Masahisa Fukase’s ‘Solitude of Ravens’ at Michael Hoppen Gallery

I was a late visitor to this exhibition, as often is the case with life, other matters seem to always get in the way, but I’m extremely glad that I made that visit.

Fukase is one of the most celebrated photographers to have worked in that halcyon period in Japanese photographic history, which began in the early 1960’s and ran for about a decade. Though he was a contemporary of Moriyama and the Provoke photographers his work was never part of the exclusive and highly influential club. His work (in Ravens) shared some of the aesthetic, the grainy black and white, blur and off kilter composition, however it was tighter in the final edits, telling a more coherent and far more personal story than say Takuma Nakahira’s For a Language to Come or Moriama’s Bye Bye Photography, both of which are as much about photography as they are about the photographer and their subject matter.

Ravens’ (shot between 1976 and 1982) is a love story, a melancholy love story told by a broken man whose wife has divorced him after his heavy drinking and bouts of debilitating depression eroded their relationship. It is a love that is both tragic and destructive. In the case of the former: it is unrequited due to her absence; in the later the obvious obsession he has for her imprisons him in his grief and compounds his increasing loneliness.

The Ravens, a bird that is omnipresent on Fukase’s home island of Hokkaido serves as on obvious symbol for Yoko (his wife). Where ever he looks there are Ravens, and so, there is Yoko. One can imagine him stalking them with his camera only to have them fly away, but not to far – just enough to remain in view – jut enough to remain out of reach, to taunt him. There are other images in the work: blurred landscapes, blizzard swept landscapes, shadowy figures on roads to nowhere and women: a naked masseuse, young ladies with raven black windswept hair, a surly cat giving a sideways look of contempt that only cats can muster, the black abstract shape of a jet in flight – I’m sure he longed to take that flight to get away – but he knew it would have been a useless gesture, he could never run from what was haunting him. But most of all there are Ravens: flying, roosting, in detail and dead.

If one could draw a literary comparison to this work Edgar Allen Poe’s Raven would be the place to start. Both Fukase and Poe’s protagonist have endure the loss of their beloved wife, although in the case of Poe’s anonymous character his Lenore was robbed of her life. In each case both men were left alone in the torment of longing and of course they were haunted by a Raven a harbinger of what would be – nevermore.

Fukase’s personal story continued on its tragic arch, in 1992 after a heavy drinking session he fell and suffered a head injury that would leave him in a coma for 20 years. He eventually died in 2012.

If it is the case that an artist must suffer for the art – then Fukase was issued with more than his fair share of pain and torment. But what a rich vain of raw fuel this provided him. This is quite possibly the most poetic body of photographic work ever produced and while anyone familiar with it cannot be anything but moved by its solemn beauty its is sad to think of the suffering endured by the man who created it.

Ultimately any artworks success must be measured against its ability to communicate the almost incommunicable, by this measure Ravens is high art indeed.

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Saul Leiter at The Photographers’ Gallery

Like many people I was familiar with Saul Leiter’s work – but I didn’t know it as well as I should have, but then who did? So much of his personal work had remained hidden until just before his death in 2013.

This exhibition acts – in a time where concept rules – as a much-needed reminder of how a photographer can engage with the world around them and in doing reveal to us how complex, contradictory, compelling, beautiful, alienating and chaotic life can be.

The exhibition opens with his early black and white work, which is even less known then the colour that followed. It is, I suppose, inevitable that any early user of colour film will be compared with William Eggleston, such is the great mans gravitational influence; for his part Leiter certainly matches up, although in many ways the Leiter has been treated harshly by “establishment”, as he preceded Eggleston by some years and so should be hailed as a master in his own right. Both men are very much the product of their environments: Eggleston the crisp defining southern light – Leiter the often subtler, diffused New York winter variety. A painter turned photography Leiter prowled the streets of New York, which through his lens became an immense, living breathing Abstract Expressionist canvas.

While there is a sense of gentleness in his images – which is partly due to his photographing through misted window or in the subdued yet luminous light of a snowstorm – he captures the grittiness of life in the metropolis. His images are more claustrophobic than Eggleston’s; there are no vistas or wide open blue sky; making Leiter somewhat closer, psychologically, to Robert Frank – there is a quiet sadness and sense of alienation in his images.

People in Leiter’s photographs are usually alone, small and against a background of bright but grubby buildings or battling the elements; framed by a window or deliberately cropped out of the image leaving only a hand or foot to be seen. The singular figures convey the sense of isolation one can feel in a city of millions.

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©Saul Leiter

In one of the most memorable images of this type, a monochrome: a young woman is placed in the bottom left of the frame, she looks distant, preoccupied and unhappy; above her, running in a dark blur diagonally across the fame is some type of solid, heavy structure, in the top right the impression of some buildings – as sign of the city – perhaps it is the weight of the city that is crushing her spirit, trapping her in her isolation.

