S T E R E O S C O P Ethe heritage issue

the heritage issue

Tradition, preservation, genealogy, legacy: what does heritage mean to you? Posing this question to the photographically minded of St Andrews, we were inundated with visual responses. A student portfolio by Benoit Grogan-Avignon incorporates notions of nostalgia while Irina Earnshaw’s deals with heritage as something observable outside of one’s own history. Maya Tounta’s collection charts her personal development as a photographer and serves as a documentation of her own individual heritage.

We were pleasantly surprised by submissions of antique photographs, filched from frames and borrowed from books. To do justice to these magnificent family relics, we built a collection that exemplifies the simple elegance of the homemade photograph. The product is a wonderfully varied (and invented) family photographic album. While the family represented here does not really exist, albums like this one do. The photographs are simple family snapshots, and yet they are often beautiful and engaging works of art.

We were captivated by the work of three photographers from the University’s Special Collections. James B. Milne’s photographs from Thailand in the 1980’s explore the relationship between the tourist and the heritage of ‘the other’—a glimpse into Orientalism in photography. The portfolio we have compiled here examines heritage as a commodity to be consumed, observed and sometimes bought. In a collection of G. Allan Little’s portraits we are afforded a look at the history of St Andrews and the East Neuk of Fife. Little’s photojournalistic style raises questions of capturing one’s own heritage and the audience for whom it is intended. Lady Henrietta Gilmour, one of the earliest female Scottish photographers, spent her photographic career documenting her own life: capturing family, friends and daily routines. Her work is a visual portrayal of her own personal history and a beautiful illustration of the past from the modern viewer’s perspective.

In his article, ‘Ressurection and Photography,’ Nicholas Guy deals with the photographer as taxidermist working to preserve and to animate something that no longer is. Matilda Rossetti’s interviews with poet Robert Crawford and photographer Norman McBeath shed light on the interesting temporal juxtapositions of photography and poetry in their joint venture Body Bags/ Simonides. In ‘The Ventriloquist and the Dancing Doll’, Alex Derpanopoulos shows us that photography can not only preserve but also uncover a family’s history.

Heritage is what survives of the past: the preservation of tradition and the freezing of memory for posterity. Photography is often criticized for its tendency to restrict the flow of time. This issue hopes, instead, to celebrate the agelessness of the medium. A perfect moment caught forever on film is a beautiful gift. Even an imperfect or mundane moment frozen in time is a thing to be cherished; a photograph is only made more salient by the realness of a mar or the true beauty of the ordinary. This issue attempts to show just that; the exquisiteness of the everyday, the extraordinary in the ordinary, the beauty of something as simple as heritage. Please enjoy.

Jackie BachEditor, Stereoscope Magazine

Irina Earnshaw

Maya Tounta

Contents

left:G.A. Little, Pluscarden Abbey, A monk and a group of visiting nuns, ca. 1967, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, gal-449cover photo:Susanna Horsey

PortfoliosFamily Photos, 16The Ventriloquist and the Dancing Doll, 26 Benoît Grogan-Avignon, 34James B. Milne, 42Maya Tounta, 48Irina Earnshaw, 56G. Allan Little, 68 Lady Henrietta Gilmour, 76

Articles & InterviewsInterviews with Robert Crawford and Norman Macbeath, 10Ressurection and Photography, 64

