The Heritage Issue by Aiden Bowman

S T E R E O S C O P E the heritage issue

the heritage issue

Tradition, preservation, genealogy, legacy: what does heritage mean to you? Posing this question to the photographically minded of St Andrews, we were inundated with visual responses. A student portfolio by Benoit Grogan-Avignon incorporates notions of nostalgia while Irina Earnshaw’s deals with heritage as something observable outside of one’s own history. Maya Tounta’s collection charts her personal development as a photographer and serves as a documentation of her own individual heritage. We were pleasantly surprised by submissions of antique photographs, filched from frames and borrowed from books. To do justice to these magnificent family relics, we built a collection that exemplifies the simple elegance of the homemade photograph. The product is a wonderfully varied (and invented) family photographic album. While the family represented here does not really exist, albums like this one do. The photographs are simple family snapshots, and yet they are often beautiful and engaging works of art. We were captivated by the work of three photographers from the University’s Special Collections. James B. Milne’s photographs from Thailand in the 1980’s explore the relationship between the tourist and the heritage of ‘the other’—a glimpse into Orientalism in photography. The portfolio we have compiled here examines heritage as a commodity to be consumed, observed and sometimes bought. In a collection of G. Allan Little’s portraits we are afforded a look at the history of St Andrews and the East Neuk of Fife. Little’s photojournalistic style raises questions of capturing one’s own heritage and the audience for whom it is intended. Lady Henrietta Gilmour, one of the earliest female Scottish photographers, spent her photographic career documenting her own life: capturing family, friends and daily routines. Her work is a visual portrayal of her own personal history and a beautiful illustration of the past from the modern viewer’s perspective. In his article, ‘Ressurection and Photography,’ Nicholas Guy deals with the photographer as taxidermist working to preserve and to animate something that no longer is. Matilda Rossetti’s interviews with poet Robert Crawford and photographer Norman McBeath shed light on the interesting temporal juxtapositions of photography and poetry in their joint venture Body Bags/ Simonides. In ‘The Ventriloquist and the Dancing Doll’, Alex Derpanopoulos shows us that photography can not only preserve but also uncover a family’s history. Heritage is what survives of the past: the preservation of tradition and the freezing of memory for posterity. Photography is often criticized for its tendency to restrict the flow of time. This issue hopes, instead, to celebrate the agelessness of the medium. A perfect moment caught forever on film is a beautiful gift. Even an imperfect or mundane moment frozen in time is a thing to be cherished; a photograph is only made more salient by the realness of a mar or the true beauty of the ordinary. This issue attempts to show just that; the exquisiteness of the everyday, the extraordinary in the ordinary, the beauty of something as simple as heritage. Please enjoy.

Jackie Bach Editor, Stereoscope Magazine

Irina Earnshaw Maya Tounta

left: G.A. Little, Pluscarden Abbey, A monk and a group of visiting nuns, ca. 1967, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, gal-449 cover photo: Susanna Horsey

Contents Portfolios

Family Photos, 16 The Ventriloquist and the Dancing Doll, 26 BenoĂŽt Grogan-Avignon, 34 James B. Milne, 42 Maya Tounta, 48 Irina Earnshaw, 56 G. Allan Little, 68 Lady Henrietta Gilmour, 76

Articles & Interviews

Interviews with Robert Crawford and Norman Macbeath, 10 Ressurection and Photography, 64

PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Jasmine Picôt-Chapman EXHIBITION COORDINATOR

