Charles Johnstone, Au Revoir Anna, 2023
The history of the television on art and photography/photobooks is compelling. My interest stems from having grown up with the television as the primary utility of my creative life. When I say television, I am not thinking of regular programming, but instead of the vast array of films I could watch on different channels like HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime growing up during the 80s and ’90s. There is also a core of my rebelliousness from thinking of the box as something to be distrusted, with many artists from Nam June Paik, Bruce Connor, and Chris Burden using the format to challenge the properties of public-facing usage subversively. These artists, amongst others, showed that television could be mined not for what it presented but instead for what it did not present and/or what was under the surface of its appearances.
Charles Johnstone, Au Revoir Anna, 2023
Of course, Marshall McLuhan’s foundational discourse about media theory was a meaningful discussion about how we perceive and challenge the dynamics of television and other forms of public media and how to disseminate from their message the propaganda at their heart. In terms of photography itself, it would be remiss of me not to mention Lee Friedlander’s work using the television as his The Little Screens continues to fascinate. Friedlander’s photographs of television sets in hotel rooms even garnered the attention of Walker Evans, who, 1963 while writing on them for Harpers Bazaar, called them “deft, witty, spanking little poems of hate.” They instilled, and still do, a feeling of absurdism in the messaging of the televised broadcast. In many respects, these images pull apart the ideal direct messaging and ask if what is viewed is communicative in cut-ups and truncated images. Doubt permeates the condition of Friedlander’s snaps, and doubt is un-American, or so you would be led to believe.
Tim Gidal, Television Portrait, 1930
The early years of photographing television led to haunted, if memorable, results. German photographer Tim Gidal’s Television Portrait from 1930 is incredibly haunting. Similarly, from just a few years previously, in 1926, John Logie Baird’s abstract rendering of human faces was frankly phantasmagoric, with the result disturbed, grainy, and out of focus. The result is eerie and speaks highly about what was yet to come in how we decipher and eliminate technology’s haunting ability to capture a type of dystopian anti-human reading. This would, arguably, lead to suggestions of machine and men merging, creating a visual syntax for how we might understand the unreconcilable image of the future with all of the possibilities it entails for capture, but also the premise of promise caught up in the visceral backlash of operations.
John Logie Baird, 1926
In more recent years, the Japanese have used television as a means to produce a photobook. Several high-profile and legendary books such as Mutsuko Yoshida TV Junkie 83′ and Television 75-76 by Mochizuki Masao have made brilliant declarations about obsessional Television watching into a photobook art form. There are more. Television in Japan, or the assessment of it, has given the culture following the post-war American occupation years something profound to dismantle and dive into, selecting, with precision, iconoclastic and counter-Western tendencies, something to assess and glare at. One might suggest, tentatively, that this assessment of the Westernization of Japan and its acute observation could be situated between fascination and resistance.
Mochizuki Masao, Television 75-76
Television is also a place where many people find attachment to cultural shifts, political events, and memorable moments. One can remember certain historical events (non-digital natives) through how they were screened on television. Before my generation, The Kennedy Assassination, through the lens of Abraham Zapruder’s film stock, would be a memorable first, followed by the moon landings, Mai Lai, RFK, MLK, The Munich Olympics, and other events. I remember clearly the explosion of the Challenger spaceship. The television was wheeled into our school on the oversized metal shelf, and we were allowed to watch the shuttle ascend live before it imploded. I remember the TV being shut off quickly and Ms. O’Connor lacking the words to discuss it all. There was a run of events in school leading up to the event, so the implosion weighed heavily on the day. Following this, in recent memory, 9/11 was the most impactful event I witnessed through my youth. Again, the TV wheeled into an early anthropology class at the university to broadcast the events.
Charles Johnstone, Au Revoir Anna, 2023
Television stains the memory for better or worse, or instead, it does. When thinking about memory, I am reminded of how the function of television affects artists even after it has become a slightly irrelevant means of communication, with streaming taking over its position. With television, time is oriented by programming, a regularity of experience. In the contemporary moment, we often watch everything live or after, and the need to be in front of the box is no longer a necessary attribute of the format. Televisions, again for better or worse, are also installed in our pockets, and the cable person is now the Internet installer. With television, those old enough will have fleeting memories of what they saw in the box, and often, it informs how they think of their past and culture and how it may lead them to create. Speaking to Magnum photographer Mark Power in one of our conversations for Nearest Truth, he recounted how American Western television programs such as Bonanza and Casey Jones led him to his recent spate of 4 (out of 5) photobooks entitled Good Morning, America. However, the work does not reflect how Mark photographs America; it does inform his idea of geography.
Charles Johnstone, Au Revoir Anna, 2024
Charles Johnstone’s new book Au Revoir, Anna (S U N, 2024) recalls, through technically outdated mediums (Polaroid and Television), his memories of French film actress Anna Karina, the doyen and muse of French New Wave cinema. Following up on a succession of previous television studies of women, from Monica Vitti, Setsuko Hara, and Moira Shearer, the recent publication continues Johnstone’s infatuation with the Polaroid medium and the women he associates with his youth. Of course, one must assume that the tribute stems from memory and perhaps youthful urgings. Each woman featured in this book certainly shaped generations of attraction from men and women alike. What intrigues me about each volume is that a ritualistic form is beginning to be unveiled in their multitude. Had it been one or two volumes, one could have assumed a temporary flirting with an idea, and yet, here in volume four, one begins to examine each new offering as an exorcism of sorts, if not a shrine-building experience. One becomes curious if the memories the artist expunges in the exercise make him feel relieved afterward and if there is a type of unburdening.
Charles Johnstone, Au Revoir Anna, 2023
To say this volume is different from the former volumes would not be accurate. Whereas the images have changed with the actress, this volume reflects a continuation of Johnstone’s vision and perception of how he thinks through the book’s protagonist and the idea of two technical mediums as sponsors to his memory. In some ways, Anna Karina is a perfect end cap to the series. I am also eager to see more books but with a different motif at their heart. Given the artist’s interest in the polaroid and the screen, looking at historical moments through the same lens might give up. This body of work has significant potential once removed from the typological investigation, and I look forward to seeing how he might develop it further. In the meantime, as suggested in the preceding reviews, it is a fantastic look at cultural memory and obsession.
Charles Johnstone, Au Revoir Anna, 2023