The Colours of Childhood
Martyn Rainbird
Level 1 BA (Hons) Photography Student (515830)
Open College of the Arts
12th March 2018
The birth of Abelardo Morell’s son Brady in 1986 was the inspiration behind the series Childhood, in which Toy Horse (see fig. 1.) is one of a number of images he took around the home. (Abelardo Morell, Artist Talk, 2016). Morell said of the series that he “wanted to suggest the fears and the awesomeness of confronting certain things at an early stage in life”. (Sivak, 2013). However, if Morell’s intention for the series was to capture the world from his baby son’s perspective then colour may have been a better choice. Bright primary colours would help the narrative and allow the viewer to be the one year old child crawling around the floor in the late 80’s.
Black and white, and the modernist style, would have been prevalent during Morell’s education at Yale University in 1981. Like many of his peers, he was inspired by the street photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. (Woodward, 2005:7). In Toy Horse we see that Morell accentuates the nature of black and white photography by producing an image with contrasting light and shade, surface reflections and shadows emphasising strong shapes and edges.
If we read the image using John Szarkowski’s modernist characteristics of a photograph (Szarkowski, 1966), we recognise the toy horse as “the thing itself”, the contrasting light in the hallway “the detail”, the object dominating the right side of “the frame”, motionless in “time”. Finally, the most significant device used by Morell, the low “vantage point” representing the viewpoint of a crawling child. Being part of the ‘Childhood’ series we have everything safely in the modernist category, all within the frame.
The results of applying some post-modern ideas of Roland Barthes, documented in Camera Lucida (Barthes, 1980), are not so fruitful. The image obviously has studium, the direct messages of what is in the frame. The size of the horse dominates the scene and it confirms that even toys can look massive through the eyes of a child. The only aspect that piques my interest, the punctum, is the use of black and white. If I was reading this image in 1987 I would conclude this as a well taken, well composed image of a toy horse in a hallway, where the low viewpoint reinforces the photographers intention of a crawling child’s eye view.
Looking deeper for Barthes’ ‘connotional’ messages may open up new avenues of meanings. Barthes wanted to find answers to such questions as, “How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?” (Barthes, 1967:32-33). We know early childhood memories can have a significant impact on who we are, how we behave and what we become. Morell had been a keen photographer, growing up in Havana, Cuba, taking photos of his family and street scenes from his neighbourhood. (Woodward, 2005:7). He grew up in troubled times, and with the threat of his father’s execution he and his family emigrated to New York when Abelardo was 14 years old. (Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture Series: Abelardo Morell, 2017).
With this additional context the image takes on a more troubled meaning relating to Morell’s experience of growing up at a time dominated by the revolution and firing squads. The horse now looks intimidating and has one of his ears missing, suggesting battle scarring and violence. This external context is one of the post-modernist ideas that Roland Barthes wrote about in Rhetoric of the Image (Barthes, 1967). His essay suggested that an image can have different meanings to different viewers that are not entirely in the author’s control.
Art photography was at a transition in 1987, with the emergence of colour images bidding to challenge their counterparts, black and white. (Cohen de Lara, 2012). The colour images of William Eggleston had been met with a range of hostility and indifference in 1976, but the MoMA ‘all colour’ exhibition (Photographs by William Eggleston, 1976) was the beginning of a new movement in art photography (Feeney, 2011). In fact, Morell’s Toy Horse stands out for me because of its resemblance to William Eggleston’s colour image Untitled, Memphis (see fig. 2.). The similarities are “the thing itself”, a child’s wheeled toy, the low “vantage point” and they both have an element of wear and tear – rust on the handlebars / broken ear – and both suggest childhood.
At the time Toy Horse was produced, John Szarkowski curated an exhibition showcasing young colour photographers including Philip-Lorca diCorcia (New Photography 2: Mary Frey, David Hanson, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, 1986). The photographers included in the exhibition worked in colour using a documentary style that explored the question of narrative. Interestingly diCorcia, who became known for his constructed colour tableaus, had completed his MFA from Yale University two years before Morell.
