Emmanuel Lenain or the tenderness of concrete

An important exhibition has opened at the Government Museum in India since April 18, exactly on the International Day for Monuments and Sites, it will run until June 30, in Chandigarh, the idealized city designed and created by Le Corbusier. It is a photography exhibition, and the author is none other than the French ambassador to Delhi Emmanuel Lenain. What we didn’t know was that it was not the first attempt by Emmanuel Lenain. When he was based in China, Beijing and Shanghai, this genuine amateur of photography has documented with his Leica M6 the daily life and unusual places during his travels and visits, and he would develops himself and print his negatives in the darkroom of his residence. Before leaving China, he assembled his photos of China and published a book: “China, the Great Works”. This series was exhibited and screened at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris and entered its collection in 2016. After returning to the Quai d’Orsay and having served as diplomatic adviser to the Prime Minister, Emmanuel Lenain was appointed in 2019 as ambassador to Delhi. He wasted no time in sizing up this vast country so full of diversity and colors with his camera, always in monochromatic Black and White. There is no coincidence in the world of photography, the same year, in 2019, the most important Indian photographer Raghu Rai (member of Magnum) received the Photography Prize from the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris. The result of the encounter of the two photographers is a crossing of vision and a joint exhibition took place in 2022, accompanied by a book entitled “In India, to Paris”, where each one reveals and shares his singular vision and his own humanist sensitivity towards an “other” culture. .

India happens to be the country where the legendary Le Corbusier carried out his life’s work in Chandigarh, so it is only natural that Emmanuel would be attracted to the beauty and the spirit of the monuments designed by the visionary architect Charles Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, notably in Chandigarh, and in Ahmedabad, works that are still very much “alive and kicking”, as the title of Lenain’s exhibition “tender concrete” suggests. Because the key characteristics of Le Corbusier’s architectural works are based on the use of reinforced concrete. If Emmanuel Lenain has seen and felt the tenderness of concrete, perhaps he meant to express the plasticity of concrete, so remarkable Le Corbusier’s intensive use of sunscreens, double-skin roofs, the care given to orientation and openings to facilitate ventilation and aeration, in order to adapt to the local climate, hence the pilings, the long ramps, and the garden terraces. This tenderness can be found expressed through Emmanuel’s own observations, his shot angles, and the patient search for the “good” light, and his own reflections on the full and the empty, to manage to compose in the end, an abstract art painting à la Mondrian, all in monochromatic Black and White, while inserting his quest for diagonals and ellipses to vary and upset the monotony of straight, vertical or horizontal lines. The dizzying curves when ceilings and stairs merge in three-dimensional apparitions “deja-vu” in Escher’s drawings. And as on penetrated through the doors left ajar, the interiors feel like the imaginary spaces and labyrinths of sophisticated video games…

We are hooked and wanting for more…

According to the French Embassy in India: “The exhibition showcases Lenain’s personal and subjective approach to photography, capturing the beauty of concrete architecture. “I am not among those left aghast by Brutalism. Quite the contrary: concrete, when handled by the greatest architects, has always seemed tender to me. It allows for sensual and dizzying curves, the alternation of empty and full, a plunge into solitude and reverie. Concrete allows for a constant, almost musical tension: rectangle contrasts with curve, sharp edges with softened poles, static with fluid, rest with movement. Here and there, buildings of strict verticality and horizontality contrast with the freedom of a curved ramp. And, as is often the case, a certain harmony emerges from opposites,” said Lenain.

Text Jean Loh

Photography © Emmanuel Lenain

Tender Concrete

EL-Tender Concrete 01 Government Museum and art gallery Chandigarh October 2020

EL-Tender Concrete 02 Mill Owners Association Ahmedabad February 2021

EL-Tender Concrete 03 Government Museum and art gallery Chandigarh May 2022

EL-Tender Concrete 04 Lilavali Lalbhal Library Ahmedabad February 2022

EL-Tender Concrete 05 Tower of Shadows Chandigarh May 2022

EL-Tender Concrete 08 Secretariat Building Chandigarh October 2020

EL-Tender Concrete 09 Mill Owners Association Ahmedabad February 2021

EL-Tender Concrete 10 Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad February 2021

EL-Tender Concrete 11 Government Museum and art gallery Chandigarh May 2022

EL-Tender Concrete 12 Panjab University Chandigarh May 2022

EL-Tender Concrete 14 Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad February 2021

EL-Tender Concrete 15 Gandhi Bhavan Chandigarh May 2022

Emmanuel Lenain ou la tendresse du béton

Une importante exposition est ouverte au Musée du Gouvernement en Inde depuis le 18 avril, Journée Internationale des Monuments et des Sites, elle durera jusqu’au 30 juin, à Chandigarh, la ville idéale conçue et créée par le Corbusier. C’est une exposition de photographie, et l’auteur n’est autre que l’ambassadeur de France à Dehli Emmanuel Lenain. Ce que l’on ne savait pas, c’est qu’Emmanuel Lenain n’en était pas à son coup d’essai. En poste en Chine, à Pékin et à Shanghai, ce passionné de la photographie, documente la vie quotidienne et les lieux insolites au cours de ses voyages et déplacements, avec son Leica M6, et développe ses négatifs dans la chambre noire de sa résidence. Avant de quitter la Chine, il a rassemblé ses photos de Chine pour publier le livre « Chine, les Grands Travaux ». Cette série a été exposée et projetée à la Maison Européenne de la Photographie et entrée dans sa collection en 2016. Après un retour au Quai d’Orsay et avoir servi comme conseiller diplomatique du premier ministre, Emmanuel Lenain est nommé en 2019 en Inde, à Dehli. Il n’a pas perdu son temps pour appréhender ce vaste pays si plein de diversité et de couleurs avec son appareil photo mais toujours en monochrome en Noir et Blanc. Il n’y a pas de hasard dans le monde de la photographie, la même année, en 2019 le plus important photographe indien Raghu Rai (membre de Magnum) reçoit à Paris le Prix de la Photographie de l’Académie des Beaux-Arts. Il résulte de la rencontre des deux photographes un croisement de regards et une exposition conjointe en 2022 accompagnée d’un livre intitulé « In India, to Paris », où chacun dévoile et partage sa vision particulière et sa sensibilité humaniste envers une culture « autre ».

L’Inde c’est le pays où le légendaire Le Corbusier a réalisé l’œuvre de sa vie à Chandigarh c’est donc tout naturel qu’Emmanuel soit attiré par la beauté et l’esprit des monuments dessinés par l’architecte visionnaire Charles Edouard Jeanneret, dit Le Corbusier, notamment à Chandigarh, et à Ahmedabad, œuvres toujours vivantes, comme le laisse entendre le titre de son exposition : « la tendresse du béton ». Car les caractéristiques des œuvres architecturales de Le Corbusier sont fondées sur l’usage du béton armé. Si Emmanuel Lenain voit et ressent la tendresse du béton, c’est qu’il veut exprimer la plasticité du béton, remarquable dans le recours intensif au brise-soleil, aux toits à double peau, le soin apporté à l’orientation et aux ouvertures pour faciliter la ventilation et à l’aération, dans le but de s’adapter au climat local, d’où les pilotis, les longues rampes, et les terrasses-jardin. Cette tendresse Emmanuel Lenain le ressent et l’exprime à travers ses propres observations, ses angles de vue, la recherche patiente de la « bonne » lumière, ses réflexions sur le plein et le vide, pour arriver à composer un tableau d’art abstrait, à la Mondrian tout en monochrome Noir et Blanc, et en y glissant des recherches de diagonales et d’ellipses pour varier et chambouler la monotonie des lignes droites, verticales ou horizontales. Les courbes vertigineuses où les plafonds et les escaliers se confondent comme des apparitions à trois dimensions dans les dessins d’Escher. Les intérieurs ressemblent aux espaces et labyrinthes imaginaires des jeux vidéo sophistiqués… On aimerait s’en mettre plein les yeux, encore et encore.

Texte : JEAN LOH

Photos © Emmanuel Lenain

Guy Le Querrec’s Chinese Gesture

A Breton born in Paris in 1941, a Magnum veteran for the past 40 + years, Guy Le Querrec has three loves. Photography is his greatest passion, but he also has an innate talent as a teacher, which was detected by Marc Riboud. It was Riboud who asked him to create a workshop at Arles Photo Festival in 1976. His subsequent master classes have trained many amateur and professional photographers alike including Patrick Zachmann (another Magnum member). This exhibition for Arles + Jimei arrives at the 30^th anniversary of his Arles workshop in China, which he conducted in Fujian in Xiamen and Quanzhou, along with eight trainees from the Arles Festival in 1988. His second love is his “country” of origin,  Brittany, where he has photographed relentlessly over the years. And third, as a music lover, he is passionate (and knowledgeable) about jazz.

