familiar objects were in their places,” is no longer safe. The novel was first published in 1961, the same year, as it happens, as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and despite the huge differences between the two – short, spare and laconic as against long, exuberant and writ extra large – they can both be seen now as part of a rising mood of revisionism, by which the still recent war was cast not as a grand cause but as a confusing collection of apparently random events, to which the only sensible response was the pursuit of self-interest. The Train, like Catch-22, is notable for the way in which it makes cowardice seem not only the most rational approach to the unfathomable absurdity of war, but also, in an odd way, to constitute a kind of nobility.

When Marcel, who tells his own story, first introduces himself, his business is doing well, his house is his own, his wife Jeanne is pregnant again and due to give birth in a month or two. “I had become a happy man,” he says, not altogether convincingly, “I want to make that perfectly clear.” Simenon is adept at conveying the ways in which a life can be both reassuring and suffocating. Jeanne is of an anxious disposition, little Sophie has a “nervous temperament” and refuses to sleep apart from her parents even though they have “furnished the prettiest room in the house for her.” The source of the girl’s anxieties is never quite made clear. Do they come from inside? Are they inherited, or are they perhaps attributable to her delivery by forceps, as her mother claims? Or do they come from outside the home, from the voices on the radio, the snatches of French and German and Dutch and English that create a “sort of dramatic throbbing in the air”?

The news of the German advance throws everything into chaos. The life that Marcel and Jeanne have carefully built up, with its “standards” and its “landmarks,” seems suddenly to be slipping away. They decide to join the Belgians who are already heading south, though “decide” is perhaps too strong a word. As Simenon describes it, the small family’s departure simply happens; they go with the flow. It seems the natural thing to do. “Everything was natural now,” says Marcel, who sees the prospect of joining the other refugees as an opportunity to escape from his carefully constructed version of himself and to follow his true destiny, whatever that may be. One of Simenon’s great strengths, equally apparent in the Maigret novels, is his ability to show how changes in circumstances can change everything, and how people who seem destined for a particular path in life and a particular destiny can suddenly be led in a quite different direction, becoming someone different in the process.

The war is ever present in The Train, but always at a certain distance, in the form of those voices on the radio or the second- and third-hand reports of eyewitnesses. Nobody really knows what is going on. The fleeing villagers jostle for seats on the train going south. An official makes room in first-class for the pregnant Jeanne and for Sophie, but Marcel must remain behind to follow in a freight train. Marcel feels keenly the separation from his wife and child, and vows to find them again, but at the same time he takes pleasure in his new freedom and his new unencumbered self. In an implicit criticism of the vagaries of nationalism and of group loyalties, Simenon shows how Marcel and the other occupants of the freight car that they find themselves in begin to redefine themselves in the context of their new, travelling home. Even the “French people in the other two freight cars… were foreign to us.”

Soon Marcel’s world becomes even smaller as he falls in with Anna, a woman of not quite definable accent and nationality, who may or may not have sought him out for her own protection. “Falling in” becomes falling in love, as together they form a mutually supportive band of two. The depth and intensity of this spontaneous affair contrasts starkly with the dutifulness of Marcel’s marriage, but – in a characteristically Simenon touch – that does not diminish his parallel determination to find his family again and to resume his old life. Is it preferable to live, with Jeanne, in predictable harmony, as a “caricature of the married couple,” or to continue to invest in a relationship that belongs only to the “fragile present,” that “didn’t have any future”? Marcel’s resolution of this question is conveyed in a few almost throwaway lines towards the end. It is a mark of Simenon’s cool humanity that we are left to see his decision as a fact of life, the kind of thing that any of us might face should circumstances conspire against us. •

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OUR pasts, and the pasts we’ve lived in, have never been more accessible. Aerial photographs of the backyard of our childhood home, records of our online shopping that constitute a kind of biography of acquisition, our emails stretching back to the beginning of time (or circa 1992, which amounts to the same thing) can all be found in a matter of moments and all without leaving the terminal. Indeed, so ubiquitous and so accessible is the raft of information that defines us that it has almost become easier to remember than to forget.

That at least is the burden of Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, first published in 2009 and now released in paperback. The subtitle is designed to be arresting: virtue and forgetting have not typically been placed side by side in our cultural landscape. Forgetting indeed has been something to be avoided. Forgetting is the process by which our memories are altered or removed, and that has not generally been seen as a good thing, expect perhaps by those – survivors of war, for example – for whom it is the only alternative to the repeated trauma of remembering. To forget, whether through the natural processes of ageing or as a consequence of illness, or to be induced to forget, in the case of such terrifying prospects as mind control or brainwashing, has been seen as tantamount to losing our very selves.

Memories, in fact, are our selves. Although our lives might be shared with others, with families and friends and colleagues, when the time comes for recollection we each of us tend to remember those shared experiences in significantly different ways. We are culturally attuned to seeing the two things – our unique selves and our memories – as mutually dependent and inseparable. Our memories create us, and we find the prospect of one day losing those memories deeply unsettling. We fear how easily we might forget, which is why the new technologies, with their capacity to archive forever the digitised raw material that shows who we are and where we have been, have appealed to us as guarantors that our memories will never fade. The vast electronic archive may not contain all the memories that are in our heads, but it does contain the stuff of memory, the documents and photographs and scraps of information that have the power to revitalise our current memories and even help us to recover ones that would otherwise be lost forever.

It is not surprising, then, that over the past twenty or thirty years of the technological revolution we have proved so relaxed, even cavalier, in assigning more and more of the responsibility for remembering the details of our lives to memory banks and memory discs and memory cards with capacities for accumulating and preserving more and more of the raw material of memory. We can only have been so relaxed about this development because of our belief that more is better – that the more information that is out there and freely available, the more we can dive into it to supplement and refresh our own memories and our own sense of our selves. Against the idea that technology is dehumanising and intrusive has grown the powerful belief that the technology is there to help us – among other things, to help us to remember and even to do our remembering for us.

Yet the ever-accelerating pace of technological development can feel as if it is creating too many choices and too much information – too many memories, in a sense – and it is this feeling of being overwhelmed that has led to a reassessment of the act of forgetting. In considering ways in which the web could be induced to forget at least some of what it currently remembers, Mayer-Schönberger has caught a revisionist moment in our approach to the relationship between remembering and forgetting. How to unburden ourselves of some of the stuff that is holding us back and tying us down to outdated definitions of ourselves is emerging as a new project for our times.

Up until very recently in human history, argues Mayer-Schönberger, “the default was to forget.” Remembering was hard, keeping records was costly. If you wanted to uncover something from your past – an elusive document, a buried trauma – you had to make an effort. To forget, to let go of or otherwise repress those memories that were superfluous to immediate requirements or just plain embarrassing, seemed by far the easier, and in many ways the more sensible option. At the same time, the relative ease of forgetting carried overtones of weakness, particularly when viewed through the lens of psychoanalysis, say, or the “never again” school of history, which painted forgetting rather than remembering as damaging to the self. By these lights, rather than take the easy option, we had a responsibility to ourselves and to others to remember. But now, “for the first time in human history,” remembering and forgetting have swapped places, and remembering has adopted the default position. We now live, says Mayer-Schönberger, in “a world that is set to remember.” This means, in effect, that the injunction to “forget it,” which once seemed like an encouragement to take the path of least resistance, now seems like a recipe for hard work.

In a media-saturated environment of constant and never-ending novelty, in which the week before last is already the remote past, it may seem counterintuitive to argue that it has become easier to remember than to forget. But Mayer-Schönberger, in describing a world that is set to remember, is not saying that everything is remembered by everyone all at once, but that elements from our pasts, forgotten by others and considered by us, if at all, as irrelevant to who we are now, can suddenly and arbitrarily resurface, sometimes with destructive consequences. One of the most influential ways in which memory has been conceptualised in modern times is as a collection of everything we have ever done, sitting there in our heads, waiting to be accessed, if only we could find the key. By happy analogy, the computer provides those keys. They’re right there, between us and the screen, offering access to information and hence to memories that might have been thought of as over and done with. The compromising photograph, for example, injudiciously posted to Flickr or Facebook, which can without warning emerge from the archive to cut short a promising career. For Mayer-Schönberger, this kind of recovered memory – recovered by others, not by the individual whose memory it is – is pernicious because it denies us the human right to remake ourselves, to learn from experience, to forget and move on to the next stage.

While the examples that Mayer-Schönberger quotes are extreme cases – for the most part, ill-advised Facebook postings do not in fact lead to career plateaus – his underlying point, that digital memory threatens to overtake human memory, refers to how we increasingly feel overshadowed by an edifice of information about ourselves that we no longer control. We can feel trapped, sometimes by the very material that we ourselves have posted online while under the illusion that we were in charge. (How extraordinary, by the way, that the two terms that we most familiarly use to describe the new reality of electronic interconnectedness, “web” and “net,” should both evoke the notion of entrapment.) It is on this question of control that the implications of Delete are most far-reaching. As control over information slips away from us, it is no accident that the curatorial impulse has assumed such importance in the way we interact with the web. Curating, in fact, is the new creativity. Compilations, assemblies, mash-ups – Mayer-Schönberger’s preferred term is “bricolage” – constitute a kind of fight-back, a way of remaking discrete documentary items, emphasising their malleability rather than their fixedness, and in doing so imposing a personal stamp upon them. In the same way, the fashion for talking up the role of so-called “information curators,” the people who drive pathways through the web in the quest for some kind of order, contributes to the idea that if we are to retain authority over our own biographies, we need to take some kind of action and not just sit there and let ourselves be taken over.

Mayer-Schönberger proposes some solutions for how we might reclaim ourselves and our memories from the clutches of the web – a changed culture of how we use and respond to the burgeoning of information, a built-in use-by date for the currency of that information – but they don’t really convince. We are left wondering whether it isn’t just better to go with the flow rather than worry too much about where it is all heading. But for Mayer-Schönberger, that would be a dangerously complacent line to take. “We are creating,” he says, “a digital memory that vastly exceeds the capacity of our collective human mind,” and it is possible to hear, echoing out from that phrase, the idea that we have built the monster that will devour us. In his suggestive remarks on the popularity of bricolage, he seems to be pointing to the possibilities of counter-revolution, of asserting ourselves against the vast repository of information, and resuming control. And indeed, an optimist could argue that the resumption of control – us owning the information rather than the information owning us – is well on its way, in the increasing sophistication of search functions that, thanks to tags and metadata and the like, not only make information accessible but also can make us feel much more in control of that information, and much more in control of our pasts. “It’s easy,” say the advertisements for ancestry.com.

AS A useful corrective to the idea that the information explosion is a very recent phenomenon, James Gleick’s information-packed history of the way we store, transmit and recover knowledge, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, reminds us that we have always felt overloaded, struggling to cope. Gleick quotes Robert Burton, writing from Oxford in 1621 of being inundated by “new books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c.” Gleick uncovers many other such examples from what we might call the “before web era,” while noting that the ever-increasing supply of information was not being lamented so much as wondered at. Indeed, by the mid twentieth century, the prospect of linking up all that information, in some unspecified but wired way, held out the prospect of a new “shared mind” that would collect and disseminate information to the benefit of all. Gleick refers to Teilhard de Chardin, who asked in 1955 whether it does “not seem as though a great body is in the process of being born – with its limbs, its nervous system, its centres of perception, its memory?” Which is, pretty much, what’s happened, even though it hasn’t turned out entirely for the best.

Gleick points to how this abundance of information has come to seem as much burdensome as liberating, not least because so much is now stored outside our heads that it threatens to undermine our sense of ourselves. What is ours, and what belongs to cyberspace? Gleick is interested in the means by which we store and access information content, more than in the function of memory itself, but there are nevertheless some striking parallels with the conclusions reached by Mayer-Schönberger, particularly around questions of control and ownership. “For a certain time,” Gleick observes, “collectors, scholars or fans possessed their books and their records.” It was “part of who they were.” No longer, when those books and those records are available equally to all, in digitised form, to be called up when required.

The problem with all this material – this infinity of choice – is that it leaves us without our own unique story to tell. Somehow, all this information and documentation must be ordered and winnowed and matched to us as individuals in order that we may possess it as part of our personal biography, rather than having it possess us. Gleick sees this process as entailing a reassertion of the power to forget, which seems to be analogous to a kind of robust editing. “Forgetting used to be a failing,” he says, “a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.” In their different ways, Mayer-Schönberger and Gleick both encourage us to consider the virtues of forgetting. Rather than a sign of weakness and decline or, most disturbingly of all, a loss of selfhood, it may be quite the reverse – a way for us to get our lives back in order.

FROM this notion of forgetting as an aid to the recovery of order and control in our lives, it is only a small step to seeing it as having a specifically curative function. In the final chapter of Memory: Fragments of a Modern History – a brilliantly researched and highly readable account of scientific, quasi-scientific and just plain quack approaches to the way we remember – Alison Winter brings us up to date with “the first speculative steps… now being taken in an attempt to develop techniques of what is being called ‘therapeutic forgetting.’” This revisionist approach to forgetting – to memory loss – goes against the orthodoxy, ingrained in most of us, that the best way to deal with traumatic memories is to disinter, confront and control them, to the point where they no longer have the power to harm us. It is all part of a cultural narrative of self-assertion, of the power of individual strength and determination to defeat our demons. But what if we would be better off directing our strength and determination towards getting rid of the memories altogether, or at least damping them down so that they cease to bother us?

In describing recent attempts, whether involving therapy or drugs or a combination of both, to induce selective forgetting in those who have suffered various forms of psychological trauma, Winter is sensitive to the underlying question of what, actually, is being erased. Is it just the traumatic memories, the ones that militate against a full and satisfying life, or is it the life itself, the individual biography that is being damped down and fundamentally altered? She reminds us, just to complicate matters, that the introduction of anaesthesia to the operating theatre in the nineteenth century “was initially upsetting, because it challenged a convention about personal identity.” If it was life’s experience, and the memory of that experience, that formed your personality and character, what did that say about a process – the administering of anaesthetic – that knocked you out so that you were guaranteed not to remember a thing? As Winter says, those concerns now seem quaint and beside the point. But if we accept without question that it is legitimate to anaesthetise the present – that is, for the time that the patient is on the operating table – then perhaps it is equally legitimate to anaesthetise the past, or at least those memories from the past that stand in the way of health and wellbeing.

Winter constructs her study as an analogue of memory itself, offering a set of historical “fragments” that taken together provide a picture of “the deep intellectual and cultural complexities of memory science in practice.” In doing so, she explicitly links the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century fascination with the working of memory to the growth of technology, and particularly to the overwhelming cultural influence of photography, film and other, electronic forms of representation. Time and again photography and film have stimulated ideas of how memory works and Winter has fascinating tales to tell of “flashbulb memories” and “Kodak moments” and “movie-like memories secreted in the subconscious.” There was a sense, too, in which the filmed moment became not just a trigger for memory but the memory itself. “Mid-century advertisements for cameras and films,” she notes, “presented home movies as a way to relive the past with perfect fidelity.” This equation of film with memory assumed even greater prominence in the last decades of the twentieth century with the rise of what came to be called repressed memory syndrome, closely followed by its oppositional twin, false memory syndrome.

Winter moves surely through the complex set of cultural circumstances that contributed to the rise and fall of repressed memory syndrome and in doing so manages to be fair both to the proponents and to the critics. It is difficult now, even though the events took place so recently, to recapture the intensity of emotion and conviction with which both sides argued their case. The repressed (sometimes called “recovered”) memory phenomenon, in which victims, often at the prompting of zealous therapists, claimed to have suffered appalling abuse at the hands of relatives or others close to them, now seems like an extreme playing out of our long-held cultural belief that the truth lies buried within us and that only by confronting that truth can we be free to be our true, unencumbered selves. It is remarkable how often the recovered narrative of “what really happened” was expressed in terms of a film or a set of photographs. “It may seem,” Winter quotes, from a 1989 pamphlet explaining the process of triggering and releasing repressed memories, “that we are seeing a slide projector, with pictures flashing very rapidly before our eyes.” Only by confronting these pictures, these buried memories, it was argued, could the victim assume “control,” of the memories and themselves.

The sceptics, those who responded to the emergence of repressed memories by recasting them as false, did not so much question the existence of the memories, or their essentially cinematic nature, as they questioned where they came from. In many cases, the sceptics argued, they did not come from lived yet unacknowledged experience, but rather were created unconsciously in response to suggestions from outside or to other, random stimuli. The argument lingers on, with no definitive answer. Are recovered memories real, in the sense that they correspond to events that actually happened, or aren’t they? The answer, frustratingly, is that it rather depends. The remarkable thing about the battle between repressed and false memories, which raged so strongly for much of the eighties and the early nineties, is how quickly the heat went out of it. It is almost as if we grew wary suddenly of looking so deeply into ourselves, of recovering long-buried memories that would explain who we really, really are. The memory project, once so earnest in its determination to get at the truth, has developed into something more focused on placing – rather than resurrecting – ourselves, as we search the registries of births, deaths and marriages, or connect and reconnect with old friends on Facebook.

When Mayer-Schönberger or Gleick speaks of the need to turn away from memory for a while and focus on forgetting, or Winter of the new interest in the therapeutic potential of deleting memories rather than resurrecting and confronting them, they are identifying ways in which we might productively respond to the burden of too much information and too much memory. There is a corollary to this new approach to forgetting. If, as we have long believed, we are the sum of our memories, then rather than rely on memories from the past to define us, memories over which we may struggle to exert effective control, why not concentrate on creating memories for the future? This notion, of creating memory rather than letting it create you, is very much in the air. Camera manufacturers, for example, no longer represent their product as “a way to remember the past with perfect fidelity,” as Alison Winter reminds us they did in the seventies. They are much more likely nowadays to offer us the opportunity to “create memories.” Or, to put it another way, to take control of our future memories, rather than letting our memories control us from the past. •

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A few of the dozen do date from nearer to the beginning, when Picador launched its strikingly designed paperback editions onto the market. Picadors were not, typically, lined up in bookshops with all the others, in long rows of standard shelves, spines stoically facing forward. Instead their bright, in-your-face covers would appear full-frontal, on one of those wire-and-plastic versions of the traditional revolving bookcase. As often as not the display stand would be plonked down in a high traffic section of the bookshop, making it a more attractive proposition to stop and browse than to try to struggle past.

Something about the look of a Picador paperback made it seem very much of the moment. In many cases, that cutting-edge quality, whether of the cover artwork or the contents or both, has lasted amazingly well. It is even tempting to think that the really outstanding novels among them, the ones that were destined to be regarded as modern classics, managed somehow to instil an extra level of inspiration when it came to designing the cover.

Such was certainly the case with Don DeLillo’s White Noise, another of the festive dozen and arguably the most lauded and influential of them all. First published in 1985, when it won the US National Book Award, White Noise became almost immediately – and has remained ever since – the defining text of postmodernism, with its endless play on notions of originality and imitation, of the trivial and the serious, the innocent and the knowing. The genesis of that original cover (shown right) is recalled in a brief collection of notes and snippets about the publication history of White Noise that appears at the end of this new edition. The design deployed video images, computer graphics, photography and typography in a kind of overload of new technology and mixed media. The illustrator, Russell Mills, based the final design on “monochromes using car spray paints” that had been specially commissioned, in a nice postmodernist touch, from the rock musician and video artist Brian Eno.

