Protest Photographs

Ken Grant reviews Chauncey Hare's Protest Photographs (from issue 27 of 8 Magazine).

In a recent radio interview, a Detroit schoolteacher spoke of her wonder at seeing a return to prairie for many acres of former urban space in her city. Whole communities, originally formed after a mass migration from the South towards the car plants and associated industries in the north of America, had lived through the Motor City era and found themselves surplus and disoriented after years of economic attrition. As one, they had to rethink how they might continue their lives and had eventually turned towards each other in co-operation, to grow orchards and farmland within the crumbling industrial landscape that had once been dominated by their provider and master. Such a rethinking of roles always seems to come at points of crisis, when the dominance of figure industries no longer seem adequate, correct or viable. It brings a necessary departure towards a more uncertain but hopeful and fulfilling way to live. I am mindful of such a crisis (albeit a very singular one) and the shadow of the industry that encouraged it, as I move through the considerable volume of photographs that fittingly returns Chauncey Hare’s work to its place among the most important American photographic projects of the last century.

Over nearly 400 pages, Protest Photographs draws on a small number of photographs from Hare’s 1978 Aperture book Interior America and its 1984 follow-up This Was Corporate America and contextualises them among many previously unpublished pictures now held as an archive that the photographer offered the University of Berkeley, California in 1999. If Berkeley had rejected the photographer’s approach, it seems very possible that the work would have been destroyed at the photographer’s own instruction, closing a career that in reality had drawn to a halt in the 1980s, when Hare stopped photographing to retrain and begin working as an adviser, counsellor and therapist to workers and their families.

The source of the ultimate dislocation that took Hare away from the world of photography is an undercurrent in the narratives that open this book. Instead of another polite appraisal, the kind that primes so many photography books, the photographer again deploys the strategy that so distinguished Interior America – using the early pages to unpack his life in open, earnest paragraphs. These personal statements are articulate, intimate and moving, building a foundation for pictures that – despite such an unguarded commentary – flow singularly across each right hand page in a structure as regular and predictable as a working life. Looking at each picture, it becomes impossible to dismiss the emotional crises that shaped, implored and ultimately stopped Hare’s progress as a photographer. Whether hereditary (Hare’s father gained a promotion that took him away from his Irish Appalachian roots, towards later years of depression and disaffection) or learned, across the 29 years Hare worked as an engineer, the act of photography is, before everything, a channel for personal

and political application – for a protest that is as emotionally open as any I have understood in the medium.

Working as an employee of Standard Oil and later Chevron, Hare had begun his project in 1968 – a year after a works assignment had briefly taken him to a Mississippi region animated by inequality and Civil Rights protests. After what was perhaps a shocking and formative experience he returned to a normal routine, using his lunch-breaks to move out of the workplace and escape the tensions and monotonies of a working life that was increasingly shaping his own physical and mental well being. The act of photography, it seemed, could temporarily assuage the nausea that Hare experienced each evening after returning from his job, a condition that even his doctors could not account for.

Walking around the periphery of the factory in 1968, Hare had been stopped by a local man, Orville England, who was keen to sell the photographer a plastic camera. He had been invited inside England’s home – a home that, years later, Hare himself would move into – to act as carer, as the old man’s life, blighted by work-related asbestos poisoning, eventually reached its difficult and inevitable end. After that early meeting, Hare had returned with a plate camera and photographed England again, a move that spurred him on to consciously photograph the rooms and residents of the modest houses within the proximity of his workplace. He would recognise lives lived out uncomfortably close to the pollution that hung in the air. He would note how security, prospects and plans were hindered by the economic fluctuations that shrank and expanded industries like lungs, causing uncertainty and for youthful ambitions to wane.

The photographer, who would wake up scared at 5 am each morning, eventually left his job and – with his new partner, the psychotherapist Judy Wyatt – progressed a relationship based on a shared and deep pain, felt about what was wrong with the treatment of working people in the society they both were part of.