His musical awakening came from listening to his parents’ 78 rpm vinyl records, especially from the Swing of Belgian accordionist Gus Joseph Viseur. The name Viseur (viewfinder in French) would attach Le Querrec’s eye to his Leica’s viewfinder for life, and set him on the road to photographing the world’s greatest jazz musicians. It is therefore not surprising to find great musicality in all of his photographs; his sense of rhythm especially, which made him known as “the photographer who makes hands dance”. In fact, Le Querrec’s picture that Cartier-Bresson has chosen for his book, “The choices of Henri Cartier-Bresson”, published in 2003, is precisely the image of Four Tuareg women singing in Timbuktu, Mali (1998). The photo captures the moment of the clapping of hands by these women, totally covered under their black burqas, but we can clearly see two hands clapping on-beat and two hands clapping off-beat, a break illustrated by the crack of light between the women in black.

MALI. Timbuktu. Sunday 18th September, 1988. During the long distance car “Raid 88-Renault 19” from Conakry to the North Cape. Tuareg women singing.

Africa is Le Querrec’s favorite continent, since his first job was that of photojournalist for the weekly Jeune Afrique. Among the books he has published on Africa, the one released in 2015 focuses on the Lobi, an ancient tribe of Ghana and from Burkina Faso. Another tribe that has captured the attention of Le Querrec are the Lacota Sioux of North America, who would every year embark on memorial ride to honor their ancestor, Chief Big Foot, a hundred years after the Wounded Knee Massacre. Le Querrec went along with them in 1990, following them with his Leica across three hundred kilometers in two weeks, in the big chill. In the end Guy remembered only two words: “Cold. Courage”. But this trip brought him a beautiful photo book, especially with this striking instant geometry when his frame is filled with the head of a black mustang, and in the foreground, the inquiring eye of the horse; and in the background: the eye of the Indian rider perceived through his black balaclava.

9th day of the journey. A 30 miles ride from Bridger (Cheyenne River reservation) to the North Fork of the Bad River, in Haakon county. The riders take a rest about 5/6 miles before their arrival. Sunday 23th December, 1990. Around 4.00pm.

But Guy Le Querrec’s most unexpected journey was indeed China, a voyage to the East that he accomplished in four episodes. In 1984 at the invitation of the French-Chinese Friendship Association, Le Querrec discovered Beijing, Sichuan, Wuhan, Nanjing, Suzhou and Shanghai. Then he returned in 1986, thanks to Leica Camera, to photograph Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. It was in 1988 that Guy Le Querrec discovered the Hui’an Maidens in Fujian Province, during his Arles master class in China. Then in 1989 he was part of the project “A Day in the Life of China”. Out of sixty foreign photographers he was the only one to select Fujian so that he could spend more time focusing on these extraordinary Hui’an Maidens. They are the key and the main thread of this exhibition, “The Chinese Gesture”, because in China today people have all but forgotten how these Hui’an Maidens did everything – while the fishermen sailed away. Guy Le Querrec followed the women everywhere, fascinated by their hardworking capacity. He shows us how they extracted granite stone in the quarry, how they transported slabs of stone with their bare hands and sometimes barefoot. How they took on the responsibility of building stone houses, but also with the carpentry. At the same time, they would repair fishing nets, and raise children. They did all this with amazing grace. Their sense of elegance is reflected in their traditional costume, which they would wear every day, rain or shine, even in the middle of important physical efforts–a short bodice that stops at the navel, tightly tailored pants, a handkerchief worn over the hair but under a big bamboo hat as a shield from the sun. Their extraordinary sense of solidarity displayed by working in teams, in groups of two or four or six…

CHINA. Province of Fujian. Village of Ta Zha. Extraction plants of granite. Quarry named granite area number 603. Dong Shan Shi Shi (West Mountain). Mine of the community for rent (operating company since 1979). Between 10 am and 2 pm. Friday 14th April, 1989.

Le Querrec’s “Chinese Gesture” is inspired by his rich harvest of images of the morning exercises of the Chinese, the taiji sessions, the morning stretching that he translated into choreography, a solo dance, a pas de deux or a collective ballet troupe performance. He confessed being drawn to movement, “When there is movement somewhere, that’s where I would go.” he said. If he was to visit a Traditional Chinese Medicine center, a Tuina massage session would be converted into a “visual dramaturgy”. He has accumulated hundreds of clichés (that’s also the word for snapshots) of Chinese photographers wiggling and writhing in every way to find the best angles through their viewfinders or to squinting through a barely developed negative roll to select their best images. His passion for jazz and his own practice of jazz photography led him to seek out the Old Men Jazz Band of the Shanghai Peace Hotel or Jimmy Jin, the guitarist leader of his jazz band at the Nanjing Jinjiang Hotel, and even the Quanzhou Folk Music Orchestra with their traditional Chinese instruments. In a nutshell Le Querrec would see and hear rhythm and swing everywhere. Consider the stunning brass band that he photographed at the burial in the rice field near a village in Chongwu, showing the musicians wearing white uniforms and hats—tradition of Southern China for funerals – still playing their saxophone, trumpet and drums but swaying with smiles as if they were intoxicated by their own music.

Province du Fujian. Entre Quanzlou et Chong Wu. Enterrement dans le village de Xiang Qiang. Le cercueil est porté par les parents proches, habillés en blanc, dont le fils et la fille du défunt. Pendant les funérailles, une fanfare joue des airs modernes (avant se jouait de la musique traditionnelle). Des pétards saluent le départ du mort et souhaitent bonne chance à la famille. Le cercueil est enterré dans les champs. En ville les morts sont incinérés. Dans les campagnes, on les enterre encore, de préférence sur les versants des collines pour ne pas utiliser les terres exploitables.

If there was only one picture to encapsulate Guy Le Querrec’s Chinese Gesture and the Master’s teaching talent, that would be the photograph taken in 1984 at Xindu’s Temple of Divine Light, which Le Querrec has called “The Flying Bag”. We can see on the left a big Chinese character FU (which means happiness, also luck and fortune) in a square frame engraved on the wall, and a man touching it with his hand. In those days visitors of the temple were told to approach the character FU with their eyes closed and then to touch it with their hands, so they could be blessed for happiness and fortune. But in the foreground another man in a cap had lifted his right arm as if he were saluting his comrade. And above his cap, there was this flying bag! Le Querrec as of today remains unable to explain where this bag came flying from. It is the mystique of film photography that makes you discover your “happiness” only well after the negative was developed. This bag is what Roland Barthes called “Punctum” in his book, Camera Lucida. And what Le Querrec calls “the decisive instinct”. A photograph becomes an icon only when, as in jazz music, everything sounds right, even in improvisation, the form and the subject are in tune, the composition and the signifier of the image. This flying bag is the perfect Chinese gesture that crowns his China Journey (“gesture” from the ancient Latin also means journey, accomplishment and exploits).

CHINA. Province of Sichuan. Xindu. Monastery of BAO GUANG (Divine Light). Buddhist temple. On the wall: inscription symbolizing happiness, which the visitors, with their eyes shut, try to touch in the center in order to gain happiness. Friday 27th April 1984.

Jean Loh

Voyage au Cœur d’une absence: le Maroc d’Eric Mannaerts

Voyage Marocain, Eric Mannaerts

Un Voyage Marocain

Un Voyage Marocain

Un voyage marocain

Voyage Marocain

voyage marocain

Voyage Marocain

Un Voyage Marocain par Eric Mannerts

Voyage au cœur de l’Absence

Nostalgie en grec signifie littéralement la douleur d’une vieille blessure, c’est un pincement au cœur, bien plus fort que la seule mémoire.
La photographie est une machine à remonter le temps, elle va en arrière, va en avant, il nous emmène vers un endroit où il nous fait mal de retourner. Le mot « mal » il conviendrait de le traiter au sens « poétique » du terme.
Car le voyage d’Eric Mannaerts vient d’une rencontre romantique avec le Maroc – (« Vive l’amour » proclame ce graffiti sur un mur) puis de ses séjours répétés durant plus de vingt ans. Il y a capté dans ses instantanés exactement ce qu’il vivait « sur le moment » c’est-à-dire en s’y fondant à corps perdu, et ce qu’il recevait comme un cadeau sans se poser de question. Cette pleine présence du moment est devenue depuis – avec le temps – une collection d’absences, une collection de poèmes sur le mal. Ce « mal » photographique au sens « punctum » dont affectionne Roland Barthes apparaît dès la première photo du livre : un banc solitaire devant un canal dont il ne reste plus que les trois squelettes métalliques érigés au-dessus d’herbes sauvages dont on devine chardons et autres plantes qui piquent ; n’invitant nullement à s’y asseoir.