DeLillo has described White Noise as “an aimless shuffle towards a high intensity event,” the occasion being a toxic spill that forces the inhabitants of a Midwestern town to evacuate their homes. DeLillo’s “aimless shuffle,” which is of course anything but aimless, covers an extraordinary variety of ground. We follow Jack Gladney – a professor in the new field of Hitler Studies – and his wife, ex-wives, children, stepchildren, friends and colleagues, as they face the big issues – principally the prospect of death – in a world where nothing is original, where “everything was on television last night,” where people act out the events of their lives according to the standard plots – what would now be called the story arcs – of movies. And it is on this question of imitation – the idea that everything is a simulacrum of something else, and that no matter how hard you look you will never locate the original because it is unlocatable – that White Noise has suffered, ironically enough, from an excess of imitation.

One frequently quoted passage centres on “the most photographed barn in America.” Waves of tourists and pilgrims come to the site with their cameras, not because it represents events of historical or social significance, but because it has been repeatedly photographed. It is famous because it is famous. “No one sees the barn,” says Jack’s friend Murray. This idea, that the barn has no substance of its own, that it exists only in photographs and images which themselves can be endlessly manipulated, has become so embedded in our cultural mindset that it is difficult today to feel the full force of DeLillo’s metaphor.

In most other respects, though, White Noise continues to strike an impressively prescient note. DeLillo is brilliant on the unthinking habits of daily life, the ways in which we continue to behave in primitive, herd-like ways, without ever quite cottoning on to just how the system is supposed to work. We suffer from a surfeit of inventiveness, which promises to make our lives easier and more rewarding, but often just makes everything more confusing than it already is. Jack describes a visit to the supermarket, where the produce bins “were arranged diagonally and backed by mirrors that people accidentally punched when reaching for fruit in the upper rows.” And in a vignette that seems to collect all the feelings of incipient despair that can be drawn out by a simple trip to the shops, Jack zeroes in on the way that “people tore filmy bags off racks and tried to figure out which end opened,” a behavioural tic that is as characteristic of supermarket shopping today as it was in 1985, and may finally disappear only with much heralded legislation against the use of plastic bags.

DeLillo catches in their developmental stages those aspects of the social landscape that have come to dominate it – the rise of the internet, the decline of privacy, the re-emergence of religion as a driving political force. He is especially good on the widening gap between intention and outcome – he has fun, for example, with the psychic Adele T., who is sometimes called in by the local police to help with difficult cases. Adele has a poor track record, except when it comes to locating things – bodies, the stashed proceeds of robberies – that the police haven’t actually been looking for.

In several recent interviews, DeLillo has raised the possibility of the end of narrative altogether – the end of one thing leading to another. Instead of responding to narratives and stories that originate outside ourselves, we will each of us be able to create our own. “An individual will not only tap a button that gives him a novel designed to his particular tastes, needs, and moods, but he’ll also be able to design his own novel, very possibly with him as main character.”

A hint of that labile future is contained in the cover design (right) for this latest re-issue of White Noise. In common with the other titles in the set, it is starkly black and white, with both image and typeface reinforcing a distinctly retro look while also being aggressively up to date. A television screen contains a human silhouette, partly obscured by interference, or “white noise.” The chief designer for Picador, Neil Lang, explains on the company blog how it was important to produce something that would work well online. To this end, the cover was also created as a gif animation, a kind of simplified moving image. Click on the link and the bands of interference on the television screen move up and down. What’s that about? Lang is not quite sure, other than to explain it as an attempt to “just create interest and maybe get people talking.” What the gif really means, for the changing relationship between print and the moving image and for the very future of the novel, will almost certainly be clearer by the time of the next re-issue of White Noise. •

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The subject of friendship, Tranter has remarked, is “very underrated,” and it is not hard to see what she means. In these post-post-Freudian times we have all too easily come to see friendship not in its own terms but more as a mask for something else, something more raw and more real and not necessarily noble that lurks beneath the surface of affable camaraderie. Sexual longing, perhaps, disguised as mere friendship. Or the chances offered by friendship for professional advantage or the prospect of entree to other, more desirable circles of influence. Linguistically, friendship has piggybacked on “networking” to become “friending,” a premeditated process of acquisition rather than something that happens spontaneously. Friendship by itself, minus the underlying motivations, has come to seem a bit tame. What is it for if it isn’t for something else? Our knowingness about these things, our quiet smile to ourselves as, for example, we hear the phrase “just good friends,” simply reinforces the idea of friendship as a cover.

It is this very tameness that can also make friendship seem like a safe option, one that carries fewer risks than say, romantic love, and which serves to keep at bay all the difficulties that come with sex and work and making our way in the world. The extraordinary success of television shows like Seinfeld, Friends and Sex in the City testify to the attractions of this idea of friendship as a refuge from all of that other, complicated stuff that friendship keeps below the surface. As the actors on Friends or Sex in the City age from series to series, their mutual friendship, frozen in time, comes to seem less and less plausible. We can’t keep out of our minds indefinitely the question of what happens to friendship when friends are forced to grow up. It is exactly this question that Kirsten Tranter tackles in A Common Loss.

Tranter approaches her novel at several removes; she is an Australian writing about America, in the voice of a man, on the subject of male friendship. Intriguingly, out of this apparent distance comes a complex and deeply sympathetic portrait of friendship, and specifically of both the strength and the vulnerability of the bonds that link a group of five American men (strictly speaking, four American and one Anglo-American), ten years out from college but still in touch, and still meeting without fail for their annual reunion. When one of them, the charismatic Dylan, is killed in an accident, the four who remain must come to grips not only with the resulting change in the dynamics of their friendship, but also with the way his death brings both their secrets and his to light, obliging them to re-evaluate themselves and one another. It is a common enough plot device; the dead man who turns out not to have been who his friends thought he was. But Tranter’s real interest is not in solving this particular mystery, the mystery of who the dead man really was. Even though some of Dylan’s secrets are revealed, we do not by the end of the novel know very much more about him or his motivations than we knew at the beginning. The focus is rather on the impact of his death on those he leaves behind.

Elliot, the one among the five friends who tells the story, has, along with Brian, Cameron, Tallis and Dylan, turned the annual reunion into a tradition, one that the survivors all feel obliged, with varying degrees of commitment and enthusiasm, to continue the year after Dylan’s death. Tranter is very good on the ways in which friendships that go way back rely heavily on precedent and unspoken rules – “after all this time there were customs that felt like ancient law” – and the way that these rules go on determining patterns of behaviour and interaction. As Elliot contemplates the upcoming reunion, the first one without Dylan, he recalls the occasion when their friend, not usually the sentimental type, referred to them all as his family. “You know, you can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends,” says Dylan. The cliché, simply because it is a cliché, seems clunky and insincere – “openly sentimental,” Elliot calls it – but it is also, in one of the novel’s profounder insights, wrong. You can’t actually choose your friends, the novel seems to be saying, any more than you can choose your family. They are just sort of there.

The annual reunions of the friends take place, in accordance with one of their “ancient laws,” in Las Vegas, the town where everything is fake, where everything is a simulacrum of something else. Tranter makes considerable play with notions of authenticity and fakery, not to mention of the authentically fake and the fraudulently real. In one of the novel’s few forced notes, Cynthia, the new girlfriend who Brian brings along to this latest reunion in contravention of another of the group’s unwritten rules, is “doing some kind of research on imitation versus authenticity.” Not that this provides her with any greater insight into the difference between what is real and what isn’t. Much of the men’s erratic behaviour she puts down to grief at their common loss, whereas in fact it is all rather more complicated, both more trivial and more profound, than that.

Each of the friends keeps his own secrets but Dylan, it emerges, has been documenting and storing everybody else’s as well as his own. There is now a real possibility that these secrets will be revealed to the world, damaging lives and threatening careers. Tranter has spoken of the importance of the secrets to the underlying framework of the novel, and of the thought she put into determining what they should be. They “range all the way,” she has commented, “from the very mundane to the shocking and disturbing and criminal.” The secrets, whether shocking or mundane, have one thing in common; they reveal the men to be hypocrites and frauds. And yet somehow this fraudulence, attributable to each of the men as individuals, does not quite extend to their shared friendship which, though battered by events and the passage of time, looks set to continue. At the very end of the novel, plans are being made for next year’s reunion. •

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FOR a while there, the new technologies seemed to be promising us that we could, if we chose, live full and thoroughly modern lives as much from a hamlet as a high-rise. We could move to the country and breathe clean air and drink clean water from a nearby aquifer and all the while have the city – its vibrancy and diversity and the opportunities it creates – piped in. Except that it isn’t quite working out that way. In Triumph of the City, the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser points to the ways in which “proximity has become ever more valuable as the cost of connecting across distances has fallen.” Hell may be other people, but we want to be near them all the same. In one of the many anomalies that characterise contemporary life, we are squashing up against one another at the very point in history when we could, without sacrificing too much of the way we live now, head for the hills.

By 2009, half of the world’s population was living in cities, and that proportion will only continue to rise. Urbanisation is on the march, and by and large we are feeling better about this fact than we used to. Coinages like “sea-change” and “tree-change,” with their implied characterisation of cities as places to get out of, are already acquiring an antique patina, and hardly a day goes past without news of a symposium or webinar on the future of our ever-expanding cities, and how to get the most out of them. Meanwhile, in countries where the vast majority of people do not have the luxury of lifestyle choices, the pull of the city is even stronger. “Rio’s slums,” says Glaeser with characteristic bluntness, “are densely packed because life in a favela beats stultifying rural poverty”; not only that, but life in a favela, unlike rural isolation, does provide at least the possibility of “pathways out of destitution.”

Perhaps, for a lucky few, it does. It may even be, as Glaeser contends, that cities that “fail to attract the least fortunate” are not performing their role effectively; in other words, are not vital and creative enough to serve as a magnet for the poor. But what, then, is the role of the slums in which so many of the new urban immigrants find themselves stuck? Are they embryonic versions of the cities to which they cling, incubators – as it has become fashionable to think – of entrepreneurialism and self-help, or are they essentially one step away from holding pens, where populations are “warehoused,” to use Mike Davis’s uncompromising term from his Planet of Slums (2005), after being moved on by bulldozers when the space is needed for other things? (Typing “favela + eviction + Olympics,” for example, into Google will return plenty of recent results.)

Slums are the stumbling block in the otherwise convincing argument that cities are good for us. Cities generate ideas and actions, the argument goes. They are at once reassuringly familiar and endlessly novel and they engender in their citizens great love and loyalty – even though the basis of that loyalty may remain a bit of a mystery to the visitor, who just happens to be passing through and who finds nothing special to write home about. And, what is more, the population density of cities makes them much better for the environment. It is this last point, even though it is now widely made and hardly qualifies as radical, that still strikes us as being deeply counterintuitive. In a culture that has come to see human intervention as inherently damaging, or at the very least entailing the loss of something irreplaceable, it is difficult to accept that the familiar grey-brown spectrum of the urban streetscape is, in truth, green. But it is. “It would be a lot better for the planet,” as Glaeser puts it, if more people lived “in dense cities built around the elevator rather than in sprawling areas built around the car.”

That word “areas” does slightly blur the point, for what do “areas” mean in this context but “suburbs,” and what are suburbs but a constituent part – often the major part – of cities? More cities “built around the elevator” would mean more tall cities like New York – or more specifically Manhattan – or Singapore or Hong Kong. It would also mean fewer like Mumbai, with its legacy of draconian height restrictions and chronic slums and seemingly unstoppable sprawl or, at the top end of those “liveability” scales that appear from time to time, Stockholm, where a normative limit of six or seven storeys makes it one of the most pleasant cities in the world simply to be in. Glaeser wants us to embrace the very, very tall; to re-envision the residential tower not only as fit for providing luxury accommodation for people who are never in, but also as the key to simpler, more manageable and more satisfying lives, where everything you need is within walking distance (walking distance plus, of course, a two-way trip in the elevator). We must “stop romanticising rural villages,” he warns us, but he also makes it clear that rural villages are not the real enemy of urban consolidation. For Glaeser, the real enemy is suburbia, and it lurks within the very gates of the city.

IN ADVOCATING greater urban density, Glaeser acknowledges his debt to the formidable Jane Jacobs, a debt shared with almost every other commentator on urban life, even those who, like Glaeser, disagree with much of what she said. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, first published in 1961, Jacobs speaks up for the virtues of close-knit, inner-city life, developed organically and built over time, metaphorically as well as literally from the ground up, and against – implacably against – the kind of postwar planning that assumed it knew best, and saw the wholesale remaking of the urban landscape and along with it the displacement of entire communities as essential in creating the city of the future. Jacobs’s hugely influential book, now reprinted by the Modern Library in a fiftieth anniversary edition, seems as fresh and important in its central thesis as, by all contemporary accounts, it did in 1961, even as parts of it evoke a world which is no longer quite recognisable.

Unlike Glaeser, who writes amusingly of his own “bout of insanity” that led him to move from the inner city to the suburbs – “to choose deer-ticks as neighbours instead of people” – the whole tenor of Jacobs’s Death and Life is to put such voluntary displacement beyond the bounds of comprehension, impossible to justify even by reason of insanity. Searching “for the salves of society’s ills in slow-moving rustic surroundings… is a waste of time,” she says forthrightly. A suburban-style development in Chicago with which she was familiar may, she concedes, be “endowed with greenery” but it is also “quiet enough to make one’s flesh creep.” And yet, to many a contemporary city-dweller, that flesh-creeping quiet, those precious intervals between bouts of neighbourly lawn-mowing and leaf-blowing, are a blessed relief from the cacophony of downtown, and one of suburbia’s greatest assets. For Jacobs, the hypothetical acquisition of “a ranch house and a barbecue” is made to seem, by implication alone, at best grotesque folly and at worst what ought to be a punishable crime. Instead of retreating to the suburbs or the countryside, we should stay and fight for the inherently life-enhancing qualities of the city. As for slums, rather than pulling them down only to replicate them somewhere else, “we need to discern, respect and build upon the forces of regeneration that exist in slums themselves, and that demonstrably work in real cities.”

Life attracts life, to repeat one of Jacobs’s many resonant phrases, a process best fostered not by suburban plots or indeed by towering residential high-rises but by something in between, by a mix of four- or six- or nine-storey buildings in which people live and work and go back and forth “on different schedules” and for “different purposes.” Street blocks must be short, and “the opportunities to turn corners must be frequent,” so that the day always presents the possibility of either familiarity or variety, of taking the usual route to work or, just for a change, going another way, and opening oneself up to surprise. Based on these deceptively simple conditions, Jacobs makes a fine-grained and inspiring case for the organic city of “exuberant diversity,” in which even from the top floor there is a sense of connectedness to the street, and where the sheer numbers of people in that street, going about their daily business or watching from their shopfronts, ensure a level of safety and security for all. Jacobs highlights the capacity of the mixed-use, densely populated but still human-scale city to provide, in a seamless combination of closeness and distance, the reassuring and stimulating presence of people who while not our nearest and dearest are not quite strangers either.

Out of the daily contacts with others that the city naturally provides – with the local shopkeeper or the regulars on the bus to work – comes “a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust.” In this age of individualism and celebrity watching, there is something heartening in Jacobs’s emphasis on the importance of shared public identity. There are very few individualised characters in The Death and Life of Great American Cities – and certainly no celebrities, unless you count Le Corbusier, who gets short shrift – and those individuals who do appear do so more as types than personalities. The same is true of buildings; through Jacobs’s eye they blur into one another in a kind of complementary difference, producing an effect “both serene and unselfconscious.” Jacobs has no patience with architectural “exhibitionism or other phoniness.” She would be unimpressed by our current fetish for iconic or statement buildings, or by the popularity of the so-called Bilbao strategy, by which civic councils and boards and corporations seek to replicate the way in which Frank Gehry’s Guggen­­heim Museum has helped to revitalise that city’s economy. And as for the extraordinary success of Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designs, the building-your-dream-home television series now in its tenth season, we can only speculate on what her reaction would be. For Jacobs a home was a means to an end, a component in a vast mosaic of interlocking urban variety. It wasn’t an end in itself.

Many things have changed since Jacobs wrote, and some of these changes have been for the worse. The eyes in the street, for example, on which she placed so much importance in ensuring public safety, are now just as likely to be electronic as human, hardly an encouraging development. On the other hand her fierce antagonism towards the faceless planners, hiding behind “the dishonest mask of pretended order,” now seems, to put it gently, to lack nuance. Not all purpose-built housing estates are social disasters, just as not all ambitious plans to knock down and rebuild end in tears. In a preface to the 1992 reissue of Death and Life, Jacobs was able to refer dismissively to London’s “grandiose but bankrupt Canary Wharf,” a huge makeover project that seemed at the time as if it was going nowhere. Twenty years on, things are looking much better; the buildings are up and the transport links are working and there are many people happy to live and work there, in much greater concentrations than they did in the past. As a development it may not exactly be loved, but who knows how time and familiarity might work their magic? Back in 1961, though, Jacobs was up against a powerful and unsubtle opponent, and this kind of philosophical nuance was not what was called for.

“This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” That is how Death and Life in American Cities begins, and pretty much how it continues. Particularly in Jacobs’s sights was Robert Moses, the so-called “master builder” of New York who had presided over many urban regeneration projects both before and after the war, and whose proposal in the late 1950s for a Lower Manhattan Expressway would have cut right through the heart of a community that Jacobs loved. The active opposition of Jacobs and her fellow residents, together with the impact of her book and the way it helped to turn public opinion against runaway development, killed the proposal. It was a victory of uncredentialled amateurs over authorities and experts.

Most significantly of all, given the continuing impact of her book on the professions of architecture, planning and design, and on the entire expanded field of urban studies, Jacobs herself was first among the uncredentialled. That is not to say she was uninformed or lacked the necessary knowledge or experience; quite the reverse. But she spoke from a position outside the academies and the professional networks. Not being part of the system, she felt free to challenge it.

PERHAPS the balance has now shifted too much the other way, with the current default position, for those who take an interest in such things, being to advocate preservation and conservation and adaptive re-use, rather than just letting the professionals dive in and have a whole other go at it in the hope they’ll get it right this time. In Edward Glaeser’s view, this default position means that it is becoming harder and harder to change the urban landscape for the better. In New York, he laments, “zoning rules, air rights, height restrictions, and landmarks boards together form a web of regulation that has made it more and more difficult to build,” and many people would see this as equally true of other cities around the world. Yet the causes that Jane Jacobs fought for are still very much there, and they still require extraordinary individuals to speak for them. Nothing exemplifies this more than the story of New York’s High Line, and the way in which, in just over a decade, an elevated railway has been transformed from a neglected and resented relic of the industrial past into an object of admiration and urban love. And, once again, it has been the uncredentialled who have taken the lead.

In their entertaining and unfailingly interesting account of how it all came about, High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky, Joshua David and Robert Hammond take pains to play down their qualifications and experience for the tasks that lay ahead of them. Prior to becoming involved in the project that -would take him over, Hammond “worked for a variety of start-ups,” helping, for example, to launch an in-flight catalogue “selling nose-trimmers out of airplanes.” Joshua David had ambitions to be an architect, until the professor in his introductory course put a stop to that. “He brought us outside on the lawn to draw buildings and trees,” David recalls. “He said I would never be an architect because the leaves on my trees were so badly drawn.” David then spent some time writing for “fluffy magazines, looking for hot trends and stylish new ways for readers to spend money.”

