press release
Esperantis by Patrick Shanahan
is a seductive and unsettling insight into the nocturnal face
of the modern urban environment. These exquisite large-scale
photographs explore imaginatively the notion of spatial estrangement,
considering the formation of the urban landscape and its effect
on us materially and psychologically.
For urban designers and engineers, modern lighting technologies
offer inventive ways to invest the urban landscape with new
cultural meanings, through the highlighting and suppression
of physical spaces. By editing and colouring, for instance,
they can create a setting that is hyper-real and illusory.
Shanahan’s photographs use a combination of the effect
of such ambient artificial lighting, together with the ‘reciprocity
failure’ of colour photographic film (the colour shifts
that occur in exposures exceeding one second). Taken in Spain
and Portugal between 1998 and 2001, these extraordinary scenes
seem familiar and welcoming, yet peculiarly otherworldly and
supernatural.
Patrick Shanahan is an artist photographer
and visiting lecturer and Esperantis
is an Open Eye Gallery Touring exhibition.
A colour illustrated catalogue featuring the full Esperantis
series, essays and interviews, accompanies the exhibition.
artist interview
PS: Patrick Shanahan
BB: Bernadette Buckley, John Hansard Gallery
BB: Thank you very much for agreeing to do
this interview for the John Hansard Gallery. Let’s just
start by talking about Zelda Cheatle’s description of
your work as “stark” and “eerie”. And
the word ‘strange’ is also often used to describe
it…
PS: I think it’s because of a combination
of things. For a start, all the photography has been taken at
night (or certainly at dusk or late into the evening) using
mixed lighting – artificial lighting of the sort that
street lighting, or sodium neon lighting provides. This lighting
gives all sorts of peculiar colours when recorded on film. The
human eye seems to absorb these colours and correct them to
a certain extent, but the camera doesn’t do that, so you
get all these peculiar things occurring that sometimes (well
most of the time) can’t be anticipated. It’s a very
hit-and-miss process, so I’m always very curious to see
what will happen when I get the film processed and contact printed
and see what’s there.
So that’s one aspect of the strangeness…caused
by colour. And then there’s also the subject matter. Mostly
it’s to do with the seaside, coastal areas. This particular
project has concentrated mainly on Spain and Portugal –
the Iberian peninsula mainly, so you’re seeing these landscapes
in a context that you don’t normally envisage them. Normally,
these places are full of people – very busy in the summer
months, with lots of people on the beach and so on. But here,
they’re deserted or almost deserted. Or where there are
people in them, (because of the long exposures… maybe
20, maybe 40 minutes) the figures don’t just record in
any simple way. People are moving through the photograph but
don’t actually register, so again I think that adds to
that sense of strangeness that is often remarked on.
BB: …And, as you say also, because of
the colours generated by that process of long exposure and use
of existing lighting. Which reminds me…do you on occasion,
also point your headlights into the scene as well.
PS: No, it’s always the ambient, available
light that is used. As I say, sometimes I don’t anticipate
what’s going to happen, but from experience, I know that
certain lights will give certain effects and so on. But it’s
really about what is already there and the way that the film
responds to it. With long exposures, you get what is called
‘reciprocity failure’ – which is when film
doesn’t respond in the way you would expect it to, when
exposed over a long period of time. So this causes the colour
to shift. When I come to print the work, I do attempt to print
it in as ‘neutral’ a way as possible. In other words,
I try to get a colour balance. Looking at the picture you may
not think that, but I do try to keep it as ‘neutral’
as possible so that the viewer sees the effect of the colours,
or the lighting effect of colour lighting.
BB: And you don’t use filters?
PS: No I don’t use filters – except
of course when I come to print I have to filter the pictures
to make the enlargement. The prints in the exhibition have been
made digitally – they’re light-jet prints –
so the neg is scanned to make very large prints and the prints
are then made on to photographic paper. People sometimes ask
me if I’ve used Photoshop, or if I’ve manipulated
the picture in any way. I do use Photoshop for an amount of
cleaning up but not for major manipulation. The effect really
comes through the use of the ambient lighting etc. So apart
from getting a reasonable colour balance, maintaining a contrast
and basically cleaning up the neg. (imperfections and so on),
it’s pretty much a straight picture.
BB: And yet, these same colours keep on coming
through in your work – that kind of El Greco green that
fills the pictures – or that purple sky that appears in
so many of them...