It’s not hard to imagine the challenge of gaining access into these homes – a process built upon trust and a nervous but determined momentum that Hare explains thoroughly in his own words – before setting up the camera to photograph. Hare’s photographic technique seems in part refined and in part abrupt or technically erratic, yet it’s always compelling. While some photographs are gently lit, with diffused light perfectly balancing interiors with the views of industrial plants that can be seen through windows, others are illuminated with the intrusion of a harsh and undisguised light. Flash plasters deep black shadows of inhabitants onto walls, creating rooms that are tight and discomforting. Elsewhere black, loosely pinned electric cables chase across walls, rendering power supplies as unstable and vulnerable. Men and women are often alone, held down underneath low grey ceilings. Family members are often sat back within the photograph, among the iconography of the wider family, the Kennedy government or religious devotion. Sometimes people are framed in doorways or wedged at the edges of a frame – occasionally they are asleep fully clothed and curled around exhausted children on still-made beds. The extreme coverage of a wide-angle lens shows complete rooms, as residents sit or stand, passively looking into their homes, surely unaware of their inclusion in the photographer’s frame.

For the first time, this new book reproduces a number of group portraits made between 1968 and 1972 – loosely structured, inclusive pictures of extended families who fill rooms by sitting on temporary chairs, which have been gathered – along with their children – and carried from other parts of the home. Working externally, Hare often photographed the sprawl of housing in the industrial belts of Pennsylvania and Ohio, and there are echoes of a wider history of the American economic landscape – and of the history of photography, as the cemetery Hare photographs in 1972 in Bethlehem borders the same housing that Walker Evans had photographed for Roy Stryker in 1935, as part of the FSA programme to document struggling workers who merited the country’s support, after the 1929 Stock Market Crash. Hare recounts how, over his years of production, he felt obliged to “honour the reality of each person and their home” and speaks of a need to relate “the truth of people’s lives”. Yet this is not a measured, dispassionate process. In the book’s afterword, curator Jack von Euw suggests that Hare did not want the book to be about himself – but this somehow seems unavoidable, with the photographer struggling to escape from his own working conditions and inevitably affected by the lives he finds inside the America he concerns himself with. As he moved further from photography into counselling and support work, it’s clear that perhaps photography had its own conditions that the photographer wrestled with. A set of Hare’s photographs were bought by the Museum of Modern Art, yet he grew to hold a mistrust of such institutions, noting how their organisational structures closely resembled those he had been at odds with throughout his life as an engineer. Hare would later picket a San Francisco MoMA showing of Szarkowski’s Mirrors and Windows exhibition that included examples of his work, in a one-man protest over the show’s corporate sponsor.

Chauncey Hare’s work deserves to be understood alongside Walker Evans’American Photographs or Nan Goldin’s first book, as a singular and articulate voice speaking of the condition of a real America – the same America that the poet Fred Voss, himself a factory machinist, would later describe as a people “as real as a Marshall’s eviction notice, or a pink termination slip”. This new book offers a serious, passionate and exhaustive statement about the nature of working peoples’ lives to a contemporary audience witnessing the largest economic downturn since the 1930s. While Hare has created an important and singular response to such conditions, and found a life beyond the circumstances

that once constrained him, in doing so he has foregrounded questions around the role of the photographer and the possibility for photography to say something of worth about something we can no longer ignore. Ken Grant

