Source Magazine

Realism, photographic or otherwise, traditionally associates itself with grubbiness. The dilapidated, the dirty and the downtrodden imply a certain weight the clean, shiny and new never can, it seems. In keeping with this tradition, those photographic practices that straddle both ‘art’ and ‘documentary’ intentions and destination, have tended to concentrate on the shabbier side of popular culture in the last forty years or so.

Cheap mass-produced nick-knacks, the gaudy and the kitsch are more commonly associated with commercial photography of the catalogue and shop window, but have all come under the gaze of the artist-photographer. Such pictures have their origins, not just in Pop Art’s preoccupation with the everyday ephemera of consumer capitalism, but also in the pioneering ‘new color’ work of American photographers in the 1970’s such as William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, who combined vernacular and popular culture with a colourful, highly saturated aesthetic. Before Pop, Walker Evans had explored similar subjects, but without the super-saturated colour of the seventies.

Such work though, often tends towards sneering slightly at its subjects, whilst simultaneously conveying on it the importance implied by selecting and photographing it. Firstly it seems to say ‘Look at this’, before quietly adding, ‘Isn’t it naff?’

Martin Parr’s name is most commonly associated with this kind of depiction of various forms of plastic novelties, toys and trinkets.  Indeed one could think he has a monopoly on such subject matter. But others have explored similar areas; we might recall Keith Arnatt’s Rubbish Tip  pictures, for instance, or Laurie Simmons’scenes acted out by dolls.

Etienne Clément’s new pictures continue this tradition by exposing all the flaws and wear and tear of the tatty toy figurines they portray.  However, by setting these plastic soldiers, cowboys, geishas girls and so on, in abandoned buildings Clément evokes something of the past lives of the toys and the dramas that they were once employed to enact.

The toys are photographed in such a way as to show all their imperfections, with the architecture receding behind them, creating the illusion that they are the same scale as their surroundings; as if they’d been photographed in rundown dolls houses. Closer inspection reveals this to be perspective trick and the toys return to their Lilliputian status. The title of this show; Toy Stories emphasises the history of the figurines, but also, implies a new, autonomous existence for the discarded toys.

The distorted and often demented looking figures pose in derelict apartment and graffiti-strewn institutional buildings as if they were posing for the fashion pages of a Sunday supplement or the cover of a music magazine.  A bright yellow cowboy brandishing a drooping gun; a cartoon Native American – made entirely from red plastic, naturally – wields an enormous axe, whilst a highway patrolman zooms around a disused kitchen on a bottle top. Elsewhere, four toy soldiers are lined up as if they are performing a Village People number, whilst stern figures of Stalin and Putin look on. But there are no narratives or tableau here, just poses.

The shabby state of the figurines is in keeping with their surroundings, and together they allude to past experiences. Yet the presence of the figures prevents these spaces from resonating in the way that we might expect.  So-called ‘late’ or ‘aftermath’ photography enables such spaces to resonate precisely because they are inhabited. In the ‘aftermath’ photo the slow, unrelenting gaze of the camera is able to accentuate every details, every trace of past actions but here, in order to perpetuate the perspective trick, the figures are so close to the camera that they turn the locations into mere backdrops, and the pictures into portraits.

Mark Bolland