Bee Vellacott

PUBLISHER & SUB EDITOR

Carson Woś

PRESS

Neha Shastry LAYOUT

Maya Tounta

EDITOR

Jackie Bach EXHIBITION COORDINATOR

SPONSORSHIP

Ilinca Vanau

Samantha Anderson LITERARY EDITOR

Matilda Rossetti

LAYOUT

Aiden Bowman PRESS

Renata Grasso

SPONSORSHIP

Nicolas Guy

FOUNDER

LITERARY EDITOR

Hope Brimelow

Nina Moog

DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Beach Outing, East Sands

interviews with robert crawford and norman macbeath by Matilda Rossetti

From all sides of the Byreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s upstairs exhibition space, distinctive Scots voices speak out about ancient battles, deaths and aspects of everyday life alongside some arresting photographs. This is Simonides: modern, dialectal translations of ancient Greek epitaphs by poet Robert Crawford paired with the black and white photographs of Norman MacBeath. These poems reflect the potency that the themes of loss, war and beauty have retained over a time period of more than two thousand years; coupled with MacBeathâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s monotone photography, this creates a timeless and thought-provoking exhibition. I met with both Crawford and MacBeath during StAnza Poetry Festival to discuss heritage, the relationship between various art forms and their Simonides project which was being exhibited during the festival.

Interview with Robert Crawford:

I begin the conversation with Robert Crawford by asking a question that I’ve been thinking about a great deal since the theme of heritage was chosen for this issue: why heritage is important in our modern-day lives. Crawford displays a level of reluctance to respond to the word heritage, commenting that for him it seems slightly reminiscent of ‘marketing campaigns’, and chooses instead to use the word tradition. The interesting, and pertinent topic is, according to Crawford, the way in which ‘one innovates within tradition at the same times as being to some extend guided by it’, as this idea characterises the way in which most of us live, though we may well rebel against the idea that we are living ‘traditional lives’. Tradition, then, is an unavoidable and integral aspect of our lives, shaping our actions as well as providing us with grounding from which to develop. Having visited the Simonides exhibition, I was eager to discuss photography with Crawford, and its ability to engage with tradition. How does photography relate to other disciplines, and how does it comment on tradition? What is the most effective medium for commenting on tradition? The questions seem to throw him somewhat, such a critical approach to art at odds with the way his imagination works. At a visual level, his collaboration with MacBeath has been ‘entirely intuitive’, and so he is not entirely sure he possesses the critical vocabulary for such a discussion. A more specific approach, then. How does tradition feature within the Simonides project? Both he and MacBeath, Crawford explains, were interested in producing something simultaneously ‘ancient and modern’ and aimed to make people think by producing something that wasn’t explicitly

one or the either. There is, Crawford says, an ‘edginess’ to such a creation, and this is the reason that the collaboration’s allusions to the current War on Terror were not made too candid. In its original display at the Edinburgh College of Art, the Simonides exhibition featured four body bags positioned, in an unexplained fashion, on the floor of studios which overlooked Edinburgh Castle, a military barracks. So, though no direct comment on contemporary conflict was ever made, there was that to spark the ancient traditional material into a rather problematic modern context, linking our past and present. The practicalities of collaborating is something which interests me, especially in this case: had Simonides’ epitaphs inspired the whole project, or were the poems found to fit the photographs? Crawford replies that the project ‘evolved simultaneously’: by chance, it seems, MacBeath had some pictures relating to classical themes when Crawford decided to show him the epitaphs he had been working on, and the collaboration began there and then. There was, remembers Crawford, a great day spent at MacBeath’s house, spreading out poems and photographs on his dining table before a long, exploratory mix-and-match session began. There were some gaps, of course, where a new photograph or poem would be required, but generally the project indeed grew up simultaneously and in a genuinely collaborative fashion. Did you struggle at all, I asked him, collaborating with someone who works in a different art form? Crawford answers no, citing the similarities between the intense sense of focus conveyed through the very short epitaphs and the intense focus conveyed through a lens, particularly a close-up. Indeed, Crawford says that he felt an ‘instinctive parallel’ between the two disciplines. But overall, far from seeing the collaboration as a ‘struggle’, Crawford admits to having a great deal of fun with the 11