En déroulant la série des photographies de ce Voyage Marocain, cette sensation lancinante d’absence émerge de l’espace bidimensionnel tel un gouffre béant voire d’une blessure géante, qui menace de nous entraîner tous dans une chute vertigineuse vers le néant. Il s’agit de poèmes – plus exactement des haïkus (*) – qui posent cette question existentielle de nos voyages dans la vie et nos rencontres sur la route (On the Road).

Traces de pas dans le sable, routes désertes et silencieuses, passerelle d’avion ou promontoire de plongeon au-dessus d’une piscine vide, un chien et un chat qu’on devine abandonnés par leur maître en vacances au bord de la mer, station de cirage sans clients sans cireurs, deux trous dans le mur annoncent l’un « pelouse » l’autre « enfants » établissant une correspondance Dadaïste, deux espadons anesthésiés dans les toilettes publiques, terrasse vide au café de la plage (une plage déserte), camping car rouillé et campé pour toujours sur le bord de la route, marches d’un temple Aztèque menant vers nulle entrée, et la plus belle d’entre elles : ce salon de coiffure au nom grandiloquent « L’Espoir Pour Femmes » qui pourrait sortir tout droit d’un roman d’Albert Camus (photo datée Fez 1982).

Ce n’est pas la présence humaine qui y changera quelque chose. Ces tirages argentiques teintés de sépia métaphysique montrent un Maroc abstrait que l’on appréhende hors de temps et de l’espace. Le voyage d’Eric est un voyage qui continue jusqu’au cœur de cette absence explicitée plus haut. Plus que des compositions photographiques c’est cette absence de rationnel ou de calcul maintenant qui transforme ces images en métaphores narratives. Cet ensemble d’enfants surpris dans leur foulée, ce gamin sur la plage qui rend la liberté à l’hirondelle, cette série de poteaux aux silhouettes solitaires et de marcheurs avec canne, que nous racontent ces images ? Cette femme assise qui se cache le visage devant un mur traversé en diagonale par un (autre) poteau renversé se protège t-elle de l’autre femme en noir, ou du soleil, ou enfin du photographe dont l’ombre forme avec les deux femmes un jeu triangulaire qu’on ne saurait interpréter ?

Dans l’esprit zen l’absence et la présence sont comme le dos et la paume de la main. Les absences vécues d’Eric sont en même temps remplies de présences et vice versa. Nous resterons hantés par cette vue de dos de ces deux femmes voilées assises face à l’océan, devant l’immensité de cette question absence présence. L’image nous démontre avec force l’incurabilité de notre cicatrice intérieure.

Enfin on est frappé par une étonnante parenté entre le regard d’Eric Mannaerts et les photographies des années 1960 du français Bernard Plossu (son Voyage Mexicain) et de l’américain Lee Friedlander (ses pérégrinations dans le MidWest des Etats-Unis), tous deux ont marqué la photographie d’une sensibilité nouvelle du côté de l’improvisation (au sens musique de jazz) et de la liberté, sans contrainte formelle sans soucis de l’instant décisif.

« Sur la fine lame du temps, avant qu’on puisse distinguer un objet, il y a une sorte de conscience non-cognitive. On ne peut avoir conscience d’avoir vu un arbre qu’après avoir vu l’arbre. Et entre l’instant de vision et l’instant de conscience il y a forcément un décalage de temps. Le passé n’existe que dans nos souvenirs, et le futur n’existe que dans nos projets. Seul le présent est notre réalité. L’arbre dont vous avez une conscience cognitive, à cause de ce petit décalage de temps, appartient déjà au passé et donc est irréel (**). »

C’est ce décalage de temps qui fait que nous ne rattraperons jamais le réel, ce décalage suscite cette nostalgie du réel, ce sentiment d’absence qui devient le mal qui nous ronge qui imprègne tout le Voyage Marocain d’Eric Mannaerts.

Jean Loh
2011

(*) Haïkus : forme de poésie japonaise en trois phrases
(**)Robert M. Prisig : Traité du Zen et de l’entretien des motocyclettes. Les éditions du Seuil et Vintage 1974.

Bill Brandt’s Annabel Lee – by Jean Loh 尚陸

The Policeman’s Daughter 1945

Abstract Nude

Bill Brand’s Perspective

Dubuffet 1960

Nude 1948

The Haunted Nude 1948

Ear on the Beach 1957

Baie des Anges France 1959

When Bill Brandt learned that the American poet Ralph J. Mills had written a poem about his picture “An Ear on the Beach”, he wrote to the poet: “This is my favorite photograph, and I thought I knew the picture, but your poem has taught me to look at it quite differently. I am delighted.”
Today no matter how hard I searched, this poem of Ralph Mills’ was nowhere to be found. But then each time I look at this picture Bill Brandt took in 1957, it is Edgar Allan Poe’s poem Annabel Lee that pops up in my mind, for no reason. Poe wrote Annabel Lee in 1849, ten years after the invention of photography, and just before he died, making it his last poem. This poem about a girl he loved to death is a truly romantic poem that has touched and continues to touch many people. Bill Brandt’s Ear on the Beach is a well-known, bizarre and surrealistic photograph. It was supposed to be a photo of nude on the beach, however what we see is a big ear, almost like a fish lying on the pebbles, or more exactly, like a conch, an open invitation to listen to the sounds of the waves, of the passing clouds in the sky, of the cries of the seagulls, and for me, to the ballad of Annabel Lee by the sea. As Joan Baez sung in 1967 in her haunting crystalline soprano voice:

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

Bill Brandt, one of the monuments of the 20th Century photography, was born in 1904 from an English father and a German mother. It was said that he spent all his life trying to forget his German lineage and to become an Englishman. Poetry was the starting point of his career in photography because the first portrait he took was of American poet Ezra Pound. Pound was instrumental in introducing Brandt to Man Ray in Paris. Paris in the late 1920’s was where most of Brandt’s major influences came from: the surrealist movement, Brassai’s night photography, and cinema! Bill Brandt was especially impressed by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s “Un Chien Andalou” and “l’Age d’Or”, and with Orson Wells and Alfred Hitchcock’s films. After he moved to England he dedicated himself to documenting the social classes of England during the1930’s, exposing the economic gap between the coal mine workers living conditions and that of aristocratic families with an army of servants. By the end of the Second World War, he chose to return to what he called “the poetic current of photography”, which consists basically of landscape, portraiture and… nude.
Undeniably Bill Brandt’s most outstanding and original work was his nude photography, which the MOMA in its 2013 March-August exhibition “Light and Shadow”, refers to as his “crowning artistic achievement”. Indeed Brandt’s Nudes series exemplifying the “sense of wonder” in his photography remains until today a major critical reference to many photographers.

Bill Brandt said he shot his first nude in 1945, on the very day the war has ended. It was like a celebration and a departure from the somber industrial era England. We can see that as a relief, a form of liberation. This first nude picture shows a girl sitting on a chair, one hand holding her left cheek, as if lost in deep thought, in a room with a window. Most of Bill Brandt’s nudes simply bear the dates when they are made, sometimes he would mention the locations; but for this particular picture he wrote down “The Policeman’s Daughter”. How strange! Brandt did he ever really explain why and how he got the daughter of a policeman posing nude for him, I wonder. Although Bill Brandt has married three times, and I suppose, he also has had many lovers as artists usually do, especially for a photographer who arranged to photograph so many women in distorted nudes, he certainly seemed to have a complex rapport with women. So I start looking for clues, and found that “La Fille du Policeman” was an unpublished novel written in French by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) author of erotic and sadomasochistic literature of the Victorian times. Swinburne was an author obsessed with domination and flagellation, in those days when spanking was secretly popular, in fantasy and in real life. As the French would say: ça annonce la couleur!

