Vehicles

©Guy Gormely

I recently wrote an introduction for the catalogue to accompany an exhibition of Guy Gormely. The exhibition is called Vehicles on show at the Son Gallery in south London. It features Gormely's work 'Cars' and Tim Smyth's project the 'Nature of Machines'. I unashamedly appropriated the title from William Burroughs.

SOFT MACHINE
Guy Gormely’s photographs are about the total presence of the car and any characteristics unique to this object on which we project our human perceptions. This anthropomorphic stance signals the car as a brooding presence, quietly thinking, like Hitchcock’s Birds ready to take over the world but in the most undramatic way. These cars are guilty as hell but they don’t care. Perhaps they have played host to intoxicated fumbling in lay-by’s, 35mph in a built up area, most certainly they have been flashed or issued a ticket. Gormely’s deadpan pictures could almost sit comfortably on the pages of Auto Trader be it not for an authorial clout. More than mere documents these unlikely, ‘one careful lady owner’ vehicles, consign the car to something ‘other.’

Aside from car mechanics we forget what a car is. Everything about this vehicle is designed to desensitise the horrifying reality that we are hurtling across landscapes in combustible metal forms at terrifying speeds, a mere knee jerk away from total disaster. The soft interior is the grey matter of the car. This is the fragile bit, the container of decisions. Dreams are dreamt in this beige grey interior looking out on to the cinematic world. It is here that we inhale the artificial stench of Magic Tree as Epping Forest blurs past. In this sculpted form is to be found the trace of former occupants, bits of Lego, a sticky two pence, a frayed page 83 of west Norfolk hiding down the back of cracked leather look seats, a scuffed ceiling after a visit to Ikea, a receipt for Tesco, a chewed pen top under the drivers seat.

The French surrealist, George Bataille once remarked that ‘no collector could ever love a work of art as much as a fetishist loves a shoe’. Or a car for that matter. The cars reality is open to projection. We are sold freedom but Gormely shows the drab object of neutral colours and the generic patterns of a Gap world. Only JG Ballard could see the potential for the sexualisation of the Ford Mondeo rust bucket hot from the suburbs, ejaculating its leaking oil and limply spewing water onto the windscreen, dotted with dead bugs, smudging obscurity all over the vision of the drivers side as it penetrates the Dartford Tunnel.

In the simplest of ways Gormley is showing us an absurdity. We all know the bigger picture about what these ego extensions are doing to the environment and the casualty department. The context is clear, so lets return to the thing itself without the glossy diversions that condition our attention span when we should be looking ahead.

'Faster But Slower'

©Michael Grieve

©Anton Corbijn

I've been asked to do a talk about my work in the place where I was born and bred, Newcastle upon Tyne, sometime in May. I have not been to Newcastle for many years. It is curious that I have been asked to do this talk now at a point when I have been feeling an incredible urge to return to emabark on a subjective body of work about the region. However, I have been thinking what have been the first great influence's on my photography. Asked the question and without hesitation my answer would be music but more specifically the new wave music of my youth that laid the foundations of my creative juices. Long before I enjoyed the pleasures of William Eggleston, Chris Killip, Moriyama, Robert Frank and the like, it was Joy Division who were central to my evolving aesthetic together with my environment, the grey, hard, post industrial landscape of the north, that also influenced Joy Divisions sound. Locked in the wonderful isolation of my bedroom, listening to John Peel, smelling the freshness of static vinyl, I pored over the album covers and inner sleeves, observing every detail, the radical, political, DIY, austere designs often with gritty urban photographs. Joy Division were different as they had a more sophisticated air, mixing inner emotion with the hard exterior of life. For sure this was poetry and the album covers were sheer masterpieces to compliment the music, the lyrics and the passion it transmitted. Still does, more than ever perhaps in my mind. When I reflect on my photography I can see the influence. It is evident that I embrace a photography that has a quiet emotional charge whatever the genre. My own work is emotionally austere I remember thinking that I would like to take a photograph with the same inner emotion as a Joy Division song. Its almost as if I need it to survive in this increasingly sterile world where photography has become almost like animation, digitised with sharp, unreal edges or photoshop(ped) to within an inch of its life.

