Edward Burtynsky: ‘Oil Fields #19a’, Belridge, California, USA, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York
J.M.W. Turner: ‘Figures in a Building’, c.1830–35 © Tate, London, 2010
Jennifer Gough-Cooper: ‘Danaid’ from Apropos Rodin, Thames & Hudson, London 2006. By kind permission of the photographer
This collection of essays and reviews follows right on from Anglo-English Attitudes. The last piece in that book was written in 1999; the earliest one here is from the same year. To be honest, nothing much has changed in the interim. I write about whatever happens to interest me, sometimes accepting commissions from editors, sometimes writing pieces and sending them in on spec. A decade from now, by which time I’ll be in my sixties, I hope to have enough new material to bring out a third volume. You see, I’ve got tenure on this peculiarly vacant chair – or chairs, rather. It’s a job for life; more accurately, it is a life, and hardly a day goes by without my marvelling that it is somehow feasible to lead it. As in the earlier collection, there’s no area of specialised concern or expertise; on the contrary, the pleasure, hopefully, lies in the pick ’n’ mix variety, the way one thing leads to another (often quite different) thing.
Actually, one thing has changed: in the last ten years I’ve been asked to contribute introductions to quite a few books, either re-issued literary classics or photographic monographs and catalogues. I love doing this and am especially grateful to the editors who somehow got wind of the idea that I was interested in Rebecca West or Richard Avedon or whoever and gave me the chance to get between the covers of a shared volume with them. This seems to me the greatest privilege that can be afforded any reader (even if it slightly undermines the idea of being – as I claim in a piece to be found later in this volume – a gatecrasher).
Booksellers and customers often complain about the difficulty of knowing where to stock or find my books. A similar problem crops up here. There is, inevitably, a fair bit of seepage between the various categories on the contents page – Visuals, Personals etc. – but, overall, this seemed the least unsatisfactory way of organising the material. To make things a little less rigid these category headings are not indicated within the pages of the text itself, so that the very personal piece on ghost bikes is followed, without warning, by the first categorically Personal piece. Like this there are only invisible, ghostly residues of division in the unfolding continuity of the book.
There is also, inevitably, a bit of repetition. I see I keep coming back to Rebecca West or John Cheever or D.H. Lawrence when I’m writing about other people: they constitute the core of my personal canon, the writers I can’t do without. The fact that Robert Frank keeps coming up as a point of comparison when I’m talking about other photographers might be a symptom of the author’s inadequate frame of reference; or perhaps it shows that there is no getting away from him (I meant Frank but perhaps the same is true of the author).
I originally intended using ‘My Life as a Gatecrasher’ as the title for the whole collection but discarded it for the reason mentioned above. The current title crops up in the essay on Susan Sontag – ‘Critics are always working the room’ – but although it was absolutely perfect I couldn’t use it because Jonathan Lethem had told me, a couple of years earlier, that he had the phrase laid away as the intended title of a future collection of his critical writings. I dropped him a line anyway and asked if he would consider loaning it to me. He agreed, and I’m extremely grateful to him for that characteristic bit of generosity.
G. D., London, June 2010
Jacques Henri Lartigue and The Discovery of India
‘You can hardly expect me to fall in love with a photograph.’
Jawaharlal Nehru
This photograph was taken by Jacques Henri Lartigue on the Cap d’Antibes in 1953. He was almost sixty by then, had been photographing for half a century. The picture is of a woman – I don’t know who – propped up on a lilo or lounger on the terrace of some presumably luxurious hotel or villa. She’s wearing a swimsuit and one of those fun wigs made of strips of coloured paper that you can buy in party shops. You can’t see her eyes, she’s wearing a pair of big plastic sunglasses, but there’s a hint (and this is the lovely flirty thing about the picture) that she is glancing up at the photographer – which means that she is also glancing up at me, at us – rather than reading the unbelievably serious book in her hands: Nehru’s The Discovery of India! It looks like it’s about 800 pages long and weighs a ton. It wouldn’t be anything like the same picture if she was reading Bridget Jones’s Diary which, obviously, hadn’t been published back then – but that’s another thing about the picture: it could have been taken yesterday, it could have been taken today (especially now that white sunglasses are in vogue again).
The book is a touch of genius – either the genius of contrivance or of the moment – but, actually, if any element of the picture were removed (the wig, the glasses, the painted nails or lipstick) it would be thoroughly diminished. That’s the thing about all great photos, though. Everything in them is essential – even the inessential bits. It occurs to me that the things that are not in the photographs are also important. The inclusion of certain things can not just diminish a photograph but destroy it. In this case – all the more remarkable in a photograph taken in 1953 – the absence of a cigarette (so often considered an accessory of glamour) or ashtray is crucial to its allure and its contemporaneity. A cigarette would ‘date’ or age the photograph as surely as it ages the faces of the people who smoke them. If there were any evidence of smoking I would have to look away. As it is, I can’t tear my eyes away. I can’t stop looking at her.
So who is she?
But there I go, forgetting one of my own rules about photography, namely that if you look hard enough a photo will always answer your question – even if that answer comes in the form of further questions. Well, whoever she is, she’s beautiful. Actually, I can’t really tell if that’s true, for the simple reason that I can’t see enough of her face. But she must be beautiful, for an equally simple reason: because I’m in love with her. Lartigue, too, I suspect. Now, plenty of men have photographed women they love but this picture depicts the moment when you fall in love.
That’s why the suggestion that she is looking up, meeting our gaze – the photographer’s, mine – is so important: this is the first moment when our eyes meet, the moment that each subsequent meeting of eyes will later contain. If this picture is of a woman Lartigue has been with for ten years it actually proves my point: that look, that meeting of the eyes, still contains the charge of the first unphotographed look from way back when. As for me, since I’ve only just seen the photo, it’s a case of love at first sight. And that, I think, is why Lartigue became a model for so many fashion photographers. The most effective form of subliminal seduction – the best way to sell the dresses or hats featured in photos – is to make men fall in love with the woman wearing them, and photographers are all the time trying to emulate or simulate that feeling. With Lartigue, though, it’s for real, and the accessories on offer are what? A daft wig, some zany sunglasses and a hardback of The Discovery of India! That’s the charm of the picture, its magic.
As I said at the beginning, they’re all crucial, these ditzy accessories. The book lends a hint, at the very least, of the exotic. And the wigs and glasses
