THIS AFFINITY

The Douglas Brothers: Frustrating Vision, Evoking Presence. By Sabina Jaskot- Gill, Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery.

In his 1964 seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan discussed a painting by Hans Holbein that now hangs in London’s National Gallery. In The Ambassadors (1533), Holbein pictured two learned men surrounded by books and instruments. Upon closer inspection, the seamlessness of the painting is interrupted by the appearance of a shadowy stain in the foreground that remains frustratingly difficult to decipher. It is only when a viewer moves to the side of the painting, and casts their eye across the scene from a different perspective, that a floating skull comes into focus. To see the skull, the painting must be approached indirectly. For Lacan, Holbein’s anamorphic skull makes visible a blind spot in our visual perception.

The photographs of The Douglas Brothers also appear to be premised on this notion of looking awry. The two brothers, Stuart and Andrew, started working together in 1986 and were soon hailed as “the most desirable photographers of their generation”. Each brought their own personality to the partnership, and a different way of interacting with their chosen sitters. A dynamic that was premised on “a complete trust in, and understanding of, each other”, the brothers acknowledged.

The presence of two photographers allowed a more collaborative approach to portraiture. One brother would take principle shots using a large format plate camera, with long exposures and considered compositions, while the other would stalk back and forth in the shadows with a smaller handheld camera, taking spontaneous shots that captured incidental details. Andrew recalled, “we created an atmosphere in which we could take pictures. It was the opposite of the decisive moment”. Together with their sitter, The Douglas Brothers formed a self- acknowledged “unholy trinity”, a unique working arrangement which allowed them to reveal the subject in ways that had not been seen or photographed before. It was by approaching the sitter indirectly that they could see their subject anew.

A breakthrough moment came when photographing the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. They found their negatives had been underexposed, but in the darkroom an extraordinary portrait coalesced in the darkness. The brothers pushed the print darker and darker, until Day-Lewis’s features were only just visible. This quietly unsettling image, and barely legible portrait, invokes comparisons with the Shroud of Turin. In both, facial features have been faintly imprinted on a receptive surface. Presence evoked through traces.

The Douglas Brothers quickly settled into a recognisable style, harnessing their “experimental instinct” to generate atmospheric and enigmatic portraits. “We tested the boundaries of common sense”, admitted Andrew. Photographing mostly indoors, using only the natural light available, their sitters emerge from dark interiors in images that celebrate the nuances of shadow. Attention is focused on the faces of the sitters, which the viewer is invited to scrutinise with psychological intensity. Long exposure times were favoured, sometimes four or more seconds,

during which the presence of the sitters becomes inscribed into the negative material over time. Blurring gives a sense of the length of this process, as sitters adjust into the picture during the exposure.

The sense of atmosphere is intensified by returning to historical printing processes, first lith and then platinum. Platinum printing was embraced by Pictorialist photographers at the end of the nineteenth century to create plastic, painterly images that betrayed the hand of the artist and countered anxiety over photography as a purely mechanical medium. Almost a century later, The Douglas Brothers returned to this technique and sensibility, emphasising the hand of the artist in the final image. The brothers recollected, “the more we were able to manipulate the print in a painterly or crafted direction, the more feeling it seemed to accrue”.

The imperfections of the printing process were also embraced for the way it made visible the photographer within the frame: “we loved the artefacts of the process, the mistakes, the scratches, the traces of the hand”. Chance is openly courted in these images, with unexpected details registering on the negative during the exposure time, capturing information that we would otherwise fail to notice.

By pursuing this style of photography, The Douglas Brothers moved against the grain of what was expected from commercial photography in the late 1980s. Their smudgy, indistinct and atmospheric prints constituted a rebellion that shaped the course of photography in the next decade.

Their work also stands in sharp contrast to traditional expectations of the medium. Since its inception, photography has been discussed in terms of its ability to present facts. In an often-quoted essay of 1857, in which the creative potential of photography is debated, Lady Elizabeth Eastlake described the camera as “an unreasoning machine” whose “business is to give evidence of facts”. Photography has long been celebrated for its ability to render objects in unprecedented detail and clarity, a medium associated with transparency and fullness of vision.

Yet, it is the realm outside of facts and clarity that appeals to The Douglas Brothers. They obstinately refuse to offer precise detail in their images, instead ushering those details towards the boundaries of indistinctness. Their photographs do not faithfully describe the world that we see, but evoke mood and atmosphere. Informational value is suppressed through focus, framing and blurring. Faces are turned away from the camera, features obscured through shadow, and rendered indistinct through movement during the exposure time. Andrew and Stuart acknowledged, “we were pushing blur to see how far you could go, to see how little information the brain needs to make a picture”.

The vision of the sitters is also compromised in many of these portraits. Eyes are masked, or closed; props placed in front of their faces. For the Surrealists, the eye possessed great significance. To avoid becoming a prisoner of external perception, chief Surrealist apologist André Breton advocated closing one’s eyes and retreating into the subconscious mind. Rather than looking out onto the world, more illumination was to be found by turning away from reality and looking inwards, towards the imagination. For The Douglas Brothers, closed eyes are an invitation to

interpretation: “there is another beauty to a face that is emptied of subtext”, Stuart recognised.

The photographs of The Douglas Brothers constantly oscillate between seeing and not seeing, revealing the sitter in new ways and frustrating our vision, allowing a glimpse of recognition and impeding identification. Just as the sitter’s vision is compromised, so the viewer’s gaze is also challenged. Much like in Holbein’s painting, these photographs suggest that we do not possess complete visual mastery over what we see. Rather than picturing a recognisable reality, The Douglas Brothers invoke the presence of something ineffable.

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