i was there

I Was There

I Was There

Teresa Cos

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

Venice Film Festival, Lido of Venice

Frieze Art Fair, Regents Park, London

Venice Architecture Biennal, France Pavillion


Venice Film Festival, Hotel Excelsior, Lido of Venice

Milan Fashion Week, Dolce & Gabbana Show, Metropol Cinema

Venice Architecture Biennal, Japan Pavillion


Venice Architecture Biennal, Beyond Entropy Exhibition, Cini Foundation

Venice Architecture Biennal, Italy Pavillion


Venice Architecture Biennal, Biennal Gardens


Milan Fashion Week, Palazzo Giureconsulti

Venice Architecture Biennal, Russian Party, Palazzo Pisani Moretta

Venice Architecture Biennal, Italy Pavillion







Circuito Off Short Film Festival, White Trash Party, Lido of Venice

Milan Fashion Week, Luca Rebecchi Show, Palazzo Clerici

Venice Architecture Biennal, Italian Party, Palazzo Contarini

London Fashion Week, Sommerset House

Milan Fashion Week, Massimo Rebecchi Show, Palazzo Clerici

Milan Fashion Week, Antonio Marras Show, Triennale


Index

77.

78.

79.

80.

81.

83.

84.

85.

86.

87.

89.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

49.

51.

50.

51.

52.

53.

55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

69.

70.

71.

72.

73.

74.

75.

FIAC, Grand Palais, Paris


FIAC, Court Carrée du Louvre, Paris


Venice Architecture Biennal, Biennal Gardens

Venice Architecture Biennal, Biennal Pavillion


Milan Fashion Week, Massimo Rebecchi Show, Palazzo Clerici









London Fashion Week, Sommerset House

Venice Architecture Biennal, Italian Party, Palazzo Contarini


Milan Fashion Week, Roccobarocco Show, Loggia dei Mercanti







Venice Architecture Biennal, Japan Pavillion

Venice Film Festival, The Red Carpet, Lido of Venice









Venice Architecture Biennal, Corderie dell’Arsenale




I Was There

Teresa Cos

93

Qui fit, Maecenas, ut nemo, quam sibi sortem seu ratio dederit seu

fors obiecerit, illa contentus vivat, laudet diversa sequentes?1

There are places and situations in which the performance of life reaches

its highest level, becoming a deliberate theatrical act. Situations in which

being seen to be there, and playing a certain role, is the key reason that

justifies one’s presence.

Public relations rule our society, whether we like it or not. Being part of a

network is required nowadays, whatever the game one wants to partake

in. Despite the rise of internet based systems of social connection, per-

sonal interaction remains the most effective way of gaining someone’s

trust; five minutes of conversation with the right person can change

one’s life or career. This is even truer in the arts and culture world, where

it is often so hard to get in touch with someone at the highest level,

that it becomes easier to try and look for opportunities ( perhaps even

stealthily infiltrating when not invited! ) where one might “accidentally”

bump into the desired encounter. I am talking about galleries, museums,

private views, showcase events such as art fairs and exclusive parties.

However, once one manages to access this magical world, the truly ex-

hausting P.R. is still yet to begin. Before getting to speak with that right

person, all the performative rituals that are necessary to grasp his or her

attention, need to be initiated and extended to the moment - which may

also never come - in which one introduces himself. When this happens,

the next and most important phase of the performance is triggered; the

part where one tries to “sell” himself can now start. Sometimes partici-

pating in an event is not even about the purpose of meeting someone,

but just about the pleasure of being in the same room with the ‘cool’

crowd, in order to be able to tell people the next day : “I was there”.

1 See Orazio Flacco, “Satira I”, in Le Satire, tradotte con coscienza e serietà da Mosca, Rizzoli, Milano, 1945. ( Horatius,“Satire I”, in Satires - Can you tell me, Maecenas, why each one, unhappy with his condition, either earned by work or donated by fate, envies one of the others? )

As a matter of fact, this is what I chose as the title of this photo book.

I Was There is the result of something in-between a survey and a

jouney around art, film, and fashion events. It is a quest for signs which

metaphorically represent the artificial and temporary nature of such oc-

casions, and an observation of people’s interaction and behaviour. In-

ternational events have deliberately been chosen - Venice Architecture

Biennale, Venice Film Festival, Milan and London Fashion Weeks, Frieze

Art Fair and Paris FIAC (Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporaine) - to

show the globalised face of the culture industry and the resemblance of

its audience. However, even though attended events took place in just

four European cities, the people in the photographs come from all over

the world.

Using Erving Goffman’s studies about performances and Zygmund Bau-

man’s theory on liquid times as intellectual backgrounds, I tried to depict

a world that, in my opinion, highly reflects some of the most evident

characteristics of our society, such as anxiety in the struggle for success,

together with the desperate need for recognition and approval, which

make people live with the constant fear of being considered losers.

