Two Photographers
Clive Stone
PETER WELLS
The photographer is supertourist, an extension of the anthropologist, visiting natives and bringing back news of their exotic doings and strange gear.
SUSAN SONTAG
The Hibiscus Coast Project is made up of sixty black and white photographs taken by a single photographer, Clive Stone. They survey the inhabitants of a community which is only a three-zone bus ride out of Queen Street. Auckland. The area, however, offers a different mental landscape. It is by the sea; and those who live there have chosen to reject the city: They live out a cherished aspect of kiwi self-image: 'the great outdoors'. It is, however, a suburban reality. It's no accident that Robert Muldoon, with his intuitive understanding of the political advantage of appearing as an 'ordinary bloke', chooses it as the locus for his Speech to the Nation. Muldoon also has his summer bach there.
CLIVE STONE
Self-portrait from TV set 1973
This 'great outdoors' is now a television suburb linked by a motorway to the city-a mere Spanish arch away. And Clive Stone's project is his personal documentation, via the camera, of these suburban natives, their exotic doings and strange gear. He is that unusual species: a man with A lens trained on Muldoon's New Zealanders.
My photography's an expression of my guilt, my inability to make a protest in another way ... I always leave subjects shame-facedly, as if I've committed a crime.
DON McCULLIN
The above quotes call into question what, for me, is one of the more interesting aspects of this exhibition. The question is: What is a photographer's attitude to his material and how may this influence what we, as viewers, see as a given reality in a photograph?
Clive Stone's attitude to his material would appear to be dual. In his catalogue notes he tells us he is interested in the 'discrepancy between what people think they are, or try to be, and how they appear in reality'. (Compare this to Diane Arbus's interest in the 'gap between intention and effect'.) This is a distanced view point: that of a critical outsider. Yet the community he is documenting is almost his own flesh. His high school years were spent on the Hibiscus Coast. His mother still lives there. The seven-year project itself got underway as a personal documentation of old school friends and acquaintances. Some of his subjects are people 'I endured adolescence with'. What we are seeing as a documentary exhibition, then, is partly a very personal coming-to-terms with people and environments which shaped Clive Stone as a human being. And, partly, it is this contrary thing, an outsider's critical view of the 'discrepancy' between appearances and reality.
I don't mean I wished I looked like that
DIANE ARBUS
Arbus for Clive Stone was the beginning of a photographic awakening: 'the first time I saw her photographs they really knocked me out'.(1) Clive Stone compared the impact of Arbus on him to John Lennon's first hearing of Jerry Lee Lewis: 'an awakening you never lose'. Her influence manifests itself in Clive Stone's photographs: in the enclosure of humans within interiors, so that we read from the faces to the artifacts and back again. (Compare Clive Stone's photograph of Ruth Aitken to Arbus's A Widow in Her Bedroom for a very direct influence.) At present, however, Clive Stone is reading Sontag on Arbus, and this is giving him cause for re-evaluation. He is disturbed now 'by the way she used people without really being aware of it', as well as the way Arbus's vision of life showed so little 'diversification'.
CLIVE STONE
Rod, Dianne, Patrick
and Theresa Jenden 1977
black-&-white photograph
Sontag's somewhat vehement criticism of Arbus could stand against Clive Stone though: 'Instead of trying to coax her subjects into a natural or typical position, they are encouraged to be awkward-that is, to pose. (Thereby, the revelation of self gets identified with what is strange, odd, askew.)'
The strongest initial impression I had of Clive Stone's photographs was the subjects' lack of ease - the absence of smiles. This is heightened by the fact they are all having their photographs taken in their own environment - on their own grounds, so to speak. Yet when I thought of it further this seemed the very reason for the constraint. The 'sinister eye', as McCullin describes the camera, is stealing their appearance at that very point where they are most vulnerable. A private world is being made public. These quintessentially ordinary people appear almost as criminals whose environments we search for explanations of the unease we see. Yet these environments return messages with which we are overfamiliar: ornaments deprived of any evil intent; china cabinets filled with cups; photographs of family arranged hierarchically; a Levenes painting of sunlit waves. Are we being given access to the little murders of daily life? Is it Clive Stone's talent to perceive the anxious thrill latent in Muldoom's (sic) Fantastic Garden? Or is it Clive Stone's personal attitude to his material (a desire to distance himself) entering into each image and interposing itself between us as viewers and the material subject - providing again and again an alienated and alienating image? To answer this, one has to go to the making of the photographs.
