The medium, the message

By Claire Holland

Photography’s role as a conveyor of “truth” has often been contested, never more so than in the current age of digital manipulation. But photographs have always been subject to trickery. In the 19th century splicing and double-negative printing, coupled with photography’s inherently alchemical nature, helped the photographers of the day convince the viewer that the evanescent forms and anomalies in the form of vaporous swirls, stains and blurs that adorned their photographs were evidence of an ethereal world beyond our own.

Seeing is Believing, a two-part exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, showcases a group of contemporary photographers whose work explores the spiritual and unexplained, alongside a selection of vintage prints from the archive of Britain’s most famous ghost investigator, Harry Price. On display in a suitably gloomy room at the back of the gallery, these works are from an era when the camera’s indifferent eye was relied on to attest to the truth. Many of the images were claimed, in their day, to be irrefutable proof of psychical activity.

Evidence of “The Crawley Poltergeist” from 1945 is presented in the form of still-life shots; samples of “automatic writing” are presented in random scrawls on scraps of paper, and a shot from the National Laboratory of Psychical Research in 1932 reveals a knotted handkerchief allegedly tied supernaturally during a séance. Some are more sinister in their hoaxing, depicting the spectral figure of a dead relative hovering at the shoulder of a sitter. Others are simply laughable; a snake of cheesecloth being regurgitated by medium Helen Duncan during a séance in 1931 was said to have been ectoplasm. It is hard to believe that anyone could have been duped, no matter how heavily the photograph was relied on as hard evidence.

Surrealist artists such as Max Ernst and Man Ray used double printing to create photomontages that took the viewer into the realms of dreams and fantasy, the influence of which can be seen in the small selection of work from each of the photographers in the contemporary part of the show.

The cracked plaster of walls embellished with shadowy, primitive figures and scribbled auto-drawings set the tone for Roger Ballen’s careful black and white mises-en-scène, in which masks, flowers and disembodied hands are recurring motifs. Florencia Durante borrows from Bauhaus photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s “drawing with light” in her large- format works. Using a slow exposure, she employs light as a force that appears to push a chair to the floor or envelope her sitter in a wiry ball.

Perhaps the most successful images on show are a series of bricked-up doorways, empty foyers and dark alleys by Tim Maul entitled “Traces and Presences”. Maul worked with a medium in New York, photographing spaces where paranormal activity had been sensed. In these eerie images of seemingly ordinary places, Maul plays with ideas of memory and mortality.

It would be a pity if visitors to this mildly interesting show failed to head next door to the gallery’s café to catch an exhibition by the French photographer Antoine d’Agata, whose compelling work would have benefited from being hung in the gallery’s main space. D’Agata claims to be “the principal character” in his images and there is a real sense that the artist is complicit in the raw, sexually charged images crammed on the opening wall; all the more surprising when we are informed that, unlike the artist’s former tutor Nan Goldin and the Danish photographer Jacob Holdt before her, d’Agata chooses not to spend long periods of time with his subjects, preferring to rely on serendipitous encounters with strangers. From a sea of images, flashes of muted colour in the predominantly monochromatic prints are mirrored in the large-format painterly photographs on the facing wall. A shot of a woman on a bed is reminiscent of a Degas pastel. Portraits in which the sitter’s features are contorted into a malevolent mask bring to mind Francis Bacon’s violent distortion of the human image.

Perhaps d’Agata’s biggest success is his ability to capture fragments of the visible world as deftly as he produces expressionist portraits in which his subjects are alienated in anonymity.