Reviews & Introductions
Reviews and Introductions
Return to Penumbria: review by Gilly Collinson
Through a Glass Darkly Brilliant
Return to Penumbria brings together photographs taken over the course of 30 years. Starting with images from 1979 and coming virtually up to the present day, it documents changing styles, changing habits – and changing attitudes.
The photographs work as both art and archive, and can be appreciated on many levels. They are all about people; even, strangely, the few without any human presence seem to be more about the people who aren’t there, and the emptiness that their absence emphasises. As a record of society over three decades, it’s fascinating to recognise the cumulative changes. What was once commonplace becomes unusual. We eat in different ways, we communicate in different ways, we dress in different ways.
For the newer works, Adrian moves from film to digital, and from black and white to colour. But he remains a purist, imposing the discipline of film onto the digital process: he frames each shot with absolute precision. Yet nothing is posed: these are snatched moments that have either been anticipated and seized, or serendipitously encountered and caught for posterity. Both approaches offer glorious results: a policeman rounding the corner of a building decorated with skeleton graffiti shows his surprise as he spots the photographer, who had recognised the site’s potential. But no-one could have planned to witness the fall of the drunk down the stairs in the public toilet, or the man chasing the wheel that had just fallen off his bike.
One that particularly caught my eye was a man with a waxed moustache browsing a second-hand book. Looking like a young Dali portrayed by Magritte, no posing in the world could ever have caught this combination of composition and surprise. The art is in the application of attention and opportunism.
My favourite photographs, however, are the ones that work on multiple levels simply because of their settings. They have been taken through windows, and the subjects look out, many alarmed, many confrontational, many confused. But the effect of the window is to produce layer after layer: we see the window, then we see the subject behind it, then we see the background behind. And it becomes clear just how clever we have become at unconsciously ignoring reflections, assuming they are an irrelevance. It takes effort to register those reflections of their external worlds, worlds that do not include us, the observers. But there, if you look very carefully, is the reflection - sometimes almost imperceptible - of Adrian taking the photograph, appearing in the print like the ghost in the machine, controlling what it is that we see. And, whether you see it as art or documentary, or social history, it is well worth seeing.
Gilly Collinson 2010
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Nexus
At Salford Viewpoint Gallery
Introduction by Trevor Coombs
Curator Oldham Art Gallery
In chapter 10 of Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes proposes two concepts when looking at photographs; firstly, of the studium as a kind of general interest for the viewer in a particular subject; and secondly of the punctum which quite literally punctuates the studium or, as Barthes says, “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.”
This is Adrian Gatie’s second exhibition series and as in his first, “In Penumbria” his attention is focussed on the North of England, once the cradle of the industrial revolution, once the source of most of the world’s textiles, a place with work for many. Now the industry is gone, the factories laid waste and unemployment is high, the result of foreign competition and the failure of government to respond with sufficient investment.
At first glance Gatie’s interest is immediately apparent…ultra penumbria, to the not beautiful. In this unreal area there seems at first nothing to attract. No obvious points of interest, no real landmarks, no pleasure; just a general mish-mash of signs interacting with each other, a concentration of the commonplace, a nexus of the mundane. Many of the signs are consciously recurrent – masks, children, the street, crumbling buildings and the general decay of the city. As a photographer he sites himself anonymously amongst them and observes; as viewers we must discern the various elements of his observations. And yet to the hardened viewer of social realism this decay of vandalism, sterility of concrete and wrath of the torn fly-poster can be at best commonplace, at worst just grainy clichés. What is it then that makes Adrian Gatie’s photographs any different?
For me, as for Barthes, it is the photograph’s punctum, “that accident which pricks me” that is important, and nowhere is it more graphically illustrated than in the gaze of the woman in N306, or the pathos of the chained performing dogs in N335. In both of these photographs, as in many others in this collection, our attention is drawn to events outside of the image. Not just literally - as in the case of the woman noticing something - but in the abstract: the cheap Christmas crackers, the litter and the graffiti add to the overall poignancy of the situation. “What are the aspirations of this woman?” I find myself asking. And the dogs, each groomed to perform, each given to creating fanciful illusions for entertainment…how contradictory the soiled blanket is!