PS: Well that purple colour was something I
didn’t anticipate. It’s a result of a combination
of unusual atmospheric conditions and the effect of street lighting.
(Sodium lighting tends to give that green cast to everything).
And, in the picture of the old Olympic Stadium at Barcelona
for example, on that particular evening, there was a heavy mist
that came in from the sea. It was very unusual for August. It
was a very hot day and suddenly there was this change in atmospheric
conditions. The mist started to envelop everywhere – including
those buildings that you see in the distance. When I took the
photograph, most of the available lighting was sodium lighting,
so when I came to print the picture, I tried to neutralise as
much of that as possible and take the green cast out of the
foreground. In so doing, it turned the sky that sort of red
magenta mauve colour. So, that colour didn’t exist in
‘reality’, but it was created through the printing
process. A happy accident.
BB: And yet it seems so appropriate here –
it lends to that atmosphere of isolation in the pictures –
of alienation even?
PS: Yes and that’s also because I’m
working in the in-between spaces between the ‘Imagination’
and the ‘Real’. The work often tends to deal with
these very vague spaces in between Imagination and the Real.
Baudrillard writes a great deal about this of course. I have
my reservations in some respects about what he writes, he’s
such a polemicist! For example, the idea that there’s
no such thing as ‘reality’ anymore, or that everything
is hyper-real, simulacral…that sort of pessimistic accent
is not something that I necessarily go along with, but the work
is nevertheless dealing with unreal, hyper-real spaces.
BB: One of the things that occurred to me about
your work (and perhaps this relates also to the point at which
you separate from Baudrillard) is how reminiscent it is of certain
paintings. I’m thinking here of Surrealist paintings in
particular – say Dali’s Swans Reflecting Elephants
or Magritte’s Human Condition. On the other hand, the
Surrealist works don’t necessarily disturb one because
it’s so obvious that they are the product of particular
artists’ imagination. What’s disturbing about your
pictures by comparison, is that one feels that perhaps some
kind of future is being hinted at. They make us uneasy because
they send us back into our own experience and make us remember
being in places similar to these. So one can’t detach
from them in the way one might from say The Persistence of Time
or some such…
PS: Yes, the Surrealists were very interested
in photography and you might think ‘well why should they
be?’ After all photography supposedly deals with the ‘Real’
and the Surrealists were dealing with the Imagination and with
psychology and so on, so why the interest in photography? Well
interestingly enough, Man Ray, who was a photographer, greatly
admired people like Eugene Adget. And again, Henri Breton wrote
about photography in L’Amour Fou . So photography had
a certain fascination for the Surrealists and I think this that
was to do with the blurring between ‘reality’ and
imagination’. For me, this has a lot to do with the ‘uncanny’,
the unconscious as a kind of double – because the photograph
is also a kind of double. And of course, the Surrealists were
interested in what Freud had to say, so I think there were a
lot of links there too. But I think that my photographs do deal
more with that sort of fear – that anxiety about the future.
It addresses those kind of issues.
BB: This is where I see a link between your
work and Situationism also – and in particular with Situationist
détournement tactics, with which artists were trying
to disrupt our half-dreamt, non-involved experience of the world.
There seems to be something of this in your work too –
the pictures attempts to disrupt, to shock us out of our apathetic
view of the everyday world.
PS: Yes yes. The Situationists’ idea
of tactical engagement was to deform conventional, or dominant
space and photography is very good at deforming space because
it can distort and contort. It can manipulate perspective and
so on and as a strategy –or as a tactic I should say –it’s
very good at disrupting dominant space and in creating an ‘alternative’
kind of space.
BB: …at making interjections into what
is already there?
PS: Yes
BB: One of the other writers I wanted to talk
to you about also was that of Barthes and in particular, about
the text in which he looks at the Winter Garden photograph.
After his mother has died, he looks at this photo of her as
a younger woman and has a kid of revelation of about photography.
The photograph he says, is powerful because it’s proof
that that which was photographed was once there. And this is
where he’s so different from Baudrillard of course, who
would not accept this at all. And yet, its very hard to discount
that kind of ‘revelation’ that Barthes had –
because he’s talking about his now dead mother, in a very
human, a very touching way. And this seems to be where many
arguments about photography end. On the one hand, the Baudrillardian
who would imply that the distance between ‘Reality’
and the ‘Imagination’ has altogether collapsed (if
indeed it ever existed) and on the other hand, the Barthesians
who would say ‘No there is still some kind of link between
the photograph and ‘the real’.
