“I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.” These are the oft-quoted words of Nan Goldin, one of the most influential photographers to emerge in the last half century. Her voracious documentation of friends, family and underground culture laid the foundations for a whole style of confessional photography, not to mention the grunge aesthetic and all its descendants. But the most fascinating aspect of her revealing portraits are not their nudity, sexuality or coarseness, but the deep, underlying hunger for connection. Her blank-eyed subjects, captured mostly in the half-light, discuss the textures and surfaces that the camera can capture. We’re confronted with a shell and left to guess its contents. Her subjects’ uniqueness and humanity vanish with a press of the shutter. Setting these people against New York’s AIDs-ravaged counter-cultural scene, her work acknowledges the futility of trying to hold on to the world around us.
This relationship between the individual and the camera has long been a tumultuous one. From the early days of photography, where in opposition to traditional visual arts the mechanised capturing of light guaranteed verisimilitude, ideas of photography and truth have danced cautiously around one another. Be it a portrait of a lover, an anthropological photo essay, or just your average holiday snap, photos are used to hold onto the past, and the people and locations that constituted it. Looking back at old photos tells us something about the way things were, and therefore the way they are.
But can we ever capture someone’s essence truly through photography? Many have tried, and examples abound. Celebrity magazine editorials, Victorian-era portraitists, Andy Warhol with his infamous screentests which search for truth by wearing away at his muse’s performative tendencies. The much repeated myths of Native American peoples’ aversion to the lens being born out of fear that the machines, and their mirrors, would take their souls have done much to embed the idea of photographing someone’s essence into the popular psyche.
Man Ray and André Kertész, plus the aforementioned Goldin and Warhol, are all amongst the long line of photographers who have taken some of their most recognisable images of themselves. The photographer’s self-portrait is a huge, fascinating and canonised sub-genre of photography. Even the modern selfie falls in line, with Kim Kardashian’s recent Rizzoli-backed ‘Selfish’ book garnering attention and acclaim from several corners of the art world.
But what does it mean to attempt to capture someone’s ‘essence’? Isn’t our sense of self constructed each moment by the choices we make? If our self is entirely a construction, isn’t the photographic self-portrait the most direct means of exposing the individual? It’s all surface to be sure, but it illuminates how the owner of those surfaces think they should be appreciated and understood. Thus it preserves an invisible moment in time.
Daido Moriyama’s photograph of a stray dog on a US army base has become a kind of de facto self-portrait for the photographer. His most famed work captures the confusion of post-war Japan’s social transition in its blurred, aggressive, out of focus edges and high contrast black and white. In the abstracted details, sometimes impossible to discern, we find Moriyama himself. The stray dog, with its gaze which challenges the viewer, positions the avantgarde Moriyama as an outsider, whilst suggesting something larger about the then beleaguered nation’s collective consciousness.
Yet it’s Moriyama’s 1978 photo essay, Tales of Tono, which plays most obviously with conceptions of past, self, and the insatiable yearning familiar across many a photographers’ oeuvre. In it, he ‘returns’ to the north-eastern town of Tono, the setting for many traditional Japanese fairytales, which he describes as an “imagined hometown,” despite never having visited it before. In the collection’s opening essay, he describes trying to reconcile the world which greets him there with the image that he holds in his head. The photographs this tension produces find him trying to capture something which he feels has been lost. The act of photographing Tono is an attempt to find something that is missing from himself. In reconciling the past as it happened and the past as it is remembered, the photograph sits at an uncomfortable juncture. Both subjective and objective, photography is an art form that challenges, attacks, and never quite satisfies. And so it reminds us of what we have lost.
