A Man Walks out of a Bar
1
Abduction
As Damian Skinner suggested in his opening comments for the exhibition of Lucien Rizos’s photographs at the Millenium Gallery in Blenheim, the title of this portfolio immediately proposes a story: A man walks out of a bar ... and then?
Even though the title of the photograph in question (Eketahuna) is more succinct, offering merely the name of a small town passed through on a road trip, it inevitably attracts the kind of sub-heading that is this book’s title; and the accumulation of a speculative narrative. The image is of a man stepping purposefully from a public bar into what (by the length of his shadow) must be early evening in (by his jersey) autumn or spring. He has been there for a few beers after work, probably. By his shirt and tie, knitted jersey but no jacket, and his black leather shoes, he looks like someone in small rural town business: a farm-supply dealership, real-estate, insurance, banking, or perhaps the owner-manager of a local store. The man looks to be in his early thirties, and he is approaching the photographer with a slightly querulous ‘Who are you?’ expression, not just because someone is ‘taking his picture’, as we say, as if describing a thief; but as if confronting a stranger – not something he expects to happen outside the public bar of his home pub, a place where nobody else ever stops unless they do so often, where he probably knows everyone by sight at least, and many by their first names.
And it’s true, he doesn’t know this photographer, who is also a violinist with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra – who clearly has a purpose with his camera, but who incidentally may be passing through on tour, perhaps; who, in any case, might as well be an alien who has arrived in this weirdly depopulated Roswellian townscape. From the familiar, comforting, garrulous intimacy of the warm bar to this eerie visual chill ... and this unexpectedly focused stranger ...
And where was he intending to go, the man leaving the bar, before this abduction took place? Before he’d had time to adjust his senses to the chilly light, to recalibrate his reactions to ‘stranger’ so soon after being with ‘mates’? He’s even in motion across the strongly marked threshold from the bottom step of the public bar, which is itself transected by a division of theatrical light and intimate shadow. His right arm is swinging as a counterweight to the axis of his hips and left knee, but the whole story of his golfer’s or rugby player’s swivel towards the next thing has suddenly been arrested in his expression, whose purposefulness is now marred by doubt and even by a hint of incredulity. What is happening to him is not merely banal. The life he sanguinely expected to continue with after having his beer probably involved his family who – the story pushing us towards its predictable consequences – will soon be wondering what has happened to him? Why didn’t he come home? Since he always has? In the past?
This urge to narrative, to set off on a dreamy speculation about what’s happening here? or what next? is irresistibly seductive, and as often as not we enjoy being seduced – we enjoy ‘letting our minds wander’, as we say, as if describing the kind of free-wheeling imaginative dérive once advocated by Situationists, and by the American Beats (and the photographer Robert Frank) on their unscripted wanderings, as a way of disrupting the plod of habitual behaviour, and freeing the mind to see what routine blinds and binds us to.
But most of the images in this book seem at first to be setting off on familiar narrative journeys, towards the familiar tropes of life as it’s lived. They are almost certainly indexed in some way to the photographer’s own life, although this relationship remains inscrutable. What we see is that the photographs notice but also remember the relations between people, their camaraderie or dissociation, their loneliness or happiness, the stuff they may buy; pervaded at first sight by a sense of finity, of time measured out in limited amounts and moving inevitably towards an end.
There are many groups and little thematic sequences in this book that support a sense of time-bound narrative. Even the objects or furnishings, such as the Woolmarked knitted cardigan in Souvenir shop, Christchurch, or the furnishings of the Television Lounge, White Harte Hotel, New Plymouth, are as full of story as they are apparently empty of people – though the cardigan, or one like it, reappears with a man in it a page later in Wairarapa as if it, too, has been abducted. But we know from the appearances of these objects, the hang of the garment or the disposition of chairs in the empty TV lounge (one of which still seems to bear the imprint of a large arse) that we are never entirely distinct or separate from the objects through which we clad, furnish, fetishise and materialise our occupation of time; how we use objects to make ourselves ‘at home’ in the time we have or have pressed ourselves into; or how we fail to do that and end up homeless in time that seems to flow past and around us, bearing away all the meaning we seem unable to attach to the lives we know to be all too finite.
But there is always a catch with these photographs by Lucien Rizos, taken on photography road trips around the country, some of them with another photographer, Peter Black; and sometimes on tour with the orchestra. Despite their apparent momentum towards the tropes of ‘life as it’s lived’, these images also stall at the very moment when the time-scales of daily life want to co-opt us to their predictable measures. In part, this has something to do with the kind of arrested motion typified in the photograph of the man walking out of a bar – that swivel of purpose across the axis of the pub’s bottom step, the one that marks clearly his passage into ‘the light of day’. At first, the man’s lifted left knee and swinging right arm seem to suggest the kind of arrested motion that became the Cartier-Bresson Leica generation’s cliché of immediacy, and eventually the cul-de-sac of their ‘decisive moment’ approach to time and narrative.
But then, despite its articulation across poised moment and motion, the picture slows. It seems to be every bit as lugubrious as the imprint of an arse on the vinyl of the easy chair in the White Harte’s TV lounge. Unlike the ‘decisive moment’ image, which traps the vividness of narrative in its timeless fragment (Cartier-Bresson’s man leaping over a puddle behind the Gare St Lazare isn’t going anywhere), the man walking out of a bar is merely held up or delayed by an intervention more glum than dramatic.
