Off Screen, essays by Parveen Adams, David Bate, Olivier Richon and Ben Okri, Kerber Verlag 2019

Dereliction of Duty
David Bate

In the introduction to his recent book, The Foreigner, the eminent sociologist Richard Sennett writes:

Sennett throws down a gauntlet to the traditional narratives on outsiders, migrants, and foreigners. The usual ‘victim’ story of the stranger is supplanted for an inquiry into human agency and the relations between the psychological and material conditions of displacement. It is this shift of focus from object to subject that one finds at work in the recent films and photographs by Mitra Tabrizian too.

The first set of photographs in this book, Film Stills 2017-18, is an ongoing series inspired and related to her celebrated movie Gholam (2017). The plot of the film explores the material and psychic life of an Iranian exile in London. A taxi driver by night and garage mechanic by day, he is a character who ‘has a history’, which we glean during the film partly through his sometimes silent gestures and interactions with others. He is both an enigma and clearly someone struggling internally and externally to find a place and life for himself in London. The still photographs of Film Stills 2017-18 use some of the same real locations as the film, but feature members of the cast and extras not included the film. In this way the still photographs extend the ideas and issues of the film, rather than freeze them into some discrete fragments as traditional film stills do. As film stills, these photographs do something else, and they come with their own specific silent space, which, when viewers look at, they can engage, imagine and fantasize dramas unfolding within or beyond the frame - off screen.

In relation to the cinematic images of Gholam’s film narrative, the Film Stills 2017-18 series show us visual scenarios set in places that look run down or seem derelict. This ‘derelict’ factor should not be taken or seen as simply a literal realism. For sure, these are real places, with real feelings, and real histories attached to them, but they also operate on us (spectators) as metaphorical spaces too. Thus, the photographs seem designed at once to indicate a material setting, ‘this London’ as a real place, actual urban spaces (i.e., not ‘that London’ - those fetishized images recognized as tourist clichés), and also as spaces with their own cultural and psychological dimensions as well. We can find an earlier preoccupation with these dual signifying aspects of real social space in Mitra Tabrizian’s series Leicestershire (2012), also featured in this book. The ‘this England’ of Leicestershire is also a place of abandonment and dereliction, delay and neglect, which, despite the differences of these series from one another, links them together. Leicestershire features spaces of dereliction which signify, as she herself writes, a place of ‘monumental factories’ once occupied by ‘a useful worker and now abandoned by the city?’ 2 With this dual focus on contemporary figures shown passing through these sub-urban spaces, wastelands and de-industrialized places, we must wonder if there is a dialogue between these human figures and the spaces they occupy or seem simply to be passing through.

Is this dereliction of space also linked to these figures in some other way than as a geographic social space, as a question about abandonment or dereliction? Can we separate the images of these actual various places from the idea of a psychological space? In this sense, the cultural spaces offered to the figures occupying Mitra’s photographs, as people who stand, look or walk in them, can also be situated as figural questions about what Sennett called the ‘inwardly’ state of a foreigner. My point is not to suggest that all these people in the photographs are ‘foreigners’, whether they are or not, or whether they are UK based and feel to be excluded (in Leicestershire the figures are ex-factory workers), but to see them as situated in places that themselves also significant: here are places these figures are given to inhabit. In other words, the pictures offer a metaphorical place to think about the relation between figures and the dereliction of space. Why do the photographs emphasize places that are run down, worn out, used and disused? Can we assume or should we read some kind of relationship between these spaces and the inwardness of the people shown in them? Is there something more to be said here about showing all these worn, empty or cluttered working spaces set in London in Film Stills 2017-18? And, similarly, what are we to make of the de-industrialized cleanliness of the spaces seen in the Leicestershire photographs - all these types of place so often otherwise rarely depicted? Is there something going on here to do with on the one hand showing what is not usually seen of the UK and, on the other, a question that asks, who ‘we’ are now? Where do ‘we’ live?

Material social conditions have material effects on those within them, we are sure of this. Yet the specific conditions may also obscure what can be read into depictions of these people and these places. To anyone, a particular environment they call ‘home’ may appear to others as neglected or disorganised, as though there has been some dereliction in the duty of care. But just as any social space, worn or worn out through human use or political calculation, do not necessarily signify as they seem, so the scrutability of any of these particular environments and human figures may be beyond visible comprehension. Appearances are not always what they seem. These pictures, I want to argue, whether public or private facing, open out onto raising questions about what people make of a situation, and what a situation makes of them, even if we cannot answer such questions directly.

