people glimpsed in the background of photos of a fisherman who has had the good fortune to land a record-breaking marlin. In both circumstances spectating becomes a form of vicarious participation. As his fame increased so his presence must have served as an additional inducement to come and have a look – and maybe get photographed in the act of looking. (Occasionally he shows the victims on their own, in the solitude of death. The silence of these pictures – of a woman who killed herself, for example, because her estranged husband took their child away to live with him and his lover – is all the more poignant given the din and jostle that normally surrounds such scenes.) Metinides has said that he has ‘photographed everything except a spaceship or submarine collision’ but his pictures of upended buses often look like a meteorite has come crashing out of space and landed in Mexico City. And although his pictures are grimly matter-of-fact they often have an other-worldly quality about them. Partly this is because what is so shown is often so strange (a bus is winched out of a lake like a giant fish, a huge truck lands on the roof of a car); partly it is the result of how it is shown (he was one of the first photographers to use a flash in daylight). The combination lends the pictures an aura that is both filmic and religious.
The films Metinides saw as a boy – gangster movies, especially – profoundly shaped his signature aesthetic, whereby a sequence of action is reduced to a single image. If the technology were available whole segments of action could be extrapolated and derived from these daylight noirs of Metinides. A shot of a shoot-out between cops and robbers in a supermarket reads like a script in super-condensed form. Another photo shows a conflagration at a gas station, started, apparently, by two young men who drove off without paying but with the hose still in their petrol tank. Glamorous as a movie star, a blonde woman is smashed by a car and becomes, in death, a broken – and eerily serene – mannequin. It seems possible that pictures like these provided part of the inspiration for the hectic, tragi-comic action of Amores Perros by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Often people who are witnesses to – or victims of – a calamity say that it was ‘like being in a movie’, and many of Metinides’ pictures look not so much like film stills as still films. Perhaps this is why, on occasion, they are reminiscent of images by Jeff Wall, who operates in exactly this idiom of artificially enhanced reality. The difference is that while Wall’s tableaux are resolutely enigmatic Metinides seeks, always, to elucidate. In this sense, it could be said, he is a reporter rather than an artist. As well as being the source of a peculiar kind of information about the world and its ways, his pictures also offer gory solace – in the form of knowledge. Maybe this is one of the reasons the crowds gaze at the photographer: in the hope that he can provide an answer as to why such terrible things happen. Within the limits of his chosen medium, Metinides does his best to oblige. In this sense, he is a storyteller.
His stories often involve a bus. Whereas many people spend their lives waiting for buses, life, for Metinides, is an accident waiting to happen. Basically, the bus brings the two together with devastating effect. Anyone who has travelled in Mexico will be familiar with the way these buses speed and surge around curving mountain roads. The inkling that your chances of survival are as dependent on the image of the Virgin swaying from the rear-view as they are on the driver or his brakes creates a weird sensation of hope, dread and resignation. The feeling is allied, in this part of the world, to the ‘deep conviction’ – as Cormac McCarthy puts it – ‘that nothing can be proven except that it be made to bleed. Virgins, bulls, men. Ultimately God himself.’
This is why faces of the people in Metinides’ photographs have a look of shock or astonishment but never of disbelief. His photographs, in fact, are of believers. The catastrophes visited upon them actually confirm people in their belief in the bloody way things are, have been and always will be. If this were not the case then the world would be a truly terrible place – because then there would be no room left for miracles.
The causes of the bleeding obsessively recorded by Metinides are ridiculous as often as they are tragic. By explaining and giving meaning to the permutations of random disaster, the pictures’ captions offer the viewer an empirical equivalent of the faith that consoles the people in them. Knowing what happened stands in for the need to understand why it happened.
Most of the photographs take place after the fact – after the stabbing or crash – but the outcome can rarely be assumed. A plane ploughs into a field, killing everyone on board. A plane crash-lands on the Mexico–Puebla highway and no lives are lost. What can we deduce from the forensic-artistic evidence offered by these twinned images of hazard? In Metinides’ view an accident is both inevitable and avoidable in the sense that it could have been avoided if it hadn’t happened. Out of this emerges the intermingling of chance and logic otherwise known as fate. Metinides shows us not only what it looks like but – and this is the twist of the artist – how to recognise it.
2003
Artists are part of a tradition even if they are oblivious to it – even if they do not consider themselves artists and are actively hostile to being regarded as such. Photography is a particularly broad and welcoming church in this respect. You don’t disqualify yourself by claiming to be interested in the medium only as a lobbying tool, as part of a larger agenda of social activism. By making this plea for exemption, you’re actually enlisting in a regiment with a particularly distinguished and proud photographic history. Commit yourself to the wider, non-ideological role of bearing witness and providing visual testimony, and you move still closer to the mainstream of that history. But what if you’re a self-proclaimed vagabond, if you not only refuse to consider yourself an artist, but are adamant that you are ‘not a photographer’ either? Then step inside, please: you will meet many kindred spirits and fellow refuseniks with whom you have much in common.
In 1975, in a bookstore in San Francisco, Jacob Holdt chanced upon – and stole – a copy of How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis. Holdt was otherwise unaware of – or, at the very least, indifferent to – the fact that he might be treading in the footsteps of earlier photographers, but for anyone with basic photo-forensic skills their prints are easy to find and follow. Temperamentally and technically, Holdt may have nothing in common with Robert Frank but – whether he cares about it or not – both are part of that mini-tradition of Europeans crossing the Atlantic and, to borrow the title of Richard Poirier’s book of essays, ‘trying it out in America’.
Part of the fascination of what Holdt found and photographed in America lies in its unconscious relation to work that has gone before or that was being made at roughly the same time. A tacit dialogue insists on being – if there is a visual equivalent of overheard – over-seen. The black-and-white sign above the gas pumps in Frank’s The Americans urged us to S A V E; the one snapped by Holdt urges us, red-and-yellowly, to S ELL.
Holdt did not share Frank’s devotion or debt to Walker Evans but elements of the America catalogued by Evans form an unavoidable backdrop to Holdt’s project. In terms of what they sought to accomplish and how they wished their work to be viewed the two men could not have been more different. Evans wanted his photographs to be seen without any ideological filtering. ‘NO POLITICS whatever,’ he insisted, though of course this disavowal of political intent did not mean there was no political content. However starkly and unsentimentally Evans recorded the poor sharecroppers of Alabama, his pictures have, over time, acquired a stone-washed glamour of their own. Free of the vulgar trappings of modern poverty, those 1930s shacks now look quaint and clean. Like some high-intensity detergent, black-and-white smartens a place up, gets rid of dirt in a gradual flash. Concerned that his pictures might be doing something similar, Holdt was adamant that his experience of the shacks of the rural African-American poor ‘was far, far worse than they appear in photographs. In such pictures you can’t see the wind which whistles through the many cracks making it impossible to keep warm in winter. You can’t see the sagging rotten floors with cracks wide enough for snakes and various vermin