Technically it was also the beginning of Bill Brandt’s surrealistic vision; as he often liked to quote Orson Well’s citation: “the camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.” In an interview in 1971 he explained how he got the idea for his famous ‘Perspectives on Nudes’ photographs. Bill Brandt said he once stayed in London in a house that was haunted, and there a spirit told him to take pictures, and he asked what kind of pictures, the spirit replied ‘nudes’. When he asked how, the words ‘wide angle, close up, high contrast’ flashed through his mind. By 1948 he did make a nude picture called “the Haunted Bathroom”. A ghost-like young woman who had long and raven black hair, she wore a loose bathrobe baring her breast and navel, sitting before a bathtub, with water projecting eerie reflections on the walls. If one examines Brandt’s nudes under a Freudian magnifying glass, we would discover perhaps traces and marks of his obsession and secrets. I suppose that is also where the mystery and the extra-dimensional come from, in the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Suspicion (Hitchkok didn’t he also have difficult relationship with women: wavering between attraction and repulsion?), and I suppose also that’s where the haunting claustrophobic atmosphere comes from, in the style created by Orson Well who had impressed Bill Brandt by shooting his Citizen Kane in real rooms with flooring and ceiling. In the end, I believe Bill Brandt has created an esthetic of naked women boxed-in between walls, ceiling and flooring, with distorted feet, hands, legs, in a sort of miniature doll-house, and his camera lens would be the peeping Tom, like his one-eyed Cyclops shots of artists Dubuffet – Arp – Giacometti.

In order to “frame” his nudes in a room with flooring and ceiling, Brandt was unhappy and frustrated with conventional cameras with lens that imitates the human eye. He actually spent quite some time searching for the perfect camera and finally he found in a second-hand store near Covent Garden an old wooden Kodak camera with wide angle lens and small aperture that was set to infinite. He was excited because this old 19th Century camera could provide him with an illusion of space and unreal perspective through distortion created by the wide-angled lens. From that day on he let himself be “guided by the eye of the camera and no longer by his own eye”, he said, and so he embarked on an obsessive project that would last over fifteen years.

In the history of photography, as soon as the medium was invented, nude photography quickly became a discipline. There is even an academic term “Nude Studies” that covers photography reproducing the classic genre usually found in oil painting or sculpture, and to reflect the colonial era of the 19th century there was even an explosion of exotic studies of oriental nudes, and of erotic nudes. Looking at Bill Brandt’s “Nudes series” from the point of view of academic study, I would classify his works into three periods: an early period of “interior nudes” (the “doll-house” period), mostly in a room or a bathroom or inside a house, where parquet, windows, ceiling, walls serve as décor to create the sense of perspective around the central nude subject which happens very often to be deliberately “ex-centered”, and where a bed, a chair, a table, sofa, bathtub, mirror serve as accessories to enhance the distorted vision. Then there is the second period in which the photographer takes his models outdoor, to the beach, near the cliff, by the seaside, to create photographs of nude in a landscape, or Nude as an imaginary Landscape. The anatomy becomes then an integral part of the landscape, an extension of the pebbles, sands, rocks. That leads us to the ultimate category Bill Brandt himself called “Abstract Nudes”, when the flesh is seen in such close-up and sometimes in such high contrast that it disappears into pure black-and-white lines and curves, over-exposed to a degree of quasi “solarization” (again, that links us back to Man Ray who “invented” solarization with Lee Miller).

Somehow I cannot bring myself to believe that Bill Brandt photographed nudes just for the sake of creating imaginary or abstract landscape. Especially when his close-up shots get to the point of magnifying the skin to its pores, wrinkles, dimples and pockmarks, goose bumps, tuft of soft blond leg hairs in the sun, neck lines, belly folds, elbows and knees, fingers and toes; they naturally form parts, or accessories, props, for the construction of his perspectives. His eye would pan across this vast land of the anatomy and penetrate and explore every shadowy cavities; getting so close that it renders these “details” of anatomy even more alive and warm instead of just cold and stony “nature morte”, they are womanly and fleshy instead of abstract piece of pebble or rock or sculpture as he pretended them to be.

To paraphrase Susan Sontag’s “to collect photographs is to collect the world”, Bill Brandt’s collection of nudes is his desire to collect the loves he missed. This is how I interpret Bill Brandt’s “new perspective”, I can picture him completely lying low on the sand, crawling on the pebbles, inching his camera so very close to the bare skin, and letting the lens be his penetrating eye, closing on deeper and deeper to the flesh, the skin, even under the skin. As if he could not help his longing for his Annabel Lee.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
(….)

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
(Edgar Allan Poe)

The Genius who photographed the Winds and Clouds of the Cultural Revolution

Self-portrait 1966

We can say that Li Zhensheng has “photographed the Cultural Revolution”, as if a revolution that has lasted 10 years could be photographable by one single man. But “photograph” Li did indeed.
A graduate of the Changchun Film Institute, Li Zhensheng photographed over a period of Pre-and Post Cultural Revolution, the eruption of violence, the mobilization of mass hysteria and its folly, the teenage rebellion against fatherly archetypes, the personal tragedy and the unintentional comical – at times bordering on the farcical – terror. He photographed the dreamlike beauty (the winds) and the horror of a nightmare (the clouds). He portrayed himself as the urbane and mundane city newspaper leading photographer, while sharing with us the sweat and tear of a harsh banishment to the countryside, revealing the grandeur and the pettiness of people immersed in the illusion of revolution. In one word he did photograph the “loss of mind” of a whole nation.
He achieved this unimaginable feat, in the manner of a movie director, a cameraman, a scenarist and an actor – combining all roles on his single person. Not content to fire away some 100,000 snapshots documenting the unprecedented event in the history of humanity, he took innumerable self-portraits, completing the news reporting at the surface with a personal narrative about his own becoming in-between the lines. From his modest family background to his rise into a resourceful, inventive and seasoned photo-reporter, we follow his education, his love story, his exaltation and his excruciating despair, his own awakening, and his inebriated celebration of the end of the Cultural Revolution, often with himself posing in front of the camera. It took him either an unconscious dare-devil temperament, or a precocious historical foresight to get as close as possible – in the true tradition of a Robert Capa – to the event. Risking his life by appearing on stage during the performance of the model opera – the White Hair Girl, just to take a close look at the climactic pas-de-deux, Li Zhensheng was in the Cultural Revolution.
In 2003 Li’s exhibition opened at the Hotel de Sully in Paris, I immediately rushed to see it. There I was struck by the un-glassed frames which invited a direct eye contact with the black & white print, with the sheer horror of the documented reality, with the panoramic of the splice-images. I said to myself: who was this photographer so conscious of his place in history, because I was amazed by the innumerable self-portraits in the exhibition. Then comes the realization, that there is no word to describe the historical value of this testimony, his prescient and unprecedented (in his time) act of “preserving and hiding” the un-publishable “negative” negatives under the wooden parquet of his room. Li was not the only photographer of the Cultural Revolution, but what he has achieved no one else has been able to come near to. His legacy is both a lesson of history and a lesson of photo-taking. I mean that as a tribute to Li’s ingenuity and creativity, and to his insight and foresight.
2003 was also the year I first met Li Zhensheng and his editor cum curator Robert Pledge at the Pingyao Photo Festival. Quoting Pledge:
“As the public now knows, Li originally wanted to be a filmmaker, and maybe he still dreams of it. In any case, photographic formats were not an issue as far as he was concerned, to the contrary. He notably used them for cinematic effect, the way a film-director would, with reverse shots, often panning in sequences for panoramic result, whether it be with traditional black-and-white 35mm film or in the 2¼inch square format so difficult to fill in a balanced way. “His work reflects the instinct of a journalist and the eye of an artist,” Alan Riding commented in The New York Times, adding that his photographs “reveal Mr. Li’s sense of composition, his understanding of lighting and his ability to convey emotion.” Some of his images, do also remind us of China’s great pictorial tradition, while others convey the more epic style and mood of Sergueï Eisenstein and of the then Soviet Union’s school of cinema, with concern for wide-open spaces and the constant movement of multitudes within. It is this double legacy of history and cinema that elevates Li Zhensheng to the very unique position he holds in the Chinese world of photography in the eyes of Western art historians and scholars. This status will hopefully be shared in the years ahead by their peers in the artist’s own country too. Li’s photographic and historical contributions constitute a formidable achievement.”
To conclude with, Li Zhensheng was rightly featured as one of the only two Chinese photographers (the other one being contemporary art photographer Wang Qingsong) in the 2007 BBC documentary “The Genius of Photography”. This small selection of the “Best Of” of his Cultural Revolution testimony is only a modest attempt to demonstrate the “Genius” of Li Zhensheng.
Jean Loh / curator
Genius: the noun is related to the Latin verb gigno, genui, and genitus, “to bring into being, create, produce”. (Wikipedia.org).
Exhibition: Li Zhensheng Red Color News Soldier, still on a world tour since 2003, with a book edited by Robert Pledge and published by Phaidon
Excerpt of Robert Pledge’s foreword to Li Zhensheng’s world premiere exhibition in a gallery at Beaugeste Shanghai in 2012. http://www.beaugeste-gallery.com

