Urban Pastoral

Justin Coombes conjures eerie enchantments from banal, nocturnal urban scenarios. By projecting photographic slides onto trees and buildings, then rephotographing the layered result using long exposures, he builds up spaces that come across with a déja vu familiarity. The effect is intriguingly ambiguous and deeply evocative. His gardens and allotments appear abandoned in some back-of-beyond place, inhabited solely by lone somnambulists. These are scenes of memory and reverie, tense anticipation and nostalgia, precise states of emotional import. One would be hard pressed to decide whether they are a matter of joyful yearning or unnerving dread. Despite their atmosphere of dreaminess, Coombes imbues his works with the many layered psychological depths of life as it is really lived.

Robert Clark, The Guardian, October 2007

Fantastic apparatus: forgetting and remembering
in the work of Justin Coombes

The photographic prints, lightboxes and video work that constitute Justin Coombes’s most recent series, ‘Hoping to Catch your Eye’, consolidate his long-running interest in the use of projected images within photography. Employing either a 35mm mechanical slide projector or a digital video projector, Coombes projects photographs into darkened interiors or onto nocturnal exteriors. The artist then captures this juxtaposition of real and projected space using long-exposures, creating photographs within photographs.

Across all of Coombes’s works there is a conflation of the fantastic and the quotidian. The lightbox ‘Sacred Objects’, made in an East London community centre, contains a doubling up of projected and real moments. Time has passed in between the original daylight shot being projected and the night-time space in which the final image is made. Thus the original image might be seen as a memory retrieved and cast back upon the present. This activity of recalling a now distant moment is recorded again by the camera; the act of doing so locates the composite of both moments always and inevitably in the past. So this complex and loaded composition reveals many of the concepts underpinning Coombes’s practice at large. He manipulates perspective and scale, the tools of pictorial realism, to further complicate the ambiguous scene. The chessboard is perhaps a reference to the motif of chequering employed so purposefully by Paolo Uccello to exhibit his mastery of the principles of perspective and foreshortening. On the back wall of the community centre, we see a series of Rubens inspired portraits of turbaned characters, and next to these, jutting out from a plant pot, are home-made paper facemasks. Edges of objects bleed into each other, rendering it impossible to mark out where the projection begins and ends. At first glance, it is hard to make out the two figures on the sofas. Slowly, they reveal themselves, spectres reclaiming their space, lacking corporeality as they sink weightlessly into fabric folds. Reminiscent of Tony Oursler’s projections of perverse fabric manikins, portions of their bodies disappear completely into shadow at the points where the projection finds no surface to settle on. Furthermore, the whitest shapes of the projection fall like sharp spots of sunlight, an artificial re-enactment of the daylight scene in which they were photographed; embellishments of what was, that, paradoxically, due to their being the brightest parts of the entire composition, seem to hold more presence than the ‘real’ objects displayed in the rest of the space.

The work the viewer must engage in to unravel these images mimics in some way the labour and time involved in creating them. The artist notes a desire to ‘thicken pictorial space’1 through his multidimensional layering. Comparisons with film techniques, such as montage, come readily to mind. Much is also owed to processes of Dada photomontage and Surrealist strategies of making. Indeed, many of Coombes’s photographs can be read as homages to Surrealism insofar as they confuse the order of space and time and invite an investigation into the formal properties of photography. Coombes’s collage technique is one that happens over time and space: it acts out the process of forgetting and remembering. But rather than rebelling outright against the formal laws and orders of representation, it heightens the viewer’s awareness of these rules by throwing them further into confusion. Logic and doubt cohabit in these photographs, disrupting certainty across multiple levels. They are models of both a fear of forgetting and an engagement with ‘living in the present’ because of the synchronicity of record with actual event.

Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel, ‘The Invention of Morel’ (1940) is set on an island where a fantastic contraption projects realistic holographic images of people who have long since left, but are fated to endlessly replay one week of their lives. On Bioy Casares’s island, there is a curious doubling of the landscape: there are two moons and two suns. The protagonist witnesses what he originally believes to be real people on the island, later realizing them to be projections of recordings of the past; a superimposition so strong that it takes on its own reality, and the projected replicas become imbued with life. Just as the novel makes us question ideas of synchronicity and time, Coombes’s photographs raise similar temporal inquiries. In the same way that the protagonist of Bioy Casares’s drama confuses what is real and what is projected, Coombes’s works elicit the same confusion between the memory and the photograph.

