On Anatomy of an Institution and having my portrait taken by an aged camera.
This was not my first encounter with this camera. I first saw it several years ago when, some what neglected; it lifelessly occupied a corner of The Manchester Metropolitan University’s (MMU) photography department. I remember seeing it as a bizarre looking piece of furniture, a cross between an 19th century table and an accordion. Back then it was a mere curiosity, an ornamental relic and a taker-upper of valuable space.
On entering the Holden Gallery the 110 year old 12” x 12” camera is in the centre of the gallery being mechanically manhandled into position by its “restorers”, a term I use very lightly considering Dave Penny and Gavin Parry brought this behemoth back to life with black bin liners and gaffer tape. But its visual restoration, or lack of it, is not what is important: rather it is the restitution of the function it performs. And from the images lining the gallery walls it is obvious to see that these two photographers have accomplished that task.
Gavin Parry and Dave Penny using the 110-year-old camera.
When I take a seat and the lens is trained upon my face I feel compelled to sit motionless before its hard gaze and the thought crosses my mind that this machine could be seen as an analogy for photography: it mechanically serves a purpose and yet strangely we all seem to be serving the machine’s purpose. Penny and Parry rush around: loading the huge dark slides, ducking alternately under the large black cloth emerging with smirks of pleasure to crank handles or attend to the machine’s modern appendages of flash meter and flash units. And we, the sitters, also obey this… thing. We queue patiently to become the object of its stare. I watched a young woman sit before the camera, waiting patiently as the photographers dashed away to collect more dark-slides from the depths of the university. She sat there for ten minutes or more compartmentalised in front of the camera, almost motionless, unable to break free, until eventually they return and aid the machine in capturing her image. Only then does she return to the present, greeted excitedly by her friend who has stood not more than 10 feet away watching the operation. Obviously it takes time to create photographs using a large camera and seeing it in action serves to ‘scale-up’ the affect cameras have upon us, an observation that can go unnoticed in the micro act of the snap shot.
A sitter projected on the camera’s ground glass screen.
Parry and Penny’s Anatomy of an Institution is an alluring collection of images. Each large-scale photograph depicts an employee or student of MMU within the workplace; technicians in the photographic studio, a gallery technician, the Dean. Each sitter confronting the camera and hinting at a self-awareness of the role-play the camera demands. The immediate comparison that springs to mind is to the images produced by August Sander in the 1920’s (an observation that is confirmed by the text written by David Brittain), but rather than seek an objective physiognomic representation of the sitters these portraits do something more profound. Visually they are fascinating: the shallow depth of field isolates the subject and is uncompromising in its control over where they eye is drawn; the narrow focus acutely separates the sitter from their environment. Environment was integral to Sander’s work The Face of Our Time and so too is it here. But where Sander’s subjects were understood in context to their environment: their physiognomy presented as inseparable from their work, Parry and Penny’s photographs separate the subject: the sitter is elevated beyond the place within the institution, we can see them as individuals. This sense is heightened by the objects within the environment, the dated machinery: an overhead projector, the draws of type blocks or the stacks of CRT monitors, all a little out of kilter to our current position in modernity. We know these are recent photographs, but the subjects are thrown back in time by their surroundings, a notion compounded by the aesthetic of the film stock and the use of a plate camera. The sitter is held captive by the photograph and simultaneously we can see they unconsciously oppose the subjectivity placed upon them. The subjects of these images have a greater self-awareness than Sanders’ subjects and they subtly express this. (Hardly surprising considering Parry and Penny’s subjects have probably, like most of us, been photographed considerably more than Sanders’ subjects ever were).
An Anatomy of an Institution portrait on display.
I find these images beautiful, not just because of their immediate appearance, rather because they are considered and have an unpretentious depth delivered through the vocabulary of portraiture. There is an argument within these images. Without too much deliberation this argument could be seen as a comment on the institution, a sign of its fatigue and its reluctantly institutionalised workers all neatly wrapped up in a microcosm delivered by an aged camera, but this would be crude and miss the profundity of these images. What this body of work does is expose the mimetic qualities at the heart of the genre of portraiture and lays them assuredly at the foot of the camera. An argument that has been exposed is between the notion of photographic objectivity (as was central to the portraiture of Sander) and the mimicry of modes of representation involved in the photographic portrait genre. Sanders’ work The Face of Our Time presents the camera as being a scientific, objective witness whereas An Anatomy of an Institution reveals the camera’s distortion of its subject through its paradoxical reliance on the history of portraiture. This is not to say that these images directly comment on Sander’s photographs, moreover I believe they could be seen as a comment on photographic portraiture.
This ailing, resurrected beast, which has been nurtured back into life by Parry and Penny and turned on the institution of Manchester Metropolitan University with considerable skill and competence, lets us glimpse under the vale of photographic portraiture. These photographers have cajoled this powerful, mesmerising camera into revealing portraiture’s foible: that portraiture may only reveal to us what it has revealed before. And in doing so they have exposed the anatomy of an institution, but not necessarily the institution that is in front of the lens.
Anatomy of an Institution, an exhibition.
On Anatomy of an Institution and having my portrait taken by an aged camera.