Two Slight Returns: Chauncey Hare and Marianne Wex

Mike SperlingerPublished 19.04.2011

Chauncey Hare, 'Richmond, California, 1969', 1969, photograph. Courtesy the artist and Steidl Writing about the poet Aidan Andrew Dun, Iain Sinclair laid out a contradictory double-imperative: ‘The poet has a dual responsibility: to give himself over entirely to his work, and to stage-manage a career.’1 The formula is quintessentially Sinclairian: Romantic realpolitik. The first imperative might seem more palatable than the second, which it in any case excludes with that ‘entirely’ – but palatable only if we

prefer our poets, or artists, to have vocations rather than careers. For Chauncey Hare and Marianne Wex, the question of a career, of art as a profession, was unresolved in ways which have affected the legacy of their work, and even the legitimacy of categorising them as ‘artists’. While they were contemporaries, making their most important work in the 1970s, they had little else obviously in common: Hare was a documentary photographer based in California; Wex was an artist and art teacher living in Hamburg. They never met, or exhibited together, nor were they even aware of one another’s work. But in their choices, the vicissitudes of their reputations, and the political valencies of their work, there are parallels which suggest how vocations can unhinge careers, and how giving oneself over entirely to the work might mean abandoning it altogether.*When Chauncey Hare staged a one-man protest outside the exhibition ‘Mirrors and Windows’ at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1979, he seemed to be entirely neglecting Sinclair’s second imperative. The curator Jack van Euw, who oversaw the 2009 publication of a new Steidl edition of Hare’s work called Protest Photographs, recollects being handed a leaflet by Hare as he stood in line for a lecture by the show’s curator: ‘I read his text and it crossed my mind that he was a lunatic.’ Hare was protesting, amongst other things, against Philip Morris’s sponsorship of the show and the inclusion of one of his images in it. To von Euw, encountering Hare for the first time, it appeared to be straightforward ‘career suicide’.2 Hare started out as a landscape photographer in his spare time, while working at the Chevron oil company in California. His experiences during a work assignment in Mississippi during the civil rights upheavals of 1967 were transformative, for both his politics and his photography, and the following year he began a series of portraits of people in their homes which became an exhibition and later a book, both with the title Interior America. Working in Oakland, California and the Sierra foothills, and subsequently in the Ohio valley where he had grown up, Hare focused mostly, though not exclusively, on working class homes; shooting with a wide-angle lens, his images divide their attention equally between the inhabitants and their decor. They are extraordinary photographs: compassionate but also formal and complex, constantly interested in the interiors as sets dressed for living, which are often themselves full of other framed images on the walls. Sometimes his subjects are posing, though rarely looking into camera; sometimes they asleep, or hypnotised by the glow of an out-of-shot television set.

Chauncey Hare, 'Cincinnati, Ohio, 1971', 1971, photograph. Courtesy the artist and SteidlSubsequently, Hare’s focus shifted to the workplace and he took images at Chevron and around Silicon Valley, for a second book called This Was Corporate America (1985). But, despite receiving three Guggenheim grants to support his photography, he struggled to find teaching work and also found himself in conflict with his employers: he left Chevron, apparently after conflict over his documentation of the company’s working practices, and was fired from a position at the Environmental Protection Agency, at least in part, Hare felt, because of a study he had conducted into employee morale. Having retrained as a family therapist, he became a specialist in workplace abuse and published a book on the subject with his partner Judy Wyatt. He abandoned photography entirely and his previous body of work remained in storage until 1999, when he entered protracted negotiations to donate it to a public institution. Hare’s stipulations – that the work could never be sold and that it could only be exhibited alongside one of two explanatory statements he had written – meant at least one museum turned his donation down, before van Jack van Euw secured it for the Bancroft Library at the University of California. It is hard to think of many careers less stage-managed than Hare’s. Even in the afterword to Protest Photographs, van Euw is frank about the element of self-sabotage: ‘Chauncey was so intent on getting his message across that he seemed to be stifling any other interpretation or engagement with his work.’3 Hare had always been acutely uncomfortable about the gap between the world of his subjects and the art world where their images circulated:From the beginning, I knew that to receive photo grants I was expected to present my photographs in a formal art way without accompanying text and to allow each of my photos to be used as a work of art that stands alone […] The formal art process dehumanised the photographs by turning them into purely aesthetic objects. It allowed and valued only that reality attributed and defined by the viewer.4 Hare identified himself with his subjects, and moreover identified his images with them too – selling prints, he said, ‘would have felt like selling the people’.5

