KEN ON KEN

KEN REYNOLDS - PHOTOGRAPHER

[Ken wrote this autobiographical piece in 2009]

A grey November day in the early 1980’s. The train from Nuremberg is passing distant forests of fir and villages dusted with snow, the houses fresh with paint, there is quiet order everywhere. And then the border. As the train pulls into the station I see soldiers evenly spaced down the platform. As soon as we stop they are on board checking the ceiling panels in the corridors. Other officials check passports, visas and luggage. They are polite, efficient and alert. After an hour all is done and we are leaving Cheb. I have once more crossed the Iron Curtain. This is the land of Dvorák and Janácek’s music, the films of Miloš Forman, the photography of Josef Sudek; this is Czechoslovakia. This is my annual holiday from the large, ever growing Edinburgh lawyer’s office where I am responsible for the building, contents and equipment. I am escaping once more from the meticulous order I need to create in my office into a tightly controlled but somehow very dishevelled land. 

The train is taking me to Prague through Bohemia’s gentle wooded hills. But the urban landscapes I am seeing are very different. There is an atmosphere of decay and neglect. The colours are faded dirty pinks and damaged reds. This is what I am going to photograph. I have taken Prague’s cityscapes before but now I want to look more closely - to look at the surfaces. From these pictures will come my first major exhibition ‘Prague Walls’ in the Edinburgh College of Art in 1984

Finding similar material at home seemed just about impossible until I discovered, one Sunday, the declining docks of Leith in northern Edinburgh. There, over repeated visits with a medium format camera, using colour transparencies, I found rusting sides of ships and metal plates strewn on waste ground. These had colours and accidental markings that with careful selection could reveal alternative decaying landscapes - and eventually result in a new exhibition “Secret Landscapes”. This exhibition showed in Scotland in 1991 and then toured six cities in Czechoslovakia, the land that originally inspired it, and then in succeeding years on to Poland (five cities) and finally Germany (Dresden, Halle, Cottbus and Nuremberg) under the auspices of the British Council.

During these years my imagination had been richly fed not only by the journeys across Europe but also by the riches of the Edinburgh Festival and Film Festival, which brought theatre from Georgia, film from Eastern Europe and Russia, music from just about everywhere. Tarkovsky’s films made a profound impression, being backed at the same time by the poetry of the great Russian poets, especially Mandelstam and Pasternak. I was immersed in music, exploring in greater depth Janéček and Bartók but also the avant-garde of the west. Equally important was the great light and space of Turner, Rothko and the Abstract Expressionists, and Serra’s monumental metal; also the figures of Giacommeti. All these I understood to influence and inspire the way I saw and created pictures. The music led me to begin exploring the possibilities of photographing musicians in black and white. 

And then quite unexpectedly it happened. 1992. Glasgow. The Tramway. A tram shed converted to show art and the performing arts. Russian theatre. Black and White. The set was just plain matt black walls. The raked stage was white snow. This was the set for Gaudeamus. I had come at the last moment invited by the English interpreter and had no idea what to expect. This was a production by the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg and their director Lev Dodin. It tells of a squad in the first days of training in an army barracks. It is brilliantly conceived and acted by a large young company with great skill. I sat there astounded, seeing, moment by moment, individual pictures in my mind. By the end of the performance I was saying to myself “whatever I do I must photograph this work.” But I had never photographed a play in my life let alone one of the stature of Dodin’s Gaudeamus. The next day the Maly had moved on and a year passed but the desire remained. Then in August 1993 Mikhail Tumanishvili brought the Georgian Film Actors Studio to Edinburgh with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This was a company I knew from their first visit in 1989. They very kindly agreed to let me work on one of the performances. This was the first time I ever photographed a play. To my joy the pictures worked, they were pleased, I was pleased and so was Lev Dodin when I showed them to him at the beginning of their 1994 tour of the UK. He agreed immediately that I could photograph his work whenever I could find a way to be present and has been true to his word ever since.

From the beginning I worked on complete rehearsals and actual performances, never on photo calls, never for publicity. Invariably from just one position, the best that I could negotiate, using very fast black and white film, and of course without flash. Since 2005 much work has been done digitally. Never commissioned. Never paid. So artistically I was my own master, trying to capture the essence, tension and movement of the director’s conception and his actors realization of the drama. 

Once started on this project it would not let me go. I searched out performances coming from Russia and the Ukraine in the West which I could catch without taking more than a day or two’s holiday. Then in November 1995 I went to Moscow for the first time and with the great help of the American theatre critic, John Freedman of the Moscow Times, I was able to see and photograph in performance 18 productions in 14 days. From then on this work gradually expanded, reigned in only by the time limitations of the day job, but also of course funded by it. 

The artistic goal has always remained the same - to create images that have the possibility to intrigue, question, and stimulate the imagination without the viewer necessarily knowing anything about the production. They are caught in a fraction of a second - one moment will work, the next one may not. The timing is critical in relation to the body and facial movement of the actors in their interaction with each other and their surroundings, and one’s own inner, intuitive response to what is the essential essence and atmosphere. All my life I have been aware of seemingly accidental symmetries, and also how so many things change in relation to each other just by moving one or two steps. In the theatre I am still and it is the actors who are ever moving in relation to each other and the set. My eye seems to instantaneously pick up and frame the unintended parallel lines created from moving arms and legs as they move across the set and handle props. This happens almost subconsciously, for the concentration has to be on the eyes and ever changing facial expressions. 

I have been privileged to work with some of the finest and most innovative directors, their companies, and actors, both in very early and final rehearsals, sometimes with many months intervening, and frequently during actual performance without any previous opportunity to see the production. The performance tradition and ethos is very different to my homeland. Traditions that have evolved over more than 100 years that demand extensive preparation and long rehearsal periods, with successful works remaining in repertory for many years. Gaudeamus can still be seen perhaps once or twice in a full month’s programme In St. Petersburg. Kama Ginkas, whom I first met during that 1995 visit to Moscow, invited me photograph his new chamber piece ‘K.I from Crime’ based on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and featuring Katerina Ivanovna and her three children, aged 6, 8 and 10. Still showing in Moscow it has travelled world-wide. On the last occasion I photographed it, in New York in 2005, the actress was the same but now with the fourth generation of children, with young Russian New Yorker’s replacing the one’s who had appeared at the Bard SummerScape two years before. 

The natural by-product of seeking the pictures that can stand on their own without knowledge of the production is that a play has been photographed in its entirety providing a record of a complete 2-4 hour performance, moment by moment. This record has come from a desire to capture the work in performance and overall this has gradually formed an archive of significant Russian and Eastern European theatre at a critical time in its history - the immediate post-communist years from 1993 to the present day. The accompanying list shows the extent of this work and also exhibitions to date, including my exhibition based on international Chekhov productions at the The Bakhrushin Russian State Theatre Museum in Moscow in 2007.