Enough Rope?

When I first started photography I’d go to an evening class and for one of the first briefs we were required to: Make a portrait of a stranger in uniform. I visited a prison (but I wasn’t a prison visitor; I went to a prison, not, to prison) and said asked if I could use a prison warder to help me re-enact a hanging-vision I kept having: ‘could I borrow a prison warder to help me bring back hanging?’

We found the spot, in a spinney quite close to the parameter wall. There was still an old rope swing hanging from the tree. I took some of the pictures on an old 5x4 plate camera. ‘You look like the hanging judge', the prison warder said, as I pulled the dark cloth over my head.

When I was young we lived near an Open Prison. You could see it across the fields, where I played. Strange to think now, that I dreamed of meeting an escaped prisoner – a bank robber or member of the Baader-Meinhof gang (but in the unlikely event, it would have been a petty-fraudster – a corrupt businessman or some bent solicitor). Nearby there were some specially built houses - a redbrick terrace -, where the prison-waders lived. 

Occasionally, whilst playing in the woods, I’d encounter a prison warder walking home after a shift, or for lunch. There was one I’d see regularly, hanging from a tree. He told me it was for his sciatica. ‘It’s not only the prisoners who do a long-stretch, it’s not only them inside who have to be straightened-out’, he’d quip. It was such a funny thing, to see this prison-warder, in his uniform – keys and all - hanging from a tree (beside a rope-swing). From a distance - and if I hadn’t have known he was doing it for his health - it looked like he’d hung himself.

And it must be made clear: I am not and never have been, in favour of ‘bringing back hanging’. Except, that is, for myself.  

Lassoing, Laundering, Smoking

Contact sheets are interesting. Consider the relationship between The Marlboro Man, lassoing, and a washing machine, spewing, in this, an unconsciously made diptych (of two shop-window advertisements). It is almost as if the image of the Marlboro Man - lassoing - were carried over into the washing machine, spewing laundered money. There’s a definite formal relationship – compositional similarities - between the two: follow the flow of the towel and the lasso; the direction of the horse’s head and the towel; the faceless washing machine and the faceless cowboy. Yet neither image can be taken at face value.

The washing machine is the natural mother of the lasso. She gives birth to the idea with all her spin cycles. The umbilical cord is the baby. If I owned a lasso I’d store it in a washing machine – the natural womb for the coiled worm. Why not? In Westerns, you see lassos – carried, coiled-up – on horses. And it’s a good feeling, riding a washing machine (or spin dryer). 
It’s my birthday and I say to the guests: do you want to witness the birth of a lasso – cut the umbilical cord before we cut the cake? They say, yes, so we all gather in the utility room, where I mount the washing machine and ride the beast until the cycle finishes. Then I open the door of the Zanussi and pull out a little lasso- baby. But hold on. Coils prevent babies (and the pent lasso is non other than a coil). How would I, if quizzed, get out of that tangle?

In the movies, homebirths always brought the cry (and I don't know why?) for, ‘towels and hot water’. I’m thinking the Great Bob Mitchum – he starred in some unmemorable Westerns. I loved and hated him in ‘The Night Of The Hunter’, but I once saw him play a Country doctor - in 1950’s matinee - one afternoon when I was waiting for Countdown. He's delivering a baby, with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. As the mother-to-be pushes, he pulls. On his cigarette and the baby, at the same time. But there was worse to come. Just after he’d pulled the baby out, he pulled the half-smoked cigarette out of his mouth and hands it to the new mum. The camera cuts to her puffing away – finishing Mitchum’s fag -, to the sound of her baby crying. Cut to new mum handing the cigarette back to Doctor Mitchum - who’s cradling the baby (all clean and white and not at all like the red-cabbage-reality of a newborn) – as the camera pans, amid clouds of smoke: the first recorded birth of a ‘passive smoker’? The term hadn’t even been invented. I wonder if the baby’s still alive? Must be 60 by now – if it made it that far. Be great if he grew up to be the Marlboro Man. Must Google. No, much better, grew up to be the Milky Bar Kid: he was whiter-than-white (laundered?), he was a Cowboy in embryo; he too, had a lasso. 

Unicorn

An Unlikely Tail

Continuing the Cowboy-and-Indian theme. Last Saturday morning, I’m with a married woman (she'd swept me off my feet), we are having an affair; so we go to a Funfair, in the hope that nobody will recognise us there. We are in a fish and chip café; I’m reading the Guardian (Not very romantic, I know) – an article on Muybridge and his classic study, ‘The horse in Motion’ (where, in 1872, he provided photographic proof that horses, when galloping, did have all four feet off the ground at the same time.

So you can imagine my surprise when, over the top of the paper, I see a horse galloping past the window. It too had all four feet off the ground, but it’s no ordinary horse. It’s sporting a feather headdress and is being ridden by two feathered creatures: birds in the saddle, both facing the wrong way. I can live with that it is after all a fairground. 