In the strongest images it is the surprise, the chance event, the almost arbitrary recording of seemingly insignificant details which hold the interest. They cannot be looked for, they either appear or do not, and ultimately, they are of course subjective. The amount of influence a photographer can exert on our perception of an event is forever limited and the most successful photographs will always have an unpredictable element present. In Nexus, Adrian Gatie’s sequencing of his photographs allows meanings different from that of the nominal content of the images to occur, different narratives to be constructed. A personal, partial, selective view, working at times on an almost metaphysical level. All these factors contribute to a successful appreciation by the viewer.
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NEXUS 2
by adrian gatie
introduction by playwright John Godber
I was seriously beginning to wonder whether it was me? Whenever I saw the North, whenever I wrote about the people I saw in the streets, at the station, in the bank, at the supermarket, in the pub, I was exaggerating. I was depicting the North as I thought I saw it and not as it was! On a number of occasions, I had read about my vision of the North in the quality papers and they had told me that I had got it wrong. That X character wouldn’t do this and Y character wouldn’t say that. I was beginning to believe the reviewers of my plays when they said I was writing about Northern clichés.
It was becoming very disconcerting. Almost as if the pictures I saw in the street and wrote about were being stolen by a theatre press who know about these people. More than that even, they lived amongst them, were their friends, spent hours in the pub talking about football and such-like. If only.
Does the North exist in an indigenous form to the theatre press? Perhaps not. And what does it matter – it’s only theatre anyway. I choose to write about the North because it’s something I know a lot about. The perception of the North in theatre circles is perhaps not so different from the way it is perceived generally. We’re either all Yorkshire pud and “Ee by gum”, or we’re self-made Geoff Boycotts who’ve got out of it and “done well forhissen”. A West End producer recently wouldn’t take a play of mine to London because it was “Too Northern”. Another reviewer, years ago, suggested my plays should stay up North because the people there lacked imagination, and would therefore probably enjoy them. What I would pay to see that overweight oaf struggle to bag a ton of coal is nobody’s business. Still, mustn’t let personal prejudices cloud the issue. When I return from my many visits to London, I am always struck on arrival at Doncaster by the difference. A different humanity, different posturings, different stress, a different kind of human spirit. I feel very much at home here, the accent fits better, the slightly abrasive and aggressive manner suits people from my plays, and I know them. They are friends, family, neighbours. I listen to the way they speak and I know I have caught them. I see them behave and I know I understand their vision. At that moment I know that at one level the reviews in the posh papers are tomorrow’s chip paper. Because the plays are essentially true.
Looking through Adrian Gatie’s Nexus 2
photographs I wish I could create these sort of images on stage. Poetry, they say, is that which is lost in translation, and I fear that an imperfect art like the theatre will never give us the whole image as it is perceived. Here were photographs which gave me the instinct to believe in the vision I see at Doncaster station, to recall the difference, to celebrate these people. So, it might not be high art to go to Blackpool every year for your holidays but thousands do, and some of them are here in these pictures and no matter what qualitative value it is the truth and as such should be celebrated. However, this celebration is not without its critical aspects. Lost in a changing world that doesn’t really change, trapped by economic constraints, confused by fashions, isolated, yet in the heart of the nation, often small minded, bigoted, wholesome, motherly, hugely protective, insecure. The people I know in the North are all these things and more. What is fascinating to me is to be reminded to look at one’s own surroundings. Over the last few years I have been perceiving reality through the theatre, rather than the other way around. This collection has jolted me back into the habit of looking at life on the street, and savouring its complexities and difference. I thank Adrian Gatie for reminding me that in the first place there is life, and then there is Art.
John Godber
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Vic Allen….. February 2009
One of the North’s key photographers in the 1980s, Adrian Gatie was inspired by the great US lensman Robert Frank. A perfect fusion of naturalism and craft, Gatie’s street photographs, using Leica rangefinder cameras with 35mm & 50mm lenses, can still be found in the Documentary Photography Archive, which famously depicts Greater Manchester in the 70s and 80s, while his book “In Penumbria” (1987) is a collectors’ item. Many of these classic black and white images have now achieved iconic status.
Some 20 years on, after a notable excursion of 19 years immersed in theatre photography, we persuaded Gatie to venture out on to the streets again. But there’s more to this than a brave new world of shopping malls, café culture and smokers standing outside buildings; more even than the new-hatched misgivings about security and violations of privacy: and certainly, more than the mere technical switch from chemical to digital technology. In an era when everyone’s phone can take a picture, can street photography still claim artistic status?