The Human Body as a Landscape

Two-handed sword – Isabel Munoz 1998-1999

High Kick – Isabel Munoz 1998-1999

Headstand – Isabel Munoz 1998-1999

Flying over the roof – Isabel Munoz 1998-1999 from Shaolin Dance Warriors

The Frog Jump – Isabel Munoz, Shaolin Dancing Monks 1998-1999

Five or six years ago, I discovered thanks to Christian Caujolle a few prints of Shaolin Monks by Isabel Muñoz. I remember the sudden inexplicable feeling of euphoria at the sight of these monks dancing and flying. To a fan of “wuxia” novels (* 1) that I was, it was like a dream come true. Shortly after, in a cinema watching Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon, I was seized by the same emotion from the first minutes of the film, the wonders of technical prowess have made it possible to reproduce on the silver screen what was only wild imagination in our mental screen while reading wuxia novels; now these characters are actually evolving in total weightlessness on walls and roofs and on tops of bamboo groves. But unlike cinema, Isabel’s photography, in its splendid sobriety, made no use of faking or special effect, and this renders it all the more precious and fascinating to me. I was especially fascinated by this direct confrontation of photographic realism with almost dreamlike scenes, magical, in the magician sense for the uninitiated.

 

In 1998, Isabel Muñoz came to China to photograph the acrobats of a circus school with the help of the Spanish Embassy in Beijing. A journalist had told her about the Shaolin monks, she became curious of their practice of ancient martial arts, and expressed her desire to meet them. An official in charge of External Relations of Henan Province then organized a trip to the foot of the pantheon of martial arts, the Shaolin Temple of Songshan (* 2).

These Shaolin monks at the time thanks to kung fu movies from Hong Kong were already known around the world. Their monastery was surrounded by a hundred martial arts schools in which students training for years just for a final entrance examination, either to the Shaolin Monastery for the best among them, either into the army or police for the others. Fanatics and curious visitors flocked from afar, they came knocking on the monastery’s door, to see and to learn their secrets (* 3). So there was a moment of skepticism and mutual observation before giving way to total trust between the photographer and her models.

How Isabel, a woman from Europe, not speaking the local language, was able to convince the monk-warriors to pose for her, to do the movements she wanted, they who had until now become so accustomed to deploying their routine demonstration for television and reporters? Isabel began by showing them her previous works, on dance (Tango, Flamenco), and on the Turkish wrestlers. When finally the monks agreed to reveal what each of them did best, it was time to identify the most choreographic movements in their boxing or fencing. For the décor Isabel proceeded to “tracking the energy of the place” and chose to move away from architectural stereotypes, instead she focused practically on the ancient walls and the dirt floor. Here was an extraordinary opportunity to continue her study of the body, especially the body in motion, and the energy that emerges which she always identifies with a spiritual dimension. “Too much architecture kills mysticism,” she said. This remarkable minimalism is obtained by separating, obliterating the “Shaolin” context in spite of the tempting beauty of ancient stone. She also had to familiarize the monks with the presence of the photographic equipment they had never seen before: flash, reflector, umbrella, tripod, and three cameras: Hasselblad 503 CW (6×6), Leica (24×36), and Mamiya (6×7).

It looked as if she had carried to the heights of Songshan Mountains her photo studio, for an intimate sitting between the photographer and her subjects.  

So began the most difficult part, how to overcome the language barrier to explain the desired shot? After an entire morning spent trying to make the monks jump, dejection came.

“I was so desperate; all they did were tiny little jumps!” As the monks left for lunch, Isabel did a trial with her assistant David, a former basketball player who had put on weight, “can you leap as if you fly in the air?” And miracle! The Polaroid got the right shot! And that Polaroid print had piqued the monks’ pride, they were now motivated to prove their real talent. They also understood the causal relationship between their moves and what would be stored inside Isabel’s cameras. From this magical complicity came extraordinary images, portraits of stunning classicism. The Photo Studio now reduced to a confined space, with the gray walls of the monastery set as a backdrop, forming an enclosure where Isabel could fully engage in a body to body confrontation with the warrior-monks, given the martial dimension of the session, the shooting felt at times like a corrida between the bull and the toreador. The Shaolin monks had no other way out but to transcend themselves.

 Isabel knew from her accumulated experiences of dance photography, how to capture the pulsating energy that was gushing through the feet, the fist, and the fingertips. In the symbolism of the human body, according to the Taoists, Man, standing between Heaven and Earth, is a landscape, in which an inner eye would see the mountains and waters and energies circulating in-between. In the Judeo-Christian concept the human body is a tree (* 4), which would also join the Indian thought, which views the body as an inverted tree. Thus in the practice of yoga; one of the fundamental origins of the Shaolin martial arts, the headstand posture (* 5) represents a tree right-side up. By immobilizing them on the ground, in the air, or in the midst of a fall, or in the inverted posture, in these moments of pause, fixed concentration, and suspended breathing, Isabel has erased all martial semantics retaining only the beauty of the choreography.

Isabel Muñoz’s practice is not a photography of movement, but a photography of landscape. She lets us see in these monks: trees, mountains, sculptures, a still life that invites meditation. And in the contemplative stillness we are touched by an energy that is directed towards one single goal: deliverance.

 

Jean Loh

June 2012

 

 

*

1) “Wu” from Wushu (Kung Fu) = martial arts, “Xia” = hero: the genre of initiation novel with complicated intrigues involving heroes and heroines with phenomenal powers, through fantastic adventures interspersed with scenes of martial arts fighting, with bare-fist or with sword, saber, and a variety of traditional and fantasy weapons, in which the Shaolin Temple is systematically present (for comparison we could think of French and Spanish swashbuckling novels of 19^th century, roman de cape et d’épée or comedia de capa y espada,)

* 2) Isabel Muñoz received the 2nd Prize of World Press Photo category Portraits Stories in 2000. Quoting the WPP archives: “At the Shaolin temple men practice a particular form of wushu, war art. The 18 basic positions of what some call Shaolin Kung Fu are inspired by the movement and agility of animals. According to legend, over 1500 years ago the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma introduced Indian principles of meditation and yogic calisthenics to the Shaolin monks’ own tradition, to help them endure the physical demands of long period of meditation. Over the centuries, the men of the Shaolin temple added skills from different martial arts to Bodhidharma’s original system, and became known of warrior-monks.”

* 3)

Those were the days when their touring demonstration was the highlight of the official cultural exchange programs. The monks that Isabel photographed had still some sort of authenticity if not to say “purity”.

* 4) Symbolism of the Human Body, Annick de Souzenelle, published by Albin Michel 1991.

* 5) Inverted posture or headstand, Sirsasana (Sirsa in Sanskrit: the head). “In the ancient literature, Sirsasana was called the king of all postures (asana). The reasons are not hard to find. When we are born, the head usually comes first, then come the limbs. The skull contains the brain that controls the nervous system and the organs of the senses. The brain is the seat of intelligence, knowledge, discernment, wisdom and energy. It is the seat of Brahman, the soul. A country cannot prosper without a capable king or constitutional power to guide it, so the human body cannot develop without a healthy brain.” B.K.S. Iyengar. Yoga Dipika Light on Yoga, published by Buchet / Chastel French edition of 1978.