Although there is something contrived about this determined self-deprecation, by the same token both men were indeed novices in the high-powered worlds of city politics and large-scale urban development. Novices who also happened to have skills, talent and connections. By the summer of 1999, when the High Line was about to assume centre-stage in his life, David had been engaged by an ambitious new company to set up its internet division. He was becoming, in every sense, a professional networker. In a revealing aside that says much about the complex relationship between public and private in the modern metropolis, he recalls this job as being “the first time in my life that I had my own office with a door to close, and so it was the first time that I could do things besides work at work.”

In a back-and-forth structure derived from interview transcripts, supported by lots of splendid photographs, Hammond and David explain how they got involved in the quest to save the High Line from demolition. At the time, they weren’t even entirely sure what it was, though of course they were aware of it as part of the backdrop to their daily lives. But each was intrigued enough by an article in the New York Times about possible futures for the High Line to attend a community forum to see what it was all about. The High Line had been built to ensure the smooth transport of freight through the city, uninterrupted by the distraction of continually running over pedestrians in the street below. It was opened in 1934, but by 1980 traffic had declined to the point where the freight line’s working life was over. There had already been a partial demolition, in 1960, at the very time that Jane Jacobs and her fellow residents were struggling against the prospect of another intrusive transport link – a freeway this time, rather than a railroad – being rammed through the living structure of the city. Whole city blocks and the way of life that went with them were being threatened with destruction in deference to the twin gods of planning and transportation, while only a short distance away stood an example of just such a ruthless intrusion, a railway line which had seemed like a good idea at the time but now, a quarter of a century later, was already past its use-by date. If the whole clunky structure were to disappear, who would miss it?

With the passage of time, the intruder of yesteryear can come to be seen as a welcome guest, and even as part of the family. But, as Hammond and David make clear, this is not a process that can rely on time and chance alone. There is an awful lot of work involved to make sure it turns out that way. The authors have fun chronicling some of the more vitriolic opposition to the High Line, and the determination, particularly from local property owners, to have it torn down. It takes someone with the vision – “wouldn’t it be cool,” thought Hammond when he first became interested in the possibilities of the High Line, “to walk around up there on this old, elevated thing, on this relic of another time, in this hidden place, up in the air?” – and the necessary energy and, in this case, a fortuitous meeting with someone who has been thinking similar thoughts, and who is also at the time of his life when he is ready for a big project.

Hammond and David both attended that first community board meeting where, David recalls, “I sat next to Robert because I thought he was cute.” David later notes that “gayness ultimately became an identifying characteristic” of the campaign to save the High Line, an observation that is not really followed up, other than by Hammond’s relating how, in the early days of the campaign, people who already knew something about the High Line would pretend that they first became aware of it during regular visits to the many contemporary art galleries in the area. Not so, says Hammond: “it was really when they were going to gay dance parties at Twilo, the Tunnel, or the Roxy.”

“We’re not close friends,” says Hammond of his relationship with David, as if to reinforce the point that it is successful working relationships and shared professional goals that really count, because they are what in the end rescued the High Line. They both understood from the beginning that what was needed was a plan, one that covered networking (both actual and virtual) and fundraising and lobbying and legal action and the garnering of high-profile support, the latter an essential ingredient of any modern conservation campaign. Celebrities may be absent from The Death and Life of American Cities, but they appear on almost every page of High Line. This might have grown tedious, but it doesn’t, because it all somehow contributes to the bigger picture. Hammond in particular is adept at contrasting his “who, me?” status with his increasingly regular brushes with fame, and at managing to convey, via a likeable line in faux-modesty, that it is not a question of his being initiated into the club of celebrities and powerbrokers, but of the celebrities and powerbrokers being initiated into his. We see up close the process by which the High Line acquired the cult status it enjoys today. “They got it,” says David of an influential couple he takes on an introductory tour. “She got it,” says Hammond of another potential supporter, equally well connected, after she too has been given the tour.

What these privileged visitors to the otherwise off-limits High Line “got” was the extraordinary capacity of this quirky structure, even in its dilapidated and neglected state, to be both in the city and out of it. The grasses and wildflowers that grew up there of their own accord – so brilliantly evoked by the Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf in his plantings for the final, reclaimed version of the High Line – somehow brought the country into the city, even as city life went on, audible and visible, all around. In one of the many striking echoes of Jane Jacobs (“I’d read Jane Jacobs right before we started,” says Joshua David), the High Line provides both connection and distance, and with that too comes the element of surprise, of a new perspective on the familiar, and of not quite knowing what will next catch your eye.

“A city cannot be a work of art,” said Jane Jacobs, in italics, by which she meant that it could not simply be designed, or made, from the top down. When Hammond observes of the completed sections of the park in the sky that “it’s not about the individual plants – it’s the overall effect,” it’s hard not to hear an echo of Jacobs and her emphasis on the organic complementarity of buildings, rather than on individual, self-consciously artistic stand-outs. But Jacobs did in fact see the city as a kind of artwork, famously characterising it as a ballet, not one created by a star choreographer so much as by a group effort made up of the changing configurations and contributions and perspectives of the people on the street. “The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.” The city is an artwork which we all participate in creating, using the props we have to hand. The High Line is a platform for watching the performance, and in the process for seeing new things and seeing things anew. •

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Originally published in 2009, Seven Ways to Kill a Cat earned Néspolo a place the following year on Granta magazine’s list of the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists and is now available in English in an energetic translation by Frank Wynne. The novel is narrated by Gringo, who tells the story of his own and Chueco’s struggle to survive in the slums of Buenos Aires, navigating the violence all round while dodging for as long as possible the fate of the cat. We’re at the very beginning of the twenty-first century and the Argentinean economy has collapsed. Money has taken on an unreal, cartoon-like quality, food is scarce and what little rice Gringo can get hold of has weevils in it. As for the cat, it is destined to be dinner.

Cats and weevils are part of a large supporting cast of non-humans that includes all manner of bugs and insects, as well as dogs and rats and weasels and, rather less predictably, two whales. One of the whales is the Moby Dick of Melville’s novel and the other is Josephina, the star of the Japanese cartoon series that Gringo remembers seeing as a child. Moby Dick makes multiple appearances, but Josephina receives only a passing nod, yet of all the animals and insects that get a mention, she is the only one whose presence is essentially benign. Gringo admires Josephina the whale for her ability to shrink down to the size of a drop of water, or to get bigger again and to “fly off with a little boy” on her back. But neither invisibility nor escape is an option for Gringo, who is trapped by the slums and constrained by a plot that drags him along against his will.

Like the civilised and the savage, animals and humans overlap in the novel to the point where it becomes difficult to tell them apart. “There’s a dark shape in the middle of the road in a pool of blood that keeps spreading,” says Gringo. He’s a long way away and he can’t quite make it out, but after a while he realises that it’s got too much hair to be a child. “It’s a dog,” he says. In similar fashion, Gringo frequently recognises himself as an animal. He prowls around like a cat in a cage. He’s a rat on the run; “all I need is a tail and I’d be one of them.” As he gets caught up in a war between rival gangs, his only possibility of escape is to communicate with his friend Quique by imitating the call of a “non-existent bird.”

With a few exceptions – like Josephina, or Quique’s dog Sultán, the one whose body Gringo has initially mistaken for that of a child – the animals in Seven Ways to Kill a Cat are typically nameless and always dispensable. And it is much the same with the people. They do go by names, but generally not their real ones. “There’s no point getting bent out of shape about names,” says Gringo, whose nickname comes from his blond colouring. Even his beloved Mamina isn’t really his grandmother. She is just somebody who took him in, and by the time of the novel’s action, when Gringo is twenty, she is already preparing to let him go again.

In a recent interview Néspolo described Argentinean writing as cannibalistic, an observation he traces back to Borges and to a continuing process of “ingesting and metabolising other cultures and literatures that has come to define Argentina’s identity.” Seven Ways to Kill a Cat is full of such self-conscious references to these “other cultures” – to gangster flicks, for example, or Hollywood westerns – and to ingrained habits of imitation. “He’s acting his part,” says Gringo of Chueco when his friend starts getting carried away with his own belligerence: “all he needs is a film crew.” Poor Chueco. “For all his gangster posing, he obviously hasn’t a fucking clue.”

Early on in the novel, Gringo gets hold of a copy of Moby Dick, which he then carries around with him as a kind of talisman, dipping into it during lulls in the action. The implausibility of this device is part of the point, suggesting as it does the gap between a literary classic from another world and Gringo’s own high-stakes preoccupation with survival. Just as Gringo looks foreign but isn’t, so Néspolo’s novel appears to defer to “other cultures and literatures” while at the same time making a firm, even belligerent, distinction between the foreign and the home-grown. “How’s it going with the whale?” asks Piti, a friend of Gringo’s cousin and another character who is susceptible to bouts of pedagogical excess, “waving his cigarette like a pointer, like he’s some professor.” Piti explains to Gringo about the human condition and the nature of metaphor and what the whale in Moby Dick represents, but Gringo is not impressed. “Metaphor my arse,” he says.

Néspolo is tackling that most difficult of novelistic tasks, how to capture the quality of uniqueness – of originality – that lies beneath a surface of cultural deference and imitation. Translation further compounds the problem. Should we as readers be looking for the spark of cultural difference in translated fiction, the qualities that make a novel still recognisably Argentinean, for example, or is it all about the universality of experience, a globalised take on a globalised world? Translation, once a near invisible profession, has moved closer to the spotlight in recent years partly because of the increasing importance of these questions; on the one hand there are the connections across cultures and experiences that translation can highlight, and on the other there is the need to preserve that quality of difference, thereby discouraging the reader from simply transposing the life of a novel set in Argentina or Azerbaijan to somewhere closer to home.

Frank Wynne touches on these questions in his Translator’s Note at the beginning of Seven Ways to Kill a Cat. “Since I could not imagine Gringo addressing his friends as ‘mate,’ ‘buddy,’ ‘bro’ or ‘brah,’ I borrowed from Spanish the many words for friend – socio (partner), loco (madman), viejo (old friend), compañero (comrade), pibe (kid) and the ubiquitous Argentinean interjection che (which can translate as ‘man’ or simply as ‘hey!’).” Another of Néspolo’s translators, Beth Fowler, who won the 2010 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize with her version into English of his short story “The Axe Falls,” puts the problem in terms of “what to do with items of food and drink such as quesillos or mate which have no direct translation.” One possibility is to “turn them into a cheese sarnie and a cuppa,” but clearly that won’t do. Like Wynne, Fowler opts for leaving these culturally specific terms untranslated. Sometimes there is just no substitute for the original. •

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Valli was already a well-established actress. She had appeared in more than forty films, and was known internationally for her roles in, for example, Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case (1947) and Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). Yet in the same year Senso was being filmed, with Valli – as the obsessive and self-destructive countess – delivering to the cameras what many now regard as her greatest performance, a real-life melodrama was developing that would come close to ending her career. It became known as the Montesi affair, and its repercussions continued for years. It is, says Stephen Gundle in his absorbing study of the case, Death and the Dolce Vita, a “very Roman story” of the intersection between glamour (a subject on which Gundle has already published widely) and the harsh facts of life, between old and new ways of looking at the world.

Gundle’s account begins in April 1953 with the disappearance of twenty-one-year-old Wilma Montesi from the home she shares with her parents, grandparents, sister and brother. After failing to return from an outing at the expected time, she is reported missing, and a day and a half later her body, partly undressed, is found washed up on a beach. What happened during those thirty-six hours was and remains a mystery. The strong likelihood is that she was murdered, or accidentally killed by a companion or companions and her body dumped, but nothing is quite certain. It could have been a simple case of misadventure. Wilma’s family thought so, a belief they stuck to through a succession of investigations, reports and trials. By their account, Wilma had complained of sore and blistered heels caused by the rubbing of her new shoes, and had heard that bathing her feet in seawater would provide relief. She had taken herself to the coast and, “perhaps due to her period, had fainted, slipped into the water and drowned.”

In one of the many instances of overlap between reality and the world of cinema, Gundle records how the actress Anita Ekberg, having scratched her heel while dancing one summer evening in 1958, was photographed later that night bathing her feet in the Trevi fountain. The picture went round the world, helping to inspire Fellini to conceive La Dolce Vita, to cast Ekberg, and to include in the film the famous scene in which she bathes in the Trevi fountain. Life and cinema were coming together. The photograph also ensured that Ekberg’s late-night paddle became, “after Wilma Montesi’s… the most famous foot-bathing incident in 1950s Rome.”

In Wilma’s case, Gundle suggests, the “foot-bathing theory” provided her family with a way of preserving her dignity and reputation after death. Five years later, when the case was still very much in the public mind and speculation continued unabated, the photograph of Anita Ekberg seemed to bring out all the underlying eroticism of the earlier story. By that time, the “new flashbulb version of reality” was making it increasingly difficult to preserve older notions of privacy and modesty. It was also making it harder to keep secrets.

Like many Italian women of her age, speculates Gundle, Wilma was captivated by the cinema, and the possibility it held out of being “discovered” and thereby transported to a glamorous and interesting life. Thanks to the widespread practice of dubbing, film acting in 1950s Italy meant that even speaking parts didn’t necessarily involve speaking, suggesting to the star-struck that the chances of being talent-spotted – in reality remote – were really just a question of having the right look, of being in the right place at the right time, preferably in the company of the right people. But the right people have a way of turning out to be the wrong people, and Gundle leads us deftly through a complex web of interconnections between those – politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, artists, actors – whose motives are obscure and whose knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the death of Wilma Montesi can never be convincingly pinned down.

Referring to one of the many supporting players in this offstage drama, Gundle comments that “her precise role was unclear.” This “mysterious woman” may have been a government agent, he observes drolly, but on the other hand she may not. She is not alone in being hard to pin down. No one’s role is clearly defined, even those who are at one time or another most directly accused of complicity in Wilma’s death. Most prominent among these were Ugo Montagna – a wheeler-dealer and one of the so-called Ciampino nobles “who secured their titles more or less as the plane taking the royal family into exile was rolling down the tarmac” – and Piero Piccioni, the son of a prominent politician. A talented jazz musician and composer, Piccioni survived the scandal and went on to a highly successful career in which he was responsible for hundreds of film scores and soundtracks.

But for a while there, things looked grim for Piccioni. The evidence against him may have been largely circumstantial and founded in rumour and the speculations of the press, but he was detained and arrested, investigated and re-investigated, before ultimately appearing as one of the defendants in the “Venice trial” of 1957. All of them, including Piccioni, were acquitted. Crucial in Piccioni’s defence was the testimony of his lover Alida Valli, who backed his version of events, confirmed his alibi, and never wavered in the essentials of her story, even as she became progressively less enamoured of the man himself. The experience, played out in public, badly affected Valli’s confidence and her capacity to continue in her career. By the time of the trial “she had been out of work for two years.” Valli did later recover some of her earlier momentum, but not before she had learned, like the countess in Senso, what can happen when real life – in this case the real life and real death of Wilma Montesi – is turned inexorably into melodrama. •

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The 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens falls on 7 February 2012 and the celebrations have already begun. The Morgan Library and Museum’s “Dickens at 200” exhibition, drawing on its vast collection of Dickens-related material, has opened in New York and runs until just after the big day. Further major exhibitions are planned, including one at the Strauhof Literary Museum in Zurich and several in France, a country Dickens admired and visited often. The British Film Institute is holding a three-month retrospective, beginning in January, of the vast array of screen adaptations of his work, even as further adaptations are in production for release later next year. The British Council, noting the continuing and ever-renewing affinity felt by many people around the world for Dickens’s work and legacy, “will coordinate a worldwide call for aspiring writers, illustrators and photographers to respond to their city,” with Dickens’s “Sketches of London” as their inspiration. The official “Dickens 2012” website lists these and many other forthcoming events on its calendar, ranging from a special iteration of the annual Dickens Festival in Deventer in the Netherlands (at which, intriguingly, “the organisers are planning to break several world records and introduce acrobatic elements”) to a “Dickens half-marathon” in Texas, scheduled to be run in June.

The link between Dickens and a half-marathon named in his honour is not as tenuous as it may first appear. Claire Tomalin’s splendid Charles Dickens: A Life, announced recently as the Daily Telegraph Biography of the Year, captures the intense physicality of the man, and the ways in which exercise, particularly long walks, would both calm and stimulate his restless imagination. His obsessive, youthful love for Maria Beadnell – “I never loved and I never can love any human creature breathing but yourself” – would have him walking, in the early hours of the morning, from his work as a reporter at the House of Commons to Maria’s home in Lombard Street, where he would wander past while imagining her asleep in her bedroom. Tomalin traces his likely route, noting that “it must have taken two hours and got him home not much before morning.” Years later, when his marriage to Catherine Hogarth was disintegrating and, to the dismay of many then and now, he was furiously writing her out of his life, he temporarily escaped the tension all around by walking from his city to his country home, from Tavistock House to Gad’s Hill – “a good thirty miles” notes Tomalin, an impressive distance for someone whose health, never robust, was proving increasingly troublesome.

Like all biographers, particularly those whose subjects are long dead, Tomalin depends for her understanding of Dickens’s life on what is on the record, on what, by a combination of chance and intention, has survived to tell the tale. She is aware of how these surviving records, on which many preceding Dickens biographies – including her own award-winning study The Invisible Woman: The Story of Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan (1990) – have been based, must be approached with a fresh and even sceptical eye if another Life is to be justified. “As to the colour of Dickens’s eyes,” she says in an elegant reference to the sometimes contradictory nature of biographical sources, “they were reported variously as dark brown, dark glittering black, clear blue, ‘not blue,’ distinct clear hazel, ‘large effeminate eyes,’ clear grey, green-grey, dark slaty blue…,” adding in a footnote that she has “collected more variants.” Tomalin does not venture a definitive opinion on which, if any, is correct. In other instances, however, particularly in respect of Dickens’s relationships with women – his mother, his first love Maria Beadnell, his wife Catherine and her sisters, the actress Nelly Ternan and her sisters, not to mention their fictional counterparts – she weighs up the evidence in the light of what is possible or likely and produces convincing readings of them all. To put it at its gentlest, these readings do not always flatter Dickens. Yet Tomalin never loses sympathy for her subject, even as she acknowledges that sometimes it is hard not to turn away, particularly from his ruthless dismissal of Catherine, his wife of more than twenty years and mother of their ten children, in favour of starting a completely new story.

CATHERINE died in 1879, almost a decade after Dickens. And yet, as Lillian Nayder points out in The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth, it has often been assumed that she died shortly after her estranged husband, or else that she lingered on in the half-light to which she had long been consigned, her life effectively over even before his. Nayder goes to great pains to restore the balance, to “pluck her,” as she rather dramatically puts it, “from the flames of her husband’s funeral pyre.” Nayder evokes what it might have been like to be a, rather than the, Dickens. She is almost certainly right to say that “Catherine’s identity as Mrs Charles Dickens did not constitute her authentic or essential self,” any more than the fact of being Dickens’s son or daughter means that there is nothing more to be said about his offspring. But there is a difference between the essential self and the part of that self that survives in biographical form; there are few among Dickens’s family and close friends who live on independently of their association with him, or whose own achievements outshine the simple fact that they knew him, and he knew them. Catherine herself was more than aware of what constituted any claim she might have to be remembered; as Nayder notes in her afterword, she requested that her letters from her husband be preserved, that “the world may know that he loved me once.”