project, enjoying the chance to spend time ‘communing with the living’ when writing is usually such a solitary act. Perhaps the question I am most interested in is the effect that the photograph/poem juxtapositions had on Crawford himself. Did seeing the photographs alongside the poems, I ask, cause you to view your work in a different light? Crawford answers that it caused him to reconsider the nature of the collaboration. Not having worked before with a photographer, Crawford was struck by MacBeath’s insistence that the relationship between the photographs and the poems ought not to be illustrative – originally, he had thought that pictures of conflict zones or war portraits might make up some of the photographic content. This consideration was something Crawford found interesting and beneficial because it meant that in each case the photograph adds something to the poem, and the poem to the photograph, allowing them to resonate together but encouraging the imagination to move off in different directions. For Crawford, occasionally the two almost pull apart slightly while being juxtaposed so that each artist opens up an interpretative possibility that may have been latent in the poem or image but may not have come out in the same way otherwise. Photography is a discipline that has long

interested Crawford; indeed, he recently published a book discussing St Andrews’ role as the first town to be comprehensively documented through photographs. What sparked this interest originally? It was, says Crawford, partly an accident. After visiting an exhibition – probably in the 1980s – where he saw a number of Hill & Adamson calotypes, he realised there was a strong early Scottish presence in photography. This was only exacerbated when, after moving to St Andrews later that decade, he became interested in the little blue plaques around the town detailing its historic photographers: he was, he says, ‘in a very literal sense being guided almost by these little signboards about the place’, and decided he would like to try and write about this. Having had the thought that St Andrews may well have been the first town in the world to have been the subject of such thorough photographic documentation, and having checked the idea with photographic historians in both the UK and the States, he began to write. I comment that we are really very lucky to be a photography magazine based here in St Andrews with access to such a large and extensive special collections resource, and he agrees. The special collections resource is a fantastic one, he comments, and one that is probably too often overlooked, given that it is the biggest in Scotland and one of the largest photographic collections in the UK, with about 700,000 images. ‘There’s not very many areas of cultural outposts where St Andrews could claim to be the first in anything in terms of history or heritage’, he declares, ‘but I think this is one where it could, and because I’ve come to love the place, awkward and strange though it is, I just liked the idea of being able to write such a book’.

ÂŠNorman McBeath

BROTACHUS I, Brotachus, lig here, a Gortyn Cretan. I didnae come tae die, just tae sell shaes. I, Brotachus, a Gortyn Cretan, lie here. I did not come to die, just to sell shoes.

Interview with Norman McBeath:

interested in poetry it was because poets were writing about the things that I was looking at – small things, perhaps overlooked by others – maybe a crack in the floor, or some rubbish on the beach, as in ‘Brotachus’. Photography does the same thing. Both the photographer and the poet are artists, and the artistic impact of what you see extends beyond what is visually represented: it’s about personal interpretation. To talk about ‘Brotachus’ specifically, I saw a black axle with two wheels on a beach, and it had an impact on me. I found the situation of the axle – designed for movement, now lying motionless – powerful. I also liked the rubber of the tyres – in Senegal, I saw flip-flops made out of tyres, and I like this idea that tyres last, that they can have a history. So yes, I think that there is an important imaginative aspect to art, which is constant across all art forms.