When occasionally seen in pairs, people tend to be incomplete elements of complex and fragmented scenes. Leiter often employs reflection in windows to create elaborate collages, which shows the viewer what is happening on both sides of the glass. In so doing we are invited to untangle the varied, knotted strands that is social interaction, a complexity and messiness that is intensified when one lives among millions of strangers.

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©Saul Leiter

The experience of city living, whether in Leiter’s 1950’s or the modern day is essentially unchanged and so Leiter’s New York becomes an archetypal city, it is easily recognizable to any current city dweller, we can understand its language, feel its rhythms and recognise the effects of its cold indifference.

There are a third set of images in the show: nudes. Exclusively black and white, Leiter’s penchant for obscuring features and parts of the body is evident her too. Again there is tenderness to the images, in some an obvious erotic element too, but there is no vulgarity or the objectification that is sometimes evident in female nudes produced by men. The other subset here are nudes that Leiter has painted over. Usually such images would not hold my attention, but these did. That they are such high quality photographs to begin with provides a very solid foundation for embellishment, in some it seems almost a shame to paint over them. But, combined with the attention of a painter they taken on a new life. They are imbued with a sense of energy, a tension that actually does bring something exciting to them – it makes them vital.

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©Saul Leiter

What Leiter does brilliantly is to not only depict a place and a time but also help us to feel a place and a time, in all of its wonderful, chaotic beauty – he commented that he sought to depict beauty, as unfashionable as that is, without apology. This seems fitting for a man who mixed with Arbus, Winnogrand and the other grandees of the New York school, but never received the same accolades, even though they are richly deserved.

Luc Delahaye

The first posting on this blog is a get to know me book list. It was only a few days ago, while looking through my bookshelves that is realized I had hadn’t included any work by Luc Delahaye. I could believe I had left him out, especially as he is one of my favorite photographers.

Delahaye was for a number of years a photojournalist with Magnum Photos. His journalistic work, often on assignment for Newsweek, took him to Lebanon, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Chechnya, amongst other places and won him a number of prestigious awards. In 2004, declaring himself to be an artist, he resigned from Magnum, not that this meant a change of subject matter; he continued to photograph in war zones and other areas blighted by social upheaval. As a photojournalist, and a Magnum member, the presence of Robert Capa is never too far away, with the famous dictum: If your pictures aren’t good enough you’re aren’t close enough being the litmus test for such work. But Delahaye seems to have not got the memo. He certainly got physically close but there was an emotional detachment – his is a cool observational eye.

He sought to formalise this approach, firstly for the book L’Autre where he used a hidden camera to photograph the people sitting opposite him on the Paris Metro. This exercise helped restore a lost faith in photography and was followed by two long trips to Russia that culminated in the book: Winterreise.

For me this small book stands as one of the finest examples of its kind. The work feels different to the journalism the preceded it. One gets the feeling that the melancholy that emanates from it is as much a reflection of Delahaye’s state of mind as is of the social decline experienced in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Spending time with drunks, criminals, addicts and the homeless Delahaye depicts a Russia that could easy have come straight out of a Dostoyevski novel.

Though it does not have the hard edge of his journalistic work, there is a sense of discomfort when looking at some of the images. The profound squalor, the feeling of hopelessness, the substance abuse and violence that offers the only way out of such dire circumstances. There are no happy people here, no smiley families or children having fun, instead everyone looks old before his or her time. In what must be the most heartbreaking image in the book a toddler, sat on the edge of a bed in a filthy room next to her older sibling, feet in layers of dirty socks, hair a tangled mess, she looks at the floor, dejected, struggling under the burdens of a life that no child should have to live. Her demeanor is that of an old lady, someone worn out or rather worn down by the unrelenting hardness of life. One wonders if she’ll ever make it to actual old age – it seems though that the odds are stacked against her.

In other images, of people on beds – a recurring theme – we see adults passed out from drink or hard drugs; lined up for arrest; beaten by the mafia, at work down a mine or in factory that looks like the gateway to another layer of hell and, like modern day hunter gatherers in a post apocalyptic nether world foraging on open landfill sites. There are small signs of what is to come though, the faint smudge of a building sized Coca-Cola logo herald the rampant capitalism of the Putin era with its oligarchs and crass nouveau riche, they haven’t arrived yet and they certainly wont bring any solace to these people, they’ll just ignore them as they drive by in their luxury cars or hold up in their mansions.

To say that this is a work of the highest caliber is an understatement. Rarely do photographers capture so intensely, so completely the atmosphere of a time, a place and a group of people. It is Delahye’s ability to capture this mood of a country at a time of profound change and uncertainty that is most striking. It is a lyrical work that seeps into the viewers consciousness, lodges itself their and stubbornly refuses to leave.

Luc Delahaye – Winterreise (Phaidon 2000)