Tomalin is particularly strong on this aspect of biography, on the ways in which other lives are subsumed within, and draw their significance from, the lead player. She quotes John Forster, Dickens’s greatest friend and his chosen biographer; a busy and successful man in his own right, Forster nevertheless saw Dickens’s death as meaning that “nothing in future can, to me, ever again be as it was. The duties of life remain while life remains, but for me the joy of it is gone forever more.” For Dickens’s sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth, who chose to continue on as his housekeeper after the end of his marriage, and to take his part against her sister, nothing would “ever fill up that empty place.” There is much more here than the exaggerations of conventional sentiment. For John Forster and Georgina Hogarth, as for many others who went on living after his death, the remainder of their time would be devoted to celebrating, whether publicly or privately, the man who had, in one sense or another, created them. Tomalin quotes George Dolby – the canny businessman who managed Dickens’s gruelling schedule of readings in his last years and remained loyal to his memory – crediting his friend and employer, by way of an appropriately literary metaphor, with giving him “the brightest chapter of my life.”

Dickens, writes Tomalin, “was surrounded by dependants”: his parents and siblings, his own children, and particularly his six sons for whom, with the exception of Henry, things never seemed to go quite right; and beyond his family, the various people for whom on frequent occasions he felt a sense of responsibility which translated into financial help and other acts of generosity. Behind this selflessness lay a very clear vision of what might have been, of how things could very well have turned out differently for him. Tomalin introduces this theme early on when she refers to some early pieces written by Dickens, “deadpan accounts of respectable failures and victims of London.” These sketches, she suggests, act as “emblematic warnings” of how easily a life can go wrong, and how quickly the prospect of success can slip away. Later, in describing the father’s disappointment in his sons, she speculates that “he saw them as a long line of versions of himself that had come out badly.” This notion, of shadow or alternative lives forever in the frame, commenting by their presence on the role of chance and the precariousness of things, gives Tomalin’s book, although in some ways quite conventionally structured, a very contemporary tinge.

EVEN more contemporary in feel is Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist, another biographical study that comes in good time for the celebrations. Douglas-Fairhurst focuses on Dickens’s early life and career, when he was becoming but was not yet made. He makes a similar point to Tomalin’s about the early sketches, published when Dickens wrote as “Boz,” identifying the strand that links them together as “the ease with which lives can be stymied or knocked off course.” He takes this relatively straightforward notion, that there is always the possibility that things will take a turn for the worse, and uses it to brilliantly illuminate the life, the work, and the relationship between the two. The idea that life is a series of “becomings,” with that word’s double suggestion of both acting and being acted upon, is presented by Tomalin and Douglas-Fairhurst – each, for example, has a chapter entitled “Becoming Boz” – but for Douglas-Fairhurst it is at the very centre of his argument.

Douglas-Fairhurst makes much of Dickens’s plurality, of the idea that his life was in fact a series of lives, some contradictory yet fully realised, others merely hints of what might have been. “There is almost nothing one can say about him,” he writes, “of which the opposite is not also true.” Douglas-Fairhurst’s sharp-eyed familiarity with the works brings to light a wealth of examples of Dickens’s fascination with alternative lives and the role of chance. “The things that never happen,” he quotes from David Copperfield, “are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished.”

Dickens’s awareness of how differently things might have gone for him – “I might have been… a little robber” – informs all his writing, but none more so than Oliver Twist, which he wrote rather as he lived, without quite knowing what direction he would take next. At the end of the first instalment of the novel he added that he wasn’t yet sure whether it would be “a long or a short piece of biography.” Douglas-Fairhurst characterises this line as both playful and true – “a frank acknowledgement that he didn’t yet know himself” where it was all heading. Oliver Twist, as seen through this lens, is a novel about the process of becoming, in which Dickens controls the trajectory of the plot by continually “rejecting alternative strands.” At the same time, Dickens uses that control to make clear how Oliver, in living his life, is repeatedly subject to chance. When he is about to be indentured to a chimney sweep, Oliver is saved by the fact that the magistrate, about to sign the necessary papers, cannot immediately locate his inkstand. The pause in the action creates a space in which the magistrate can reconsider. “If the inkstand had been where the old gentleman thought it was…” quotes Douglas-Fairhurst, adding, “it would have been quite a different story.”

In strikingly different ways, Tomalin and Douglas-Fairhurst convey an overriding impression of Dickens’s extraordinary energy, his capacity to keep striding on into the future, taking advantage of every opportunity, processing everything that he saw and experienced and turning it into his work. Yet all the while he was also looking backwards; “he liked,” writes Tomalin, “to keep hold of every part of his life, and relate each to the others,” thereby retrospectively converting his own life into a narrative which he repeatedly tinkered with and rewrote – in some instances, such as the story of his marriage, quite drastically. Life’s course may turn on the placement of an inkstand, but that didn’t stop Dickens (as, perhaps, it doesn’t stop many of us) trying to control his own narrative, whether he was looking forward or looking back. Both Tomalin and Douglas-Fairhurst refer to Dickens’s habit, when travelling, of rearranging the furniture in his hotel room to his liking. The props had to be correctly positioned, the scene set. And then, after imposing himself on the room, he could go to sleep. •

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It is all the more impressive that the process that Hardach describes in her endnotes, of research and interviews and repeated field trips and the snippets of cultural or linguistic interest provided by friends, results in such a distinctively individual take on one of the most vexed questions of the age – mass immigration, and the plight (the very word seems to despair of a solution) of refugees. The narration alternates between the third person and the voice of a young woman, brought up in Germany and now working in the bureaucracy of a mairie in Paris, who has her suspicions about a forthcoming wedding. Is it the real thing, or is a Kurdish girl being coerced to marry against her will? “The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages,” prepared by her predecessor, is no real help.

At first it is not clear what lies behind her concern. Conscientiousness, perhaps, a determination to follow the rules. After all, forced marriages, the manual says “in big bold letters,” are illegal in France. It becomes progressively more apparent that it is all a bit more complicated than that. The wedding, and whether or not it should be allowed to go ahead, revives memories of someone she once knew. We have been introduced to Selim in the first sentence of the novel, a Kurdish boy swimming through sewage to reach the coast of Italy. Arriving in Germany without papers, he is declared, after dental and other examinations, to be thirteen years old, and allocated a birthday. When his eighteenth birthday comes around, though, he is likely to be deported, unless he can find a reason why he should be allowed to stay. Like marriage.

The woman who works in the town hall in Paris, preparing the paperwork for forthcoming marriages and trying to ascertain whether or not they are “real,” has herself been married, under a false if not forced arrangement. As a schoolgirl in Germany, she agreed to marry Selim, as a way of ensuring he can stay. The question of whether this marriage, which involves years of subterfuge and pretence in order to keep the authorities at bay, is “real” or not, is never asked directly, but is left to bubble along underneath a world in which cultures mix and re-mix and where nothing is straightforward. “As if we could tell whether a marriage was real,” says Sandra, who also works in the mairie. “I can’t even tell whether my own is.”

This is a picture of a Europe in which everyone is mashed up with everyone else, moving with varying degrees of confidence and fluency from language to language, latching on to cultural roots and customs that they don’t quite remember or indeed have any meaningful connection to, and which in any case may not, rather in the way of their marriages, be real. Everyone seems to be an immigrant of some kind, whether it be the narrator’s Paris friends who all went to international schools and “grew up in a sort of geographical limbo,” or the people Selim meets in the refugee camps, the “nameless Liberians who were really Nigerians, and stateless Palestinians who were really Egyptians.” The essential difference is between the privileged ones who can move freely across borders, and those who, like Selim, must do so by stealth.

In search of the truth about forced marriages, the narrator consults the head of the Ligue pour la Défense des Droits de la Femme. The two women take a walk by the canal, where “the hip young interns from the advertising companies and tech start-ups… were sitting on the bank, legs dangling over the water.” A few pages on, some Afghan boys are “bathing their feet in the canal,” passing the time before making the break for Britain. The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting False Marriages links these two kinds of nomads together to show, with originality and wit, that the differences are as much ones of circumstance as anything else. •

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Petterson’s most recent novel, I Curse the River of Time, first published in Norwegian in 2008, focuses on the fragility and strength of our connections to family, and the ways in which things never quite turn out as we hoped or planned. We can anticipate danger or disappointment and try to guard against them but the blows, when they come, are still likely to catch us by surprise. I Curse the River of Time begins with just such a blow, as the narrator Arvid Hansen recalls the time – we later discover that it is 1989 – when his mother is diagnosed with stomach cancer. It was not something she expected. As a smoker, she had always imagined a different fate.

Arvid’s mother remembers all the nights she would lie awake, “terrified of dying from lung cancer, and then I get cancer of the stomach. What a waste of time!” Petterson, a master of the laconic joke lurking in the gloom, has another twist in store in this irony of diagnosis. Arvid’s mother smokes menthols, which is explained by Arvid as a kind of avoidance tactic. “If you were scared of lung cancer you ended up smoking menthols.” And so, we are left to infer, perhaps this preventative strategy – of smoking menthols – actually worked. Arvid’s mother doesn’t get lung cancer, she gets something else. In a novel that focuses on our general inability to influence events, it’s a small but significant victory.

Arvid is a smoker too. “I have been my entire adult life,” he says, expressing it as a given, a condition of adulthood, rather than a choice. He too lies awake at night, worrying about the consequences not only of his smoking but of what it takes to participate in the world. Arvid has been a communist in his youth, turning his back on the university education his mother wants for him in favour of showing, by means of political activism and a job in a factory, solidarity with the workers. He falls in love, with communism and with China and with the girl who becomes his wife. But by 1989, he has lost faith in “the great country that had once been our Jerusalem,” and his wife has lost faith – or interest – in him.

In 1989, that fulcrum of a year, Arvid is thirty-seven. Winter is coming, his mother is dying, his marriage is collapsing and, not very far from his home in Oslo, the Soviet Union is on the way to collapsing too. Farther away the protestors have been killed in Tiananmen Square. One of the remarkable achievements of I Curse the River of Time is the way in which Petterson illuminates, while never labouring, the connections between smaller events (a mother’s death, a couple’s divorce) and large, geopolitical shifts – the connections, if you like, between the personal and the political. In the end, Petterson seems to say, it’s all personal.

Arvid even manages to personalise Mao – a difficult task at the best of times – as “someone I was drawn to, someone who had felt how time was battling his body, as I had felt it myself.” His brother recalls how Arvid “used to talk to Mao,” via a poster that hung above his bed, and Mao, in effect, talked back. A portentous line from one of Mao’s poems – “I curse the river of time” – seems to Arvid to speak to him directly, linking him to the great helmsman. These links to the larger-than-life people and events of history can take on a sinister tone; when Arvid edits his own brother out of a childhood memory, he speaks of erasing him, “like Stalin erased Trotsky.”

Against these problematic links with history, there are many smaller stories that aren’t told; the story of Arvid’s parents, his brothers, his wife or his children. Yet enough is said of all of them to help us build up a picture – a picture of Arvid’s wife, for example, and her fractured relationship with her own parents, her early hopes for her marriage and her subsequent disappointment. Petterson creates an absorbing narrative out of stray clues and glancing references. “I have never really been able to see enormous changes coming until the last minute,” says Arvid, but that is what holds our attention, in novels as in life. Arvid’s mother doesn’t want to die in 1989. Russia is in chaos, “it’s all hanging by a thread.” She wants to hang on too, “to see how it all turns out.” •

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There is a scene in Todd Phillips’s buddy film The Hangover (2009) that reminds us, even as we celebrate the contemporary phenomenon of extended youth, that nothing lasts forever and that a day of chronological reckoning will come. Three latter-day musketeers, having misplaced the fourth, are quizzing a hospital resident in an effort to fill in the drug-induced blanks of the previous night and find their lost friend. As he responds to their questions, the doctor continues in a routine and detached way to examine an elderly patient. The old man, dressed only and unflatteringly in his underpants, is both in the scene and out of it. The chatter goes on around him, but he doesn’t speak, other than to thank the doctor politely at the end of the examination. He is, we infer, suffering a form of disorientation and disconnection that is beyond restoration.

It is a funny scene, not least because the joke is on the young(ish) men as much as on the old man. As he sits there in biddable silence, he embodies a state of mind – of being acted upon rather than acting, of forgetting what happened yesterday – that is so central to our perception of what it means to be really old that, like the hyperactive heroes, we can hardly bear to look for fear of having to confront what may lie ahead. It is one of the most unsettling of twenty-first-century dilemmas: forty may be the new thirty, and sixty the new fifty, but surely the day will come when we are forced to relinquish our youth – when no more extensions will be granted – and accept, with as good a grace as we can muster, that old is old?

But then again, maybe not. If we take as our guide another film, one that focuses directly on the aged rather than glimpsing them via the gaze of the young, things can look rather different and rather more encouraging. Stephen Walker’s documentary Young@Heart, made for television in 2006 and subsequently released in a theatrical version in 2008, follows a choir of the elderly – current members are aged from seventy-three to eighty-nine – through the process of preparing for a major concert. Within the relatively low-key world of documentary films, it has done very well (so well, in fact, that it is scheduled for a “narrative remake” by Working Title). It is frequently re-screened, and has won numerous audience awards at film and music festivals around the world. The sight (and sounds) of older people putting in the hard work and long hours of rehearsal to perfect their performance is genuinely uplifting, testament to the revitalising power of music and of a shared commitment to a common end.

But a good part of the popularity and impact of the film can also be attributed to the contrast between the age of the performers and the age of the songs they sing: pop and rock classics decades younger than the people singing them. It is a contrast that produces, for instance, a particularly resonant rendition of the Ramones’ 1978 hit, “I Wanna Be Sedated.” Looking ahead, though, it can be only a matter of time – in fact the process may already have started – before the newer recruits to the Young@Heart chorus will be more nearly contemporaneous with their concert repertoire. The songs of the 1960s, 70s and eventually 80s will, in a very real sense, be their own. What difference will this convergence make, to them and to their audience?

This question – what happens when we re-enact and reinhabit our own past – is one that Ellen Langer, professor of psychology at Harvard, has been researching for much of her career. In Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility, Langer recalls an experiment she first conducted with her graduate students more than thirty years ago. For a week, a group of elderly men were sequestered in a location that had been got up to mimic the world of two decades before: its furniture, its food, its music, films and newspapers.

By being obliged to live in the past, and to speak of it in the present tense, the men quickly reacquired much of the sociability, confidence, and mental and physical agility of their younger, prime-of-life selves. They were being “cued” to be vital and energetic and they had, temporarily at least, broken the cycle of decline. (A second group of men participated in the same experiment, with one crucial difference: in their interactions with one another, they spoke of the past as the past. This group also improved, but not as much.)

Langer’s work forms the basis of a recently aired BBC series called The Young Ones, in which six octogenarians are brought together in a house that has been turned into a 1970s time capsule. There they are left alone, apart from the cameras, to get on with it, without the benefit of any outside help. We see improvements, including physiological improvements, just like those in the original experiment, some of them manifesting themselves in only a matter of a few days. The participants, stimulated by the right cues, get younger.

There seems little doubt that the experiment works: the executive producer of The Young Ones, Tom McDonald, records in a BBC blog posting how he looked on in amazement as “the atmosphere in the house changed from being a slightly sad retreat for some very nice elderly celebrities into being a dynamic, living, breathing space where collectively everyone was living as their younger selves.” It is not so clear quite how this happens, or what exactly the “cues” are and how they produce the effects that they do. Neither Langer in her book nor the television program really pins this down.

Being immersed in a time in which they were confident and in charge seems to prime the participants to be confident and in charge once again. But there are other things going on too: companionship, shared laughter, and a stimulating change of scene; the sense of renewed connection with the world events that shaped their lives rather than of being overwhelmed by the one-damn-thing-after-another of the twenty-four-hour news cycle; the enforced mutual- and self-reliance in the face of the sudden absence of helpers and carers; the feeling of being involved in something significant and of great scientific interest. All these and more could potentially be playing a part.

Langer is not, in any case, saying that in order to feel younger, old people should live in the past. Her point, both more subtle and more difficult to act on, is that as we age further and further into the last third or so of what is now a normal lifespan of seventy or more years, we increasingly follow a set of cues that are recognised by all – young and old alike – as signalling not vitality and active participation in the world, but decline and the inevitable loss of capacity. If, for instance, young people are culturally programmed to speak more slowly and to articulate more carefully to old people, then the old will continue to slow down, perpetuating a reflexive cycle of cues. Langer has no patience with this learned behaviour. For her, our life stories are not – or rather, they need not be – conventional narratives, made up of a beginning, a middle, and a slow, sad and disappointing end. Decline is not pre-ordained.

What happens, she asks by way of example, if we reverse the standard order of the typical eye chart, in which the letters start large and gradually get smaller, and instead have the lines of letters progress from small at the top to large at the bottom? Rather than reaching a point we have already anticipated, where we know we won’t be able to read the letters, we move instead from the smaller letters to the larger ones, towards capacity and achievement. But more than that, we find that by doing it this way we can actually read more of the letters. Quoting research conducted by Harvard colleagues and published in 2009, Langer records how participants in just such an experiment, faced with the reversed chart, “were able to read lines they couldn’t see before on a standard eye chart.” Tantalisingly, she doesn’t follow up on her next remark: when asked to assess their own performance, the subjects in the experiment “thought they did better on the normal chart.”

As this experiment shows, the effect of reversing convention is that “people can see what they couldn’t see before.” If we cultivate and maintain what Langer calls mindfulness, if we remain alert to the possibilities of novelty and reinterpretation, if we force ourselves to do things differently, we will impose ourselves on the world rather than allow ourselves to be imposed upon. “Rather than try to learn from experience,” she says, in a formulation that may in the end say a little less than it seems to, “we might be better off to experience learning.”

In Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America, Margaret Morganroth Gullette is even more impatient than Langer at the notion of ageing as an inevitable decline, with the letters just getting inexorably smaller. Ageism, she says, is insidious and “menacing,” a conspiracy to sap confidence and deny competence. Gullette argues for a countervailing “progress narrative,” a kind of “vast, anti-ageist conversation that will move our hearts [and] tune up the policy engines.” But the difficulty with proposing a conversation as a solution is that it isn’t really a solution at all; rather, it is an acknowledgement of the insurmountable nature of the problem. The narrative of ageing as decline is so powerful that it will take more than a conversation, however robust, to turn it in a different direction.

Gullette is surely right, though, to say that for many people ageing “is the new fate worse than death.” She quotes survey data to suggest that “Americans over the age of fifty-five fear Alzheimer’s more than any other disease, even cancer.” What she calls “the terror of forgetting” is, in effect, the fear of losing control over our own lives. In this sense at least, the fear of forgetting is all of a piece with its apparent opposite, namely the very contemporary worry, generated by the rise of the new technologies, that nothing will ever be truly forgotten. In both cases, what we are really frightened of is losing control of how we present ourselves to the world; of, so to speak, losing our minds.

