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Henry Bond

Henry Bond photographs evidence of haunted scenes. The images he presents in his fourth solo show at the Emily Tsingou gallery in London are unnervingly still and disquieting, even though they overtly depict nothing more unsettling than anachronistic-seeming ordinary objects that are often in disarray. The mess in many of these photographs is banal, yet it does not appear entirely benign. And the reality is that it isn't.

In this series, Bond presents re-photographed images of scenes that are haunted, not by supernatural presences, but by unnatural events. Bond first encountered each image at the British National Archives, where they are kept as details of the original crime scene documentation of murders committed in England in the 1950s.

The frisson of terror ever-present in Bond's appropriated images arises from the fact, unforgettable once known, that the teapot, faded floral wallpaper, array of tasty biscuits and folded newspaper that we see were inanimate, inarticulate witnesses to murder.

Since graduating from Goldsmiths College in 1988, the forty-one year old London-based photographer has had solo shows at international exhibition spaces including Copenhagen's Fotografisk Centre, FotoMuseum in Antwerp, Le Consortium in Dijon, Geneva's Centre de la Photographie and the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. In addition, his work has been included in group shows at the Hayward Gallery, Leeds City Art Gallery, the Barbican Art Gallery and Tate Modern.

Bond's 'Forensic Series', which is on display from July 11 - August 4, 2007, is a psychologically loaded extension of his previous body of work in extracting larger cultural trends and narratives from minute, everyday details. His October 2002 exhibition at Emily Tsingou, "What gets you through the day," consisted of a digital slide show presenting 120 photographs from his book by the same name. The images in that show were apparently snapshots of often-overlooked aspects of daily scenes. They were the sights and artifacts that define an age because they are taken for granted within their original context.

But unlike his past work, where Bond was alerting viewers to the importance of commonplace things, the components in the accidental compositions seen in Bond's current exhibition are arresting because their viewers are already conditioned to examine and study them. Viewers reflect on these objects not only because appropriation art involves the intellectual exercise of looking at pre-existing images in a new context, but because their history has tainted them. On the surface they might seem drab and dull, but they beat with an ectoplasmic pulse which is all the more ominous because it is so out of place.

Henry Bond
11 July - 4 August
Emily Tsingou Gallery
10 Charles II Street
London SW1
T: +44 (0)207 839 5320

ANA FINEL HONIGMAN: Did your interest in the banal seeming details of crime scenes originate with fictional mediums, either cinema or literature, or did your interest originate from another source?

HENRY BOND: Well, as far as my work is concerned there are two key themes: firstly, that the small detail may be contrasted with the "large" myth, the spectacular. In photography this brings the discussion back to Bourdieu's notorious hierarchy of subject matter in which boring and insignificant stuff was the least popular, and a view of a dramatic sunset was the most revered choice of subject. Equally, Poe (in 1841) noted that 'the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant' a point that Freud followed up in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. You can enter the project from either of those two angles really.

AFH: So, in this instance, you are demonstrating how potential clues to a crime represent the way small details are clues to truths larger than one, even one horrific, event or story?

HB: The details that I have picked out are indexical to the basic paradigms in operation: a photographic detail that reveals residual visual evidence of neurosis, psychosis or perversion.

AFH: So, these are essentially portraits of particular places?

HB: This is a re-photography project that isolates small details of pre-existing photographs.

AFH: Was the decision to re-photograph the original images mandated by necessity or was it an intentional part of the concept behind the series? I imagine you weren't allowed the remove the originals from the British National Archives?

HB: This work is concerned primarily with everyday, banal subject material. The fact that the viewer does not see the horror or trauma of the murder is significant, it was a creative choice.

AFH: It is always striking how victims of violence are usually described as somehow otherwise exceptional in mass journalism. They are often referred to as "angels" or portrayed as remarkably social. How do you think this tradition of aggrandizing the victim affects our understanding of crime?

HB: Well, my research has mainly been concerned with the pathological actions of the criminal insofar as they are residual in the photographic images of the crime scene.

