Bearing Tension
Photographs by Russ Flatt
DANIEL MICHAEL SATELE
RUSS FLATT Swimming Pool #3 2013 Colour photograph
Follow the lines of sight from one person to another in these images to discover their stories. Crisscrossing eye contact with unmet gazes, Russ Flatt’s photographs are shot through with a tension between the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown. If they tell their stories through a network of perspectives, we are in it, afforded the crucial point of view that takes in more than the sum of outlooks given the depicted individuals. At the narrative centre of this series is a boy in early adolescence and the question of what he knows and sees. The world of sexuality, appearing explicitly only in the bedroom scene, electrifies the others perhaps even more strongly for its being, paradoxically, invisible yet plain to see.
Swimming Pool #3 resembles a baptism: four men keep the boy’s seemingly unconscious body from going under, as though he has just been drowning. We understand the men as lifeguards within the story being told but Flatt leaves a margin of irony open within which we also easily understand them as models posing for a photographer. That we can recognize the image’s fabrication without buying any less into its story, exemplifies the complex interplay of verity and artifice at work here. The domestic, would-be mundane settings act in tandem with an anti-documentary, stylized presentation. Often using triangular compositions reminiscent of those favoured by Renaissance painters, Flatt imbues his images with an aura of allegory, as though the set-up surfaces encode esoteric meanings that only want deciphering.
Baptism, a rite of admission, might here be seen as initiation to adult identity; but Flatt is not purely concerned with individuality. A personal yesteryear is mapped onto a national one as the images’ palette and mise-en-scène evoke a sense of nostalgic kiwiana. The pool, while a perfect symbol for the unconscious, also stands for collectivity, as we are all the same before the water’s indifference, and, in the pool, all connected by its pervasive, liquid touch. If the ‘Kiwi Summer’ is one of New Zealand’s national myths, a topos called forth to embody ‘the good life’ supposed to be found here, the pool is something of a national institution, a site for schooling the true ‘kiwi kid’ in the good life’s enjoyment. Since youth, summer, and yesteryear are all often imaged as periods of special insouciance and innocence, we can approach these photographs asking what it means that Flatt unsettles this mythology.
RUSS FLATT Swimming Pool #1 2013 Colour photograph
RUSS FLATT Swimming Pool #2 2013 Colour photograph
RUSS FLATT Bedroom 2013 Colour photograph
RUSS FLATT Car 2013 Colour photograph