- Venue
- Royal Academy of Arts (publisher)
- Location
This new book of photographs by Nicholas Sinclair brings together work produced in five European cities: Paris, Berlin, Palermo, Budapest and Istanbul. Each of Sinclair’s city-subjects elicits a distinct yet related variation on a theme of human-inflected surfaces – walls, tree-trunks, telephone booths – interpreted through a strategy of almost obsessive attentiveness. What Sinclair does with these subjects, and what he has done in much of his recent work, is to locate a visual motif that somehow stands in for the place in which he is photographing. This is not however the clichéd metonymy of an Eiffel Tower (= Paris), or a Reichstag (= Berlin), but a much more anonymous selection of raw material that reflects something of the étranger’s sense of displacement and unfamiliarity. Here, the smallest of details can seem a comfort – evidence of human intervention that, language notwithstanding, could really be anywhere. It is these apparently familiar details that we often seize upon when in uncharted surroundings, perhaps returning to them with relief or even affection, as we slowly begin to find our bearings. This approach has been used in two of Sinclair’s previous books, Berlin: Imagining the Tri Chord (2007), and Crossing the Water (2002). In the earlier of these, the technique of repetition seemed to reach a kind of expressive intensity, not by virtue of the abstract interlacing of lines created by the criss-cross patterns of branches that was the book’s leitmotif, but through the (literal) subject itself: the East Sussex lake edged with a tangle of trees that constituted a remembered childhood locale. Here the camera became a kind of prosthetic infiltrator, repeatedly stalking memory in order to resolve its fugitive image.
Repetition is a key aesthetic strategy in ‘Five Cities’ – as are symmetry, modularity, and progression. These are terms more readily associated with Minimalist sculpture’s bland uninflected surfaces than with representational photography, but Sinclair’s employment of these tropes is essential to the structural and conceptual nuancing of his subject matter. Firstly, the hesitant aspect of this repetitive procedure – photographing the same subject several times but with a subtly modified frame or range – challenges the time-honoured notion of the photograph as scientific fixer of optical reality. Like the Gaussian curve, in which the position of a star can only be determined in contingent fashion within an area of uncertainty, so Sinclair’s ‘scatter’ approach seems to tell us that no single image can quite encapsulate the reality in front of him. At the same time the parts-to-whole macro-logic of five photographs for each of the five cities seems almost to contradict this studiously empirical approach, creating a taut dialectical tension. It is here then that the structured, progressive/cumulative formal elements act as a temporal ‘grid’ as, turning the pages of the book, the viewer is introduced to the micro-subject of each city as a sequence of shifting, finely grained variations.
There is more to this act of multiple re-visiting however, than either a purely formal or gestalt intention: the key conceptual implication is that both surface-subjects and photographs are ‘works in progress’ (or in the case of the surfaces themselves – as Nicky Hamlyn puts it in his introductory essay – “works in process“). Graffiti, at least before it became a professionalized activity, can be seen to embody a space of collisions, elisions, meetings and near misses. Gauntlets are thrown down, only to be taken up and passed on, baton-like, months or even years later: ‘Killroy was here’ – ‘so was I’ – ‘everyone was here’ – ‘I wasn’t’, and so forth. It is this tension between language as mediator (of meaning) and material, between communication and inarticulacy, which provides a further dialectic permeating ‘Five Cities’. In her essay on the painter Cy Twombly, Rosalind Krauss highlights Twombly’s propensity, through his adoption of graffiti, for “operating within the field of the performative” in language. It was the philosopher of language J.L. Austin who identified the concept of performative utterances, or speech acts – the notion that speech can be a form of action (‘I promise’, ‘I arrest you’, and so on) – and Krauss adapts this linguistic formulation to fit a broader sense of the act of naming. With his scrawls, scribbles and inscriptions, Krauss suggests, Twombly is performing speech acts: “I mark you, I name you, I call you ‘painting'”. Graffiti – Twombly’s chosen ‘medium’ – similarly performs, and Krauss outlines its tripartite characteristics: as action (“I mark you, I cancel you”), as invasion or violation (“of a space that is not the markers own”), and as trace – or rather as a kind of conversion into a trace – from the “present tense of the performative into the past tense of the index”. If this last phrase suggests the mechanism of photography then this is unsurprising: Krauss uses the example of Roland Barthes in her essay on Twombly, and Barthes’ musings on the photographic image are too well known to require rehearsing here. Suffice to say that the transition, or conversion, from the “present tense of the performative into the past tense of the index” could equally be used to describe the activity of the (similarly invasive) photographer’s camera. Sinclair is aware of this doubling function, the necessity to fix over and over, if for no other reason than to illuminate the futility of the gesture. It might be argued that, unlike Twombly, it is not Sinclair who is doing the marking, that he is instead responding to ‘found’ marks and gestures: but this is somewhat to miss the point of how the camera itself is being utilized here, and it brings us full circle to the notion of the photographic city-subject. For, ultimately, what the photographer is seeking is to enter into a dialogue with (inscribed) surfaces as agents, themselves already mediated through social interaction. The photographer/camera therefore becomes a link in a chain, re-activating (and accounting for) a set of objects within a social network or nexus. This is the city not as symbol – cultural, economic or political, receding into an image of itself – but as site for meeting, interaction, and exchange; the ordinary stuff of urban encounter – the grubbing, skulking and foraging of quotidian existence.
What of the photographs themselves? In an introductory essay to ‘Five Cities’, filmmaker Nicky Hamlyn brilliantly dissects the formal constraints within which these images operate. Hamlyn draws attention to the framing strategies employed by Sinclair, in particular those apparent in the Istanbul sequence, in which a particular, cruciform configuration of letters forms the word ‘KILOT’, the camera ‘panning’ with each image to reveal a fresh composition that is contingent upon this enigmatic motto. In fact, in each of the five sequences of photographs Sinclair subtly foregrounds, through framing and proximity, the particular graphic, spatial, tonal or chromatic elements particular to the motif. So in the Paris pictures, the emphasis is on the cropping and orientation of the various signs – arrows, or the loops and lines of individual letters – within a flat chromatic field. The Berlin series conversely focuses on depth, or the implied depth of layered images (the kind of ‘shallow space’ that Greenberg thought was integral to the pictorial tension in Pollock’s paintings of the late 1940s), through a fortuitous overlaying of white – a cartoon face – over black and red, over grey. The crispness of the top, most recent layer contrasts with the fuzzy-edged, spray-painted lower stratum, creating a powerful, illusory depth-of-field effect that wittily mimics the camera’s own spatial constitution. Similarly, the choice of colour or black and white film is a strictly functional one, rather than the outcome of a fetishized or whimsical preference: the bas-relief effect of the Palermo tree-trunks casts them figurally as pale-toned effigies against an umbral ground; in the Budapest pictures the telephone booths are simultaneously black boxes, and 2-dimensional planes against which illuminated shapes – phonebooks, inscriptions, notices – are picked out. In both instances colour would be an irrelevance, and a distraction. In fact throughout the series technique remains resolutely pragmatic and un-showy, resulting in not simply a collection of images gathered from diverse sources, but a genuine photographic artefact in book-form.
