‘Two and Two’ review by Francis Hodgson

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

Playing Games with Real Life

By Francis Hodgson

Published: June 16, 2010.

John MacLean is a commercial architectural photographer by trade who publishes little monographs of thoughtful pictures as his personal work. The latest is called Two and Two and is on view at London’s Flowers East. The principle is straightforward. Two pictures are made of the same scene and printed together. They might be separated by a few moments, or they might be separated by a few hours. The process is deeply formalist, but not at all dry.

The artist has referred to Robert Rauschenberg’s twin paintings “Factum I” and “Factum II” as a starting point. But photography has always looked at controlled series. The release of work in series by artists such as John Baldessari or Ed Ruscha is after all merely a continuation of the natural outcome of roll film passed through the printing and editing process.

In MacLean’s hands, the doubling is normally purely photographic. He will shift focus, reframe, use a reflection, sometimes simply move the camera a few feet to get a new take on the scene. The small effects can be very strong: a wavy line of shadow up some steps is straightened in the companion view. A (beautiful) postmodernist image of a “no parking” sign becomes a high-period Hollywood lighting cameraman’s version of the same thing simply by moving round the corner. There is a games-playing element to all this: it can take a few moments to spot the connection between views.

It’s not all games, though. MacLean’s procedure has a solid cumulative effect. He doesn’t ask us, pair by pair, to decide between a “good” picture and one that is worse. He asks us instead to suspend for a time the too-rapid picking and discarding that we all do in defence against the sheer volume of photographic imagery that we see.

In Phoenix, Arizona, MacLean made a parody pair of images after the US photographer Lee Friedlander and suddenly an ordinary road crossing is a piece of art history. And while he was at it, MacLean curled the branches of a tree – which adjoin in the pair – into a shape more glorious than nature had given it in either picture alone.

Slightly further east in London, at Maureen Paley’s gallery, Hannah Starkey’s show is more conventional. This is an apparent overturning of the law by which art exhibitions are radical in inverse proportion to the rent. As such, it is in character: Starkey has a neat trick of consistently making old-fashioned pictures without losing the commercial allure of a certain edgy cachet. In fact, she has ploughed much the same furrow for quite some time; a radical change in her ideas may be overdue.

Having said that, this pared-down little show is close to being brilliant. If, as I rather hope, it is a swansong for this work, it is a good one. Starkey’s shtick for years has been to make set-up or staged photographs, invariably of youngish women, in which an implied narrative is caught by a single picture. It is crafted to look as though it might have been just a snapshot, and the effect has always been to make the viewer fill in the gaps of an apparently dramatic story whose beginnings and end we were not told. It is a process that many other photographers have explored but here, in five pictures made within the past year or so, Starkey has finally found real consistent form.

Each study is of a single woman, physically isolated in a still moment of contemplation. The picture spaces are deliberately, even lovingly, complicated. One woman, for example, studies her own appearance in a window as she smokes outside a blandly labelled television office building. She wears muted clothes, a dark trouser suit (it might be a uniform) and masculine shoes. She stands in a darkened doorway. Next to but not visible to her is a window that reflects a gleaming stretch of tarmac with a dozen different kinds of shining grey in it. The inescapable thought is that this woman is missing out. Something’s there, but not for her.

The only picture that has a title is a self-portrait. A figure holds a camera to her eye in a window, surrounded by white frames of an industrial kind, perhaps aluminium windows. Whatever they are, they are puns on the business of making framed imagery. Is she outside and reflected, or inside and screened? Hard to tell. What is most arresting is the sheer number of masks between us and the artist: the window itself, a clear plastic sheet, draped, a backlighting effect that keeps her face in darkness, and the camera. Defensive? She’s inaccessible.

