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The Guardian has reproduced this year’s LS Lowry lecture. It is quite long, it meanders a bit, and is a bit too much about the author (speaker). But it contains some interesting thoughts. This thread on the Large Format Photography Forum picks away at one of them. Comment number 7 is particularly worth reading.

Back to the lecture:

See that through to its logical conclusion and provincialism becomes an artistic strategy: not a misfortune of birth or temperament, but a wilful rejection, not simply of metropolitan fashion and facility, but of the very idea of a gravitational centre. You haunt the margins because the margins are where independence and originality are to be found.

I don’t think that there are any universals here. Some people need the vibe of the grand centres to work, whilst others need avoid those same vibes. I think that there is a tendency for both groups to assume that the other is somehow wrong. Even the labels that get applied are heavily value loaded.

“I wasn’t particularly anxious to paint, ever…” he said once, “I wasn’t fit to do anything else,” he said at another. “Not once did Lowry suggest that he himself was an artist,” an old friend said of him. “I work because there’s nothing else to,” was another of the ways Lowry talked about his work. “Painting is a marvellous way of passing the time.”

….

But there is a price to be paid for this particular ambivalence. Where you do not attach an unambiguously, not to say transparently high value to yourself and to your work, others will have difficulty locating it. It is a sad fact about readers and lookers that they need to be told what a thing is worth and will often take art at the artist’s own valuation. Lowry did not hold his work in disesteem, but in its presentation, in its apparent subject matter, in the titles he gave it, in the contrary and sometimes dismissive narratives in which he obscured both his ambitions and his achievements, he not only refused all suggestions of the highest seriousness, not to say grandeur, but made it difficult for others to see or describe that grandeur for themselves.

Only think of the artistic strategy of the conceptualists – a Damien Hirst, title, say: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living – and compare it with Landscape in Wigan or Industrial Scene, Ashton Under Lyne.

Herein lies another separation of personalities. The British, on the whole, don’t like self-publicists. Lowry’s attitude (as reported) is more acceptable here. Yet neither attitude tells us much about either what the artist got out of their work or what value that work has to the world at large. Again, I think people of one type tend to look at people of the other type as somehow less worthy.

Metropolitan self publicist, or shy and provincial? Or any other mix (there are provincial self publicists after all). The principal difference it seems to me is the amount of notice given by the chattering classes. The noise of the camp followers may drown out the artistic signal.

A more interesting line of thought comes from:

Though Lowry talked often about painting the humanity he saw, there is reason to believe that, as a painter anyway, he didn’t see any. His humaneness as a man is not in doubt. He was touched by the scenes, now of ordinary vitality, now of sometimes extraordinary suffering, which he observed around him as he walked across his familiar terrain, collecting rents, and otherwise walking out his loneliness. He said he painted what he saw, but he also said he painted what he was, and what he saw was what he was – a humanity with nowhere in particular to go, nowhere that made any sense anyway; a humanity on no errand of any consequence, driven hither and thither by desires it barely recognised as its own.

This goes to the heart of the debate that was rolling around a couple of weeks ago about how much of the photographer goes into the photograph. As far as I know, Lowry’s paintings were not a clear development of much that had gone before, and he hasn’t inspired, except in a commercial knock-off sort of way, a school of painters to follow him. It seems likely, therefore, that he did paint what he saw, and that what he saw was what he was.

And to wind up this miscellany of ideas: That Manchester Feeling on Unpopped.

Some related posts chosen by the software:

• Photographers’ preoccupations 2
• Getting in the way
• Fraternité