Pastel Suburbia Thursday October 20, 2005
Most famous and successful photographers have a recognised ‘style’, conferring on them a sense of artistic authorship that in cinema is referred to with the French term auteur. In the seminal book On Photography Susan Sontag referred to this, and it makes sense when you consider the enormous quantity of existing imagery in which most of it necessarily lacks distinction. A photograph is notably easy to create, millions of people do it, and it is correspondingly difficult to have power, influence and effect, in a vast sea of pictures.
I’ve sometimes considered my own work in relation to this, and how it may not have an obvious ‘style’. Certainly, the photos at my web site show a wide range of material, content and manner (this serves a purpose). My very favourite work is mountain photography, and if I were compelled to define my ‘style’ I’d say that’s where you find it. But I can’t spend all my time in the mountains and enjoy – and occasionally surprise myself with – radically different images, that achieve a different kind of beauty. However where I live, it’s very difficult to find photogenic potential. I visit one photoblog site authored by a man living in the heart of NYC and he goes out every day – every day – and finds something interesting and vibrant to photograph. I know, from experience, I could do the same thing if I lived in London – another major city teeming with diverse, dense, constantly changing interest. Manchester is dull, downbeat, and you cannot openly use a camera on the streets without arousing suspicion or even hostility. In London life is so manically fast you can literally point a camera at someone, they will notice you, and just walk by in the crowds without saying anything at all; in any case, there are probably a hundred tourists in the near vicinity with cameras, and everyone understands it’s what people do in such an exciting and colourful metropolis.
I took O Level Art at school (I think I got a B grade in the end), and recall one of my paintings of people on a bowling green. It had a particular style I find difficult to describe, although it could probably be done with reference to established artists. It was stylised just slightly towards comic book or children’s art, smooth rather than sharp. The colours were pastel and serene, with a limited palette like a summer’s evening when the sun is low in the sky. In terms of style – as opposed to content – someone like Edward Hopper is a reasonable comparison. I went to a London exhibition of Hopper in 2004 where the final and – they argued – summative painting of his work was his picture of an open window, featuring some of his interests like the relationship between interior and exterior, simple and compelling geometries, stillness, and a poetic and psychological rendering of light, as a subject in itself.
Photographically, unless you work very hard with stage-managed content (and some people do), you can only achieve this effect when the conditions are right – i.e., when the light is right.
I enjoy the following image, for these reasons: it is pastel, delicate, quiet, suggesting a serene moment discovered in a composition from a suburban and ostensibly banal environment. It reminds me a little of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet opening with a strange visual interpretation of ordinary suburban details: a fire engine, a white garden fence, made hyper-real like you are seeing them for the first time and endowed with extra-ordinary meaning. The Lynch cinema is psychological, and he also paints; Hopper was famously influenced by cinema, where for example his famous Nighthawks was much like a scene from film noir – which in turn, led film directors to emulate his style.
If I had a style, it would maybe be this one: if, that is, I had the environment and the opportunity to develop it. I understand that the light at America’s Cape Cod, which fascinated Hopper, is visually very interesting. I ‘caught’ this moment fortuitously, on an autumn afternoon when the colours were pastel and muted, creating a ‘flat’ effect you also see in the composition – no one part of the picture controls or dominates; the flash of autumnal red counterpoints the greater expanse of soft green, offering a visual highlight that balances, but does not dominate. The eye wanders around, finding no particular focus. It’s not meant to. In that respect, Lynch-like, it expresses the uniformity of suburbia reconfigured in a way that makes it interesting.