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Death and Transformation: Natural Histories at firstsite (18th Sept – 23rd Oct, 2004)
SOURCE Issue 41, Winter 2004.
Essay by Mark Bolland.
Pinhole cameras, and the photographs that are made with them, frequently evoke thoughts of early photography and pre-photographic optical devices. The relative primitiveness of the often homemade or wooden, lens-less and shutterless camera excites ideas of WHF Talbot’s first “mousetrap” cameras or of the camera obscura. The softness of the images produced by pinholes seems to remind us of early Victorian photos and the long exposures required by pinhole cameras also recall a time, long before “decisive moments”, when only the dead were completely still in photographs. Pictures produced with the pinhole’s infinite depth of field, and the extreme close-ups that this facilitates, have a direct or unmediated feel to them: this too they share with much photography from the medium’s infancy, from the brief moment before its industrialisation.
Such comparisons could again be drawn (and some were in the literature that accompanied the exhibition) at the recent show of pinhole pictures by Jan Dunning at the firstsite gallery in Colchester; and with some justification, too. In Dunning’s work, it is not only the technological “primitiveness” and the time exposures that are reminiscent of early photography.
In what was her first show in a public gallery, Dunning presented pictures of mythological scenes enacted by figures in woodland settings, fantastical landscapes, ad close-ups of dead animals. All of which seems in keeping with the melancholia and death, Arcadias and Greek mythology that pepper the art and literature of the second half of the nineteenth century. The uniform grainy softness of the pinhole, where everything is in focus, but nothing quite sharp, makes Dunning’s pictures hazy and fantastical-seeming, and this also recalls images from the first decades of photography. The softness and the long exposures combine to produce and aesthetic that is similar to photographs by Nadar, Cameron, et al, albeit in something close to Technicolor.
The spirit of her work, though, is more in keeping with such pranksters as Oscar G. Reijlander, who made sometimes rather saucy “combination prints” with moralistic themes, and Gustave Le Gray, who created romantic vistas with dramatic skies by making one exposure for the sky and another for the land and joining them at the horizon. The influence of Elsie Wright and her cousin Frances Griffiths who fooled Arthur Conan Doyle with their “Cottingley Fairies” is also present here.
Unlike some of her predecessors however, Dunning does not offer these pictures as documents of anything. They are fantasies; imagined worlds and meditations on death and transformation. And early photography is not the only reference that springs to mind when looking at them: some of the images, such as Untitled (Pigeon), resemble the close-up camerawork of natural history documentaries, and some, such as Untitled (Pleasure), look more like the sets of 1950’s “B” movies.
Her carefully constructed tabletop landscapes are as close to TV and movie sets, models and background paintings as they are to her Victorian influences, and as with empty sets and unused props, the size and scale of the subject matter is often hard to grasp. When we can determine the scale, as with the pictures of dead animals, we still feel a strange combination of immediacy and alienation, as if we are looking at the world through someone or something else’s eyes. In some cases we see things from almost ground level, further accentuating this effect.
Dunning combines pinhole softness, unusual viewpoints, and an unnerving shift in the perception of scale to make everything she photographs seem equally otherworldly, whether the subject is Leda and the Swan or a dead squirrel.