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Firstsite papers: Jan Dunning
Produced on the occasion of Natural Histories, on show at firstsite 18 September – 23 October 2004.
Essay by Martin Clark.
Pinhole cameras are a curious technology. They recall photography’s early days, its antique origins, with their long exposures, their flat, imperfect focus, and the almost magical, alchemical nature of their operation. In fact this magical quality seems to stem from the fact that there is so little technology employed in that operation. Rather, they appear closer to natural, or should we say, supernatural, phenomena – just a simple box with a hole in it, nature apparently does the rest. Partly because of this they feel oddly anthropomorphic. They work almost exactly as we do, passively internalising an inverted image of the external world. Unlike us though, the camera can fix this image on to light sensitive papers, plates or film. Our gaze already objectifies the world around us, the people and things within it, but this action is frozen in the photograph, it reaches its perfect expression through the camera’s clinical, detached efficiency. In this way the camera becomes both an extension of our own perception as well as its mute, mindless double.
Jan Dunning makes all of her photographs with a pinhole camera (I say “makes” rather than “takes” very deliberately, for as we shall see they are made things, meticulously constructed on many different levels), but it is not only the technology she uses that is reminiscent of early Victorian photography – that calls to mind the magical, the fantastic – so too, in a number of ways, does the subject matter. From haunting self portraits, to allegorical tableaux drawn from legend or literature, from empty landscapes of gothic forests, to deserted islands ( a favourite subject of Victorian fiction), as well as the startling studies of dead animals, reminiscent not just of taxidermied specimens, but also of post-mortem memorial photography, a widely practised rite of mourning in the 19th Century; all these images, to some extent, recall early photography’s exploitation of artifice, its exemplification of the posed, the staged.
Dunning’s earliest works are almost invariably self portraits, studies of herself as an autonomous, objectified subject, caught within the gaze of her curious doppelganger – the pinhole camera – her curious, fascinated double. In a later series, Metamorphoses (2003-04), she continues to use herself, or rather the image of herself, but this time in character, acting out or playing the roles of various figures from classical mythology. In all of these images the body is seen as an uncertain, mutable thing. Because of the pinhole camera’s long exposures, edges become blurred, limbs double up, the integrity of the subject is undermined as the figures seep into and out of their surroundings – wisps of women with no more substance than smoke; formless, fluid, drifting, shifting. These works locate themselves at that uncertain, interstitial space – that point of rupture through which we flood out and the world flood in – the very point at which the photograph locates itself. This is the liminal space where inside and outside are confused, where edges smudge and bodies are transgressed, exceeded; where the fragile fiction of ourselves collapses.
In the newest work, the women have disappeared altogether, replaced by a series of apparently uninhabited islands and forests – two more subjects rich in literary, mythological and psychological resonance. Islands have always held a strange fascination for us. The earliest mythologies from all cultures of the world understoon their peculiar grip on our unconscious, their hold on our imaginations. But these islands Dunning photographs are not real islands, they are models, and not even models of real islands at that. Instead they are drawn from the imagination; memories of islands, perhaps seen, perhaps dreamt, or perhaps conjured from the pages of a book – odd analogues, ideas of islands or maybe ideas as islands, “consciousness thickened into a thing”. Perfectly formed, they can only be entirely beautiful, absolutely perfect, because they are so perfectly themselves. They are completely self-contained; like a book, a painting, a work of art. Pictured for us like this they are peculiarly alluring. We can observe them in their entirety, see where they begin and end, and this is strangely seductive. Because we can perceive them completely, we feel perhaps that we might possess them completely. An island (particularly a deserted one) is a thing to be inhabited, to be claimed. In fact it can only appear, it can only exist for itself, once we are there to complete it, to give it expression. Just as the island creates the wilderness about it, makes visible the desert of the sea, so to the subject is necessary to create the island, to complete it. In his essay Desert Islands Gilles Deleuze writes: “An island doesn’t stop being deserted simply because it is inhabited… Far from compromising it, human beings bring the desertedness to its perfection and highest point… those people who come to the island indeed occupy and populate it; but in reality, were they sufficiently separate, sufficiently creative, they would give the island only a dynamic image of itself, a consciousness of the movement which produced the island, such that through them the island would in the end become conscious of itself as deserted an unpeopled. The island would be only the dream of humans, and humans, the pure consciousness of the island.” 1
The island, for the viewer then, becomes both an extension of our “self” as well as its perceivable limit. Inhabiting that geographical body we extend out to its edges, only to be pushed back towards ourselves. This is a movement which finds its antithesis in the “Forest” photographs. Like the islands, these too are creations, modelled from the mind on a table in the studio, but unlike the islands there is something deeply unsettling about them, calling to mind the sinister, enchanted space of the fairytale. Where the islands are, in one sense, comprehensible, these forests are unknowable. Islands are all about edges, the forest though, spills out in all directions; shapeless, structureless, wild. It’s all about what we can’t see, lurking in the shadows or just outside of the frame. A sprawling, creeping place with no fixed borders, a place in which we come adrift, stranded, lost.
Some of the most arresting images, though, are the Deaths (2003-04). These differ from the other series in that they are essentially photographs of found objects, images stumbled upon rather than consciously, or indeed unconsciously constructed. These photographs picture the corpses of a number of recently deceased wild, but everyday, animals; a pigeon, a squirrel, a badger, a fieldmouse, a bug or a butterfly. Each was photographed where it was found, where it lay. Simple, stark, almost unbearably honest, they feel more like photographs from a crime scene than “memento mori”. Corpses are awkward objects, unable to settle, to find their place. Living things disappear into the world – fleeting shapes that scamper, flutter, flap and fly – it’s only when an animal dies that it appears so abruptly, so intensely. In his essay, The Two Versions of the Imaginary Maurice Blanchot writes, “ The cadaver is its own image, it no longer entertains any relation with this world, where it still appears, except that of an image, an obscure possibility, a shadow.”2 For Blanchot the corpse is absolute image, an object that is not that person, no longer that person, but which, liberated from use, resembles them even more perfectly than when they were alive. Here then, is the perfect metaphor for photography’s condition. All photographs are corpses, reducing everything and everyone to their disembodied resemblance. Just as the camera captures and image of the subject; a testament to their presence, their vitality, their life, so too, in that same movement, it objectifies them, splits them from themselves, reducing them to nothing more (or less) than a petrified resemblance. The image – the photograph – is both the perfect expression of the object and its absence manifest as presence.
“The place where someone dies is not some indifferent spot… The deceased cleaves jealously to his place, joining it profoundly, in such a way that the indifference of this place, the fact that it is after all just a place among others, becomes the profundity of his presence as deceased.”3 Like the islands then, which in their own way resemble corpses, (and in a Heideggerian sense, like all works of art) these cadavers create and choreograph the world around them; their saturated visibility, their excessive appearing, produces and reveals the space that surrounds them, allowing, again, the world to appear; the scrubby grass, the pitted pavement, the particular banalities of the roadside, the wide expanse of sky. These animals have already gone through that awesome transformation that Blanchot speaks of, they have already, in death, become perfect similarity. By photographing them in this exceptional place where they have finally come to rest, Dunning reiterates this movement while at the same time monumentalising it.