Press

Beautiful Artifice by Joanna Lowry, Archive, Issue No. 16, October 2009.

‘The scenes were taken from old pictures, and the participators had been cleverly fitted with characters suited to their types. No-one, for instance, could have made a more typical Goya than Carry Fisher, with her short dark-skinned face, the exaggerated  glow of her eyes, the provocation of her frankly-painted smile. A brilliant Miss Smedden from Brooklyn showed to perfection the sumptuous curves of Titian’s Daughter, lifting her golden salver laden with grapes above the harmonising gold of rippled hair and rich brocade, and a young Mrs Alstyn, who showed the frailer Dutch type, with high blue-veined forehead and pale eyes and lashes, made a characteristic Vandyke, in black satin, against a curtained archway. Then there were Kauffman nymphs garlanding the altar of love; a Veronese supper, all sheeny textures, pearl-woven heads and marble architecture; and a Watteau group of lute-playing comedians, lounging by a fountain in a sun-lit glade.’

In Edith Wharton’s novel the House of Mirth, first published in 1905, she describes turn-of-the-century high society entertaining themselves with the production of elaborate drawing room tableaux – the heavy curtains being parted to reveal the ladies of New York resplendent in silks and satins, attired as nymphs and goddesses, posed within the antique settings of Old Master paintings. In the novel it is only the women who take part in this masquerade – the entire scene operating as a commentary upon the fragility of their position in society, totally dependant as they are upon their presentation of self, upon maintaining the right combination of beauty and artifice, upon having the correct props, and, most importantly, of being able to merge into the picture. The novel’s heroine, Lily Bart, seals her own tragic fate by going one step further and making the picture subservient to her: …’ It was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynold’s canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace.’ 

In this short scene Wharton captures the complex and seductive problem of woman’s relationship to representation and beauty. The stilled framing of the tableau represents that ideal realisation of the image that the women have to attempt to occupy. She describes for us its complex synthesis of femininity and surface beauty, the enormous labour involved in the creation of these dramatic reconstructions, and the many opportunities they offer for tragicomic failure.  It is this peculiar constellation of glamour, society, surface decoration and imminent failure that has gone on to sustain an entire century of mass culture in its representation of the woman as fashionable icon or goddess, whether in the annals of fashion photography, on the cinema screen, or in the society pages of the contemporary gossip magazine.

Photography, of course, provided the technology to immortalise the tableau vivant and transport it from the drawing rooms of the nineteenth century into the image world of the twentieth.  Yet it was not a case of photography as a technology simply providing the means for recording a dramatised scene; the technology, from the beginning, was deeply embedded in the complex structuring of social relations – in the operations of gender, of class, and of the maintenance of a set of social norms through the colonisation of the imagination itself.  The earliest fashion models were society belles and debutantes who exploited any opportunity to present their wares in the marital marketplace of the society magazine.  The soft focus glamour of the early fashion photographs taken by Baron de Meyer and Cecil Beaton encoded a world of play acting fantasy that seemed to reinforce the notion that the world of the imagination was the province of the upper classes, and that it was a world inhabited by women and primarily constructed by men.

 But if photography seemed to offer the possibility for making the imaginary real and offering us back a high class fantasy world that we could aspire to in our dreams it also, in its realisation of those fantasies, brought them down to earth and reminded us that embodied gods and goddesses weren’t quite as inspiring as their abstract literary sources. The women in these photographs were always at some level betraying the fact that they were real: and that of course was also part of our interest in them. We liked the fact that they offered us images of perfection, but also we liked to know that they were susceptible to failure, that they were fallible too. Our fascination with Hollywood film stars is exemplary of this double-think in our relationship to the image. We love both the actress and the part that she plays. Our imaginative engagement with the film is not destroyed by our knowledge of the actress behind the role. On the contrary it is enhanced, and this central fracturing of the belief system of the film is also the source of the route back into our own experience and our own fantasy lives.

Hollywood cinema was also dependant upon the tableau in the form of the film still to secure its hold upon the public imagination. Iconic scenes from the films re-enacted for the still camera and glamorised publicity shots of the stars played a central role in maintaining the position of the cinematic in the public imagination. As a child in the 1950s I can remember leafing through the pages of film annuals and immersing myself in a fantasy world that seemed to be at one with the surface of the photographic image itself: the pearly surface of the photographic print tantalising me with its promise of the truth of a beauty most fair.

The photography of Madame Yevonde developed in the 1930s, at a time when popular cinema was besotted with the spectacular. While Hollywood was inventing the glory of Technicolor she was experimenting with the extremely arduous new technology of colour printing, bravely taking on the dominant fine art aesthetic of the black and white print and producing fantastic colour-saturated portraits of society ladies dressed as Goddesses. These were pictures which built upon the tradition of the tableau with its amateur staginess and its fetishisation of the female form, but which also declared that this was a photographic space in which there would be no holds barred, in which her models could take hold of their assigned roles and play them according to their own rules. Her portraits made it clear that these were women playing parts – in these photographs the woman was not subsumed within the picture, as in Wharton’s tableaux, instead she performed it.

It is this sense of the importance of the act of performance itself that Neeta Madahar borrows from Madame Yevonde in her new series, Flora, of photographic portraits of female friends with flowers. The idea of asking each of the women to choose a flower that bore a female name offered a starting point for a series of collaborative portraits in which the model and the photographer created a fantasy scene around the theme of the relationship between flowers and femininity. The artifice of these scenes is positioned precisely on the boundaries of the make-believe that is characteristic of the tableau vivant. On the one level we are invited to believe in these scenarios, brought to us with the help of lavish props, sophisticated lighting, and a production team that includes a fashion stylist, a make-up artist and lighting technician, and yet, contrarily, there is also no attempt to disguise the fact that this is a form of amateur theatrics – the mylar sheeting and flowing organza and fake grass have undeniably been draped by Madahar and her team, and the women’s faces and bodies may be expertly made-up and photographed in soft focus but they still bear the traces of real life and age. There is no photoshoppery here, no attempt to use digital technology to reinvent the imaginary ideal.

This work can perhaps be seen as self-consciously reflecting upon the relationship between analogue photography and the imagination. If in some sense there is always something lacking in that relationship, and something poignantly ridiculous about the attempt to pin down our fantasy inventions with the evidential doggedness of the photographic print, then the recognition of the almost comic futility of the project offers scope for the collaborators to prise open that space of performance and re-appropriate the territory. Unlike Wharton’s Lily Bart these women approach the subject of femininity with a certain wry humour; they know that it is all a matter of smoke and mirrors, that beauty is something created with love and glimpsed in passing, and not necessarily captured by the full glare of the studio lighting rig.  They know that even as they aspire to the perfection of the image they have a life beyond it. My favourite photograph in the series is that of Sian with Lotuses, standing on a pedestal surrounded by a wall of shimmering cheap mylar sheeting normally used in hydroponics and curtain trimming as pondweed but undeniably emanating all the charisma of a Jane Russell-type Hollywood star. The image is almost flat, two-dimensional, the woman’s body almost merges with the wall of scenery and props. She is image; she is artifice. But she also beams brightly out at us with a rather healthy glow, erupting out of the image with all the optimism of a woman who claims beauty for herself, challenging us to challenge her. Do we believe it or not?