Is Guy Bourdin redeemable?

(photos in the post below)

The title of this post may seem surprising to some. Why should the late, great, Guy Bourdin need redeeming? It feels like of late, it's become very, very unfashionable to talk about Bourdin in terms of his (whisper it) misogyny. Even The Guardian, in their recent potted biography of Guy(www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/mar/21/guy-bourdin-when-sky-fell), was quick to play up his genius and play down his woman-hating, portraying him as an eccentric artiste, and the odd ways he directed his female models as endearing little quirks. Perhaps this has something to do with his death - it's difficult to speak ill of the dead, especially when they're so talented, or maybe because of the recent film about him, When the Sky Fell Down: The Myth of Guy Bourdin. Bourdin is so very chic at the moment. And it's difficult to level serious charges at the chic, for they can always shrug off their work as satire or parody or a challenge to the viewer. Biographies of Bourdin make for unsettling reading. He was a man who lived Freud writ large: who went for red-haired women that reminded him of his mother, whose first wife killed herself and whose suicide he went on to re-stage in fashion shoots. The way he treated the models was notably horrible: 'On one occasion Bourdin wanted to cover the pale bodies of two models in tiny black pearls. He had his assistants cover the models in glue and attach the pearls. The layer of glue interfered with the skin's ability to regulate temperature and exchange oxygen; both models passed out. As his assistants hurried to remove the pearls and the glue, Bourdin is reported to have said "Oh, it would be beautiful to photograph them dead in bed."' (www.utata.org/salon/37437.php Sunday Salon). But it never seems quite fair to assess an artist via their life, rather than their work, so, by all means, type "Guy Bourdin" and "models" into google, and read on at your leisure. Because, it's really the work itself, isn't it, which is so objectionable. Quite possibly because it's so seductive - the bright colours, the glossy surfaces that coax you into these photographs, that wear down your shock at just how pretty these images of violence are.

From Edgar Allen Poe to Alfred Hitchcock to David Lynch, one image endures. Why are dead/wounded/vulnerable women always, always in style? Comparisons are always drawn between Bourdin and Helmut Newton. But these comparisons don't seem very fair. The argument goes, both photographers introduce sordid reality into the world of fashion. But the comparison doesn't really follow. As you can see from the photo on the left, while Newton's images are heavily sexual and often sadomasochistic, the similarities stop at the eyes of the women. Newton's women either gaze off disdainfully into the middle distance, as if too bored by the viewer to give them the time of day, or stare back unflinchingly. These images are sexual, but the power lies with the women - they've got a sort of tigress like quality. In Bourdin's work, when you can see the eyes, mostly they're averted, not disdainfully, but submissively, geisha-like. It seems interesting that more often that not in Bourdin's work you can't see the eyes of the models because their heads have been cut out of the shot, or they've been trussed up in harnesses or contorted painfully so all you can see are pert bottoms or stockinged legs (though Newton, admittedly, likes a good stockinged leg shot, himself) or swan necks as a red-haired belle dies gently, prettily in a bathtub.

I suppose the question is, can we enjoy Bourdin's work? For me, the problem of Bourdin is the problem you have when you crack open a Bukowski novel, or the latest Bret Easton Ellis. How far do they have to push you before you finally concede, shutting the book, leaving the gallery, the way they act towards women makes me queasy? Especially with Bret Easton Ellis, it's started to feel that what was once one disturbing element amongst many (gang violence, numbness, consumerism) has become the element of a Bret Easton Ellis novel, the star attraction. His books are now marketed accordingly (see, if you have a strong stomach, http://www.thedevilinyou.com/). The worst of Bourdin is his legacy in the fashion industry. Legions of fashion photographers have dumbed-down his work, featuring less of his brilliance and more of the sex. Obviously, there was the controversial Opium ad, with Sophie Dahl, as pale and copper-haired as any of Bourdin's women, naked and nubile and drugged in high heels. But more mundanely, the hundreds of American Apparel ads of women bent over, particularly the one which caused so much uproar when on a billboard in Times Square - I can't find an image for it online, but it was a girl bending over in nothing but tights, something which seems the mirror image (minus the great use of colour)of a Bourdin photo. You can't help but wish that Helmut Newton, as revered and respected as he is in the art world, had had a more enduring effect on mainstream fashion photography. A legion of strong, amazonian, voluptuous women, even if they were in stirrups, would feel like a breath of fresh air after all these photos of broken, vulnerable women.

Eleanor Antin photos part 2: Helen of Troy, Pompeii, Nurse

How do I love thee, Eleanor Antin? Let me count the ways...

