Hido has expressed his adherence to the idea that ‘sources of terror in childhood often become sources of attraction in adulthood’. With reference to these pictures Hido mentions the time he saw his father taking a semi-porno picture of his mother, but remember, it’s not a one-way street, photography. It’s quite possible that the same things that troubled and inspired him might be at work, just as powerfully, on his models. In at least some of the pictures the tense outcome of the collaboration between photographer and model is the reciprocity of attraction and dread.
2008
Criticism sometimes achieves the condition of art; certain works of art are also a form of commentary or criticism. Roland Barthes’ meditation on photography, Camera Lucida, is a classic example of the former. How to respond creatively to a book that has profoundly shaped the way the medium is regarded? A writer might feel compelled to follow George Steiner’s grand advice and ‘write a book in reply’. And if you’re not a writer, but a photographer? If you do what Barthes is writing about?
Idris Khan’s response was to photograph every page of the book and then digitally combine them in a single, composite image. The result of this homage to – and essay on – Camera Lucida (English edition) is a beautiful palimpsest: a series of blurred stripes of type in which the occasional word can be deciphered and one of the images reproduced by Barthes – a portrait of Mondrian, by Kertész – glimpsed. Khan did the same thing with On Photography by Susan Sontag. The whole of the book can be seen in an instant, but the density of information is such that Sontag’s elegant formulations add up – and are reduced – to a humming, unreadable distillation. Already slight, the gap between texts and Khan’s images will shrink further if the books are re-issued with his ‘readings’ of them – surrogate author photos? – on the covers.
It’s not just books about photography; Khan also photographs photographs. Bernd and Hilla Becher compiled a comprehensive inventory of architectural building types, such as gas towers, all photographed in a stark, neutral style. Khan’s composite, ‘Every … Bernd & Hilla Becher Prison Type Gasholder’, transforms their rigid geometries into a fuzzy, vibrating mass, more like a smudged charcoal drawing of a shivering iron jelly than a photograph.
These – the Sontag, the Barthes and the Bechers – were the first things by Khan that I came across. It was obvious he was on to something. A better sense of what that something might be can be seen at the Victoria Miro Gallery. Practically everything in this, Khan’s first UK solo show, is a composite of some kind but the range and depth of the idea has been extended with – the pun is unavoidable – uncanny success.
Freud, in his famous essay, mentions ‘the constant recurrence of the same thing’ as a symptom of ‘the Uncanny’. In Khan’s picture of every page of the recent Penguin edition the black gutter at the centre throbs like a premonition or memory of an Op Art void. It makes you wonder if, as well as psychoanalysis, Freud also invented the Rorschach blot. In the background, two of the paintings discussed by him, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with St Anne, peer through a shifting sleet of type like emanations of the unconscious or something. It’s only a book – only a photo of a book – but it pulses like a living thing.
Khan was born in Birmingham in 1978. His mother, who had trained as a pianist, worked as a nurse. She converted to Islam after meeting his father, a doctor. It was his idea that Idris photograph every page of the Qur’an. Since a significant part of the population believes that the complexities of the world can be resolved by this one book there is a certain logic in taking things a stage further, and reducing the book to a single manifestation of itself. I’m not qualified to speak about the first reduction but the second looks – to boil things down still more – incomprehensible. And lovely. The patterns bordering each page are turned into a solid black frame so that the book becomes – as is often said of photography – a window onto the world. Inside this frame – rigid, unalterable, definitive – all is in flux. Fixed meaning dissolves in a blazing grey drizzle. Words, as one of Don DeLillo’s narrators says when confronted by a swirl of Arabic script, are ‘design, not meant to be read, as though part of some unbearable revelation’.
Working in a medium wedded to the visible, photographers, perversely and inevitably, have been preoccupied with photographing the invisible. Given his mother’s training, music has an obvious allure for Khan in this respect. ‘Struggling to Hear … After Ludwig van Beethoven Sonatas’ is a picture of all of the composer’s scores for piano, the impenetrable mass of black serving as a visual corollary of Beethoven’s increasing deafness.
Each art form has its own unique advantages and limitations. Words and music unfold successively, through time. Photography is about an instant. By analogy it can ask the impossible: in this case, what if you could hear every note of Beethoven’s sonatas in an instant? What would that look like? And when we think of a piece of music that we know well, don’t we sometimes remember it, not phrase by phrase, but in its amorphous entirety?
It is often said that photographers freeze time, but Khan does the opposite. This can be seen most clearly in his re-mixes of Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies of the 1880s (a well-documented source of inspiration for Francis Bacon). Muybridge used fast shutter speeds to break action into moment-by-moment increments, rendering movement stationary. Khan takes these sequences of isolated moments and unfreezes time by combining them in a single image. Muybridge’s strictly mechanical record of a man getting out of bed becomes a vision of the unconscious lifting clear of the body, a dream of waking. It’s like a photographic equivalent of Henri Fuseli’s Nightmare, an out-of-body experience made flesh – and vice versa.
To learn more about artists’ working methods some paintings have been X-rayed so that preliminary versions of masterpieces are brought to the surface. Khan’s photographs are a kind of reverse X-ray, laying bare by accretion. Marrying up the eyes of all Rembrandt’s self-portraits, reducing them to the same size and layering them digitally together, Khan effectively photographs him with an exposure time lasting the length of the artist’s life. ‘Rembrandt by Himself’ offers an experience akin to the painter looking at the mirror in the moment of his death, when the evidence of a lifetime of intense self-scrutiny flashes before his grave-dark eyes in a single instant.
As is always the case with artists of considerable originality there are precedents for these essays in visual condensation. Most recently, there are Fiona Banner’s paintings in which a film is verbally transcribed in her own hand so that an entire movie can be seen – but not read – in an instant, on a single canvas. In the 1970s Hiroshi Sugimoto began photographing empty movie palaces and drive-ins. Using an exposure time equal to the duration of the film, Sugimoto reduced the contents of whatever was on screen – car chases, murders, betrayals, romance – to a single moment of radiant whiteness. The most explicit precursors, however, are also the earliest. They also enable us to view Khan’s situation and methods in a broader historical and contemporary context.
In the late nineteenth century, photography became an important tool in an alliance between some of the ‘scientific’ fads of the day – physiognomy, eugenics, racial taxonomy – and attempts by the police and the state to isolate types likely to commit crimes. Writing in 1882, Francis Galton declared that there could ‘hardly be a more appropriate method of discovering the central physiognomic type of any race or group than that of composite portraiture’. His composites of convicted criminals duly showed ‘not the criminal, but the man who is liable to fall into crime’. Using similar techniques Arthur Batut, in France, made ‘type-portraits’ to identify the defining traits of particular races, tribes or families (including his own). In a phrase that might have come from Khan’s
