Pictures of you

What a most interesting encounter it must have been for two legends of the "underbelly": international art star Nan Goldin and local showbiz villain Ben David. The two met in 1992 when the artist-photographer tagged along with German filmmaker Jurgen Bruning, who came over to the Philippines to shoot a film entitled Maybe I Can Give You Sex. Goldin took pictures of the drag queens performing at Ben David’s Monokel Club as part of her eagerly anticipated second book, The Other Side, her follow-up to the much renowned slide show Ballad of a Sexual Dependency. Goldin’s photographs are candid, brutal and heartbreakingly tender. According to Susan Sontag, Nan Goldin’s photographs "combat moralistic bullshit." Her images possess the technical crudeness of everyday snapshots: invariable views of people, made at eye level, with the subject almost always in the middle or intimate distance and in natural or available light. But it is precisely because of such informal marginalia that her snapshots manifest an extraordinary beauty, complexity and humanity that cannot be matched by fancy cameras, zoom lenses and motor drives alone. Goldin’s drive is unique. It’s from the gut. It’s art.

The snapshot is her most ideal medium. "It is the closest thing to love."

Her loves in the pictures are friends, lovers and acquaintances – mostly outcasts of society, but whom she fondly refers to as her "re-created family." I hope that Ben David, who is yet another dead, stellar outcast in the local showbiz constellation, is remembered in pictures by his "other" family as a good man, and not a scoundrel like the characters he portrayed in the movies. If Nan Goldin unwittingly killed the snapshot by overexposing its naive and raw charm to the art, fashion and advertising worlds, the snapshot’s worldview – its snapshot aesthetic – continues to relive and resurrect all our distant beloveds into a singular picture of Yous (pronounced hues), the Monokel landlord included.

The Cure’s best album, "Disintegration," has one song that Nan Goldin, Roland Barthes or Marguerite Duras would have loved, Pictures of You. Similar odes to beauty, memory and loss are expressed in the snapshots of Larry Clark, Wolfgang Tillmans and Ryan McGinley, as well as in snapshot-inspired movies like John Water’s Pecker, Bruce Weber’s Chopsuey, and some young guy’s amateur iMovie opus Tarnation. Goldin has even inspired the likes of David Rimanelli to give a class assignment called "Make Your Own Nan Goldin," and Claire from the TV series Six Feet Under is a self-avowed fan and fictional heiress to the throne. They didn’t shoot with a voyeuristic gaze; they were all part of the mis-en-scene and the subjects’ lives that they were trying to capture.

In the Philippines, I am particularly fond of Kidlat Tahimik and Khavn dela Cruz’s poignant and absurdist video diaries, as much as the zany point-and-shoot 4R photos of Paolo Raymundo and the conceptually sublime pictures of Ringo Bunoan. For her ambitious project It’s Morning, Where Are You? 1999-2000, Bunoan took a photograph of each waking moment for an entire year. Her hazy, dark-lit and enigmatically banal images attempted to reveal the unutterable force that is the everyday personal. Recently I heeded a friend’s recommendation and checked two amazing photo blog sites: Mike Epstein’s www.satanslaundromat.com and Eliot Shepard’s www.slower.net. The future of the snapshot looks good.

Marguerite Duras was not an American filmmaker, a Filipino photographer or an adolescent photo blogger, but a French writer who has worked in the snapshot idiom via literature in The Lover, and a frequent sparring partner-in-print of fellow Frenchman Roland Barthes, who also was not a photographer but a philosopher. A consummate mythologist of modernity, Barthes read movies, icons, television and popular culture as "texts," analyzing their syntax and interpreting their signs. But faced with a photograph of his mother who had long since passed away, his semiotics turned into nostalgia. In the influential book Camera Lucida, Barthes confessed that "as Spectator I was interested in Photography only for ‘sentimental’ reasons; I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think."

Snap. Shot. Words that wound. Snapshots wound. Its photo paper, cuts. Both the image and its beholder bleed.

While a snapshot may act as a prophylactic against loss, a paper cut is a badge of courage for remembering (and holding on to) that loss.

One lost snapshot is the Polaroid photograph. A casualty of global communication and digital photography, it locally got resuscitated through a photo installation currently on view at Lumiere Gallery in Makati. Run by Sotheby’s-trained Rina Adapon and six other partners, including photographer Neal Oshima, Lumiere was founded in 2003 to showcase contemporary work with a focus on new media, digital art and photography.

PHILIPPINE STAR: When asked, a lot of people would probably point to classical portraiture, landscape and still-life as the valid examples of art photography. To some, even, computer art and fashion photography. So, why an exhibition of everyday Polaroids in your gallery?

Rina Adapon: I will paraphrase the introduction I wrote for the show: the inspiration behind the Polaroid Revisited show was a reaction to the omnipresence of digital photography and printing that we see in art exhibitions. Recognizing that much of the appeal of digital is the ease in use, we wanted to remind our audience that the Polaroid came first with instant pictures without sacrificing quality, though admittedly, it was never considered inexpensive. We also wanted to showcase the variety of images that Polaroid technology produces.

One could say that the Polaroid photograph is both a picture and an object. The image that it captures and churns out may appear mundane and the process, quick and casual, but the fact that there is no negative, film or digital chip that enables duplication makes the snapshot a unique object, literally a one-off. Does this hold a special appeal to the one who takes the image, and to the one who holds it? Or is the homemade magic incidental, its authenticity an illusion?

I believe that this uniqueness definitely has a large impact on how the Polaroid is perceived. Again, I will borrow from the intro panel: part of the Polaroid’s charm is that each photograph is distinct and can never be re-produced. Each print, irreversible. Unlike digital images where one can have illimitable mutations and an infinite number printed, each one being an exact replica – a clone, as it were.

What were the motivations for mounting such a show and the concerns that you wanted to address? How did you choose the artists and images to be displayed? What made you decide to weave the different Polaroids together into a single mobile-like structure?

We wanted to approach the Polaroid in a fun way, in keeping with the spirit of the method. B + C Design (the exhibition designers) and Marta Lovina (the preparator) conceived an installation that is radically different from traditional photographic displays. The Manila audience is somewhat self-conscious when visiting gallery spaces, so the idea was to create an object that was so attractive that you would feel compelled to approach it. The mobile-like structure, which actually has the shape of a camera turned on its head, hanging from the ceiling, is a joy to have in our space. Our audience has reacted very positively to the installation. The Polaroid contributors responded with real enthusiasm to the call for images. When they heard that the motivation for this show was to showcase a method that was non-digital with a concern for the "unique," there was no hesitation whatsoever. We have had such a positive response to this show that we are planning to re-install the structure in our video room after this show ends.

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Collaborative photography is one thing, social amnesia is another. Filipinos, snapshots and collective memory have a funny relation: It seems that the more pictures of political candidates Filipinos see "wounding" the streets, the more likely it is that these officials become omnipresent, not at all lost to or missed by us. They get in Congress for their sake, not heaven’s, and instead of scars they give us belly aches of laughter and album stacks of misery. Take 1986, EDSA. Rallyists flashed cameras and L-signs with parallel intensity. Everyone must have taken or at least seen snapshots of that fateful revolt. Just imagine the masses of pictures to be collected and displayed if there is ever to be a People Power Museum. That would be cool, except nowadays, L on the forehead stands for "loser."