My first week as Artist-in-Residence at Trinity College, Bristol has passed in a flurry of grant applications, delivering books and studio, and finding the teaspoons. Getting to the post on time, clocking in with my PhD supervisor in Cheltenham, remembering that my long summer loans have expired on my books, talking to the tax-woman and forgetting to bring in that all-important accessory, the Church of England wall-calendar has left me dizzy. But all of that is circling the right space.
I’m looking at the Trinity College photo of 1977, in which I find my parents, Tom Gledhill and Serena Holroyd. In their late ’30s, they met here, and a year after this photo was taken, they married. Another year later and I was born in Bristol, which had become their UK base in the midst of inter-continental travels including Uganda, Nigeria, India, Malawi and Kenya. The hairs go up on the back of my neck with this photo. Initially because of the invisible relation happening between my parents, stretched across the space (which I’ve talked about before – in this case, mistakenly identifying them in the 1978 photo): my Dad is in the centre at the back, as if his is the crest on the lintel behind him, and my Mum is second from the far left, standing.
But there is more to this now that I’m here too, working. As I look, I see a geometry with my own personal triangulation of father, mother and me; and also now a geometry with people, building and environment. Though this is more a sedimentary layering than a triangulation: the people are the front line, the presenting face, the uniformity of purpose; the building is the constructed stage, the bearer of history and inscription; the environment is the wavering shimmering reflection in the windows of surrounding trees and sky. The picture turns a collective portrait scene into abstract strata – there is no side or back. But if the lack of depth or conversation is frustrating, it’s also the perfect backdrop for a new adventure. A new adventure into pictures and place. I like to think I might be a little bit like one of the group, a young man towards the top left, who resolutely turns his head to the side, avoiding the common gaze.
For the forthcoming Images, Icons and Idols conference at the University of Manchester, I hope to present a paper with the title and abstract below. Forming part of my doctoral research, this paper will contribute to a chapter on the iconic characteristics of the photograph, particularly as they relate to the interpretation of biblical texts:
Photographing Jesus: Truth, Typology and the Turin Shroud
The first photographs depicting Jesus in the nineteenth century were typically defined by fine art conventions relating to symbolism, dress, age and pose (Gabriel Harrison, Léon Bovier, Fred Holland Day among others). A relatively young medium, the interpretation of photography’s realism, to our modern eyes, is not convincingly suited to ideal representations of a religious or mythological nature. However, in the person of Jesus Christ, the combined aspects of an historical flesh-and-blood figure and an iconic, divine being receive a unique hermeneutical treatment in the form of photography. Taking the specific example of the Turin Shroud when it was first photographed in 1898, this paper will present the photographic aspects of its representation of the crucified body, and examine the visual interpretation by which these have become evidentially and ontologically ascribed to Christ. The extent of the denoted and the connoted photographic image (Roland Barthes) on the Shroud will be discussed with reference to, respectively, the physical record of truth (as it correlates to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ death) and the notion of the icon as a form of typology in reverse. With regard to the latter, the perceived presence of the real object of veneration is, I suggest, less the subject of discourses relating to material idolatry and instead a visual correspondence after-the-event to the textual pre-figurations of Isaiah 52-53.
I’m thinking about the phrase ‘making an entrance’ – I think my artwork here in Trinity College’s reception is introducing itself quite quietly, but hopefully so as to point out the process and the means, rather than as a showy full-stop.
Trinity itself is, after all, about the process and the means. The showy full-stop is God, and I don’t think anyone here has the visual, doctrinal or textual monopoly on describing who He is. I do, however, want to raise the curtain on what happens to people here, to their perceptions and to the reframing nature of faith.
These pieces were made in 2011, and were included in a Bristol exhibition called ‘Walking Through the Veil’. They are about transition – visually, from negative image to positive image, from forest as flattened pattern to 3D space. But also mystically, from self-involved relating to the world to spacious inter-relating. It’s the resonance of a entrance-way, which in a church’s structure is called the narthex, where you turn round to find yourself in a different type of space. A space that reframes you, rather more than you do it.