Hare’s images themselves, however, are more ambivalent than all this would suggest. Discussing how welcoming people generally were when he asked to photograph them in their homes, Hare writes: ‘Easy entry meant I had a responsibility to honour what I saw and photographed – especially when I used a wide angle lens that took in more than what people thought I was photographing.’6 Many of the images testify to that slight deception, and it is part of what makes them compelling, but it complicates, or qualifies, Hare’s idea of responsibility. Similarly, Hare’s close identification of the people with their images is strange insofar as they are not named in the captions (only the place and date of the photograph, when known). Their particularity slides into something else – Hare himself calls them ‘archetypal images of America’.7 Protest Photographs shimmers with the tension between the claim implied by its title and the much more classical, and irreducibly aesthetic, appeal of many of its images.*Around the same time that Hare was protesting outside SFMoMA, a very different photography book was published in Germany. It was by an artist called Marianne Wex and its full title was ‘Let’s Take Back Our Space’: ‘Female’ and ‘Male’ Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures (1979). Wex had started out as a painter, but an interest in body language had sent her out into the streets of Hamburg in the early 1970s with her Mamiya camera, where she had started to take pictures of people unawares at train stations and street crossings. After she had taken around 3,000 photographs, she began to sort them according to typologies of body language and to observe the differences between the sexes. While continuing to take more images, she also started to research ancient and mediaeval statuary as a record of previous era’s ‘ideals’, and to plunder contemporary media images too.

Marianne Wex, excerpt from 'Let's Take Back Our Space', 1979. Courtesy the artist Let’s Take Back Our Spaceis organised thematically. The first half of the book focuses on contemporary images and groups them by posture (‘Seated persons, leg and feet positions’, ‘Standing persons, arm and hand positions’, etc.). On the left hand of each spread, images of men in a given posture run along the top and of women along the bottom; the right hand spread tends to be sparer, often reserved for one or two ‘exceptions’ to the stereotypically gendered gestures. The second half focuses on statuary and includes

a number of short texts on art history, gender and socialisation, and accounts of Wex’s own experiences. As a whole, the book features a bewildering array of photographic source material: Wex’s street photographs, photojournalism, advertisements, art historical reproductions, family album snapshots, pornography, mail order catalogue clippings, publicity shots, television and film stills, etc. Wex crops and juxtaposes the images purely according to their gestural content, and with a ruthless wit – for example, on page 102 we find a man standing on a field of bodies, Jewish victims of Nazi genocide, juxtaposed with, amongst others, a muscleman from a home exercise ad and a tourist on a Bangkok beach in similar poses. At such moments her work takes on an affinity with Hans-Peter Feldmann, otherwise a very different artist, while at other times there are clear parallels with feminist contemporaries like Martha Rosler and Sanja Iveković. Like Hare, Wex’s project derives part of its dynamic from its apparent contradictions. Its repetitions and reiterations can make the conventional postures it is resisting seem archetypal, inescapable; in defence of individuality, it presents serried ranks of stereotypes. There is something of Hare, too, in the vestigial echo of voyeurism: if his images encompass more than his subjects were aware of, hers were, for the most part, completely unwitting (which was necessary, as she pointed out, to capture unconscious postures). And its sheer exhaustiveness is offset by its idiosyncratic categorisations, the exuberant subjectivity of its taxonomies. This last characteristic was something Wex was very conscious of, and understood as an attempt to overcome the separation between the sciences and everyday existence: ‘knowledge is gathered in single fields without checking the relationships within the individual fields. And all of this happens while bracketing out the so-called personal feelings’.8

