What a Choquer--the face of modern France

Who are the French today? What is their character, their identity, their reality; what are their aspirations?

Luc Choquer went about to answer these questions in a manner that recalls August Sander. The result is a sort of typography of contemporary French people, and by extension, of French life. Choquer has taken hundreds of photographs over the years, entered homes, asked people of all walks of life to pose for him. He often uses flash, slightly underexposing a picture's background, increasing its saturation, and using flash on the foreground and the subject(s), creating a slightly surreal effect, lifting the subjects off the background.

After seeing it, what can be said? In a  conversation with my friend Marc who saw it with me , we argued about whether Choquer's images showed something specifically French. He felt that the pictures could mostly have been taken somewhere else, that the people and their environments lacked a specifically French quality.

So, indeed, the people in the pictures look like any other, pretty much. Dancers during a break, kids by the swimming pool, middle class couples in the gardens of their representative houses with pools, another couple in their beige living room on a pompous fauteuil and a fake window, teenagers on the street--one can almost hear their "urban" music (or whatever that overproduced, sampled hiphoprappop shite is called in France... sorry, my age shows, I know)--and rich people at a horse race that look like any rich people at any horse race. With minor variations, they could be German or English or American or Dutch or in any industrialised Western country. I would not have recognised them as particularly French, either. France to me means also buildings, an infuriatingly difficult language to penetrate, an incredible sense of beauty, elegance and presentation (and vanity), a visible pride in public spaces and public institutions, and stunning wild landscapes, food and wine, and much more. Little of this shows in the pictures.

Choquer's images are representations of the aspirations of French society. It is a distinctly middle class vision, this idea of risig above one's station in life, of deciding to be "someone". And it so happens that those aspirations are pretty much the same as in any other Western country.

What surprises me is how readily I identify clues about social class, educational level, or certain attitudes. I respond by finding certain people or features--clothing, living environment, for example--attractive, but others not. Indicators of masculinity, assertiveness, independence, intelligence, health make it likely that I regard the people in the image with positive feelings because they correspond to my own aspirations, to how I would like to see myself or to be seen. And again, small things can turn me off--trying too hard, artifice, obvious vanity. These are the things that I was taught to detest from a young age, and, not surprisingly, most people that I associate with. Cue "The White Ribbon" by Michael Haneke for more on my northern German Protestant background.

Corresponding to Choquer's typography, there are advertisements that target these groups of people and feed their aspirations. Looking at the pictures, the ads and the products that these French people consume are easy to imagine. I may not be familiar with the brands, but I know how they are placed and what social prestige they may carry. I am aware how well I speak and comprehend that language of consumerism because it is absolutely international, the Esperanto of globalisation. Mass consumption requires mass taste. Yet, this language to Marc or me--and I suspect to many others--is not a language adding to the complex canon of meanings, traditions, images, and cultural signifiers familiar to us; quite the opposite, it subtracts. We lose a part of our cultural identity and thus a part of our bond with our patrimony and heritage and those that used to share this with us.

The face of modern France is a face like any other?

Avatar!

This evening I did something unexpected; I watched Avatar, James Cameron's CGI avalanche. I had not specifically meant to; my list of current films to watch runs to about a dozen and Avatar wasn't on it. But my mate so wanted to see it--Sigourney Weaver would make him swoon even if she advertised incontinence pads--and he paid, so what the hell...

It was pretty much what I had expected. Overwhelming, really. Scenes of extraordinary beauty, finely rendered to the last pore, hair, and leafy vein. Breathtaking action in 3D had me jumping in my seat. Even an old (in terms of practice) cynic like me was impressed.

Of course, my cynicism is no match for that of Avatar's producers. Avatar is a technological marvel rendered to perfection by countless processors, using the most advanced digital imaging technology ever, but what does it do? It spools off a story of aggressive cartoon cut-out technology junkies vs peace loving indigenous people (beautiful, naturally, because in Disney-nature beauty equals goodness) living in harmony with Mother Nature, an actual divine being encompassing all living things--people, trees, animals, flowers etc. Through their righteous determination, the goodness of their spirits, the purity of their intentions, and with the help of Mother Nature herself, the evil technology junkies--easily identified as Uncle Sam's finest--are defeated and Mother Nature, uncorrupted by the forces of technology and profit, continues to prevail in peace and, erm, harmony.