One reason for the cultural dominance of the “decline narrative,” for the fact that old age is, if not the new “fate worse than death,” then at least an equally unattractive prospect, is that many more people are living long enough to be confronted by both. In his engaging overview of what it means to be old, You’re Looking Very Well: The Surprising Nature of Getting Old, the developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert points out that “in the industrialised world in the twentieth century there was an unexpected and unprecedented growth in the older population – some thirty years were added to life, an increase greater than in the previous 5000 years.” Of course, there have always been old people. The difference now is that there are many, many more, with these numbers, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the total population, set to increase even further, not just in the developed world but in many developing countries as well.

In addition to his professional qualifications, Wolpert speaks with the authority of an octogenarian. His own experience occasionally creeps into You’re Looking Well, further illuminating the summaries he provides of the ever-increasing mass of research into ageing. It is hard, for instance, not to read some personal frustrations behind his account of the phenomenon of “benevolent prejudice,” whereby “the warmth felt towards older people means there is often public acceptance that they are deserving of preferential treatment – for example, concessionary travel.” This is all very well, but what, Wolpert asks, if benevolent prejudice also leads, rather in the manner of Langer’s cultural cues, to “assumptions that it is ‘natural’ for older people to have lower expectations, reduced choice and control, and less account taken of their views”?

In the face of prejudice, benevolent or otherwise, Langer, Gullette and Wolpert, like many other contemporary commentators on the phenomenon of ageing, tend to advocate the path of most resistance, of very definitely not going quietly – even as they acknowledge that this can work for only so long. Nature will eventually take a hand. In trying to come to terms with this reality, Wolpert tells a story against himself. “I once proposed,” he says, that “we all should have a gene which ensured painless death when we were eighty.” Having reached the age of eighty-one, he has “now increased that age to eighty-five.”

If, like Wolpert and the increasing numbers of people who are living longer, your objective is to stave off both a “declining” old age and its close companion, death, for as long as possible, the most logical strategy is to remain healthy and active and at the same time to push the boundaries of the normal lifespan. To this end, The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study, by Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin, offers guidance, based on survey data going back as early as the 1920s. By analysing this evidence, certain trends can be identified. A long, healthy life seems positively correlated, for example, with career success, with an optimistic (but not necessarily sunny) temperament, and with conscientiousness and organisational skills. (Langer, while acknowledging the link between an optimistic temperament and the likelihood of a long life and continuing good health, speculates that “perhaps excessively scheduled lives portend premature death.”) Marriage, on the other hand, whether unsatisfactory or happy, doesn’t seem to make much of a difference to longevity – except perhaps for men, who could, the authors speculate in one of their lighter moments, be benefitting from having someone always on hand to call an ambulance.

Despite the claim on the cover that “this book… will optimise your chances,” the reality is that the insights it provides are essentially retrospective. It is true that at one point we are told that our life “patterns can be altered and improved,” and the authors even stray into slightly creepy territory with their comment that “being selective about whom you socialise with” and building up “a network of healthy friends” might nudge the odds in your favour. But by and large, while some of the key factors contributing to longevity are convincingly identified, we don’t really learn very much about how to plan in advance for a long and healthy life. Conscientiousness may be linked to longevity, but what if we aren’t really conscientious at all but just pretending to be? Will that work?

With all the evidence so far suggesting that the best-laid plans for a long life and a healthy and vigorous old age may well go awry, it is little wonder that the best option for many people seems to be not to get old – and even, ideally, not to die – at all, but to remain forever young. (Once, not so long ago, this phrase served as a consolatory metaphor for the early death of a loved one, but it is now more likely to signal a determination to stay very much alive and perpetually in the second, third or fourth flush of youth.) To put it another way: is it really possible, as Ellen Langer’s research seems to suggest, to recover and preserve enough of our past selves and our past confidence to ensure that we remain, even into old age, “forever young” and in control?

The answer, probably, is “up to a point.” Once upon a time, the injunction to “act your age” meant to act your chronological age (or even slightly older, as in “grow up”) – to stop being immature and to go with the flow of time. Now it could just as easily mean that we should act the age we think we are or would prefer to be; after all, to further mine the database of age-related clichés, you’re as young as you feel. There is no longer any social compulsion, as Wolpert notes, to wear age-related clothing, or to adopt age-related behaviour. The experiments of Langer and the experience of the Young@Heart chorus appear to say that we can, to some extent at least, reject the conventional trappings of old age and determine for ourselves just how old we want to be. We can follow our own cues.

The problem is that acting, and that includes acting your age, requires an audience to see you, and as countless “senior citizens” have observed to their chagrin, with old age comes a form of invisibility. For many people, to be old means to be no longer centrestage, or even in the chorus. As for the old man in The Hangover, it means sitting in the corner being half-attended to while the young have all the fun. It may be that what truly revitalises the members of the Young@Heart choir, or the participants in Langer’s social experiments, making them feel younger and more alive, is having an audience to play to. Which leaves us with another question: how do we act our way out of old age if no one is watching? •

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The unglamorous yet strangely charismatic lobster is the subject of two recent books, both of them appearing under the Reaktion imprint. Richard J. King’s Lobster is the latest addition to Reaktion’s splendid Animal list, where it joins monographs on the crow, the ant, the tortoise, the cockroach, the rhinoceros and thirty-five others, with wolf, trout, sparrow and chicken coming soon. Elisabeth Townsend’s Lobster: A Global History forms part of its Edible series, where its companion volumes include Cake, Caviar, Cheese and Chocolate. Inevitably, there is some overlap between the two series: between Cow, for instance, and Cheese or Milk. But the lobster provides the only example of a direct match.

It’s as if it wasn’t quite clear where the lobster belonged, which seems somehow appropriate for a creature whose essential character – its lobsterness – is so difficult to pin down. Both King and Townsend do their best to simplify the unsimplifiable by offering a clear and concise definition, although given the confusion that exists in the English-speaking world over what exactly is meant by a lobster, as against say a crayfish, a prawn, a shrimp, a bug or a langoustine, one may as well ask, as King rhetorically does, “what is a biscuit?”

And yet of course the many species of lobster do share certain characteristics. According to Tin-Yam Chan in the Lobster Newsletter, an electronic journal currently hosted by the Western Australian Department of Fisheries, at last count there were 247 living marine lobster species, twenty-eight of which were first described only in the last decade. Among the most common and best known are table lobsters like the clawed American and European lobsters (sometimes referred to as “true” lobsters) and Western Australia’s rock or spiny lobster (also popularly known as the crayfish, even though, just to muddy the waters even further, the crayfish is a freshwater and not a marine crustacean).

The novelist David Foster Wallace, in a piece called “Consider the Lobster,” first published in Gourmet magazine in 2004, runs through the common features. “A lobster is a marine crustacean,” he tells us, “with five pairs of jointed legs… stalked eyes, gills on their legs, and antennae.” He continues, the language growing more self-consciously specialised and impressively scientific, before concluding with the bathetic acknowledgement that lobsters “are basically giant sea-insects.” Biological precision notwithstanding, Wallace recognises the lobster as one of nature’s boundary-crossers – an animal that lives with the fishes and looks like an insect.

In terms of public image, the lobster is a good few steps ahead of the cockroach, but in contrast to the cat, for example – which, like the cockroach, is also part of the Reaktion “Animal” (and, just to be clear, not the “Edible”) series – the lobster does not have the advantage of a huge, ready-made supply of potential readers, of cat-lovers for whom the volume Cat would make an excellent birthday present. In both the visual and gustatory senses, lobster is something of an acquired taste which, once acquired, inspires great loyalty. And not just from diners. It is the loyalty of the second look, the realisation that what appears at first to be an unprepossessing creature is in fact quite beautiful in the intricacy of its construction. King quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson to this effect; Emerson found the lobster “monstrous to the eye the first time it is seen,” but on closer examination “as perfect and suitable to his sea-house as a glove to a hand.”

Culinary history is full of foods that have, in terms of the esteem in which they are held, started low and finished high, beginning as a staple and assuming over time, thanks largely to decreasing availability, the status of special treat. Oysters are just one example. The trajectory can also go the other way, as industrial levels of production transform an occasional luxury like chicken to a familiar and predictable standby. Lobster, however, with its customary capacity to straddle the boundaries, has managed over a very long time to keep a foot or five in both camps. King and Townsend, assisted by Reaktion’s generous quota of illustrations, include (different) images of seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes in which the brilliant red of the boiled lobster draws the eye into a privileged world of sensuality and indulgence. Yet at roughly the same time, across the Atlantic, the Pilgrim Fathers were shuddering at the thought of yet another lobster dinner. Both authors quote the words of William Wood, author of New England’s Prospect (1634), who showed a fine appreciation of the laws of supply and demand when he observed of the abundance of lobsters in the new colony that “their plenty makes them little esteemed and seldom eaten.”

Lobster stocks – while no longer as plentiful as they were in seventeenth-century New England, or in the commercial heyday of the late nineteenth century or even as they have been within more recent times – remain relatively robust, at least when compared with the much more rapid decline in the numbers of some other marine species. Attempts to farm them on a large scale have so far proved disappointing, but the early adoption in many of the major fisheries of sustainable practices to ensure the preservation and protection of breeding stock has helped to support the numbers. The Marine Stewardship Council, King tells us, have “given their certification (of environmental sustainability) to the spiny lobster industry off Western Australia… the first of any fishery in the world,” and others have followed.

As major industries go, lobstering retains an artisanal quality. Even when it is practised under the auspices of large corporations, as it is in Canada, for example, it remains primarily reliant on natural cycles and the hard-won skills of the professional lobsterman. The lobster on the dinner table evokes for us a connection with its habitat and the natural world that has been all but lost in the case of other, more staple proteins like beef or chicken. By way of reinforcing the point, purists recommend that for the optimum culinary result, the lobster be boiled in seawater.

Lobster doesn’t take kindly to being relegated to the supporting cast. The authoritative and always authoritative-sounding Jean-François Revel, in his Culture and Cuisine (1982), rules that “lobster in a bouillabaisse marseillaise is merely a tourist ‘frill’: its flesh becomes flabby in the cooking and its flavour is lost, adding nothing to the dish.” Lobster is best when it has centre stage, whether grilled and served with butter and lemon or playing more elaborate costume parts, dressed up in classic recipes like Lobster Thermidor or Newburg. It fits easily into the leading role, which helps to explain why it is so strongly associated in our minds with special occasions. Those seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes, showing a lobster with a claw or two hanging nonchalantly over the edge of the serving plate, emphasise the creature’s enviably regal bearing (appropriately enough, a lobster’s blood is sometimes described as having a blue tinge).

As is perhaps inevitable with such a focused subject, King and Townsend cover much of the same territory, particularly when it comes to the literary and artistic life of the lobster. King ranges more widely and deeply in this department, which again is not surprising given that he has what many people would regard as one of the world’s ideal jobs, teaching the literature of the sea at the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program in Mystic, Connecticut. King is particularly good at conveying something of the dedication and enthusiasm of those people who have over the years devoted themselves to studying the lobster, like Francis Hobart Herrick, author of Natural History of the American Lobster (1911) and described by King as “the Da Vinci, the Darwin, the William Shakespeare of lobster biology.” At a time now of heightened distrust of theories of everything, there is something heartening about the kinds of insights into specialised worlds that characterise this and other volumes in the “Animal” series, worlds of shared and mutually supportive expertise, communities of enthusiasts not only for the lobster, but for the cockroach or the cat as well.

Townsend’s focus is much more specifically culinary, and couched in a direct, even colloquial style. “If you’re thinking about eating a dead lobster, think again,” she advises. “Forget cooking any shellfish… that has died before you prepare it.” In this instance at least her directness leads her further than King ventures in confronting the vexed question – what might be called the lobster in the room – of how to ensure optimum freshness and flavour (not to mention food safety) while dispatching the lobster humanely. King entitles the relevant chapter, with a Townsend-like touch, “To Boil or Not to Boil,” while Townsend heads hers “Killing and Cooking (Humanely).”

It all hinges, as David Foster Wallace considered at length in his 2004 essay, on how we see the lobster. Is it to all intents and purposes an insect, a kind of giant mosquito that cannot be understood to feel pain? Or do those scrabbling claws, struggling to escape the boiling water as the live lobster is plunged into the pot (“head first,” announces Julia Child airily in a YouTube clip from one of her cooking programs, apparently on the grounds that this will ensure an almost instantaneous death), signal not only the experience of pain but other, human emotions like fear and anguish and even, perhaps, a sense of betrayal?

Both sides of the argument tend to favour anthropomorphic language, with the advocates of live boiling or last-minute dispatch emphasising the least attractive non-culinary qualities of the lobster. Trevor Corson, author of The Secret Life of Lobsters (2004), recommends either the “professional” method (“take the largest knife you can find and plunge it straight into the bottom of its head and then quickly slap the knife down so it cuts through the middle of the head, through the nose and between the eyes”) or, for the more squeamish, the so-called chill-and-kill method, which involves first putting the lobster in the freezer for fifteen minutes to render it near-unconscious. This unsentimental approach seems at least partly reinforced by Corson’s characterisation of lobsters – in a 2004 interview in which he responded to what he saw as Foster Wallace’s wishy-washy approach – as rude, anti-social, cannibalistic and “constantly pissing in each other’s faces.”

In his A Concise Encyclopaedia of Gastronomy, first published in full in 1952, André Simon acknowledged that plunging a live lobster into boiling water resulted in “violent attempts… to emerge.” On the other hand, “with the lobster placed in cold water and the boiler put on the fire, there was no evidence of discomfort.” It is difficult today, in our climate of confusion and concern over live transportation and the methods used to kill animals for the table, to maintain quite such a level of insouciance. The passive voice – “there was no evidence of discomfort” – just doesn’t strike the right note for a contemporary audience. Australia’s RSPCA is unequivocal on this issue, forthrightly advocating the chill-and-kill method for lobsters: “The RSPCA believes that all crustaceans that are used for food and other purposes must be killed humanely as soon as possible after capture. This is because crustaceans experience pain and suffering and should be given the same respect and consideration that other animals are given.”

For Townsend, the answer to producing lobster meat humanely may lie with a giant machine, described colloquially as The Big Mother Shucker, which, while the name doesn’t sound especially compassionate, “kills lobsters in about two seconds” by means of very high water pressure. But, as with so much to do with lobsters, this isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. In an essay in the Summer 2011 number of the Virginia Quarterly Review, an issue devoted to the state of the world’s fisheries, Jesse Dukes notes that the manufacturers of this new technology say that “it can take up to forty-five seconds for the tanks to reach full pressure,” from which he concludes that “it’s unclear how long it takes a lobster to die.”

These new, industrial methods may, says Dukes, “be no more humane than boiling.” Both King and Townsend are sensitive to the ethics surrounding the dispatch and consumption of lobster, but they both feel too that, as King puts it, “the live lobster in the kitchen… is a final vestige of what it is like to butcher or kill our own food,” a way of maintaining what Townsend calls a “connection between the food we ingest and its origin.” But that’s easier said than done. It is all very well to emphasise the connection between origin and ingestion when the subject is a potato, but a variety of more complex emotions intrudes when we are confronted with a flailing lobster. The debate is likely to continue. •

The post Started low and finished high appeared first on Inside Story.

“PEOPLE like bonnets,” says that master of the delicate art of adaptation, Andrew Davies, in a 2009 interview for the Radio Times. “I don’t think you can underestimate [the importance of] that,” he adds, lamenting a decision by the BBC to axe his planned versions of Trollope’s Palliser novels and Dickens’s Dombey and Son, evidently on the managerial and marketing grounds that the nineteenth century is due for a bit of a rest. The new preferred century for adaptation is the one we’ve only recently finished. “They’re certainly putting the stress on the twentieth century,” Davies says. To demonstrate that these things go in cycles, Davies himself – best-known for his takes on warhorses like Middlemarch and Pride and Prejudice – began his long career of converting the written to the televisual by focusing on rather more contemporary sources, including a successful thirteen-part series in 1980 based on R.F. Delderfield’s novel To Serve Them All My Days (1972), and an adaptation a decade or so later of Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, which was first published in 1956.

What these two series have in common is their concern with the worlds of teaching and academia – a concern shared by other works solely by Davies, including the brilliantly original A Very Peculiar Practice, first aired in 1986, still among the best of all attempts to capture on film the arcane world of higher education. Unlike policing or emergency ward medicine, these professions are not normally considered inherently dramatic. As Davies (himself a teacher for over twenty years) has demonstrated, this can be a shortsighted view. Indeed, given its episodic nature, measured out in periods and terms and semesters, the business of teaching might have a certain natural affinity with the television series, the large drama made up of a sequence of smaller, self-contained ones. Whatever the exact nature of the attraction, Davies returns to teaching – and to the twentieth century – with his adaptation of Winifred Holtby’s best-selling and never-out-of-print novel of 1936, South Riding.

Holtby, the daughter of the first woman alderman in Yorkshire, was a successful writer and journalist, and a public advocate for all forms of equality. In South Riding she underlines the essential bravery and nobility of careers in teaching and, perhaps more controversially, local government. In both lines of work the individual is, ideally and idealistically, subsumed to the greater good, dedicated to improving things for future generations. In her autobiography, Climbing the Bookshelves (2009), Holtby’s goddaughter, Shirley Williams, relays her early childhood memories of the godmother who died, at the age of thirty, shortly before the publication of her best-known work. “For Winifred,” says Williams, a former Labour government minister and joint founder of Britain’s Social Democratic Party, “local government, far from being lacklustre, involved itself in the deepest hopes and fears of its community.” The central figure in South Riding, Sarah Burton, is similarly involved in the “hopes and fears” of her community. The newly appointed headmistress of Kiplington Girls’ High School, she is a visionary for whom “the passion of all crusaders, missionaries and saviours tore her soul.” Sarah’s milieu is local, her allies and adversaries the various members of the local council and the community who populate, sometimes to a confusing degree, the pages of the novel.

Indeed, as if to demonstrate its suitability for adaptation, South Riding begins more like a play than a novel, with a list of characters running to 168 names, or 169 if we count Rex, an Alsatian dog. One of the main tasks of the screenwriter or dramatist is to reduce this cast list to a manageable level, sufficient to convey the focus on and interactions of the wider community, but not so numerous as to overshadow the principals and generally cause confusion. The first cinematic adaptation, rushed out in 1938, directed by Victor Saville and written by Ian Dalrymple and Donald Bull, comes in at just under an hour and a half and along the way plays fairly fast and loose with the plot. But overall it captures much that is essential to the original work – the passion and foresight of Sarah, the fragile but resilient nature of community, the tension between those who advocate change and those who resist it. Its biggest failing is in the flat treatment of the one character in the novel who comes close to outshining Sarah – Alderman Mrs Beddows, septuagenarian and pillar of the community, who is based closely on Holtby’s mother. But as if to show that you can’t please everybody, Alice Holtby hated what she saw of herself in the book. She much preferred the film version.