In 2004 I had the good fortune to meet Tony Wilson, journalist and co founder of Joy Divisions record label, Factory Records. I met him at the ICA in London to do his portrait for a trendy French magazine and where he was conducting a witty self depricating talk about his failures or more specifically about all the things he nearly did but didn't, such as signing The Smiths to Factory. Out of all the philosophy and experience of life I understand only one thing and that is life is fuelled by paradox and when I remember Tony Wilson telling the story of when Martin Hannett, the producer of Unkown Pleasures and Closer, instructed the drummer, Stephen Morris to play 'faster but slower' it only strengthened my conviction.

No Love Lost/Foto8

This portfolio of my work, No Love Lost, is featured in the current issue of Foto8. Many thanks to Lauren, Jon and especially Max for understanding.

Wrong Place

©Michael Grieve

We are living in a time of great control in all aspects of society. I was recently commissioned to photograph on the red carpet at the London Film Festival. The PR company told me that I was one of three in-house photographers. My specific brief was to represent the festival as exciting and vibrant, something other than the stiff photo call standard, the great yawn of nothing photography. Smashing I thought, a well paid job and a free reign to make interesting photographs. I'd shot in this environment before, when I worked for The Independent newspaper in 1999 without any great hinderance. But not this time as I quickly realised that the 'fascists with clipboards' (PR) were not going to let me do my thing even though I was very reasnoble (honest) about it and expained that my brief wanted me to have greater freedom. Oh, no. These women, who disliked me getting close to the talent as it apparently angers the publicist, made life very, very difficult for me. They wanted me to only photograph in three places. One on the red carpet, the other just inside the foyer with the 'talent' pinned up against advertising and then again upstairs getting exactly the same shot as before and exactly the same shot as the other two in-house photographers. In other words, whats the point, where is the spontaniety, where is the difference? The week ended in dispute. I had complaints made against me, even though mine were not heard, or even respected... I had been stopped from doing my job by insensitve souls who really do not care about anything except their pre conditioned rules. By the end of the week I ended up not caring and found it hard to raise any kind of enthusiasm or will to fall into line. My crime.... I cared too much about producing good work. The ridiculous world of PR and celebrity culture has spawned a perverse image control code of conduct, cheapening our culture.
However, I managed to take this photograph of Eva Green with my old Leica M6, stealing the flash from the paparazzi, by being in the wrong place, that is often the only place to be.

From Back Home

©Anders Petersen

Just received a crisp new copy in the post all the way from Sweden of the Anders Petersen/JH Engström book, From Back Home. When I first set eyes on this book in Arles last year I knew I had to own it. The wonderful thing is I will be reviewing this book for 1000 Words. Anders, who I first met in a late night Paris bar in the Bastille, muttering 'things are as they are', is far from a conceptual photographer 'artist' which is probably why, although shortlisted, this influential photographer did not make it to the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize finalists. The fashion these days is for deadpan, emotionless photography, clean, neat, generic, sterile and, dare I say it... smug. Any engagement with the spontaniety of life is apparently, for the most part, redundant. Probably doesn't look good on corporate walls.

Portrait of Will Self

©Michael Grieve

A recent commission for Le Monde found me in the London home of writer Will Self. It's not often that I am commissioned to photograph someone whose work I admire. As as a result of the portrait session I was invited to The Sebald Lecture 2009. The lecture was given by Self on Absent Jews and Invisible Executioners: WG Sebald and the Holocaust. A brilliant lecture, delivered with theatrical confidence in which Self analysed Sebalds historical writing in the light of the evolving historical understanding of the Holocaust and the part the German people took in it.

Blog Manifesto

This is where I lay my cards on the table and get things off my chest, open myself up to scrutiny and criticism and undoubtedly learn more about myself. I am fairly certain that no one will really be interested in my ramblings on photography and other such things and so I will simply imagine that I am talking to myself... as I often do.