Barry Woods/ Decline
From the exotic other to the highly staged conceits aping film’s manner of display and ersatz drama, via the trawling through of the bizarre and the grotesque, it would appear that nothing has been spared the photographic gaze. At times this gaze has assumed a frenzied dalliance with extremes and the conceptually and/ or theoretically spurious in a quest for difference or gravitas. Of course a fascination with sex, death, transgression and celebrity guarantees, if not success, then at least a moment in the spotlight for any aspiring foto ‘artiste’.
There is though, a photographic continuum, an approach that transcends genre and time and is characterised less by that which is spectacular than that which is everyday and commonplace and is in the end the photographic. What I am referring to here is that practice that eschews the epic and the sensational for, after Szarkowski, photo subjects that ‘…are simply present: clearly realised, precisely fixed, themselves, in the service of no extraneous roles.’
I am indebted at this point to a recent quote by Stephen Shore, a rejoinder to those of an overly fabricated approach when he states that ‘to see something spectacular and recognize it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary, something you’d see everyday and recognize it as a photo opportunity – that’s what I’m interested in.’
The interest then, is in what could be described as ‘vernacular photography’, but this is a poetic vernacular wherein the banal is charged with intelligence, the commonplace becomes magical and where the mundane shimmers in the eye of the spectator… lets say, the empathy of Strand, the deliberation of Pinkcombe and the curious eye of Eggleston.
Woods’s ‘Decline’ study operates in the same terrain, image making which unpicks the everyday and results in a re – imagining of what is simply before us, re vitalising the spectators engagement with the picture, in the detail and traces of fabric that most fail to see in the drone and saturation of the routine.
These pictures, of an empty care home for the elderly, would appear on the surface, to be from that recent manner of picture making characterized by a thematic and stylistic affectation of disinterest… as if banality is, in itself of import…those photographs that are marked by their hostage to a stylistic affectation. But not so with Woods’s work here. This work has the lineage of Riis and Hine in its social import but also recalls the work of Evans in its patient deliberation and scrutiny of what is before the lense.
Now, Woods position as detached observer is an astute one to take, although when he refers to his adoption of an ‘objective style’, we know that he is of course, fully aware of the implications of burdening the subject matter here with the sheen of, say, a Salgado.
In this sense Woods is clearly not the completely honest broker he might have us believe, rather, his use of the objective signature is a knowing foregrounding of the material in the frame, in a manner that negates dilution by an overtly photographic presence. As such, this work pre figures, limits the viewers range of responses to the images but also solicits particular social questions about the work.
One picture from the series triggers particular anxiety in this viewer. There is a bed sideways on, a wall light fitting, two chrome light switches, a handrail, a call device and – trailing out of the frame a sink, tiles and a mirror, an inventory so mundane as to question its inclusion.
The dread however, is in the detail, in the specifics of the stripped, sagging mattress, the crumpled stained plastic sheet…no, not crumpled, but shaped in the hurried desperate dragging from the bed – its sheet…the panic button function on the call device and the corporeal decay realised in the hand rail…the forlorn, discarded talc container beneath the bed. A scene of desultory abandonment.
An inventory of items in the frame, yet in their detail, in their combination becoming so much more than the sum of their parts.
Shot in natural light, this picture is ‘simply present’, the veil of ‘the photographic’, that aspect of the practice that foregrounds the process, is largely absent aside of selection and framing and so the picture assumes the gravitas of evidence and of documentation, witness photography no less. But there is more to this picture than mere description, more than a simple analogue of what was before the camera.
Dyer, citing Yourcenar’s ‘Memoirs of Hadrian’, suggests that to photograph an unmade bed is, in that context, ‘…to record a premonition of someone’s eventual passing away’ and that apropos a photograph by Stephen Shore ‘We know nothing about this friend, but there is nothing else to know…because – as this bed makes plain – he has, in a sense, already gone’.
In this light, in the context of this study, this bed signals no less than a site of trauma, as the commonplace scene slips across the fault line from the banal to the defamiliar, from faded domestic to unheimlich, as the ‘homely’ arcs Lynch like across the divide.
As we look at these images, at this bed, we are compelled to complete each dreadful scene, imagining the paucity of life lived in such a place until, in the end, we recognise in these pictures our own inevitable fate – that we all will arrive at this place!
If we accept the unmade bed as redolent of someone’s passing, then the ‘Decline’ photographs provide the preamble to that certainty, the tawdry furniture pieces, the broken fittings and stained wallpaper are the bit parts to the beds lead role in the tragedy.