And it is in this hesitation or hold-up, this momentary and partial slowing that is the opposite of the dramatic or poetic instantané, that we, the viewers, have time to let our minds wander off, away from the lazy instant of the photograph, into the seductions of what else might be possible along the margins of ordinary life – some kind of abduction into the fantasies that boredom, routine and stasis might encourage anywhere, including a small town like Eketahuna on a chilly evening in autumn, when the streets have been stripped of life as if by some catastrophe (but probably by more mundane calls on peoples’ time).
It is these slow contradictions or tensions between narrative and visual meaning that can drive our receptions of the images into strange psychic territories, as the film critic Lesley Chow has noted of film. And indeed, there is something filmic in the way these images proceed, not quite stopping page by page, their interstices and links giving us time both to follow and to resist the plot. The photographs resist the motionlessness of discrete images allocated a double-page spread each (the format of Robert Frank’s The Americans). They form and then subvert or collapse sequences, and this ambiguous resistance edges the still towards the moving image.
Recently, Rizos has been making videos of street musicians which turn this effect back in the other direction, since the ‘moving images’ of his videos are, without exception, single-frame, fixed position takes of their objects. It seems to be his instinct, if not his method, to subvert not just his own editing strategy but his entire conceptual intention. Or to subvert or even satirise our expectations of what, at first sight, in A Man Walks out of a Bar, might look like a downbeat panegyric to ‘real life’, a kind of provincial Edward Steichen-like, humanist, ‘family of man’ portrait of the nation’s heartland. Only, it is not that – it is emphatically not that; that least of all.
A large territory opens up here, where story, location, time and image begin to tangle themselves in issues of history and what we most often call ‘national identity’, supposing that a collection of photographs taken on the road between 1979 and 1982 could somehow be that definitive (and of what, exactly?). But then, we know that even Robert Frank’s The Americans of 1958, which this book quite clearly remembers well, was a kind of fiction; and, in its sometimes bitter tone, a reproof to the hubris of Steichen’s ‘family’ and its often patronising texts. And anyway, I lose interest at the moment the story of a man walking out of a bar heads in this direction, towards the reunion of a kind of national family, or a generational portrait in the manner of Ans Westra or Marti Friedlander. This is not because I think such inquiries as theirs are uninteresting (they are interesting) – it is because I feel the tug of another kind of story.
2
Melancholy
I find myself needing to ask a strange question: where to locate the melancholy in these images – not all of which are sad? It is not enough to assert that they are melancholy. All that does is put an adjective next to my response to them. Rather, their pervasive sense of the melancholy stallings of time, and of fantasies and psychic disturbances opening up around these hesitations – this sense seems to gather at the intersections of certain effects and themes.
For example, melancholy is attracted to the points where repetitions or thematic clusters of images seem to stabilise time into sequence, only to break up and disperse across a reef-like irruption of nostalgia – the ‘I remember that’ moment lost just as it seems to be cohering into pattern. Or melancholy congeals where the experience of immediate, familiar or mundane time (my daily life) intersects with and disperses into the broad reaches of epochal themes known by historians as longue durée, and the desolate sense that there is nothing immediate, individual or specific, that everything has already always happened like this before and will always go on doing so. Or melancholy haunts the affect of alienation when, as I look at these images, I encounter the return gazes of people noticing a voyeur among them – but not me in the first instance, so the melancholy of estrangement is caused not by an encounter as such but by the intersection of an encounter (the photographer’s) and my displacement from it.
These moments and others deserve the kind of close attention Rizos gives his sixty-four apparently casual images. This is not least because, individually and in their complex relations to time, sequence, and story, they also intersect deliberately and knowledgeably with the practices and even sometimes (I’m supposing) with the specific images of two master photographers, Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
In the mid 1980s, Rizos shot a number of street portraits from the corner of McDonalds in Courtenay Place – the McDonalds Corner portfolio. These blatantly hit-and-miss photographs were simultaneously homages to the decisive-moment strategy associated with Cartier-Bresson; and parodies of it. The parody was double-sided. It deflated the mystique of masterful sensibility – the impeccable instinct – associated with the instantané; and it wryly noted the melancholy provincial bathos of relocating that sensibility from the streets of Paris to the corner of McDonalds in Wellington, New Zealand.
In 1986, Rizos staged an exhibition in Wellington called My Relationship with the Old Masters, which included fragments of collector advice on photographers including Boubat, Steichen, Arbus, Orkin and Adams. The critical instinct revealed in these works appeared in another exhibition, subsequently published as a spiral-bound book, with the title My Relationship with Henri Cartier-Bresson (Rizos inscribed my copy of this with the droll note, ‘... processing issues that C.B. and I had to resolve in our relationship, in order to move on ...’).
The key image in this affectionate but mordant suite of sketches, paintings and collages was one of Cartier-Bresson’s best-loved photographs, Rue Mouffetard, 1954, the picture of a cheekily grinning small boy heading home with two large bottles of vin ordinaire. In one of Rizos’s watercolour and China-white sketches of this photograph, a handwritten caption reads, ‘I was walking along, minding my own business when, all of a sudden ...........’. One of the final double-spread images in the book relocates the boy with wine bottles in the sculptor Giacometti’s studio with what appears to be the sculptor’s Walking Man of 1960 – the suggestion being that the boy has kept on walking into adulthood, but has nonetheless remained stuck to the ground of his modernist instant in history. The facing page, and the book’s final image, consists of a dozen thumb-nail images of the boy on Rue Mouffetard – suggesting that his instant was only ever a multiple-choice option, the product of an editing or film-processing decision as much as of a quasi-mystical gift of perception.
