HIRO (Japan, 1930),
DAVID HOCKNEY (U.K., 1937)
Demultiplications
Colour photography, because of the scarcity of its hues, its floating
values, the transparency of every blur, thus invites to the demultiplications
of a photograph inside itself, either by contrasted internal echoes or by
contrasted internal overlaps. The first case applies to Hiro, the second to
Hockney.
1. Internal contrasted echoes: Hiro
Being Japanese (for whom perception consists in emotional (re)attacks
that are both incessant and intense), Hiro has a taste for the refreshing
activating interval, the ma. However, as colour photography is diffusive, it could not trigger pure voids as those encountered in Ueda and Suda’s black and white. However, it has
another resource: repeating a same form in Russian dolls, with diverse values
and saturations of a same hue or of several. The system is ancient in Japan,
where it was used by Japanese erotic painters to render the vision orgasmic, in
particular for the female sexual organs. The Japanese erotic cinema used the
same technique for sequences edited image per image.
The stormy echo hence produced – Hiro’s photographic subject
– is not alienating, blowing, mediatizating. It is at the opposite of the
western Echo, the Narcissus’ lover, who was a paroxysm of Greek mediation.
Rather, it takes away any comfort of unity and totalization from perception,
makes it felt as a (re)departure of the same-other. Under the condition,
assuredly, that the colour be acid, should not give into weight, and provokes
something of this deep surface or surface depth which Tanizaki defines as the
base of Japanese topology in the Eloge de l’Ombre.
In the issue 13 of ‘Zoom’ (ZH) which includes the most important
collection of Hiro photographs, we could have illustrated his subject using a
sky, whose pleats multiply the cut-out of a mountain (ZH, 80) or through the
echoes that surround the head of Berkley Johnson on the cover. Rather than
using these too direct examples, we preferred the difficult yet fecund case
where he accomplished himself through the echo of only two
violently-contrasting liminances on a face (*ZH, 57), hence conjoining
paradoxically the cut-out and chiaroscuro, the latter being de-mediatised by
that one to the benefit of a deep and surfacing shadow according to the
Tanizakian program.
In any event, the reality-image of the fifties, in the work of Penn, has
found a matter that is consubstantial in the work of Hiro: the
matter-light-form-image-colour of the plastics, which are simultaneously
transparent and coloured (ZH, 51, 53, 77). The entire ‘Zoom’ collection deploys
this new ‘median reality’ – which is simultaneously matter and form,
nature and artifice – that, under the auspices of the jewel, joins the
flesh (ZH, 51, 53), the technical transport object (ZH, 76), the communication
relay (ZH, 80), the architecture setting the bodies (ZH, 58), right up to the
couples of bodies setting each other mutually (ZH, 60, 61, 65). The lying ‘S’
in acid red-coloured plastic in front of the mountain that itself is covered in
an artificial-natural light (ZH, 77) is probably the archetypal Hiro image.
Hiro is the last fashion photographer that we will meet in this book. It
is therefore time to salute the decisive role that fashion in general –
with advertising – has played in the history of photography for a good
half-century. We underlined this for Irving Penn, but should have equally
insisted for Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, William Klein, and Helmut Newton.
Fashion is often deeper, more audacious and prophetic than the reportage and
abstraction. Systematically jumping above trivial psychology and sociology, it
commits ontology and cosmology through the image of the body and the
environment, the acquaintances of the Sign and of a certain death, the
dimensions of space, the reversibility or the irreversibility of time. The
issue of AD/ART, published by designer Cheyco Leidmann at Love Me Tender publishing in 1983 gives a scope of these stakes.
2. Contrasted decalage: Hockney
In 1982, in David Hockney Photographer (DH), Hockney explained why he used contiguous
photographs. Photography, made by a Cyclops object, could not supply the
binocular show that painting offers. Even if the latter is not tri-dimensional,
it results from the hand and the brain of a painter who usually works with both
eyes. However, by overlapping photographs, we can hope – says Hockney
– that we will find something of the effects of binocular parallax. He
started using this process by overlapping five photograph of his friend Peter
Schlessinger as soon as 1972 (DH, cover), reached the peak of this technique in his 1985 Stephen Spender (**PN, 278), and its diversity in 1986 Pearblossom Highway (FS, 387). Contiguous photographs call upon colour, which alone is sufficiently shining to link their disparities.
If there, painting makes a suggestion to colour photography, we must see
what the latter suggested in return for Hockney’s painting. His homosexual
vision (very different to Francis Bacon’s whose ‘beautiful colours’ roam around
the wound and the forbidden penetration) calls upon a show that is convex and
sparkles from everywhere, without concealment, even in the shadows. However,
only colour photography – through the combination of frank Cyclopean and
coloured massiveness – could supply him this, under the condition that
the theme was angular from the start. This is the demonstration of the
photographs of the Nid-du-Duc swimming pool, dated 1972 (DH, 32), at the root of the famous Paper Pools, dated 1978.
A medium that is flat, stretched, and strict as ordinary photographs
serves well Hockney’s intentions. In his work, the frescoes of colour Polaroid
– such as the Portrait of David Graves in 1982 (DH, 95, 96) seem to have lasted a
long time. As shown in the work of Stefan De Jaeger (PHPH, 62), the colour
Polaroid – small or large – is more the instrument of the
continuous and the milky, almost Rubean depths.
Henri Van Lier
A photographic history of photography
in Les Cahiers de la Photographie, 1992
List of abbreviations of common references:
PN: Photography until Now, Museum of Modem Art.
The acronyms (*), (**), (***) refer to
the first, second, and third illustration of the chapters, respectively. Thus,
the reference (*** AP, 417) must be interpreted as: “This refers to the third
illustration of the chapter, and you will find a better reproduction, or a
different one, with the necessary technical specifications, in The Art of
Photography listed under
number 417”.