Darren Hall ‘There Are Some People Who Interest Us Immediately, At First Glance, Before A Word Is Spoken’
In Glasgow and thereabouts there is a longstanding greeting to friends and strangers alike, it is “hey big man!”. This could be proffered to anyone over 5 feet high and would be cordial, carefree and, quietly, a disarmer of any malice aforethought in its address. This came to mind as I was thinking about Hall’s New York pictures and how, I wondered, on the streets of a city that celebrates its combative front could such evidently ’staged’ pictures be made?
The answer is a simple one. Darren Hall, the photographer, is a ‘character’, a ‘big man’ and in the words of that Pogues song – ‘a man you don’t meet everyday’. This series of portraits then, reflect much of the artist, both the images and the process of their making…it is said that we are revealed by what we do rather than what we say… here then, in these photographs the author, indeed, returns!
But fie, enough hagiography here, “there is nothing beyond the text!”
Street photography is another foto sub sect with its own loose parameters of subject, style and precepts… the decisive moment… integrity… objectivity… the surreptitious lens… it has its own aura and devotees of its potent testosterone mix of Sam Spade and Weegee, scented with a whiff of braggadocio as the intrepid lensman, for it is a he, negotiates the ‘jungle that is the street.
Hall’s work is free of such baggage, it is neither gendered nor shot through with the signature of any ‘decisive moment’ yet is – de facto – of the street. This is street photography of another stripe and borne out of that rarest of gifts, the ability to stop someone in full flow of their journey and give their time to you – a total stranger who interrupts their mission, halts their pressing need to be onwards and elsewhere ‘like right now’. This,remember, in the city where eye contact is agreed by many to be at least a risk or worse, a provocation.
Breaking with so many conventions of the ’street’ genre, Hall’s pictures stage manage the ebb and flow of the sidewalk as each individual is selected and abstracted from the throng, prioritised then centred in the frame. This is clearly a process at odds with and contrary to the motion of a metropolis so geared irresistibly to the rhythm of commerce, to the making of a sale and the closing of a deal. Now, speed and efficiency being the measure of all things and the yardstick beloved of the unimaginative and the mediocre, it follows, perforce, that those who march to its lumpen beat would embody its uniform mien, such is the way of things in the fading light of the age of the global market.
Hall, however, works against the grain, his antennae alert to the organic and the awkward, from scrawls on walls and call box ephemera to those people that resonate something other than the pedestrian, the pedants and the pin stripes. Here in this series of portraits is a stillness, a stasis exaggerated in the Manhattan context. This is played out in the juxtaposition between the very real characters he portrays and the anaemic blandness of the corporate or faded, redundant columned mise en scene.
One picture frames a dapper New Yorker decked out in a five button sky blue suit and sky blue shoes… ‘matching white shirt tie and pocket kerchief topped with the swagger of a white panama style hat’ … he’s black and has the be bop air of another more memorable New York than the one he occupies at this moment… a trace of Birdland, 52nd and Broadway, Parker and Coltrane…Miles Davis night sticked on the pavement by the cops…… an emigre from Claxton and Berendt’s ‘Jazz Life’.
Atop an iron basement cover he seems to have emerged upwards into the wrong place at the wrong time, his recherche comportment mocking his immediate surroundings, framed as he is by the dull style of choice for banks and town halls from another age. The splash of brio this figure brings to an otherwise pallid, nondescript place is Hall’s small personal victory against the prevailing regime of banality, this project his act of documenting like minded spirits set against the milk sops and salaried, the supine and the ‘do goods’ so reviled by a certain Mr Burroughs…
Each image in the series employs the same formal arrangement of a centred figure, symmetrically framed and, for the most part, re framed in the angles , shapes and materiality of the buildings. This incongruous ’staging’ (Hall is theatrical in the closed framing of this work, suggesting a stage) serves to double the defamiliar sensation that each character brings to the scene, as if somehow, this person should not be there! In each picture the figure destabilises the calculation of the buildings form, chiding Loos’s maxim that ‘ornament is crime’. Amidst the moribund sterility, Hall presents us with signs of the living and breathing – the ‘pure dead gallus’.
In this sense these charcters, orchestrated by Hall, can be seen as projections of the artists will personified in the frame, the artists one man campaign, his offer of life to the stultified and the atrophied…
Although calculated, as to some degree these pictures are, there is no feeling of coercion, no cynicism in these portraits. I like to think there is a reciprocality, a tacit agreement between artist and sitter that permeates the series… a meeting of equals lets say. For this viewer then, these people are ‘guests’ in Hall’s subtly resistant tableaux, characters invited to parade their wares, indeed to promenade for the camera in his aestheticised street scenario.
Another picture, although maybe an obvious choice, appears to be an extra from a Genghis Khan epic, or more likely from an advertising shoot… maybe for a new ‘manly’ after shave or some other ‘new, must have’ product. Predictable as it may be, it does reinforce the notion that, for Hall, this project (ongoing and with no plan to stop, apparently) is a social as well as photographic event, how could anyone pass up an opportunity to speak to this guy Hall asks?
Announcing himself as the steppes marauder, Genghis adopts the half turn pose of a boxer, squat like a Tyson or Duran, readying a feign or an uppercut from way down low. The slightly surreal comic value is only heightened by the security pass hanging from his neck and, at his side, his resume, or maybe it’s his script for the days shoot. The barely visible sun glasses and the 14 hole DM’s complete the character within the character – mise en ebyme -in Hall’s gaudy retinue.
‘There Are Some People Who Interest Us Immediately, At First Glance, Before A Word Is Spoken’ is, in the end, a conversation piece, but it is a conversation between the artist and selected passers by that also just happens to involve the making of a picture.It is important to note though, that in this case the making of the picture dissolves the (usual) hierarchy of artist and sitter in the very process of its taking – the courtship, the staging and finally the ‘picturing’. This is Hall’s talent. There is then, an unusual integrity about this work, the simple honesty of the request itself, that ‘can I take your picture?’ moment that few can readily and routinely ask.
But maybe it’s easy for Hall, maybe like Arbus, another ‘public’ photographer, the work is done in the gimlet eye for character, in the selection of subject more than the work of actually making the picture. Maybe Hall, like Arbus before him, ‘doesn’t press the shutter – the image does’?
Whatever, these are finely drawn, considered pictures made by an interested artist, a photographer eager to remind the viewer that life is out there, it is on the street and it is worth seeing.
john donaldson, meatyard arts.