This most enchanted vision of Nature is entirely a high tech pixel storm, using the very same technology that the military uses for flight and battle simulations. An army of tens of thousands of software programmers in Utah and elsewhere in the US are working their fingers to the bone to ensure that, should Uncle Sam ever decide to invade and exploit another planet and annihilate its people, Mother Nature can go fuck itself. The film denounces the blind pursuit of profit, yet is the result of an unprecedented marketing process; its concept includes video games, computer applications, books, and a host of product spin-offs from the start like no other film before it. And, of course, it has become the highest grossing film within weeks.

Cameron & Co could have stolen Alien or Fifth Element or any number of other themes, and I would have bowed my head in reverence. But they chose this, the most outrageous lie possible. Not only do form and content not overlap, they live in different galaxies. It is propaganda of the very highest production "value", a lie so out there, told with such verve that one is simply overwhelmed by it.

Like oil companies drilling to save the planet, like George W Bush and Tony his poodle announcing "a final push for peace" while they are amassing the largest invading army in decades off the borders of Iraq, like junk food companies sponsoring the Olympics, Avatar is pure propaganda, a patently untrue story that we are desperate to believe. Not believing it is rather more painful.

It is indicative that this is the first major film of its kind. Ultra-expensive, technically without peer, it was never going to bite the hand it serves. 

 

She is alive!

Good night.

Constructing myself 2

© ninthplanet 2010

How to explore the relationship of fetish, brands, and identity? What might have formerly been thought of as belonging to two very different spheres--commercial brands and products on one hand and personal attributes and style on the other--are no longer distinguishable. Commercial brands and products are the building blocks of modern lifestyle. They identify a person's place in society or at least their aspirations to a particular place. They also identify locations, here a banal modernist building of the sort to be found everywhere, given an identity thanks to Deutsche Bank. Brands and products must fit within our aspirations and the image we are constructing of ourselves.

"Is it me?"

Shopping bag--Lidl, Sainsbury's, Iceland, or Selfridge's? Drink--Coke, Diet Coke, V Water? Apart from commercial brands, most other products, especially clothes, have developed a similar function. Thought of as "expressing" personality, they may rather be its construction. It was once the luxury of the privileged--clothes that served no role (apart from covering the body), but to distinguish the free individual from the undistinguished, poor peasant or worker whose clothes were dictated by his means or by their function.

Heiress Doris Duke in an old press shot

 Opening of an exhbition at the Guggenheim Museum, NY

 August Sander, Handlanger

This privilege now extends to almost everyone in modern consumer society. Where this privilege does not extend to, its absence is painfully felt and justifiably interpreted as social marginalisation and a lack of individuation.

Brands or product types--the leather jacket, trainers, a tie, or a 3-piece suit, tattoos, a hairstyle, a particular fashionable mannerism, e.g. the gangsta walk, the high five--all exist on a continuum. If my aspired to image is "butch"--which is to masculine as camp is to feminine--I will not drink Diet Coke; Coca-Cola has especially created Coke Zero for me (if my beverage needs to be sugar-free because I am a health and body conscious kind a' guy). Likewise, a red Mohican gives the message that its wearer sees himself as a bit of social rogue, certainly non-conformist.  The plastic shopping bag sends off a very different message to a jute bag without corporate logo.

Every detail carries with it a world of associations, which are absorbed into a person's identity. All those identity bits are assembled by the process of consuming, typically, but not necessarily, involving a commercial transaction. This assembled identity fits the idea of  lifestyle, which implies a deliberate and self-aware choice, the consumer choice. Here, objects--and the term includes all of the aforementioned and virtually every possession or attribute--have become signs, unrelated to any practical use or need, according to Jean Baudrillard. Each sign acquires the role of a fetish, a pars pro toto, which itself becomes the object of desire instead of the thing it refers to--from those Manolo Blahniks in Sex and the City to the football socks and sneakers of a sportswear fetishist. The use of eroticism in advertising carefully establishes the fetish character of products.