It seems to me the photographic works in this book highlight the relationship between identity and space, and explore how they may or not be in harmony. The way that figures and space are made to operate within the photographs is what can be called, after Jacques Rancière’s work on politics and aesthetics, a ‘dissensus’ image, as one that refuses a consensual approach. A dissensus image offers a disjunctive relationship within the frame, from which emerges a question for the viewer. These pictures ask the spectator: how complimentary are the conditions to the people shown in them, what are their relations?

A man walks through a London cemetery, we see his figure from the back, tiny in the distance at the end of a long path. He has already walked through the overgrown graves in the foreground and reached the end of the path from our vista viewpoint. His white hair stands out in the image like a full stop to a sentence, just as this figure marks the end point of a journey through the cemetery, having walked past death. London cemeteries are linked in a popular imagination (through novels, films and historical fact) to crime scenes, whether Victorian, gothic or in contemporary life. A London cemetery is a place where someone will rob you, even when you are dead. The figure (a man?) who has passed through this neglected place seems to have escaped such drama, even though we know he has walked through this mortuary place of death. There is a deceptive and redemptive optimism is this image by Tabrizian: here is a figure who has - quite literally - passed through death and come out the other side. As with other images here, this picture shows us a materially real place, which situates the figure in dialogue through it, whether they congruous or incongruous to such a place.

In another photograph we see a garage workshop with the frontal view of a partly dismantled sports car. Light from the left-hand side of the image, presumably from an open entrance, shines light onto the interior objects and contents of the workshop space. A tyre serves to prop up the front of the car. A dusty windshield and a dribbled puddle of liquid on the foreground floor suggest that the car has not been used for a long time. This car is not going anywhere soon. Deposited here like a plant in a greenhouse, the grey tones and hue of the car now match the background grey wall of the workshop, as though to say ‘this car now belongs here’. The dismantled identity of this car-object, which is a thing only usually brought to such a workshop space as ‘a visitor’ when in need of repair, is now condemned to ‘live here’. We find here the slippery floors of displacement: an object in space serves as a metaphor for both people and their belongings, and an environment of space as the location for identity. There is no human figure in the picture, but the car features as a surrogate person.

Despite the scruffy floor and rough functional appearance of the workshop, there is nevertheless a keen sense of order and tidiness. Someone has invested time and effort to make this place what it clearly is, a workplace. And the car seems to ‘fit’ this space snugly, orderly in its presence, but ‘unfinished’ in its state, and missing some sense of completeness. Like all of us, or any workshop, this is a place of becoming, even if it appears as one of decay. Lives act out existence, from day to day by working on the things that go on inside and outside of our space, just as this place is the maintenance of a space of work.

In Sennett’s view, ‘the pressing business of becoming a foreigner’ is ‘that one has to deal creatively with one’s own displaced condition, deal with the materials of identity’. 4 Sennett adds, ‘One has to make oneself’. 5 To construct one’s identity in a new location is to use the materials at hand to make oneself. I see this idea at work metaphorically in this garage photograph. The ‘business of becoming’ in Mitra Tabrizian’s photographs is recognised as emerging from a spatial condition of dereliction, a space of neglect that asks the spectator whether this is a negative moment or positive condition: how complimentary are these figures, as a set of relations and conditions? At the same time the pictures offer a question about the actual (disintegrating) state of the host cultural space, in terms of its material and psychological well-being.

How do we construct representational visual images into forms that can explore the psychical image of ‘identity’ as a process of becoming? What is the space of the ‘foreigner’ as a material condition, as a set of inter-subjective relations? Mitra Tabrizian’s work has found a way to show people not having what we think they want or need. The features of abandonment in these pictures speak to what might be called a ‘dereliction of duty’, which is the (USA) military term for when someone (lets say, a government) wilfully refuses to perform their duty or has incapacitated themselves in such a way that they cannot perform their duties. 6 This is the subtle significance of dereliction as a signifier here, to suggest the situation of abandonment. We can find a popular if opposing attitude towards this aesthetic strategy elsewhere in culture. In the ‘shooter’ video game Call of Duty, the viewer/player is involved in active destruction, life itself is identified as a scene of combat, and dereliction is the inevitable result of action on the battlefield. In this game, the space of dereliction is a price paid for individual survival, a place where inflicting death on others is an inevitable (and for some unenviable) duty. Dereliction and abandonment are valued as a matter of being. In Mitra Tabrizian’s work such dereliction is not a matter of duty, it is already a social and psychical condition. The foreigner must not only survive such dereliction, but make a space in which identity can create itself anew out the rubble of the past, in the present.