On Field Work

by Alison Nordström           

Charlotte Haslund-Christensen’s Natives: The Danes is a series of  recently completed photographic diptychs showing small groups of Danish people in rural, urban and suburban Danish landscapes. In exhibition, it is accompanied by systematically presented arrangements of objects that relate to these people and their lives, including cigarette packets and hand-crocheted toilet paper covers. In this, and in the photographs themselves, Haslund-Christensen references the products and practices of anachronistic ethnographic science and its representation. She has chosen a complex metaphor.

The subjects standing  before her camera are generally attractive folk, healthy, well dressed, even chic, in that casual way of people bien dans sa peauwho are not going to let their clothing get in the way of what they want to do. Honestly represented and representing themselves honestly, they stand, shoulder to shoulder, in a pose so common to a variety of photographic conventions that they could be read with equal ease as teams, colleagues, families, scientific specimens, or symbols. The notion of specimen comes to the fore in the other half of these diptychs. Here, the same people, standing in the same relationship to each other, have turned, or have been turned, so that they can be photographed from behind. We can easily and voyeuristically study details of clothing, hairstyle and stance with an intimacy and intensity that actuality and good manners would forbid. 

Photographically, this is intentional and intelligent work, historically informed and visually arresting. It is, on many levels, a statement about contemporary Danish identity, but it is also about the observation and presentation of that identity, and, most important, a self-reflexive exploration of one young Danish woman’s relationship to it.

            The visual vocabulary of photography includes more different possibilities and uses than its generally accepted histories usually include. In addition to the narrow but familiar canon of the art photograph, photographs have long been made to serve as evidence, souvenirs, aides memoires, commodities, science and entertainment. In the rich, post-modern slurry of contemporary photographic practice, we find that vernacular photographs are as productive a source of thought and inspiration for artists as are the undertakings of their predecessors who made art. The photograph’s remarkable ability to record and index were noted from its invention, and use of the camera to fix people as subjects of scientific inquiry began as early as the 1840’s. The particular visual form of some of the photographs used by anthropology to invent itself has become the trope by which Haslund-Christensen explores her own culture.

             The relationship between still photographs and ethnography is long, slippery, ambiguous and complex. It is important to note that in the nineteenth century, Western studies of exotic people were not so much conducted in the field as they were in the ivory towers of Cambridge, London, Paris, Berlin and Copenhagen. There, philosophers, naturalists, theologians, and geographers pieced together fragments of information conveyed to them from far away by missionaries, naval officers, tourists, entrepreneurs and adventurers. This information might be obtained from letters, diaries or first-hand accounts, but often it was manifested in the material forms of cloth, weapons, religious objects, human bones and photographs. 

            It appears that most of the photographs used in this way were made not with the intention of science but as an entrepreneurial response to the hunger in Western Europe and the United States for the novelty, and sense of possession, of these previously unimaginable people. Only occasionally were systematic efforts made to document exotic people as bodies to be measured and analyzed. Most notable of these, perhaps, was the 1869 project undertaken by biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and so brilliantly considered by Elizabeth Edwards in Raw Histories. Subjects were posed full length, back and front, in unnatural positions conducive to comparisons of limb length and cranial capacity. Often forced against a grid, subject both of the photograph and of the vagaries of Imperial control, these now nameless people remind us of insects impaled upon pins with their scraps of definitive Latin names.

It is the visual rhetoric of this taxonomic impulse that attracts Haslund-Christensen. Her subjects are identified only by place names, as “ Natives of Aarhus” or “Natives of Falster.” Their front-and-back posing, while appearing less coerced than that of the cowed beings of  Huxley’s era, is a deliberate reference to it. Like its cousin, the mugshot, this kind of photograph must be in some way about unequal power relationships. The colonial administrator who turned a camera on a subject person 150 years ago was affirmed by the camera’s inherent ability to transform the individual into a representative type, but he is also demonstrating his authority over the person who stands still at his command. In this period, we find very few photographs of colonists that were made by the colonized.

            What, then, are the implications of Haslund-Christensen’s presentation of her fellow-Danes as Other? There is, first, an exercise in irony; these solid, pleasant, unthreatening, middle-class Scandinavians are unexotic, even to this non-Dane. For Haslund-Christensen, they would be unremarkable to the point of invisibility unless othered by the visual language of their representation that she chooses. We must remember here that othering is a two-way street. The distance Haslund-Christensen imposes on her subjects also allows her to be an outsider.

            The image most important to an understanding of this series serves as the frontispiece of this book. It is a portrait of the photographer, seated on a battered trunk, wearing the expeditionary kit of 100 years ago: tweed knickers, desert boots and vest. It is a romantic image that evokes Osa Johnson, or Yvette Borup Andrews: those flapper-companion adventurers of the 1920’s. It is a performance that distances her further from the contemporary quotidian presence of her subjects. Haslund-Christensen is a descendant of generations of explorers, adventurers and amateur anthropologists. In the 1920’s, her dashing grandfather Henning Haslund-Christensen collected traditional garments, silver jewelry and music over several years in Outer Mongolia. His name is quickly recognized by most Danes. In simultaneous homage, challenge, and self-reflexion, Charlotte Haslund-Christensen creates a persona that separates her from her current circumstances in both attitude and time.

          It is this performative element that distinguishes Natives: The Danesfrom either naïve document or easy parody of an anachronistic and racist visual trope. Haslund-Christensen creates a theatrical event in which she stars, casting herself as an intrepid explorer, equipped with maps, expeditionary vehicle and an entourage. Her month-long ventures into the cities and boondocks of this most domestic of countries are the venues of important art-making, however ephemeral. The photographs produced as part of this performance are almost peripheral, but they are all that remain.

         What delights us most about the inherent slipperiness of photographs is the way their uses and consequent meanings shift, with apparent ease and elegance, over time. Haslund-Christensen has appropriated an anachronistic visual structure made for what was then considered science to consider profound contemporary personal issues of identity and place. We appreciate the emotional ambiguity, formal symmetry and intelligence of this art project.

         At the same time, we must also appreciate that these pictures stand as a historical document that will increase in value and meaning over time. Thirty or forty years ago, I remember that it was usually easy to identify various European nationalities by such clues as shoes, socks, jewelry, luggage, hats and cameras. This is no longer possible; Haslund-Christensen’s Danes wear the international uniform of  Levis, Nikes and T-shirts with logos. Today we barely notice; one hundred years from now it will be vital evidence of style, design, desire, taste, habit, custom and commerce.

          I find myself returning to these photographs often. Taxonomy rejects favoritism, but I have favorites. “Natives of Almind” shows us four neutrally-clad figures against a dead flat monochromatic winter landscape under a thick gray sky. The backs to us are broad, silent and unyielding; the clothing is weirdly without historical referent. Little incongruities - the older woman’s pearls, the color-blocked seat of the younger farmer’s work pants - continue to resonate and tease. I think of the photographs of Edward Curtis, of August Sander. In Haslund-Christensen’s simple statement of fact, we find powerful romantic and wistful overtones that constitute the inherent pathos of all photographs - a reminder of mortality. In Natives: The Danes, both format and subject carry the suggestion that these types, as people, though captured on paper, are vanishing, as of course they, and we, are.

Alison Nordström is Curator of Photographs, George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York.
She holds a PhD in Cultural and Visual Studies.