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PUBLISHER & SUB EDITOR

Carson Woś

PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Jasmine Picôt-Chapman

EXHIBITION COORDINATOR

Bee Vellacott

PRESS

Neha Shastry

EDITOR

Jackie Bach

LAYOUT

Maya Tounta

SPONSORSHIP

Samantha Anderson

LITERARY EDITOR

Matilda Rossetti

EXHIBITION COORDINATOR

Ilinca Vanau

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LAYOUTAiden Bowman

PRESSRenata Grasso

LAYOUT

Maya Tounta

LITERARY EDITOR

Nina Moog

SPONSORSHIP

Nicolas Guy

DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Beach Outing, East Sands

FOUNDER

Hope Brimelow

10

interviews with robert crawford and norman macbeath

From all sides of the Byre’s upstairs exhibition space, distinctive Scots voices speak out about ancient battles, deaths and aspects of everyday life alongside some arresting photographs. This is Simonides: modern, dialectal translations of ancient Greek epitaphs by poet Robert Crawford paired with the black and white photographs of Norman MacBeath. These poems reflect the potency that the themes of loss, war and beauty have retained over a time period of more than two thousand years; coupled with MacBeath’s monotone photography, this creates a timeless and thought-provoking exhibition. I met with both Crawford and MacBeath during StAnza Poetry Festival to discuss heritage, the relationship between various art forms and their Simonides project which was

being exhibited during the festival.

by Matilda Rossetti

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Interview with Robert Crawford:

I begin the conversation with Robert Crawford by asking a question that I’ve been thinking about a great deal since the theme of heritage was chosen for this issue: why heritage is important in our modern-day lives. Crawford displays a level of reluctance to respond to the word heritage, commenting that for him it seems slightly reminiscent of ‘marketing campaigns’, and chooses instead to use the word tradition. The interesting, and pertinent topic is, according to Crawford, the way in which ‘one innovates within tradition at the same times as being to some extend guided by it’, as this idea characterises the way in which most of us live, though we may well rebel against the idea that we are living ‘traditional lives’. Tradition, then, is an unavoidable and integral aspect of our lives, shaping our actions as well as providing us with grounding from which to develop.

Having visited the Simonides exhibition, I was eager to discuss photography with Crawford, and its ability to engage with tradition. How does photography relate to other disciplines, and how does it comment on tradition? What is the most effective medium for commenting on tradition? The questions seem to throw him somewhat, such a critical approach to art at odds with the way his imagination works. At a visual level, his collaboration with MacBeath has been ‘entirely intuitive’, and so he is not entirely sure he possesses the critical vocabulary for such a discussion. A more specific approach, then. How does tradition feature within the Simonides project? Both he and MacBeath, Crawford explains, were interested in producing something simultaneously ‘ancient and modern’ and aimed to make people think by producing something that wasn’t explicitly

one or the either. There is, Crawford says, an ‘edginess’ to such a creation, and this is the reason that the collaboration’s allusions to the current War on Terror were not made too candid. In its original display at the Edinburgh College of Art, the Simonides exhibition featured four body bags positioned, in an unexplained fashion, on the floor of studios which overlooked Edinburgh Castle, a military barracks. So, though no direct comment on contemporary conflict was ever made, there was that to spark the ancient traditional material into a rather problematic modern context, linking our past and present.

The practicalities of collaborating is something which interests me, especially in this case: had Simonides’ epitaphs inspired the whole project, or were the poems found to fit the photographs? Crawford replies that the project ‘evolved simultaneously’: by chance, it seems, MacBeath had some pictures relating to classical themes when Crawford decided to show him the epitaphs he had been working on, and the collaboration began there and then. There was, remembers Crawford, a great day spent at MacBeath’s house, spreading out poems and photographs on his dining table before a long, exploratory mix-and-match session began. There were some gaps, of course, where a new photograph or poem would be required, but generally the project indeed grew up simultaneously and in a genuinely collaborative fashion.

Did you struggle at all, I asked him, collaborating with someone who works in a different art form? Crawford answers no, citing the similarities between the intense sense of focus conveyed through the very short epitaphs and the intense focus conveyed through a lens, particularly a close-up. Indeed, Crawford says that he felt an ‘instinctive parallel’ between the two disciplines. But overall, far from seeing the collaboration as a ‘struggle’, Crawford admits to having a great deal of fun with the

12

project, enjoying the chance to spend time ‘communing with the living’ when writing is usually such a solitary act.