This was not my first encounter with this camera. I first saw it several years ago when, some what neglected; it lifelessly occupied a corner of The Manchester Metropolitan University’s (MMU) photography department. I remember seeing it as a bizarre looking piece of furniture, a cross between an 19th century table and an accordion. Back then it was a mere curiosity, an ornamental relic and a taker-upper of valuable space.
On entering the Holden Gallery the 110 year old 12” x 12” camera is in the centre of the gallery being mechanically manhandled into position by its “restorers”, a term I use very lightly considering Dave Penny and Gavin Parry brought this behemoth back to life with black bin liners and gaffer tape. But its visual restoration, or lack of it, is not what is important: rather it is the restitution of the function it performs. And from the images lining the gallery walls it is obvious to see that these two photographers have accomplished that task.
Gavin Parry and Dave Penny using the 110-year-old camera.
When I take a seat and the lens is trained upon my face I feel compelled to sit motionless before its hard gaze and the thought crosses my mind that this machine could be seen as an analogy for photography: it mechanically serves a purpose and yet strangely we all seem to be serving the machine’s purpose. Penny and Parry rush around: loading the huge dark slides, ducking alternately under the large black cloth emerging with smirks of pleasure to crank handles or attend to the machine’s modern appendages of flash meter and flash units. And we, the sitters, also obey this… thing. We queue patiently to become the object of its stare. I watched a young woman sit before the camera, waiting patiently as the photographers dashed away to collect more dark-slides from the depths of the university. She sat there for ten minutes or more compartmentalised in front of the camera, almost motionless, unable to break free, until eventually they return and aid the machine in capturing her image. Only then does she return to the present, greeted excitedly by her friend who has stood not more than 10 feet away watching the operation. Obviously it takes time to create photographs using a large camera and seeing it in action serves to ‘scale-up’ the affect cameras have upon us, an observation that can go unnoticed in the micro act of the snap shot.
A sitter projected on the camera’s ground glass screen.
Parry and Penny’s Anatomy of an Institution is an alluring collection of images. Each large-scale photograph depicts an employee or student of MMU within the workplace; technicians in the photographic studio, a gallery technician, the Dean. Each sitter confronting the camera and hinting at a self-awareness of the role-play the camera demands. The immediate comparison that springs to mind is to the images produced by August Sander in the 1920’s (an observation that is confirmed by the text written by David Brittain), but rather than seek an objective physiognomic representation of the sitters these portraits do something more profound. Visually they are fascinating: the shallow depth of field isolates the subject and is uncompromising in its control over where they eye is drawn; the narrow focus acutely separates the sitter from their environment. Environment was integral to Sander’s work The Face of Our Time and so too is it here. But where Sander’s subjects were understood in context to their environment: their physiognomy presented as inseparable from their work, Parry and Penny’s photographs separate the subject: the sitter is elevated beyond the place within the institution, we can see them as individuals. This sense is heightened by the objects within the environment, the dated machinery: an overhead projector, the draws of type blocks or the stacks of CRT monitors, all a little out of kilter to our current position in modernity. We know these are recent photographs, but the subjects are thrown back in time by their surroundings, a notion compounded by the aesthetic of the film stock and the use of a plate camera. The sitter is held captive by the photograph and simultaneously we can see they unconsciously oppose the subjectivity placed upon them. The subjects of these images have a greater self-awareness than Sanders’ subjects and they subtly express this. (Hardly surprising considering Parry and Penny’s subjects have probably, like most of us, been photographed considerably more than Sanders’ subjects ever were).
An Anatomy of an Institution portrait on display.
I find these images beautiful, not just because of their immediate appearance, rather because they are considered and have an unpretentious depth delivered through the vocabulary of portraiture. There is an argument within these images. Without too much deliberation this argument could be seen as a comment on the institution, a sign of its fatigue and its reluctantly institutionalised workers all neatly wrapped up in a microcosm delivered by an aged camera, but this would be crude and miss the profundity of these images. What this body of work does is expose the mimetic qualities at the heart of the genre of portraiture and lays them assuredly at the foot of the camera. An argument that has been exposed is between the notion of photographic objectivity (as was central to the portraiture of Sander) and the mimicry of modes of representation involved in the photographic portrait genre. Sanders’ work The Face of Our Time presents the camera as being a scientific, objective witness whereas An Anatomy of an Institution reveals the camera’s distortion of its subject through its paradoxical reliance on the history of portraiture. This is not to say that these images directly comment on Sander’s photographs, moreover I believe they could be seen as a comment on photographic portraiture.
This ailing, resurrected beast, which has been nurtured back into life by Parry and Penny and turned on the institution of Manchester Metropolitan University with considerable skill and competence, lets us glimpse under the vale of photographic portraiture. These photographers have cajoled this powerful, mesmerising camera into revealing portraiture’s foible: that portraiture may only reveal to us what it has revealed before. And in doing so they have exposed the anatomy of an institution, but not necessarily the institution that is in front of the lens.
Links:
Anatomy of an Institution
Anatomy Projects
Lewis Williams, Dec 2010
And here’s the portrait i had taken when i went to visit the exhibition:
copyright : Gavin Parry /Dave Penny 2010
Filed Under: Exhibitions