© ninthplanet 2009

The gay world, in particular, has embraced this to the extreme as it is already set apart by its sexuality. Men refer to each other by their online nicknames, their assumed identities; they buy and wear the outfits that embody their sexual lifestyle identity, and they share this lifestyle (by lifestyle I do not mean sexual orientation as such as that is not chosen) with like-minded others. The world of Recon, a commercial company that runs an online gay dating site based on fetishes, comprises an online shop that sells the outfits and accessoires, gay fetish "events", and the aspirational role models in the form of professionally photographed and post-produced shots as well as pictures of ambitious members who present themselves in the best possible light both as products and as consumers. Each member profile lists the product's attributes alongside the shots. Recon, like so many other sites, sexual or not, has created an entire lifestyle world, here equating sexuality, personal and group identity with consumption.

It demonstrates how people not only express their personality, but actively assume and construct it by purchasing products. This process changes how people conceive of each other and of themselves, i.e. as products.

In a meta-fetish sort of way, Recon brand their own events and some of their products with their logo, thus fetishising the fetish shop/website itself. The brand becomes part of the core of a person's personality, sexuality.

Fetishes are specific, as are lifestyle identities. Incongruence or being out of context kills them instantly. Fetishes lose any notion of being sexually arousing; they become comical or ambiguous.

© ninthplanet 2009

Incongruous lifestyles are either eccentric or a bit tragic, depending on social class. A rich person may quite comfortably adopt working class mannerism, but a lower middle class person with upper class mannerisms is Hyacinth Bucket. The poor prole who drives a ridiculously overstyled car, the lower middle class family that have tarted up their council house with leaded windows--they are all the familiar butt of jokes. Rich people "acting down" may be complemented on their "lack of airs" or their modesty, or they will, at least, always command the respect their wealth bestows them. But for a Jordan to be exposed as a chav slapper, will always trigger the "well, she's no better than she should be" response of the HEAT readership.

Lifestyles must possess an air of authenticity; they must be perceived to be a true expression of a person's personality, as opposed to just expressing an aspiration. Any clues that do not fit the image risk revealing its aspirational and deliberately styled nature.

Western consumer society leaves no escape. Even the act of not participating is understood as a lifestyle choice. People not basing their lives on career advancement and aspirations for status, wealth, comfort etc, do not do so because they had not "thought about it". They cannot escape from these lifestyle choices; they must be made, even if in the negative. The individual is framed within a social paradigm that is not of his own making and mostly beyond his own control.The only people that do not build their lifestyle through consumer choices are those who cannot afford to. As a consequence, we are blinded to their identity and personalities; their poverty serves as an impenetrable surface, which defines them and which is illegible to us due to the absence of the familiar cues. They become effectively invisible, as in Neil Gaiman's book Neverwhere. Their poverty becomes a sort of moral blemish, behind which the individual disappears.

by Jim Goldberg

In the image at the very top of this post, the dildo is overkill. No one would flirt with the man. "Getting it right" requires a high degree of awareness of products and their meanings. Every fetish and every consumer lifestyle has a point where the cracks become apparent. Look behind the ears and you see the scars of the face lift. Witness a catty "domestic" scene between the glamourous and pervy  'A' gay fetish couple, and the lustre of their "lick my boots you dirty pig" routine will never be restored. Ever more refined consumption, a high awareness of one's image and its constant monitoring are the essential ingredients of a successful lifestyle identity. One mistake and the whole construction is exposed as, at worst, a fake and the person as inept or dishonest, with doubts over his true identity raised.

