Speaking Portraits

When I was in Berlin last April, Abi and John took me to the opening of an Australian artist, Nathalie Latham, whose works I had seen the week before in Toronto at 401 Richmond: a series of photographs in a series of vitrines, depicting Asian metro riders asleep on the train. The works made me stop and look, which does not often happen for me with photography. I did not put those pieces and Nathalie together until I met her in Berlin a week later and told her I was from Toronto, at which point she told me about her show at 401, which, thankfully I had seen and commended her on.

The show in Berlin included a series of photographs as prints and light boxes, and a series of videos and audios, and some booklets. But the piece that grabbed me by the gut and yanked me in was a video showing young Chinese men and women with their faces plunged underwater (we see them as if looking up at them, ourselves under water as well), their eyes squeezed shut, bubbles pouring out of their opening and closing mouths. No audio. Just silence. What were they saying? Were they singing? Were they praying? I noticed a little hand-made booklet hanging from some string on the wall just to my left, so I picked it up and read. The text revealed the deeply-secret thoughts of each “talker”, wishes they could not bring themselves to say out loud, so they said them into the water.

At the show, I asked Nathalie if there was some way I could get a hold of the booklet because the content was so unbelievably heartbreaking. I wrote some of the text down, but I don’t have that journal with me now. I just remember one of the talkers saying something about his life being in ruins but for reasons that seemed so reversible to me, yet not to him. Another talker worried about doing well at school for the sake of her parents. This may not be the kind of profound wish we hold in the west, but it likely has deep resonances for a young Chinese student whose status in her family is tied to her educational successes.

After reading the booklet, I turned around and suddenly the line of large photograph portraits hanging on the wall behind me, inscrutable moments before, now made sense. Each image offered a face obscured by wet paper flattened against the face, on the paper itself some Chinese characters, the written version of each person’s water-spoken secret, now functioning almost like captions for the faces we cannot see. What struck me about these images was how facial expression, which is how we read people, had been replaced by text/graphics, a different way to read each person.

In Abi and John’s flat, these photographs read in a different way. They could be portraits of political activists, their manifestos obscuring their wanted faces. Or, these could be portraits of dead people, their death wishes plastered to their heads as part of a burial ritual. Or, these could be images of lovelorn suicidal cases, their love letters now exposed for all to see.

It’s hard for me to see these photographs with fresh eyes because I saw them first in the context of the video in Nathalie’s show. Still, I’m drawn to these faces that reveal and conceal so much simultaneously. It’s like standing in front of a shut door that hides a room full of everyone's secrets, but you already know them all because you have the same ones. For all that I am denied specific access to each person's specific face, and his or her specific thought, I still relate to the idea that there is person under the paper. I still want to know who is behind the paper and what the paper says. I also think about pattern recognition, how we are programmed to see a face and relate to it even if we have minimal information. Scale and orientation of the paper (portrait vs. landscape), the visibility of the shoulders and chest (suggesting there is a head on top of them) and the trace of hand “writing” all tell me there was/is a human there, enabling me to project not only a person, but what that person might be feeling, thinking, desiring. No amount of language or visual barrier can divide me from them. They feel intimate, knowable, vulnerable and present.

. . . While I am sitting here writing this review, facing a large mirror that reflects the photographs back to me, I realize these photographs are also doppelgangers: stand ins for Abi and John. They are here, living in the living room, while Abi and John are back in Canada.

When I am in this room with these photographs, I have this sense that I am not alone. I also have this sense that I understand something about Abi and John, but not in a way I can articulate in words. Chinese characters provide the perfect metaphor for what I want to express, actually: as inscrutable as they might be on one level, they are like tree carvings that say, “I was here”, or even, “I loved this person”. I love that Abi and John felt compelled to have these photographs. I remember how excited they were at the show by these particular works.

In the same way this re-view offers a portrait of the portraits (as filtered through me), and a portrait of Abi and John (as filtered through me), and a portrait of me (as filtered through my take on the photographs and Abi and John) , and, of course, a portrait of Nathalie Latham (as filtered through all of the above), each of these portraits only tells a small part of our stories, which are always in flux depending on context. But these microscopic and fleeting moments in which we hear our own tiny voices, the way Horton hears a who, are the very moments in which we discover ourselves inside a flower or photograph we love, and in relating to those things, we also express to those near and dear, those who are paying attention, who we are . . . in that moment.


If you scroll down -- http://nathalielatham.blogspot.com/2008_05_01_archive.html -- you'll see the work of which I speak. On the 24th image, I'm the gal in pink with rolled up jeans, heading out the door.