Christian de Laubadere’s Revelation

Ch de Laubadere at St Regis Lhasa Tibet

No Apocalypse! But…
Christian de Laubadere called me the other day with excitement in his voice, saying he wanted to show me his latest work– “something to do with photography” –that magic word alone is enough to arouse my curiosity.
So there I was at his atelier and really stunned by the sight of twenty tableaux of what I first perceived as constellations, or astral maps. He explained: These are “Éclats de Porcelaine”, which could be interpreted as a mosaic of chinaware. As a lover of ceramics Christian had an early inspiration while browsing the catalogues of Christie’s and Sotheby’s. He was struck by the clinical sharpness of the pictures that are usually printed against a dark background. So he found a way to reproduce those ceramics in what he called “photographic prints” on canvas, which he combined with dark oil paint and partial varnish to create a mixed-media work.
In 1936 Walter Benjamin wrote in his famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, that a reproduction would have lost the “aura” of an original work of art, but I could see on the contrary that in Christian’s work his ceramics “brillent de tous leurs éclats” – are shining bright; with a subtle aura, that is. The secret of this aura lies in the elaborate process of “revelation” invented by Christian, which I would assimilate with the photographic process.
The search, cut and scan of the desired (ceramic) image correspond to the phase of image hunting and capture on film for a photographer. The printing and transfer onto canvas can approximate the “latent image material”, which is the exposed photographic material that is ready to be developed or revealed. Christian then completely “blackens” the canvas, using a quasi-primitive method of smoke layering from burning petroleum oil. The symbolic black was not lost on me as I was raised in darkroom printing through my high school years with the Jesuits. Then using fingers, hand, sponge or tissue or any spotting tools, Christian would selectively remove the black paint to reveal and expose what he wanted to accentuate, and to “shade” or keep unexposed certain surfaces he wants to preserve in what is called “fog density” during the photographic development process. He would conclude with matting and varnishing. The whole process reminds me of the exposure, the developer (in French the revelator) and the fixer steps in the darkroom printing sequence. In the end I understand now why Christian called me up to say “I did something like photography you’ve got to see!”
According to one of the entries of Wikipedia, “Revelation brings together the worlds of heaven, earth, and hell in a final confrontation between the forces of good and evil. Its characters and images are both real and symbolic, spiritual and material.” And in Christian’s “Revelation” one can find the universe condensed in the hic et nunc (here and now), where and when his creation takes place, in the conjunction of photography and oil painting, in the confrontation of the black and white with the colors, the clash of the lively images of the chinaware with the dead (nature morte) dark smoked paint, both real and symbolic, both spiritual and material.

Jean Loh, Photography Curator
Shanghai 24 May 2011

Bees in the Body Temple: an attempt to decode Zhe Chen’s photography

Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.
(1 Corinthians 3:19-20).

“Brought up in Beijing, China, Zhe Chen is a photo-based artist currently living in Los Angeles. In the past four years, Zhe has created a series of projects focusing on body modification, human hair, identity confusion, post-traumatic stress disorder, and memory. Zhe’s winning project is a document of self-mortification among a community of disaffected Chinese. The difficult nature of her subject is made more complex by Chen’s lyrical approach, identifying the physical self-destruction of her subjects as an act of spiritual cleansing.” That is how in some sixty words the Inge Morath Foundation and the Magnum Foundation have summarized the essence of Zhe Chen’s early master piece Bees in their introduction to the 2011 Award presented to her.

I first saw Zhe Chen’s earlier photographs, a series of self-portraits called The Bearable which received the Three Shadows Award, at Caochangdi PhotoSpring Festival in April 2011. Pinned to one wall were pieces of a puzzle depicting painful memories. There were no captions, so I thought it was again some young Chinese woman photographer toying with the fashionable “private photography”. When at last in Shanghai I encountered the photographer in person, I was immediately attracted to Zhe’s darkness and surprising self-awareness in spite of her young age. More specifically, that at 21 of age, her creation grew uniquely from her own personal experiences as a self-mutilating practitioner, impressed and touched me profoundly. There is something in her secret yet exhibitionistic nature that convinced me she was of the caliber of an “author photographer”.

Zhe started hurting herself seven years ago, when she attended a top high school in Beijing, consequence of “bad blood” with her authoritarian parents who are high ranking party officials. After earning a scholarship at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design she began showing her photographic diary of self-harm as an assignment for her class, and that became the starting point of a healing process. Yet today she still cannot resist the temptation of relapse from time to time just to “enjoy” the thrill of seeing blood seeping out of her self-inflicted cut. In Ancient Greece, Hippocrates believed that bloodletting a patient to restore health acted like the process of menstruation; insofar as menstruation functioned “to purge women of bad humors”. In modern day there are people, especially young women suffering from depression and/or inability for social adaptation, who tend to fall into a pattern of cutting or lacerating parts of their bodies as a way to “survive” when they are not ready to commit suicide. One of the most haunting pictures of Jane Evelyn Atwood’s monumental work on women in prison shows a display of lacerated forearms with ugly and badly stitched wounds lined up side by side, punctuated by marks of cigarette burns. Those scars or marks are from four suicidal women cellmates of Pardubice Detention Center in the Czech Republic in 1992 (*1). Award winning Japanese photographer Kosuke Okahara has revealed the phenomenon to the world through his photo-reportage of self-mutilating Japanese girls (*2).

As a way to better understand herself and to further her photographic art, Zhe has embarked on a project consisting of extending her self-portraits by finding and photographing people who share the same or similar pathology with her. From the relatively simple act of tattooing one’s skin, or of ear piercing to the more serious acts of auto-mutilation and body modification, Zhe found those she calls “Bees” by showing them first her own scars. She calls them “Bees” out of Virgil’s quote: They left their lives in the very wounds they had created for themselves. And I have been carrying with me a quote of Leonard Cohen which I had wanted to use for a photographic project for many years. He wrote in the Favorite Game: “Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh” (*3). And I felt like a wish fulfilled when I found Zhe Chen’s photos. “Photographing my bruised body is the perfect way to evacuate the unspeakable suffering in a tangible form.” said Zhe as if she wanted to share her secret with me.

I have been wondering why there are people who are afraid of pain and others who relish pain. Humanity seems to be made of those who inflict wounds and pain on others and those who self inflict sufferings. From the ancient age, conquerors, dictators and slave masters have used corporal punishments and tortures to impose physical and psychological dominance. And since the Passion of Christ, fanatical religious followers have practiced self-harm and self-flagellation in their monastery cells and in public processions as a means to experience divinity. By marking stigmata on their bodies, which resembled the wounds of Jesus Christ’s crucified body, they intend to purge their imaginary or collective sins. For this body temple, they believe, is also home to the devil. In Tuol Sleng, the Museum of Genocide in Cambodia, the horror photographs are fading with time, but one icon in the history of photography stands out, sadly, and painfully vivid in the minds of viewers. “A young boy, dazed and shirtless, staring at the camera expressionless, eyes vaguely lowered. Because he wore no clothes when arrested, the executioners had fixed a safety pin directly onto his skin, bearing the number “17”, in the inventory of the tortured victims.” (*4) Today’s stigmata have been deviated from an act of religious devotion or spiritual salvation into a form of body art or eroticism. Beyond tattoos and piercing there are all sorts of scarifications and microdermal implants inflicted on any part of the body, even leaving “artistic” scars or marks through painful and quasi-surgical procedures.
In a way, at the very origin, we all share one common experience of pain: our belly button is here to testify to our coming to life through an injury. This universal scar of ours gives all its sense to Cohen’s “word made flesh”. Beyond nationality, religious and cultural differences, what cuts into our skin – the envelope of our body temple – is the same universal pain. This initial pain is perhaps the reason-why the overarching goal we pursue in life is happiness.

And when we cannot find happiness, Zhe shows us, we shall commit further sacrileges to our body temple by inflicting violence on our body. Zhe’s collective of bees are simply “those who are different”, in the definition of Diane Arbus when in 1963, she set out to look for and photograph midgets, transvestites, those with Down syndrome, transsexuals, individuals with abnormal physical identity standards, the tattooed and the nudists, and so on, those she called “an American experience”. Yet Zhe’s collective does not look like another parade of “freaks” (*5). They are, rather, performers of a secret society that practice auto-mutilation: artists of razor blade or cigarette burns, of controlled eating disorders, performers of body modification. They are modern day students of the Marquis de Sade and of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. In apparently quiet and well-balanced photographs, under the surface lies a tension that spells danger, violence, and threat, Zhe’s portrayals physically magnify what Roland Barthes called “punctum”, (*6) in such a sense that we ache just by looking at some of the close-ups.

It is this physical “sting” of Zhe’s Bees that leads to our emotional disturbance. It is this pain that makes us realize how much we are physically and emotionally alive. Not only does Zhe reveal to us a world in which we are totally unfamiliar, but she also drops in our lap an incomprehensible world. What the innocent blue angel in her swimsuit is hiding is the detail that pierces the surface of apparent tranquility. It is a Diane Arbus secret.(*7) It doesn’t suffice merely to locate and identify the tell-tale scars on her skin, but one needs to ask why and how and who she is, and who they are, anyway, all of them? This run-away girl who tries to hide from a violent and abusing family, is portrayed in a blue swim suit against a blue background, droplets running down her goggled cheeks like tears, her clenched hands shaking, it reminds me of Luc Besson’s movie of 1988 The Big Blue, which attracted a huge teenage audience for its romanticism tinted with suicidal impulses. The young girl forced by her parents to undergo spinal corrective surgery and turned self-harm adept, the gang member turned body modification artist finding salvation in being suspended by his skin, the young night club hostess practicing S&M rituals, the sufferers of eating disorders and Hikikomori syndrome (*8) who only find comfort in self-harm in their secret hide-out. Who are they? And Why? The troubling questions arise like storms in our brains. We shall leave them to specialists and experts in wide-ranging fields: medicine, psychotherapy, sociology, politics, philosophy or theology. What we can only say is that here we have powerful but at the same time indeed, lyrical, photographs.

