'Humanist Landscapes' of class, culture, art

Synchronicity, a truly modernist preoccupation, survives in fine form at the Yale Center for British Art. There, Humphrey Spender's Humanist Landscapes: Photo-Documents 1932-1942 presents a social documentary of Depression-era and wartime Great Britain through photographic quotations from the working class. At the same time, the exhibition documents Spender's own ambivalence towards his mode of narrative. Constantly struggling with his own subjectivity and its emphasis on the objectivity of those he photographed, Spender eventually rejects the craft altogether.

While studying architecture in London in the early 1930s, Spender trained himself in photography. He obsessed over its stylistic possibilities, as his early work illustrates. His photography lost its baby fat, so to speak, when Spender signed on as "Lensman" for the Daily Mirror in 1932. The bulk of the gelatin silver prints derive from Spender's subsequent work for Mass-Observation (1937-1938) and Picture Post (1938-1942), two journals devoted to raising class consciousness.

Each photograph in the show unifies a moment in the life of the subject and a moment of Spender's certainty about his social responsibility in taking the photograph. However, confrontation sometimes arose between Spender and his intended subjects. In one photograph entitled "Pub, Bolton, 1937," Spender shoots a pub interior from an elevated angle. In this picture, three of the men have just observed Spender, and one raises his hand menacingly out in front of him.

As the exhibition's literature explains, the gentleman is probably unemployed and afraid of losing his government relief if caught drinking. The tension of the environment explains its less than painstaking composition: it is slightly out of focus and poorly lit. The power of this image, however, lies in its fossilization of Spender's own presence at the center of the scene.

Spender repeatedly turned to recreational environments for his images, most notably the pier and carnival at Blackpool. He need not always literalize the working lives of these citizens for us to picture them enduring their jobs. Looks of awkwardness and cautious energy, even on holiday, inform us of their daily lifestyle. The carnival feels more like an investment, an opportunity for financial gain, than escapism. An elderly couple sitting on a boardwalk bench read the advertisements at the back of a newspaper as the sun sprawls on the water behind them in "Pier, Blackpool, 1937."

Spender repeatedly returned to this theme of everpresent economy. For his study of Bolton, Spender shot photographs from the roof of the town's art gallery. By using this vantage point, Spender successfully forces the gallery, a cultural symbol, out of the image and captures a landscape of untempered industry.

When Spender noses his lens into a smaller segment of the urban landscape, he does so to reinforce the internalized nature of these people's world. His landscapes of urban poetic silence betray the influence of surrealism, most clearly in the image "Woman Scrubbing Doorstep." The kneeling woman in this image works under her daughter's gaze. Nobody else appears on this street of identical homes where mother and daughter work hard to maintain their threshold of presentation to the outer world. It is an act of cleaning up appearances which Spender does not quite collude with; he captures these women engaged in their labor, rather than the sparkling aftermath.

Spender's photographs bewitch us most when they are somewhat literal. This is most true of the image "Christ is Risen, Bolton, 1937." Women in closely wrapped coats turn a street corner. They appear to stream in one continuous ray drawn from a factory which has just let out. On this street corner, a church poster recalls them to their blessings: "Heaven Above is Sweeter Blue. Earth Around is Sweeter Green." None of the women lift their eyes from the sidewalk of sweeter green to read this sign.

Spender's photographs are surprisingly prophetic. One photograph in particular, taken for Mass Observation, depicts a circle of children congregated in a German town square in 1934. The children seem to be a transliteration of the American boy scouts, wearing shorts and shirts with ties. However, in the background waves a Nazi flag. Spender did not see the necessity of immortalizing this image, and for that reason, it amplifies our horror. We see youth playfully joining part of a machine which went on to produce some of the worst atrocities known to humanity.

One of the last photographs on exhibit speaks of a moment of absolute intrusion. In "Fighter Pilots Resting on Alert, 1940," Spender presents to us exactly what the title anticipates. He photographs three pilots looking like victims of excessive gravitational force, slumping in their chairs. Spender photographs them at a less respectful distance than usual. It is no wonder that, having experienced the utmost in vulnerable subject matter, Spender felt uncomfortable with the proportions of his anthropological intrusion. While this exhibition enables one to admire the tremendous artistic sensitivity of Humphrey Spender, it simultaneously makes us mourn the brevity of his photographic visitation.

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