PS: Yes I find Barthes’ account here
very moving and I suppose that what he is saying, at the end
of the day, is that all photography is about death because it’s
always a record of something in the past. Photography does privilege
time. It has that hold over the past, which we cannot, in a
sense, get away from – we’re always aware of this
when we look at a photograph.
BB: But your photographs have a very particular
relation to time. In some ways, they seem to be suspending it.
That is, in your photographs, everything seems to be frozen
in time and space. But this is paradoxical also, because in
another sense, the work seems to be pointing at a time in the
future that perhaps we ought to be a little anxious about?
PS: Yes. It is looking to the future. I’m
not sure whether its fear of the future, or almost idealistic
desire for the past. But there are certainly elements in the
photographs that give that sense of suspended time. For example,
it might depict a concrete block floating in water, in defiance
of both gravity and time, or rocks by the sea, that are ‘floating’
in the mist…One suspends time and defies nature and gravity
in this way.
BB: That sense of a time gone by seems to
be created with reference to the Modernist type of architecture
that appears in your work – a Modernism of the 50s, 60s
and 70s that is very outmoded now. It looks at a kind of ‘modernity’
that is no longer full of hope, but is now very shabby.
PS: Yes I think the photographs do have a kind
of positive hopeful optimistic feel about them. I certainly
don’t think they have the Baudrillardian pessimism that
thinks that everything is going to implode. O tjoml O generally
have a fairly positive disposition and I think that that comes
through in the photographs. This sort of redemptive aspect in
the [hjotographs, coulms thgouth in what I’ve called the
“luminous uncanny”. Its to do with the way life
used to be. And in a way, there is a certain kind of paradoxical
element to the photographs. On the one hand, we’re dealing
with a landscape which can be fearful, which one can feel alienated
in. Even as an artist working in that landscape, one can feel
quite fearful, being in an unfamiliar place with a camera and
expensive equipment. One could so easily be mugged and there’s
always that sense of fear in the back of one’s mind. But
I think there is also that sense of fear experienced through
the photography as well – of fear and alienation. However
countering that sense of fear, there’s also that sense
of the thrilling – that seductive quality that the pictures
have. So I think its this sort of paradox, this frisson between
the fearful and the thrilling that provides a kind of intellectual
shudder – a shudder of recognition – and which in
some ways I suppose gives a kind of redemptiveness.
BB: And perhaps that’s why this work
started me thinking about Caspar David Friedrich? Perhaps the
two bodies of work are linked by way of the ‘sublime’
– that which has the capacity to be both amazing, redemptive
and wonderful and but which at the same time, holds a kind of
terror for us?
PS: I’ve considered the ‘sublime’
in relation to my work and I’ve come to the conclusion
that the work is more about the uncanny. In a sense, the uncanny
is a kind of sub-genre of the sublime. The sublime is about
aspiration – it’s about awe and I think some photographers
perhaps deal much better with the sublime than I do. I’d
say that my work is dealing more with the uncanny though there
are photographs that hint in that direction. I’m thinking
in particular for example, of that seascape. When you first
look at that photo, you’re disorientated. What you see
(or what you think you see) are rocks in the foreground and
then in the distance, a sort of mist (which could be low clouds)
and then in the distance again, there seem to be lights moving
about. You can never be quite sure what the picture is about.
People have often said to me ‘Did I take the photograph
from an aeroplane or a helicopter?’ because it’s
almost as though one is looking down on this from above, from
the Alps or somewhere.
BB: And this disorientation that the viewer
has, is a physical disorientation almost, isn’t it?
PS: Yes there is that ambiguity of scale that’s
being played out there. Is it mountains? Is it rocks? Is it
a close-up even? And that mist that might also be cloud…
BB: Perhaps this again is why these photographs
send one back to painting so often? Because when you look at
them, you sometimes wonder if this is single point perspective
that you’re looking at. As in that photograph of the island…San
Sebastian…it’s as if it’s a painting done
on the verge of discovering single point perspective. The island
is floating of course, but in the way that characters in some
Indian miniatures do and it’s almost as if it’s
not built on a post-Renaissance perspective.
PS: Which is quite interesting, because the
camera is, by its very nature, that single-point perspective.
Somehow, through scale, and perhaps through colour as well,
the relationships between different planes and different objects
change.