But look at the tail. The tail, it’s all-wrong. Despite the speed it’s going, the horse’s tail’s hanging flaccid. I consult my Guardian - look at Muybridge’s horses in motion - all of his galloping-tails are horizontal. I go up to the counter and ask to see the horse’s owner: ‘I want to see a man about a horse’. The man who ran the horse (the trainer?) refused to be photographed (on or off the horse). Perhaps he was already riding a bit too close to the wind; perhaps he too was having an affair? But he let me acquaint him with Muybridge’s ‘Horse In Motion’ photographs. ‘Look at the tail’, I said. ‘Why isn’t your tail sticking out like that?’ He said it must be something to do with ‘Health and Safety’, something about ‘having a child’s eye out, or worse – impaling the public. Or that it might just stick out as too phallic. So I said, ‘here, you can keep the newspaper, it might make you change your tail; if all else fails you can use it to wrap your fish and chips’. ‘Impossible’, he replied. ‘Where have you been? We are no longer allowed to wrap fish and chips in newspaper haven’t done so for years: Health and Safety’.

It started with a Red Indian but the Red Queen has to have the last word. Lewis Carroll (a pioneering photographer in his own right) wrote ‘Alice Through The Looking Glass’ in 1871 - at exactly the same time Muybridge made his famous ‘Horse in Motion’ studies. So if The Red Queen was addressing this Red Indian horse (instead of Alice), she might have said: ‘The world goes at a very strange pace, it takes all the chasing you can do to keep your tail in the wrong place’. 

Good Pictures Are A Joke

The thing about a ‘found’ photograph (or in this case, a ‘found’ strip of negatives) is, you can only guess at the intended meaning. And most of us, once in a while, would like to get away from the challenge and excitement of contemporary issues and seek our pictures in a more romantic world. But this picture’s a joke.

In Cowboy-and-Indian films, Indians listen to the ground to tell how far away the cowboys (on horseback) are: so far so good. But this Indian – a squaw - appears to be deaf, and the cowboys must have been nearer than she thought. They’ve ridden right over her; hence the plasters on her face. The plasters have a practical importance as well as a pictorial significance (she wouldn’t be an Indian without them), suggesting that it’s a good picture (whatever that means?). But I find so-called good pictures a joke. Disappointing pictures, they're what to aim for. They are the pictures to make. 

A Word About Coffee-Filter-Bags

The line that separates good taste from bad seems sometimes no wider than a hair, but it is important to be able to recognise where it lies (or if it harbours pubic lice). The representation of the nude is strangely hedged about with inhibitions, prohibitions, taboos, and a general state of pubic bashfulness, and nothing but good taste (in coffee) can guide you.

Consider the matter of pubic hair. Concealment may often be effected by the use of a coffee-filter-bag. But avoid any form of concealment – drapery - that fails to conceal itself, for this is worse of all.

The Post Office generally takes a dim view of pubic hair and its representation in windowed envelopes as ipso facto evidence of obscene intent. 

A word about Coffee-Filter-Bags

Don’t try to make sense of coffee-filter-bags, or reduce them to rational terms. Least of all garments can they be justified on utilitarian (coffee) grounds: obviously, they are not devised to filter vision (dirty visions?), like a fig leaf. The pubic triangle and the coffee-filter-bag are not only related by their tobleronearity, both filter dirt entering the body. To the feminine taste, their decorative qualities are frequently elusive. But to the male they speak in an obscure code of emotional values, representing a sort of passionate catharsis, tragic sometimes, more often gay, exuberant or defiant, entirely personal always. However, mere man should not attempt to say whether a certain lady wears a certain coffee-filter-bag at a certain time because she is happy or because she is unhappy – exuberance, filtered or unfiltered.

A coffee-filter-bag on a coathanger resembles an umbrella. An unused – virgin - coffee-filter-bag could also be worn as a hat. The French composer, Poulenc (I adore his music), always wore a hat, and by looking at it you could tell at a glace if he were depressed, and wished to be left alone. It was easy. If he was ‘down’ he wore his hat with the rim turned down. Alternatively, an upturned rim said, say hello, I’m happy today. And Freud makes some interesting suggestions about hats, providing them with a background of unconscious sexual symbolism. Since this blog is designed for the family circle, we shall not further elaborate. 

Umbrella Treatment

I remember being horrified at school, on being taught that syphilis had to be scraped away – from the inside of the penis – by a device known as the ‘umbrella’. This, we were told, had been the standard treatment, between the Wars. And they left our imagination to a visual image.

But in ‘Art-and-Craft’ class my imagination found a concrete form. This is a collage of what I imagined the ‘umbrella’ treatment for syphilis would have looked like. I was 15 when I created it, and it’s a mixed media work: Bitchumen; Perspex; toothpaste; coffee; coffee-filter-bag; coat-hanger; Kleenex (used); umbrella cover (with umbrella pattern). I never went on to do ‘O Level Art’.

Vintage photograph (only recently discovered) © Chris Lucas (my father).