I DIDN’T WANT to go. I don’t go anywhere anymore. I have my TV and I have the Internet and I have my local café. That’s all the humanity I can tolerate en masse, and still I have the odd nightmare that is so devastating, so threatening that I wake up gulping in the cool night air. Although the people at the café number quite a few, I know most of them by name, and they are warm sensate beings made of the same ephemeral stuff as me. I can relate to them because we share the same streets, the same food, that same obsession with the weather. They aren’t in the least digital. I don’t like to leave my studio, my kitchen, my garden, my wife and my cats. For all the complicated thinking I do, I remain, I think, a simple person. Having dinner in a Palais with 600 other people is a frightening prospect. We shall, I assure my cowering self, drown our anxieties in champagne on the evening.
My house is about 45 minutes west of Nimes. In the summer in Nimes you can hear the spectators in the huge Roman arena spectating down upon the torturous killing of a bull by the youthful matador in his satin britches. At the bottom of the boulevard that empties onto the arena’s roundabout the trains come and go high above you behind the station’s immaculate façade, a structure that most resembles a toy cardboard silhouette of a real train station. It is an enchanting place from which to leave for Marseille, where you then catch another train to Cannes. The second train weaves its way across the arid plains and along the Côte d’Azur providing the most opulent and poetic cinema – streets so old that beloved ghosts parade around in broad daylight, villas so awe-inspiring as to turn the imagination to visions of lusty geriatric encounters and somnambulant afternoons of nothing but endless card-playing. Arriving at the murky train station in Cannes is a letdown. But Cannes itself is anything but.
Sur le Plage
Although I’d been to Cannes once in 1979, I still didn’t know where I was going and so took a taxi to my hotel - which was a five-minute walk from the station. When I returned to the station at the end of my stay I lingered at my favourite café until just moments before my train was to depart then sped down the hill and into my seat. By that time, having enjoyed the hospitality of both the Mayor of Cannes and the Sony Corporation, I had assumed the jaunty confidence that I usually reserve for taking the empty wine bottles down to the recycle bin in my village. But there was much in between that satisfied my appetite for the culturally, socially, and philosophically askew. And I was reminded that, for me at least, there is always something vaguely ominous about people having too much fun. I had promised my most generous sponsor – the editor of this magazine – that I would not only partake of my privileges as a VIP guest of Sony but also take pictures and note the behaviour of my colleagues, while simultaneously evaluating the photographs on show: in other words, I needed to prepare myself to write something as well as document my stay with my digital camera, a gift from the photographer Mark Luscombe-Whyte who, appalled that I didn’t already have one, promptly gave me his.
My first evening in Cannes was drenched in that mystical light that only the Mediterranean can summon up out of its blue depths. From the Palais des Festivals, an impressively low modern building on the harbour, we were taken in smart new cars up into the hills overlooking the sea to Villa Jean-Gabriel Domergue. There the Mayor of Cannes, whom I never did actually see, welcomed us with copious amounts of champagne into his imperial terraced gardens. My camera never stopped whirring open and closed. Naturally, I ventured into the villa to have a look round. The foyer was completely empty but for one gilded chair – an image worth having. A dusty golden light hung in the air; shadowy figures crouched solemnly in the next room. There was a tribal, almost primordial aspect to the scene – all very mysterious. I crept in to find an ancient, diminutive gentleman in a baseball cap, his oxygen tank stationed nearby, sitting at the centre of a vast sofa holding court. I later learned that the monsieur being interviewed was Phil Stern, who was to receive Sony’s Lifetime Achievement Award the next evening. Stern was the fellow who took that glorious picture of Marlon Brando opening his mail and looking for all the world as if he were singing Rossini’s Barber of Seville. Outside on the terraces, the waiters posed in their black suits before the towering cypresses as the murmur of expectation, identities unfolding one person to the other, drifted out over the city nestled in its steamy pocket below. Nearing dusk, we were transported back down to the sea where we ventured onto the Sony yacht. There we were fewer and mingled even more intensely, our luminous heads mirrored in the ceiling of the ship’s salon.
C’est la mode
A yacht is a peculiar place to have a party. When I was in my teens I used to sing – my fellow band members and I were the paid entertainment – balanced on the bow of a yacht as the boat slowly circled the harbour in what the people of that New Jersey resort town called the Festival of Lights. As the night wore on, my job became increasingly more dangerous as our captain became ever more erratic in his movements. The most dangerous part of the evening for the VIP’s on the Sony yacht was leaving the vessel. Every precaution had been taken to insure our safety but the delirium that is consistent with this sort of occasion, brought on innocently enough merely by talking and drinking, makes each guest a liability. Typically, our hostess, the deceptively fragile Katie Reynolds, had seen to everything. The texture of the carpeted steps down to the dock – Katie’s charming colleagues observing us closely, at moments with their arms spread wide – insured that no geniuses, be they image-makers or camera-makers, landed on their heads. There’s nothing more unsettling at the end of an engaging night out than a photo op soaked in blood. The party on the Sony yacht was an occasion to remember for all the right reasons. Thank you, Katie, Anna and our friends at Idea Generation.