BB: You like to keep the viewer in this queasy,
disorientated position don’t you?
PS: Yes I think that as an artist, one is reflecting
and responding to the lived environment – the environment
that we all inhabit. I want to question that environment, to
raise issues about modernity, about spatial estrangement as
a tactical manoeuvre, and I think this is a very good way of
engaging the audience.
BB: But this engagement with the landscape
is of a very different kind to that of, say, Smithson, or others
of the Land artists of the 60s, who worked as lot with ‘natural’
forms. Not always of course, there were always works like Partially
Buried Woodshed – but Smithson’s work led the viewer
into a different kind of engagement it seems to me …
PS: Yes I’ve always admired Smithson’s
work and his interventions in landscapes. His work is being
re-evaluated at the moment and as records of these environments
are published and exhibited, so too is Smithson’s work
as a photographer. But for me, I have less of an intervention
– I work on what is there.
BB: Your work reminds me more of Smithson’s
writings rather than his photography – his writings on
spiral jetty are very troubled and filled with images of blood….
But let’s move on now because I want to ask you also
about the particular moment at which this work is being shown.
The EU has been extended to accommodate ten new member-states,
Tony Blair has just signed the UK up to a constitution within
this larger European Union and here we are looking at photographs
of Euroland. Even the title of this exhibition – Esperantis
–recalls Esperanto as a potentially common European language
– albeit one that like Atlantis – is now virtually
buried beneath the sea.
PS: And ‘Esperanto’ means hope
as well.
BB: Do you have a particular anxiety about
the future of Euroland?
PS: No, I’ve worked all over Europe,
in Eastern Europe and indeed as well in North America and the
Middle East. Most of the works in this exhibition are shot in
Spain – in North Spain in particular, as I know that region
quite well. I guess what attracted me to this location was the
fact that Spain has been going through some major changes –
post Franco and since it joined the EEC and so forth. A tremendous,
rapid modernisation has occurred and it seems that wherever
you go, you see these contrasts between the old and the new.
It’s that sort of juxtaposition that fascinates me and
that’s probably the main reason why I’ve chosen
Spain and Portugal in which to work. But having said that, I’m
a Europhile. It just so happens that the show is on at the moment
and there is a lot of debate about whether or not the UK stays
in the EU, but from my perspective, there’s no conscious
attempt at raising these sort of political issues through the
work.
BB: I wondered because, Spain and Portugal
are such popular holiday destinations for people travelling
from the UK. And the reputation of the the English at these
places is not particularly good, as amplified by recent events
in the European Cup Final. So I wondered if there was a certain
perspective here to do with Englishness – by default almost?
PS: I see what your are saying. No I don’t
think so. I don’t think I need the work to related to
defining a certain kind of Englishness. The modern world is
so cosmopolitan and so small these days – you can fly
to Spain so quickly – I think there is a certain internationalism
that is conveyed by the photographs. The fact that they have
been made in Spain and Portugal is of less importance. I could
have included work from other countries that I’ve been
to. I could have included work from Cornwall where I live, or
from Italy. But it just so happened that that particular body
of work, made over a 3-year period, seemed to hold together
very well and had a cohesive aspect to it.
BB: You do have an admiration for a particular
group of English photographers, don’t you?
PS: Yes. My first experience of photography
really was with the American Topographic Photographers. I did
a first degree in Fine Art and I was working mainly in sculpture
and in installation – not in photography at all. Photography
was always the by-product of the other 3 dimensional work I
was making. I had a very good tutor who had been a sculptor
and was now a photographer making photos. He was very influential
and suggested that I should look at certain peoples work. At
the college I was at, we just happened to have a very good library
of photography, so I started exploring a lot of these photographs
made by people I’d never heard of. I became more and more
interesting in photography and I discovered people like Eugene
Atget, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander and all the Modernist American
and European photographers. Then in the mid 70s there was a
new kind of movement – the New Topographics. People like
Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal etc were looking at a landscape
in transformation and that work really interested me. But equally,
at the same time, a lot of English photographers like myself
were doing the same sort of thing. They were very influenced
by this new movement, so in the late 1970s, early 1980s, there
were a lot of photographers interested in this – people
like John Davies Ken Phillips…
BB: And was there an attempt to Anglicise what
ws predominantly an American movement – to give a British
spin to American landscape photography?