These are very good studies of wistfulness, of the private person visible in public spaces. Like MacLean’s, their complexities are deliberate and well-mastered and their references to earlier pictures rich and helpful. Like MacLean’s, they show that to be a photographer in the age of the mobile phone takes more than just equipment. Neither photographer really photographs the world. Each is more interested in remaking it. By properly photographic means, naturally. John MacLean runs until June 26, www.flowersgalleries.com; Hannah Starkey continues until July 18, www.maureenpaley.com

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‘Two and Two’ article: British journal of Photography

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Before and After

July 2010

“In Shimmer, I relaxed and recognised that it’s about the moment before and after as much as it’s about the ‘perfect’ moment,” said Paul Graham in a recent interview for Aperture, referencing his 2007 tome, A Shimmer of Possibility. Made up of 12 small books, published by Steidl, it includes various sequences of images, in which Graham shot the same subject from a variety of angles and distances. “Could I be the devil’s advocate and argue that this sequence represents a more natural way of seeing; that we as photographers have become too obsessed with looking for this ’special moment’, this one punctum in life?” he asked.

Graham is not alone in his thinking, as sequential images have become something of a small trend recently. George Georgiou won BJP’s Project Assistance awards last month with a proposal that includes pictures captured close together and then displayed alongside each other in pairs and groups. Examples include a woman walking down the street towards the camera, and candid portraits shot from the same angle over a short period of time.

“It’s something I’ve been playing with for the last five years,” he says. “I’m fascinated with comparing the same space over time and seeing how it changes.”

John MacLean, whose images are shown here, just finished a project called Two and Two, in which he experimented with “different ways of shooting the same thing”. It was shown at London’s Flowers East gallery in June. “I was inspired by Robert Rauschenberg but also, perhaps in a spirit of contrariness, by William Eggleston. I had read an interview with him saying, ‘I believe in taking one picture of one picture’, and it stuck in my mind. I began to wonder what taking two pictures of one picture and printing them side by side could show.”

Why this trend right now? It’s partly to do with digital technology – Georgiou points out that digital capture has made shooting multiple images more affordable, while Graham says that he was part-inspired by flicking through images on his computer. But maybe it’s also just time for one of photography’s most famous dictates to be reappraised. “Someone I know, who is working on the 2010 Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective at MoMA and has seen his contact sheets has said to me, ‘The decisive moment is bullshit’,” said Graham in Aperture. “There are ten pictures before and ten pictures after every one of them. He actually took 30 pictures of people leaping over that puddle.”

“I’m not sure that I ever really cared for the concept of the decisive moment,” agrees MacLean. “It has always sounded rather rigid. I think it is far more exciting to consider that there is more than one way for a photographer to take any picture, and exploring that fully means exploring the medium itself.”

British Journal of Photography, Diane Smyth. July 2010.

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‘Two and Two’ artist’s statement

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Two and Two

Photographing the same subject twice between 2008 and 2010.

A rediscovered interest in Robert Rauschenberg’s collages, particularly his twin paintings (Factum I and Factum II), had diverted my thinking in 2008 away from the single photographic image towards combinations of two or more. This, coupled with a desire to embark on a project that addressed the characteristics of the medium of photography itself, became the genesis of Two and Two – a series in which I have taken two photographs of the same subject and displayed them side by side.

Two and Two asserts that there is more than one way to take every photograph, and that two different photographs of the same subject represent two distinct choices. By presenting these two choices together, I aimed to define my decision-making process and thereby learn something about my use of photographic language.

I began by listing what I thought the intrinsic photographic strategies might be – and these became frequently used points of reference in the project. My list comprised the decisions any photographer might make to influence the perception of an image: point of view, cropping, choice of moment, intervention, focus, lighting, orientation and sequence. Although I wanted the process of taking the photographs to be spontaneous, inevitably I thought about the kind of situations which might illustrate these devices.

As I began photographing, I gradually accumulated a folder of diptychs which I frequently returned to when considering new combinations. I had quickly discovered that taking one photograph in anticipation of taking another meant holding at least two images in mind; and this stretched my capacity for previsualisation. The first photograph was taken whilst thinking of the second, and the second taken with reference to the first. Predictably some carefully considered diptychs failed whilst other, more whimsical, attempts were effortlessly successful. My camera’s subject matter was dictated by its potential to be photographed twice.

After two years I brought the project to completion. The editing process, perhaps unsurprisingly, offered the most valuable overview. The final selection does indeed offer some insight into photographic rhetoric. But what interests me more is the appearance of an underlying theme – a fascination with photography’s ability to describe and distort, conceal and reveal, dislocate and unite.

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