For those who engage in the process of adaptation, not pleasing everybody is part of the job description. “Was I the only one to notice,” asks one viewer of Davies’s South Riding, in a post on the BBC website, “that the calf born towards the end of the program had a modern plastic ID tag on its left ear?” For many fans of the original novel, the current television adaptation is just too modern. For them, the 1974, pre–plastic tag version produced by Yorkshire Television is the gold standard against which Davies’s version must compete. Adapted by the novelist Stan Barstow, with Dorothy Tutin as Sarah and Hermione Baddeley playing Mrs Beddows as a “character,” it runs for thirteen hour-long episodes that could feel, if watched one after the other, rather longer than the book.

Sticking closely to the original, this version probably seems even more faithful now than it did when it was first aired, thanks to that phenomenon whereby, with the passing of time, historical drama on film blurs more and more into the era it represents, and becomes harder to distinguish from it. The preponderance of long shots, taking in groups of characters as well as the surrounding landscape, seems to emphasise interaction and interdependence, rather than a more contemporary focus on individuality. Camerawork, acting styles, lighting, are all identifiable as old-fashioned, and in that sense “truer” to the historical period being represented. (All except, that is, for the hair, which has a way of anchoring any film or television drama firmly to the date of production.)

Davies’s version of South Riding, directed by Diarmuid Lawrence, first aired in Britain in early 2011 and is now available on DVD; it is likely to screen in Australia later this year. Running to three hour-long episodes, it relies much more on close-ups than its predecessors, contrasted with views of an unpeopled landscape and, at regular intervals, a long straight road heading to an unknown destination. The result is to skew the emphasis towards pessimism about the future, and to downplay Holtby’s own compensating optimism, which dominates the end of her novel. “We are members one of another,” Sarah reflects in the book’s final pages. “That is what it means – to belong to a community.”

In this contemporary rendering, Sarah’s vitality and resilience, so effectively evoked by Anna Maxwell Martin, never really merge with her surroundings. She remains a very contemporary individual, from her first appearance in a bright red dress that contrasts with the greys, browns and blacks worn by almost everyone else. The burden of the future is placed entirely on Sarah, and on her favourite pupil, Lydia Holly (Charlie Clark), rather than on the community they are ostensibly so much a part of. “He’s the past and you’re the future,” Davies has the socialist councillor Joe Astell (Douglas Henshall) say to Sarah, comparing her with the man she is in love with, the conservative, brooding Robert Carne (David Morrissey). Davies picks up on Sarah’s – and Holtby’s – deep ambivalence about Carne and what he represents; Holtby wrote elsewhere of “the courage of those who, seeing the things they have given their lives to, passing, raise no hand to prevent the coming of the new, that may mean for the world salvation, but for themselves, and all they stand for, certain destruction.”

THIS self-conscious recognition of approaching anachronism is present too in the figure of the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), the patriarch in another recent, and hugely popular, television drama series, this time from ITV, Downton Abbey. Created and largely written by Julian Fellowes, and drawing on the same knowledge of and feel for life above and below stairs that informed his script for Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001), Downton Abbey, like South Riding, speaks to a modern audience’s sense of being in transition between an older, more stable world and one which is moving too quickly for us to make sense of just where it might be going. “We can’t fight progress, but we must find ways to soften the blow.” Characters both represent and comment on their times – the times being in this, the first series, the two years before the declaration of war in 1914 – and particularly on the way in which the past defines and constrains them. “Women like me don’t have a life,” says Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), the older of Grantham’s three daughters, who as a woman can inherit neither her father’s title nor, thanks to an entail applied by her grandfather, the estate. “Really, we’re stuck in a waiting room, until we marry.”

Downton Abbey conveys a sense of powerlessness to which many of the characters respond with a kind of proverbial pragmatism. “We all carry scars… inside or out,” says the housekeeper, Mrs Hughes (Phyllis Logan). “Nothing in life is sure,” says Mrs Patmore, the cook, played by Lesley Nicol. Mrs Patmore, whose eyes are failing, sticks to the recipes she knows by heart rather than venturing anything new. Mrs Hughes, who has adopted her title because people expect a housekeeper to be a “Mrs,” refuses a late offer of marriage that would, quite literally, make an honest woman of her. She is too tied to her profession and to the great house to want to take on a new role as a farmer’s wife and besides, she likes having a job of her own. It’s a decision that is seen, characteristically of the series overall, as conservative and progressive at the same time.

This focus on a kind of courageous stability is echoed in the frequent tableaux of characters sitting at tea or at table, or strolling at a glacial pace in no particular direction, or in the shots of individuals reading quietly by themselves or contemplating in private the exigencies of life. At intervals the pace suddenly picks up – a hunt, a rowdy political meeting, a flurry of excitement at a formal dinner when Mrs Patmore mistakes the salt for the sugar. These activities seem to herald new possibilities for the characters, ways of shaking things up and trying something new, but the rules very quickly reassert themselves. Yet Downton Abbey, like South Riding, maintains its momentum not least because of our own certain knowledge that things are indeed going to be shaken up, and fairly soon. Our certainty is reinforced by the introduction in the final episode of that now classic trope of advancing modernity, the telephone. The man who comes to install it just happens to need a secretary and Gwen the housemaid, who with the encouragement of Lady Sybil has been taking courses in typewriting by correspondence, gets the role, stepping out at the end of the series into the wider world, from which comes the news that war has been declared. Thus is the way prepared for the forthcoming second series, just as the news of the sinking of the Titanic, with the loss of Lord Grantham’s first cousin and heir, has prepared the way for the first.

Downton Abbey is that curious thing, an adaptation without an original, or at least without a single, preceding text against which it can be compared and its faithfulness judged. Instead it has many texts behind it – the novels of Henry James, for instance, or L.P. Hartley or Kazuo Ishiguro, not to mention countless volumes of history and memoir – which gives us the slightly unsettling feeling that we have met the characters before, and know their backstories. Rather than turning the characters into clichés, this has the effect, along with the uniformly superb acting, of giving them many more layers than the script alone provides, and contributing to what many reviewers have called the addictiveness of the series. In Episode 2, it is revealed that the butler, Carson (Jim Carter), was once one half of a travelling music hall act. Lord Grantham’s forgiving reaction nudges us to the conclusion that Carson’s present life is not so very different from his old one. In the commentary to the first episode on the DVD, Julian Fellowes observes, of the kinds of people on whom his characters are based, that “they were all performing a role that was decreed for them,” thereby reworking a line he has already given to Lord Grantham. “We all have different parts to play,” the earl advises his distant cousin and new heir Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens), “and we must all be allowed to play them.” At the heart of a very careful reconstruction of the past is a very modern notion, that performance offers us the key to fulfilment.

The kinds of self-contained communities depicted in South Riding and Downton Abbey fascinate a modern eye with their rigidity and stratification, their rules both spoken and unspoken. We are torn between our admiration for those who want to break out of their assigned roles, and a balancing regard for the ones who just knuckle down and do the best they can with what they’re given. Assailed as we now are by competing definitions of community – local, global, virtual – we are as constrained in a way as the characters on the screen, except that, unlike them, we are not so sure of the rules. As with all historical recreations, particularly of times that are, like these, not so far away from ours, we tend to see our predecessors as versions of ourselves, just as their predicaments are versions of ours. Perhaps that is why we take such perverse pleasure in identifying those on-screen anachronisms, the plastic ID tags that both separate us from and connect us to the imagined past. Even Julian Fellowes succumbs. He tells us on the DVD commentary that if we pause the player at just the right point in Episode 1, when the housemaids are engaged in plumping the cushions, we’ll catch a glimpse of a modern zip fastener, which wasn’t in use until many years later. •

The post Versions of ourselves appeared first on Inside Story.

IN OCTOBER last year, Col Needham, the founder and CEO of the Internet Movie Database, helped mark the twentieth anniversary of that extraordinarily influential website – the ninth most popular in the world, according to Urlfan – by issuing a list of his favourite films of the past twenty years. At number one on the list (and second only, Needham notes, to Vertigo as his all-time favourite) sits Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a corporate thief who steals secrets from inside the heads of his dreaming victims. The film is described on IMDb as taking place “in a world where technology exists to enter the human mind,” which serves quite nicely as a summary of the impact of IMDb itself on the way people make, watch and think about movies. For anyone with an interest in film, the IMDb has managed, like Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception, to get inside our heads.

Lists form the bedrock of IMDb, beginning with the credits that are shown, in reverse chronological order, for millions of individual films and film-makers – actors, directors, cinematographers, scriptwriters, art directors, costume designers. We can, for example, browse the 310 (and counting) titles in which the actor Vernon Dobtcheff, at once instantly recognisable and difficult to place, has appeared, or focus instead on the single entry for a forgotten child actor of the forties that prompts us to ask, as IMDb is forever prompting us to ask, whatever happened to her? On top of these lists of credits is a superstructure of other lists, some compiled by staff of IMDb but most by regular users of the site. These take the process of list-making a step further, to produce an ever-expanding network of rankings. The best of film noir, the best splatter movies, the five worst movies of 1979, the best performances by men playing women, the worst ones by women playing men, the “ten top questionable hairstyles at the 2011 Golden Globes.” The list, as they say, is endless.

IMDb is a vast mosaic of interconnectedness, where it seems that everyone who has ever had anything to do with making a film has his or her own dedicated page that then links, through infinite permutations, to other careers and other lives. This in itself represents an extraordinary project of recovery, of both films and careers. It is not so long ago, for example, that the careers of even the best-known actors and directors were difficult to document in their entirety. Those early forays, for example, in which they had only a line or two of dialogue, or oversaw a few action sequences as second assistant director, remained unknown except perhaps to themselves and to their most dedicated fans.

Now, thanks to the contributions of thousands of people over two decades, IMDb comprehensively chronicles the careers of the famous and the obscure alike, ensuring that the parts they played are given their due, and ensuring too that the ones they would rather have forgotten about are also up there with the rest. It will even credit the uncredited, those cases in which an individual contribution to a film has not been acknowledged by any of the official means (although IMDb does draw the line at “filmographies consisting exclusively of uncredited work”).

The Internet Movie Database satisfies our innate need to identify patterns. Rather in the manner of the parlour game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” we can make our own connections – and hence our own lists – by tracing the points where individual careers and biographies intersect with one another. IMDb encourages us in this pattern-making by facilitating the search for pairings and for other, more wide-ranging combinations. We can, for example, find all the films made in Argentina between 1920 and 1930, in itself a relatively straightforward enquiry, or, to quote one of IMDb’s own sample questions, we can – in the unlikely event that we really want to – “get a list of comedies from the 1970s that have at least 1000 votes and an average rating of 7.5 or higher.” And if, just for fun, we want to look for all the people born in Kiama in New South Wales, we can find that, in addition to one of Australia’s greatest cultural exports, the costume designer Orry-Kelly, four other names come up, among them an Alfred Hustwick, who died in Los Angeles in 1958 and whose credits include the screenplay for The Beast of Borneo (1934).

The two essential pillars of IMDb – lists and rankings – have been there since the beginning, when Needham collated two separate newsgroup projects into a “Combined List and Movie Ratings Report.” At that point it contained some 10,000 titles, a figure that has since grown to 1,845,052 (as at April 2011), along with a mind-boggling 4,084,246 entries against the names of individuals. (These figures cover both the mainstream site and the “adult” content, which is accessible only to registered users who specifically request access – a feature that is in the interests, as IMDb rather coyly puts it, of providing “some level of control for those of a sensitive nature.”)

By the mid 1990s, the site had already migrated to the web, adopted the name by which it is now known and attracted large numbers of volunteer contributors. At the same time, it was beginning to outgrow its capacity to survive on goodwill and enthusiasm alone. Its decision to accept advertising, its employment of a full-time CEO and staff, its acquisition by Amazon as a subsidiary company in 1998, and its subsequent introduction of a professional section called IMDbPro in 2001, all signalled to the purists that the golden days were over, and that the site had sold out to commercialism, to fandom, and to those who hoped to make it in pictures.

Whether or not these developments constitute a sell-out, there is no doubt that the balance has shifted. A major redesign of the site was undertaken in 2010, and while it still has some way to go before it is complete, the overall effect is clear. Clicking on a “name” now produces a glitzier page than long-time visitors have been used to, often with only a partial rather than full list of credits immediately visible. In many cases this partial list is almost crowded out by other stuff – photographs from opening nights and awards ceremonies, images from the DVD covers of some of the best-known films on which the subjects have worked, links to the latest gossip about them and, further down the page, their star signs. For those who hanker for the way things used to be, there’s an option to customise the site to reinstate the old-style just-give-me-the-facts look, but it must only be a matter of time before that option is allowed to fade quietly away.

AND YET what is remarkable about IMDb is how it has managed, admittedly sometimes a bit shakily, to maintain a balance between its shifting identities; on the one hand a community of people who like films, and on the other a commercial operation that gives as much emphasis to the future – projects in development, rumoured castings – as it does to the past. When the IMDb message board function was first introduced in 2002, it supplemented another feature by which users could post film reviews, the result of which is now thousands upon thousands of reviews, accumulated over a dozen years and constituting a fascinating record of public taste and personal enthusiasms. The review function is linked only to individual movies, but the message boards are linked to every person and film in the database – with the exception, so far, of individual episodes of television series – as well as to a bewildering array of special topics, from “Actors and Actresses” to “Home Theatre Equipment” to more general categories like “The Soapbox,” a free-for-all where the posts increasingly refer only tangentially, if at all, to movies.

For some, the message boards marked the real beginning of the end, opening the way for contributors to flood the actors’ pages with posts headed “Hot or not?” or “Looks like?” and generally fail to take things seriously. According to one recent comment from the old guard, it all began well enough; at first “the boards were populated by true and mature film fans who had meaningful, if sometimes contentious, discussions.” Now, by contrast, they are “troll heaven.” Yet all may not be lost. A recently introduced beta function – providing the ability to search a vast array of message board postings and threads (though not the lot, because older posts are eventually “expired”) – shows that the enthusiasts and the “mature fans” continue to flourish among the trolls, that “inappropriate” postings are generally (though not always) deleted in good time, and that there are still many instances that taken together demonstrate a collective love and knowledge of the byways of film.

IMDb has always relied heavily on volunteers to supplement its data by contributing plot summaries, “mini-biographies” and items of film trivia, thus helping to ensure that the site continues to grow in range and, up to a point, reliability. A list of the top contributors is published every year, and each of them receives a letter of appreciation from the CEO. When one of the most prolific contributors recently discovered that a newly implemented search function returned only the first 1000 of his 5378 plot summaries, he understandably went into panic mode, fearing that the rest of them might be lost forever. Within twenty-four hours Needham had publicly assured him that the quirk in the search function had been fixed.

Equally, IMDb can take a very stern line with its contributors. “An administrator can delete anything,” says a response to a frequently asked question. And those seeking more than a generic explanation as to why their contribution has been rejected will get short shrift. “We cannot provide a more detailed explanation… so please don’t ask.” The submission guidelines themselves, formidable in their detail, sometimes betray a note of impatience with those who don’t follow them or who might be contemplating some form of circumvention. If you’re thinking, for example, of updating the credit for an actor who once played the part of a superhero, you’ll need to be clear on whether to list the superhero and his alter-ego as two separate characters or as one character with two different names; IMDb provides detailed directions. The rules for submitting “mini-biographies” are similarly comprehensive, though there’s a hint of resignation in the instruction to use the third person – “he attended, not first person: I attended” – suggesting an acceptance of the fact that at least some of the more glowing biographies are written by the subjects themselves.

It might be expected that the biographical focus would be on the stars and the big-name directors, but in fact the unsung attract as much if not more biographical attention. The particular enthusiasms of the most prolific contributors can also skew the emphasis; a preference, for instance, for Russian actors and film-makers (for which the often-informative entries by Steve Shelokhonov are worth clicking on), or for composers, cinematographers or, in the case of more than one prolific contributor, for porn starlets. For what they add to the experience of using IMDb though, and entertaining as the occasional snippet can be, there’s a question mark over whether the “mini-biographies” add a great deal to what it is that makes the site indispensable.

The IMDb “experience,” for want of a better term, goes back to the lists. IMDb is far and away the most comprehensive record of who did what. There are errors, of course, and lacunae, and it’s also true that, just occasionally, someone can be clever enough to create an entire career out of nothing and slip it onto the site. A decade or so ago, a film buff from Melbourne with an impressive knowledge of British cinema came up with Rita Waterhouse, a dancer, actor and director from Bendigo who in her short life – from 1913 to 1949 – built up a long list of credits in France, Britain and the United States, all after running away from a Swiss finishing school to try her luck on the stage. Rita attracted the interest of researchers, and from there found her way into reference books and journal articles. And though her page and the various links to her were removed in 2006, she can still be tracked down in the internet archives. She survives too in a single reference on IMDb itself, where she is listed, against the rules, as “Girl in Blue Dress (uncredited)” in Gone with the Wind. This last remaining entry could be an oversight, but I like to think of it as deliberate, a sly acknowledgement of the site’s capacity to confer eternal life on the real and imagined alike.

Whether for film buff or industry professional, the core value of IMDb lies in the ability it gives us to see a film or a career at a glance and to go on to explore the links. Meanwhile, the range of the site is constantly being extended, into television series and the full documentation of individual episodes (a huge undertaking over recent years), and to more comprehensive coverage of foreign-language film and TV. Despite its massive growth over the past two decades, and the changes in its look and feel, it is remarkable how consistently IMDb has managed to hang on to its original, documentary agenda. In doing so, it has coped with VHS and the introduction of DVDs, as well as new formats and distribution methods, including the rise of YouTube and the capacity to produce films for streaming directly over the internet, thus bypassing theatres and traditional broadcasting networks altogether. As a consequence of all these developments, it is now very much more of a challenge than it was in 1990 to determine what, exactly, is a movie.

The most significant change that has occurred since IMDb began, and the one that lies at the heart of the uneasiness that many of its long-time supporters feel, is the way it has transformed – or, perhaps more accurately, could not help but be transformed – from a disinterested collector of information to something rather more than that, namely an active and influential player in the film business. This can’t simply be put down to the advent of the professional components such as IMDbPro, which by their very nature encourage the kind of self-advertisement and hype that has found its way into other areas of the site – in the form, for example, of the promotional trailers that now dominate the top of the front page. It is due far more to the fact that IMDb, as a consequence of its extraordinary success, now has the power of validation. As the director Eli Roth says in a short video clip made to help celebrate the twentieth anniversary, the fact that his first film appeared on the site as an in-development project helped him to secure the finance he needed to complete it. “If your movie doesn’t have an IMDb page,” says Roth, “it’s not a real movie.” •

The post The list goes on… appeared first on Inside Story.

A young woman tells Hewitt of a friend who recently brought her mother to IKEA for the afternoon. After several hours in the store, her friend’s mother summed up the experience: “I really think I should throw out a lot of the stuff we have at home.” As that reaction makes clear, the IKEA experience is as much about divestment – or rather the idea of divestment – as it is about acquisition. It represents an opportunity to start anew, with clean lines and blond wood and no clutter.

