Jungle Hauntings
geordie ghosts and pub corner photo studios
I’ve been thinking about ghosts this week, and the slightly grandiose and paradoxical question of how to capture change. I’ve been thinking about both in relation to the Amber Film Collective, and their work in industrial communities in the north-east. What follows are some thoughts on hauntings, social change, and a photo studio in the pub.
I’m writing about Amber, and particularly their films Dream On (1991) and The Scar (1997) elsewhere at the moment, so I won’t say too much about them here. If you haven’t seen those films, though, they’re some of the most unique accounts of deindustrialisation that I’ve come across. I’ve also been writing about Sirkka-Liisa Konttinnen’s Step By Step photo series, which focused on mother and daughter relationships in the dance schools of North Shields. Social realism upended by tinsel wigs and sugarplum dresses. At some point, I’d like to write more on the relationship between the dancing body, mobility, maternal relationships, and fantasy that it explores. Here, though, I wanted to share some thoughts on Jungle Portraits, a series of photographs taken by Izabela Jedrzejczyk in partnership with the Amber Collective in 1980.
I came across Jungle Portraits a few months ago, and was immediately struck by the images. They’re a little like high-school yearbook photos, or tintype portraits, or dodgy acting headshots. Or all of the above, only incongruously starring a motley crew of punters from “The Jungle” pub on Tyneside. What makes them so arresting? Is there something about that straight-down-the-lens look that hits particularly intensely when looking at photos from the not so distant past? In Camera Lucida, a book that pretends to be about photography but is really mostly about his mother’s death, Roland Barthes writes of the photograph, that:
“from a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.”
which is really just Barthes trying to put his finger on the feeling that sometimes comes when you look at a picture of another body in another time and another place, and feel as though they’re looking at, or even touching, you directly.
Cowboy lady is looking at me, whether like the delayed rays of a star or not. I fall in love with cowboy lady, obviously. Her hair is of an indescribable texture, her nail varnish opalescent in that older woman way, and she’s pioneering the ludicrously yet confidently out-of-place western trend much before it was cool. She’s meticulously posed: hand on hip like teapot, pint raised as if to clink glasses with me. She also looks a little off-guard, or unhappy, like Jedrzejczyk clicked her camera a fraction of a second before a matching smile came, or just after it fell. It adds to a sense you get throughout these photos. Something consistently feels a little mismatched.
I’m immediately drawn to other particular favourites. Smoking girl, with her perfectly bleached away brows, and handsome couple, one half of whom looks ready to step onto the stage in tribute to Agneta Fältskog.
These favourites betray a passion for the sartorially kitsch, one that this series indulges no end. It’s a deep dressing-up box of fashions, perfectly sized pockets for packets of cigarettes, and spirals of fringe that leave the spectre of the heated roller permanently in sight. There’s a great value to it on this basis alone. From the cultural diversity of Tyneside to its often-undocumented glamours, the series tells us about the ways in which people smiled and smoked and held hands, in a particular time at a particular place, and the types of shoes they wore whilst doing so.
Importantly, the subjects of these photos look forcefully back at us, and it’s mostly striking because we don’t expect them to. Similarly to the women of the Bus Journey series I wrote about in my last post, we’re used to seeing working-class subjects looking in and around at their own worlds. We’re less accustomed to their looking right back at us. The Northumberland Arms was so named The Jungle for the animal heads that had previously lined the pub walls, and of course, for the rowdy reputation its upstairs club had apparently garnered on the quayside. The people drinking there are two years into Thatcher’s Britain (big important historical agents!) and they’re in the middle of their nights out (just wanting to grab another pint! maybe a packet of salt and vinegar!) Jendrzejczyk captures something of that duality, combining the formal and the casual, the posed and the authentic, the photographic studio and the pub.