Marianne Wex, excerpt from 'Let's Take Back Our Space', 1979. Courtesy the artist Wex’s project originally took the form of dozens of large collaged panels, which were first exhibited as part of ‘Kunstlerinnen International 1877–1977’ at NGBK in Berlin in 1977. It was well received and various elements of it were included in shows internationally over the following years, including one at the ICA

in London in the early 1980s. Wex, however, was already turning away from her art practice by the time the book version of her work was published. Around the beginning of the period when she began making Let’s Take Back Our Space, Wex had been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness; after the book was published she travelled widely and investigated alternative medicine, during which time her condition worsened before finally going into remission. Subsequently, she studied for several years under a natural healer called Lily Cornford in London, and for the last two decades she has given seminars on self-healing to small groups of women all around Europe, often drawing on what she felt she had learnt during the 1970s about the effects of comportment on women’s physical and mental health. Her work served her as a teaching aid, while remaining otherwise out of circulation.*In many ways, Wex’s project was diametrically opposed to Hare’s. Hare was concerned, ostensibly at least, with individuals, whereas Wex was interested in patterns and stereotypes; Hare’s images are expansive, trying to register every incidental detail, whereas Wex’s are reduced and cropped to serve illustrative purposes (some are reversed horizontally, for example, to make the homologies clearer); Hare’s subjects are always located within space, whereas the only locus for Wex’s is their own bodies; and so on. What the two share, nevertheless, is a kind of career trajectory: from increasingly politicised art-making to an abandonment of the role of artist altogether in favour of therapeutic practices, in the broadest sense. Hare, as well as setting himself in opposition to the ‘formal art process’, rejects even the label of ‘photographer’: ‘I do not now see myself as a “photographer”, but as a working person who has made photographs for a short period of his life.’9 Wex, for her part, ‘didn’t mind if it was called art, any art to me is research’.10 Feeling that almost all of the artistic and conceptual tools she had inherited were derived from patriarchal forms, she resolved to, ‘put all my energies in creating new forms with other women [and] stop concerning myself with the analysis of the world of men’.11 Abandoning art, importantly, is not the same as apostasy. Neither Hare nor Wex has taken the well-established anti-career path of the wayward poète maudit, glorifying renunciation; we are a long way from Rimbaud giving up poetry for gun-running. Hare and Wex both seem to have felt vocations (‘the signals that came from inside,’ as Hare puts it) that called them through and then beyond art, at a moment when ‘socially-engaged’ or ‘research-based’ practices were not on the career menu for artists – while at the same time more contingent factors (conflict at work, illness) affected their choices. Their subsequent abandonment of art practice, and of any stage-managing of their erstwhile art careers, in each case helped to condemn their considerable bodies of work to relative obscurity. In fact, their subsequent careers perhaps retroactively contributed to this process too: therapy and healing are things contemporary art tends to keep at arm’s length, perceiving them as too connected to ideas of instrumentalised self-expression and catharsis.12 Reviewing Interior America for the New Yorker in 1979, Janet Malcolm compared it to Walker Evans and Robert Frank’s work, but concluded cautiously, ‘it is too early to tell about Hare’s place in photography’.13 For over two decades that place has been very marginal. It is only fairly recently, with the Steidl publication and the first exhibition of Hare’s work in Europe – some of the Interior America images featured in the show ‘Anonymes’, curated by David Campany and Diane Dufour, at Le Bal in Paris last year – that Hare’s work has begun to receive serious attention again. Wex’s book is long out of print and the original panels had been in storage at the Bildwechsel archive of women’s art in Hamburg, until a small selection were included in a show which I curated for Focal Point Gallery in Southend in the UK in 2009; the gallery subsequently published a small catalogue, with reproductions from the original book and newly commissioned essays. The strip-mining of ‘lost’ artists of the 1960s and 1970s has become a small industry. The most telling example is perhaps Lee Lozano, who made ‘dropping out’ of the art world into a self-cancelling performance at the time, but whose work has undergone spectacular reappraisal. But simple acts of restitution and revaluation, however merited, risk papering over the fissures into which those artists’ careers had fallen in the first place – not least because, in many cases, those fissures remain. The slight returns which are no such a feature of contemporary art’s relationship to its past should not fool us into forgetting the gaps, lapses, occlusions and omissions which necessitated them in the first place. Similarly, if individual artworks or bodies of work are ‘orphaned’ by artists’ later life choices, then