All of this is what also ambushes our encounter with the man walking out of a bar in Eketahuna, New Zealand, on a chilly evening around 1979 – even though a strict chronology locates this photograph almost ten years before the My Relationship with Henri Cartier-Bresson project. After all, Rizos was certainly thinking about Cartier-Bresson and Frank long before making his droll homage in 1986. In any case, there is for me no way to avoid the possibility that the placement of the Eketahuna man’s walking legs, his exit from a bar, even the akimbo set of his arms and elbows (which could be holding bottles) are remembering the kid on Rue Mouffetard and relocating him in a suite of photographs that in turn reprocesses that decisive moment tradition through the disenchantment of Robert Frank’s The Americans.
And the impact of this haunting, which fills the deserted small town street with phantoms, is also a source of weird melancholy, because, although the man is where he is, and is who he is, he is also being abducted to an archive from which he will return changed, having surrendered part of his identity to the kind of directionless time the photograph trades in. I was walking along, minding my own business, when all of a sudden ...’
‘Hello, honey. I’m home.’
3
Close Encounters
The trajectory of Cartier-Bresson’s oeuvre, and his eventual disenchantment with photography, seem to have been determined as much by his leftist politics as by his travels. Thus, his The Great Leap Forward, China, 1958 portfolio, one of the most sanguinely documentarist of his essays, contrasts with the satirical tone of his 1960 photo-essay, Bankers Trust, New York. A clear implication of this contrast is that Cartier-Bresson’s agendas for photo-essays were predetermined to some extent by political ideology – they were not, or were not always, purely the products of ‘the split-second recognition of a fact and the organisation of its forms’. This effect of predetermination became increasingly noticeable after the surreal vividness of his early work from the 1930s, most of which consisted of stand-alone images; and the harsh photographs taken during the 1940s in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Another obvious driver of the subsequent displacement of the instinctive instant by the programmed sequence was the requirement of photojournalism, mediated by Magnum, to generate coherent photo-narratives – sequences of images that would tell a story augmented by captions.
The rise of Magnum-style narrative photojournalism was clearly a conceptual driver of Steichen’s The Family of Man project in 1955, with its over-arching narrative of a human family united in the optimism of post-war democracy. Robert Frank was initially closely involved with developing Steichen’s grand project, not least because of his association with networks of European photographers, but he left before the exhibition opened to enormous popular acclaim at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His own vision, coloured by the experiences of growing up Jewish in neutral Switzerland during the Holocaust, was dark and disenchanted compared to Steichen’s. What followed were the more than 20,000 exposures that became the astringently edited 83 photographs of The Americans.
In the deliberate randomness of its journeys across America, its begun but then subverted thematic sets of images, its interplay of still and filmic visual narratives, The Americans simultaneously deployed and subverted the dramatic strategies of decisive moment photojournalism and what had become its comfortably extended form, the photo-essay. Frank’s undercover camera was also a weapon against the American heartland’s political and cultural conservatism, hidden as this was by the Harper’s Bazaar or even Life Magazine appetite for celebrities and newsworthy events. The central image of The Americans may well be the tuba-player at a political rally in Chicago, his face replaced by the blow-hard bell of his instrument.
Nor did Frank want the gravitas of a Walker Evans stationed behind a tripod and commanding professional respect. Often set at a five- to six-foot focal range and concealed in his overcoat, Frank’s Leica did not even perform like the optical prosthetic that was Cartier-Bresson’s viewfinder. It was, rather, a covert instrument of cultural espionage, operating tangentially to an immediate eye-brain link, and no doubt subverting his own intentions from time to time. What he finally edited out of the succinct selection of the published works in The Americans may well have included much that was intended, whereas what was retained may often have been the product of chance occasioned by subterfuge – of the dérive not the schedule.
The knowledge of all this is evident in A Man Walks out of a Bar. One of the effects of such literate artistic knowledge is, of course, to route an informed metropolitan conversation about some of the key, and often contending, strategies of pre-digital twentieth century photography through provincial, small-town narratives. Robert Frank did something very similar in 1950s America – and, like Rizos twenty years later in New Zealand, without either patronising the objects of his photographs or risking the hubris of sentimental heartlandism.
It is worth remembering that Rizos, though a photographer first and foremost, is also a symphony orchestra violinist who tours regularly and performs to audiences the length and breadth of the country, in small towns and rural communities as well as in the regional cities. The photographic expeditions that accumulated in the portfolio A Man Walks out of a Bar were therefore occasionally complemented along the criss-crossing and democratising grids of the symphony orchestra’s independent programme and schedule, which effectively may have contributed to randomising the sequences and innate coherence of any supposed journey specifically centred on taking photographs. One might even imagine the traces of a soundtrack under some sequences – I do – though the fragments of radio play-lists muffled by motel walls or crackling in and out of range on the car radio are perhaps more likely. In any case, we may suppose that Rizos took photographs because he was moved by the fleeting glimpses of human relationship, domicile, and material culture that passed the car or the tour bus window or were visible from the window of a small town hotel; because what he objectively saw with the camera subjectively indexed memories of his own life, including its sound-tracks, so to speak – or because he found himself randomly looking at such a view as that from the hotel, and being reminded of another photographic image, so that a kind of doubling took place, something like a visual chord.