The founder of IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad, understood from the beginning the sense of opportunity his stores could provide, and the potential their inventories offered for personal renewal. It is all there in Kamprad’s nine key principles, first promulgated in 1976 in his “Testament of a Furniture Dealer.” “Doing it a different way,” says the sixth principle, neatly capturing the idea of a fresh start, even while leaving the “it” open to individual interpretation. And the lead-in to the final principle is, in effect, an injunction to employee and shopper alike to leave the past behind and just get on with it: “Most things still remain to be done. A glorious future!”

The idea that IKEA can help us to start again also crops up in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second volume of his massively popular trilogy. His heroine, Lisbeth Salander, has buried her old identity and created a new one. So when she buys an apartment, it is logical that she should furnish it entirely from IKEA. She begins with matching KARLANDA sofas and works right down to “a starter pack of stainless steel cutlery” and “a huge quantity of office supplies.” Nothing in her choice of furniture or homewares offers a hint of her past, real or imagined, which is of course a major part of their attraction.

Larsson describes Salander as browsing the store and then writing down the product codes of the items she has selected, emphasising the mechanical and unaestheticised nature of the task. It is, literally, interior design by numbers, which is perhaps not quite what Ingvar Kamprad had in mind when he formulated his fifth principle, that “simplicity is a virtue.” It does, however, offer a kind of liberation, which is certainly what he did have in mind.

Highlighting the virtue of simplicity in the design of the modern interior is not Ingvar Kamprad’s invention, nor is it characteristic only of IKEA. It is part of the modernist aesthetic. We have been taught to admire spareness and space – Lisbeth Salander “wanted to have a pleasant, sparsely furnished apartment” – and the roots of that admiration go back a long way. In 1898, when the novelist Edith Wharton and the architect and interior decorator Ogden Codman published one of the first modern manuals of its kind, The Decoration of Houses, they were quite clear where they stood: “simplicity,” they wrote, “is the supreme excellence.”

Wharton and Codman were generally discouraging of too much inventiveness on the part of the amateur decorator, leading as it can to an over-abundance of “trashy china ornaments.” Reinforcing their point, they warned that “the simplicity and dignity of a good room are diminished by crowding it with useless trifles.” Behind these kinds of admonishments are assumptions that have survived to the present day, namely that the individual, in assuming sole responsibility for decorating his or her own home, is bound to be overtaken by clutter, and that the best preventative strategy lies in seeking some kind of professional assistance.

This helps to explain why IKEA appears not to have suffered unduly, or even at all, from what many see as the rather stern way it has with its customers. A Saturday morning spent following the arrows, suppressing the occasional surge of panic at the thought of never reaching the end of the winding path, is all part of the deal. IKEA in any case remains sensitive to the degree to which its customers will follow overt directions, tweaking its approach from country to country according to customer feedback and the sales figures. This is based on the recognition that there is a fine difference between, on the one hand, encouraging people to remain in the store and to see everything there is to see – and to buy quite a bit of it – and, on the other hand, precipitating outbreaks of so-called “IKEA-rage.”

In a public lecture delivered in January at University College London, available on YouTube, Alan Penn, professor of architectural and urban computing at UCL, asks the question, “Who enjoys shopping at IKEA?” He captures the fundamental paradox that underlies the entire IKEA experience. It is “highly disorienting,” he says, “and yet there is only one route to follow.” It is surely no coincidence that the layout of the IKEA store replicates the confusion most of us feel when confronted with the mysteries of home decoration and interior design. We are looking for direction and lo and behold, almost without realising it, we find we are being led along the correct path.

Once inside the store, we are never in a position to see more than a small portion of the stock at any one time, so as first-time visitors we do not initially appreciate that its contents constitute a complete world. That perception of the interconnectedness of all the items – their stylistic consistency – grows slowly as we make our winding way, following the people in front of us. Gradually we feel more comfortable and at home. And at some point – Penn suggests it is typically after about half an hour into what might well be a two or three hour stay – our confidence in the IKEA world reaches a level where we “feel licensed to impulse purchase.”

IKEA is aware to the point of self-parody of this aspect of its appeal. The British campaign to launch the 2011 catalogue, as developed by the ad agency Mother, “used cats as the undisputed creatures of comfort to see what made them happy in IKEA’s Wembley store.” One hundred cats were released overnight into various parts of the building and then tracked by cameras. The resulting video (also accessible via YouTube) begins with shots of individual cats taking the plunge from various high points onto the floor. The cats then team up and start following one another – and the arrows – along the designated path. Gradually they begin to separate again, as they grow more comfortable with the idea of exploring the objects that attract their individual attention. The mood becomes more soothing, the cats more sedentary and relaxed, and up comes the strapline – “happy inside.”

From disorientation comes contentment. It is again an extraordinary paradox that IKEA – the subject of so many jokes and horror stories of people being lost in the maze, desperate to get out – should owe its massive global success to the recognition that we all, as customers, crave the direction and security it provides. We succumb to being led through the maze that is interior design, knowing that we need help in negotiating the pitfalls of bad taste. IKEA may look confusing and even intimidating at first, but it ends up by providing us with a safe way through.

Johan Stenebo, in his erratic but intermittently illuminating book The Truth About IKEA, based on twenty years he spent with the company, recalls how sales in Germany “at the beginning of the nineties contributed one third of IKEA’s turnover,” even as the interiors of the German stores resembled “the catacombs of Rome.” By Stenebo’s account, “the stores were literally packed with people… hungry, thirsty, exhausted and dying to go to the loo, who slowly dragged themselves along the 1.4 km long aisles… In pure desperation these poor wretches would push open the emergency exits in order to flee out into the fresh air.” Yet the tills kept ringing, suggesting that in practice many more people persevered to the registers than opted for the escape hatch. Contrary to Stenebo’s perception, the customers must have been, if the sales figures are anything to go by, “happy inside” after all.

For Stenebo, “one of IKEA’s absolute competitive advantages is the fantastic capacity to in a subtle way, almost unnoticeably, manoeuvre your purchases.” In other words, while IKEA encourages us to subscribe to the modernist design aesthetic that less is more, it manages at the same time to convince us – and this is the truly brilliant bit – that more is less. By means of a sophisticated sequence of in-store placements and displays, we are led to buy not just a sofa but a lamp and some drinking glasses and some other bits and pieces as well, all the while under the illusion that the process being engaged in is not one of randomly accumulating stuff but of de-cluttering and streamlining an overcrowded life. It is no mean achievement that IKEA has continued to embody in the public mind the modernist ideals of simplicity and minimalism yet all the while its total product range has been growing – to the point where, by 2010, it comprised some 12,000 items.

IKEA and its designers have won their share of awards over the years, and more recently there have been major retrospective exhibitions in museums in Sweden, Germany and Austria. But for all its success as a company and a brand, individual IKEA products never quite seem to gain unreserved admittance to the design hall of fame. This could be because, like the BILLY bookcase (28 million units sold and counting), these products are identified more for their low-cost functionality and sheer ubiquity than for their intrinsic design qualities. Or it could be down to the way in which IKEA can sometimes produce, in the name of “democratic design,” pieces that closely resemble more famous, more iconic creations.

Evidence for this reluctance to fully endorse IKEA’s design credentials lies, for instance, in the fact that the recently released Tools for Living, compiled by Charlotte and Peter Fiell and subtitled A Sourcebook of Iconic Designs for the Home, doesn’t mention IKEA at all, in any of its more than 750 pages. In contrast to the customer loyalty and enthusiasm for its products engendered by IKEA, evident in websites like IKEAFANS, the editors of Tools for Living advocate a more aesthetically considered approach to de-cluttering, a cooler and more discriminating relationship between prospective user and individual object. “Wouldn’t it be better,” they ask rhetorically, “not to clutter our lives with a sea of questionable bric-a-brac, but rather to share our homes with a smaller number of functional and aesthetically refined possessions?” It’s an approach that’s just a bit too rarefied for IKEA.

Tools for Living is labelled as a “sourcebook,” meaning that if you are in the market for a kettle or a sofa that is both functional and beautiful, then this is the place to look. And indeed it is, although the authors do labour sometimes to maintain the link between functionality and design status. An orange-squeezer, for example, is described as “an elegant and effective citrus-pressing solution,” and we are assured that the O-series scissors, designed by Olof Bäckström in the 1960s, are not only good for cutting but “are a joy to use on each and every occasion.” This kind of simplicity is quite distinct from the kind that IKEA offers: in Tools for Living each item stands alone as a streamlined design statement, angling for the audience’s attention. The objects themselves are the true stars, and our role is to admire them.

It is very different in IKEA-land, where the individual objects, rather than claiming all the attention for themselves, combine to form a stage on which we can then perform our lives, unencumbered by evidence of our pasts – those chairs that grandma gave us, for instance – and unbetrayed by our own clunky ideas of what goes with what. As Alan Penn puts it, “the IKEA lifestyle frees the shopper from the weight of personal and cultural value,” frees us to be the people we want to be, rather than be defined by our possessions. It seems to promise us that we, not the furniture, will be the stars. And best of all, in IKEA-land there is lots of storage.

Unlike many an iconic modern design, IKEA recognises our need to put things away, to hide the evidence of clutter and chaos in our lives. It knows that we know that we will never really get rid of the mess. The most we can hope for is to keep our clutter out of sight and to create the illusion of order. To that end, IKEA provides drawers under beds and compartments in headboards, shelves built into coffee tables, “interior organisers,” “clothes storage systems” and “TV-related storage solutions with a smart inside.” In a striking moment towards the end of the cat ad, an especially snow-white specimen is shown looking into a very large, snow-white drawer and then reflectively closing it with its paws. You can tell the cat is imagining all the junk and clutter that would fit inside. •

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It is very much a game for the times, a product of our newly acquired awareness of the significance of fonts – of the appearance of the text we read, and the impact of that appearance on our lives. It is hard to imagine the Font Game gaining traction twenty or even ten years ago. Outside of a small number of professionals and aficionados, there simply weren’t enough people with enough familiarity with the world of fonts – people who habitually read the medium as well as the message – to make up a viable pool of players. It was very much a specialist interest. That has all changed; not only did the web enable the Font Game in terms of providing the technological platform, it did so too by creating a large cohort of enthusiastic followers of fonts.

As Simon Garfield points out in his clever and funny book on the history of typography, Just My Type, “the word ‘font’ – previously a piece of technical language limited to the design and printing trade” is now very much part of “the vocabulary of every computer user.” As it has become part of everyday speech, it has also lost some of its precision. Once used to describe a subset of a more comprehensive typeface – the letters as they appear in upper case, for example, or italicised – it is now generally used interchangeably with “typeface” itself, to mean an entire family of type. This does not make it any easier to pin down exactly how many there are, though Garfield estimates there are now “more than 100,000 fonts in the world.”

In any event we are probably already past counting, particularly when the full range of variations and modifications – not to mention adaptations, updatings, homages and the like – of individual typefaces is included in the mix, and when families of type can extend across languages and scripts, hoovering up letters and characters and an infinity of quirky, language-specific marks, creating vast compendiums of the raw materials of printed text. To say that we are spoiled for choice is putting it mildly. Early on in Just My Type, Garfield in effect asks the question that has occurred to most of us as we’ve scrolled through the drop-down menu trying to decide which font to use. Why do we need so many?

It’s a question that Garfield returns to, offering various possible answers without quite settling on a definitive one, perhaps because there is no real point in finding a definitive answer. Whether or not we need all these fonts, we’ve got them and we are getting more every day. The unused and unloved ones will retreat further and further into the background, but they can’t be uninvented, so the question becomes one of understanding why some fonts work better than others, why some are more suited to specific purposes and why – the most difficult question of all – some just look better and can stand infinite repetition. Still, the fact that the font revolution is unstoppable doesn’t mean that people don’t wish that somehow it could be stopped.

Garfield quotes Erik Spiekermann, co-founder of FontShop and “a legend in the graphic design world,” as he comments with more than a hint of exasperation that nowadays “everybody wants to design a bloody typeface.” In similar vein, the distinguished designer Massimo Vignelli caused something of a stir earlier this year when he cheekily proposed in an interview that the list of available fonts could and should be whittled down to twelve (“I am being generous today”), which would in his view be to the benefit of all. It wasn’t only type designers, in forums and on sites like I Love Typography, who objected to this view. For the large and growing community of people who just love fonts and typefaces, the over-abundance of design choice is part of the attraction, just as it is for people who love wallpaper or designer chairs.

And there is always the chance, if you keep your eyes open, of spotting the next Albertus (1932, by Bethold Wolpe), a favourite of Simon Garfield’s, which he calls “the most expressive font in town,” or Helvetica (originally 1957, by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann), whose ubiquity in the modern world was the subject of Gary Hustwit’s successful 2007 film of that name, or Gotham (2000, by Tobias Frere-Jones), the Obama campaign typeface, credited by many observers with managing “to look both establishment and fresh,” and thereby with helping to get the candidate over the line and into the White House.

Another attempt to answer the question – the question of why we need “so many blasted typefaces,” as one frustrated contributor to a Microsoft forum puts it – is offered by Adrian Frutiger, creator of the classic Swiss typeface Univers (first designed in 1954). Garfield quotes Frutiger as likening the diversity of typefaces to the diversity of wine. When there are so many versions, “it’s the nuances that are important.” For the type designer as for the winemaker, originality and difference must be contained within strict parameters, as set by historical conventions and by the expectations of readers (or drinkers), and these can be pushed only so far before what is produced is no longer recognisable as text or wine.

Given the subtlety of the differences between them, expressing just what it is that makes one font superior to another, or indeed one wine to another, in anything other than highly technical language is a challenging task, with the results – a lexicon of adjectives like “assertive” and “crisp” that seem never quite to capture what it is we are getting at – left all too open to dispute. In the end, says Garfield, the “only intractable, invincible basic rules of good type” are that it be “interesting” and “beautiful,” and “tasteful and witty and apt. And readable.”

Without at all labouring the point, Garfield makes it clear that this last, ineffable quality, of readability, is the key to any successful typeface. But therein lies a paradox. A good typeface should be a pleasure to look at in itself without distracting from or obscuring the meaning contained in the words. To that end, it must have a timeless quality and yet speak to the times; a dated typeface, however aesthetically pleasing it may be, can be a barrier to meaning. Garfield captures the simple eloquence of the great designers in both articulating and celebrating these apparent contradictions. The individual letter should be “both banal and beautiful,” says Frutiger. “The excellence of a designer’s work,” wrote the creator of Goudy Old Style, Frederic Goudy, in 1940, “depends entirely upon the degree of imagination and feeling he can include in his rendition of… traditional form.”

The adaptation of traditional typefaces for the computer age continues to have a huge impact, by fuelling the rise of font literacy and the proliferation of choice. It has led, too, to a more widespread understanding of how, with the right font and layout, the written word can be made to appear to its best advantage. In his essay of 1915 on “Modern Typography,” Bernard Shaw declared his view that “an author is not a fair judge of a printer, because the author himself usually spoils the printer’s work.” By this he meant that in correcting proofs of their own work, authors would blithely fiddle about, adding and deleting bits without regard for the look of the words on the page, “so that the printer finds all his trouble wasted and his work disfigured.” Shaw identifies an exception to this rule in William Morris, a writer and printer both, who “whenever he found a line that justified awkwardly, he altered the wording solely for the sake of making it look well in print.” This is now something we can all do; with a few keystrokes, we can change the look to suit the words, and with a few more, we can if we wish change the words to suit the look.

All creative endeavours, however radical, operate within certain formal constraints, but few can be as hemmed in as font design. Yet inventiveness thrives within this rigid framework. Wit and originality can be expressed in something as small as an unconventional tittle (the dot on the “i” or the “j”) or in the contrast between the size of the two bowls in a looptail “g.” Postmodernism, with its emphasis on questioning and upending the conventions, has never really gotten a grip on fonts, despite the development of categories of typefaces like “grunge” and “abstract.” If a newly created typeface is to have some expectation of being widely used it cannot stray too far from the principles of mid-century modernism, of clarity and functionality.

Font design remains at heart a bastion of seriousness, even as irony and irreverence have become the default registers in so many other aspects of contemporary life. So-called “ironic fonts,” the ones that call attention to their own font-ness, can be fun and on certain occasions can feel just right, but they rarely take off, their application confined to specialised websites or to small, one-off ad campaigns. The same can be said for “calligraphy” and “handwriting” and “handwritten” fonts, examples of which will achieve sudden popularity only to disappear just as quickly.

And if a fun or naturalistic or faux-naif font does cross over into genuine popularity and doesn’t have the grace to fade away of its own accord, the wrath of the font community can be something to behold. Garfield begins Just My Type with the story of the friendly and casual-seeming Comic Sans (1994, by Vincent Connare), which was included as a supplementary typeface in Windows 95 and just exploded, to the point where it started showing up in places where a moment’s reflection might have led to another choice: “on the sides of ambulances, on online porn sites, on the backs of the shirts worn by the Portuguese national basketball team.” The backlash – “ban Comic Sans” – has become a phenomenon in itself, accompanied, as so often in cases of bloggers’ revenge, by language of an intemperateness that can seem out of all proportion to the error of succumbing to Comic Sans in the first place.

Garfield identifies yet another paradox in the paradoxical world of fonts. On the one hand it is a place of unfettered freedom, literally so in that many fonts are available free or packaged into other transactions, and even when a direct charge is made it is typically not, given the creative effort that has gone into the design, especially high. For someone looking for the ideal font for self-expression, the range of choice is seemingly infinite. At the same time, the phenomenon of corporate fonts, of commissioning and copyrighting a font that then belongs to the commissioning organisation, is becoming more and more common.

And as anyone who has ever had to conform to a branding strategy will know, once an organisation settles on a typeface – whether it’s free or bought off the shelf or specially commissioned, the world of fonts can suddenly narrow down to a rigid and mind-bogglingly detailed set of rules and regulations. Fortunately Just My Type, with its lightly worn historical and technical references, its portraits of the (often unsung) heroes and heroines of font design, and its break-out chapters on some of the fonts that have made design history, avoids this kind of prescriptiveness in favour of celebrating the vast and ever-increasing multitude of fonts. •

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It is tempting to see more in this quoted remark than just a passing comment on the closed and self-reinforcing nature of the professions, in this case the profession of cooking. It also seems to be saying something about Adrià’s relationship to culinary tradition. In certain dramatic and larger-than-life ways he embodies and epitomises the profound shift that has been taking place over the past forty years in attitudes to cooking and particularly to haute cuisine, away from processes of recovering and refining the old ways of doing things and more and more towards being adventurous and inventive and original.

In the food writing of the mid twentieth century, when M.F.K. Fisher and Elizabeth David and Julia Child and others like them were introducing vast numbers of readers to the long history and continuing vitality of the great cuisines, the language of approval centred on words like “authenticity.” The success of the dish hinged on its capacity to reproduce the way it should be done, as sanctified by tradition. This did not entirely rule out a role for creativity in the kitchen, for new ways of doing things or even for cutting the occasional corner, but these influential texts told their readers that there were clear historical parameters and that they were firmly set. For the serious cook, the message was, the past is always with us.

What is radical about Adrià is not so much that he rejects the culinary past – as Andrews makes clear, he is much more versed in and sympathetic to traditional ways of cooking than his critics typically allow – as that he is so fixed on the possibilities of the future. Adrià’s interest in doing new things in new ways drew him first to nouvelle cuisine, which appealed to his instincts for aestheticising food and for creating pictures on plates. (That early influence remains; Andrews describes a dessert he enjoyed recently at El Bulli as “sculpture on a plate, an evocative scene built from spice bread, liquorice, frozen chocolate powder and cherry sorbet.”) But nouvelle cuisine rapidly developed its own rules and conventions, against which Adrià began to strain.