Unlike Arbus’ physically obvious freaks, Zhe’s subjects’ “aristocracy”(*9) remains indefinable, true to their own secret ritual they would only share with Zhe, and in a more subdued and inward-looking way than the victims of obsession and dependency captured by the blatant flash of Nan Goldin (*10). Not content to hang around or accompany them to the hospital, Zhe persuaded her subjects to pose in the nude by removing her own clothes to reveal her scars. This compassion helps explain the total self-abandon displayed by her subjects, in a way only offered to someone who is a member of the same club, a la Nan Goldin and Nobuyoshi Araki (*11).

Finally, Zhe’s poetry and lyricism lie in her exploration of the different genres, from portraits, landscape to still-life, with a treatment akin to an instinctive deep breath after you nearly drown. Her camera points down, shoots up, lying in bed, getting wet in the shower, blurry as the subject breathes out into the lens. Zhe’s composition recalls the creativity and freedom of experimentation that were the signature of another tragic genius in photography, Francesca Woodman (1958-1981). The photograph of the bloody bandage wrapped around the wrist of one of the bees strangely echoes that of Francesca Woodman wearing tree bark on her arms (*12).
Enough with comparison, Zhe Chen’s Bees has no equivalent in Chinese photography; the subject also reveals a facet of China unseen before.
One can interpret Zhe’s images according to one’s sense and sensibility; but there is no rationale besides the esthetic quality, and beyond our fascination with the awkward smile on the face of the blue swimmer and the tiny marks on her forearms, left by an imaginary baby shark.
Like a good movie, we come out of the screening of Bees as if we had taken a dive in the ocean, coming out of the chilly and salty water feeling fresh and alive, ready to face up to whatever that may come.

Jean Loh / Curator
(*1) Jane Evelyn Atwood, Trop de Peines – Femmes en Prison, Albin Michel 2000
(*2) Kosuke Okahara, Ibasyo, Sony World Photography Award Global Tour
(*3) Leonard Cohen The Favorite Game 1963
(*4) Christian Caujolle (founder of Agence VU’), in Circonstances Particulières – Actes Sud 2007. « Un jeune garçon, abasourdi, torse nu, fixant l’objectif sans expression, les yeux vaguement baissés. Parce qu’il ne portrait pas de vêtement lors de son arrestation, les bourreaux avaient fiché une épingle à nourrice directement dans sa peau, portant son numéro d’ordre, le 17, dans l’inventaire des suppliciés. » (*5) Freaks – a film by Tod Browning 1932 (*6) Roland Barthes in La Chambre Claire – Le Seuil 1980 (*7) Diane Arbus: “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” Five photographs by Diane Arbus Artforum, May 1971 (*8) Hikikomori, literally “pulling away, being confined”, i.e., “acute social withdrawal”, is a Japanese term referring to the phenomenon of reclusive people who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement because of various personal and social factors in their lives. (*9) “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.” Diane Arbus “Revelations” A retrospective catalogue 2003
(*10) Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Aperture 2004
(*11) “If the person I’m photographing is naked, then I, too, will be naked — a naked photographer!” In Photography: Tokyo Nostalgia and Sex. Interview with Nobuyoshi Araki in Japan Times 2003
(*12) Untitled: MacDowell Colony Peterborough, New Hampshire 1980, in Francesca Woodman, Phaidon 2007.

Barbara Plays Ouka Leele

The first time I came face to face with Ouka Levee’s work was this enigmatic lemon-headed woman that was part of the VU’ agency anniversary project called 80+80 which I curated in Pingyao in 2007. I could not explain the work especially when it is catalogued as “photography” because I somehow felt that it looked more like a painting to me, or even like a parody of advertising. The name of the author reminded me of the Hawaiian 4-stringed instrument called Ukulele but did not tell me whether the author was a HE or a SHE. The second time I saw another Ouka Leele work was at a lecture given by Christian Caujolle who recounted the anecdote of how he – at the time photo editor of the Daily Liberation – found a funny picture to illustrate a reporting about a book festival. The picture was of a bearded man with an open book sitting on his head. Again the coloring struck me as unreal. When Caujolle dialed this photographer in Spain he was surprised to find out that was actually a SHE and that she spoke a little French. She told him she first took a photograph in B&W then she enhanced the image using water color. In a way, Ouka Leele defined her art as putting a partition between the photographic paper and the reality and this layer, this partition is painting.

I became curious about the creativity of this Spanish artist who began her career in the late 1970’s after the death of Franco. And I realized she was a key member of the Movida, a cultural and artistic revival of a post-Franco era.

Historically speaking, Spanish dictator General Franco died in Madrid in November 1975, ending 36 years of repression and censorship. King Juan Carlos I facilitated the democratic transition by appointing a new government. By 1977 Spain held the first democratic election in 40 years and a new constitution was signed. Enrique Galvan became the mayor of Madrid: he was the key promoter of the Movida Madrilène. By 1982 for the first time a socialist party came to power and Felipe Gonzalez became prime minister. People in Madrid were excited by the new freedom and turned everything into exuberant celebration and happy revolution. Everyone was free to express whatever he wanted, to have fun, to dress up, to move, to create, that became the “Movement” or “Movida”. It was post-dictatorship, post-censorship, new democracy, new freedom; liberation in all fields including political and sexual, leading to unbridled creativity in art, design, comic strips (Ceesepe), music (Alsaka, Mecano) and cinema (Pedro Almodovar).

Born in 1957, Barbara Allende Ouka Leele described herself this way: “I was born into a family where it was natural to have paint brush, photo camera and cinema camera around. My parents pushed me into this early on. I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up: to paint, and I dreamed of inventing colors. But I didn’t know that I would end up painting photographs. I became hooked by photography the day I saw the magic revelation of an image on a piece of paper. Then I started playing with inventing images, and capturing them with a camera became my language. I was speaking about my own reality through colors and paint brushes. The rest is a boring résumé of love stories, of learning from masters, from dreams and miraculous experiences such as waking up every morning and opening my eye on a new world.”

In that context Ouka Leele’s first work was an homage to the Surrealists who in 1938 have organized the International Exhibition of Surrealism, where 15 artists such as Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, Max Ernst, etc were given each a dressmaker’s mannequin which they could transform in any way they desired, with Man Ray as the photographer of the end result. One picture by Man Ray at that time also showed Andre Breton as “God” with a crown of thorns on his head. Following that lineage Ouka Leele’s series “Peluquerías” announced clearly the revolutionary nature of a new photographic portraiture: an impressive production of provocative portraits she made of her friends: singers, artists, designers, actors etc, hairdressing them with all sorts of odd and absurd things on their head. These photos shot in B&W were then water-colored into saturated high-contrasted tone to create a distorted representation. The daily home objects, Coca Cola bottles and irons and toasters might constitute a reference to American pop art, but the fish the turtle, and the octopus would relate to Christian symbolism and mythology. More deeply they are exploring one of the most basic instincts of human being: that of transformation through disguise, transvestite, masquerade (see today’s Cosplay). Playing with hair, the emanation of sexuality that we wear openly on our head, this distinctive and remarkable series of portraits proclaims the power of imagination, now totally free of censorship or of any taboo. In her first home movie shot in silent 8mm black & white film in the 1970’s we can see the making of “lemon”: she (Ouka Leele) was laid down on the floor and placed herself the lemons around her head to compose the picture. Her friends wearing an iron or a fish on their head went parading in the street or driving in the tunnels of Madrid. One guy was wearing a huge octopus on his head, he picked up a pair of scisors and cut off its tentacles which dropped to the floor like in a hair salon. A newlywed couple went up a high rise tower with the bride wearing an ensemble of cola bottles and the groom wearing a set of electric shavers….There was such an air of absolute freedom and creativity that we could imagine the fun the Dada and the surrealists were having when they created their art works in the 1920’s, and 1930’s.

 

In the 1980’s Ouka Leele moved more assertively into traditional painting, especially pictorial classicism, her “tableau-photography” acquiring abundant draperies and more baroque elements, with a stronger flavor of Spanish surrealism (Bunuel, Dali) and a more dramatic stage setting.