AFH: Which newspapers do you read for pleasure or information? What is your main news source?

HB: Well, this research is not about news, it is about deconstructing the photographic image through the depicted signifiers.

AFH: Sure, but outside of research for this project, or other projects. I am interested in how this work relates to ways in which society responds to crime. That's why I am asking you how you're accustomed to seeing crime depicted. A profile in the New Yorker Magazine will discuss details. A story in The Sun might include a detail with particular emotional punch but a paper with a drier reporting style will not.

HB: The point in relation to this work is that any press story is ultimately evolved out of speculation. The press reporter's access to a crime scene is restricted, it is literally blocked by the ubiquitous black and yellow tape emblazoned with the exhortation: CRIMES SCENE DO NOT CROSS. The photographs that I have worked with are documents made in a place that the press photographer or reporter cannot go.

AFH: Isn't all understanding of a crime essentially only speculation to everyone but the victim and culprit?

HB: What the crime scene photographer engages with is a residue, the detritus. In relation to film, Barthes commented that, paradoxically, the filmic cannot be grasped "in movement" but only through the artifact of the still. In contrast to the press photographer, the scenes of crime photographer is confronted with an excess of material.

AFH: Can you relate these details in the cases to Roland Barthes's notion of a photograph's punctum?

HB: Certainly, they are all examples of his invaluable and extraordinary concept.

AFH: Are you familiar with each of the murder cases you're depicting or were you only permitted to look through images at the British National Archives?

HB: I have researched using the complete written report delivered to the DPP by the SIO (senior investigating officer) of the case.

AFH: Were these unsolved cases or were most of the cases solved?

HB: These are solved cases. In each case the outcome was a conviction for murder.

AFH: Do you know whether there are clues to the crimes presented in any of the images? Or are you intentionally only re-photographing benign and banal details?

HB: This is the point of the research. All the details considered are revealed as being directly related to the specifics of the crime.

AFH: Can you explain the relationship between the particular object in one or two of your images, and the actual crime?

HB: These relationships are discussed in detail in the text of my PhD thesis. They don't really function as brief anecdotes. If your interest is aroused, then please refer to the complete text.

AFH: Now I understand your comment on the residue of the "the pathological actions of the criminal." Aren't these objects almost just evidence of the victims' daily lives?

HB: No, I argue that these small details are actually often the central organizing factor at the scene. Often in ways that are highly unexpected. They are not at all "incidental". We are back to Poe here: 'truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.' As Freud argued: what are often called accidents are better understood as unconscious "achievements".

AFH: Are there trends in these cases? Were most domestic violence cases or were some of the cases instances where strangers entered a home?

HB: The trends are visual and psychoanalytical: from the three Lacanian paradigms emerge three clearly distinct "aesthetics".

AFH: You keep talking about these crimes in very intellectual, academic terms. But all theory aside, aren't you aware that your viewers might respond to these images emotionally, or empathetically?

HB: There is no correct way to respond to an artwork. There is no attempt to marshal the viewer's encounter.

AFH: If you are interested in examining theories of pathological behavior or the relationship between aberrant actions and everyday objects, then why not construct fantasy scenes? Why use real cases files or crimes with real victims?

HB: The purpose of the work is precisely an intervention into an archive of objective, scientific images. The activity produces another level of remove from the original scene. It is this distance or alienation that
interests me as a narrative structure itself.

AFH: That is fascinating. Do you think viewers' potentially empathetic emotional reaction to the images' context is cooled by the images' apparent objectivity? Or is it instead that tensions between the context and content create a sense of horror in the viewer?

HB: In essence this project has been concerned with the notion that a simple object may be "doubly inscribed": it has a familiar function, but equally, it is loaded with unconscious associations.

AFH: In the past you have photographed common and often over-looked objects without such disarming histories. Why did you want to move toward representing objects with a very fixed and frightening narrative history?

HB: In this instance the banal cannot remain anecdotal: it is always "loaded". As Blanchot noted "the cadaver also touches everything in the room".