Authenticity and humanity can only be found in the cracks of this lifestyle image. Be it the Celine Dion disk in the pervy skinhead's music collection, the secret pair of frilly knickers in the back of some hairy builder's chest of drawers, or the preposterous chandelier in the living room of a small council flat--in the gap between reality and aspiration is where true life is found. It's like the gap below the skirting board, or behind the sofa where the detritus of a life lived accumulates. The surfaces are swept and tidied in order to be presentable, but those corners and cracks--how embarrassing!--we can trust to tell it how it is. I guess as a psychiatrist, I find psychological cracks fascinating; they reveal a humanity and truth that never fails to move me.

Where I assemble images from several others, I want those cracks to be visible on second sight; maybe it is the light, the perspective or the colour temperature, a sloppy mask or some other detail. It has to be almost invisible at first glance, so as to be believable, and then, on closer inspection, reveal its construction. As a life styled.

Just went and saw Open See, an exhibition at the Photographer's Gallery in London, which "documents the experiences of people who travel from war torn, socially and economically devastated countries, to make new lives in Europe", by Jim Goldberg. Many images are harrowing--pictures of people who have fled war, persecution, or torture, whose families have been slaughtered, who have been sold into slavery as prostitutes or labourers, or who simply dream of a happier lives in the midst of ravaged and litter strewn landscapes, struggling to build a meagre existence in the slums constructed of the debris of our industrialised world. 

 And as always, these images arouse the usual emotions in me--first of all, a form of guilt, not entirely sure of what exactly, but a vague sense that how I live, the society I live in are partially to blame for this misery, then followed by an admonition "to do something about it". From the time my mother made me finish my dinner--"Think of those poor children in Africa!", she would say, and I would hang my head in shame and shovel the remainder of those thrice warmed up leftovers into my mouth--to today when I am still pissed off at those "poor children" for my mom's challenging cuisine... Guilt, shame, misplaced anger, more guilt, heavy stuff a few yards away from the shops and café lattes of central London. Looking at the pictures requires an effort to separate these images from the unreflected feelings they trigger in me. And actually, these pictures are not about me at all. After sifting through my own middle class shit, their true horror and despair begins to sink in, not as a call to action or for remorse, but as a process of understanding, of empathy.


The images seem vaguely familiar; many look like the generic visual disaster news fodder I have come to anticipate. It is grim there, in those far away countries.  I know it is there all the time; and I do not wring my hands, sell the Jag (if I had one), and dress in sackcloth and ashes every day. I do not even lose my sleep. Why the knot in the throat now when I see the pictures? So saturated with images are we, real or virtual ones, that they make us "tourists in other people's lives", as Susan Sontag says. Are Jim Goldberg's pictures more or less real emotionally than a dramatic episode of "Eastenders"? Are they a little afternoon trip into migrant horror land for an hour, good for a sigh, a twinge of conscience, a sad shake of the head before we "return" to our world again?


Goldberg goes further, beyond the image. Many of the pictures are accompanied by captions that provide clues, or they have been defaced or written on by the people they portray. He has not stolen the shot, appropriated a life for the titilation of Western conscience; he has returned the images to their rightful owners who mark them as their own. In Regarding the Pain of Others Sontag makes the point that the meaning of images is free floating and has to be grounded by words. In Goldberg's photographs, the words belong to the people depicted, as does their meaning.

 

Actually, these images are much closer to home. In my work as a psychiatrist, I see people dislocated by war, poverty, disaster, and personal tragedy every day, people from far away or from England even, people living on the streets of London or in so-called bed&breakfasts-- grungy hovels crawling with bedbugs, always next door to an off licence it seems. They tell me their stories, and of their nightmares and the fear that still haunts them, the shame they feel at their helplessness and dependency, the institutionalised humiliation of the benefits and housing system, the worry of how others look at them.  I examine the scars left by their torturers, prescribe medication so that they can sleep at night, listen to the pointless rage and hopeless expectations of the street prostitutes who got fucked by their uncles and stepfathers when they were six or seven. My head is full of crackly newsreel footage of their lives.

After Open See, I am surprised at how familiar it all seems to me. It is as if Goldberg's pictures, the words and traces of those lives illustrate my patients', the bits that only live on in their memories day-to-day, night-to-night, too incredible, irreconcilable with my own life, hopes, and dreams. In my mind, I have seen those pictures innumerable times. They are just as I expected them to be.