Perhaps the question I am most interested in is the effect that the photograph/poem juxtapositions had on Crawford himself. Did seeing the photographs alongside the poems, I ask, cause you to view your work in a different light? Crawford answers that it caused him to reconsider the nature of the collaboration. Not having worked before with a photographer, Crawford was struck by MacBeath’s insistence that the relationship between the photographs and the poems ought not to be illustrative – originally, he had thought that pictures of conflict zones or war portraits might make up some of the photographic content. This consideration was something Crawford found interesting and beneficial because it meant that in each case the photograph adds something to the poem, and the poem to the photograph, allowing them to resonate together but encouraging the imagination to move off in different directions. For Crawford, occasionally the two almost pull apart slightly while being juxtaposed so that each artist opens up an interpretative possibility that may have been latent in the poem or image but may not have come out in the same way otherwise.

Photography is a discipline that has long

interested Crawford; indeed, he recently published a book discussing St Andrews’ role as the first town to be comprehensively documented through photographs. What sparked this interest originally? It was, says Crawford, partly an accident. After visiting an exhibition – probably in the 1980s – where he saw a number of Hill & Adamson calotypes, he realised there was a strong early Scottish presence in photography. This was only exacerbated when, after moving to St Andrews later that decade, he became interested in the little blue plaques around the town detailing its historic photographers: he was, he says, ‘in a very literal sense being guided almost by these little signboards about the place’, and decided he would like to try and write about this. Having had the thought that St Andrews may well have been the first town in the world to have been the subject of such thorough photographic documentation, and having checked the idea with photographic historians in both the UK and the States, he began to write.

I comment that we are really very lucky to be a photography magazine based here in St Andrews with access to such a large and extensive special collections resource, and he agrees. The special collections resource is a fantastic one, he comments, and one that is probably too often overlooked, given that it is the biggest in Scotland and one of the largest photographic collections in the UK, with about 700,000 images. ‘There’s not very many areas of cultural outposts where St Andrews could claim to be the first in anything in terms of history or heritage’, he declares, ‘but I think this is one where it could, and because I’ve come to love the place, awkward and strange though it is, I just liked the idea of being able to write such a book’.

13

BROTACHUS

I, Brotachus, lig here, a Gortyn Cretan.I didnae come tae die, just tae sell shaes.

I, Brotachus, a Gortyn Cretan, lie here. I did not come to die, just to sell shoes.

©N

orm

an M

cBea

th

Interview with Norman McBeath:

Robert Crawford mentioned that he was originally surprised, though later pleased, that the photos you decided to pair with his poems weren’t merely illustrations of them: why do you think that it was so important to keep the relationship between them distinct?It was very important to me that the photographs were not illustrative, that they were not a literal interpretation of the poems. The link between poem and photograph should be evocative, emotional and indirect. It’s vital that people can work out the links between the works themselves, on a personal level. With photographs and texts, you want both to excite the imagination – things that are too similar don’t do this. All art should be a catalyst for the imagination.

He also mentioned this morning at StAnza that one aspect of the photography that he particularly liked was the fact that it was black and white, giving the collaboration an ageless feel. Was this a conscious decision?Yes it was – a lot of my work is in black and white, I like the timelessness it gives to photographs. I used film for these photographs because it also feeds into this timeless aspect. Photography is going through a revolution at the moment, but I don’t feel that film is obsolete – it has its own enduring and individual qualities as does the digital medium, so there is no real conflict. Both can be employed to powerful effect. But I felt in this case, I feel film worked well.

What advantages do you think photography as a discipline has over poetry?I actually feel that photography has many parallels with poetry. When I first became

interested in poetry it was because poets were writing about the things that I was looking at – small things, perhaps overlooked by others – maybe a crack in the floor, or some rubbish on the beach, as in ‘Brotachus’. Photography does the same thing. Both the photographer and the poet are artists, and the artistic impact of what you see extends beyond what is visually represented: it’s about personal interpretation.To talk about ‘Brotachus’ specifically, I saw a black axle with two wheels on a beach, and it had an impact on me. I found the situation of the axle – designed for movement, now lying motionless – powerful. I also liked the rubber of the tyres – in Senegal, I saw flip-flops made out of tyres, and I like this idea that tyres last, that they can have a history. So yes, I think that there is an important imaginative aspect to art, which is constant across all art forms.

