Photography & Me - a personal statement

                  A young person’s profession, photography is used to perpetuate superficial
ideas about beauty, celebrity or fashion and to ‘document’ aspects of our social life in ways
that often seem to intrude into people’s private lives. It is an unsatisfactory
means of truly personal expression and an art only in the sense of requiring practised skill.
The medium was at its most pivotal in our society between the 1930s and ’50s,
when it provided a magazine reading public in Europe and America with essentially humanist,
documentary images of the plight of other people, particularly the poor - a role that
was taken over by television in the 1960s. Photographs continued to be used by newspapers
and the more celebrity, fashion and consumer fixated magazines while, as a ‘serious’ medium,
it was taken up, often for its amateurish qualities, by the relatively more peripheral if equally
fashion conscious art world.

                  Photographs of all kinds continued to be valued as records of social history
but, as Roland Barthes famously pointed out are ‘messages without a code’. Only
dealing in appearances and without much intrinsic beauty of their own, they can generate a powerful
and sometimes nostalgic fascination as well as excite arousal or prejudice and provoke either
envy or that moral indignation felt about the suffering of others. Documentary photographs, though,
are not seen as the product of a human mind but only as having been ‘taken’ from real life
and cannot express, other than implicitly, the photographer’s intentions - why they were taken.
They are not understood as complex accounts of the human condition but, at their best,
can reveal beauty and the profound dignity that some people emanate. Beyond this, photographs
only carry ideas contained within their content or context.

                  Since the 1960s, many art-conscious but still essentially documentary photographers
reacted against the somewhat romantic tradition of photo-journalism and took a more
hard-nosed approach to their work. As with some of the films of Mike Leigh, they chose subjects
that could be made to look ridiculous in ways that failed to invite any more balanced
understanding of the situation shown. Other photographers, accepting the belief that anything
exhibited by anyone calling themselves an artist somehow became ‘art’, tried to avoid social
significance altogether, preferring subjects that were irrelevant but could be depicted stylishly
and sold for a higher price. Photography, though, had neither the aesthetic range nor the expressive
power to carry such emptiness and so, as Thatcherism began to change our society and the political
promises of hope were replaced by invitations to greed and fear, so empty pictures or those that
made fun of their often hapless subjects - the lowest form of photographic wit, became fashionable.

                  I was a professional photo-journalist in London during the 1960s and ’70s when I also
worked on many personal projects. These resulted in my putting together sequences of photographs
taken at different times and in different places that I hoped would communicate certain
beliefs and intentions in terms of a common, if more abstract significance that I saw in the pictures,
without the use of captions. The problem was, as John Berger pointed out in his introduction
to my book “How We Are”, that “people are unused to reading photographs in this way” - in fact, few
seem to expect to find any ‘meaning’ in photographs at all.

                  After moving to Lincolnshire in 1979, I spent three years photographing the village
in which I lived and produced the most straight-forwardly ‘documentary’ project of my
career. I also re-edited much of my early work and put together a series of shorter, simpler
sequences but, when I had exhausted these themes and had nothing more that I wanted
to photograph, I turned my attention to writing. This involved working on a form of poetry
through which I could explore what was inside my head rather than in the world outside
with metaphors, some of which I later tried to illustrate with photographs, now in colour, and
used with the verse in sequences that were called ‘narratives with photographs’.

 

Euan Duff, April 2007.