Thus, the image View from hotel balcony, Hawera recalls the Frank image View from Motel Window, Butte, Montana, 1956, not just because it is a view of any small town from a hotel window, but because the image has a kind of cross-grained iconic redolence. In the case of Frank’s photograph, the grim coal-mining townscape with its Bill Brandt-ish lighting and desolate streets answers back to a 1950s post-war America emerging from a memory of labour as depression into an era of labour as prosperity; other icons rubbed the wrong way by Frank included the cowboy, the greasy-spoon diner, the film star, the open road, the automobile, teen romance ... and many more.
In Rizos’s hotel balcony photograph of Hawera, desultory traffic cruises a main street empty of people but presided over by the signage of The Farmer’s Co-op. The storefront’s dark windows hardly open on to optimistic pastoral vistas, and the cars cruising the street seem to be doing the work of keeping people from each other while going nowhere. The iconic clichés of small-town community and farming prosperity are nowhere to be seen – but we sense them as absences or unfulfilled desires, as negative icons.
Elsewhere in the portfolio, such iconic desires appear more gently and even wistfully, as transitions, improvisations, or shifts in tone rather than as counter-arguments or absences. Effects involving the repositioning of points-of-view (or timbre), speed (or tempo), and narrative (or melody) begin to appear. They seem to be audible as well as visible. A Display window in Waverly exhibits photographs of three generations of mothers holding their baby daughters. This at-one-remove image of historical mother-daughter photographs is followed by a street scene in Stradford in which what might be a grandmother and mother are walking with small children in pushchairs. Then, a grim-faced man alone in Dunedin, who seems to be looking across the page in the direction of the next photograph in which someone who resembles him is walking out of the page with a woman; they seem to be ignoring each other and are facing the point-of-view of the photographer. Next, in Foxton, a young man and woman are talking intensely across the axis of that point-of-view. In Napier, a middle-aged man and a woman are ignoring each other in the back and front seats of a car; both are facing forward across the camera’s axis, although the man seems to have just noticed the photographer and has begun to swivel in that direction. At Sumner Beach, Christchurch, a young man and woman are cuddling happily on some concrete steps, oblivious to the photographer; at the Agricultural & Pastoral showgrounds, Gisborne, a man who resembles the one in the previous photograph is lying on the grass next to a woman, with a small boy clinging to his back; a roll of barrier mesh seems to have been rolled back to accommodate this intimate view of them. In Christchurch a woman walks with three children towards the photographer. In a Front yard, Christchurch, a man is playing with two small girls who have their backs to the photographer. Four people are squashed into a car in Sunday afternoon, Kapiti Coast. A single man strides out through a garden gate in Dunedin. Another man stands by himself outside a house in Huntly, looking to his left across the axis of the viewpoint and in the direction the photographer is travelling away from him.
At one level, these images are experienced as desultory variations on iconic themes of relationship – as a kind of hesitant, interrupted narrative shifted through cross-grained perspectives and points of view along or across the axis of the camera’s viewfinder. In this, they are textual or even dialogic – they seduce us into ‘making up stories’, as indeed I was seduced when I began with the image of the man walking out of a bar in Eketahuna.
But at another level, these variations and improvisations have (dare I say) a musical structure. It would be foolish to assume that, just because the photographer Rizos is also a musician, his approaches to photography will involve ‘musical structure’. Yet the best analogy I can find for a sequence like the one described above is of a riff or chord sequence, in which a core chromatic set is sustained through a sequence of tonal shifts. This impression is enhanced by the sense of time and movement in the photographs – not just within those whose objects are sighted from the speeding window of a car or bus, where a foreground blur or a perspectival tilt of perspective tell us we are moving; but in the page-by-page sense of time passing and distances traversed.
And in either case, whether the camera is speeding past its object, or whether time and distance are being traversed page by page, we as viewers remain in the one place. We are motionlessly attending to a performance predicated absolutely on objects passing in sequences, on time both passing and retarded as the pages of this score are turned; and predicated also on recognitions, on the knowledge and familiarity that allows us to understand variations on themes and conventions because we remember something like the melody. We can almost sing along to this travelling visual radio as it picks up the regional stations on its journey.
In this respect, the composition of photographs is not textual at all, or less so. Rather than being seduced into story-telling, into the kind if diurnal or everyday time into which stories fit easily, we are taken up with abstract narrative structures whose meanings are thematic not factual, general not specific, tonal not material. They are dialogic not in the sense of speaking to us and each other, but in the sense of wordlessly addressing known and remembered forms. The time of such abstractions is not the everyday time of stories, but the longue durée of historical themes sweeping past and leaving behind the detailed instances of human life hesitating in these photographs – hesitations and inconclusions that are momentarily glimpsed only as they fade into abstraction.
This is the achievement of A Man Walks out of a Bar: to orchestrate and momentarily hold on to the vulnerable fragments of human life lived across small increments of finite time and almost cohering into stories we can understand – to arrange these familiar desires within a larger, abstract time and space which, though we have heard something like it before, seems to be beyond us and to be always going beyond us.
