So far in this project, my references to the use of colour have been in relation to achieving a sort of ironic Martin Parr palette whereby the discontinuity between the ‘ugly’ subject and its ‘pretty’ appearance would mirror the incongruities in my area of interest, the work(place). Rob Bremner’s use of colour is far more lyrical, drawing the observer into a relationship with the subject that is subtle, closer and more empathetic.
Rob Bremner was born in Wick, North East Scotland. He started work, aged 16, in a garage but persuaded a wedding photographer in Inverness to take him on a 6 month YTS scheme, in the hope of getting a longer lie-in, shorter working hours and more money, according to Bremner. In 1983, he moved to New Brighton, on the Wirral, to enrol in the Wallasey School of Art where he came across Martin Parr and street photographer, Tom Wood. After Wallasey, Bremner moved to Newport to study at David Hurn’s School of Documentary Photography although it does not seem that the two saw a great deal of each other;
“In the second year David Hurn bumped into me in the corridor, there were only 20 of us on the course at any given time, he asked me who I was, he couldn’t remember, I was glad he didn’t.”
(Malestrom, 2019)
After Newport, Bremner moved back to Merseyside and has followed a career in commercial photography, including photojournalism, mainly as a free-lancer. His non-commercial work includes a series of portraits and urban landscapes that, in the words of the Liverpool Echo, ‘captured the true heart of 80s Liverpool’. This work was exhibited as ‘Liverpool Unfinished’ in 2013 and has been reproduced in Bremner’s first published collection, The Dash Between (2019), which also includes later work.
The use of colour in this collection seems slightly at odds with some of the ‘gritty/ urban/ realistic’ documentary conventions of today. Part of the current fashion for film emulation, compositionally sculptural, black and white documentary is perhaps a product of a more general artisanal revival. Or it may be an homage to the historical origins of photography and its claims to fine art, especially where this preserves and reinforces a decent distance from commercial photography. Some of it, no doubt, represents a serious aesthetic commitment to stay with the subject, undistracted by the additional information/ noise that colour adds. Whatever the reasons might be, it is worth recalling that the use of colour in documentary photography was, at first, almost an act of rebellion.
The widespread adoption of colour film by hobbyists as well as advertisers made possible by the film technology of the 1950s seemed gaudy and vulgar to ‘serious’ photographers who had, of necessity, largely defined their art and craft in black and white to this point. As Meyerowitz noted,
“Color was thought, back then, to be too commercial, or too much an amateur’s material, or too damn colorful.”
Joel Meyerowitz, 2012
However, colour also provided an opportunity for Meyorowitz, along with Saul Leiter, William Egglestone, Steven Shore and others to “offer a challenge to the conventions that undermine every medium” (Meyorowitz, 2012). This challenge went beyond the simple inclusion of colour as a subject for photography but produced also a subtle shift in subject matter; away from what Agnes Sires, writing about William Egglestone, describes as;
“supposedly salient subjects – like the photojournalism championed by Magnum – to the more poetic everyday object.”
(Sires, 2014, p. 11)
This shift to the poetic mundane was a further distinction made by Meyorowitz, Leiter, Egglestone and others that was explicitly intended to distance their work from the established photographic canon. It is traces of the radical poetics of the everyday that I find in Bremner’s work.
Some of Bremner’s urban landscapes use colour in the way that I am using it; to point to the obvious contradiction between the surface and the reality it is trying to gild ;
Bremner also has a sharp eye for the incongruity between line/ form and the subject of the image; what is meant to be straight, is bent; roads don’t seem to go anywhere; what is meant to be space is filled – with rubbish; what is meant to be new is already in decay; it is a world where the angles don’t align or make sense;
But it is in his portraits that Bremner excels and justifies the claims made on his behalf by the Liverpool Echo (above). The late 80s were only 5 or 6 years after the Toxteth riots; a few years after Michael Heseltine engineered the Garden Festival and the yuppification of the Albert Dock as a response to decades of rising unemployment, poor housing and poverty; a Liverpool just after Derek Hatton’s Militant had lost control of the city and where some in Prime Minister Thatcher’s government were advocating a process of ‘managed decline’ for the city.
