itourist?

Excerpt 3: © Aoife Mac Namara, ‘An Interview with Paul Antick: Opportunism, Ideology and Photography’ in Aoife Mac Namara, Bungalow Blitz (Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, 2006)

How do you work with the people you photograph?

When I photograph people I rarely give them explicit instructions as to how they should behave in front of the camera, beyond where to stand. I try to leave the pose or, more specifically, the facial expressions they assume down to them. Of course, there are exceptions, the Gillespie family. on the lawn for instance. But as I say, generally speaking I’m not overly prescriptive. That said, I probably would have advised against particular facial expressions that, for some reason, I considered unsuitable. Although I cant think of many instances when I’ve actually done so…

Actually the poses that most people assume probably have as much to say about their relationship to photography and the media generally, as they do about anything else. For example, the extent to which their understanding of me as a professional informs the ways in which they present themselves to the camera.

madjanek, dir.17, 2004 © paul antick

I’m confident that if I’d approached the people in Donegal – or Poland, and Germany, where I was working recently – with a snap shot camera then their responses would have been quite different. People would have presented themselves to me quite differently, if they’d agreed to present themselves to me at all, which is doubtful. The young woman posing outside the women’s camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau is a particularly good example of this. The ironic thing about this image – ul. faszymu, birkenau, dir. 11, 2004 – or, at least, my encounter with the woman in it, is the fact that after having explained that she’d decided to revisit Auschwitz, following a school trip to the camp, because she wanted to consider its meaning or significance in a more contemplative fashion – without being distracted by her school pals – she then effortlessly slipped into the kind of pose one would probably associate with a fairly seasoned young model in some frivolously hip British style magazine. Dazed and Confused for instance. Whether or not she was aware of the contradictions I’m not quite sure, but the more I think about it the more extraordinary, the more fabulously obscene, or obscenely fabulous, the whole situation seems.

For me, photography can be extremely manipulative. The type of photography I’m interested in. I must admit that I do derive a certain amount – probably a lot – of pleasure from this, photography’s sadistic aspect. Having said that, it’s likely that my own pleasure is actually tinged with a powerful sado-masochistic impulse as well. After all, although I feel compelled to massage, reconstruct and generally meddle with people’s images; basically using them in order to satisfy my own ends, I’m also acutely aware that in entering into this kind of relationship I am bound to take some responsibility when things go wrong. In the event that the people I photograph become upset with the images I produce for example. The extent to which both they and myself are able to withstand (or not) these kinds of assaults, this testing of boundaries, is probably important to me at some level. I don’t know. Perhaps I’m hoping that they will be upset.

auschwitz-birkenau, dir. 12, 2004 © paul antick

From a rather less personal point of view, however, I do think that the expectations that many liberal photography critics and theorists have of people (the people in the photographs), that they’re poor passive dopes who are not remotely media literate and therefore need to be protected from the likes of photographers like me is problematic.

Clearly a lot of people don’t know what they’re letting themselves in for when they agree to be photographed, but many do, or at least should think rather more carefully about the consequences of their actions. Take for example the young Slovenians larking about on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau where SS doctors would decide which Jews should be worked to death and which ones immediately gassed. An obvious criticism of this photograph is that, as a photographer, I was exploiting the people in the pictures in order to make a photograph that in some way uses the codes of style photography to address the relationship between commodification, memory and the Holocaust. Of course, this is true. But I have to say that if these young people were prepared to present themselves in such a way, in a place as symbolically loaded as the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and if they happen to be less than happy with the results, well so be it. I would, however, have far more sympathy with anyone who made the connection between my interest in the Holocaust and the fact that, despite any ‘positive’ outcomes such an interest might produce, it inevitably becomes a part of the highly instrumentalised – and far from disinterested – production of academic and artistic knowledge.