*written for Projections of Love Publication (Feb, 2023)
Early in Morgan Quaintance’s moving image work, A Human Certainty, stark, black and white stills of bloodied bodies and death - captured by tabloid street photographer, Weegee - flash across the screen before a cutting to an aerial view of a body lying on the ground surrounded by police vehicles. Captions read, ‘Death from above; the god’s eye view’. The camera, like a celestial overseer, captures a view that mere mortals cannot, attributing the higher power of objectivity to forensic photography and urgent newsreel. However, for Weegee, ‘stiffs are the easy ones to capture’. For him, the dead are, at once, perfect sitters and money makers. The celestial overseer is not so objective after all.
In Jill Magid’s Trust, her month-long seduction of Merseyside Police and Liverpool City Council’s video surveillance system portrays a dom-sub relationship on Liverpool’s streets. Yet, it’s she - with closed eyes - who holds the power as she brings a softness and intimacy to her exchanges with the police. “Once seduced, a system moves from an exercise of power to a form of exchange.” Tracked from above, instructions for Jill are given with care, a correct step is praised and warnings are delivered with reassurance. As the CCTV operator proffers, ‘That’s a really nice shot, I think you are gonna like this shot, Jill.’ The survelliance system has been hijacked in the name of art and the anonymous surveiller has become a co-collaborator.
A similar disruption can be observed in Maryam Tafakory’s, Nazarbari نظربازی. - a heady montage of overlays, cuts and collages from Iranian Cinema after the 1979 revolution. Iran’s prohibition of images of men and women touching on screen is transcended as desire is powerfully rendered through sound, light, colour, sensation, poetry and silence. Intimate and tender, the work circumvents censorship through its multiple depictions of insatiable yearning and desire.
Whether used for erasure, voyeurism, or control, in these works the camera perverts the operator’s purpose. In an effort to achieve closure, A Human Certainty’s heartbroken narrator chooses to bring his camera to the scene of his relationship break up, ‘the last place I saw you’. Instead, the third eye thwarts his efforts and creates an ineffaceable image of his heartbreak.
Weegee is mistaken when he claims that ‘you push the button and it gives you the things you want’. Instead, the image is malleable, mutable and capable of multiple interpretations and manipulations.
The camera ‘conditions’ how relationships develop in the films and distance is sustained either by choice, or by force. The once-lovers bounding down to the beach in A Human Certainty ensure distance is maintained; ‘In the water we swam parallel. Careful not to touch.’ In Trust, there is the distance between the remotely controlled CCTV and Magid walking through Liverpool’s city centre. In Nazarbazi نظربازی., distance between men and women is enforced by law yet the prohibition of touch inspires a play of glances. In each work the act of observing, and being observed, is intimate. Tafakory explains: “I wanted the film to be about distance and nearness and their interchangeability: about the touch that doesn’t touch yet touches too much".
Across the works, the absence of touch, inscribes intimacy into the act of looking and looking is the moment when intimacy is found. As Derrida wrote, ‘when our eyes touch the question will always be whether they are stroking or striking each other.’