And how has street photography changed in those 20 years, in aesthetic, ethical and practical terms? Gatie’s methods for working the streets on projects in the 1980s are well known, but would those methods and ploys still work as well today, with the increased stresses related to personal space and identity invasion and the heightened awareness that we all have in the open streets in these days, post-1996 Manchester bombing, post-911, post-2005 London bombings. Will people’s reactions to the presence of a street photographer have changed?….Adrian Gatie shows us here, with new colour photographs juxtaposed with his well known black and white images….and tells us all about it in his introductory text.
Vic Allen….Dean Clough Galleries
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ADRIAN GATIE - A VIEW FROM AMERICA
(introduction to Vanishing Point)
If Adrian Gatie had been there, camera in hand, the day I first staggered onto the streets of Scarborough in the fall of 1997, I shudder to think what image his shutter would have captured.
A jet-lagged American, collapsing under the weight of two absurdly over-packed suitcases, I had come to Scarborough to study the work of Alan Ayckbourn at the Stephen Joseph Theatre.
In my sleep-deprived state, I realized immediately on that windswept, cloudy North Yorkshire day that "I wasn't in Kansas anymore" - or, in my case, Oklahoma. A product of the manicured midwestern suburbs of the United States, the streets of Scarborough were a closed book to me.
Little did I know how lucky I would soon be in finding someone to help me turn the pages...
If Scarborough was a mystery to your woebegone traveller, the inside of the theatre seemed reassuringly familiar. However, the Stephen Joseph Theatre was created by a man who loves surprises, and not the least of those surprises to be discovered at SJT in 1997 was the work of one Adrian Gatie.
Theatre-goers would recognise at once "front of house" pictures - photographs of the current production placed in the theatre lobby and windows to entice potential ticket buyers to leave their living rooms for an evening of live entertainment.
The problem with most of these theatre photos of "live" entertainment is that their images are often as dead as doornails. If you've often found these pictures posed, anything but kinetic - "stagey," if you would - you would be right. Most often these publicity photos are hastily set up by the director near the anxious end of the rehearsal process, placing the stationary - and pre-occupied - actors onstage and telling them to strike a pose (to channel my inner Noel Coward) "in the manner of the character." The resulting photos usually capture little or nothing of the dynamic of the performance - or, if they do - you're in for a hell of a night at the theatre!
The house photos I discovered at Stephen Joseph Theatre were the most vibrant I had ever seen. They told the story of the moment so vividly, that I found my eyes jumping from one to another, and then again to another, and again, and again, not as if these were static photos tacked up on the wall, but images from a graphic novel or my favourite childhood comic book. They made me want to know how the story ends.
And they made me want to know how they were made. And so one afternoon, I came to Stephen Joseph Theatre just to see Adrian Gatie at work.
Gatie has nothing but disdain for the traditional set-up shot. Instead, after familiarizing himself thoroughly with the production by viewing earlier rehearsals and scrutinizing scripts, he would attend the final dress rehearsal of the play. Then, as the cast performed what the first paying audiences were only half a day from seeing, Gatie would begin moving relentlessly - for over two hours - round and round the circular stage of SJT. By doing this, Gatie's insightful photographs captured the momentum and interaction of each dramatic encounter as it occurred, in a way that was unsurpassed by any other theatre photographer I know of.
However, once the final dress rehearsal was done, the still relentless Gatie was just beginning. Notice I said "final dress rehearsal" - the play would open the next day and the photographs would be needed in place, in the lobby and elsewhere, by 5pm. That meant, having run his mini-marathon, Gatie would rush off to his darkroom and remain there - often for the next twenty hours or so working through the night - to have the photos ready.
And Mr Gatie never misses a deadline.
And should you question whether my account of the special difference within Adrian Gatie's work is accurate, let me tell you a little story that I don't think even Adrian knows anything about at this time of writing. When he reads this, it will be the first he knows of it.
The day that the photographs I saw Adrian taking were placed in the SJT lobby, the lead actress from that production, a very experienced performer, walked into the theatre, stood in front of the photos with other cast members and - obviously very disconcerted - burst into tears.
"What is it?" one of her friends asked anxiously.
"The pictures..." she said. "He's...he's captured all my secrets!"
