paris + klein
Thursday, March 22, 2007
My post this week is mostly about William Klein's Paris + Klein, but I also recently read In Vogue ("The Illustrated History of the World's Most Famous Fashion Magazine," by Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva), and I want to deal with some structural and historical associations that should be drawn between them.
One of the great and historically significant photographers of the 20th century, Klein's rendition of Paris as mainly people in crowd situations using an extreme wide angle lens reinvokes several classic books of documentary photography that he published in the 1950s and 1960s, including projects on New York, Tokyo and Moscow.
Although I believe that Klein's greater influence on photography was as a documentarian and as a seminal practitioner of street photography, Klein's early photographic work was supported by Vogue creative director Alexander Liberman, and he has contributed fashion photography to the magazine for decades.
I read the Vogue book because I wanted to refresh my own sense of how styles and norms of fashion photography have evolved over the last 50 or 100 years. In Vogue was helpful, but I think it's just too big a topic to be taken up in one book, even one as big as this one (more than 400 pages).
Moreover, most of the photography presented in the Vogue book was very interesting historically, but I did not find most of it particularly interesting either aesthetically or conceptually; applying the famous analytical categories proposed by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, these photographs were all studium and no punctum. That is, they all exhibit a certain level of craft and photographic presence that brings them to the attention of a thoughtful interpreter of photographs, but they do not exhibit an element of piercing or tearing that characterizes a higher order of individual emotional engagement with a photograph.
In the view of many scholars, Barthes is most famous for elaborating the science of semiotics proposed by Saussure, tracing out its implications through the interpretation of mass media and its signification, and connecting that process of the making of meaning with ideology, especially the ideological norms favored by dominant class or political interests in Western culture. Barthes has been a particular inspiration to a brand of structuralist cultural studies that seeks to analyze the structures of signification, and thereby reveal and resist the underlying agenda of the dominant class.
That is a very conventional summary of Barthes, but also one that misses a key element of his long career, I think: its essential irony. Looking at some of the most famous of his scholarly undertakings, such as Camera Lucida's quasi-phenomenological inquiry into the essence of photography, or S/Z's line-by-line reading of Balzac's Sarrasine, I am always left with the feeling that Barthes knows the limits of his structuralist or positivist desires, and always follows them until the very moment that the structuralist paradigm breaks down and eats itself alive. Inquiries by Barthes appear to satirize themselves; after all, has anyone ever really read The Fashion System all the way through?
What I found most noteworthy about the photography in the Vogue book was the tremendous group photographs made by the Vogue photographers, especially those in the last 10-15 years, and by photographers that I do not ordinarily admire very greatly (including Annie Leibovitz, Patrick Demarchelier and Steven Meisel). Despite my misgivings about their aesthetics and their politics, these photographers are awe-inspiring in their ability to manage bodies in the virtual space of the photographic image, and also to marshall the immense resources they are able to bring to the task.
Much like the work of his successors at Vogue, Klein's images in the Paris book, which are mostly comprised of street or documentary photography, is all about groups, and all about a densely packed urbanity that almost seems unthinkable to someone who has lived almost an entire life in the American west. Klein's approach immerses his photographic presence among political activists, upper class country clubbers, sports fans, gay celebrants, fashionistas and many other of the nodes of participation that argue for a society defined as an organic whole rather than as a collection of discrete individuals.
The Paris book is also a denial by Klein of the kind of structural elements that I have been isolating in my readings of photography books so far. Unlike New York 1954.55, Klein's 1995 revisioning of his classic 1956 publication of Life is good and good for you in New York, trance witness revels, Paris + Klein anticipates the structural essence of a Flickr photostream, deploying a seemingly random sequence in which one should get lost, rather than attempt a reading.
But even Klein's negation of structure has a structure. Although he has disposed of the formal chapters and categories of New York (defined by titles such as Album, Streets, 5&10, Gun, I Need, Funk and City), the human density with which he introduces us to Paris gradually diminishes as we approach the end of the stream, finally devolving to images of urbanity without humanity.
posted by fogged @ 1:41 PM