PS: This is something that David Brittain and
I have spoken about, interestingly enough, but I don’t
think we’ve ever come to any decision about this. Has
there been an English version of the New Topographics. I think
that what happened was that poepole who were influenced by American
Topographics moved on into other areas. So there was never that
strong movement like there was in the States. And there were
other photographers whose work I also admired – people
like Raymond Moore and so on – people who are perhaps
not given the recognition that they deserve.
BB: And finally, could you tell me something
about your current project – the body of work you are
developing around the Eden project.
PS: Yes I’ve called it Paradisos –
which means The Garden of Eden or paradise. It picks up on some
of the ideas in Esperantis but also moves them on somewhat.
I stared working on this project at the same time that I started
working on Esperantis. I worked in Spain and Portugal during
the Summer months and then in Autumn and Winter I worked closer
to home, but Paradisos took a bit more time to develop.
The Eden Project is probably one of the most important tourist
sites in the UK today and it has grown in recognition over the
last 3-4 years. So the book I’m producing (which is at
the dummy stage at present) has gone through several different
changes. The latest version really describes the transformation
of a post-industrial landscape – from a Britain that started
to decline in the 1970s to a post-landscape which is very much
to do with the simulacra and artificial nature. Eden, as you
know, is a site which creates (or re-creates) all different
climates and areas from around the world. So it’s a kind
of globalism in a very small area. The themes of the artificial
and the simulacra continue, in a sense, from the Esperantis
work.
BB :The title Paradisos reminds me of Milton’s
Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. And I suppose in common
with the latter, there’s something almost metaphorical
about the way that you’re picturing these places –
is that fair to say?
PS: Yes, it has a certain allegorical content
in that it’s an allegory for modern living.
BB: Thank you very much Patrick Shanahan for
allowing us to conduct this interview for the John Hansard Gallery.
project room
July 7 - August 28 Stuart Ross, The Hidden Gardens,
2004, video installation work
A garden without a fence is in fact no longer a proper
garden.
Anne van Erp-Houtepan, ‘The Etymological
Origin of the Garden’, 1986, in Journal of Garden
History, 6: 3, p.229
The word garden is derived from the old English word
geard, meaning yard. It is no wonder then
that this word so often evokes for us, the idea of a confined
space. Think garden and in your mind’s eye, you
will probably see a familiar patch of home-grown flowers, a
rain-stained collection of outdoor furniture, a potting shed,
a clumsily hung washing line. Regardless however, of what is
in your imagined garden, one thing’s for sure. You know
it’s yours because it’s surrounded by a privet hedge
– or a red brick wall, or a latticework fence from Homebase.
Or this, at least, is what Peter Ackroyd claims in Albion
– The Origins of the English Imagination, when he
says that the English garden is a “nationalist icon”
– one that evokes (and here he makes a contrast with the
grand and formal gardens of the French chateaux) the “very
image of defensive privacy”.
What are we to make then, of the domestic gardens of Grundisburgh,
into which, on an annual basis, residents invite the world for
a good look around. It is this gesture of openness, this eschewal
of any ‘defensive privacy’ which Stuart Ross takes
up in his video work The Hidden Gardens, 2004. Filmed
by the artist’s mother, the gardens of Grundisburgh are
here subjected to another kind of public gaze. Where previously,
the annual fête may have presented opportunities to nose
around a neighbour’s garden, shown here in the gallery,
The Hidden Gardens presents random viewers with the
chance to observe an annual institution in English village life.
Thus villagers’ own curiosity is now reflected back upon
itself and magnified to a perhaps uncomfortable degree. What
is revealed in the same moment is a rare and slightly oddish
form of life that many might have thought to be now extinct,
or (more truthfully perhaps) to never have existed at all beyond
the fictional confines of Ambridge. In this way then, The
Hidden Gardens, though drawing on the ‘real’,
more properly resides in a metaphorical realm –
as a kind of cipher that gently teases at some of the national
myths of Englishness.
Bernadette Buckley, John Hansard Gallery
forthcoming exhibitions
Winter 2004
Joan Jonas
16 November - 23 December 2004
A John Hansard Gallery exhibition in association with Anthony Wilkinson Gallery
Winter 2005
Gerald Giamportone
18 January-5 March 2005
A John Hansard Gallery exhibition
Spring 2005
Per Head
15 March-20 April 2005
A John Hansard Gallery/CCAR exhibition
