Leonard Bell - Ockhams 2021 Finalist, talks to Millie Blackwell
MB: You’re the author of eight books, and you have an academic background that suggests you to write books about a wide variety of subjects. How do you choose your subject matter?
LB: It comes out of what I'm interested in, what I think is worth researching, looking into intensively and writing about. And of course, with books, not every topic is necessarily going to be viable from the point of view of a publisher. So there's a variety of factors there. In this particular case, it emerges from both my friendship and knowledge of Marti Friedlander's photography over many years. And I had written an earlier book which got a lot of response. Marti's photographs are still generating a lot of very intense interest. So, in some ways, the book was waiting to be written, though the topic for this one came to my mind after Marti Friedlander died. She died in 2016, so this came to my mind in 2018. Sam Elworthy asked me "Okay, what's next?" And so I had to do some quick thinking and came up with this particular focus.
MB: And this one accompanied an exhibition?
LB: That was so with the first book I did on Marti Friedlander too, which was accompanying a big exhibition at the Gus Fisher Gallery in the University of Auckland. In this case, they came together by chance, in many respects. I had almost completed the book, and Janine Parkinson, who had recently taken up a position at the National Portrait Gallery in Wellington, contacted me and said, "Got any ideas for an exhibition?" So I suggested Marti Friedlander portraits relating to the book, of course. So it came together wonderfully, and the exhibition in Wellington got an enormous number of visitors. And it's traveling around the country this year and into next year.
MB: The beginning of the book spends sets the context for what New Zealand was like when Marti was practicing. And I was born in the 1980s, and started university in the early 2000s. By the time I got to Canterbury University, photography was very much considered a fine art; one of the official five. What was the general opinion of photography last century?
LB: Lawrence Shustak from New York was the first lecturer in photography at the School of Fine Arts at Canterbury University. He was appointed in 1973, and that was the second photography appointment at a university art school. There'd been one previous in the mid sixties with Tom Hutchins, also a photographer. So it was more the Seventies that photography as a medium moved away from simply commercial, and increasingly, good photographs were seen as fine art. PhotoForum, a magazine and co-operative, only emerged in the early Seventies driven by John Turner, and they lobbied very strongly for quality photography, as a fine art.
I quote a couple of people in the book; Frank Hoffman, a great photographer who described photography in the mid sixties, as "a poor cousin of painting." So it's a kind of shift in consciousness and visibility that's been very pronounced in a relatively short period of time in New Zealand.
MB: Another piece of really interesting detail in the book is portrait theory.
LB: I felt it was something worth exploring, because a lot of people seem to take photographs at face value. What you see is one-to-one correspondence with a thing or a person out there in the world, whereas the relationship is very complex. I tried to address the complexities of photographic representation with portraiture as clearly as possible. Going back to 1859, Charles Baudelaire, art critic, and probably better known as a poet, said,
"A portrait. What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound?"
Perfect, really. Once you recognise the complexity of a portrait, what does it do? It expands one's sense of how complex people can be. It's very difficult to pin people down in a simple way.
MB: A good example is the photograph of Gretchen Albrecht in her studio; she's working but she is not actually dressed in working clothes. She's in a bright dress, and it's completely set up, but somehow you just don't see that the first time around.
LB: Gretchen's a good friend of mine. She was instructed by Marti to wear bright-colored clothes. But the point is this is directed; a directorial portrait with a photographer directing the sitter in various ways, but very cleverly and very subtly. She worked very quickly in terms of moving around her subject, almost like a dance, and she was a very quick thinker, very astute psychologically. So it was quite extraordinary to see her in action.
MB: What do you think Marti would have to say about selfies?
LB: Obviously I can't speak for Marti, but I think should probably distinguish between good, bad, and indifferent. It's not the medium itself that is either good or bad, it's how it's handled, or the person behind it and what they do with it.
MB: How did you decide on the book’s size and format?
LB: That came out of looking at a whole variety of possibilities between the publishers, AUP, particularly Sam Elworthy, their production editor Katharina Bauer, the designer Keely O'Shannessy and myself. We spent a lot of time considering the fine details of format, size, relationship of image to page and of photographs to one another. I've always loved books as things, as objects to hold in your hand, as an object of beauty. Books can work on various levels; it's a scholarly text, but written in a way that's accessible to anyone.
MB: Who did you have in mind as the ideal audience for this book?
LB: It's probably a range of constituencies. People who have a particular interest in photography and also in portraiture, and in artists and writers and potters and other creative people trying to make their way, and in New Zealand at various times. Most of the people who're included in the book emerged in the fifties, sixties and seventies. It was a period of enormous cultural and social shifts, in which prevailing attitudes and responses to the arts changed enormously from pretty difficult to much better and more promising in terms of people trying to make a life out of it
MB: We are working on what to say when introducing a new book to a customer [hand-selling] that they might not have heard about. Do you have any tips that we could tell customers that Leonard Bell told us directly?
LB: My last paragraph in the book in the epilogue focuses on people who were innovative and took risks. Not necessarily easy to live with or be with, but they're needed, really, for a lively society in which creativity is valued, particularly creativity in the arts. Unfortunately that's not always the case, and sometimes the visual arts are seen as unnecessary or useless. I tend to see it quite differently; it's absolutely necessary for our sanity, for our lives.
MB: I have a personal interest in wood pencils and we sell a lot at the bookshop, so I'm always interested to know if pencils feature in any part of your work or your process?
LB: They do, particularly in note taking, reading books and jotting in the margins, which you can later rub out if necessary. Most archives, like the Alexander Turnbull manuscripts and archives, you have to write in pencil so you don't accidentally mark a manuscript. I use pencils when I'm researching and gathering notes together, which will be predominantly by hand, then first drafts onto the computer, printing out and correcting using either a pencil or a red pen. Pencils are still part of it. I'm very much a hand-minded brain person.
MB: Do you listen to any music while you're working? And if you do, what do you listen to?
LB: No, I just focus as intensely as possible on what I'm doing in terms of thinking or writing.
MB: I'm interested in what your favourite illustrated nonfiction is?
LB: There's a two-volume Photobook: A History published 16 or so years ago, Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, which is outstanding. It follows the phenomenon of the photo book from when they first appeared in the mid 19th century through to the present in all their diversity and variety. So for anyone interested in photo books, or books like the portraits book, I would certainly recommend that.
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See Millie’s video review for a look inside the pages of Marti Freidlander - Portraits of the Artists.