Robert Crawford mentioned that he was originally surprised, though later pleased, that the photos you decided to pair with his poems weren’t merely illustrations of them: why do you think that it was so important to keep the relationship between them distinct? It was very important to me that the photographs were not illustrative, that they were not a literal interpretation of the poems. The link between poem and photograph should be evocative, emotional and indirect. It’s vital that people can work out the links between the works themselves, on a personal level. With photographs and texts, you want both to excite the imagination – things that Has seeing your photographs paired are too similar don’t do this. All art should be alongside Robert Crawford’s poems made a catalyst for the imagination. you consider your own work differently? Yes, definitely. There is no fixed meaning He also mentioned this morning at to a photograph; it’s all about the context. StAnza that one aspect of the photography A different mood can make you consider that he particularly liked was the fact a photograph afresh, as can a different that it was black and white, giving the wall colour upon which the photograph is collaboration an ageless feel. Was this a displayed... the meaning can alter for me conscious decision? even without Robert’s texts. But when you Yes it was – a lot of my work is in black read the poem ‘Brotachus’, in this context and white, I like the timelessness it gives the photograph has a definite meaning. Yet if to photographs. I used film for these used in the context of a poem about ecology, photographs because it also feeds into abandonment, changing tides, it would have this timeless aspect. Photography is going a different feel. through a revolution at the moment, but I don’t feel that film is obsolete – it has its own What drew you to take part in a enduring and individual qualities as does the collaboration that was so interested in the digital medium, so there is no real conflict. relationship between the old and the new? Both can be employed to powerful effect. But I liked the idea that Simonides was writing I felt in this case, I feel film worked well. about real people’s lives at a time when that was relatively uncommon – I’m very What advantages do you think interested in people, and that aspect tied in photography as a discipline has over poetry? well with my own documentary work. I actually feel that photography has many I liked its freshness, and the idea that parallels with poetry. When I first became we can still learn from poems two-and-

ORPHEUS

Abune his heid fleed coontless burds. The fush Flang theirsels up oot o the daurk-blae wattirs Jist for the drap-deid brawness o his sang.

Above his head flew countless birds. The fish flung themselves upwards out of the dark-blue waters simply for the drop-dead beauty of his song.

©Norman McBeath

a-half thousand years old. It was nice to a person’s heritage in a portrait? Is this demonstrate that they still hold powerful difficult to do? relevance today. Portraits, for me, are very much about the now. There are some practical reasons for this Is this why you think heritage is – they can’t take up a lot of time, though they take a lot of time to set up – but they are important? I think the past should always be valued, even about the relationship between the sitter and if it is not necessarily good – good or bad, the photographer at the present time. They we can still learn from it. Similarly, whether are a record of the situation at the present we look at the fast-paced events in history time. A portrait is a record of how that person or the slower-to-develop ones, there is a lot was then, and it increases in value over time that the past can teach us. You can like or because it acts as a memory. Photographs last dislike it, but it has depth – history enriches longer than people – so it is unique among the present. So much has happened, and it memories. There will never be a moment would be wrong not to take account of that, again like there was at the time of taking it. and looking at the world involves looking at people. You’re well-known for your portraiture, and I feel this could tie in a little to heritage - do you feel it is important to capture

The ‘Simonides’ exhibition book is available to buy from Easel Press at www.easelpress.co.uk; Robert Crawford’s ‘The Beginning and the End of the World: St. Andrews, Scandal and the Birth of Photography’ is published by Birlinn Ltd.

family photos

Helen Henderson

Names refer to the students who submitted the photographs.

Hugo Shelley

Denisse Disla

Juste Jonutyte

Emma Cunningham

the ventriloquist and the dancing doll by Alex Derpanopoulos

A photograph of Allie C. Way.

A decade ago, I found a photograph in my mother’s basement. It is a black wooden-framed portrait of a woman and her husband. The caption reads: ‘Charles E. Colby & Allie C. Way The Ventriloquist & Dancing Doll’. Something exceptional in the photograph urged me to research the people it features. Five years later, I found the text on a website posted by a descendant of the people about whom I was so curious. It is included here for your enjoyment.

‘“From the Fort Wayne Gazette (Ft. Wayne, Indiana) 1896 January 12 “The attraction at the Empire the coming week will be Colby’s All American Novelty company, composed of the stars of the American vaudeville stage. Mr. Charles E. Colby is the only warbling ventriloquist on the stage. His latest novelty, the dancing doll, has been the hit of the season. Mlle. Alberta is the only lady in America doing on the bounding wire...” Charles E. Colby was my adopted great grandfather. “Mlle Alberta”, slack rope walker and the dancing doll mentioned, was my great grandmother, Alberta “Allie” Howard Way. Her son, Edward C. Colby, was my grandfather. The only information I have on Charles is from my grandfather’s marriage license which states Charles was born in Connecticut. He was a theatrical agent. My grandfather, Edward C. Colby, was born in 1880 in St. Louis. All we know is that [the] marriage didn’t last and she married “Mr. Colby”. Edward was raised by Charles and Allie. We didn’t know his first name until I got my grandmother’s marriage license application. My grandfather listed his father as Charles Colby and his father’s place of birth as Connecticut. The only picture we have of him is of his back — he’s

