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The large cibachrome photographs in
Juul Hondius’ show "Faction" were all suggestive of phenomena like illegal
immigration, asylum seekers, refugees and civil war. In an age in which winning entries for
the World Press Photo competition usually are highly aesthetic
and carefully composed, no matter how gruesome the subject-matter, Hondius'
glossy depictions of politically charged scenes cause a flash of
recognition. Un/Defender (2000) shows a man in a white cape leaning in
apparent exhaustion and despair against a ‘Defender’ Landrover in a muddy
field. Although the scene has been staged in Holland, the word Bosnia
seems to be written all over it. The fact that the man seems overly
groomed, like a model in a fashion shoot, only underlines the image’s
power. It may be overly perfect, but not so much that the connection with
the media imagery on which Hondius draws is lost. If the man’s gesture is
rhetorical, this is precisely the rhetoric of grief and despair, whose roots lie in classical western
painting, that news photographers exploit. Some works suggest narrative
connections: the man who is seen leaving a coach in Man # 1 (1999) is making his way through a wood on the
other side of a water in Crossing (2000). The title reinforces the
suggestion that he is illegally crossing a border, similar to the way in
the UN/Defender title reinforces the Bosnian connection. The bland Auto,
on the other hand, says nothing about the suggestive 1999 image of damp
car windows though which some people are dimly seen, suggesting perhaps a
drug deal or some other shady activity. The work appears to demand a more
explicit, more narrative and newspaper-style caption. While this emphasizes that
photographs are only able to function in the news media because an
explicit content is given to them by captions and articles, it also points
out that many images have as it were inherent captions. By using highly
coded elements from previous photography and film, they
forge a seemingly natural link between visual rhetoric and written
rhetoric. The somewhat more ambiguous Bus (2000) shows black people dozing
in a bus. The low perspective from across the isle was created by shooting
the photo in a bus that was sawn in two, yet this ‘impossible’ perspective
only serves to make the image more convincing and hence emphasizes its
reality effect. The sleepiness of the scene is reminiscent of David Goldblatts’ pictures of black
South-Africans being driven from ‘homelands’ to their work and back again
each day on absurdly long journeys. But the daylight contradicts this
association, and the imagination drifts off to the USA, where
fully-functioning citizenship seems to be linked to owning a private car,
and the bus is the domain of the poor and ethic minorities. (The script of the film Speed emphasized that Sandra
Bullock had to take the bus because her driving-license had
been revoked – otherwise the film’s premise would have been too improbable
even for a Hollywood blockbuster.) Hondius’ works would not be so
successful if he were merely trying to demonstrate, once more, that images
can be deceptive and that the mass media are particularly deceitful. His
main interest appears not to be the veracity of an image, but the
development of a critical
iconography of the present. Virtually all the images have to do with
mobility and borders, and ensuing problems such as smuggling and other
crimes, civil war and immigrants ‘penetrating’ the borders of the nation
state. Although Hondius does address the question of the photographic
construction of ‘naturalness’ trough a canny actualisation of visual
clichés, his overriding interest seems to be the way in which these
clichéd yet new images form part of a pathological iconography – an
iconography of travel, stemming from and fuelling a widespread fear and
fascination of globalised flows of commodities, capital and humans.
Sven Lütticken
Art Forum September 2003 |