We want to impress, we want to please, we want to show that we can

be whoever we want to be, or better, whoever it is convenient to be

within a certain group of individuals. Sometimes this is an unconscious

process, sometimes it is deliberate, “performers may be sincere, or be

insincere but sincerely convinced of their own sincerity”2, but definitely

it comes to a point in which there are no boundaries between our true

selves and the selves we want to be. “This mask is our truer self, the

self we would like to be”3, comments Goffman. A mask can refer to any-

thing: clothes, accessories, a particular attitude, facial and speech pat-

terns. In accomplishing the shooting of I Was There, attention was paid

2 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Anchor Books,

New York, 1959, p. 77. 3 ibid., p. 30.

94

to all the expressive equipment intentionally or unwittingly employed by

the individuals during their performances, particularly to what Goffman-

refers to as setting and personal front. The setting involves furniture,

décor, physical layout, and other background items which supply the

scenery and stage... If the term setting refers to the scenic parts of ex-

pressive equipment, the term personal front refers to the items that we

most intimately identify with the performer himself and that we naturally

expect will follow the performer wherever he goes. As a part of personal

front we may include: insignia of office or rank; clothing; sex; age and

racial characteristics; size and looks; posture; speech patterns; facial ex-

pressions; bodily gestures; and the like.4

The curious observation of these qualities, together with the sense of

frustration that I have always felt whilst myself being a performer at

similar events, was one of the main points of interest that first brought

me to this project. This concept was initially realised in a small series of

images called Party Anima(l), shot during summer 2009, at Venice Art Bi-

ennale private views and Venice Film Festival after parties. I started, not

fully conscious of what I was doing, to take close-ups of gesticulating

hands, shaking hands, holding-glasses-of-champagne hands, holding-

cigarette-and-mobile-phone hands, as well as tattoos, clothes’ textures,

purses, backstage bangles. These are details that represented to me

wider signs of a constant pressure to pretend to be at ease in every

circumstance. I deliberately chose to avoid faces in the belief that there

was already so much information in those details and in those gestures

that I did not need facial expressions to speak about that carefully con-

trolled behaviour that so much recalls Sartre’s waiter:

All his behaviour seems to us a game. He applies himself to chain-

ing his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating

4 ibid., p. 34.

the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mecha-

nisms;...He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he play-

ing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing

at being a waiter in a café. ...The waiter in the café plays with his

condition in order to realise it...5

I Was There is based on the concept of self-recognition. Aware of the

risk of sounding naive and pretentious, the book is directed to the same

typology of people depicted in its photographs; because whilst a good

percentage of them are conscious that the dynamics that lie in fashion

and art events are merely to be considered rules of a game one needs to

play, some others take this too seriously, becoming victims of an over-

imposed system. Moreover, I never considered myself different from

the subjects of my photographs; I was there too, I have been there be-

fore, and I am sure I will be there in the future.

I Was There looks at a certain aspect of our society using irony as an an-

tidote to disappointment, but also as a weapon to instil the viewer with

the awareness that we are all together in this facade. Still, the hope is to

provoke a concerned smile, rather than a laugh.

Garry Winogrand is the photographer who in my opinion was able to

best express this kind of subtle feeling. In his book Public Relations, he

draws images of the late ‘60s fanciest parties, thrown in New York City’s

culture Meccas, such as the MOMA and the Guggenheim Museum, in

the presence of the most famous artist of all time, such as Andy Warhol

and Frank Stella, alongside images of the protests that at the same time

were crowding the streets below. His ironic attitude is not intimidated by

the subjects depicted in the photographs; regardless, Winogrand takes

the mickey both of the arty New York scene as well as the young

5 As in Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Anchor Books, New York, 1959, p. 81

95

activist - broken glasses and blood on his face. The editing and the struc-

ture of the book, that were carried out at that time by the curator Tod

Papageorge, are what leave us astonished at the end, with a smile yes,

but also with the feeling that something has just been provoked in our

minds.

The use of the flash light has been a clear choice since the beginning. As

I was taking pictures mainly at fashion events or in situations in which

the attention given to style is an integral part of the mise-en-scène, I

thought that I wanted to play with features belonging to fashion photog-

raphy. For this reason I looked at the work of German photographer Juer-

gen Teller, who has made the use of flash light one of his most distinc-

tive style marks, in particular the use of shadows on clear surfaces, so

cold and dry that creates that sense of unease that I wanted my pictures

to be infilled with. But at the same time I also wanted to use the flash for

its most brutal, and at the same time playful characteristic, of creating

images that almost look as if they were staged, and in which people are

frozen in time as manikins. Observation, interaction with subjects and

speed have been the most important issues to achieve this intention.