1
Abduction
As Damian Skinner suggested in his opening comments for the exhibition of Lucien Rizos’s photographs at the Millenium Gallery in Blenheim, the title of this portfolio immediately proposes a story: A man walks out of a bar ... and then?
Even though the title of the photograph in question (Eketahuna) is more succinct, offering merely the name of a small town passed through on a road trip, it inevitably attracts the kind of sub-heading that is this book’s title; and the accumulation of a speculative narrative. The image is of a man stepping purposefully from a public bar into what (by the length of his shadow) must be early evening in (by his jersey) autumn or spring. He has been there for a few beers after work, probably. By his shirt and tie, knitted jersey but no jacket, and his black leather shoes, he looks like someone in small rural town business: a farm-supply dealership, real-estate, insurance, banking, or perhaps the owner-manager of a local store. The man looks to be in his early thirties, and he is approaching the photographer with a slightly querulous ‘Who are you?’ expression, not just because someone is ‘taking his picture’, as we say, as if describing a thief; but as if confronting a stranger – not something he expects to happen outside the public bar of his home pub, a place where nobody else ever stops unless they do so often, where he probably knows everyone by sight at least, and many by their first names.
And it’s true, he doesn’t know this photographer, who is also a violinist with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra – who clearly has a purpose with his camera, but who incidentally may be passing through on tour, perhaps; who, in any case, might as well be an alien who has arrived in this weirdly depopulated Roswellian townscape. From the familiar, comforting, garrulous intimacy of the warm bar to this eerie visual chill ... and this unexpectedly focused stranger ...
And where was he intending to go, the man leaving the bar, before this abduction took place? Before he’d had time to adjust his senses to the chilly light, to recalibrate his reactions to ‘stranger’ so soon after being with ‘mates’? He’s even in motion across the strongly marked threshold from the bottom step of the public bar, which is itself transected by a division of theatrical light and intimate shadow. His right arm is swinging as a counterweight to the axis of his hips and left knee, but the whole story of his golfer’s or rugby player’s swivel towards the next thing has suddenly been arrested in his expression, whose purposefulness is now marred by doubt and even by a hint of incredulity. What is happening to him is not merely banal. The life he sanguinely expected to continue with after having his beer probably involved his family who – the story pushing us towards its predictable consequences – will soon be wondering what has happened to him? Why didn’t he come home? Since he always has? In the past?
This urge to narrative, to set off on a dreamy speculation about what’s happening here? or what next? is irresistibly seductive, and as often as not we enjoy being seduced – we enjoy ‘letting our minds wander’, as we say, as if describing the kind of free-wheeling imaginative dérive once advocated by Situationists, and by the American Beats (and the photographer Robert Frank) on their unscripted wanderings, as a way of disrupting the plod of habitual behaviour, and freeing the mind to see what routine blinds and binds us to.
But most of the images in this book seem at first to be setting off on familiar narrative journeys, towards the familiar tropes of life as it’s lived. They are almost certainly indexed in some way to the photographer’s own life, although this relationship remains inscrutable. What we see is that the photographs notice but also remember the relations between people, their camaraderie or dissociation, their loneliness or happiness, the stuff they may buy; pervaded at first sight by a sense of finity, of time measured out in limited amounts and moving inevitably towards an end.
There are many groups and little thematic sequences in this book that support a sense of time-bound narrative. Even the objects or furnishings, such as the Woolmarked knitted cardigan in Souvenir shop, Christchurch, or the furnishings of the Television Lounge, White Harte Hotel, New Plymouth, are as full of story as they are apparently empty of people – though the cardigan, or one like it, reappears with a man in it a page later in Wairarapa as if it, too, has been abducted. But we know from the appearances of these objects, the hang of the garment or the disposition of chairs in the empty TV lounge (one of which still seems to bear the imprint of a large arse) that we are never entirely distinct or separate from the objects through which we clad, furnish, fetishise and materialise our occupation of time; how we use objects to make ourselves ‘at home’ in the time we have or have pressed ourselves into; or how we fail to do that and end up homeless in time that seems to flow past and around us, bearing away all the meaning we seem unable to attach to the lives we know to be all too finite.
But there is always a catch with these photographs by Lucien Rizos, taken on photography road trips around the country, some of them with another photographer, Peter Black; and sometimes on tour with the orchestra. Despite their apparent momentum towards the tropes of ‘life as it’s lived’, these images also stall at the very moment when the time-scales of daily life want to co-opt us to their predictable measures. In part, this has something to do with the kind of arrested motion typified in the photograph of the man walking out of a bar – that swivel of purpose across the axis of the pub’s bottom step, the one that marks clearly his passage into ‘the light of day’. At first, the man’s lifted left knee and swinging right arm seem to suggest the kind of arrested motion that became the Cartier-Bresson Leica generation’s cliché of immediacy, and eventually the cul-de-sac of their ‘decisive moment’ approach to time and narrative.
But then, despite its articulation across poised moment and motion, the picture slows. It seems to be every bit as lugubrious as the imprint of an arse on the vinyl of the easy chair in the White Harte’s TV lounge. Unlike the ‘decisive moment’ image, which traps the vividness of narrative in its timeless fragment (Cartier-Bresson’s man leaping over a puddle behind the Gare St Lazare isn’t going anywhere), the man walking out of a bar is merely held up or delayed by an intervention more glum than dramatic.