they pass down to us with a set of perplexingly familiar but intractable questions: about life and work, intention and history. What, for example, would Hare or Wex’s images look like considered instead as part of a life practice, a continuum with what they chose to do since they stopped making them? Are artists really, ultimately, responsible for their own reputations? And are we are any better equipped now than thirty years ago to answer what it really means to have a career in art – or, for that matter, to abandon one? Thanks to Steidl & Partners for allowing the use of two images from Protest Photographs by Chauncey Hare (2009).

Footnotes1. Iain Sinclair, Lights Out For The Territory, London: Granta, 1997, p.154.↑2. Chauncey Hare, Protest Photographs, Gottingen: Steidl, 2009, p.369.↑3. Ibid., p.372.↑4. Ibid., p.16.↑5. Ibid.↑6. Ibid., p.14.↑7. Ibid., p.16.↑8. Marianne Wex, ‘Let’s Take Back Our Space’ (trans. Joahanna Albert with Susan Schultz), Hamburg:

Frauenliteraturverlag Hermine Fees, 1979, p.10.↑9. C. Hare, Protest Photographs, op. cit., p.20.↑10. Interview with the author, August 2009. Audio of the interview is available athttp://

www.focalpoint.org.uk/archive/exhibitions/13/ ↑11. M. Wex, ‘Let’s Take Back Our Space’, op. cit., p.350.↑12. Therapy remains permissible, of course, when clearly introduced and neutralised as subject matter.↑13. Janet Malcolm, ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem, PA’, The New Yorker, 6 August 1979, p.80.↑

Chauncey Hare - "Interior America"Hare's book of domestic photographs, made in Western Pennsylvania and Oakland, California, was published by Aperture in 1978. The pictures are drenched with seventies photo aesthetics; hard flash, wide angle lense, and casual compositions. Many of the photographs feel like scouting pictures from various locations in "Silence of The Lambs" The best of them are more humorous than they are bleak. And much of them are down right depressing. Hare has had a somewhat odd and unique career history. Only a small amount of his work has been published and it rarely shows up in galleries or museums. "Chauncey Hare does not define himself as a photographer, but instead an engineer, a family therapist and, above all, a protester. Funded by three Guggenheim Fellowships and three National Endowment Fellowships, he spent only a short period of his life making photographs. Frustrated by the photo art world, he photographed only intermittently to 1985, when he stopped making photographs altogether. He has an engineering degree from Columbia University, an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, a Masters Degree in Organization Development from Pepperdine University, and a Masters Degree in Clinical Psychology from Sierra University. He and his wife Judith Wyatt are co-authors of the denial-breaking clinical handbook Work Abuse: How to Recognize and Survive It (1997). As a licensed family therapist Hare now helps working people – in person, on the phone, and on the internet."

