TO zyxwvu Robert Davies,Belly zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgf Burton zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfed I, from The Body zyxwvutsrqponmlk THE BODY WILLIAM EWINQ THAMES AND HUDSON €16.95 US CHRONICLE $29.95 4 3 2 PP. 3 5 COL I 3 3 1 DUOTONE ILLUS ISBN 0-5002-7781-8 UK ISBN 0-81 18-0762-2 US THE FIRST THING that springs to mind about this small but chunky book is that its propor- tions and spine title bear a remarkable similar- ity to the standard edition New Testament, available in all schools and hotel rooms. Although lavishly illustrated, this is not an- other photography coffee-table book in size and shape. You have probably never seen a large flat photography volume on a coffee table, big books need shelves or ledges. zyxwvutsrqponm The Body is compact and handy for a quick browse - probably the perfect object for any table. Open the book and you will be fascinated by hundreds of small, well printed pictures that span the last hundred and fifty years. Some are old favourites, others are just famil- iar in a generic sense, all are depictions of the body. It is here that the book falls to pieces. Loosely it is a collection of images; not a survey, not a thesis, not a reference book. It is the conventions of collecting that lead to classification; a system of naming and thereby knowing. So what can we learn about photo- graphy and the body from this book?; or what does The Body not say, not show, not talk about? In tone, text and content this book elides controversy and avoids ugliness. At almost every conceivable level the his- tory of the collectable and nameable which makes up “the body” is a history of obses- sional neurosis. Just think of the contempor- ary scandal caused by Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, or the ongoing arguments against por- nography. These are not modem problems; remember this is the body of conflict between religion and science, divinity and dissection. Photography entwines itself almost invisibly in this history as a means to represent anxi- eties about the body, and at the same time to lay them to rest. The photograph, which makes time stand still, is a memorial to the temporality of flesh, as well as being the perfect medium for representing the “other” - object of desire, investigation, or fear (and often all three). The Body is a book of discontinuous images presented neutrally in terms of “gen- eral interest”. There is a studied calmness throughout, which provides a comfortable viewing distance; a safe place from which to peruse. The problem areas are well contained, either by dealing with them as quaint issues of the nineteenth century, such as pornographic, medical and anthropological photography, or by including, but sanitizing them; a nice picture from Serrano’s morgue series, or put- ting a Film Still by Cindy Sherman in the “Political” chapter. The Film Stills are not about the body. Where would Sherman’s sex pictures go?; or the decaying flesh? Ewing manages to include the unruly and abject ’ 24 ~1IOLUMP21Jo 1 body by metonym; Serrano and Sherman by association set up the softest breeze of death. Meanwhile the content of the book remains unsullied. Ewing’s selection of images can be read as an unconscious defence against the body as much as a manifest displaying of it. The Body offers us a safe ride through the terrors and temptation of the flesh; an almost biblical path from which we can look, glimpse death and sex without fear of contamination, or of becoming sick from the pleasure of looking. In one sense this is a laudable attempt to chummy interview between Westerbeck and Meyerowitz that concludes the book - Gary, Diane, Robert, and Lee are all there - and one is left with an embarrassing note of self con- gratulation and an even deeper sense of nar- cissism, complete with photograph of the two looking like ad-men having recently exited the Grouch0 Club. Despite these reservations this is a hand- some book, well produced and printed. Aca- demically it has much to recommend it as a sound historical survey of a fascinating and important photographic genre. get the body through the censors and past the present hysteria surrounding representation and obscenity. In another sense, this gentle remedy offers us nothing but a hygenically WARWORKS DAVID WISE wrapped palliative, masquerading as a mean- ingful, though not meaning anything in parti- cular, stroll through the archive. zyxwvutsrq Women, ptrotography and zyxwvu the iconography of War VAL WILLIAMS US DIST. TRAFALOAR SQUARE 95 PP. COL AND MONO ILLUS ISBN 1-853&1591-8 NAOMI SALAMAN VlRAao Cpo BYSTANDER A History of Street Photography THAMES AND HUDSON C40 $60 WEISTERBECK AND JOEL MLYEROWITZ THERE ARE certain subtitles that, like certain first names, need to go into immediate and US DIST. BULLFINCH PRESS 8 COL I258 MONO ILLUS ISBN 0-5005-41 90-6 - indefinite suspension. Just as we could do without another Pete and Dave for a while, so we could take a respite from “culture and identity” and “iconography”,repeatedly used BYSTANDER IS an intelligent and exciting to qualify book titles. “Iconography” is mis- book. Turning its pages we encounter a frisson leading for Wanuorks which is specifically