Morell, however, persisted with black and white and it is for this reason I believe Toy Horse is unexpectedly successful as reference to his own childhood. Morell remembers in black and white because that was how moments were captured when he was a child. Similarly, my 1970s childhood memories captured on colour slides are in the browns and oranges of the era .
Morell described himself as a “beginner photographer” in 1987 (Abelardo Morell, Artist Talk, 2016), which may have influenced his decision not to use colour. It had already been acknowledged by Henry Peach Robinson that “to a photographer, the addition of colour would only be a complication”. (Robinson, 1881:6). The comparison Peach Robinson was making was between painting and photography, before the invention of colour photography. John Szarkowski was of a similar opinion (Szarkowski, 1976:9-10), where he doubted there were enough gifted photographers to use colour.
The limited acceptance of colour photography around 1987 was confirmed by Paul Graham, who recollects how his Beyond Caring (1984) series was criticised for trivialising his subject with use of colour. He said he received a lot of ‘flak’ (Graham, 1996, p12). Morell was not a risk taker and was on safer ground with black and white. It is what he knew and what he would continue to use for another two decades.
List of Illustrations
Figure 1. Morell, A. Toy Horse (1987) [photograph] In: Woodward, R. (2005) Abellardo Morell. Page 35. London: Phaidon Press
Figure 2. Eggleston, W, Untitled, Memphis (1970), [photograph] In: Szarkowski, J. (1976) William Eggleston’s Guide. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2nd edition.
References
Abelardo Morell, Artist Talk 10.12.16 (2016) [user-generated content online] Creat. Brown University. 26 Oct 2016 At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oz4FpxWxZJ4 (Accessed 27 Feb 2017)
Abelardo Morell (2018) Childhood. At: http://www.abelardomorell.net/project/childhood/. (Accessed 28 Feb 2018)
Barthes. R (1967) ‘Rhetoric of the Image‘. In: Image Music Text (1977). London: Fontana Press
Barthes. R (1980) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Howard, R. New York: Hill and Wang.
Clarice Smith Distinguished Lecture Series: Abelardo Morell (2017) [user-generated content online] Creat. Smithsonian American Art Museum. 15 Nov 2017 At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoQMFXWf63o (Accessed 27 Feb 2018)
Cohen De Lara, D. (2012) Why This Photograph is Worth $578,500?. At: https://petapixel.com/2012/03/20/why-this-photograph-is-worth-578500/ (Accessed 28 Feb 2018)
Feeney, M (2011) William Eggleston’s Big Wheels. Smithsonian.com. [online]. August 2011. At: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/william-egglestons-big-wheels-17143399/ (Accessed 26 Feb 2018)
Graham. P (1996) Paul Graham. London: Phaidon Press
New Photography 2: Mary Frey, David Hanson, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia (1986) [exhibition]. Museum of Modern Art, New York. 9 October 1986 – 6 January 1987.
Photographs by William Eggleston (1976) [exhibition]. Museum of Modern Art, New York. 24 May – 1 August 1976.
Robinson. H.P (1881), Pictorial Effect in Photography: Being Hints on Composition and Chiaro-Oscuro for Photographers. Reprint. London: Forgotten Books, 2015
Sivak, A. (2013) My Kid Could Shoot That: Abelardo Morell’s Work from a Child’s Perspective. At: http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/my-kid-could-shoot-that-abelardo-morells-work-from-a-childs-perspective/ (Accessed 28 Feb 2018)
Szarkowski, J. (1966) Photographer’s Eye. New York: The Museum of Modern Art
Szarkowski, J. (1976) William Eggleston’s Guide. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2nd edition.
Woodward, R. (2005) Abelardo Morell. London: Phaidon Press
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Martyn Rainbird 