- Venue
- Photographers Gallery
- Location
- London
It is a short walk through Soho from the old location of the Photographers Gallery to the new one in Ramillies Street. Walking there with my daugther we re-assembled a mythical Soho built on the three generations of family stories that begin in the thirties when my father arrived from Portugal. The Gallery is currently showing ‘Soho Nights’ and ‘New Westerners’ by Katy Grannan. ‘Soho Nights’ was an absorbing exhibiton of black and white photos, some from Picture Post, of Soho life in the fifties and early sixties. As my daughter said – it looked like fun.
The exhibition upstairs was more of a challenge. Confonted by a series of highly posed and relentlessly artificial photographs of two elderly transexual women, I felt resentment. I felt tired of photographs where people ‘dress up’ and pretend to be other than themselves. Like the theatrical poster, you can see the make up and the frozen moment overloaded with significance.
The ‘New Westerners’ photographs are carefully constructed and a complete contrast to the documentary style of Soho Nights. In them the landscape of the west coast of America performs as scenery. The composition is meticulous and the light and colour beautiful. Time is suspended. As in a renaissance painting the foregrounds are set with delicate plants and flowers.
The middle-aged to elderly transexuals are costumed in the clothes of young women from the fifties and sixties and posed as if they are twenty. I have a photograph from the nineteen- twenties of my mother posing on the South Downs in just such a way as these men-turned women. People don’t pose that way today.
I ask myself if these scenes are directed by the photographer, the women as performers, or, are they representing themselves as they wish to be seen. In either case, why should they want to appear like this, mutton dressed as lamb, male as female, with their aged and lumpy bodies, coarse skin and hair, in white stockings and Wizard of Oz shoes?
Faced with such deliberate composition the viewer can only conclude that these are pictures of self-determination, about choosing identity, or as my daughter said, queerness. So the questions I am left with are about queerness and why some people choose to highlight rather than hide their uncertainty and otherness. Perhaps their compulsive candour is the inevitable obverse of our need to fix, identify and label each other.
