Committed to Memory by Axis Graphic Design

Published in 2007 by

Published on the occasion of an exhibition at

Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery

and the authors

Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery

Carlisle City Council

Castle Street, Carlisle, ca3 8tp

Castle Street, Carlisle

England, ca3 8tp

may be reproduced, transmitted or used in any

(44) 01228 534781

form or by any means – graphic, electronic or

Exhibition and publication curated by

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mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

Paul Herrmann

www.tulliehouse.co.uk

taping or information storage and retrieval

isbn: 0-907852-17-3

5 May – 1 July 2007

or otherwise – without the permission of the

Exhibition organised by Fiona Venables,

Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery

John Darwell Committed to Memory

Introduction

Paul Herrmann

Billy Percival first introduced me to John Darwell. In fact, strictly speaking, it was the other way round. I was one of a clutch of aspiring photographers lucky to have come to a portfolio session John was giving in the mid 1980s – and he showed us a pile of prints from his latest project on the Manchester Ship Canal. I kept going back to the print of Billy, or as he was then known, Lock Repairman, Runcorn. “You like that one, don’t you?” I remember John saying. That’s the kind of comment he sometimes makes – it might seem superfluous, but it set us up for one of those conversations that stayed with me. I did like that one, and I still do. It seems to me an extraordinarily balanced picture. Is Billy happy about being photographed, or not? Sometimes I think he looks like a man who never smiles; other times it appears as though he’s about to laugh, or that he’s laughing already. Is he backing away, or is John wanting to keep a respectable distance? John’s put Billy’s head on a ‘third’, you might think; the point where the back wall meets one of the two side walls; but then it turns out that third is almost in the centre of the picture. Workshop buildings like that can be shadowy places, but not this one; Billy’s face is softly lit, with a touch of flash. This softness, and the softness of the light all around, along with Billy’s soft clothes, seems to drain the hardness from the metal and stone that fill most of the frame. Billy’s even indifferent to the massive drill bit pointing at his back or the trolley that might suddenly rumble towards him – and us. What I see now, that I didn’t see twenty years earlier, is that I’m looking at a self-portrait. John is present in all the pictures he makes. He is connected to his subject at many levels, in ways I’m only beginning to uncover. In fact all his pictures are, at least partly, about himself. His pictures are also like him – not the same as being about him. Many photographers’ best work is the work that’s most like themselves. Energetic and vibrant photography made by people who are constantly on the go; calm and reflective, or cool and analytical work from people of a similar character. It’s not important to know that to appreciate the work; it’s just something I’ve noticed. When people work against their characters, it can be interesting, but things can seem a little wrong. The writer Mark Irving referred to a certain type of photography that “espouses its own rhetoric – of surface texture, visual style, of its engagement with its subject – in order for it to demonstrate its intelligence.” He saw this as one way that photography might be elevated to the status of art, and contrasted it with “the more stealthy but long-suffering strategy – to avoid rhetoric altogether, to erase the idea of the photographic encounter and to replace it instead with the idea that the world delivered itself into being through photography with the photographer acting as its semi-disinterested midwife... The closer [photography] has got to being accepted as mainstream art the less explicitly rhetorical it has wanted to appear and the more the photographer has sought to remove his or her presence from the picture.” Of course engagement with the subject is not the same kind of rhetoric as surface texture, but it’s interesting to think of it as rhetoric at all. The act of taking, or making, a photograph must involve some kind of observation, and consequently a certain amount of change or influence on what is being observed. Isn’t the attempted removal of the photographer’s presence therefore a more rhetorical gesture than acknowledging it?