seated at the piano and Allie Way is posed in her “dancing doll” costume. I’ve found newspaper mentions of the act in the 1890s and early 1900s. Edward Colby also joined the act doing a “buck and wing” dance. He ended his vaudeville career in South Africa when the touring troupe he was with left the country with the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899. He was 43 and the leader of the Mare Island Navy Band when he died in Vallejo, California, in 1923, of kidney failure. Edward was close to my grandmother’s mother’s family, the Goulds. We have a postcard from my grandmother’s Aunt Jennie (Gould) Bell in which she refers to visiting the “lion tamer” (Allie had a pet panther) in Plymouth, New Hampshire. The Bells bought Allie’s house there, according to the family story. My mother believes she died in Plymouth. She was born in either Louisiana or Missouri and had spent most of her life traveling the country in circuses and vaudeville. She may have spent time at the house in Plymouth well before her career ended as she used to practice her slack rope walking on a rope tied between two trees in the back yard there. I’m hoping someone knows of a Charles Colby in their family history that ran off to join the circus’.

After reading this, I realised that I owned a portrait of her ancestors — that I had an image of Charles Colby’s face while she only had one with his back turned playing the piano. I sent her the photograph and for the first time, her family was able to see what he had looked like.

The only photograph Betsey Snow had of her adopted great grandfather, Charles E. Colby.

The photograph the author of this article, Alex Derpanopoulos, found. 31

Portfolios

BenoĂŽt Grogan-Avignon James B. Milne Maya Tounta Irina Earnshaw G. Allan Little Lady Henrietta Gilmour

Benoit Grogan-Avignon

J.B. Milne, Chiang Mai (Chiangmai), Paper Umbrellas, 1987, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, jbm-24-2-35

James B. Milne

left: J.B. Milne Chiang Mai (Chiangmai). [North Thai] Tribal dancer, 1987, Courtesy of St Andrews Library jbm-24-2-38

right: J.B. Milne Chiang Mai (Chiangmai). Boys playing Chin Lone, 1987, Courtesy of St Andrews Library jbm-24-2-36

left: J.B. Milne, Laphun Chiang Mai (Chiangmai) [Thai] Children, 1987, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, jbm-24-2-29

right: J.B. Milne, Lamphun Wat Kukut [Chedi], 1987, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, jbm-24-2-47

Maya Tounta

Irina Earnshaw

Resurrection and Photography by Nicholas Guy

To my memory, the first thing I ever killed was a squirrel. The animal rights activists among us may not look upon this statement with ardent glee. The reality is, having a dead squirrel on your hands isn’t exactly the most pleasant, or indeed, macho of experiences. What it is however, is the ending of a life. Photography and taxidermy capture a living image of the dead. They attempt to freeze a memory in time, metaphorically bringing the dead back to life. Both a fly trapped in amber and the photograph help us to see how the dead live(d). I believe that the taxidermist and the photographer have almost interchangeable jobs; to some extent, they are both artists of preservation and resurrection. The included photographs were taken in the Bell Pettigrew museum with kind

permission from the curator, Dr. Martin Milner. I often work in this museum during the bi-annual exam purgatory, and I find the place very conducive to revision. The room is fascinating: to me it isn’t a cemetery for animals, but neither is it a zoo. This museum is in fact an unchanging purgatory of its own, a stationary and tranquil environment that leads not to heaven or hell but preserves a ‘living image of the dead’. These animals, as if frozen in time, exist between life and death, forever trapped in the past. That which was dead, appears alive. Humans are fascinated with death but luckily we don’t stuff each other; the camera does that for us. Capturing as Roland Barthes states, the ‘corpse alive’, the recorded image certifies that which once lived in a way that preserves as aspect