CLIVE STONE
Paul and Neil Pardington 1978
black-&-white photograph
People invest a photographer with a certain power.
CLIVE STONE
Over one-third of the photographs in this exhibition show friends and acquaintances of Clive Stone. The other photographic subjects were obtained on a casual basis. If Clive Stone saw an exterior of a house that looked interesting he went inside. He would produce a newspaper clipping describing what he was doing. He emphasised the project's historical value (i.e. impersonal benefit).Often these initial encounters involved' a hell of a lot of fast talking'. And some quick handwork too. While they read the clipping he was setting up his camera. You 'kind of feel like you're intruding on their space - and you're kind of trying to wheedle something out of them'. He used bait: the promise of a print. He took two rolls of ten images on a Mamiya RV67 camera.(2) Nearly all the photographs were taken on a tripod, the camera raised as high as it would go. Often he would stand on a chair. Frequently he did not talk while the photographs were being taken. The choice of where to pose was 'mutually agreed upon'. Each person was given the right not to have their photos exhi bited if they so wished. (Two did.) And each person also signed an initial consent form to show they had agreed to be photographed.
It's of interest that the colourful in habitants of the Hibiscus Coast are all captured in black-and-white. This came out of Clive Stone's desire for a 'more complete control over the print': he could develop his own work himself. Black-and-white also has the advantage of being 'another step removed from reality'. It is the traditional light and shade of angst-ridden movies. Its polar extremes are less charitable to life than the comforts of colour. In one way it is an alienating technique, a symbolic bleeding off of ,colour', a blanching away of a possibly too painful reality.
Clive Stone's use of natural light is also interesting for its implication of distancing. It promotes the idea of an invisible photographer. We get the feeling that the photographer hasn't interposed his personality between us and what we are seeing: it is simply the camera's responsibility. This in itself is a ruse. For of course we have the photographer holding the camera.
CLIVE STONE
Ruth Aiken
black-&-white photograph
Here he is holding the sinister eye peculiarly high: it looks down on its targets as they huddle in the far distance, against the 'pathetic' bibelots of materialist existences. When I asked Clive Stone why he used this alienating camera angle so often he said at first he wasn't sure why. 'I've often wondered that.' Then he said it was 'to gain a more interesting perspective effect, especially using a wide-angle lense'. When we talked about it further he said, 'I have to admit I did it to get a little sense of unease going'. I asked him where he thought this unease came from. I haven't really thought it right through. I wouldn't like it to be an artificial unease. I'd like to think it was there in the first place. I did feel, I do feel the uneasiness is there: but whether that's typical of New Zealand communities, who knows- But I think it's there . . .' He confessed he found the photographic sessions 'in the main very nerve-racking'. 'I couldn't exactly say I enjoyed the experience.' It's germane here to recall that the sessions were often conducted with a minimum of verbal cajolery.
We talked about the subject further. I certainly wasn't out to ridicule anybody, you know. I did it as sensitively as I could. The point is that if the tension which we're talking about comes across in the photographs then it's there. Whether it's the result of their own nervousness or awkwardness, or the unease that they have anyway-or whether it's because I'm there and I'm an outsider - or whether it's because I'm aiming the camera at them - I'm not really sure, and I'm not sure if it matters but I didn't want to deliberately invent it.'
There still aren't many hibiscus trees growing on the Hibiscus Coast.
CLIVE STONE
I myself don't believe the unease is a 'deliberate invention'. Yet Clive Stone's frequent use of a distancing camera position, aided by the emotional connotations of a naturally lit (grey) black-and-white, has created its own peculiar statement. It is as if we are seeing his subjects through a thick plate glass window. We can observe them perfectly: but they sit there, soundless and incapable of observing us. In this fourth week of the Springbok Tour I ask myself: is this photographic exhibition an accurate photographic statement about this community- All I know is that, in these photographs, these members of the silent majority exude an angst as potent as a gas.
1. My quotations are from taped conversations with the artist.
2. A camera which produces a large negative, and hence the high resolution so crucial to this sharply in-focus image making.