Another photograph, almost identical in content, with the addition of a small bedside chest of drawers, adds to the evidence. In this picture, the viewer is positioned at the foot of the bed, the lines forming the pattern on the mattress leading the eye to the headboard. Above the single bed, the same wall light fitting, to the right a disconnected power supply and a metal hand rail, to the left the drawers and a light switch. The arrangement of each is determined by the necessity of ease of access for the bed ridden, the old and the infirm. Again, the trace of ‘what has been’ permeates the scene.
The bare, disconnected wires hang downwards over the headboard, darkened at the point where its occupants head used to rest, this, a visceral DNA residue of the departed.
The linear pattern on the mattress eerily recalls photographs from another site of dread, the uniforms of the inmates of Dachau or Treblinka, the ripples on its surface inviting closer inspection for marks of ‘him, already gone’. Two drawers are visible next to the bed, each has an overly ornate reproduction brass handle which, together with the paper border running across the wall affects a status blackly comic in its failure.
Both drawer fronts are grubby but especially so the top one around its lock, heavily stained by regular use, blackened as if by the filthiest of hands. A locked drawer much used, a prized, intimate cache in this semi public space where the personal has no currency. There is an opened letter on top of the drawers, for the attention presumably of someone now gone, read by others, discarded, its intimacy debased.
These pictures invite particular, acute responses in the spectator. They bring to mind Barthes’s provocation in ‘…beyond what it permits us to see’ and register in that space we call the uncanny, wherein the dread not of – what we do not know – but indeed what we do know, emanates from these scenes.
This is, of course, fitting. The homely, the domestic, the site of sanctuary and the hearth is here re presented, transformed into a place of dread where only a cursory glance is required to see the melancholy in the detail and the detritus of neglect. The spectre of abandonment haunts these images, broken chairs, torn curtains and the shabbiness of what is still complete, the drabness of the whole and the dread so invoked. A ‘semiotic of despair’ is, I would venture, appropriate here…the home and all that it signifies is in these images, traduced.
Is it too fanciful to suggest that the ‘Decline’ series of images present these interiors as crime scenes?
The outlines on the walls and the traces of the once lived in are the signs of, lets say, a ‘psycho – social forensic’ in which the spectator is invited as a witness.
This notion of ‘witnessing’ is important here and operates in two crucial ways. First, the series invokes the uncanny, as, picture by picture the anxiety increases with the spectators recognition of that essential – ‘ness’ of the uncanny which is ‘estrangement’. This repetitive insistence to gaze upon these frames of separation, imbues each individual frame and the study in total with a primal almost repulsive fascination. The familiar in Woods’s images turns on the intersection between the apparent banality of the scenes charged with the dread or repulsion in recognition of ones own mortality, thus the series collapses into ‘this unheimlich place’.
Second, the study bears witness as evidence, the material evidence of the consequences of a post-social political culture in which ‘what was once a social need has now become a business opportunity’.
In this social/ material context, these photographs function in the same way as the pictures of Riis and Anaan, Lange and Vachon in that they draw attention to certain conditions and specific circumstances that warrant the light of a wider public. That the pictures in ‘Decline’ deny the established conventions of the documentarist is to the works advantage, avoiding the pitfalls of the sermonizer, whilst presenting a quietly reflective critique of late capitalist politics, played out in the reality of community care in a profit orientated social culture.
I am reminded here of Roberts view that ‘In conditions of social crisis the aestheticised and selective appropriation of the everyday (in photographic practice) made no sense…’. Woods’s photographs are cogent affirmations of Roberts’s position in their ascetic, naturalist manner of display that is fitting in such a socially engaged study.
Moreover, ‘Decline’ provides a dissenting voice that challenges the myth of a social, civic, caring society as represented in the everyday ‘realism’ of the spectacle in which the narrative of ‘social cohesion’ and ‘welfare’ are but fictive tropes.
These photographs are evidence of and testimony to, a culture of mendacity and dissemblance in which the idea of the ‘social good’ has become a platitude in a venal discourse, where profit has become the acceptable criteria by which all things are measured.
Woods’s ‘Decline’ study, is a small marker in a historical moment, evidence on the charge sheet against late capitalism and its social consequences, but this work is also a dread reminder if we needed one, of our tenuous, temporary hold on life itself.
A psycho–social forensic.
John Donaldson, meatyard arts 2009