The flash indeed can be a challenge: you don’t often get to shoot the

same picture twice, because if people are not aware of your presence

the first time, after such a bolt of light, they will be, and inevitably get

self-conscious, making the second shot pointless. At the same time, at

events such as fashion weeks, the opposite problem can occur. A lot

of the people there are in fact dying to be photographed, to find them-

selves in the style page of a fashion blog. So they pose for you, which

is not necessarily a good thing. But as they don’t bother about the flash,

because it makes them feel like stars, you can at least keep on shooting

pretending you are being accommodating, till the moment comes, sooner

or later, in which tired of smiling or looking at you, they will drop the veil,

and finally give you the picture you wanted. This is basically the loss of

what Goffman defines the maintenance of expressive control, the mo-

ment that can reveal what lies behind the mask of the performers.

A performer may accidentally convey incapacity, impropriety, or dis-

respect by momentarily losing muscular control of himself. He may

trip, stumble, fall; he may belch, yawn, make a slip of the tongue,

scratch himself, or be flatulent; he may accidentally impinge upon

the body of another participant. Secondly the performer may act in

such a way as to give the impression that he is too much or too lit-

tle concerned with the interaction. He may stutter, forget his lines,

appear nervous, or guilty, or self-conscious; he may give way to

inappropriate outbursts of laughter, anger,...he may show too much

serious involvement and interest, or too little.6

In other words, we must be aware that the impression of reality fostered

by the performances that we deliver in public, is a delicate and fragile

thing that can be shattered by very minor mishaps. The expressive co-

herence that is required in performances points out a crucial discrepancy

between our “all-too-human selves and our socialized selves”7. When

someone is caught in one of those revealing moments, the flash light -

together with a smart framing to insert the human figure in an unusual

or double sensed position - transforms a simple gesture into an evoca-

tion of something that goes beyond the image. The viewer is left with a

sense of curiosity mixed with doubt, and this is exactly what gives value

to the picture.

The process of editing the pictures has been very hard. When dealing

with a project like this, that always involves the presence of people, you

are somehow obliged to shoot a lot of photographs. When you go

6 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Anchor Books, New York, 1959, p. 60.

7 ibid., p. 63.

96

home and start looking through them, you realise immediately that the

things you couldn’t see at the very moment of the shooting, now be-

come the reason why you choose a picture instead of another. It is re-

ally challenging to try and keep a complex scenario, such as a group of

people, together in a single frame, because there is no way of having

total control over the situation. Part of the framing is always conscious:

you see someone interesting, you follow him, you focus on him. But it’s

the unpredictable that makes a picture worth choosing, or that thing that

whilst being still perceivable, stands outside the picture; for instance, a

cut arm of someone outside the frame can be the key element of the

entire composition.

The book alternates rhythmically between single and double page

spreads, with the single usually occurring on the right. The only pictures

that stand alone on the left introduce the two core moments of the book.

The first is a digression on events attended in Italy. This is probably the

most intimately constructed part of the book, as during the editing I real-

ised that I had unconsciously shot some pictures that spoke to me about

the decadence of my home country. The second digression is dedicated

to art fairs, with a particular attention not only to the behaviour of the au-

dience at these events, but also to its interactions with and reactions to

art works. When constructing the pairs and the sequence itself, I had to

deal with complex choices, in order to achieve the specific mood I was

looking for. The photographs of details that represent the artificiality of

the events I attended (for instance a picture of electricity cables running

along the stairs of a XVIII century Milan palace) helped me to create that

feeling of untouchable tension which to me represents the theme of the

entire book. People’s glances are the other main thread, because they

speak alone of the core theme of the book, the above described anxiety

and need for recognition. This is perceivable simply by the tension

in people’s eyes, that remind of Sartre’s “attentive pupil who wishes

to be attentive, his eyes riveted on the teacher, his ears open wide, so

exhausts himself in playing the attentive role that ends up by no longer

hearing anything.8 Similarly we can be so caught inside our characters,

that we surround ourselves with lines that don’t belong to us. I Was

There, yes, but where exactly? The world of events is so crowded with

everything, that ends up being empty.

When one looks at the emptiness of current art, the only question is

how much such a machine can continue to function in the absence

of any new energy, in an atmosphere of critical disillusionment and

commercial frenzy, and with all the players totally indifferent? If it

can continue, how long will this illusionism last? A hundred years,

two hundred? This society is like a vessel whose edges move ever

wider apart, and in which the water never comes to the boil.9

I guess that if one substitutes ‘current art’ with ‘current society’ the

equation doesn’tnreally change, does it? And who are these ‘indifferent

players’, if not us? Even if, contrary to Bauman I believe that there is en-

ergy to be found in new generations, we definitely reached a break point

and we are in desperate need for new perspectives.

8 As in Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Anchor Books, New York, 1959, p. 42.

9 Jean Baudrillard, Fragments, Verso, London, 2007, p.25.

i was there

Documents

parismilan fashion week

triennalemilan fashion

triennalelondon fashion

londonmilan fashion

biennal pavillionfiac

regents park

grand palais

lido of venicefrieze