the grain of voice

Photography and the Grain of the Voice is an exhibition by 19 students from the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, Germany, curated by Dr Wiebke Leister. The work was exhibited at the London College of Communication last week where it was received as an extremely accomplished and thought provoking body of work.

The photographers were asked to consider Roland Barthes' 1972 essay 'The Grain of Voice' as a lietmotif in the production of work that considered photography as performative. How in making the work the photographer becomes involved in an active engagement with the question of what a photographic voice can be and how it can relate to ideas of authorship in the making of and the thinking about photography.

The students posed many different questions in the process of producing the work - Who is speaking? And who is looking? What is the character of the author? Is there an element of fictional self portraiture involved? What kind of timbre does the visual voice have? What do we imagine off frame?

The photographers were attempting to find a gesture in their art that reached out to the viewer .... 'The 'grain',' for Barthes, 'is in the body, in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.' 

I was asked to review the work of Johanna Kopp who produced a series of poetic portraits titled 'About Closeness'. Johanna is a sensitive artist who by looking intimately at gesture, facial expression, gaze and posture pared down the elements to capture a private moment of internalization and contemplation. 

Taking, as a starting point, Barthes' description of the skill of a particular harpsicordist who was able to communicate a tremor from her inner body in her music  - Johanna's project was a search for a way of making portraiture that touched on an interior moment. An attempt at a 'moment of truth', a shared moment of equilibrium.

We talked about Bettina von Zwehl's work - how she sets up a controlled situation in order to elicit a very private human emotion (Fur Alina), and Rineke Dijskstra, who also waits for a particular moment in which to photograph. In all there is a paring down of gesture and pose, a search for an internal moment, and a desire to become systematic and detached in order to reach that moment of non pose.

We also discussed how photographers project themselves on to their subject, the images are in fact self portraits, where an intimate moment is shared between the photographer and the subject.

The Grain of the Voice was an impressive body of work which drew on different readings of Barthes multi-layered text. I was particularly drawn to pared down palette of  Anne Lena Michel's still lives in The Attempt of a Transformation of an Immediate Vicinity and the retro wit of Philip Ullrich's Next time it will be about the Solar System. Finally, a special mention for Philipp Gallon whose failed equation for building a grain enhancement machine was replaced with a grain of the self in Assuming a pose could reveal an expression of failure, when it is a neutral one. I was moved by this young artist's sincerity.