To return to character, and more particularly that of John and his work. I’ve always seen honesty and empathy in both him and his work. In fact there’s a tension between these two. If you’re being honest about a subject it can sometimes be cruel. John steps back when he needs to. So the ship canal work leaves its subjects just enough space. There’s rarely a confrontation between photographer and subject; the subjects are in their space, and John’s in his. In Jimmy Jock, Albert and the Six-Sided Clock, many of the subjects are masked, covered, turned away or partly hidden. This leitmotif recurs; not just in the series about nuclear power and weapons (Legacy, First and Last, and By Association) and those very personal projects (In Isolation, Garden of Earthly Delights, (h)arris) where you might expect it, but among workers at a carpet factory (Workplace). There’s another pattern, or influence, that runs through John’s work, and that is Zeitgeist, spirit of the age. The relationship between John’s work and the time in which it was made is not always straightforward, but to me it is a key to understanding the pictures. As historical events unfold, there is a cultural response. Sometimes it’s the other way round and culture becomes a historical agent. The eighties was a time of political polarisation in Britain, perhaps the closest we’ve come to civil war so far in my lifetime. You were either for the miners, the dockers, the printers, or against them. Working as a photographer at that time, it didn’t really feel to me like there was much space for someone considering both sides of, say, the death of industry of the North, or the birth of Loadsamoney in the City of London. It was a time when there was a lot of shouting. The photographers who were getting noticed were those whose work was loud (in terms of its rhetorical content); which took sides – particularly as the stream of photography generally available was then starting to grow to a flood. There is a value to work which steps back from the dominant culture, and even from the dominant subculture. John’s honesty and empathy defines his relationship to the culture of the time. There are cross currents in the progression of his work. One current seems to run with the culture. The typical concerned, thinking artist of the eighties, investigating social issues and politics, started to look inwards in the nineties and two thousands. John’s subject matter moved from the social issues of work, decline and regeneration, via the personal questions of journey and discovery, towards the psychological issues of melancholy and depression. Another current runs the opposite way. The work on social issues is in fact intensely personal, not just in the early social projects as I have described but right up to Dark Days, in which the blocked off road and the approaching cloud of smoke work on many more levels than just a simple depiction of foot-and-mouth disease. The personal journeys are loaded with social content; Not Starting from Here, for instance, is both a witty and gentle comment on contemporary leisure, and something more biting on the way we treat the environment, as well as telling us about John’s view of the world and himself. The most concentrated of the psychological investigations, A Black Dog Came Calling, seems to me also to contain the most tearing symbolism of social decline, about the descent both of the soul and the institution. That’s one of the things about using photography; you never escape the real. And linking this all together is the recurrent visual symbolism; a lot of it about John himself (his feet, his clothes, his shadow, himself in his subjects); much, as I mentioned, is about the subjects’ (and John’s) part-hidden and ambiguous position in the photograph and in the environment. Distance, water, smoke, and fog all emphasise that, and make their own references; while strange discarded objects, hanging, stuck or half-buried, abound. Each symbol plays a role in the pictures it appears in. The hanging thing, such as the suspended twig in After Schwitters, which looks like it will fall at any moment, looks back to the balance in Billy Percival’s portrait, and comments on our delicate position

in the world; while the abandoned smiling plastic bottle in Not Starting From Here, although brightly coloured and bathed in sunshine (usually symbols of optimism), can evoke either sadness or humour depending on the mood of the viewer. There’s often wit in his pictures, which is a difficult thing to accomplish in photography, but it’s one of the things that adds to the pleasure of looking at his work. John’s use of colour is central. He made the early projects, such as Working Lives and The Big Ditch, in black and white, and started in black and white for his next project in Sheffield. But as soon as the first roll of colour was processed, he knew he would never take another black and white photograph. The picture that he chose from that first roll is of a derelict steelworks site, and it aims straight between the eyes. The distant background that might belong in The Big Ditch is literally scribbled out by bent rusting steel (another recurring theme), and it seems as close as John gets to pure gesture and emotion, an intensely personal response to a social tragedy. The colour is anti-colour, wrongly lit mud and rubbish. John had found his tool of choice, the 120 colour negative. He doesn’t usually rail like that. The colour and the substance of the world, I feel, are generally a source of pleasure for him, and photography a continual excitement. John was only able to make the Black Dog Came Calling images after he was out of his depression; he says that because he “could metaphorically speaking take charge of the depression and look it in the eye, [the making of the work was] in many ways exciting and fun... By taking control of it (even by emotionally placing myself back in the depressive state as the only way I could recognise the symbolic elements when I saw them) I was able to control the situation and ultimately to see the depression for what it was, and by producing the images that made it tangible to take away its power.” While his physical home is Cumbria, his spiritual home might be the American desert, glimpsed in Desert States, where he stayed long after running out of film. “The light, colour, sense of space, the huge sky, coyotes howling at dusk, even the bars, truck stops, neon all added to a sense of self containment,” he writes. “I regard it as somewhere I felt more spiritually at peace than anywhere else I’d encountered.” John approached me to help with a fresh look at his work to date, for this book and the accompanying exhibition in 2007. In organising the photographs in the exhibition, we’ve used the older black and white social projects as the starting point, with A Black Dog Came Calling as one possible conclusion. The sequence in this book is deliberately less formal, picking up on the visual themes and metaphors that run through his photography. Because really, the story of his work is the story of his journeys; back and forth to depression, to social collapse, to isolation, but always retaining an optimism borne out of physicality, of the object, of the pleasure of communicating something about the world, and never far from wit, humour and lightness. In John’s hands and in his eye, photography is a complete language. .