And it is in this hesitation or hold-up, this momentary and partial slowing that is the opposite of the dramatic or poetic instantané, that we, the viewers, have time to let our minds wander off, away from the lazy instant of the photograph, into the seductions of what else might be possible along the margins of ordinary life – some kind of abduction into the fantasies that boredom, routine and stasis might encourage anywhere, including a small town like Eketahuna on a chilly evening in autumn, when the streets have been stripped of life as if by some catastrophe (but probably by more mundane calls on peoples’ time).
It is these slow contradictions or tensions between narrative and visual meaning that can drive our receptions of the images into strange psychic territories, as the film critic Lesley Chow has noted of film. And indeed, there is something filmic in the way these images proceed, not quite stopping page by page, their interstices and links giving us time both to follow and to resist the plot. The photographs resist the motionlessness of discrete images allocated a double-page spread each (the format of Robert Frank’s The Americans). They form and then subvert or collapse sequences, and this ambiguous resistance edges the still towards the moving image.
Recently, Rizos has been making videos of street musicians which turn this effect back in the other direction, since the ‘moving images’ of his videos are, without exception, single-frame, fixed position takes of their objects. It seems to be his instinct, if not his method, to subvert not just his own editing strategy but his entire conceptual intention. Or to subvert or even satirise our expectations of what, at first sight, in A Man Walks out of a Bar, might look like a downbeat panegyric to ‘real life’, a kind of provincial Edward Steichen-like, humanist, ‘family of man’ portrait of the nation’s heartland. Only, it is not that – it is emphatically not that; that least of all.
A large territory opens up here, where story, location, time and image begin to tangle themselves in issues of history and what we most often call ‘national identity’, supposing that a collection of photographs taken on the road between 1979 and 1982 could somehow be that definitive (and of what, exactly?). But then, we know that even Robert Frank’s The Americans of 1958, which this book quite clearly remembers well, was a kind of fiction; and, in its sometimes bitter tone, a reproof to the hubris of Steichen’s ‘family’ and its often patronising texts. And anyway, I lose interest at the moment the story of a man walking out of a bar heads in this direction, towards the reunion of a kind of national family, or a generational portrait in the manner of Ans Westra or Marti Friedlander. This is not because I think such inquiries as theirs are uninteresting (they are interesting) – it is because I feel the tug of another kind of story.
2
Melancholy
I find myself needing to ask a strange question: where to locate the melancholy in these images – not all of which are sad? It is not enough to assert that they are melancholy. All that does is put an adjective next to my response to them. Rather, their pervasive sense of the melancholy stallings of time, and of fantasies and psychic disturbances opening up around these hesitations – this sense seems to gather at the intersections of certain effects and themes.
For example, melancholy is attracted to the points where repetitions or thematic clusters of images seem to stabilise time into sequence, only to break up and disperse across a reef-like irruption of nostalgia – the ‘I remember that’ moment lost just as it seems to be cohering into pattern. Or melancholy congeals where the experience of immediate, familiar or mundane time (my daily life) intersects with and disperses into the broad reaches of epochal themes known by historians as longue durée, and the desolate sense that there is nothing immediate, individual or specific, that everything has already always happened like this before and will always go on doing so. Or melancholy haunts the affect of alienation when, as I look at these images, I encounter the return gazes of people noticing a voyeur among them – but not me in the first instance, so the melancholy of estrangement is caused not by an encounter as such but by the intersection of an encounter (the photographer’s) and my displacement from it.
These moments and others deserve the kind of close attention Rizos gives his sixty-four apparently casual images. This is not least because, individually and in their complex relations to time, sequence, and story, they also intersect deliberately and knowledgeably with the practices and even sometimes (I’m supposing) with the specific images of two master photographers, Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
In the mid 1980s, Rizos shot a number of street portraits from the corner of McDonalds in Courtenay Place – the McDonalds Corner portfolio. These blatantly hit-and-miss photographs were simultaneously homages to the decisive-moment strategy associated with Cartier-Bresson; and parodies of it. The parody was double-sided. It deflated the mystique of masterful sensibility – the impeccable instinct – associated with the instantané; and it wryly noted the melancholy provincial bathos of relocating that sensibility from the streets of Paris to the corner of McDonalds in Wellington, New Zealand.
In 1986, Rizos staged an exhibition in Wellington called My Relationship with the Old Masters, which included fragments of collector advice on photographers including Boubat, Steichen, Arbus, Orkin and Adams. The critical instinct revealed in these works appeared in another exhibition, subsequently published as a spiral-bound book, with the title My Relationship with Henri Cartier-Bresson (Rizos inscribed my copy of this with the droll note, ‘... processing issues that C.B. and I had to resolve in our relationship, in order to move on ...’).
The key image in this affectionate but mordant suite of sketches, paintings and collages was one of Cartier-Bresson’s best-loved photographs, Rue Mouffetard, 1954, the picture of a cheekily grinning small boy heading home with two large bottles of vin ordinaire. In one of Rizos’s watercolour and China-white sketches of this photograph, a handwritten caption reads, ‘I was walking along, minding my own business when, all of a sudden ...........’. One of the final double-spread images in the book relocates the boy with wine bottles in the sculptor Giacometti’s studio with what appears to be the sculptor’s Walking Man of 1960 – the suggestion being that the boy has kept on walking into adulthood, but has nonetheless remained stuck to the ground of his modernist instant in history. The facing page, and the book’s final image, consists of a dozen thumb-nail images of the boy on Rue Mouffetard – suggesting that his instant was only ever a multiple-choice option, the product of an editing or film-processing decision as much as of a quasi-mystical gift of perception.
