Fascinating and heart-rending images of people on the margins
Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins
Barbican Art Gallery
‘You can’t live in a household that is too well kept,” Henri Matisse once said. “You have to head for the jungle to find simpler ways that won’t stifle the spirit.”
At the time, the French artist was explaining his decision to travel to the jungles of Tahiti in 1930. But he was also speaking metaphorically: after all, too much strait-laced propriety risks sapping the soul. Another Kind of Life, a brilliant new exhibition of photography at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, focuses on people who dwell permanently in the “jungle” evoked by Matisse – ie, far away from “normal” society, with its insidious pressure to conform.
The show’s structure is simple: 20 international photographers, who have all produced bodies of work since the Fifties documenting those “on the margins of society”, are each given a single room. Their subjects are denizens of the counterculture: risk-takers and mavericks, wastrels and misfits, outlaws and sex workers, circus performers, bikers, hermits, and survivalists.
Much of the imagery on display is masterful and compelling. But it is the stories behind the pictures – the fascinating, often heart-rending tales of human struggle, sacrifice and heroism – that prove to be transcendent and, at points, moving us to tears.
First up is Diane Arbus, represented by just six photographs, including shots of a sword-swallower and a mixed-race couple. Arbus will be familiar. Many of the photographers who follow will not. Igor Palmin’s dreamy photographs of hippies in southern Russia, for example, have never been shown in Britain before. There is a lot of melancholy and alienation – Bruce Davidson’s series The Dwarf (1958), featuring a circus artiste, is emblematic of this tendency. Likewise, Dayanita Singh’s spellbinding depiction of Mona Ahmed, a eunuch from New Delhi who was castrated as a boy.
But there is also a great deal of devil-may-care exuberance, teenage sexual chemistry, and raucous merriment: witness Danny Lyon’s images of adrenalin-junkies riding Harley-davidsons (his photobook
The Bikeriders inspired Dennis Hopper’s 1969 film Easy Rider), and Chris Steele-perkins’s puckish photographs of British Teddy boys, with extravagant Brylcreemed hair, living it up in Bradford nightclubs and London pubs.
Aside from Arbus, Davidson and Daido Moriyama, whose grainy, deliberately out-of-focus photographs of the mid-sixties evoke Tokyo’s working-class street culture and swirling nocturnal underworld, a couple of series stand out. In 1971, Larry Clark published Tulsa, a controversial book of photos featuring young addicts and deadbeats in his hometown in Oklahoma. Whereas other work in the show, such as Lyon’s, now feels historical, Clark’s harrowing images of people shooting up and staring emptily into oblivion remain thoroughly present-tense.
In one picture a man sucks on a cigarette, his face hidden in shadow, while a baby lying across his midriff stares straight at the viewer with bright eyes – still pure and uncorrupted. Here, then, is a portrait of life on the margins that is simultaneously in our own backyard: a broadside against the American dream.
Even more unsettling is Boris Mikhailov’s fictional colour series
The Wedding (2005-06). To make it, the Ukrainian photographer paid two so-called “bomzhes”, or homeless people, with battered faces and dirty clothes, to perform the roles of a couple getting hitched, in the bleakest, most dismal of nuptials.
As the series progresses, the “newlyweds” strip, get drunk, and lark about. The whole thing has the demented, unhinged quality of a very black and ancient folktale, disturbing not least because the morality of two real-life victims play-acting for Mikhailov’s camera is so ambiguous.
It also reminds us of the inherent voyeurism of photography – after all, where do we viewers stand in relation to all this material, much of which, if we’re honest, offers a vicarious, even prurient thrill? At what point does documentary become exploitation?
After considering the hopeless circumstances of many of the subjects in the show, I returned home to my humdrum conformist’s life, to enjoy a hot supper. The “jungle” evoked by Matisse is an exciting place to spend an afternoon, but I wouldn’t want to pass a lifetime there.
Of course, as this memorable exhibition reveals, not everybody has the luxury of such choice.