The ‘70s: Photography and Everyday Life

Teatro Fernán Gómez, Madrid, Spain

‘The ‘70s: Photography and Everyday Life’ is one show among many in this year’s PHotoEspana, a photography festival that each summer takes over Madrid’s galleries, museums and institutions. Under the directorship of Sergio Mah, the two-month festival encompasses all kinds of exhibitions, from blockbusters like ‘Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life’ and historical shows such as ‘Dorothea Lange: The Crucial Years’ as well as lesser known historical figures, including the great rediscovery of Jindřich Štyrský, a Czech surrealist who was active during the 1930s. Alongside these exhibitions, the festival features more complex and contemporary approaches to the medium, such as Walid Raad’s work with The Atlas Group and Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s photographic archive ‘Evidence’ (1975-77).

‘The ‘70s’ is an apt thematic introduction to PHotoEspana 2009, as this survey show serves as the most explicit illustration of this year’s theme: ‘the everyday’. The ‘70s is often considered the decade when ‘the everyday’ emerged full-fledged as a theme for photography, and also when the subject found its perfect expression – in the ‘de-aestheticized’ look of the snapshot. The decisive moment championed by Henri Cartier-Bresson gave way to spontaneous subjectivity or deadpan documents of the vernacular: anything and everything became worth photographing.

Among the works and series by the 23 photographs in the exhibition are the obvious choices, such as William Eggleston, who, in the context of a grouping of not exclusively American photographers, appears primarily as a documentarian of American culture and the trashiness and disposability of an emerging consumerism in the US. But the show also features more surprising inclusions, such as the Spanish artist Carlos Pazos’s series of slides (‘In Privacy’, 1977). Like Eggleston, Pazos was one of the few artist-photographers of that time working in colour. In these photos, he takes on the persona of a wealthy dandy – posing while having a facial, or else lying naked in front of a fireplace and lounging on a satin-covered mattress. In a different take on social lifestyles, Mali-born Malick Sidibé photographed groups of young people and couples at parties, weddings, baptisms and births in Bamako.

Such inclusions make it apparent that, while a serial and conceptual approach may have dominated much of American photography of the decade, this tendency existed much less self-consciously elsewhere. Particularly striking are photographs by Kohei Yoshiyuki, who worked as a commercial photographer but spent his nights in the parks of Tokyo, hiding in the bushes and leaping out with his camera and flashbulb to capture elicit sexual encounters. In grainy images taken with infrared film, we catch glimpses of confusing scenarios that are vaguely discernable as sexual, but other times its difficult to tell why four men are crouching on their knees fully clothed, or why a man and a woman are locked in a tangled embrace on the ground while several onlookers are hunched in the bushes or beside trees. The frozen action and grainy look of Yoshiyuki’s images almost resemble war photography.

Though the show does not include war reportage or straight photojournalism, it does show how the camera was used without irony as a political tool in the hands of photographers such as David Goldblatt, who provided evidence of apartheid in South Africa, and Eugene Richards, who documented the poverty and social ills of his Massachusetts neighbourhood.

While such works show that the ‘70s was still an era when the photographic medium was used as a social and anthropological recording device, it was also, uniquely, brandished as a weapon by artists such as Laurie Anderson. In her series ‘Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity)’ (1973) she cruised the streets of New York’s Lower East Side waiting for men to make rude or sexual remarks in her direction. When they did, she whipped around, camera in hand, and photographed them. Here she presents them as criminals, with white bars over their eyes to ostensibly mask their identities, and accompanied by the stories that led up to these mutual assaults.

Both Anderson’s project and Ana Mendieta’s series ‘People Looking at Blood’ (1973), for which the latter placed a puddle of fake blood on the sidewalk and photographed passersby, are total rejections of the interest in traditional street photography exhibited throughout photographic history, particularly by men. Here more than anywhere we see that the camera is not an innocent tool or innocuous recording device – that there is a charged relationship between photographer and the photographed, no matter how ‘everyday’ the encounters are meant to be. In the exhibition as a whole, it becomes evident that the camera is an inherently sociological tool; anything that falls under its gaze will become a record of how life looked at that point in time. Importantly, by seeing ‘the everyday’ through photography in the ‘70s, we see that there is no longer anything ‘everyday’ about these photographs, nor can what’s in them be described as everyday, in that even the hitherto banal or incidental details – hats, hairstyles, handbags – are all part of a social record that sometimes supercedes the original intent of the photographs. At this moment, curators are turning their attention to the newfound passage of the ‘70s photographic tradition into art history, but I’m sure ‘The ‘80s’ won’t be far behind.

Christy Lange

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