The work called “Innocence and Youth” (1984) clearly refers to Goya’s Maja, one of the greatest works of Goya’s made in 1800, a nude is lying on a red velvet couch with a red cushion in the most classic pose. It could perhaps also be a reference to Manet’s Olympia, the black telephone symbolizing the black servant or the black cat in Manet’s painting. The plastic wrap in lieu of draperies could suggest the semi transparent dress for the clothed Maja. It is her way to show the convergence of tradition and modernity.

A more complex staging is the apparently enigmatic “Peor Impossible” (1985) showing a group of people posing on the beach. This painted photography with yellow as the dominant color was originally created as a cover for a Rock band’s album, the name of the band was Peor Impossible, meaning “impossible to be worse than that”, in terms of posing, Ouka Leele may be laughing at her own staging of all these artificial and exaggerated poses. Actually this photo pays homage to the greatest classic painting of all times, Las Meninas (1656) by Velasquez, about the teenage princess with her courtesans, as we know Picasso alone has painted 58 reproductions of Las Meninas. Here the naked man on the foreground plays the role of the dog in the painting. Ouka Leele’s modernity lies in the fact that this is “Cosplay” before the concept even exists. This parody of Velasquez would allow for multiple analyses (why the princess is here offered a green crocodile in lieu of the cup of clay to stop her precocious menstruation as in the original painting?). Velasquez’s remarkable treatment of interior space is here replaced by an open space on the beach. Photography becomes a demonstration by Ouka Leele of an artificial reality even less natural than painting.

To understand the major master piece of Ouka Leele: “Remember, Barbara” this monumental photograph of 150x120cm, three key factors come into consideration. The first is the reference to mythology and in particular to Metamorphosis of the Roman poet Ovid (43-17 BC) – a classic legend about the princess Atalanta who was raised by a bear and who agreed to marry the first man to beat her in a foot race. Eventually, Venus helped out a young man named Hippomenes. She gave him three golden apples to drop during the race and delay her. So he won the race and Atalanta as a wife. But he forgot to thank Aphrodite, who made them consummate their marriage in the sacred temple of the goddess Cybele, who punished them by turning them into lions. This story was made into a classic painting by Guido Reni (born 1575) whose focus was on the two characters Atalanta and Hippomenes forming with their semi naked bodies a striking dissymmetric ballet with the boy sustained in his run towards the right side and the girl stooping to pick up the apple towards the left side. In 1987 Ouka Leele proposed to the mayor of Madrid to hold a sort of “art performance” in the biggest square of the capital, right at the fountain of Cybele with the two stone-lions, by stopping all traffic she created the most dramatic stage set with sixteen models and a whole team to reconstitute the story of Atalanta. And here is the second consideration, this photo painted in pink and orange is actually a declaration of love by Ouka Leele to the city of Madrid. Cybele being the goddess of earth, the artist wanted to affirm her attachment to the city where she was born, to her own roots. She was so intimately connected to the Movida that this picture reflects all that moves and agitation and the contemporary ambiance of the city within the esthetics of classic painting. The last point refers to the title “Remember Barbara” which addresses her real name, Barbara Allende, but which comes from a poem of the French poet Jacques Prevert “Rappelle-toi  Barbara” (1946). The artist explains that the title is to remind her never to forget the Cybele inside of herself.  In 2005 that is nearly 20 years later, Ouka Leele organized another performance at the same place, this time for an artistic intervention in denouncing violence and abuse, and to help set up a shelter for battered women and children. 300 people had joined her to recreate her picture of 1987, which was filmed by four cameras placed in different places of the Square.  Three colors loaded with symbolism, the black of death, the red of life and the white of purity, were used in the costumes for men, women and children who formed a circle around Cybele, goddess of the earth and fertility.

From the 1990’s onwards Ouka Leele’s photographic creation became more intimate, although still elaborate in the staging, especially with nudes. And she seemed to have given up coloring her pictures, and elected to use even digital photography. This nude with mirror is again a typical example of her classicism and her modernism.

 

Jean Loh

Photo Curator

Shanghai May 2010

A Landscape inhabited by Dragons, Horses, Spirits and Gods

Mu Guiying the woman general – Guangzhou 2005

While researching Stephen Shore, Jeff Wall and Robert Adams; those artists who had tried to challenge the esthetics of their time, and who had played with a new form of amateur-aesthetics or a form of landscape photography that would be far removed from Ansell Adams’, I found out that behind their vision of mostly banal suburbia, and apparently ordinary street scene where nothing seems to happen, but a vision that had revolutionized main stream documentary photography, there were intangible tension and artistic emotion that one would find in reading novels about transformational journeys or watching initiatic “road movies”. If we think that Jeff Wall’s conceptual attempt “The Landscape Manual” – a criticism of the objectivity of documentary photography, was written and published in 1969, we realize that most Chinese landscape photography – because of the thousand-year maceration in traditional culture, starting with Lang Jingshan’s earliest works (Chin-San Long 1892-1995), including the so-called contemporary artists today, is viscerally infused with the very Chinese forms of Mountain and Water (Shan Shui : Chinese traditional landscape painting). 

The exorcist: A Nuo Dancer - Guangdong 2009

Xu Peiwu’s new series of Alpa Diary is inhabited by a different kind of Shan Shui: mainly from his personal training as a water color painter and from his own sensitive and susceptible soul. His landscape stands out as both a continuation and an innovation compared to his tension-filled depiction of the Pearl River New Town, his earliest work that read like a war reportage. Peiwu said that between 2007 and 2009 he had gone through a difficult period of personal crisis, with mental anguish and spiritual quest. It was only when, in the fall of 2009, he took up a 2,500km journey, trekking from Guangdong to Guangxi across Yunnan and Guizhou, that he was able to recover some of his peace of mind, thanks to the “grace” he found in some of the sad and desolate landscape that became the main medicine of his own therapy. 

In Xu Peiwu’s “Alpa Diary”, the title being an homage to the camera he loves to use, although on the surface we are once again in the safe and familiar zone of documentary photography, which by definition can only record and describe reality that is visible and tangible, this essay we also called “Dragons, Horses, Spirits & Gods” constitutes an exploration of the unexplained meanings of life, of the invisible and the intangible, amidst the signs that appeared to him such as lilies dying in the drying pond, wild horses whispering in the woods, village people forming a slow-motion dragon dance, demigods revealed on the walls of hundred year-old haunted houses, spirits of carved stones on the beach looking out into the indistinct past… The whole series brings a new esthetic and a different vision to landscape photography. 

These are the new Shan Shui tableaux, which Peiwu has collected in a quest of over five years, that invite us to look deeper, and “to see” beyond the figurative and the apparent, we only need to follow the guiding lines and structures, and discover the carefully composed directional pathways. One of Peiwu’s earliest snapshots was this iconic image of a woman general in opera costume with her horse against rows of newly built luxury villas in the background. The coexistence of the profane with the sacred seems to be found everywhere if we know how to look for them. 

The dragin lizard

The series assembled this way was inspired by an idea we first discussed about during the 2005 Lianzhou Photo Festival, when we went photographing the Yao people in the country side. We chanced upon a noisy funeral of a King of the Yao’s, amidst non-stop thundering explosions from several kilometer-long lines of firecrackers. In the suffocating smoke and haze, an impressive crowd of Yao mourners dressed in their best costumes formed an eerily silent procession. This funeral parade just crossed our path barely five minutes after we attended a Yao wedding heavily laced with rice wine in a roadside village. The tragic followed the euphoric, Thanatos and Eros, by a flip of the coin. We felt however, that there was something beyond a simply National Geographic sort of coverage of ethnic tribal events… 

Guangzhou Panyu

The title “Dragons, Horses, Spirits and Gods” comes from a Chinese saying “Long Ma Jing Shen” meaning energy, dynamism, and high spirit. By breaking apart the four characters, we obtain the literal “Dragons, Horses, Spirits and Gods”; the plural in English allows widening the field of potentialities, as there are figurative “horses” and the secondary degree of “horses”. The concept serves as a pretext to decode a photographic work that would be at the same time pure essay of landscape photography or an exploration into the power of photography to carry and to reveal the immaterial and the metaphysical, without which life is meaningless. It also serves to solicit, as August Sander would have approved, our capacity to “see”, to “observe” and to “think”. Last but not least, this Alpa diary definitely contributes in its way to the foundation of a Chinese “Landscape Manual”. 

Lotus pool in Lianzhou - Guangdong province

Jean Loh 

Curator 

May 2010 Shanghai 

Claude Hudelot Margo RenisioBob Pledge (denim shirt) and Ms Tang the ballerina photographed by Marc Riboud in 1971

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Opening of Xu Peiwu show at Beaugeste Gallery