Has seeing your photographs paired alongside Robert Crawford’s poems made you consider your own work differently?Yes, definitely. There is no fixed meaning to a photograph; it’s all about the context. A different mood can make you consider a photograph afresh, as can a different wall colour upon which the photograph is displayed... the meaning can alter for me even without Robert’s texts. But when you read the poem ‘Brotachus’, in this context the photograph has a definite meaning. Yet if used in the context of a poem about ecology, abandonment, changing tides, it would have a different feel.

What drew you to take part in a collaboration that was so interested in the relationship between the old and the new?I liked the idea that Simonides was writing about real people’s lives at a time when that was relatively uncommon – I’m very interested in people, and that aspect tied in well with my own documentary work.

I liked its freshness, and the idea that we can still learn from poems two-and-

a-half thousand years old. It was nice to demonstrate that they still hold powerful relevance today.

Is this why you think heritage is important?I think the past should always be valued, even if it is not necessarily good – good or bad, we can still learn from it. Similarly, whether we look at the fast-paced events in history or the slower-to-develop ones, there is a lot that the past can teach us. You can like or dislike it, but it has depth – history enriches the present. So much has happened, and it would be wrong not to take account of that, and looking at the world involves looking at people.

You’re well-known for your portraiture, and I feel this could tie in a little to heritage - do you feel it is important to capture

ORPH

EUS

Abune his heid fleed coontless burds. Th

e fushFlang theirsels up oot o the daurk-blae wattirsJist for the drap-deid brawness o his sang.

Above his head flew countless birds. Th

e fish flung them

selves upwards out of the dark-blue waters sim

ply for the drop-dead beauty of his song.

a person’s heritage in a portrait? Is this difficult to do?Portraits, for me, are very much about the now. There are some practical reasons for this – they can’t take up a lot of time, though they take a lot of time to set up – but they are about the relationship between the sitter and the photographer at the present time. They are a record of the situation at the present time. A portrait is a record of how that person was then, and it increases in value over time because it acts as a memory. Photographs last longer than people – so it is unique among memories. There will never be a moment again like there was at the time of taking it.

The ‘Simonides’ exhibition book is available to buy from Easel Press at www.easelpress.co.uk; Robert Crawford’s ‘The Beginning and the End of the World: St. Andrews, Scandal and the Birth of Photography’ is published by Birlinn Ltd.

©Norman McBeath

family photos

18

Helen Henderson

Names refer to the students who submitted the photographs.

19

Hugo Shelley

21

Denisse Disla

Juste Jonutyte

24

Emma Cunningham

25

the ventriloquist and the dancing doll

by Alex Derpanopoulos

26

A photograph of Allie C. Way.

‘“From the Fort Wayne Gazette (Ft. Wayne, Indiana) 1896 January 12 “The attraction at the Empire the coming week will be Colby’s All American Novelty company, composed of the stars of the American vaudeville stage. Mr. Charles E. Colby is the only warbling ventriloquist on the stage. His latest novelty, the dancing doll, has been the hit of the season. Mlle. Alberta is the only lady in America doing on the bounding wire...”

Charles E. Colby was my adopted great grandfather. “Mlle Alberta”, slack rope walker and the dancing doll mentioned, was my great grandmother, Alberta “Allie” Howard Way. Her son, Edward C. Colby, was my grandfather. The only information I have on Charles is from my grandfather’s marriage license which states Charles was born in Connecticut. He was a theatrical agent. My grandfather, Edward C. Colby, was born in 1880 in St. Louis. All we know is that [the] marriage didn’t last and she married “Mr. Colby”. Edward was raised by Charles and Allie. We didn’t know his first name until I got my grandmother’s marriage license application. My grandfather listed his father as Charles Colby and his father’s place of birth as Connecticut. The only picture we have of him is of his back — he’s

seated at the piano and Allie Way is posed in her “dancing doll” costume. I’ve found newspaper mentions of the act in the 1890s and early 1900s. Edward Colby also joined the act doing a “buck and wing” dance. He ended his vaudeville career in South Africa when the touring troupe he was with left the country with the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899. He was 43 and the leader of the Mare Island Navy Band when he died in Vallejo, California, in 1923, of kidney failure.

