Review
Culture
5 min read

The very image of kindness

Photography risks cruelty in search of sensation. Andrew Davison contrasts such works with Dorothea Lange’s compassionate gaze.

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A black and white close up of a mothers cradling her jaw in worry as children cuddle into her.
'Migrant Mother', Lange's best known image.
Public Domain, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Do you like your photography cruel or kind? I’m generally an enthusiast for kindness – an unsung virtue – but I was mesmerised by a 2019 show of photography by Diane Arbus (1923–71) at the Heyward Gallery, London, and she’s the cruellest of the lot. Her photographs are a study in the awkward, the disturbing, and the unusual: a pair of brothers with extraordinarily large ears, a child with a grimace and a toy hand grenade, a boy from a pro-war parade, wearing with straw boater and “Bomb Hanoi” badge. 

Arbus’s photographs have an undeniable charge. They hold your view. I’m glad, however, that I stand in front of her prints, not in front of her lens. She was not out to show you at your best. Here is Germaine Greer, describing a photoshoot with Arbus in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. 

'Clutching the camera she climbed on to the bed and straddled me, moving up until she was kneeling with a knee on both sides of my chest. She held the Rolleiflex at waist height with the lens right in my face. She bent her head to look through the viewfinder on top of the camera, and waited… as soon as I exhibited any signs of distress, she would have her picture… Nothing would happen for minutes on end, until I sighed, or frowned, and then the flash would pop. After an eternity she climbed off me, put the camera back in her bag and buggered off. A few weeks later she took an overdose of barbiturates and slit her wrists.' 

Reviewing the Aperture monograph that would secure Arbus’s fame, Susan Sontag described her work as ‘a hymn to the isolation and atomization of the individual’. I am not sure that’s entirely fair. There was undeniable cruelty to Arbus. “You see someone on the street,” she wrote, “and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.” Perhaps all photography risks cruelty, depicting us warts and all (at least before the advent of the Instagram filter, although I’m inclined to call Instagram filters the worst indignity of all). Yet, even in Arbus, just in portraying the human as human, compassion lurks at least just round the corner. 

But sometimes compassion is nearer at hand, even centre stage. For that, I turn to Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), and to a recently-opened show of her work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, entitled Seeing People. It holds Lange before us as the archetype of compassionate photography.  

Lange could not have produced the photographs she did, however compassionate she might have been, without time, care, and attention. 

Lange trained as a portrait photographer, establishing a successful studio in San Francisco in the 1920s. Her approach to photography as a humane act developed during her work documenting rural poverty in the decade that followed. With it, she drew public attention to the effects of the Great Depression and the dust bowl, and helped to shift the public mood. From 1935, she did that under the auspices of what would soon become the Farm Security Administration. A photograph taken in March 1936 – “Human Erosion in California” (eventually known as “Migrant Mother”) – proved to be her career-defining shot. It shows Florence Owens, mother of ten children, photographed in the pea pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California. She and her family were in a dire situation, constantly moving to find new, transitory work.  

In the 1940s, Lange documented the suffering of Japanese Americans during the Second World War (“Japanese American-Owned Grocery Store, March 1942”), not least once Japanese Americans began to be moved into internment camps (“Grandfather and Grandson of Japanese Ancestry at a War Relocation Authority Center, July 1942”). For the rest of her career, Lange would travel to places in the United States that rarely, if ever, feature in genteel conversation, to photograph people scraping through on very little, never failing to capture a sense of their dignity. 

So, Lange was a compassionate photographer. I knew that before this show opened, and kindness is there in print after print. I was expecting that. What struck me for the first time is that Lange’s compassion was no light, easily achieved affair. She was careful, prepared, painstaking. She spent extended periods in deprived parts of her country, sometimes travelling for months at a time. She immersed herself in the life of a community, not least in its religious life, rather as an anthropologist would. She took detailed notes, and laboured over how to describe her subjects in captions and accompanying prose. 

It is too easy to say that Lange was compassionate in way in which Arbus was not: too easy, if that implies that the fruits of her compassion were easily achieved. Lange could not have produced the photographs she did, however compassionate she might have been, without time, care, and attention.  

She ‘saw people’, as the name of this exhibition reminds us. She saw people is because she took time to look. Before she clicked her shutter, she looked, she saw, she listened. 

In contrast to Lange’s deliberate intent, Arbus was a wanderer. She had a remarkable eye, and she took what she wanted. She is among the greatest of opportunist photographers. Sontag got to the heart of that, remarking that Arbus treated human beings like the “found objects” that Surrealists elevated to the status of art: 

What may seem journalistic (read “sensational”) in Arbus’s photographs places them, rather, in the main tradition of Surrealist art—with their taste for the grotesque, the proclaimed innocence with respect to their subjects, their claim that all subjects are merely objets trouvés.  

Therein lies the difference from Lange. 

The world could do with more compassion. Who would deny that? The message of the Washington exhibition, and of Lange’s work as a whole, is that compassion is not the work of a moment. Posting outrage to social media, or posting solidarity for that matter, is not going to change very much at all. It may make things worse. Lange’s lesson for this hour is that compassion requires us to take time. Her message is in her anthropological attention to people, communities, stories. She ‘saw people’, as the name of this exhibition reminds us. She saw people is because she took time to look. Before she clicked her shutter, she looked, she saw, she listened. 

  

Dorothea Lange: Seeing People runs from 5 November 2023 to 31 March 2024 in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Entry is free. 