All of this is what also ambushes our encounter with the man walking out of a bar in Eketahuna, New Zealand, on a chilly evening around 1979 – even though a strict chronology locates this photograph almost ten years before the My Relationship with Henri Cartier-Bresson project. After all, Rizos was certainly thinking about Cartier-Bresson and Frank long before making his droll homage in 1986. In any case, there is for me no way to avoid the possibility that the placement of the Eketahuna man’s walking legs, his exit from a bar, even the akimbo set of his arms and elbows (which could be holding bottles) are remembering the kid on Rue Mouffetard and relocating him in a suite of photographs that in turn reprocesses that decisive moment tradition through the disenchantment of Robert Frank’s The Americans.
And the impact of this haunting, which fills the deserted small town street with phantoms, is also a source of weird melancholy, because, although the man is where he is, and is who he is, he is also being abducted to an archive from which he will return changed, having surrendered part of his identity to the kind of directionless time the photograph trades in. I was walking along, minding my own business, when all of a sudden ...’
‘Hello, honey. I’m home.’
3
Close Encounters
The trajectory of Cartier-Bresson’s oeuvre, and his eventual disenchantment with photography, seem to have been determined as much by his leftist politics as by his travels. Thus, his The Great Leap Forward, China, 1958 portfolio, one of the most sanguinely documentarist of his essays, contrasts with the satirical tone of his 1960 photo-essay, Bankers Trust, New York. A clear implication of this contrast is that Cartier-Bresson’s agendas for photo-essays were predetermined to some extent by political ideology – they were not, or were not always, purely the products of ‘the split-second recognition of a fact and the organisation of its forms’. This effect of predetermination became increasingly noticeable after the surreal vividness of his early work from the 1930s, most of which consisted of stand-alone images; and the harsh photographs taken during the 1940s in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Another obvious driver of the subsequent displacement of the instinctive instant by the programmed sequence was the requirement of photojournalism, mediated by Magnum, to generate coherent photo-narratives – sequences of images that would tell a story augmented by captions.
The rise of Magnum-style narrative photojournalism was clearly a conceptual driver of Steichen’s The Family of Man project in 1955, with its over-arching narrative of a human family united in the optimism of post-war democracy. Robert Frank was initially closely involved with developing Steichen’s grand project, not least because of his association with networks of European photographers, but he left before the exhibition opened to enormous popular acclaim at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His own vision, coloured by the experiences of growing up Jewish in neutral Switzerland during the Holocaust, was dark and disenchanted compared to Steichen’s. What followed were the more than 20,000 exposures that became the astringently edited 83 photographs of The Americans.
In the deliberate randomness of its journeys across America, its begun but then subverted thematic sets of images, its interplay of still and filmic visual narratives, The Americans simultaneously deployed and subverted the dramatic strategies of decisive moment photojournalism and what had become its comfortably extended form, the photo-essay. Frank’s undercover camera was also a weapon against the American heartland’s political and cultural conservatism, hidden as this was by the Harper’s Bazaar or even Life Magazine appetite for celebrities and newsworthy events. The central image of The Americans may well be the tuba-player at a political rally in Chicago, his face replaced by the blow-hard bell of his instrument.
Nor did Frank want the gravitas of a Walker Evans stationed behind a tripod and commanding professional respect. Often set at a five- to six-foot focal range and concealed in his overcoat, Frank’s Leica did not even perform like the optical prosthetic that was Cartier-Bresson’s viewfinder. It was, rather, a covert instrument of cultural espionage, operating tangentially to an immediate eye-brain link, and no doubt subverting his own intentions from time to time. What he finally edited out of the succinct selection of the published works in The Americans may well have included much that was intended, whereas what was retained may often have been the product of chance occasioned by subterfuge – of the dérive not the schedule.
The knowledge of all this is evident in A Man Walks out of a Bar. One of the effects of such literate artistic knowledge is, of course, to route an informed metropolitan conversation about some of the key, and often contending, strategies of pre-digital twentieth century photography through provincial, small-town narratives. Robert Frank did something very similar in 1950s America – and, like Rizos twenty years later in New Zealand, without either patronising the objects of his photographs or risking the hubris of sentimental heartlandism.
It is worth remembering that Rizos, though a photographer first and foremost, is also a symphony orchestra violinist who tours regularly and performs to audiences the length and breadth of the country, in small towns and rural communities as well as in the regional cities. The photographic expeditions that accumulated in the portfolio A Man Walks out of a Bar were therefore occasionally complemented along the criss-crossing and democratising grids of the symphony orchestra’s independent programme and schedule, which effectively may have contributed to randomising the sequences and innate coherence of any supposed journey specifically centred on taking photographs. One might even imagine the traces of a soundtrack under some sequences – I do – though the fragments of radio play-lists muffled by motel walls or crackling in and out of range on the car radio are perhaps more likely. In any case, we may suppose that Rizos took photographs because he was moved by the fleeting glimpses of human relationship, domicile, and material culture that passed the car or the tour bus window or were visible from the window of a small town hotel; because what he objectively saw with the camera subjectively indexed memories of his own life, including its sound-tracks, so to speak – or because he found himself randomly looking at such a view as that from the hotel, and being reminded of another photographic image, so that a kind of doubling took place, something like a visual chord.
