Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.
Charles Baudelaire

What do Harry Callahan, John Constable, Michael Mckenna and Michelangelo all have in common? I was reminded of this last weekend.

It was a revelation to me some years ago when I attended a week-long workshop with David Hurn, the Magnum photographer. I expected to be given all the secret tips of being a great documentary photographer, along with constructive critiques of my documentary work. Well, I got one of those two. Sort of.

What he did do was fill us with photographic history and the techniques used by the Greats (Cartier-Bresson, Capa (both of them), Burt Glinn et al) to the point where my head began to swim… I learned about the importance of the frame edge and compositionally working the photograph outside the frame. I learned about how to approach a moment and follow through it, much as a trapshooter does when he/she is shooting a clay bird. It was on the third day however that a myth I didn’t even know I was entertaining was shattered.

The Greats worked for a living.

Duane Michals photographed cigarette commercials. Ansel Adams photographed tour groups at Yosemite. Harry Callahan was a commercial photographer. And Hurn himself interspersed personal work with assignments. In fact his personal work came, in many cases, from his assignments. Eugene Smith produced his greatest work while on assignment. In other words, they used the assignment opportunity to produce their best work.

As did Michelangelo, who was under commission when he painted the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. John Constable painted what he knew, but was ever mindful of his clients, wealthy industrialists in the new cities of the Industrial Revolution.

The artist starving in the garret is one of those wonderful myths cherished by a public who would seem to want to see artists in that light.

Not the artists themselves however. I have yet to meet one who enjoys poverty. Make no mistake about it; being a professional artist is a profession and one that requires a talent for self-promotion. Claude Monet talked in his letters about his constant struggle to make ends meet and to leverage the most out of his opportunities. That did not however, prevent him from making new work and making work that broke new boundaries. The Art was the thing…. Towards the end of his life, he talked about the embarrassment that came from what his paintings commanded; that as a student, he was lucky to get 100 francs but could now command 100 0000 francs.

It didn’t seem to cause him too much angst.

What is important here is to realise that all of them saw the commission as an opportunity to make work in their own image, to stamp their own mark upon it. Eugene Smith marched to the beat of his own drum. James Nachtwey works under the mantle of a personal ethos. In every case personal philosophy and artistic concerns infuse and inform their work and make it the distinctive thing it is.

For a long time I have been interested in public events; festivals, things like that. I am continually drawn to the human dance. You see, it seems to me that festivals are like carefully crafted and choreographed ballets. The organisers create the stage and a basic outline. The people who come bring their own script, and the whole thing then follows the interaction between these disparate scripts. In the intersections of these predeterminations lie the meanings and significance of the human condition.

I received a commission to photograph Frenchfest 2007, the first time it had been organised by the Christchurch City Council. Until then it had been put together by a local committee. I last photographed it around 1994, so I wasn’t sure what I would find. I knew however that I needed to make something of it for myself, to work as if every image was a potential portfolio shot, to push myself as hard as I could, to follow my own leads and ideas. And the human dance was what drew me.

I worked throughout the day until the performance began on the main stage. A show, entitled La Premiere d’Akaroa, had been put together under the leadership of Christchurch’s well-known Mark Hadlow. It had element of vaudeville with a strong emphasis on circus. But that was all I knew.

Being the official photographer, I was able to get backstage and watch the performers preparing. As the clowns and aerialists warmed up and stretched and gradually moved themselves further and further inside their characters, I became more and more fascinated. To one side the crowd sat expectantly, not sure what was coming. In the middle the band were warming up their instruments. On the other side, behind the black curtain, the performers were falling into role and losing themselves to the coming performance. To one side was the “real” world, with people slouched on folding chairs, to the other a world that was somehow other, with clowns, dancers and people who had shed the everyday for a trip to a place only they knew, as if they had cracked open the door to another reality. I began to understand the fascination of the circus. It was a serenely surreal spectacle.

And in that moment I knew what was drawing me: the voice of Charles Baudelaire, calling me across the centuries.

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.

Somehow, what lay before me had a quality that transcended conventional concepts of space and time. And a comment made by somebody came back to me:

sometimes reality and truth lie on the periphery of the vision, on the edges of the frame, not at the centre.

The music faded away, the final curtain fell (metaphorically) and we moved into town, photographing people in the late afternoon light.

Then it was time to return for the evening performance.

As we all assembled backstage, the night slowly hovered into view, lingered for a time then fell. The curtain of the day was drawn. the performance began anew.

It seems to me that if you wish to record the dance, you must enter into it, you must become one of the players. Time passed and memory cards fell away. I was lost to the wonder of what was happening before and above me. The night was held out by the energy and colour of the spectacle.

Then the night had its way.

The moment was gone.

The dance was over.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 10:17 pm and is filed under Thinking about Photography and Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.