Protest Photographs by Chauncey Hare

Over the next month, time willing, I will be featuring several books which are my picks for best books of the year. The first is the new Steidl and Steven Kasher publication of Chauncey Hare's Protest Photographs . Chauncey Hare is known primarily for his 1978 book Interior America from Aperture. Attuned to his own estrangement in the corporate world being a research engineer for Standard Oil, he began photographing as an escape from his everyday routine. In his written introductory essay he describes the physical and psychological toll that such an environment had on his health including daily nausea and extreme panic disorders from which he suffered. These unpleasant attacks would let up as the week ended and Hare could look forward to photographing during the weekends. Starting with 35mm and graduating to a Burke and James 5x7 camera, Hare was initially too shy to approach people directly so he described the landscape around the homes of Richmond, California where he lived. On one occasion in 1968 Hare was approached by a man who offered to sell him a camera. This invitation into the man's home led Hare to start to explore the interiors lives of the workers in the area. Citing the resonance of photographers like Evans and Russell Lee, Hare methodically worked to gain access into people's living rooms and three Guggenheim fellowship facilitated a large body of work that has incredibly remained under the radar of many younger photographers. When I was in art school, Hare's Interior America was a book that often came up in conversation with my teachers. What struck me was his indelicate use of artificial lighting. His strobes aren't softened to reduce strong shadows and often the blanket of light is harsh. It is if he wished for every hard edge to be revealed in crisp uncompromising detail. The original edition of Interior America followed a straight forward design from Marvin Israel keeping to one picture on the right and a short caption specifying place on the left page. It suffered from a weak printing which made Hare's pictures on first glance seem unimpressive. One had to fight to fully sense the power of those 77 images. The whole endeavor feels cheap and so typical of books from the late 70s.

Protest Photographs is a more direct title for the work. Hare's response to the claustrophobic atmosphere and spiritual desolation in the workers lives (and his own) is its driving force and his main concern. It is his vision of what could be extraordinary lives dulled by joyless routine and loss of personal meaning - anesthetized cogs in a machine.

Protest Photographs expands the edit of Interior America to include many more images as well as photographs Hare made within the offices of corporate world he was rallying against (Hare once handed out protest leaflets at a lecture at MoMA protesting the Mirrors and Windows exhibition that included one of his images as he didn't approve of the museum's corporate sponsor). The printing is light-years better than the original, restoring Hare's extended tonal range and giving it its full due. Hare was considering destroying all of the existing prints and negatives of his work unless the Bancroft Library at the University of California would accept it as a donation. The wealth of material which includes taped interviews he conducted with workers and corporate managers, slide shows, 50,000 negatives, 3500 prints and 30,000 35mm slides. In the late 1980s Hare gave up photography to become a therapist who concentrated on work related abuse. Perhaps he saw how it is difficult for photography to truly make a change, or, was photography just a step in many outlets to spread the message of shifting priorities to one's own happiness and fulfillment. Hare lived in both those worlds. His view was saved and is now available in this book - kept out of a bonfire that couldn't possibly have consumed his anger.POSTED BY MR. WHISKETS AT 10:24 PM

Chauncey Hare PROTEST PHOTOGRAPHSPublié le 14 décembre 2009 par Rémi Coignet

Dès l'incipit, Chauncey Hare prévient le lecteur. Ces photos sont des images de combat : "Ces photographies ont été réalisées pour avertir et protester contre la domination grandissante des travailleurs par les multinationales et leurs élites, actionnaires et dirigeants." Un combat mené une quinzaine d'année durant puis abandonné (avant d'être repris sous une autre forme) face à la force de l'adversité mais aussi de l'intransigeance du photographe. Mais revenons au début. Né en 1934, Chauncey Hare obtient en 1956, au sortir de ses études, un emploi d'ingénieur dans une raffinerie de Californie. Il le conservera 23 ans. Menant, selon ses propres termes, une vie "mainstream" avec épouse et villa, il occupe ses loisirs à photographier des paysages.

Le soir, dans son sous-sol, il fait des tirages. Parfois, il expose dans des musées locaux. Son chemin de Damas s'ouvre en 1967 lors d'un séjour professionnel dans le Mississippi. Là, il est confronté au Mouvement des droits civiques et commence à réaliser des portraits des manifestants. Mais la révélation interviendra un an plus tard. Un jour de mars 1968, pendant sa pause déjeuner, il se promène aux abords de son bureau et rencontre un homme, Orville. Celui-ci l'invite à entrer chez lui et raconte alors son histoire. Ancien ouvrier de la raffinerie, il souffre de troubles respiratoires graves causés par l'inhalation de gaz toxiques. Chauncey Hare revient le lendemain le photographier dans sa cuisine. À partir de là, il entreprend de photographier systématiquement des travailleurs dans leur intérieur. Ce sera le titre de son premier livre en 1978, Interior America.