Edward was close to my grandmother’s mother’s family, the Goulds. We have a postcard from my grandmother’s Aunt Jennie (Gould) Bell in which she refers to visiting the “lion tamer” (Allie had a pet panther) in Plymouth, New Hampshire. The Bells bought Allie’s house there, according to the family story. My mother believes she died in Plymouth. She was born in either Louisiana or Missouri and had spent most of her life traveling the country in circuses and vaudeville. She may have spent time at the house in Plymouth well before her career ended as she used to practice her slack rope walking on a rope tied between two trees in the back yard there.

I’m hoping someone knows of a Charles Colby in their family history that ran off to join the circus’.

A decade ago, I found a photograph in my mother’s basement. It is a black wooden-framed portrait of a woman and her husband. The caption reads: ‘Charles E. Colby & Allie C. Way The Ventriloquist & Dancing Doll’. Something exceptional in the photograph urged me to research the people it features. Five years later, I found the text on a website posted by a descendant of the people about whom I was so

curious. It is included here for your enjoyment.

After reading this, I realised that I owned a portrait of her ancestors —that I had an image of Charles Colby’s face while she only had one with his back turned playing the piano. I sent her the photograph and for the

first time, her family was able to see what he had looked like.

The only photograph Betsey Snow had of her adopted great grandfather, Charles E. Colby.

30

31

The photograph the author of this article, Alex Derpanopoulos, found.

Portfolios

Benoît Grogan-AvignonJames B. Milne

Maya TountaIrina EarnshawG. Allan Little

Lady Henrietta Gilmour

Benoit Grogan-Avignon

36

37

39

40

41

43

James B. Milne

J.B. Milne, Chiang Mai (Chiangmai),

Paper Umbrellas, 1987, Courtesy of

St Andrews Library, jbm-24-2-35

44

right:J.B. Milne Chiang Mai (Chiangmai). Boys playing Chin Lone, 1987,Courtesy of St Andrews Libraryjbm-24-2-36

left: J.B. Milne Chiang Mai (Chiangmai). [North Thai] Tribal dancer, 1987,Courtesy of St Andrews Libraryjbm-24-2-38

right: J.B. Milne, Lamphun Wat Kukut [Chedi], 1987, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, jbm-24-2-47

left: J.B. Milne, Laphun Chiang Mai (Chiangmai) [Thai] Children, 1987, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, jbm-24-2-29

Maya Tounta

52

53

54

55

56

57

Irina Earnshaw

58

59

61

62

63

Resurrection and

Photography

by Nicholas Guy

‘Photographs [are] devices for stopping time and preserving fragments of the past, like

flies in amber. [...] The lover of photography is fascinated both by the instant and by the past’.

– Peter Wollen, ‘Fire and Ice’, in Liz Wells, The Photography Reader (2010)

permission from the curator, Dr. Martin Milner. I often work in this museum during the bi-annual exam purgatory, and I find the place very conducive to revision. The room is fascinating: to me it isn’t a cemetery for animals, but neither is it a zoo. This museum is in fact an unchanging purgatory of its own, a stationary and tranquil environment that leads not to heaven or hell but preserves a ‘living image of the dead’. These animals, as if frozen in time, exist between life and death, forever trapped in the past. That which was dead, appears alive.

