Masquerades. Exercise 2

Recreate a childhood memory in a photograph.

Possibilities:-

1. The house I was born in. Huge ox eye daisies growing over the front wall. The rag and bone man’s horse eating the flowers with commentary.
   Picture of horse and cart at Beamish Open Air Museum perhaps. It’s not far from here.
2. Taking my younger brother to school on his first day. He is only 18 months younger than me.
   Picture of grandchild in school uniform – with commentary.
3. The smell and taste of my yellow table at my primary school in December 1952 during afternoon nap time.
   Yellow square – with commentary.
4. The first time I stood on top of a mountain – Barbon Fell September 1963.
   Picture taken from the top of Barbon Fell from my archive with – commentary.
5. Wearing my Dad’s broken watch to school and playing with it all to learn to tell the time.
   A broken watch if I can find one in the market.
6. Sitting quietly all day one Saturday and Reading The Swiss Family Robinson from cover to cover.
   An armchair
7. Playing with my penknife and carving bits of wood.
8. The first time I ate a banana.
9. The end of sweet rationing in 1953 and Mum giving each of us a caramel as we went out to school in the morning.
10. Watching my parents drive away leaving me at the boarding school for the first time, age 13. I’d had cider with my lunch and I was not entirely sober.

Final choice:

My old penknife.

I don’t know where this knife came from. Perhaps I saw it in a drawer and decided to adopt it. It is very sharp indeed. I don’t think my parents knew I had it or, if they did, they thought I was sensible enough to have it. I never cut myself with it.
Knives were strictly forbidden at my boarding school but I managed to keep this knife with me all the time I was there. Keeping such a thing secret was a victory over a system that I hated. At least in this one small case I was winning.
M says it represents some kind of craft work while I just think of it as messing about with a forbidden knife and getting one over on authority.

Masquerades. Exercise 1

1. Is there any sense in which Lee’s work could be considered voyeuristic or even exploitative? Is she commenting on her own identity, the group identity of the people she photographs or both?

The question of capturing one’s essence in a photograph was thoroughly explored in Italo Calvino’s short story ‘Adventures of a Photographer’ in 1958. His protagonist, Antonino, wanted to discover the essence of Bice, his model, and to capture it in a photograph. He wanted to see what were the traits that defined her true character. He used an antique box camera with a black cloth and ground glass screen. (Lee typically used a small snapshot film camera) He could find no answer to his question, “What drives you two girls to cut from the mobile continuum of your day these temporal slices, the thickness of a second?” (1) Even when she was naked and even when they became lovers he could not capture the essence of who she was. I think the clue lies in his question – temporal slices cut from the mobile continuum of time. He already knew that everything changes and that in the end he was on a wild goose chase. Lee’s images admit and rejoice in the impossibility of capturing the self in a photograph.

Her pictures show someone who is completely mutable and undefined yet whose character is revealed. She is confident, brave, adventurous, possibly opinionated. Of course this cannot be a complete picture. After all, if we are capable of surprising ourselves whom we assume to know inside out, how can we know another person. Lee explores “the fluidity of individual and group identities.” (2)

Assuming that Lee involves her people in the process and that they understand what she’s doing, she is not exploiting them. She is, however, inviting us to see and perhaps be involved in stereotyping the various groups – this is me as an x, this is me and a y. She presents herself as the opposite of naked.(3) When she does appear naked she is still in disguise, acting a part. Berger’s comment on nakedness only applies to a subset of nudes such as Brotherus’ and Woodman’s images of themselves (and I’m not very sure of that).

2. Would you agree to Morrissey’s request if you were a day on the beach with your family? if not, why not?

The women replaced by Morrissey in her pictures are asked to become the photographer as she takes on their identities. It sounds like fun if you’re up for it. The most important part of each image is unseen: it is the discussion and collaboration between the photographer and her subjects. All that process is hidden from us. All we have is the consequence and the guess at how many people refused her request before she was successful. Are these families complete strangers to her, I wonder. Whatever, people agree to her becoming a kind of cuckoo in their nests.

I would be strongly tempted to go along with her project and then dine out on the experience.

3. In her series ‘Seven Years’ she is more herself but she shifts her age, her gender, her place in the family so much that she is continually in camouflage, hiding in plain sight. We see her and still wonder who she is at the same time. “Morrissey encourages us to read her photographs. August 8th 1982 is every family photograph that makes us cringe. It is the picture we did not want taken and that we most want to lose behind the sofa, but that appears at the most inopportune moments. If it is a poem its subject is adolescence and it perfectly epitomises the uncomfortable emergence of nascent sexuality.” (4) The more she reveals of herself the harder she is to see.

 

(1) http://beauty.gmu.edu/AVT459/AVT459-001/Calvino.pdf

(2) https://nmwa.org/explore/artist-profiles/nikki-s-lee

(3) “to be naked is to be without disguise” Berger, J, (2008) Ways of Seeing 2nd ed. London: Penguin Books

(4) Camilla Brown in  www.trishmorrissey.com/articles/essays/portfolio-2010.html