magazines; the mid 1930s saw the launchof, amongst others, Good Photography, PhotoTechnique, Photo Art Monthly and US CameraMagazine.With Americans buying an estima-ted two million cameras per year, the newperiodicals addressed a nationwide audiencefor photography far removed from the clien-tele that frequented (in declining numbers)the gallery circuit. That said, the museumsand galleries continued to perform animportant educational role in which theyserved to historicise, evaluate and conferlegitimacy on photographers and practices.

Raeburn’s history closes with the open-ing of the Department of Photography atNew York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1940.Ironically, the moment marked the point atwhich both government support and theinterest of popular magazines appeared towane. Of course, the impending war playeda role, but Raeburn intimates that theinstitutional consecration of photographywas at the same time the silencing of thedynamism, diversity and debate that madethe 1930s so fervid a decade.

A Staggering Revolution is subtitled ACultural History of Thirties Photography. Assuch it presents a brilliant sociologicalmapping of its subject that is nuanced,far-reaching and exhaustively researched(though without a bibliography). Perhapsthe price paid for the diligence of Rae-burn’s focus on the cultural sphere is thatit acquires a certain insularity. To return tothe economic and social crisis that fos-tered the formation of the FSA, there islittle sense in the book of the 15 millionunemployed, nor of the catastrophic 50per cent fall in industrial production. Andwe are not asked to consider too deeplywhy the Roosevelt government shouldchoose to make representations of therural poor on an unprecedented scale . . .nor how those representations were to beused – but perhaps those are questions fora social, rather than cultural, history.

guy lane

Freelance picture editor

ACTING THE PART: PHOTOGRAPHY

AS THEATRE

lori paul (ed.)

National Gallery of Canada, and Merrell, Londonand New York 2006 d29.95 $56.18176 pp. 60 col/54 mono illusisbn 1 85894 328 0

This is a well-produced book withgood quality illustrations and usefulessays. There are also short biogra-

phies of the photographers who wereincluded in the exhibition that it originallyaccompanied, as well as a brief, but useful,list of books, catalogues and articles forfurther reading.The publication and relatedexhibition (Ottowa, June–October 2006)focus on a topic that has been very popularfor a couple of decades now, namely thestaged or constructed photograph. It isclear from the visual and written materialpresented here, however, that this type ofphotograph has a history that dates fromthe very beginnings of the medium. Oneof the first illustrations in the book is ofHippolyte Bayard’s staged photograph(1840) of himself posing as a drownedman, who has been driven to suicide by thegovernment’s failure to recognise fully hisrole in the invention of photography.

The introductory essay, appropriatelycalled ‘Setting the scene’, discusses thevarious types and developments of con-structed photographs up until the present,and the relationship of the staged photo toart, cinema, film magazines, fashionphotography and literature. This is a goodintroduction and paves the way for threemore essays, arranged in chronologicalorder, on Victorian-period staged photo-graphs and albums, modernity and thestaged photograph, and contemporaryphotography and theatricality. This lastessay, beginning with a quote from Hegelvia Jeff Wall, ‘Essence must appear’, andsuggesting that in the represented body ‘itappears as a gesture which knows itself tobe appearance’, is the most theoreticallyinclined. It is not quite clear, however, what‘essence’ is being represented in contem-porary photography or indeed whetherphotography can represent any ‘essence’,and the emphasis is more on the self-reflexive aspect of the posed image. Thisis perhaps the main weakness of the book,in that there are elegantly written essays,references to useful items for further study,and some great images, but a keen sense ofhistorical situation is sometimes lacking.Just what are the differences, and reasonsfor these differences, between a stagedphotograph from the nineteenth century,one from the 1930s, say, and works fromthe early twenty-first century, which mightsuperficially look as if they are similar, butare created in very different contexts?

For example, there is a wonderfulcolour photograph of men in a kitchen(one is wearing an apron) smoking,chatting and drinking coffee, made byPaul Outerbridge Jr around 1939 for a

coffee advert. What a brilliant image for adiscussion of gender, class and commo-dification on the eve of the Second WorldWar. There are also the comments made inthe essay by Lori Paul on the importance ofthe staged photograph in advertising.

One of the most useful points made inthis book is the overlap between cinema,painting, avant-garde photography, andadvertising and fashion photography,which points to the erosion of boundariesbetween high art and ‘the culture industry’,with photographers working across thesefields in the interwar years, in particular.Perhaps it was only through working forcompanies that photographers were ableto produce some of the images thatrequired considerable resources in termsof equipment, location and props, thoughMadame Yevonde’s Goddesses series in 1935famously used rubber snakes and othercheap props bought from toyshops. Thelarge and sumptuously produced stagedphotographs of recent years, such as thoseby Jeff Wall, put the earlier small mono-chrome works in the shade.