Humans are fascinated with death but luckily we don’t stuff each other; the camera does that for us. Capturing as Roland Barthes states, the ‘corpse alive’, the recorded image certifies that which once lived in a way that preserves as aspect

To my memory, the first thing I ever killed was a squirrel. The animal rights activists among us may not look upon this statement with ardent glee. The reality is, having a dead squirrel on your hands isn’t exactly the most pleasant, or indeed, macho of experiences. What it is however, is the ending of a life.

Photography and taxidermy capture a living image of the dead. They attempt to freeze a memory in time, metaphorically bringing the dead back to life. Both a fly trapped in amber and the photograph help us to see how the dead live(d). I believe that the taxidermist and the photographer have almost interchangeable jobs; to some extent, they are both artists of preservation and resurrection.

The included photographs were taken in the Bell Pettigrew museum with kind

6565

of the real, even if it has disappeared. We fear death, so we try to ward it off, taking pictures of those who are alive, and keeping close pictures of those who are dead. Perhaps, we hope, one day someone will do the same for us. By photographing these animals, a process of dual preservation takes place (fairly pretentious, I know). Through photographing taxidermy, we preserve the preserved, capturing moments in time that have in some way, already been captured. A dual memory is produced, a doubling of memory.

Taxidermy, like photography, entices us. In the photograph, or the rather gaudy stuffed animal, I see something as I knew it, but then realise this is not how I know it. ‘Totally false’ and yet ‘partially true’, I believe the animal behind that plane of glass is real, sitting and waiting. Recognising it as devoid of life, I am presented with a stuffed animal: nothing close to what I

once knew. Almost alive but definitely not, the specimen of taxidermy tantalises but always fails. To the same degree, the memory or image in the photograph seems alive in our imaginations, but it is not. So similar and yet so different from the real being, we come just close enough to the recreation of the thing in question, yet we never quite reach it. The images and their paired animals remain strange but familiar. Both photography and taxidermy preserve, but neither can fully recreate actual lived experience. We see how the dead live and how they lived, but never the embodiment of living. In speaking about one of these art forms, we are really speaking about the other. Both preserve life.

Returning to where I began, if I had the chance, would I have photographed or stuffed that poor squirrel? I am not sure, but I probably would have tried in some way to resurrect it.

Jasm

ine P

icôt-

Cha

pman

‘... I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false. To say, confronted with a cer-tain photograph, “That’s almost the way she was!” was more distressing than to say, confronted with another, “That’s not the way she was at all”’.– Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980)

‘In Photography, the presence of the thing (at a certain past moment) is never metaphoric ... it is because it certifies, so to speak that the corpse is alive, as corpse; it is the living image of a dead thing’. – Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980)

G. Allan Little

69

G. A. Little, Dalkeith, Sister Augustine of

the Sisters of Charity, 1974, Courtesy of

St Andrews Library, gal-378

71

left: G.A. Little, Dundee Docks. A visiting seaman, ca. 1973, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, gal-327right: G.A. Little, George Normand, retired postman, Cupar, 1974, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, gal-243

G.A. Little, Irvine, Rev. A Macara, minister of Irvine parish Kirk, 1972, Courtesy of St

Andrews Library, gal-517/8

74

75

G.A. Little, East Neuk fishermen, ca. 1970, Courtesy of

St Andrews Library, gal-71

Lady Henrietta Gilmour

Lady Henrietta Gilmour, Melville Largo taken

at Black Corries, 1895, Courtesy of St Andrews

Library, lhg-3-23

78

Lady Henrietta Gilmour, Miss Violet Lambert, ca. 1905, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, lhg-3-12/lhg-4-4

79

right: Lady Henrietta Gilmour, Lady Henrietta Gilmour, 1899, Courtesy of St Andrews Library, lhg-1-15a left: Lady Henrietta Gilmour, Lady Gilmour with camera, Miss Grace [Gilmour] with telescope, 1899,

Courtesy of St Andrews Library, lhg-1-14.

published with the generous support of the university of st andrews department of art history, a registered charity in scotland no.

sc013532.

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