Bremner identified with the daily lives of those he photographed (he was himself on the dole for a lengthy period after returning to Liverpool) and he became friends with many of his subjects. The degree to which Bremner was embedded in the community that he documented produces a level of intimacy and, more importantly, a kind of clear sightedness that might not have been possible otherwise. It is difficult to idealise someone that you really know and Bremner is hostile to the kind of academic led photography that he sees as exploitative:
“I noticed there’s an MA in Salford where it’s like ‘social photography’ they call it, and the entire thing seems to be how to fill in grants forms from the Arts Council so you can get money to photograph poor people, but, you’re obviously not poor because you’ve just done a three year degree and now you’re doing an MA for two years and you’re paying out thousands to go and photograph poor people!
(The Malestrom, 2019)
Why not just go up to them in the street and say “excuse me Mr poor person can I take your photograph?” It’s just crazy.”
Bremner’s images are not idealist nor romantic – he knew his subjects too well for that. His celebration of the vibrancy of the colours in the clothes worn by young people in particular, while often set directly against the drab background of the built environment, is just that – a celebration of young people’s creativity and colour;
Bremner does not see in street fashion any form of cultural proto-resistance. As he said in a 2019 interview,
“Because nobody had any money, everyone was in the same boat … It wasn’t just you in this position, it was entire communities. … Liverpool people generally got on with it. In many ways, they adapted well to their circumstances.”
(Huck, 2019)
Elsewhere , he has noted,
“I think that [the people that I photographed] may not have been that political, but I think quite a few of them were lost. Their dads would have gone down the docks and got a job or gone to the sugar factory and all of these things – that wasn’t there for them. The most they could hope for was YTS.
(Dazed Digital, 2019)
Liverpool was politicised and everybody knew who Margaret Thatcher was, and she was a bitch, but what they were doing was making the best of what they had.”
Neither was Bremner himself politically motivated;
“I wish I could say I was a socially aware photographer, campaigning against Thatcher’s Britain, but I just felt comfortable taking photos there and liked the people”.
(British Culture Archive, 2019)
What Bremner has documented, even if inadvertently, is the resilience of working class communities – the capacity to make the best of the circumstances that are forced upon them. The warmth of his affection for the people he photographed is perhaps best seen in his images of older people, especially older women who are so often undocumented photographically;
Despite being the faces of the dispossessed and the powerless, there is a humanity to these images that would be less, if not lost altogether, had they been stripped of their colour. The images appear natural, the faces characterful, a rough beauty drawn from the hardships they had faced. These are not abstract forms, rendered in neutral tones – these are pictures of people you recognise, even if you have never met them, set in places you know, even if you have never been there.
Bremner did not always shoot in colour. In 1988-9, not being able to afford colour stock, he bought out of date 35mm cine-film and took a series of images of Liverpool’s Pier Head and these too are included in The Dash Between. These images are limited to a specific time and place and while equally sensitive and humane seem more distant, not just in time but also emotionally – they are almost photo-journalistic and more explicit in their aim to document and record rather the expression of a daily, lived experience shared with people he knew.
As with Perec, Bremner has rendered the ordinary, exceptional; the mundane, powerful. He demonstrates the ‘courage for the mundane’ (Goldberg, 1911-1970; see Weisman, 2014) – the desire and the capacity to make art and meaning out of the ‘small reality’ of our everyday lives.
His colour photography is the work of a poet rather than an archivist.
References:
Sires, A. (2014) ‘The Invention of a Language’ in Eggleston, W., William Eggleston: From Black and White to Color, Göttingen; Steidl Verlag
Weisman, A. (2014) ‘After all of this, I will have to muster all of my courage for the mundane”: On Leah Goldberg’s Paradigmatic Temperament’ Prooftexts Vol. 33, No. 2, Spring, 2015, pp. 222-250
All of the image used here are taken from Bremner, R. (2019) The Dash Between Liverpool: Bluecoat.
N.B.
The title of Bremner’s book comes from an old saying;
“There are two dates on a gravestone – someone’s birth and their death and in between is a short dash.”