‘Photographs [are] devices for stopping time and preserving fragments of the past, like flies in amber. [...] The lover of photography is fascinated both by the instant and by the past’. – Peter Wollen, ‘Fire and Ice’, in Liz Wells, The Photography Reader (2010)

Jasmine Picôt-Chapman

of the real, even if it has disappeared. We fear death, so we try to ward it off, taking pictures of those who are alive, and keeping close pictures of those who are dead. Perhaps, we hope, one day someone will do the same for us. By photographing these animals, a process of dual preservation takes place (fairly pretentious, I know). Through photographing taxidermy, we preserve the preserved, capturing moments in time that have in some way, already been captured. A dual memory is produced, a doubling of memory. Taxidermy, like photography, entices us. In the photograph, or the rather gaudy stuffed animal, I see something as I knew it, but then realise this is not how I know it. ‘Totally false’ and yet ‘partially true’, I believe the animal behind that plane of glass is real, sitting and waiting. Recognising it as devoid of life, I am presented with a stuffed animal: nothing close to what I

once knew. Almost alive but definitely not, the specimen of taxidermy tantalises but always fails. To the same degree, the memory or image in the photograph seems alive in our imaginations, but it is not. So similar and yet so different from the real being, we come just close enough to the recreation of the thing in question, yet we never quite reach it. The images and their paired animals remain strange but familiar. Both photography and taxidermy preserve, but neither can fully recreate actual lived experience. We see how the dead live and how they lived, but never the embodiment of living. In speaking about one of these art forms, we are really speaking about the other. Both preserve life. Returning to where I began, if I had the chance, would I have photographed or stuffed that poor squirrel? I am not sure, but I probably would have tried in some way to resurrect it.

‘... I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false. To say, confronted with a certain photograph, “That’s almost the way she was!” was more distressing than to say, confronted with another, “That’s not the way she was at all”’. – Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980)

‘In Photography, the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric ... it is because it certifies, so to speak that the corpse is alive, as corpse; it is the living image of a dead thing’. – Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980)

G. Allan Little

G. A. Little, Dalkeith, Sister Augustine of the Sisters of Charity, 1974, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, gal-378

left: G.A. Little, Dundee Docks. A visiting seaman, ca. 1973, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, gal-327 right: G.A. Little, George Normand, retired postman, Cupar, 1974, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, gal-243

G.A. Little, Irvine, Rev. A Macara, minister of Irvine parish Kirk, 1972, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, gal-517/8

G.A. Little, East Neuk fishermen, ca. 75 of 1970, Courtesy St Andrews Library, gal-71

Lady Henrietta Gilmour, Melville Largo taken at Black Corries, 1895, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, lhg-3-23

Lady Henrietta Gilmour

Lady Henrietta Gilmour, Miss Violet Lambert, ca. 1905, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, lhg-3-12/lhg-4-4

right: Lady Henrietta Gilmour, Lady Henrietta Gilmour, 1899, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, lhg-1-15a left: Lady Henrietta Gilmour, Lady Gilmour with camera, Miss Grace [Gilmour] with telescope, 1899, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, lhg-1-14.

published with the generous support of the university of st andrews department of art history, a registered charity in scotland no. sc013532.

Mark Gruber Gallery Fine arts from the Hudson Valley

markgrubergallery.com for information on upcoming shows.

Check us out at CircularTime.com Shrine World Venue, New York City Friday June 1st 8-10 pm Paris in October, check back for more dates 85

4 tIMEs A yEAr 180 pages ANd full ONlINE ACCEss

ON TOP OF iT WWW.GUPMAGAZINE.COM

1 year: Nl €26 / EU €28 / rOW €33 2 years: Nl €47 / EU €50 / rOW €62 88 INClUdING POstAGE / stUdENts 20% Off