September 7 – 30, 2006
IN LIMBO
Through this series of photographs taken in the London underground during the years 1999-2005, I explore the notion of ‘absorption’ in the public realm. This notion is in accordance with what Georg Simmel in 1908 described as the ‘blasé outlook’, which is the typical outlook that city people adopt, as a the consequence of an intensification of external sensual stimuli in the city.
In the subway we seem to ignore that we are being observed by other people. The presence of a photographer and a visible camera also seems to be ignored. However, on the same time I wonder whether we have to do with a kind of attitude similar to what Michael Fried described as “theatricality”. Whether by being conscious of our roles as ‘subjects’ to the gaze of others we pretend to be absorbed. My series includes photographs that show people who are aware that they are being photographed but still remain unresponsive and have a blank expression, as if they are looking inwardly. I did not use a hidden camera as other photographers did (starting with Walker Evans in New York subway in 1938 and most recently Luc Delahaye in Paris metro in 1999), as I was not after an ‘objective’ recording or ‘truth’. However, the result was similar to theirs.
In Limbo
Text by Ian Jeffrey
In the old days, in the 1950s at least, we gave up our images more willingly to the camera. We were still participants in a great collective venture, and somehow it showed. But as time wore on, we became more sceptical about the idea of a collective destiny. Photographers too became more sceptical and began to show us at times when we were at a loss… as we are on the kind of rail journeys which are Eleni Mouzakiti’s subject in this book.
Why persist as a People’s portraitist in these changed conditions?
For several good reasons. The other who had once been primarily a representative of humanity has become, in the new scheme of things, altogether more of a mystery. At a glance we can distinguish relatively little, and especially in the heterogenous circumstances of the big city. One of the disappointments of the mobile phone is that it breaks the spell. Revealing far more of the humdrum life of the other than we want to know. Almost all of these pictures project encounters as minor melodramas, involving tension and suspicion. They re-enchant the world or re-phrase it as a tale told about people who harbour deep secrets. Secondly, the photographer herself leads an altogether more precarious life in these changed circumstances. In the old days it was a fully justified role, but that can no longer be said of it. In the absence of any good social reason the photographer lies open to challenge and even to threat, and it is easy to imagine that some of the dramatis personae in this collection were less than happy to appear on Mouzakiti’s stage. The photographer under these terms I now a hunter, someone who runs a risk, and whose mettle is tested, So, what we are also asked to attend to is her own predicament as a taker of images.
Mouzakiti is a late modernist in so far as she draws attention to her own viewpoint, and to her own existence as a kind of secret agent. Robert Frank did something like this with The Americans in the 1950’s as did Rene Burri with the Germans a few years later. The difference is that both of those photographers were interested in the culture at large with all its apparatus. Here, on the other hand, you can learn little about London in general. What happened from the 1970’s onwards was that we became more and more aware of ourselves as solitaries. The old modernism involved us physically in workshops and on dance-floors. The new postmodern culture , on the other hand, tends to pass directly from screen to mind. Because of this we have developed an idea of the body as somehow underused and problematic. The body, with all its expressive capacities, has been left to one side or in a kind of limbo. Where better to realise this disconnecting vision than in what the English call variously ‘the tube’ or ‘the underground’, the very epitome of limbo.
-Ian Jeffrey, Art Historian and Photography Critic
Eleni Mouzakiti is an Athens based visual artist, educator and curator of photographic exhibitions and publications.
After studying studied German Language and Literature at the University of Athens, FU Berlin and Ruprecht-Karl University of Heidelberg, she received an MA in Image and Communication from Goldsmiths College, University of London and a PhD (2004) in Arts and Humanities with a specialization in Photography as an Art Practice from Derby University, UK.
Eleni was a fellow of the Greek State Scholarship Foundation, the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation and the DAAD -German Academic Exchange Service.
Her photographic work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions and festivals internationally
Her works belong to the collection of the Portland Museum of Art, Oregon, USA, the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography (Greece), the State Museum of Contemporary Art (Greece), the ACG Art Collection and other private collections.
Committed to long term projects, in her work she focuses on human ecology issues, on ‘absorptive’ behaviour in the public realm, leisure time geography, landscape as a Fantasy of [not] belonging, memory and history.