Review
Culture
Film & TV
Paganism
5 min read

Kaos shows why we might think twice before inviting the old gods back

The illusory glamour of Olympian gods titillates us once more.

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles. He previously studied Dark Age archaeology at Cambridge, and afterwards worked in international law.

A mock classical ceiling painting depicts modern version of the classical gods.
Ye gods above.
Netflix.

The old gods are making a comeback all across Western culture. This is a conclusion increasingly reached by a spectrum of culture-watchers; some religious, some not at all. But, if true, the boldest and brashest example of this comeback may well be the new Netflix series KAOS, starring Jeff Goldblum, released last month.  

Kaos is a genre-busting mythological dark comedy-drama. One might say a modern re-summoning of the pagan gods.  

Charlie Covell, the writer and mastermind behind the show, and a self-confessed mythology geek, has created a colourful, high production, and often funny depiction of what the world might be like if the gods of Olympus still ruled over us. The plot follows several different strands taken from Greek mythology - most obviously Orpheus’s journey into the Underworld to bring back his dead wife, Eurydice - and weaves them together into a larger narrative, retelling the downfall of the gods. 

As the show opens, Zeus reigns as king of the gods from his fantastically kitsch mansion atop of Mount Olympus. So long as the sacrifices and adulation of humankind keep rolling in, he is happy. But when he wakes one day to discover a new wrinkle on his forehead, this triggers not only a kind of mid-life crisis, but also possibly - so he fears - the end of the world as he knows it.  

Goldblum plays Zeus as, well, Jeff Goldblum: quirky, nervy, paranoid, and not a little menacing in an understated way. In other words, perhaps more “Jeff Goldblum” than you’ve ever seen him on screen before. It is certainly a compelling and sometimes hilarious portrayal.  

“A line appears, the order wanes, the family falls, and Kaos reigns.”  

This is the prophecy that has haunted Zeus for aeons. What he doesn’t know is that he shares this personalised prophesy with three other mortals in the story - Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau), Caneus (Misia Butler), and Ariadne (Leila Farzad) - all of whom will play an unwitting role in bringing about the overthrow of the world order under the Olympian gods (hence: KAOS). The early episodes establish who these mortals are and begin to draw their disparate stories together.  

Counterpoint to Zeus is his brother, Hades, ruler of a literally black-and-white underworld, with David Thewlis brilliantly cast in the role as the world-weary and ailing keeper of the realm of the dead. Something is amiss down there which threatens the whole system of human souls and what happens to them. When he tries to warn his brother, Zeus’s disdain for Hades and his problems only makes matters worse. Also in the frame of this dysfunctional family are Hera (Janet McTeer) and Poseidon (Cliff Curtis) - brother and sister (and wife in Hera’s case) to Zeus, as well as being lovers behind his back, who are poised to put into effect their own betrayals, if Zeus goes too far off the rails. 

Last, but not least, since he proves the bridge between the gods and humans is Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan), one of Zeus’s many children. (But the only one who comes to visit.) A hedonistic agent of chaos from the outset, Dionysus seems to be the only one of the gods with any genuine interest or admiration for humans. Impressed by rock-star Orpheus’s passionate love for his wife, Eurydice (“Riddy”), it is Dionysus who helps Orpheus break into the Underworld to get her back when she dies, thus triggering the series of events that could let to the fulfilment of the prophesy. 

The illusory glamour of the gods of Olympus seem to titillate us once more. We don’t really believe in them, but we’d kind of like to see more of them all the same.

Smart, stylish, twisty and certainly original - (the entrance to the Underworld is through a dumpster bin around the back of a bar) - Kaos is an ambitious multi-stranded epic about power, fate, love, and family. But perhaps above all, it is saying something about the relationship between humanity and the divine. At one point, one mortal tells another that the only good things in life are human. This feels like a statement of underlying intent. And the way the gods (especially Zeus) become more capricious, more sadistic, more vengeful as the story unfolds, the more it feels like we’re encouraged to agree. Defiance of the gods is the real mark of virtue here. Rebellion against the gods, the natural outworking of that defiance. 

The irony is that whatever distaste which Kaos succeeds in cultivating in us, the viewer, for pagan forms of the divine may help explain why, historically, Christianity swept aside all the pantheons of pagan worship of the first millennium in the wholesale way that it did. Jesus Christ literally incarnates that bridge between the divine and the human. And what’s more, the message he preached claimed that, far from disdaining humanity, God loves them so much that he was willing to be the sacrifice for their good. And not the other way round, demanding incessant and capricious sacrifice by humans instead.  

Now, centuries later, in Western culture, familiarity seems to have bred contempt with that far more hopeful story. Instead, the illusory glamour of the gods of Olympus seem to titillate us once more. We don’t really believe in them, but we’d kind of like to see more of them all the same. And storytellers like Charlie Covell are only too willing to give the public what they want. If the old gods are indeed trying to make a comeback, Kaos shows us why we might think twice before inviting them in.  

Does Kaos succeed? It certainly makes a valiant attempt to marshal a large number of plot lines involving a huge cast of characters, unfortunately not all of whom are interesting enough to keep you coming back for more. And an awful lot is riding on there being a Season 2 - that is, if the threads we have followed so far are to lead on into a satisfying and meaningful conclusion.  

Without that, I’m afraid the whole thing may be left standing alone as a work of, well… chaos.