The actress - who had previously seen thousands of lobby photographs throughout her career - honestly felt Gatie's photographs had brought her upcoming performance so incredibly to life that audiences would no longer be surprised by what they would see that night onstage.
(By the way, this story ended very happily: The performance in question went on to universal acclaim and the Adrian Gatie photographs of it became some of the most memorable images of the actresses career.)
After seeing these pictures, I realized that Mr Gatie was a man I very much wanted to know. And, with what I was slowly coming to recognise as blunt "Northern charm," he generously invited me into his studio and showed me many hundreds of photographs that made the acclaimed history of Stephen Joseph Theatre - as well as Hull Truck Theatre, Lowry Manchester, York Theatre Royal, London's Piccadilly Theatre, The Old Vic, Leeds Playhouse, Sheffield Crucible, Nottingham Playhouse, Oldham Coliseum, Liverpool Everyman and many more - come to life for me.
And, in passing one day, Adrian mentioned that he also occasionally took photographs outside of a theatre...I was soon to learn of a whole new ball game!
Having come to the work of Adrian Gatie by way of the stage lights, it is not surprising that I initially looked at his iconic In Penumbria photographs through theatrical eyes. For me, it is impossible to look at his unforgettable image of the old woman in the hessian shawl, breadcrumbs in hand, sometimes known affectionately by Gatie aficionados as "the pigeon strangler" - and not see one of the witches from Macbeth. And who could the seemingly newly itinerant "Jimmy Scruffy" be, but Sir Andrew Aguecheek, at last stripped of his wealth by the Toby Belches of the world?
But if I project onto the work of Adrian Gatie, his revelatory images have certainly projected their spell onto me.
Remember me stumbling, gobsmacked, onto the streets of Scarborough, a stranger in a strange land, overwhelmed by the myriad of unfamiliar images and sensations there? Even that first day after Adrian Gatie began sharing his In Penumbria photographs, his vision of the North began to come more into focus for me.
Oscar Wilde rather famously said, "At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them...They did not exist till Art had invented them."
I would not go as far as to say Adrian Gatie "invented" Northern England for me, but after seeing his work I found myself thinking that perhaps I could eavesdrop visually onto the world that surrounded me. That, if I tried to follow his example, I too could really begin to see the faces behind the innumerable cafe windows of northern streets as they shared desperate confidences, or as they snatched at their food as relief from the grey tedium, or looked pensively at their watches though they had few places to go, even as the image of their own now lost youth passed silently behind them.
There are thousands of families who gather in the streets of the North of England every day, but look at the holidaying family in Scarborough and note the contrasting and matching body postures and expressions of the male and female figures - is that merely a coincidence or a family's history caught in a moment? And the forbiddingly protective mother in York shielding her equally wary "princess" - can the two of them conspire together to ward off the "dragons" of the streets?
The insightful eyes of Adrian Gatie helped me, an American far from home, begin to see the world that is Northern England. It is truly fortunate that the North has "poets and painters" like Alan Ayckbourn, John Godber, Alan Bennett, Willy Russell and yes, Adrian Gatie, to reveal the "secrets" that we all perform in plain sight - "secrets" that are not always easily seen but, thanks to them, will always be remembered.
John Zygmunt 2012
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Adrian Gatie……….an appreciation
Drawn to situations with raggy edges, to the downside of urban life, Adrian Gatie has photographed the streets since the seventies, looking for…”whatever is out there”. Much of his work is rich in irony and humour and whatever it is that he looks for, his photographs often contain an almost theatrical element that prises the image from its real life setting, creating a separateness which invariably allows for communication without text or caption. His many years working in theatre photography have undoubtedly influenced his ways of looking and of seeing. Gatie’s moving black and white images of the people of Manchester and Salford are as iconic in their own way as Robert Doisneau’s prints of 1950s Paris.
Adrian’s work possesses a genuine love of humanity, humour and compassion for life. His ability to observe human nature and capture the incongruity of a moment often exposes the humour in even the most poignant of situations. This gritty sense of humour is fundamental to all of his work and is implicit to the understanding of many of his images. “325-Scarborough (611)” and “128-Manchester (345)” are perfect examples of his talent for recognising an instant in time and capturing it before it disappears back into the everyday. Adrian Gatie’s ability to seize the precise instant within a multitude breathes life and potency into all of his photographs.
Paul Wynter (LondonArt)