Of all the comparable forms I suggested earlier, it’s the 19th century tintype portrait that ultimately seems closest. That’s partly a question of style – high contrast, dark backgrounds, shining faces, but it’s also an affective sense of the eery. We might attribute that to a returned gaze, or the sometimes distant expressions, but it also comes from the knowledge we hold over these subjects, the change we know is about to occur. Two years after these photos were taken, the Byker Wall was completed. Two years after that, the miner’s strikes would push industrial communities in the north-east close to breaking point, and in another two, the Metro Centre would open its doors (complete with Europe’s biggest indoor theme park) and signal a new era for Newcastle entirely. Alex Niven has written well on all of this and more. By 1989, unsurprisingly, The Jungle had closed down. It was soon to be demolished, and has now been replaced by a block of luxury flats. All of which is simply to say that the decade following Izabela Jedrzejczyk’s Jungle Portraits was one of seismic change for the city beyond the pub walls. The individuals in these photos were about to see the world immediately around them shift intensely.
To the twenty-first century viewer, then, the subjects of these photos become ghosts of a different time. All of this led me to thinking about Andrew McMillan’s Pity, which brings together the experiences of three generations of a South Yorkshire mining family with sociological theories and a story about drag. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year, and has pushed me to think a lot about British industry, and how its stories are told. It imagines the inhabitants of post-industrial communities as haunted. That’s haunted less in the sense of hauntology (where the “present is haunted by the metaphorical “ghosts” of lost futures”), though there’s plenty of that too. But McMillan, I think, is more interested in your classic ghost story: one where miners, steelmakers, and a pale Margaret Thatcher still hover just above the lives of people trying to understand the histories and possibilities of the towns in which they live. The book is also patterned by the reflections of an academic research group, and has a lot to say about the distance and tensions between sociological enquiry and its subjects. One of the questions the group pose to the ex-miners resonates particularly:
“What is it to be looked at, but not seen?”
It’s hard not to think about the punters at The Jungle in relation to such a question, and why I think Izabela Jedrzejczyk’s photos offer up something genuinely different. We’re forced to see her subjects, partly as they want to be seen, and partly as the agents of History proper. Bringing the formality of the studio into the pub isn’t a cowing to establishment expectation, but a demand that these individuals are read as the deserving subjects of historical portraiture: posed, poised, and commanding.The form isn’t inherited wholesale, but made to fit the unusual environment in which Jedrzejczyk works. There are fissures and hints of the casual, a pint on the back of a chair, or a beermat in shot. The portrait form is forced to bend to its big-night-out subjects.
We think we know those subjects, but mostly in the context of much more voyeuristic, or at the very least unposed, documentary photography. Jendrzejczyk’s series does documentary differently, forgoing the pretence of an in-the-moment authenticity. Instead, she brings the artificiality of the studio into the back room of the pub. Over 15 sessions, she built up this series in the manner of a jobbing commercial portrait artist. This enforced formality allows the subjects an aesthetic and embodied control they might otherwise be denied. Lenny landlord is standing, looming, strong. Girl in white crosses her legs and tilts her whole body on the diagonal, like a flexing dancer in strappy stilettos.
There’s an obvious confidence and dignity that is often denied to marginalised subjects, particularly when photographed by those outside of their own communities. It seems paradoxical that such a controlled set-up might breed a form of liberation for its subjects, yet freed from the myth of artless authenticity, they are free to just be. Or rather, they are free to present themselves honestly, which is to say with all the flawed artificiality with which one presents oneself to the world on a daily basis. In allowing her subjects the opportunity to present themselves in their idealised form: strong, sexy, in love, aloof, Jendrzejczyk manages a wildly more psychologically “authentic” series of images than might be otherwise achieved. Self-fashioning doesn’t always succeed of course - we also see the nerves, the insecurities, and the discomforts, yet this prioritisation of psychological complexity, and by extension historical agency, is unusual, and extremely compelling.
I’m just at the beginning of thinking about all of this, but I’m grateful for Jedrzejczyk’s photos, and the alternative framing they offer. You can also listen to her talking about the series, here.
The figures in these photos might well be ghosts, and yet that doesn’t quite do it justice. The good atheist that I am, I can’t help but want to argue that ghosts are only powerful for what they represent to the beholder. These figures, on the other hand, are powerful on their own terms, at least as much as they can be within the framework of the photograph handed through time.
I want people to see these subjects, not just to look at them. I want to see them too, as fully as is possible, in the writing I’m trying to do. But I also want these portraits to look back, powerfully, at us. In other words, I want cowboy lady to keep looking at me! Sometimes it’s good to be intimidated by a stare.