Formellement, les photos de Chauncey Hare doivent beaucoup à Walker Evans et aux photographes de la Farm Security Administration. Frontalité, neutralité apparente, vaste gamme de gris. Les portraits incluent de nombreux détails qui permettent de caractériser les individus. Parmi ses contemporains des années 1970, on l'a souvent comparé à Bill Owens. Pourtant les images de Hare malgré certaines similarités thématiques n'ont pas l'optimisme pop deSuburbia. Elles évoquent bien plus le Amerikanske Billeder de Jacob Holdt. Mais à la stupéfaction du jeune Danois découvrant les conditions de vie des noirs et du prolétariat américain, Hare oppose une froide rage dénonciatrice.

En 1970, il obtient sa première bourse Guggenheim. Deux autres suivront, lui permettant temporairement de quitter son travail d'ingénieur. la reconnaissance artistique passera encore par une exposition au Musée d'Art moderne de San Francisco puis au MoMA en 1977. Mais déjà, le malentendu s'installe entre le milieu de l'art et le photographe. Ce dernier reprochant à l'institution de l'empécher de communiquer sur la dimension politique de son travail. Au fil des ans le conflit ira jusqu'à la rupture : Chauncey Hare n'a jamais accepté de vendre des tirages et a toujours refusé que ses images soient exposées comme des œuvres d'art de manière isolée, en dehors de leur contexte. Comme il le reconnaît lui-même, mentalement, Hare passe de crises d'angoisses en accès dépressifs. Entre deux campagnes photographiques, il reprend son emploi d'ingénieur. Au sein de son entreprise, il organise une forme de subversion en promouvant le travail coopératif en lieu et place de l'organisation hiérarchique mais aussi en photographiant les employés et en enregistrant leurs récriminations envers leur employeur.

Il quitte finalement son job d'ingénieur en 1977. Dans les années suivantes, il tentera une carrière de professeur de photographie mais là encore les conflits vont se multiplier. En 1984, il publie un deuxième livre, This was corporate America avant d'abandonner la photo quelques temps plus tard. Chauncey Hare passe ensuite des diplômes de psychologie, et, avec sa

nouvelle épouse se spécialise, on ne se refait pas, dans l'aide aux travailleurs victimes de harcèlement moral. Nouvelle forme de combat. Ensemble, ils ont écrit un best-seller, Work Abuse: How to Recognize and Survive It. À la fin des années 1990, Hare songe un temps à détruire son œuvre avant d'en faire don, sous des conditions strictes, à la Bancroft library de l'université de Californie.Le radicalisme de Hare lui a aliéné les milieux de l'art (1) ce qui a contribué à son relatif oubli. Protest Photographs permet donc de redécouvrir une photographie emblématique des années 1970, tant par ce qu'on y voit, que par le cadre politique dans lequel elle s'inscrit. Superbement imprimé, Protest Photographs balaie l'ensemble de l'œuvre de Hare : les intérieurs mais aussi des paysages urbains et des scènes de travail, principalement à la raffinerie Chevron. L'occasion aussi de lever le voile sur un auteur, on en conviendra, assez frappé.RC & MKBChauncey Hare, Protest Photographs, SteidlKasher, relié, 376 pages.

(1) Il n'est qu'à relire le texte consacré à Interior America dans le Parr/Badger qui malgré une invitation à redécouvrir l'œuvre n'est pas tendre avec l'auteur.

Légendes des illustrations : couverture du livre ; Orville Englander, Richmond, California, 1968 (c'est image qui déclenche toute la série Interior America) ; Monongahela, Pennsylvania, 1972 ; 1968-1972.