Eleanor Antin is all sorts of exciting. She's interested in storytelling, in blurring lines between history and the present and fiction and reality; in questions of identity and gender. Which all sounds pretty hifalutin, but what I guess it all boils down to, is that her photos are never just photos, they've always got some killer hook behind them. So, for example, my favourite ever Antin photos, 100 Boots: she takes 100 pairs of wellies and photos them in different parts of Southern California. In front of churches, in military formation standing one in front of another over mountain tops, crowding round dance floors googling at an exotically-clad dancer. But that's not hooky enough, so she makes the photos into postcards and sends them off to the great and good: artistes, dancers, libraries, wherever(ok, not wherever, exactly, not Domino's Pizzas or anything, but you get the picture), now and again over a two year or so period, then (then!) the boots, having taken Southern California, storm New York, becoming the stars of the show at MOMA for a few months where they hide in a crash pad and you can only see them through a peephole.

I love this. I used to live in Barcelona, right near MACBA (which is their modern art gallery). I'm a bit weak at the knees for MACBA. I should come clean: I wasn't always. The first time I saw it the building made me feel a bit headachey. It's designed by Richard Meier and it looks like an enormous cartoon laboratory from 2000 lightyears into the future. But it works, somehow. When you get in there you feel very tranquil and spacey and light, so it got so as whenever I needed cheering up I'd swing by. I guess what I find sort of endearing about MACBA is that it doesn't feel the need to change the art a lot. I had a year long membership there and there were maybe three, four different exhibitions tops. But it's sort of nice, because you get to feel pretty affectionate towards art in a way you probably wouldn't in some slick London gallery. Like familiar faces on the street. Yeah, okay, enough lyricising.

So, obviously, as you might have guessed, some of the shots from 100 Boots were there. And they were my favourite, I suppose, because you've got this huge idea of the epic journey, of these boots taking two years to go from Southern California to New York, and getting posted all over the country, like less ambitious latter-day Odysseuses, but at the same time the boots, often as not, look either forlorn or absurd, like a gaggle of women at a hen party. Also, I know this isn't a particularly intellectual judgement to make upon them, but I mean, it's so fucking cute, somehow. I'm not sure how Antin's managed to make inanimate objects adorable, but she definitely does. So that for me, is the immediate appeal. I'm less knowledgeable about this second set of photos I should talk about. I'm not entirely sure whether her Helen of Troy ones were part of her Last Days of Pompeii exhibition, but I'm going to group them together, because what she does the same sort of thing in both sets of photos (which I'm afraid will be posted separately, above, because blogger hates me ramming huge numbers of photos down its throat at once) , which is reconstructing the ancient world in a chintzy nineteen century salon painting style, while popping in a few surprising modern elements. So the Helen of Troy ones are great. She styles Helen of Troy out like she's some bubblegum popping Valley Girl, and puts her beside all these muscled hunks who look authentically classical and are just splayed across this harsh rocky landscape, contorted in pain. What's brilliant is she's got Helen with a friend looking at all these men in complete disgust, as if (to paraphrase Antin) she finds all their idealistic would-be hero violence just absurd. And, with the Pompeii ones, better to just quote Antin, as she's far more eloquent than I could ever be on the subject:

"Pompeii, especially, with its grand murals and its flourishing gardens haunted by the dark shadow of Vesuvius, has always suggested uncomfortable parallels with our contemporary world, especially here in Southern California, where the sunlit life also turns out to have dark shadows in which failure and death lurk at the edge of consciousness. Now in these times, we have even closer parallels with those ancient, beautiful, affluent people living the good life on the verge of annihilation."

Obviously, this isn't the A-Z of Antin's photos. She does some very interesting stuff where she assumes the identity of a nurse, Eleanor Nightingale and takes sepia-tinged photos of her in the Crimean War, mopping the soldiers' wounds and so on. And there's also this amazing set of photos she takes of her naked body over a 36 day period where she's on a diet, about the way her body grows closer and closer to classical sculpture. But I mean, if I went into that, where would I ever end? Eleanor Antin is ridiculously prolific, and ridiculously interesting, and it just never ends. So, that's it for today!

summer/photos/procrastination

Here's the plan.
By the end of the summer, fifty mini-essays on fifty different photographers.

Why? Because, just recently, it feels like photography's moment's passed a bit. Maybe it was when they started selling lomo cameras in Urban Outfitters. Maybe it was when those groovy iPhone people brought in the hipstamatic app to make all your handheld drunk night out photos you took post-drunk chips pre- the bus home dreamy and sun-lit and just swimming with nostalgia. Maybe it was when Vice magazine started publishing Ryan McGinley photos in a way that made it seem like Vice was the chicken that hatched the Ryan McGinley "hedonism! drugs! skateboarders!" thing rather than vice (HA) versa. Suddenly photography feels more like a gimmick than anything else.
And, well, why let that happen?

Listen: I know if this was going to be encylopaedic, and authorative, I'd start with August Sander or someone. Diane Arbus, maybe. But I'm afraid this is going to be a little bit muddled, and not very coherent. So I'm going to be perverse, and start with someone who's more famous for art than for photography.

So, tomorrow let's start with Eleanor Antin. Because, y'know, she's brilliant and playful and everything, and probably not as well known as she should be.