Thus, the image View from hotel balcony, Hawera recalls the Frank image View from Motel Window, Butte, Montana, 1956, not just because it is a view of any small town from a hotel window, but because the image has a kind of cross-grained iconic redolence. In the case of Frank’s photograph, the grim coal-mining townscape with its Bill Brandt-ish lighting and desolate streets answers back to a 1950s post-war America emerging from a memory of labour as depression into an era of labour as prosperity; other icons rubbed the wrong way by Frank included the cowboy, the greasy-spoon diner, the film star, the open road, the automobile, teen romance ... and many more.
In Rizos’s hotel balcony photograph of Hawera, desultory traffic cruises a main street empty of people but presided over by the signage of The Farmer’s Co-op. The storefront’s dark windows hardly open on to optimistic pastoral vistas, and the cars cruising the street seem to be doing the work of keeping people from each other while going nowhere. The iconic clichés of small-town community and farming prosperity are nowhere to be seen – but we sense them as absences or unfulfilled desires, as negative icons.
Elsewhere in the portfolio, such iconic desires appear more gently and even wistfully, as transitions, improvisations, or shifts in tone rather than as counter-arguments or absences. Effects involving the repositioning of points-of-view (or timbre), speed (or tempo), and narrative (or melody) begin to appear. They seem to be audible as well as visible. A Display window in Waverly exhibits photographs of three generations of mothers holding their baby daughters. This at-one-remove image of historical mother-daughter photographs is followed by a street scene in Stradford in which what might be a grandmother and mother are walking with small children in pushchairs. Then, a grim-faced man alone in Dunedin, who seems to be looking across the page in the direction of the next photograph in which someone who resembles him is walking out of the page with a woman; they seem to be ignoring each other and are facing the point-of-view of the photographer. Next, in Foxton, a young man and woman are talking intensely across the axis of that point-of-view. In Napier, a middle-aged man and a woman are ignoring each other in the back and front seats of a car; both are facing forward across the camera’s axis, although the man seems to have just noticed the photographer and has begun to swivel in that direction. At Sumner Beach, Christchurch, a young man and woman are cuddling happily on some concrete steps, oblivious to the photographer; at the Agricultural & Pastoral showgrounds, Gisborne, a man who resembles the one in the previous photograph is lying on the grass next to a woman, with a small boy clinging to his back; a roll of barrier mesh seems to have been rolled back to accommodate this intimate view of them. In Christchurch a woman walks with three children towards the photographer. In a Front yard, Christchurch, a man is playing with two small girls who have their backs to the photographer. Four people are squashed into a car in Sunday afternoon, Kapiti Coast. A single man strides out through a garden gate in Dunedin. Another man stands by himself outside a house in Huntly, looking to his left across the axis of the viewpoint and in the direction the photographer is travelling away from him.
At one level, these images are experienced as desultory variations on iconic themes of relationship – as a kind of hesitant, interrupted narrative shifted through cross-grained perspectives and points of view along or across the axis of the camera’s viewfinder. In this, they are textual or even dialogic – they seduce us into ‘making up stories’, as indeed I was seduced when I began with the image of the man walking out of a bar in Eketahuna.
But at another level, these variations and improvisations have (dare I say) a musical structure. It would be foolish to assume that, just because the photographer Rizos is also a musician, his approaches to photography will involve ‘musical structure’. Yet the best analogy I can find for a sequence like the one described above is of a riff or chord sequence, in which a core chromatic set is sustained through a sequence of tonal shifts. This impression is enhanced by the sense of time and movement in the photographs – not just within those whose objects are sighted from the speeding window of a car or bus, where a foreground blur or a perspectival tilt of perspective tell us we are moving; but in the page-by-page sense of time passing and distances traversed.
And in either case, whether the camera is speeding past its object, or whether time and distance are being traversed page by page, we as viewers remain in the one place. We are motionlessly attending to a performance predicated absolutely on objects passing in sequences, on time both passing and retarded as the pages of this score are turned; and predicated also on recognitions, on the knowledge and familiarity that allows us to understand variations on themes and conventions because we remember something like the melody. We can almost sing along to this travelling visual radio as it picks up the regional stations on its journey.
In this respect, the composition of photographs is not textual at all, or less so. Rather than being seduced into story-telling, into the kind if diurnal or everyday time into which stories fit easily, we are taken up with abstract narrative structures whose meanings are thematic not factual, general not specific, tonal not material. They are dialogic not in the sense of speaking to us and each other, but in the sense of wordlessly addressing known and remembered forms. The time of such abstractions is not the everyday time of stories, but the longue durée of historical themes sweeping past and leaving behind the detailed instances of human life hesitating in these photographs – hesitations and inconclusions that are momentarily glimpsed only as they fade into abstraction.
This is the achievement of A Man Walks out of a Bar: to orchestrate and momentarily hold on to the vulnerable fragments of human life lived across small increments of finite time and almost cohering into stories we can understand – to arrange these familiar desires within a larger, abstract time and space which, though we have heard something like it before, seems to be beyond us and to be always going beyond us.