Despite my minor criticisms, this is avery interesting book with thoughtfulessays, which should encourage studentsto read more on issues of performance,theatricality, and self-reflexivity of imagesand, for practice-based students, it mayprompt them to progress further on theroad to developing a theorising practice.

gen doy

De Montfort University

CHRIS SHAW

LIFE AS A NIGHT PORTER

Twin Palms Publishers, San Francisco,www.twinpalms.com2006 $60.0064 pp. 64 duotone illusisbn 1-931885-50-8

Imagine you were unfortunate enough tofind yourself naked, locked out of yourhotel room, and in the presence of a

malign night porter armed with a camera.It is the stuff of bad dreams. Imagine, too,that the porter’s award-winning photo-graphs are received to great acclaim andare exhibited as far afield as Paris andSydney. You would be forgiven for thinkingthat things could not get much worse.Well, they just have.

Life as a Night Porter is a sumptuouspublication of the remarkable collection oflonely, sordid, sad and hilarious imagesmade by photographer Chris Shaw during

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ten years’ work in the capital’s hotels. In aseries of grainy, over-developed and badlyexposed pictures we gain access to anether world of nocturnal corridors andfoyers in which the guests are drunk, thestaff are asleep and the women are on thegame. Rarely has the world of hotelkeeping been laid bare (pun intended) socaustically.

Shaw is a graduate of Farnham ArtCollege, but by the early 1990s, by hisown admission, his career was not goingaccording to plan:

I was doing bit of freelance work but I’d lost myway as it were. I was homeless in London whenI saw a sign in a job centre for work as a nightporter, and I thought they might be offeringstaff accommodation.

The long night shifts served to revive hisdormant interest in taking photographs:‘After a couple of years I’d forgotten allabout photography, but I began using it asa way of staying awake throughout thenight’.

Shaw’s pictures evoke the bleary-eyedlongueur of the tawdry small hours asmuch by their style as by their content.The scratched negatives, the processingerrors, the damaged prints and theslipshod focusing all appear consonantwith the squalid scenes they depict. Heexplains how the style emerged:

A lot of the damage to the negatives was due tomy lifestyle; I’d work all night then go into thedarkroom and do a few hours. I was constantlytired. I didn’t hang the negatives properly orclean them properly before putting them intotheir sleeves. It started by accident and becamea kind of style because after a while I realised itworked well with the subject matter.

Another function of this approach is that itserves to position his pictures in relationto those of other photographers workingin black and white who have chosen to testconventional criteria of competence andpresentation. Most obviously, his style isindebted to the iconoclasm of much post-war Japanese photography, particularlythat of the Provoke era. At the end of thebook, Shaw compiles a ‘gratitude list’ ofinfluences, including Daido Moriyama,Kikuji Kawada, Takuma Nakahira, Masa-hisa Fukase and Ikko Narahara.

With regard to his own pictures, Shawclearly values the studied avoidance of any-thing resembling technical accomplish-ment: ‘The photography became artlessin a way and that’s what’s so good aboutit’. He proceeds to relate an incident fromthe darkroom:

I was looking at a picture thinking, ‘This isboring’. So I stuck my thumb on the wetnegative, and then enlarged it and what you getis the pattern of the thumbprint enlarged overthe image . . . a crazy aesthetic. I just lovemessing around in the darkroom – it’s notAnsell Adams for Christ’s sake.

Aesthetics aside, it is hard not to ponderthe fate of the unfortunate guests – nakedand padding the corridors in search ofa key. Evidently for Shaw they were fairgame:

Guests getting locked out was a regularoccurrence in the hotel. I was really sickof it because I’d have to go all the way backup to their rooms and let them in again. I reallyhated it. I thought if any one of those bastardscomes down tonight I’m going to take theirpicture.

By 2003 Shaw had produced a criticallyacclaimed portfolio of prints that wasexhibited at London’s Tom Blau Gallery,Paris’ 779 Galerie, the Rencontres d’ArlesFestival (2004) and the Australian Centrefor Photography, Sydney.

Despite the supposed artlessness of hisapproach and his claim that photographywas merely a means of staying awakeduring long shifts, it seems that, for Shaw,the publication of Life as a Night Porterrepresents a natural conclusion for thework he undertook, ‘I was influenced byJapanese photographers in the sense that(with one exception) the photographs areall vertical pictures . . . because it was abook project from the word go’.

guy lane

Freelance picture editor

Locked.LockedOut,Chris ShawrChris Shaw.FromChris ShawLife as aNightPorter.

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