Jim Goldberg OPEN SEE, at the Photographer's Gallery, London

totem

Dungeness on a sunny day is crawling with photographers. The desolate ambiance of the enormous expanse of shingle, the nuclear power station in the background, the caché of Derek Jarman's former cottage, or the picturesque decay of the boats and huts on the beach... 

I was fascinated as well by some of the things sitting there in the shingle... Whether old engines on blocks, big barrels with mysterious numbers on them, or other constructions--all seemed to be somehow animated, as if possessed by spirits. I imagined them as totems, spirits of the dead, the revered witnesses of a past age. The modern day tripper still feels their presence, but cannot understand them. The local version of those Easter Island heads, really. As a kid, I would have happily spent a whole summer there, preferably early in the morning or in the evenings when I would be alone with them; I would have brought them back to life...

parting as friends

A few months ago, I moved out of my flat in London, which I had bought as a trainee doctor together with my German partner at the time. It had been a big, inexpensive flat, quite central on a 60's council estate in Hackney. The architecture still exuded 1960s modernist visions of community living and civic society. Of course, it was built on the cheap--floors that seemed to have been made from orange crates, crumbling concrete, peeling paint, doors as substantial as a postcard. Years of neglect, the drunken screaming at night, vandalism, the smell of dope wafting through the corridors, and the inevitable CCTV cameras all pissed on what little was left of modernist utopia. Finally, the neighbourhood had become ultra hip--pointy shoes, Pete Doherty lookalikes and Macbooks everywhere. This abrupt change felt as odd to me as the deprivation that had preceded it.



When I finally sold the place, it was without a sense of nostalgia. It had not been a bad flat, but nothing to wax lyrical about. I did not hate it; I was just fairly indifferent to it. And yet, when almost everything was packed and the flat was almost naked, I could not just sneak away without a nod of acknowledgement of the years we had shared, the flat and I. A quarter of my life, partners had come and gone (and eventually stayed), illness, birthdays, guests, shags, flatmates, dinner for friends, and my cats barfing on the carpets... It was this intimacy of living that had turned those charmless walls into my home. I had changed the place to some extent, and I had certainly changed while living there. It had been "mine" for better or worse. I took out my camera during the last couple of hours, put it on a tripod and took some pictures that, to me, demonstrate this intimacy and this ownership. We are both naked; I face the camera; I inhabit the flat as much as my body, which bears the marks and scars of my life.


We part as friends...

a few more at
ninthplanet's photostream

PhotoBearUK

A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune of meeting a photographer whose work I absolutely love. He asked me if he could take my picture. Much of his work fits the category of gay male nudes, which I normally run a mile from. Much of the fetishistic gay male glamour photography stuff bores me to tears--there is already tons of it around. I find much of it all surface, no depth. It perpetuates the myth that gay man are, or at least should be, hypersexualised always-ready-when-you-are totty. I have to confess here that I do not even like most porn; it simply does not turn me on--it usually has a sense of deja-vu, and it remains too distant from me, certainly more than my own fantasies or experiences. All in all, I do not often find gay male nudes very interesting.


Vincent's are different. They are less nudes than naked portraits. The models are not passively consumed by the viewer, but actively engaged as most of the pictures are shot dead pan. The quality of the lighting and the detail lend the images depth and palpable presence. They can be sexy (and most of the men in them are sexy to me), but they are so without negating the sitters' individuality and personality. 


So, I agreed. I was wearing an orthopaedic boot after some foot surgery, which was not an obstacle to doing these pictures apparently. I am by now reasonably comfortable posing in the buff though I am not that confident physically. But I actually like these pictures very much. There are two pictures of the session here, but there are hundreds more (and of much more attractive models) on Vincent's Flickr site where he operates under PhotoBearUK. He also takes a huge variety of pictures, from flowers to landscapes, and a trawl through his Flickr site is hugely rewarding. 


Check out his websites:
PhotoBearUK
mascularstudio