In the middle of the twentieth century
there was a lack of pretense to 'artmaking' in the work of the commercial
portrait photographer. As Seydou Keita
observed simply When you are a
photographer, you always have to come up with ideas to
please the customer…You try to obtain the best pose, the
most advantageous profile.... In retrospect the workaday
realities of the professional portrait photographer - a focus
on documentation and care in composition - combined
with traces of social context can result in a compelling
beauty, drawing on both nostalgia and a fascinating though
sometimes disturbing exoticism.
Seydou Keita and Mike Disfarmer, two working photographers on opposite sides of the globe, maintained commercial studios rooted in their own communities; Keita working
in Bamako, Mali through the 1950s, and Disfarmer in Heber
Springs, Arkansas through the 1940's. Self-employed as
portrait photographers, over the decades each created a
document of place - an anthropology that emerges through
a study of collected identities. Although their work was
almost entirely commissioned, both photographers maintained an archive of their images. Disfarmer's work was
recovered in the seventies and Keita's in the early nineties.
Interesting issues lie in the contrast between these two
bodies of newly discovered work. Particularly when their re-examination sets both up as other, most significantly
in a contemporary timeframe, but also to audiences for
gallery presentations of photography - mostly a white,
western, affluent consumer class. Set side by side the work
of these two photographers upends conventional western
notions of health, wealth and individuality. The third
world is opulent in its contrasts of rich textures, prints and
the display of consumer articles. By contrast, the first
world is starkly represented by the obvious struggle
betrayed in the sitter's faces and hands, and by 'good'
clothing that obviously shares duties between work and
church, the only outlets for social engagement in the dry
Cleburne County in northern Arkansas. Fresh out of the
Depression and into World War II, the people of Heber
Springs are stern and subdued while Bamakois celebrate
their position of privilege and their modernity in a centre of
colonial power.
The honesty that the sitters bring to these works, as they
present their closest relationships for documentation by the
camera is at once heartwarming and disturbing. Family
groups, close friends, newly-weds, are photographed hand
in hand, hugging, arms casually slipped around waists. The
posed embrace, at once awkward and intimate, represented
so frequently by both photographers is disarming from a
contemporary perspective. Viewing the work of these two
photographers, there is an odd sense of intrusion: a sense
that the sitters are completely unaware that this work
would ever find a larger audience. These are intimate
images intended for an audience of intimates. This quality
seems lost in contemporary portrait photography. A studio
portrait is today assumed to be for broader consumption,
and that change in perceived audience
impacts tremendously on how a
media-aware sitter presents him/herself.
Studio portraits of this character were
uniquely available to the time and
place represented by these photographers. Both affordable and accessible,
the studio portrait touched a large
cross section of people. In spite of the
availability of cameras such as the
Brownie, equipment and processing
would not have been as democratically available as the studio portrait in geographically isolated communities such as
Bamako or Heber Springs. This combination of forces could
enable a discrete organizing vision, like Keita or Disfarmer -
the photographer - to create a social document, defining
the picture of a people.
These images are rendered social documents b virtue of their collection within the context of an art gallery. Their representaion here shifts the meaning awa from their original role as personal to one that is public and accordingly subject to both scrutiny and a kind of cliched cultural
tourism. While complicit in the colonialization of these
objects, it is important to take care to consider the context
of their production.
On balance the work of these two artists provides a meaningful glimpse into another time and place. At the same
time it challenges conventional understanding of relative
cosmopolitanism in the middle of the century. The opportunity to recognize a more nuanced history through these
images may well forgive their being thrust onto this stage.
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