As early as the 1930’s, Walter Benjamin theorised on the power of the camera over the recollections of the human eye, ‘ … the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has, so to speak, seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot wherein the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. For it is another nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye’.2 This ongoing concern was recently elaborated on by the philosopher Sylviane Agacinski. The action of recording, of taking a photograph, includes the possibility of a return. As Agacinski confers, through the photo, ‘the trace will be able to come back, and this very possibility programs both the forgetting (since the trace guarantees material memory) and the remembering (I will be able to have access to it again). In counting on a retrospective vision, in entrusting my memory to the material trace, I can save myself the effort of a substantive recollection, indeed even of an attentive look at the present’.3 With Coombes’s recent works, we first become aware of an elongation of the passage of time (the photographs are taken during the day and projected later at night or many weeks or months later) and also the dramatisation of forgetting and remembering. In certain cases, the projected image is not clear, it is difficult to discern particular objects, like the mind straining to bring a memory back into focus. These images also contemplate the risks in sacrificing present experience to photographic recordings.

The leap Coombes makes with this new set of works is not only to consider the passage of time, but also to dramatise the act of forgetting and remembering; the very process of memory itself. Due to the long exposure of the photograph, Coombes is effectively creating images that don’t exist in real time, or are perceptible in the same way to the human eye. For Coombes, the act of projection is like ‘the bearing of memory on a current moment’.4 If these two concepts are considered simultaneously: that these photographs capture images only perceivable by the camera, and that the projection is like a memory returning, then these works come close to acknowledging the contradiction between the recorded image and the inaccuracies of human visual memory.

Leigh Robb, 2006

Other Stories

Justin Coombes is an artist working in photography, drawing and performance. The bulk of his photographic work currently divides into two ongoing series entitled Capital and Photosynthesis.

Capital is an ongoing series of documentary photographs. Coombes began to make these pictures in Oxford, recording the stylised, anachronistic events staged at the Oxford Union and in the town hall. The series expanded to become a kind of travelogue of the Far East, Europe and America, and a record of his immediate environment in London. He became interested in documenting events where there was a clear tension in power relations between people, or between people and institutions. These kinds of events, usually set in capitalist countries and involving issues of wealth and status are often more visible in metropolitan centres. So the title of the series exploits these two meanings of the word capital. Furthermore, many of the images feature headless statues and isolated faces. The viewer might draw further connections between the political and sociological issues addressed by the photographs, and the significance of the human face; its expressions and sublimations. Capital provides a kind of framework and catalyst for Coombes’s staged photographs, known collectively as Photosynthesis. The Capital pictures could also loosely be described as reportage, but as they document sexual, social and political ambiguities they often do not have the clarity that would make them saleable as press-shots. They are heavily influenced by photographers who have an ambiguous relationship to photojournalism and the ‘documentary’ image, such as Weegee, Garry Winogrand, Gilles Peress, Martin Parr, Chris Steele-Perkins and Nick Waplington.

In Photosynthesis, Coombes uses long-exposure photography and slide-projection to construct poetic visual narratives. He projects images onto buildings, interiors and trees using a tiny, 150-watt slide-projector. In real time, the naked eye can hardly discern an image, but when the scene is photographed, and the camera’s shutter opened for long enough, the projection takes on a ghostly, saturated quality in the resulting picture. In the same way that plants need light and the process of photosynthesis in order to grow, these pictures only exist as a result of the careful and lengthy accumulation of light onto film or a digital imaging sensor. The gardening parallel is enforced by the pastoral (and urban pastoral) settings in series such as White Widow Story, Coming Home, Strangers’ Aubade and We Possessed all the Universe Together. The pictures are strongly influenced by early Surrealist experiments in photography as well as the work of contemporary artists such as Jenny Holzer, Krystof Wodiczko, Gregory Crewdson, Tony Oursler and Shimon Attie.

Recently, Coombes has also begun to produce live performances which use details of the photographs described above, Part slide show, part lecture, the performances also use his casual, autobiographical drawings and his own voice to form a strange confessional narrative. The text in the performance Veronica is a fusion of poetry, quotation and storytelling that weaves different strands of his thinking together; meditations on art history, political failure, depression, memory and love. These performances are strongly influenced by the later work of French auteur filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker. Juxtaposing the stylised, highly orchestrated projection pictures with the documentary work, the theatricality of the former rubs off on the 'realism' of the latter, and vice-versa, producing a kind of visual magic-realism.

Nick Hackworth, 2003