The Face of (His) Time - On Oliver Griffin
By Alexander Lee
'I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking,' wrote Christopher Isherwood. In his Berlin Diary (1930), Isherwood attempted simply to depict the Berlin he saw and experienced in the heady days before the rise of Nazism. The seedy underground clubs, the bustling cafes, the peculiar, often eccentric characters were set down without comment, approval or opprobrium. The image of the impassive camera which Isherwood chose to encapsulate his literary approach was thus telling. The camera - analogue, manual and, at that time, physically cumbersome - was seen as an open eye, a lens on the spaces and patens of life which could neither manipulate nor deceive. For Isherwood, it was the fact that it was an unflinching tool to engrave his world as it was that made it the perfect model for his literary project. This, indeed, was a perspective which was shared by Isherwood's Berlin contemporary, the photographer August Sander. In The Face of Our Time (1929), Sander exploited the impassiveness of the camera to capture the people around him. 'Like a footprint or a death mask' (to use Susan Sontag's words), his portraits were an imprint of everyday life preserved without comment: sometimes official, sometimes glamorous, sometimes gnarled and work-work, the figures in his photographs - like the characters in Isherwood's Berlin Diary - appeared as in life, and the photographs themselves became transparent windows rather than malleable images.
Isherwood and Sander's conception of the camera embodied not a form of realism as such. Their approach was at some remove from, for example, Zola's naturalism, which sought a believable everyday reality, but succeeded only in creating images of subjective impressions that shaded off into a perverse idealism. Rather, Isherwood and Sander saw the camera as a documentary tool. Neither making assumptions about the nature of everyday reality, nor seeking to judge it, they each saw the camera as a means simply of recording, archiving, classifying. In one sense, this idea of the camera was deeply impersonal and consciously objective. In another sense, however, this same objectivity succeeded in transforming the work of Isherwood and Sander into profoundly personal and intimate pieces. Although the instrument itself was impersonal, it offered an insight into a world which the author or photographer himself experienced, a chance for the viewer to see through another's eyes, an opportunity to re-evaluate how we ourselves encounter our surroundings.
The advent of digital photography has to some extent altered the image of the camera. Rather than being impassive and objective, the camera is now commonly viewed as just another means to distort and adapt reality, a part of the cult of the shifting image in a consumerist culture. Manipulated, touched-up, stretched and retoned, the photograph is no more a representation of reality than a Hollywood film. The personal and the intimate, as well as the objective and the impersonal are often submerged beneath the swirling waters of unstable images.
In The Evaluation of Space, however, Oliver Griffin returns to notion of the camera employed by Isherwood and Sander. Preferring the analogue and the manual to the digital, Griffin consciously documents the spaces and objects that provide the context of - and thus the parameters for - his life. As in The Face of Our Time (and also, to some extent, as in the work of Wolfgang Tillmans) there is neither any attempt to distort the reality captured, nor any effort made to comment on what is shown. The effect is arresting and directly challenges the viewer's relationship with urban space and urban life. In many of the photographs, Griffin captures images of his use of carparks for BMX flatland riding. These functional urban spaces, the very model of everyday modern and postmodern life, are subverted and thus both reappropriated and redefined by the activity. In capturing this experience impassively, Griffin thus provides and intimate and personal portrait of his own experience of reclaiming the urban environment and reclassifying the parameters of behaviour intrinsic to the notion of urban space. In other photographs, suburban housing is captured with a similarly impersonal eye, and the effect is equally disquieting. The houses shown are boring, unexciting, profoundly uninspiring, and deliberately so. They are not shown as participating in a wider consumer culture, nor depicted as echoes of aspirations, but recorded in all their humdrum domestic reality. We are literally peering through the windows. As the context for everyday life, such intimate photographs force the viewer to look beyond the world of image and into the realities of both urban space and urban life. The immediacy and objectivity compel us, in other words, to re-evaluate how these everyday spaces define our lives and our behaviour. The documentary approach, which both records and classifies, engenders a stark and sometimes unsettling reflection that, while bordering on the scientific, is inescapably personal both for the artist and for the viewer.
Reaching beyond the postmodern obsession with the image, Griffin's The Evaluation of Space is a return to the idea of the artist himself as a camera. The choice of analogue and manual photography in preference to digital methods restores at once a sense of objectivity and an intimate subjectivity that compels the viewer to indulge in a re-evaluation of his own relationship with space at the same time as it succeeds in documenting the artist's own spaces. While hinting powerfully at the application of a similar approach to other media, Griffin - like Isherwood and Sander before him - provides a portrait of his own time through space that obliges the viewer to look again at the face of his time. The artist as camera has turned the camera onto the viewer.
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See also an earlier contribution from the Evaluation of Space series on The Utopian, here.