Jiltfest 2K10: The Day After

In the spirit of voyeurism, I’ve spent the last twenty minutes or so lurking about the park, photographing strangers in an attempt to emulate this afternoon’s exhibit in the Tate Modern. Though the picture I’ve decided to engage is one I took yesterday in the London countryside, I’ve included a few of this evening’s photographs to share my creepings and lurkings with our QueerLondon fan base. I should preface this post by admitting that I am not sure I have quite the eye for detail which is required of a photographer, but that I plan to smokescreen my audience into forgetting this by way of my blog post.

Compositionally, I like the texture of the water; the squiggly lines of the ripples seem to contrast nicely to the very straight ones of the fishing pole. I also like that the viewer is given minimal information about the main character. Man? Woman? Sleeping? Enjoying a lazy day by the pond? Alone? Frustrated? It turns out that this man was snoozing gently, pond-side, quite alone. Something about the way the green of the grass spikes into the water interests me as well, though I’m hard pressed to specify.

I’ve selected this particular photo (which I took prior to our trek to the Tate Modern) because I find something about the voyeurism involved in catching this Londoner at his sleepiest intrigues me. What does the fact that this man is unaware that he is being watched (and captured) mean for the photo? Though we can imagine that the sleepy man is no different for having been captured in such a way (that is, until the Queer London blog gets optioned for a film), this photo, along with the exhibit, seems to raise questions of artistic morality. Why is voyeurism constructed as undesirable in our culture if, practically speaking, it is nearly entirely harmless? What am I, the photographer, doing to this bystander without his consent? One such effect seems to be in the way this medium mythologizes its subjects. It seems as though this voyeuristic photography does a disservice to its subjects by manner of the way in which the photographer strips the subject of his “real” story and impresses his own narrative on the subject. What the man in this picture is actually doing ceases to matter; I have captured him on film and as a result, he will assume whatever story I attach to him.

In the spirit of our discussions of Carol Ann Duffy’s “Stuffed” and Wolfgang Tillman’s photography, I cannot help but think of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, which seems to parallel Duffy’s poem in its examination of the artistic impulse. We are asked, if only momentarily, to believe that the subjects of a painting are, in fact, real people that have simply been shaped to the artist’s will and frozen in time, condemned to hang on a wall forever. Sondheim and Duffy both seem to explore the selfishness involved in the creation of art thought the way both artists (taxidermist and painter) ignore their subjects actual function/need and instead shape them to whatever is most aesthetically pleasing. Following this line of thought, I wonder what happens if we think about the subject of this photograph as alive. I seem to have turned this Londoner into a 21^st century mariner-sleeping beauty and perhaps, in compressing him to a digital image, robbed him of personhood in the name of art. All in a day’s work, I suppose.

(I was tempted to write about this tender moment I seem to have captured between man and squirrel, but I think the picture tells quite a richer story by itself than I could manage. Love comes in all sizes, dear readers. I just worry that the logistics of moving in together might be tricky; that man looks ill equipped for tree climbing.)