Then came an epiphany, which Andrews pinpoints to 1987, when Adrià was included in a visit by Spanish chefs to the great restaurants of the Cote d’Azur. Following a demonstration in Cannes by the chef Jacques Maximin (described by the Guide Gault Millau, we are told, as the “Bonaparte of the ovens”), during which he had urged his audience to be creative in their cooking, somebody asked him what he meant by “creativity.” Maximin responded along the lines of “creativity means not copying,” and “this simple formulation, Ferran says, changed his life.” He threw himself single-mindedly into invention and culinary experiment. And by Ferran Adrià’s own admission, it’s been hard work to remain consistently inventive. “For a chef to make something new,” he says of himself, “after centuries of cuisine, that is incredible.”

For his admirers and detractors alike, Ferran Adrià’s reputation as the world’s most innovative cook rests on his unstoppable enthusiasm for science and technology and the roles they can play in helping him create new dishes and new techniques. Indeed some of those techniques are better known than he is: “cooking” with liquid nitrogen, for example, or producing “foams” out of unexpected, often unglamorous ingredients, or introducing “spherification” to the world, a method, as Andrews describes it, “for enclosing flavoured liquid in a skin of itself, as it were,” thereby creating a perfect, idealised version of the original. At one point in the narrative Andrews tries a “plump green pearl” made out of peas. “It was the very essence of peas,” he comments.

Andrews also credits Adrià with fundamentally changing the ideal of the fine dining experience from à la carte to dégustation, from one where the diner exercises a degree of influence by making choices from a menu, to one where the diner simply sits there, deferring to the artist and waiting for what comes next. Adrià discarded à la carte altogether in 2002. Fittingly for a technophile, he redefined the restaurant dinner as a series of culinary tweets, usually thirty or more of them in a sitting, each one a compact encapsulation of wit, inventiveness and flavour. Indeed, on many occasions Adrià has described his approach to cooking as inventing a new language. If so, it is a language of aphorism, in which a lot of meaning is packed into each very small dish.

The question is, what does all this meaning mean? That is where both cook and biographer do tend to hit a stumbling block. In more traditional cuisines, words like “authenticity” and “legitimacy” serve a purpose, linking the dish to history and presenting it as an embodiment of culture and values. But when the culinary imperative is to “make it new,” as it is for Adrià, this kind of terminology, which emphasises the past, doesn’t really apply. Instead, when his cooking is described, by himself and by others, the word that recurs is “purity” – as in “purity of flavour” and “purity of the ingredients.” “What we did was so pure,” recalls his long-time friend and colleague José Andrés of their early days at El Bulli. For Adrià and his followers, food takes on a metaphysical quality, in which the objective seems to be to create a dish that isn’t really food at all, but the idea of food. When Adrià moved on to the next iteration of his famous “foams,” his so-called “airs,” made by injecting the “maximum amount of air” into the ingredient, the result, says Andrews, was “just the ingredient, oxygenated almost to the point of abstraction – pure essence of flavour.”

In some ways Adrià’s career so far can be seen as a path to abstraction, towards some imagined point at which the dish he creates speaks only of itself. But in other ways he has been anything but abstract, precisely documenting his every move. Andrews himself seems almost overwhelmed by the quite extraordinary volume of documentation that Adrià has produced, or caused to be produced, about his own practice. He begins by noting that “no other chef has so precisely and exhaustively – obsessively is probably not too strong a word – chronicled his own professional life and the history of his restaurant.” The list of publications is indeed mind-boggling, including but by no means confined to the General Catalogue (five volumes and rising) which aims to record every dish ever created at El Bulli. The El Bulli (latterly styled elBulli) website is a vast compendium of documents and images that is regularly supplemented.

It currently includes a request – posted in the context of the recent announcement that the restaurant will close by 2012 and re-open in 2014 as an (as yet undefined) foundation – for anyone who has ever worked at El Bulli, beginning with its pre-Adrià incarnation in 1964, to send in their details, preferably with a photograph taken at the time. It is almost as if, retrospectively, Adrià is pulling together and celebrating the professional family that he lacked when he was starting out. For a man who looks so relentlessly to the future, he has an abiding sense of the past – specifically his own past – and of the history that he and his friends and colleagues have created. Today’s innovation could well be tomorrow’s standard, and thanks to Adrià’s compulsion to record, if that does happen then we’ll know just what to do when it comes to reproducing it.

For many readers of Colman Andrews’s account of the life so far of Ferran Adrià, the subtitle – “the man who changed the way we eat” – will strike a jarring note. While his influence on fine dining and high-end restaurant culture is clear, the impact he has had on the day-to-day preparation and consumption of food is less easy to define. For the sceptic, a recent press release announcing an alliance between Adrià and the telecommunications company Telefónica, aimed at turning El Bulli into “the most creative and innovative lab in the world,” will not be encouraging. “The idea,” Adrià is quoted as saying, “is to transform, once and for all, the relationship between creativity and society through the use of new technologies,” an idea that could be dismissed as just another kind of “air” – in this case served very hot.

And yet. While it’s too early to say for certain, Andrews’s subtitle could well turn out to be justified. Adrià has been influential in blurring the distinctions between categories of food – local and international, natural and artificial, raw and processed, delicate and robust, sweet and savoury, fast and slow. He has shown how domestic and restaurant cookery can learn from high-volume industrial processes, without necessarily seeing those processes as inherently evil. He has mixed ingredients and, perhaps more importantly, hierarchies of ingredients, as in the case of his famous or notorious (depending on your point of view) “Kellogg’s paella,” described by Andrews as “made out of puffed rice (think Rice Krispies) fried with saffron and mixed with tomato, prawn powder and raw prawns, and served with an ampoule of intense brown prawn extract to be squeezed directly into the mouth.” He has embraced and in some cases invented kitchen gadgetry and other products with what can seem like an undiscriminating fascination with novelty, but quite a number of these innovations are now in commercial production and may, in some cases, end up as part of the standard batterie de cuisine. Most of all perhaps, he has linked food and cooking to the spirit of the times, in which, with the help of the technology, anything is possible. •

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The short list for this year’s Global Mobile Messaging Awards provides a window to the future. One of the finalists in the Innovation in Messaging category is SpinVox Messenger, an application that “automatically converts a voice message into text and delivers it directly to the recipient as an SMS, ensuring call completion (and) stimulating call continuity”. The spoken word segues into text of its own accord, without the need for human intervention. “Messaging,” comments one of the judges not quite illuminatingly, “is helping us to re-examine the importance of voice.”

The eventual winner in the Innovation category also does what it does automatically; in this case by “automatically saving every text and photo message on line.” The evanescence that was so much part of the essential character of mobile text messages is a thing of the past; “your taxi is on approach” can now live forever on the hard drive. In another example of the unlimited potential of text messages, we learn from pangolinsms.com that “Pangolin’s Interactive Messaging Unlimited software is perfect for concerts,” where it is used to display SMS text messages on giant TV screens onstage, a practice that has been growing in popularity over the last few years. Again something that seemed so innately characteristic of the text message, a private communication transmitted to a screen only just big enough to read from, is transformed into a public display. How did it all happen, and so quickly?

Text messaging, or SMS, began almost by accident. It was borne along in the early nineties in the slipstream of the mobile phone, as a by-the-way function – handy but to the phone companies not self-evidently essential – that rapidly and unexpectedly became a phenomenon in its own right. For many people, particularly younger people, texting became the preferred form of electronic or indeed any other communication. Against the discursiveness of email the text message, from within its miniaturised frame, got the essential point across with as little fuss as possible.

In a study of the mobile habits of psychology students at the University of Padova which appears in Mobile Phone Cultures, a volume of essays edited by Gerard Goggin of the University of New South Wales, Alberta Contarello and others note that of all the functions and qualities the participants associated with mobile communication SMS came first (ahead of, for example, convenience, reachability or fashion). The authors observe in passing that SMS is a “user design variant,” which is true to the extent that the explosion of interest in texting in the mid to late nineties was not anticipated. The market, in effect, voted with its thumbs.

As Alex S. Taylor and Jane Vincent point out in “An SMS History” (in Lynne Hamill and Amparo Lasen’s Mobile World: Past, Present and Future), “early SMS campaigns to promote the delivery as well as receipt of messages… positioned the service as a second-rate add-on to voice transmissions.” To them, “what now seems striking and somewhat peculiar is the idea that messages were not considered to be something that people would compose themselves on their mobile phones.”

In retrospect, the key factor in the take-up of texting seems to be what was thought of as its Achilles heel, the limitation to 160 characters per message. “Paradoxically,” Taylor and Vincent write, “the limit of 160 characters and the cumbersome and time-consuming multi-tap method for entering text… struck a chord with users, particularly younger ones.” Other forms of electronic communication – emailing, blogging – impose no meaningful constraints. You can go on forever if you want to. But texting was different, though it is changing now. The constraints were severe and in the way of constraints they also posed a challenge. If it couldn’t be said in 160 characters (fewer in some other languages) then perhaps it wasn’t worth saying.

THE GOLDEN YEARS of the text message already seem to be behind us, back in the late nineties and the first few years of the new century. This was the time when the text message was in its pure state, before MMS and before the capacity to send multiple messages and to include fancy accoutrements like attachments and embedded links; when the message just said what it had to say, unencumbered by qualifying clauses. A text message could be read rather than navigated or scanned, because there wasn’t enough there to navigate. In its abbreviated simplicity it offered a welcome alternative to the endlessness of everything else. The vexed question of when to stop writing – an email, a blog entry – just didn’t arise. You had to stop, because you ran out of space.

Some see this enforced brevity as the heart of the problem. For them, the text message and its cousin instant messaging embody everything that has gone wrong with language, as we forsake complexity and nuance and the time-consuming courtesies in favour of, linguistically speaking, the short sharp shock. For others, the text message holds the key to the revitalisation of language, as it encourages us to find all sorts of new and inventive ways to say more with less. It stops us rambling on. It makes us think. David Crystal, in his recent book on the subject, txting: the gr8 db8, inclines towards the latter view, but only in the face of what he calls the “extraordinary antipathy” to this new – or maybe not so new – way of writing.

In a comment on the Oxford University Press blog posted shortly after publication, Crystal laments the fact that the antipathy he identifies in his book continues unchecked by any evidence to the contrary. He quotes the remark made by a spokesman for the Head Teachers’ Association of Scotland who seemed uninfluenced by Crystal’s anti-alarmist findings: “Because of the rate in which text-speak is taking hold,” says the spokesman, “I shudder to think what letters will look like in 10 years’ time.” There is no need to panic, says Crystal. He makes the case for the energy and inventiveness of texting, adding reassuringly if not entirely consistently that the sorts of things that texting relies on – abbreviations, acronyms, vowel-less sentences, and all manner of language-play – have been around forever.

Another scholar of texting and mobile telephony – it’s a fast-growing field – comes to very similar conclusions. In Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World Naomi S. Baron adopts a fairly relaxed tone on the where’s-it-all-heading question, reassuring the doom-sayers that “in reality, there are relatively few linguistic novelties specific to electronically mediated language that seem to have staying power.” In other words, it’s inventive, but not so inventive that it risks changing language out of all recognition. Indeed Baron sees some virtue in the way in which text messaging demands concision. By contrast, in a reference to electronic writing generally, she asks whether it could be that “the more we write online, the worse writers we become?”

Could it be, Baron wonders, that the “sheer amount of (electronic) text” being produced is “diminishing our sense of written craftsmanship”? In some ways this is counter-intuitive, particularly if we subscribe to the adage that practice makes perfect. If writing makes you a better writer, then surely even more writing makes you an even better writer. But only, perhaps, if you edit as you write. “Murder your darlings,” Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch famously said in his advice to authors, and the Cut function on Word came along to make it easier. The problem is that the darlings won’t stay dead. Those excised phrases and paragraphs often lurk underground, waiting to be resuscitated, and very often they are, not least because there is room for them. If the system allows it, why not say more? Guidelines for web writing typically begin with a version of the injunction “make it short,” but for all that the content of the average website just grows and grows. Only with the text message are you forced to keep it short, whether you want to or not.

Keeping it short means leaving out the non-essential bits. The more non-essential bits we leave out, the more concision can elide into compression, and clarity into confusion. Which is why, Baron notes, “scores of journalists are apparently in agreement that our linguistic prospects are bleak,” a reference to the sub-genre of opinion- and think-pieces that regularly declare that the linguistic end is nigh and that very soon we will each of us have no idea what anyone else is saying. And it is not only journalists who feel this way. The New York Times records James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, drawing laughter at the launch earlier this year of a Pew Research Centre report into student writing when he expressed concern about “what he called ‘the slow destruction of the basic unit of human thought, the sentence,’ because young Americans are doing most of their writing in disjointed prose composed in Internet chat rooms or in cellphone text messages.”

David Crystal singles out his candidate for the most apocalyptic of all such cries of pain. It comes from the distinguished journalist and broadcaster John Humphrys, writing in the Daily Mail of 24 September 2007, who described texters as “vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago.” Even allowing for hyperbole, this seems extreme. But Humphrys’s rant is not quite as unfettered as this extract might suggest. What prompts his outburst is the news that the Oxford English Dictionary has dropped the hyphen from 16,000 compound words on the grounds that we are all too busy for hyphens. We must change the way we write, reports Humphrys, because “we no longer have time to reach for the hyphen key.” The objection, as it so often is, is not so much to texting – or fast food or fast anything – as it is to the pressure we are under and the way in which that pressure seems to speed up time. It’s not so much about the abbreviation itself, but about the need to abbreviate in the first place. Why shorten everything? What’s the rush?

Humphrys is particularly venomous when it comes to the abbreviations used in texting and email, describing them as “grotesque.” In the early days of text messaging it was all harmless enough: “tks” for “thanks”; “u” for “you”; 4 for “for.” But now it is much more complicated, as texters “have sought out increasingly obscure ways of expressing themselves.” Lists abound on the internet of acronyms, alphabetisms, and other combinations of letters and numbers that far exceed the lexicon that even the most committed texter would necessarily take the trouble to master. Abbreviation becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. A kind of verbal nanotechnology. Webopedia’s “Text Messaging Abbreviations: A Guide to Understanding Online Chat Acronyms & Smiley Faces” was up to 970 entries at last count, but is looking for more. “If you know of a text message abbreviation that is not included in our list, please let us know.” This suggests an exercise that has gone beyond an anthropological record of practice to become a call for creativity and invention. PXT. Please explain that.

Abbreviated and otherwise modified language may look streamlined, but it can often take longer to put together than the conventional kind, and longer to pull apart. Ill-literacy, a San Francisco-based “collective of poets, emcees, and all-around fresh individuals,” zero in on this paradox when two of their number – Ruby Veridiano-Ching and Nico Cary – perform a stand-up routine on the subject of text-messaging that elicits cries of recognition from their mostly college audiences. “The great thing about text messaging,” says Cary in a performance that can be found in several iterations on YouTube, “is that you don’t have to respond right away. You can carefully craft each message so that you sound witty.”

Against the commonly stated view that texting is not really writing at all, but rather a hybrid of the written and the spoken, Cary emphasises its writerliness, the ability it gives to present a version of yourself in haiku form, rather than the version that comes across in unmediated speech. Some of this careful crafting that he talks about involves deciding whether or not to break the rules, or whether in fact breaking the rule has itself become the rule. “Should I spell ‘what’ ‘w-h-a-t’, ‘w-a-t’ or ‘w-u-t’”? he asks plaintively. And when, having finally sent the carefully crafted message, you don’t get a response for forty-five minutes, it can “drive you fuckin’ crazy”. So powerful is the illusion that texting is spontaneous and natural that even though it has taken three quarters of an hour to compose your message, once it’s been sent you expect an immediate reply.

In a study undertaken at the University of Plymouth, researchers divided their student participants into two groups, texters and talkers, according to the predominant use they made of their mobile devices. “The fact some people prefer texting to talking suggests that they get something out of texting that they cannot get from talking… They committed more time and effort to the process of message composition, writing longer messages and editing them more carefully, expressing things in their messages they may not have felt comfortable saying face-to-face.” This conveys the sense that texting is more deliberative than it appears, that it allows you to present another version of yourself than the one people see in front of them: an alternative to speech rather than a version of it. And it us best not to mix them up. As the netiquette advice provided on txtmania.com has it, “as much as possible, avoid texting while in a conversation with real people.”

Texting takes time, even when it doesn’t seem to. In the Pew Research Centre report that prompted the remark from the Librarian of Congress about the decline of the sentence, a ten year old is quoted as saying that “I put in 20 hours [per week] plus [texting]. I can’t even count because I mean it’s not like you’re spending a continuous hour writing/texting. It’s just like text, text, text while you’re doing other stuff.” The young respondent manages to sound both casual and pressured, valuing the instantaneousness and spontaneity of the medium while clearly spending a lot of time on it. It’s just one text message after another. “Text, text, text.”

A report prepared by ANU and the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association concluded from questionnaire data that the jury was out on whether mobile phone use alleviated people’s sense of time pressure. “Nine per cent answered ‘Yes, a lot less’; 25% answered ‘Yes, a little less’; 15% answered ‘No, not much less’; 25% ‘No, not at all’ and 26% were unsure,” figures which, taken together, tend to leave the question open. Meanwhile, reports on the ease and utility of text messaging – its capacity to reduce the pressure – have tended to give way in recent times to reports of its dangers, with texting while driving coming in for particular censure.

There are many signs that text messaging as a personal communication tool, for all its continuing popularity, is being overtaken, or in some cases taken over. From personal to personalised. The Obama campaign has helped pioneer the political use of high-volume text messaging to provide the illusion of two-way traffic – “sign up to the right to receive text messages on your phone,” says barackobama.com – while in effect being simply a mobile mail-out. And, the campaign site advises, “for high volume text users” (a phrase which seems explicitly to acknowledge the addictive element in texting) there is Twitter. The Google tagline for Twitter succinctly indicates the speed with which texting is being supplanted by newer and more sophisticated verbal nouns: “Social networking and microblogging service utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface.” Obama Mobile won its category for the 2008 Global Mobile Messaging Awards. According to 160characters.org, the website for the SMS and Mobile Messaging Association, “Obama Mobile has set the gold standard for harnessing the power of mobile technology to engage supporters and to drive a political movement.”

But for some commentators, texting is already history. According to a post of 28 August 2008 by Ed Hardy, editor of brighthand.com (a site providing news, reviews and discussion on “handhelds and smartphones of all kinds”), “texting was created back in the 1990s because people wanted email on their phones, but the technology wasn’t available yet. That’s why engineers came up with a crippled version of email that phones could handle. The technology for full email access is available now, so SMS has really outlived its usefulness.” If he’s right, and he probably is, then instead of lamenting the role of text messages in the decline of language we will find ourselves mourning the energy and liveliness and to-the-pointness of texting. The plain vanilla text message, sent from one person to another, will rapidly come to seem like the telegram of the digital age. •

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