not born of the recognition of the sheer unpredic- about war “icons”in any traditional sense. ability of life. Definition of the term “street There is a particular perversity in selecting photographer” is elusive. To say as Colin work against expectations and it is by going Westerbeck does in his introduction beyond perversity that the work can become interesting. Val Williams’s previous exhibition and catalogue, Who’s looking at the family?, was about loneliness and violence rather than relationships and contact. Ifthat is what famil- ies mean to this curator, then war is not going to be about its obvious associations either. And here we have it: no trace of blood and The combination of this instrument, a camera, and this subject matter, the street, yields a type of picture that is idiosyncratic to photography in a way that formal portraits, pictorial landscapes and other kinds of genre scenes are not. is simply to state the obvious, if rather ponder- ously, that street photography is different from other photographic genres. The water- mark of the street photographer is his con- cem, differently expressed depending on his sensibility, with the life he encounters : pathos, vitality, madness and love are displayed in a tableau of all that makes us human. The photographer’s art is expressed in his personal vision of the street. The format of the book is well chosen: each historical period is represented by a selection of photographs “shaped” by Joel Meyerowitz. This is followed by an essay by Westerbeck on individual photographers. These essays are lively and interesting, although there are some blunders and minor irritations - Bill Brandt for example cannot be considered in any way, as stated by Wester- beck, a ‘British” photographer. However, my major reservation about the book is in its misjudged range and scope. This is essentially a history of American street photography made with a specifically Ameri- can sensibility. The European tradition is covered in a limited and rather orthodox way, while the editors reserve their real passion and interest for the American photographic tradi- tion. This leads to a rather lopsided view and to significant omissions: there is no discus- sion, for example, of Chris Killip, Graham Smith or the Martin Parr of The Last Resort whose work formed a potent enrichment of British documentary photography in the late 1980s. I would have thought that Killip’s astringent classicism with its fusion of tradi- tion and original sensibility represents an im- portant extension of the genre. Smith’s photographs of drinkers in South Bank are a good example of the flexibility of the genre - they are “street” photographs in the sense that the street, the community Smith is interested in, has simply come inside to meet in one place. In The Last Resort Martin Parr ex- tended the vocabulary of the genre through his sometimes malevolent use of a medium format camera and highly saturated colour. The result is that the contemporary section suffers - the scene as described here feels at least a decade out of date. Add to this the very battle, with mess and death almost surgically excised from its reality. In an attempt to flee the (highly questionable) premise that “We know more about war photographers than we know about the soldiers”, we are shown work TH6 ART BOOK that originates at a safe distance, mediated via television screens, folded uniforms, latter-day portraits. Much of it, like Hannah Collins’s giant page from War Damaged Volumes, Anna Fox’s Weekend Wargames, or Anne Noggle’s former women fighter pilots, we have probably seen before. Other work we think we have seen before anyway, like Moire McIver’s folded uniforms and Barbara Alper’s captioned shots off the Gulf War news bulletins, the stuff of student experimentation. Sophie Ristelhue- ber’s portraits from a Paris military hospital and Ania Bien’s hall of holocaust memorabilia necessarily impress by the overworked techni- que of staging on a massive scale. The book has the edge over the exhibition, however, in a multitude of ways. Firstly, it necessarily cuts everything down to size and allows one to re-evaluate the work accord- ingly. Overall, it still remains disappointing. Secondly, there is the written - generally exceedingly well written - context provided by the book. In a work that demands so much of the viewer (or, some would say, oflers so much less from the photographer) this ap- pears to be essential. Thirdly, the text in- cludes some of the history denied by the exhibition: although this is familiar terrain from Val Williams’s earlier Women Photogra- phers, it is ground well worth going over. Unfortunately, however, it can also serve to reinforce the power of an Olive Edis or a Lee Miller over the other more fashionable (yet oddly already old-fashioned) imagery Val Williams seeks to promote. AMANDA HOPKINSON OTHER EDENS NICK WAPLINOTON 88 PP. 50 COL ILLUS APERTURE ~27.95 $40 ISBN 0-8938-1587-X NICK WAPLINGTON is not very popular in the UK photography community. His preco- cious success has attracted quite a body of detractors still unwilling to accept that he is one of the most startling and accomplished c 0 zy a, Y m Ill c .- s E 2 c N ‘ In .a, Y s In- ._ zy 2 a