I must confess that anything whatsoever to do with awards I find a dubious proposition. Who’s to say what’s better than something else? Art itself is a dubious proposition, a conclusion I came to years ago when trying to work out how to pay my rent without dealing drugs. I didn’t see, hear, or smell any drugs in Cannes. No one seemed to need them, except for a few indigent souls who sat nearby, anxious and perplexed, at the café. In the real Cannes, personal style counts for a lot and it is not the variety that hides a multitude of false pretences. It is not about being an artist, it is about being a living object that someone else might want to possess, or at least hold for a moment or two. My spare hours were spent sitting outside the café on the Boulevard Carnot doing one of the things I like doing best – watching people. Hundreds of images occur that could easily rest nicely in anyone’s camera, but those hundreds of images, for me, are most satisfyingly lost to the sanctuary of thought. Perception becomes the mental complexion of the day, and the wine goes down easily. Cigarette smoke spells the word photograph only to be swept away by a cool breeze down to the Croisette, white sand verging on the sea, where no one worries too much about dying prematurely.
Glittering Prizes
Was there an escalator in the lobby of the Palais des Festivals? Did the ladies clutch up their slinky skirts as they balanced on the fluted metal stair treads? There must have been one, but I can’t really remember, very likely because I was too busy at the time observing the multitude making its way in a long phalanx through the monumental glass entrance, then being funnelled up into the darker loftier regions of the building where the decorative plantings become the props of a jungle mise en scene – yes, this was indeed cinematic, high and low angles abounding. Now we were going on to the Sony World Photography Awards dinner, and things appeared to be getting more serious. I thought I’d said something clever to my editor on the telephone when he’d invited me to attend: ‘The last time I ate with 599 other people was when I was in prison’. As I entered that huge black space, the prerequisite gold chairs glinting, the techno-lighting in the rafters pulsing, I realised I was about to experience a dimension of our culture that I had previously gratefully avoided – ceremonial enslavement and its inevitable psychological devastation. Fortunately, I was surrounded by kind and gentle souls oblivious to their predicament. It was my job to enjoy myself and I did, sort of. I went sailing into the vortex of the occasion finally to be confronted by the spectre of Phil Stern hovering above me on the stage in his tuxedo and baseball cap – perhaps not his baseball cap, but Phil just isn’t Phil without his cap. So let’s just say, regardless of my state of mind, that Phil’s cap was on.
I didn’t have to get lucky to meet interesting people at the Sony World Photography Awards, I was a VIP surrounded by other VIP’s. Nan Goldin, Bruce Davidson, Martin Parr, Tom Stoddart, all had something to say, for which I was grateful. Nan and I had an old friend in common and Nan had contributed an image to a book* I’d recently done, so I was particularly glad to be in her company. She is an elegant and outspoken woman who knows exactly what she’s looking at on every level imaginable. Bringing the Magnum photographers to the event was a brilliant idea, especially as it gave an outsider like myself something to judge the work in competition against. This was where the awkwardness began. For me, the amateurs, as categorized by the organisers of the event, outshone the professionals.
Amateurs sing and dance with unabated passion, while professionals too often pose nonchalantly on one foot surrounded by the same trick poodles. Arup Ghosh deserved to be rewarded for the simple intimacy and unadorned beauty of his picture of an Indian barber shaving one of his customers, the act subtly reflected in the mirror behind him. His photograph was black and white and the black and white work was the strongest in the exhibition. Among the professionals, Giacomo Brunelli’s animals were immediate and majestic, Moises Saman’s images of the gangs of El Salvador were altogether carnal and chilling, Munem Wasif Abdul’s pictures of life in Bangladesh were arresting in a way that I can only describe as classically poetic, and Vanessa Winship’s portraits of the schoolgirls she found in Turkey were timeless, direct, and simply superb.
À bientôt
The amusement and tenderness of chance encounters at such occasions, as this is necessarily an equation of unrequited love. Afterwards, we pursue our affections by e-mail; we exchange our images and wonder at what we knew in the moments before and after each image was captured. New friends are made, never to be seen again. Each night of this event I would walk out into the night with a thirst for more, and so my camera would find a not so warm body in a store window, a conjunction of streets where I might have met a new friend again and again, had our first encounter not been of the fugitive kind. On the train from Cannes back to Marseille, and then on to Nimes, I wrote: ‘The entire world is convenient to the photographer, but finding beauty in suffering is wrong. The exploitation of this perversion is even worse. Who does such voyeurism, sentimental though it may be, serve? How does the artist benefit anyone but himself? The story is about observing life and taking the memory away with us. So the question must be: Shall we live and work through revelation – identification with all living creatures – or through our need to be known to others?’
All images©MARCUS REICHERT 2008
